• Heh, an impression of the Left?
• Left, Right and assumptions on Islam. I’d have to say my “assumptions” are a little different. I don’t fear “The Right is concerned about a monolithically hostile Islam that the West must defend itself against.” instead, I have this notion that religions always have people with a different level of faith and commitment from the casual to the very fervent. Islam is not “moderate” internally so the violent fervent will always be with us as long as there is an Islam.
• US decline of influence … going strong since 1945!
• Ideology and Idol.
• Blame shifted away from Bush and the Admin, by a non-supporter no less.
• A person who left the fame/fortune treadmill.

More here.

Well, maybe they’re not being vocal about it, but Investor’s Business Daily did not something in Nancy Pelosi’s press release on the economic stimulus package making its way through Congress.

We’re so used to Democrats pushing tax hikes as the answer to all of America’s problems that we were taken aback to find the following words buried in Pelosi’s release on the stimulus deal: "Economists estimate that each dollar of broad tax cuts leads to $1.26 in economic growth."

Gee, that sort of sounds familiar. It’s almost, though not quite, like what the much-reviled supply-side economists have been saying for, oh, 30 years or so.

Pelosi, and other Democrats now suddenly touting tax cuts, may be on to something. We might demur on the notion that all tax cuts must be "broad" to be effective. Evidence really lies more strongly with giving tax cuts to those who would start new businesses or expand old ones. But it’s refreshing to hear a Democrat admit the obvious — that tax cuts work.

Now, their base may have other thoughts on this, which is why I’m sure we haven’t heard much about this being trumpeted by Pelosi’s office.  It has been Received Wisdom, from the Democrats’ point of view, that tax cuts — letting people keep their own hard-earned money back to them — is somehow bad, economically and morally.  Here we see that, behind closed doors (and within unread papers), they may, in fact, not think that, at least economically. 

IBD, though, notes that not every tax cut has the same effect.

But not all tax cuts are created equal — something, unfortunately, Democrats don’t seem to get. They think giving tax cuts — or, more accurately, cash — to those with lower incomes results — presto! — in stimulus. That’s not the case. Rebates are like welfare checks.

In fact, investors and entrepreneurs create economic growth, new jobs and higher incomes. They’re the risk takers who build our economy. But today they’re taxed at the most punitive rates.

The biggest bang for the tax-cut buck, therefore, comes from lowering rates for those who will actually take the money and create or expand a business with it — not just spend it at Wal-Mart.

New research shows this to be true. In the broadest such study ever, University of California economists Christina and David Romer looked at every tax change in the U.S. after World War II.

Their unambiguous conclusion: "Tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects." Indeed, a tax cut of just 1% boosts GDP by about 3% for several years, they found.

This is a truth that the Democratic base really isn’t ready for, but baby steps are good.

[tags]tax cuts,Democrats,Nancy Pelosi,Investor’s Business Daily,economy[/tags]

If the Republican Party continues on its current path it will nominate either John McCain or (given a Super Tuesday miracle) Mitt Romney, who are not bona fide conservatives. In doing so, the GOP will demonstrate that it no longer represents conservatives and has placed a higher value on winning an election than standing by its principles.

The GOP didn’t get to this point overnight. Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of President Bush who, in spite of his excellent nominations to the Supreme Court of Samuel Alito and John Roberts, his consistent pro-life stands, and his persistent prosecution of the war on terror has done little else to further conservative principles. Government programs have expanded dramatcially under this President’s watch and spending has gone through the roof.

There’s little reason to think that John McCain or Mitt Romney would govern much differently from President Bush. I think they both would stand frim on pro-life and terrorism issues and follow the President’s lead. Beyond that, I don’t expect that there would be much more we would see from their administration that would follow conservative principles.

However, I do not intend to sit on the sidelines come November. The stakes are far too high for conservatives to sit out this election. With the retirement of so many Republican congressmen this year it likely that both the House and Senate will not only remain in Democratic hands but their majorities in both houses will be much larger. It’s safe to say that conservatives don’t want to put either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the White House with a Democrat controlled Congress.

That’s exactly why conservatives should stop whining about how McCain and Romney don’t represent their values. More conservative candidates like Duncan Hunter, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo and even Mike Huckabee are being tossed aside in favor of more “electable” candidates. Conservatives have had their chance to select someone who reflects their values. Instead, they have decided to put winning above principles. Given the dynamics of this year’s election that is understandable. But that’s not necessarily the right thing to do.

If a Democrat wins the White House this year (and there is a good chance that will happen) perhaps Republicans will take a good hard look and see how abandoning their conservative principles led to their defeat. It’s a lesson that they should have learned from the 2006 election.Until they do learn it, they shouldn’t expect to win many more elections.

•  The Christian Carnival is at Everyday Liturgy.
• Scum? noted.
• Preparing for Lent.  And here. I’d like to also mention on Monday March 10, if you celebrate Lent in your parish or tradition, find a local OCA or Antiochan Orthodox parish and go to the Canon of St. Andrew (that is repentance and Lent have a connection for you). There is no better liturgical reflection on repentance than that to be found anywhere.
• On that Game this weekend (and church).
• On Market and the left.

The rest of morning linkage can be found here.

Links:

• Anticipating matriarchy.
• Good news. “Myanmar’s detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Wednesday was allowed to meet with top members of her party as well as with a government liaison officer, an official told AFP.”
• Bush and Obama, both good men and some evidence.
• Run away! Please.
• Two paths to a secular government and society.

Congratulations to Senator John McCain for his victory last night in the Florida Republican Primary. He has now emboldened his position as the front runner for the nomination. While he’s not necessarily the person I would want as the nominee, I’ll support him if he wins the nomination.

Looking over last night’s results, I’ve observed six things that should be kept in mind as the process moves forward.

Read the rest of this entry

Seven al Qaeda killed in Miqdadiyah

The latest Coalition raid in Miqdadiyah occurred on Jan. 3, resulting in seven al Qaeda fighters killed. Coalition special forces, part of Task Force 88, the hunter-killer teams assigned to hunt al Qaeda’s networks, “targeted associates of an al Qaeda in Iraq leader allegedly responsible for coordinating and directing a large terrorist group, and carrying out executions in the Diyala River Valley region.” Coalition forces called in an airstrike on a safe house, killing two al Qaeda operatives. Five additional al Qaeda terrorists were killed in a follow-on raid.

Taliban commander killed in clash in South Waziristan

The Pakistani military has killed a senior Afghan Taliban commander during a clash in the tribal agency of South Waziristan. Saifur Rahman Mansour, the Taliban commander during Operation Anaconda, was killed in the Taliban-controlled tribal agency, Iranian Press TV reported.

34 al Qaeda killed in day’s fighting during Phantom Phoenix

Coalition and Iraqi security forces were active on Thursday and Friday in fighting as part of Operation Phantom Phoenix. Two senior al Qaeda in Iraq operatives were killed along with 32 foot soldiers during fighting in Arab Jabour, Miqdadiyah, and the Samarra region. Another 34 al Qaeda fighters were reported captured.

Cross-posted at New Covenant.

Could Senator Hillary Clinton try to steal the Democratic Presidential nomination?

Sure, it may seem like a stretch but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a sudden call from the Clinton camp to have delegates from Florida and Michigan seated at the convention particularly if she wins big in today’s Sunshine State primary.

But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility at all to consider that Senator Clinton could win the nomination without receiving a majority of the delegates selected through the party’s primaries and caucuses. That’s because of a quirk in the Democratic Party known as the Superdelegate, who is an elected official or party member and is not tied to any particular state primary or caucus.

Though it is not widely reported in the media, Senator Clinton holds the lead for the nomination due to the advantage she has over Senator Barack Obama in the Superdelegate category. As of this writing, Mrs. Clinton leads 201-116 according to the Real Clear Politics delegate scoreboard with 114 left uncommitted. Senator Obama has won more delegates through the primaries and caucuses held to date by a margin of 63-46.

It would be ironic if Senator Clinton managed to secure the nomination without winning a majority of the delegates up for grabs during the primary season. Given how close the race for the Democratic nomination has been so far, it’s also not beyond the realm of possibility. But we will hear anything about voter disenfranchisement like we have the last two election cycles from Democrats? Don’t bet on it.

• Some good said about McCain.
• The death penalty and secularization.
• Blasphemy in Afghanistan.
• On becoming pro-life.

In a conversation on Sunday, the question was raised (which is not new but certainly pointed),

“We believe that abortion is murder of innocents. We would not stand quietly and non-violently attempt by political action or consciousness raising to stop the Holocaust. Why should we not be bombing abortion centers? When we are called to account before the dread judgment seat of Christ how will be judged for not letting using violence to stop this?”

I’d like to attempt to answer this question. Before we jump before the fold, I’d like to remark on one thing. Holocaust is a thing which is in the common imaginary, the common symbol for things of this nature. One might ask, why not Holodomor? 4 million died in the Holodomor which number significantly in the 20 million killed by internal purges and famine enacted purposefully just as 12 million were killed by Hitler in the Holocaust (of which just over 6 million were Jewish).

The World went to war to stop Hitler, we in America crossed the Atlantic to voluntarily take part to end his evil. Stalin and Lenin’s evil was occurring en mass prior. If there was a moral imperative to go to war to stop Hitler because of Holocaust, was there not the same need to stop Stalin, Lenin, Mao and so on. Should we put an end to the regime North Korea? Now!? But one thing these things share, which they don’t share with local abortion clinics is that the political process works intra-state, not inter-state.  Read the rest of this entry

Things seen over the weekend:

• Apologetics links, with a science/faith twist.
• Jesus and pacifism and from elsewhere a supporter of pacificism speaks out.
•  Contra optimism.
• Hmmm. Not a joke, apparently.
• Private war discussed.

Whew, I’m sure we feel better after this report.

Canada’s foreign ministry, responding to pressure from close allies, today said would remove the United States and Israel from a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured.

Both nations expressed unhappiness after it emerged that they had been listed in a document that formed part of a training course manual on torture awareness given to Canadian diplomats.

The article goes on to note it was all a misunderstanding, though it’s not quite clear if the misunderstanding was that the US and Israel were on the list, or that anyone found out that the US and Israel were on the list.

And what were those things that got us on the list in the first place?

Under ”definition of torture” the document lists US interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding prisoners.

Folks, if that’s "torture", the word no longer has meaning.  Blindfolding?  You want to debate waterboarding, that’s fine.  But if that debate is going to take us down a road that leads to the banning of blindfolding, then the Left needs to come clean on this before the debate starts. 

Some say they’ll know torture when they see it, and for most people that ain’t it.

A fatal flaw for the notion of natural process evolution is that it has no way to explain the abstract. In a world of the strictly natural, what are we to make of, say, love?

At the pro-evolution site, Panda’s Thumb, we see a post titled, Evolution of altruistic cooperation and communication in robot societies. The author states,

Discovery Magazine reports on a continuation of experiments involving evolvable robots, communication and concepts such as altruistic cooperation and lying.

By the 50^th generation, the robots had learned to communicate—lighting up, in three out of four colonies, to alert the others when they’d found food or poison. The fourth colony sometimes evolved “cheater” robots instead, which would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink.

Some robots, though, were veritable heroes. They signaled danger and died to save other robots. “Sometimes,” Floreano says, “you see that in nature—an animal that emits a cry when it sees a predator; it gets eaten, and the others get away—but I never expected to see this in robots.”

Fascinating how simple processes of variation and selection can explain the evolution of altruism, cooperation as well as cheating. What has ID done recently that increases our understanding of how cooperation, cheating and altruism arose?

Is he serious? A contrived experiment (PDF), with designed parameters, mimicking established social group characteristics explains the evolution of altruism, cooperation as well as cheating?

Be on the lookout, whenever natural process evolutionists attempt to explain the abstract, they always end up sneaking in the back door and stealing concepts that don’t belong to them. You see, in the world of naturalism (i.e., the strictly natural), there is no basis with which one can declare that some action is altruistic or someone is a cheater. Without an objective moral understanding that altruism is good, and cheating is wrong, the words lose their meaning.

From MSNBC, Study on hurricanes, warming creates storm,

Global warming could reduce how many hurricanes hit the United States, according to a new federal study that clashes with other research. The new study is the latest in a contentious scientific debate over how manmade global warming may affect the intensity and number of hurricanes.

Again we find that stem cells could be the cure for things that had been incurable.

Heart attacks occur when the heart muscle is starved of oxygen, usually because the arteries that supply it with blood become blocked with fatty deposits. A bypass operation restores this blood supply, but the lack of oxygen leads to permanent scarring of the heart muscle.

Even after the operation the heart’s activity does not return to normal. "If you have a large heart attack like this and you are lucky and are referred for a bypass operation, your quality of life will be permanently affected because the pumping function of your heart is reduced," said Raimondo Ascione, the surgeon who is leading the research. "Your tolerance to exercise is reduced so you can’t really enjoy your life."

The trial will involve patients with the worst prognosis, those who have scarring on at least half of the left ventricular wall. "It’s the worst heart attack you can have. Most patients just die," said Ascione.

The team will extract bone marrow from all 60 patients and separate out a class of stem cells that makes up 1% of the tissue. Previous studies have suggested that this cell type is able to regenerate heart muscle cells and blood vessels. By using the patient’s own cells there will be no problems with tissue rejection.

But again, as well, is a missing word in the article.  It’s implied in that last quoted paragraph, but it’s not said by name.  These are adult stem cells, from the patient.  Very little these days is said about adult stem cells, because of the agenda of folks who want embryonic stem cell research to get federal funding. 

The question isn’t whether or not embryonic stem cells would be useful.  The real question is; if adult stem cells have such wide, varied uses, and have been proven to work time after time, why do we want to step into the ethical quagmire of using embryos?

[tags]stem cells,Raimondo Ascione,heart disease,medicine[/tags]