Watch this video for some details into Barack Obama’s position on abortion, specifically his position on what to do with babies born alive after a botched abortion.

Yes, this video does make an emotional appeal, but listen to the facts as well.  This is Obama living up to his reputation as the most liberal of Senators.  Hey, he’s even to the left of NARAL, if you can go that far without falling off the political spectrum.

[tags]Barack Obama,US presidential election,abortion[/tags]

Matthew Yglesias:

Watch in amazement as John McCain condemns Russia for having the temerity to cross an international boundary — “in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

We all recall, of course, John McCain’s outrage when the United States violated this rule back in 2003.

So James Taranto’s prediction has quickly come true.  Which got me wondering; how many dozen UN resolutions does it take before an invasion is OK by international standards, and how many resolutions was Russia enforcing when it invaded the Republic of Georgia?

[tags]Mathew Yglesias,John McCain,Russia,James Taranto,Best of the Web Today,United Nations,Republic of Georgia[/tags]

John McCain said "…today we are all Georgians."  The Lefty blogosphere’s reaction:

Matthew Yglesias:

Common sense indicates that, no, I am not a Georgian. But John McCain says “today we are all Georgians.” But does he mean it? Suppose Russia was bombing Atlanta and threatening to advance to Savannah. In solidarity with Georgia (the state) Americans from all fifty states would band together and fight the Russians off. Now I don’t think we should go to war with Russia. And I hope John McCain doesn’t think we should go to war with Russia. But insofar as he doesn’t mean that we should go to war with Russia on Georgia’s behalf, what’s the meaning of the claim that “we are all Georgians”?

On one level, it’s empty political sloganeering. But on another level it’s not empty — it’s downright irresponsible, and an example of the sort of irresponsible behavior that got us into this.

"smintheus", on the front page of the Daily Kos:

How would the trad media have portrayed Barack Obama if he had behaved as John McCain has done since Georgian President Saakashvili sent troops into South Ossetia? Would it have been ‘presumptuous’ to issue proposals to intervene in the fighting even before the President had spoken? To stake out an aggressive position far in front of anything the US wished to adopt? To attack a rival candidate for refusing to do the same?

Jasen at ElectoPundit:

Maybe John McCain would like to get us involved in ethnic cleansing campaigns, or nuclear exchanges?

Michael Crowley at The New Republic:

It may be a noble sentiment, and Georgia is deserving of American diplomatic support. But is he really speaking for all–or even most–Americans? My strong hunch is that precious few Americans want to feel they’re the victims of Russian aggression. Instead they want all the foreign-policy madness to calm down already. It hardly seems a winning message for McCain to imply that in their hearts the American people should consider themselves at war with Russia.

A. Serwer at The American Prospect:

I think I speak for most Americans when I say:

"Does he mean the state?"

In all seriousness, if the battle over South Ossetia is 9/11, then didn’t McCain just commit us to a military response, since that’s how the United States responded in the aftermath of the WTC attacks? The election hasn’t even happened yet and he’s trying to start new wars.

Some people might call that "presumptuous."

I wonder what these folks would think if, say, a Democratic President, in the middle of the Cold War, went to West Berlin and said,

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!

Do you think there’d be nearly the accusations of war-mongering and presumption then?  (Hint: No.)  JFK claimed to speak for the entire free world, for goodness sake!

Perhaps McCain should have said, "I am a Georgian" in Georgian.  That would have been OK, right?  Right?

[tags]John McCain,Russia,Republic of Georgia,Matthew Yglesias,Daily Kos,The American Prospect,ElectoPundit,The New Republic,John F. Kennedy[/tags]

Used to be that scientists thought that our solar system was pretty normal, and that there were plenty just like it out there.  TV shows like Star Trek and Stargate:SG1, among many others, traded on that to create unlimited worlds to explore.

On top of that, the idea that man is special in the universe, as suggested by the Bible, was taken down a few notches by that assertion.  If there are so many systems that would support life as we know it, the idea that God created just us seems a quaint anachronism. 

Well, as it turns out, our solar system is "pretty special", according to the headline in ScienceDaily last week.  Remember the old analogy of monkey’s typing on a jillion typewriters just waiting for a Shakespeare sonnet to come out, and its parallel to evolutionist theory about random chemicals banging together to create life?  Well, time to add a few jillion barrels of monkeys to the mix.  Apparently, coming up with a solar system like ours ain’t that easy.

Prevailing theoretical models attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way. Now a new study by Northwestern University astronomers, using recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars, turns that view on its head.

The solar system, it turns out, is pretty special indeed. The study illustrates that if early conditions had been just slightly different, very unpleasant things could have happened — like planets being thrown into the sun or jettisoned into deep space.

So what did they find out?

Before the discovery in the early 1990s of the first planets outside the solar system, our system’s nine (now eight) planets were the only ones known to us. This limited the planetary formation models, and astronomers had no reason to think the solar system unusual.

"But we now know that these other planetary systems don’t look like the solar system at all," said Frederic A. Rasio, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is senior author of the Science paper.

"The shapes of the exoplanets’ orbits are elongated, not nice and circular. Planets are not where we expect them to be. Many giant planets similar to Jupiter, known as ‘hot Jupiters,’ are so close to the star they have orbits of mere days. Clearly we needed to start fresh in explaining planetary formation and this greater variety of planets we now see."

The more we find out, the more we see that we really got "lucky" (in scientific parlance) to have such a nice place to call home.

[tags]solar system,planetary formation,Frederic A. Rasio,Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences[/tags]

James Taranto, writing for the Wall St. Journal, tried to anticipate an argument by anti-war types:

Here’s what’s going to happen next: Someone will argue that America lacks the "moral standing" to oppose Russian intervention in Georgia, because we intervened in Iraq "without U.N. approval." When the U.S. liberated Iraq, of course, it was acting to enforce the Security Council’s own resolutions. So America’s acting to overcome U.N. fecklessness will be invoked as an excuse for Russia’s unprovoked violation of another country’s sovereignty. U.N. idolatry runs counter to the U.N.’s own purported reason for existing.

As blogger TigerHawk notes, though, they may not ever make that argument because they won’t have much of anything to say.  After checking off the many groups that have nothing to say about it (and crediting the one that did), he concludes:

So far, at least, it is safe to conclude that these organizations are not so much anti-war as they are anti-American and anti-Israeli. It is useful to clear that up.

Since that post, two sites have said at least something about it.  Democracy Now has conducted an interview with a retired Air Force Colonel about the history in the region.  The Stop the War Coalition has an opinion piece that essentially states that Georgia is as much to blame for the conflict.  But there is still basically no real outrage.  Pretty much all quiet on the anti-war front.  And if the only wars that they are against, or even bother to work up a sweat about, are those involving the US or Israel, then I’d say they need to relabel themselves or lose their own moral authority.

[tags]moral authority,anti-war,Democracy Now,Stop the War Coalition,James Taranto,Best of the Web Today[/tags]

I’ve meant to do something like this for a while; post a thought from the recent Sunday sermon.  Our pastor prepares notes with blanks to fill in to help memory retention, and they’re 3-hole punched to keep in a small notebook.  I’m going to (try to) post just a thought from the sermon here at the beginning of the week.

(I attend Lilburn Alliance Church with pastor Fred Hartley.  There is a link to the previous Sunday’s sermon on the main page of the web site, or you can subscribe to the podcast.)

The series our pastor is beginning a study of John 15, starting this week with just the first verse.  The NIV translation of this verse is, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener."  He covered the whole first verse, but I’m going to just touch on the first phrase of it.  The literal translation of that phrase from the Greek is "I, I am, the true the vine…."  No, that’s not a typo.  If you look at the Greek version, even if you don’t know Greek (and I don’t), you’ll see the first two words meaning "I" and "I am", and a short one-letter word preceding each of the next two words, being the definite article "the".  Again, I’m not a Greek scholar and I’m taking Pastor Hartley’s word for this, so feel free to comment if you find something different.

This construction of "I, I am" is (as I understand it) unique in Greek literature.  This is meant to convey the fact that Jesus is the "I Am" of the book of Exodus.  This is another of His many claims of divinity.  Jesus used this construct on at least 6 other occasions, including one that got the religious leaders perturbed.  (Again, the Greek translation shows this.)  For those that suggest that Jesus never actually claimed to be the divine Son of God, these instances are some of those where he did, in a language that his hearers would understand.

Then there is the construction "the true the vine".  Here, Jesus is claiming exclusivity, again using a language construct that his hearers understood.  He is not a true vine, one vine of many truths.  Instead he is the one and only vine that is true.  There are other vines, but none that are as eternally true as Jesus.  Again, this goes up against claims that Jesus is but one of the many ways to God.  He never spoke of any other way but Himself, and he spoke of Himself as the single path to God the Father, in ways that both the people he spoke to could understand, and even more plainly for the rest of us that don’t speak Greek.

I’ve had a few discussions with folks in the past, going back to the Bulletin Board Systems of old (pre-Internet, for you young’uns) where I’ve heard the claims about Jesus never intending to claim exclusivity, and the many ways in which people try to shoe-horn Jesus into their own religion or philosophy.  The problem is, and has always been, that Jesus didn’t ever allow for that in what He said.  He fully intended to stand alone and unique in human history, and efforts to incorporate His teachings, and He Himself, into the religions of others is a testament to the power in His words, and the deception of those trying to claim Him. 

The fortress built by pundits on the left are starting to crack … from the inside.

In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s overseas trip, the liberal punditocracy has begun to fret. Certainly there is reason for concern. Obama’s poll numbers are within the margin of error in a year in which a generic Democrat would be beating a generic Republican by double digits. And the storylines which dominated the news since the trip have been ones unfavorable to their chosen candidate: his ego, the snub of wounded U.S. soldiers in Germany, a potential flip-flop on offshore drilling and a poorly received attempt to play the race card.

Richard Cohen was one liberal pundit who emerged from the fog of Obama-mania. Cohen threw cold water on the notion that a liberal Senate candidate from Hyde Park showed political courage by opposing the Iraq war, and then recited chapter and verse on the flip-flop orgy:

He has been for and against gun control, against and for the recent domestic surveillance legislation and, in almost a single day, for a united Jerusalem under Israeli control and then, when apprised of U.S. policy and Palestinian chagrin, against it. He is an accomplished pol — a statement of both admiration and a bit of regret.

But what really irked Cohen was Obama’s “tissue thin” record and the nagging sense that despite Obama’s attractive packaging Cohen was “still not sure, though, what’s in it.”

Indeed, these concerns (and other concerns by many other pundits including Dana Millbank; read the whole thing) have been raised by Republicans for some time.  Yet they were dismissed as being racist, jealous, out of touch, and distracting from the real issues.  Some writers chided McCain’s attacks on the media for being in the tank as desperate, but perhaps some have taken it to heart. 

By all accounts, Obama should be trouncing McCain.  That he isn’t, and that this is surprising to the media, is a bigger indicator of who is really out of touch.

[tags]liberal media,Barack Obama,Jennifer Rubin,Dana Millbank[/tags]

The military and its use in defending the country are one of the powers expressly enumerated in our Constitution.  Unlike other responsibilities that some would like to give to it (e.g. health care, as I’ve discussed here before), this particular duty is spelled out quite clearly.  Our founding fathers, in attempting to limit the federal government’s powers while leaving the rest to the states or the people, made sure that this power was indeed a federal issue.  Defense of its citizens and interests is a proper role of government.

Over time, aspects of the military have changed, but none more controversial than its makeup.  When a racially-integrated military was suggested, initial reactions against it were mostly due to racial prejudice than anything else, either on the part of the person reacting or on the assumption that such prejudice existed in the ranks.  As racial views changed, that integration became far easier.

Over time, another type of integration took place; that of including women in combat.  The concept was not entirely new (it goes back to ancient times), but in the US, while the controversy was heated in earlier decades, as women were included more and more the issue isn’t considered that big a deal anymore, on par with racial integration.  However, I think that recent events should give us pause to consider the question again.

There have always been the straw arguments that proponents of women in combat have attributed to the other side that either were never actually presented or were extreme minority opinions.  One of those was that women weren’t as patriotic as men or willing to die for freedom.  This was typically presented as the claim that women were just as patriotic, with the implication that the other side didn’t think so. 

However, there are a number of arguments against women in combat that represent real physical and psychological concerns, and not always on the part of the women themselves.  Wikipedia presents some of these arguments, including physical differences and the reaction of men to wounded women.  The tradition and seeming instinct of protecting women plays into this.  The cry, "Women and children first", was never taken to be a call to arms.  The Wikipedia article notes, regarding experiments with women in integrated units in the Israeli Defense Force:

The reason for removing female soldiers from the front lines is no reflection on the performance of female soldiers, but that of the male infantrymen after witnessing a woman wounded. The IDF saw a complete loss of control over soldiers who apparently experienced an uncontrollable, protective, instinctual aggression.

Say what you will about the male and the protection instinct, it’s real and it’s there (and it’s not a bad thing).

Another issue has been that of romantic relationship within the unit, causing a couple to perhaps become more concerned about each other than the remainder of the unit, or a love triangle which would create less concern between some.  Unit cohesion is paramount in combat, and adding this dimension can easily cancel out any other gains.  (Incidentally, this is, at least to me, the main reason to be against gays in the military.) 

It’s this sexual angle to the inclusion of women that can be the most destructive.  And to some, it can be far worse than an issue with a jilted lover.

Read the rest of this entry

I’m currently on vacation in Ithaca, NY. My dad’s father, my dad, his 2 brothers, and a whole host of family in-laws and friends have purchases homes here and retired to the beautiful central New York region. Ithaca is home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, and over the years students from those schools essentially paid for the homes while they rented them during the school year. We would take our 3 weeks vacation here every year to mow the lawn (5 feet high by summer; students don’t typically mow lawns) and see our cousins. Because the brothers and their sister tried to coordinate vacations, we got to know our first cousins very well, as well as some second cousins and others of various once-removed or twice-removed situations.

Ithaca lives up to the stereotype of a very liberal college town, politically speaking. Obama will carry this town with greater than 95% of the vote. For a very long time, large, “big box” stores — Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Home Depot, for examples — were kept out of town so as not to ruin the local town charm. The problem was, suburbs just outside the town were quite accepting of these stores, and they saw their tax revenues jump as the stores came in, while Ithaca found itself in a bit of a crisis. Money came in to the town, but it flowed out to the mall just on the other side of the town line or in burgs 20-30 minutes away. In the end, the “CAVE” people (liberal folks who were labeled “Citizens Against Virtually Everything”) had to relent to the fiscal realities. Ithaca now has a thriving shopping area for those that want the big stores, and after 5 or so years it still has The Commons where you can stroll around to find that corner bookstore.

What the CAVE people were worried about didn’t really happen, or at least not nearly to the extent that they predicted. The Meadow Court and the Grayhaven motels, longtime residents of Ithaca, have survived the introduction of the Hampton Inn chain. The Grayhaven caters to dog owners, one of the ways they stay competitive; defining their market. The local Wicks Lumber, which has a small hardware store attached, is still in business, even with Home Depot less than 2 miles away. The “mom & pop” establishments are essentially still here. The free market didn’t kill them off, and the CAVE people have grudgingly accepted it. (Well, some were simply out-voted. Acceptance isn’t always a given.)

In the end, capitalism worked. People got more choices, and the existing businesses survived, either by defining their markets, trading on their nostalgic or hometown quality, or enjoying customer loyalty going back decades. In Ithaca, both kinds of consumers — for the large and small businesses — exist, and businesses of both types can exist, side-by-side, in a capitalist society.

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If you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that a vote for the surge in Iraq and its strategy changes would dramatically reduce the amount of violence and deaths, giving the Iraqi government breathing room to get 15 of 18 benchmarks completed, would you vote for it?  If it was a certainty?

Obama wouldn’t have.  The man of Hope and Change(tm) would have kept the status quo.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is playing politics with the war and the lives of our soldiers.  Bailing out at all costs — big costs, to Iraq if not to us — is irresponsibility at its highest.  That’s not the kind of man I want as President.

[tags]Barack Obama,Iraq surge[/tags]

Click image for a larger version.  Rev. Don Sensing queries, "Wasn’t it in July 1989 that the UN said we only had 10 years left to save the planet?"  Guess we did it.  Can we move on now?

Oh, well maybe not.  Sensing also points to this report (PDF) which starts:

Addressing the Washington Policymakers in Seattle, WA, Dr. Don Easterbrook said that shifting of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) from its warm mode to its cool mode virtually assures global cooling for the next 25-30 years and means that the global warming of the past 30 years is over.

That dive starting in 2006 may be just the beginning.  Expect environmentalists to have something to say about it.  Al Gore will probably not be the spokesman for it; too closely associated with that other natural phenomenon. 

[tags]global warming,environment,Dr. Don Easterbrook,Pacific Decadal Oscillation[/tags]

When that little boy was (supposedly) shot and killed in 2000 by Israeli security forces, the NY Times reported, and continued to return to, the issues as a seminal event in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This week, however, a judge in France (the footage belonged to France TV 2) has agreed that claims that the footage is a fraud are legitimate.  It’s not the same thing as saying the footage is a fraud, but the defendant had to overcome a huge hurdle.

This is a stunning victory because Mr. [Philippe] Karsenty had to prove to the French court that his claims that the film is a fraud are legitimate claims. Karsenty presented enough evidence for the French court to rule against a state operated entity and this is a big upset in France because this does not typically happen. The state almost never loses.

Karsenty had several experts come to his aid as technical witnesses that the whole thing did not add up but the French court also at last had a look at some more of the film that France 2 TV had steadfastly refused to show up until this point. It clearly showed Palestinian operatives staging a faux fight between themselves and the far off Israeli security forces. It revealed fake rescues of unharmed people, fake casualties and staged injuries. What the court saw was the creation of Palestinian propaganda. In other words, the "death" of Muhammad al-Dura was a staged lie, invented as theater by Palestinian operatives to use as anti-Jewish propaganda.

But the kicker is that this major discrediting of a lynchpin in the Palestinian’s reason for the Intifada has been dealt a serious blow.  Newsworthy, right?  But now, the Time seems to have forgotten the whole story.

Read the rest of this entry

If America falls into recession, Democrats will blame Bush, no doubt.  But does Dubya’s influence on the economy cover the entire continent of Europe?  Retroactively?

A mood of fear and pessimism is starting to descend on Europe. It now seems the region could head into recession even before the United States.

Many EU nations are in real trouble. In Spain, economy minister Pedro Solbes declared that the country was facing its "most complex crisis ever" following a collapse of the property market.

A leading Spanish property group, Martinsa-Fadesa, filed for bankruptcy earlier this week.

Like Spain, Ireland has suffered a housing market collapse and many people have run up huge personal debts. The Irish economy shrank earlier in the year and economists say that if it continues to contract, the nation will fall into recession by the end of 2008.

Despite this, the Irish Prime Minister or Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, has insisted his country is still doing remarkably well, despite the global economic downturn, and has rejected claims that he is personally responsible for the downturn.

Denmark is already in recession and shows no sign of emerging from it in the near future. The government there stepped in to rescue a failing bank, Roskilde, in early July.

Unlike the US economy, which still grew (albeit very weakly) in the first quarter, European countries are already in different degrees of economic retreat.  And the emphasis above (mine) notes that this is a global economic problem which we are weathering better than the countries Democrats keep holding up as examples we should follow.

Is Bush that all-powerful?  (Hint: No.)  But it’s just too good a glop of mud to sling at him for Democrats.  They just can’t pass up the chance, and they hope their followers aren’t paying attention. 

[tags]economics,recession,Spain,Ireland,Denmark[/tags]

The conventional wisdom is that this upcoming election will be Obama’s in a walk-away.  Could be.  But on the chance he loses, Democrats are already writing the narrative they will use to explain it.

In a speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual convention in Cincinnati, [NY governor David] Paterson also suggested that the defeat of Senator Obama by Senator McCain in the presidential contest would be a victory for racism.

And he knows this because everything can be blames on racism.  The preceding paragraph notes:

Governor Paterson, who became New York’s first black governor following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer, is lashing out at the press for describing him as an "accidental governor," implying in a speech that the term’s frequent usage was motivated by racial bias.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are racist! 

The article actually goes on to note, contrary to Paterson’s contention that only he, as a black governor, has been termed "accidental", 3 other people (including President Bush) and 6 separate examples of politicians being referred to as "accidental".  The man has got a serious chip on his shoulder.

[tags]New York,Governor David Paterson,racism,Barack Obama,NAACP[/tags]

Not content to send mere reporters with Obama when he visits Iraq, all the Big Three network news organizations are going to send their anchors.  Which, of course, they also did for McCain.  Or not.

While Thursday’s New York Times reported that the anchors from all three network newscasts will be joining Barack Obama on his trip to Iraq, they showed no such interest in following John McCain during his visit to Iraq in March. During the week of March 16, McCain’s trip received only four full-length stories during the combined ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news program coverage. Three of those stories were on NBC’s "Nightly News," one of which focused on McCain’s mistaken comment about Iran funding Al Qaeda in Iraq. ABC’s "World News" did only one full-length story on McCain’s Iraq trip, which mentioned the gaffe. The CBS "Evening News" was by far the worst, devoting only 31 words to the Republican nominee’s Iraq visit during the entire week of evening news coverage.

(Emphasis in original.)  This is pointing out yet another disparity from the media regarding news coverage that the Times is now having to grudgingly recognize.

Even the Times article acknowledged that McCain’s Iraq trip received little coverage: "Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad…But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates."

Oh, but it’s not actually true that the media are ignoring McCain, it’s just that the fact "feeds into concerns" that there is a problem.  Like I said, grudgingly.

And by the way, how much better must the security situation be in Iraq that the Big Three feel comfortable sending their top dogs to the field? 

[tags]Barack Obama,John McCain,liberal media bias[/tags]