Good morning. Well, my youngest daughter arrived safely after a 32 hour train ride. We’ll see how the first day goes. 

1. A sober look at the current GOP field.
2. A must-read book noted.
3. What passes for medical ethics.
4. Government hiring/firing practices.
5. Fact, stranger than fiction. Or at least weirder.
6. Some on the Murdoch kerfuffle. I was on vacation, if anyone knows of a unempassioned rundown of the facts of the case, leave a comment with a link. Thanks.
7. Security taking their job (security) ahead of their humanity.
8. Borders and the “what would you have done?” question.
9. Talking about the borrowing limit.
10. There has always been a strong anti-space current amongst progressives.
11. Questioning the anti-Bachmann fervor. I had also posted a question regarding the anti-Bachmann fervor (on my blog) and got a lot of weak tea in response. 
12. China seas and ships of war.
13. Someone who buys into the targetted income fallacy.
14. Conservative “porn.”
15. One question might be why it takes 15 years for the AGW establishment to notice. 

Chuck Colson highlights some new archeological findings that continue to lend credence to historical Biblical accounts.

Good morning.

1. The Stasi.
2. Textbooks to rent.
3. The cosmological argument for God (HT: Mr Carter).
4. Two climate related incidents, CERN decides good science practices are bad (for politics, I guess), and some past (and present) climate consensi. Today’s predictions, of course, are going to be so so much more accurate, in part because of the policies noted in the first post help make for good progress (in which good doesn’t mean accurate).
5. That number, I offer, packs a lot of garbage statistics. My Honda for example is, likely, 65-70% less costly to refuel than the average and it’s a gas burner (and energy taxes on gasoline are the same as for that average car). Add taxes into the mix, the somewhat suspect eMPG conversion, and voila you’re probably around 90%. 
6. Marriage and that ugly patriarchy stuff.
7. Russia and abortion, today.
8. One pro-choice person fears some pro-life groups steer toward perferred outcomes (apparently that steering isn’t a problem when pro-choice groups do the same). We call that hypocrisy.
9. Neanderthal!
10. Why? Because momentum is mass * velocity and energy is 1/2 * mass * velocity squared. Damage is related to energy, momementum is what affects recoil. 
11. Poverty is not relative.
12. Party on dude.
13. Out of the mouths of liberal spokespersons.

Quote:

The debt ceiling should not be something used as a gun against the head of the American people

[emphasis mine]

From some radical right-winger? Some looney tea-party nut? Nope. Straight from the President himself.

Think there will be any nonsensical criticisms from the left on this one?

Tim Groseclose is a distinguished professor of political science. He is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He holds joint appointments in the political science and economics departments. He has held previous faculty appointments at universities including Stanford and Harvard. In short, he is certainly not  a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

And yet he is coming out with a book,"Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind", that has been researched over eight years, using "state-of-the-art statistical and social-scientific methods", and which comes to the conclusion that, indeed, the media is so biased to the left that Fox News doesn’t get credit for it’s centrist stance. The PowerLine blog reprinted the preface on Sunday, will reprint the introduction today, and chapter 8 Tuesday through Friday.

This purports to prove scientifically that there is liberal bias in journalism, and that it works; it shifts the general public to the left which, in turn, remakes the "center" in this country more liberal. Which then feeds on itself.

This could be a very important  book in the coming years. Worth keeping an eye on.

Good morning. My youngest daughter is leaving on a mission trip today, your prayers on her behalf would be appreciated.

1. In which a tax break = government assistance … kinda like not being mugged in the inner city is positive race relations. Seems to me one should offer less foolish comparisons when deriding others as fools.
2. A note on the debt discussions I haven’t seen repeated elsewhere.
3. Guidlines for Catholic Charity, which I suppose anti-Catholic bigots will find objectionable, but I can’t see why or how.
4. The danger posed by attractive women (to men).
5. Dodd-Frank with more “help” like that the recovery will just zoom along … or not.
6. Some words for freedom.
7. Returning to that Black parenting issue raised by opponents of Ms Bachmann.
8. Liberal spokespersons are just sooo genuinely friendly.
9. Unsolicited advice for Mr Clemmons in his defense … don’t try that tact.
10. So, the “compromise” the Dems have on the table? 2 billion in cuts 800 billion in new taxes. One what planet is that a compromise (hint: not Earth)?
11. B&P on the debt here and here.
12. Diversity watch-bunnies didn’t catch this one.

Post-war (i.e. WWII) marginal tax rates (the top individual tax bracket) have fluctuated from above 90% to below 30%, but W. Kurt Hauser noted that, in 1993, the total tax revenue, as a percentage of GDP, stayed virtually constant. Really. The data has been updated to 2007 and the observation holds. You can’t soak the rich. Raise their rates, and GDP goes down to match, in addition to the tax shelters that suddenly become very popular. Social engineers who want to use the tax code to implement what they want ought to be very disturbed, if they even know about this.

In terms of absolute dollars, federal revenues have tripled in the last 50 years (quadrupled if you consider the amount just before the recession). The problem is, federal spending has outpaced even that. Ed Morrissey has the charts to show that we don’t have a revenue problem.

Homeschooling is such a success that liberals at the NEA, in the Dept. of Education and in Congress are "troubled" and "concerned" by it, and of course consider it racist. Yes, really.

The pro-life cause continues to advance, recently in Ohio. And Americans United for Life has put out a scathing 181-page report on abuses and law-breaking at Planned Parenthood, and is taking it to Congress.

Global warming seems to have stopped. Well, Scientific American says, "Blame Asia!"

Obama, in prosecuting war, embraces his inner Dubya.

Just like the press (and the anti-war movement) has gone very quiet about wars, old and new, being prosecuted by this President, the NY Time even notices that the press has been ignoring the poor during this recession. And they’re part of the press to blame for it! What a difference a Democratic President makes!

Andres Oppenheimer says it best. "What Chavez has done in Venezuela over the last 12 years is nothing short of an economic miracle: Despite benefiting from the biggest oil boom in Venezuela’s history, he has somehow managed to turn the country into a shambles." Read the whole thing. It’s amazing to see truly how much money socialism can spend on people, only to make their lives worse.

Comparing and contrasting the economic stimulus under Clinton (that got rejected) to the economic stimulus under Obama (which passed) and which was actually better for unemployment.

If the debt ceiling is not raised by August, we would still have enough money coming in to not default on interest payments on the debt, and cover Social Security, Medicare, and "essential" defense. Don’t let Obama’s threat about withholding Grandma’s check scare you.

The ban on circumcision that will be on the San Francisco ballot in November is rife with anti-Semitism. That’s just about all you need to know about it, but here’s more.

And some more slipper slope for you. (Click for a larger image.)

All that goodwill that George W. Bush squandered, especially in the Muslim world, was going to be returned under Obama. Yeah, right.

Today’s eye-opening IBOPE Zogby International poll for the Arab American Institute Foundation should be a wake-up call to the White House on its failing foreign policy. After two and a half years of bashing Israel, appeasing rogue regimes such as Iran and Syria, and promising a new era of relations with the Muslim world, Washington is now less popular in major Arab countries than it was when George W. Bush was in the White House.

The poll surveys Arab opinion in six countries: Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, and reveals that “Arabs see the Obama Administration’s handling of most Middle East policy issues as having made no contribution to improving US-Arab relations. Only on the issue of the “no-fly zone over Libya” do a majority of Saudis and plurality of Lebanese see a positive contribution.”

I don’t think Obama ever said how it was going to be different; he merely declared it would be so. Well, it’s different, just not in the way those who voted for him expected.

Change!

Flashback to 2004, when there was still a show called "Crossfire" on CNN, and when the President of the Human Right Campaign (which advocates for, among other things, same-sex marriage) was still Cheryl Jacques.

Pro-family supporters fear legalizing same-sex marriage will open doors for polygamy to continue breaking down the sanctity of marriage. The issue of polygamy, presented by many pro-family groups, is showing itself more and more as a dead end for pro-gay activists in their push for homosexual marriage to be legalized.

Tucker Carlson, host of CNN’s "Crossfire", debated with Human Rights Campaign President Cheryl Jacques on the polygamy issue. Carlson asked her why shouldn’t polygamists be able to marry and all she could say was, "I don’t approve of that."

When conservatives say that about same-sex marriage, they’re called Puritanical, or shoving their views down others’ throats, etc., etc. But it was all the willfully ignorant Jacques could come up with at the time. She couldn’t fathom the idea that by changing the definition of marriage once, others would take that and run with it for other definitions.

Willfully ignorant. And now we have this.

Kody Brown is a proud polygamist, and a relatively famous one. Now Mr. Brown, his four wives and 16 children and stepchildren are going to court to keep from being punished for it.

The family is the focus of a reality TV show, “Sister Wives,” that first appeared in 2010. Law enforcement officials in the Browns’ home state, Utah, announced soon after the show began that the family was under investigation for violating the state law prohibiting polygamy.

On Wednesday, the Browns are expected to file a lawsuit to challenge the polygamy law.

The lawsuit is not demanding that states recognize polygamous marriage. Instead, the lawsuit builds on a 2003 United States Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy laws as unconstitutional intrusions on the “intimate conduct” of consenting adults. It will ask the federal courts to tell states that they cannot punish polygamists for their own “intimate conduct” so long as they are not breaking other laws, like those regarding child abuse, incest or seeking multiple marriage licenses.

The same-sex-marriage-to-polygamy link was understood by the dissenting conservatives on the court in the Lawrence case.

The connection with Lawrence v. Texas, a case that broadened legal rights for gay people, is sensitive for those who have sought the right of same-sex marriage. Opponents of such unions often refer to polygamy as one of the all-but-inevitable outcomes of allowing same-sex marriage. In his dissenting opinion in the Lawrence case, Justice Antonin Scalia cited a threat to state laws “based on moral choices” against “bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity.”

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in New York, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, made a similar comparison on his blog on Thursday in an essay criticizing the state’s legalization of same-sex marriage and the possible “next step,” which could be “another redefinition to justify multiple partners and infidelity.”

This linkage, hand-waved away by same-sex marriage advocates at the time, is nothing less than willful ignorance. Each step was a clear slip down a slope they denied existed. Further predictions of what will happen should not be taken lightly at all. But they will. Case in point:

Such arguments, often referred to as the “parade of horribles,” are logically flawed, said Jennifer C. Pizer, a professor at the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and legal director for the school’s Williams Institute, which focuses on sexual orientation law.

The questions surrounding whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry are significantly different from those involved in criminal prosecution of multiple marriages, Ms. Pizer noted. Same-sex couples are seeking merely to participate in the existing system of family law for married couples, she said, while “you’d have to restructure the family law system in a pretty fundamental way” to recognize polygamy.

Professor Turley called the one-thing-leads-to-another arguments “a bit of a constitutional canard,” and argued that removing criminal penalties for polygamy “will take society nowhere in particular.”

Except that it is happening as we speak. This is not the first attempt at the polygamy issue, and if it fails it’s certain to not be the last. Marriage has always been defined as:

A) Two people
B) Different genders

When B has fallen, A cannot be very far behind. Beyond that, marriage will be whatever anyone wants it to mean, and thus will cease to have meaning. The social engineers will have won, but society will have lost.

I came across this article yesterday on the Science 2.0 website, with a very honest title; "I confess: I don’t know when human life begins". Paul Knoepfler, Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy at UC Davis School of Medicine, walks through all the stages of gestation and does, however, come up with his reasons for when life doesn’t begin. Before that, though, he goes through a list of three main authorities on when it begins; those with moral authority, doctors, and scientists. He argues that none of these folks have "the answer" that applies to everyone, but that seems to suggest that we get to define when life begins rather than life defining itself.

Religious commandments or cultural norms really don’t determine when life begins; they only generalize about when people should treat life as having begun. (He touches on that on his own blog.) That is not the same question as when life truly begins, but lacking that knowledge, we do need some sort of dividing line. He argues that science really doesn’t, and perhaps can’t, answer that question. At this point in our scientific knowledge, I tend to agree, especially since the question of what "life" actually is is still quite a mystery. Hence, we can only, at this point, decide when to treat life as having begun. Those aforementioned commandments and norms were instituted long before we knew what we now know about what’s going on in the reproductive cycle, and our new knowledge should inform our decisions, should it not?

In 1998 I wrote an essay, "Just One Question", which gave my take on the topic, especially as it related to abortion. My personal opinion in that was that life begins at conception, and I set out my arguments for it. (This was the culmination of a debate, 5 years earlier, on a local computer bulletin board system; the internet before there was The Internet.) Some of my points here will come from that.

Knoepfler talks about 6 main possibilities when when life might start: "(1), before conception (yes, you read that right), (2) at conception, (3) at implantation, (4) when distinctively human, organized brain activity begins, (5) when the fetus can survive outside the womb, and (6) at birth. "

Read the rest of this entry

Good morning.

1. The evolution of a word through misunderstanding.
2. Grist for the Fan/Fred un-fans.
3. I don’t think that’s exactly right, it’s how buearocracy expands of which currently in the US the left is a ardent advocate.
4. Mr Krugman then and now.
5. Dry your air.
6. Not one of Mr Obama’s better moments, the “you’re all dumb” argument is not so endearing to the general public.
7. Ballistics and cover vs concealment.
8. Well, if Mr Rush is a leading intellectual of the right, here’s one of the left’s … and a recent remark.
9. Or let’s all start speaking Latin … in which the verb was at the end of the sentence.
10. A athletic hero … which falls in a long standing tradition (recall Tyler Hamilton finishing on the podium with a broken collarbone … and after the tour completed had to have all his molars capped because he was grinding them in his sleep because of the pain).
11. False story gets legs.
12. Choose your reality? 

A five part series.

Good morning. Well our road trip continues, now we are in the UP.

1. Much ado about nothing.
2. How to deflect and evade, liberal style. Marriage and out-of-wedlock childbirth is at a historical high and it seems quite plausible that it is higher than prior to 1860. But apparently even suggesting that might be the case is out of bounds. Why? If it is true, acknowleding the same isn’t racism … evading the question, however, is.
3. Lo and behold, another highly popular liberal rhetorical technique, the kindergarden insult (and that’s just the title). What I don’t get is the longer lifetimes touted for CFLs in places in which they are turned off an on a lot (like a bathroom in a house with teenagers) … it seems to me they don’t outlast incandescents by much if at all. 
4. Ironic use of the term “might be photoshop” … but yes, I’d likely want one.
5. In which “not vice versa” might be better coined in terms of sets and subsets.
6. Sneaky Pete, meet sneaky Ivan.
7. Theological speculation should not lead to violence.
8. Goes without saying.
9. Just like conceal carry bans, … another practice supported without reason.
10. Ms Bachman, and I wonder … if find myself being drawn to a more and more sympathetic stance regarding Ms Bachman the more I see silly and spurious charges and claims made against her. However, I suspect the turned table situation (my linking many charges against the regrettable Democrat in the White House), has not in fact been influential in leading, for example, my two frequent liberal commenters (at my own blog) to support him. As my suspicion is that they would in the absence of such claims still (alas) support him. But I wonder about the less committed readers. 

According to this expert, what the Democrats are proposing — new taxes to deal with the budget crisis — is the absolute wrong thing to do.

“First of all, he’s right. Normally, you don’t raise taxes in a recession, which is why we haven’t and why we’ve instead cut taxes. So I guess what I’d say to Scott is – his economics are right. You don’t raise taxes in a recession. We haven’t raised taxes in a recession.”

[…]

“We have not proposed a tax hike for the wealthy that would take effect in the middle of a recession. Even the proposals that have come out of Congress – which by the way were different from the proposals I put forward – still wouldn’t kick in until after the recession was over. So he’s absolutely right, the last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up – take more demand out of the economy and put business further in a hole.”

This economics "expert" is the August, 2009 version of President Obama. That was then, this is now.

In a 75-minute meeting Sunday night, President Obama once again demanded that more than $1 trillion in tax increases be part of any deficit reduction package attached to a vote on the debt ceiling. In the session, Obama rejected a Republican proposal to seek $2.5 trillion in spending cuts and reforms, and insisted on higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals.

Apparently, economic principles have an expiration date.

The Space Shuttle ended a 30 year run of launches, today, with its final launch at Cape Canaveral. Is this the effective end of government sponsored manned space exploration? Despite the euphoria of the 1960s, what with the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions geared to get us to the Moon before the Soviet Union, and along with it an implausibly fictional dream of exploring the universe, we are left with the potential prospect of sending robotic rovers to boldly go where no man has gone before. In 1967 we were dreamers: dreaming of Pan Am passenger shuttles, transporting people to operational Lunar Bases by 2001, or of moving past the speed of light to meet up with Vulcans in the 23rd century. Yet the laws of physics (and economics) are unmoving reality checks, and it appears that where no man will ever get to where no man has gone before.

Yet, despite the silliness of some of our predictions, hopes, and dreams over the past 50 years of manned space travel, I think it’s interesting to note the changes that have occurred between the first and last Shuttle launches. Consider that at the first launch of the Shuttle, in 1981, there were no laptops carried by the astronauts, indeed, there were no laptops at all! The digital cameras they now use to record images and video were also nonexistent. If an astronaut desired to carry a portable music device onboard in 1981, it would have been a Sony Walkman and it would have played cassette tapes. Of course, now an astronaut can slip an iPod in his pocket and carry thousands upon thousands of songs. Or consider the changes in video conferencing, e-mail, cell technology, as well as the computer processing power needed for virtually all of these advancements.

Still, there is a sense of loss as we bid farewell to this part of our history – a decidedly 20th century aspect of history. Will the future of manned space travel move from government funding to that of private enterprise? If so, what are we to make of such a transition? It might end up that such a venture will be an example of how, save for political or national security issues, government is best left out of areas which private enterprise is fully capable of handling.

I leave you with a song, penned by Kate Campbell, comparing the building of a concrete canoe with the first end of the space program…

Bud’s Sea-Mint Boat
by Kate Campbell

He lived his life
A civil service man
Designing toilets
For the space program
He believed
If we could go to the moon
There’s nothing on Earth
A man can’t do

So he ordered a ton
Of sand and clay
In his front yard
He built a frame
Most folks said
It’ll never float
Still they came to see
Bud’s cement boat

A dream is anything
That you want it to be
For some it’s fame and fortune
But for others concrete
Sometimes you just
Gotta follow your heart
No matter where it leads

He gave up fishing
And most of his friends
Worked all night
And every weekend
But he didn’t mind
The sacrifice
Cause he’d build a boat
That’s one of a kind

Well the neighbors thought
It was a real eyesore
They’d say hey Bud
What are ya building that for
And knowing they would
Never understand
He’d just smile and say
Because I can

Well he got laid off
In seventy-four
And they don’t go
To the moon anymore
But down around
The Alabama coast
She still floats
Bud’s Sea-Mint boat