Stones Cry Out

That was then:

As President Barack Obama heads to Indiana and Florida over the next two days to sell his economic stimulus plan to a somewhat skeptical Congress, White House and congressional Democrats are moving around new poll data that suggests the public is broadly supportive of the bill.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sent out an email to reporters this morning touting the data — from a Gallup survey — that showed roughly two-thirds of the public approves of the way Obama is handling the passage of the economic stimulus package while just 31 percent say the same of congressional Republicans.

Emphasis supplied by the NewBusters article, because this is now:

"If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG I’d visit my doctor," Gibbs said. "If you look back I think five days ago we were, there was an 11 point spread, now there’s a one point spread."

Gibbs continued, "you know, I mean I’m sure a six year old with a crayon could do something not unlike that. I don’t put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is the daily Gallup trend. I don’t pay a lot of attention to meaninglessness."

The difference?  The polls were with the President then, and they’re not now.  Obama himself touted Gallup when they were with him.  Now, not so much.  If you are going to push an agenda at least partially on poll numbers, you have to take the good with the bad. 

1. The Anglican primate honored.
2. Divorce statistics.
3. Industry regulation and California … the proposed condom law.
4. Debt and Greece.
5. The White House and anti-Semitism.
6. A curious climate graph.
7. Submit or include.
8. Social justice and co-habitation.
9. A plea regarding Mr Woods.
10. Self-similarity and Nebraska.
11. Reggae and theology.
12. Regarding Mr Gore.
13. An idealogical stance against ideology.

Via HotAir, Boxer makes it clear she considers a male’s access to viagra equivalent to that of a woman’s access to abortion. Excuse me, ma’am, but your weak comparison should be directed, following your line of thinking, to that of the pill, and not abortion.

Follow up on an item I previously noted and a very happy ending. A 90 year old Medal of Honor winner won his battle with his homeowner’s association with an assist from both of Virginia U. S. Senators (hat tip: Hot Air):

RICHMOND, Va. — A 90-year-old Medal of Honor recipient can keep his 21-foot flagpole in his front yard after a homeowner’s association dropped its request to remove it, a spokesman for Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said Tuesday.

The Sussex Square homeowners’ association likewise has agreed to drop threats to take legal action against retired Army Col. Van T. Barfoot, Warner spokesman Kevin Hall said.

The association had threatened to take Barfoot to court if he failed to remove the pole from his suburban Richmond home by Friday. It had said the pole violated the neighborhood’s aesthetic guidelines.

This was a no-win situation for the homeowners’ association and they made the right decision. Hats off to Senator Mark Warner and Senator Jim Webb for standing up for Col. Barfoot. The homeowners’ association also made the right decision by allowing this American hero to keep his flag.

As climate change skeptics yearn to make bad behavior by some scientists into ClimateGate, and climate change pessimists try to look the other way in the face of bad publicity, my friend and colleague (a Christian, economist, and scientist) Rusty Pritchard, the president of Flourish, provides a clearheaded and even humorous analysis of the stolen-yet-troublesome email scandal.

Pritchard writes:

As a Christian, it is easy to see that the whole arena needs to be more infused with grace. Climate scientists shouldn’t feel attacked for trying to build the best understanding they can of how the climate system operates. Those scientists who are skeptical about the mainstream science should be recognized for their important role in asking hard questions. Political operatives who pretend to be more certain than scientists about whether people are or aren’t contributing to climate change need to stop fomenting antagonism.

1. Does “a leak” change the perspective over illegal hacking? Conspiracy theories remain intact however.
2. Short answer. No.
3. The murdered priest in Moscow … a friend now beaten.
4. Consequences of desiring to increase political involvement in healthcare … more politics in healthcare.
5. Heh.
6. A question … and a partial answer.
7. I concur with the aesthetic judgement offered.
8. Climate on steriods.
9. Goodness and normative ethics fer gurls.
10. A thanks to Yamamoto for Pearl Harbor from an American.
11. Well, the other thing for which Cicero is remembered …  the convoluted sentences for students to translate.

One of the side effects of the late vocations classes I’m taking (currently on the Old Testament), is that after each session I return with wonderful kernels of ideas from which to expand a (hopefully) interesting essay based on the discussions we have in class. Last week one of the books we read was Isaiah.

Isaiah 7 … and particularly Isaiah 7:14 has been a lighting rod for messianic interpretations.

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin
shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

This verse and the surrounding few verses, Christians have traditionally taken as a sign-point identifying the virginity of the Theotokos. Much modern commentary focuses on defending the use of the word virgin. The Masoretic text (MT), which is the primary source for the Western canon (apparently) uses a term which is more ordinarily translated as young or unmarried girl … not virgin. The LXX text however both originates much earlier, might have used a separate strand of source text than the MT, and unambiguously uses a Greek term which translates as virgin. However, that isn’t the core problem. For even if you either buy the somewhat contorted arguments for translating the MT term “virgin” or just use the LXX itself as your base text there remains a problem (of course if you’re going to use the LXX here, then you’ve a problem explaining why you’ve decided to dropped half a dozen or more books from the canon … additionally one of the oldest complete extant LXX copies the Codex Alexandrinus also contains first and second Clement in the New Testament).

Read the rest of this entry

The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor Naval Station on December 7, 1941 marked one of the darkest days in America history and prompted our entry into World War II. Fifteen servicemen were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on that day but only five survived the battle. Lt. John William Finn, who turned 100 years old this past summer is the only remaining survivor of those fifteen men. He reportedly was headed to Pearl Harbor today for commemoration ceremonies. Mary Katherine Ham has a wonderful profile of this genuine American hero that is well worth reading.

Ed Morrissey reminds us also of the enduring lesson of Pearl Harbor:

The lesson from that war is that appeasement and complacency doesn’t keep one from having to fight a war. It usually forces one to fight from an extreme disadvantage. That’s a lesson we have not remembered in dealing with expansionist powers in our own time, even after a second shock like 9/11 after years of complacency in dealing with al-Qaeda. We’re falling back to treating radical Islamist terrorism like a Law and Order episode, and allowing one of the main drivers of radical Islamist terror, Iran, to arm itself with nuclear weapons with no consequences whatsoever.

We must never forget Pearl Harbor.

On the 30^th anniversary of its writing, Flourish magazine is publishing Wendell Berry’s The Gift of Good Land, a penetrating examination of the Christian stewardship of God’s creation.

It is a wonderful counterpoint to much of the silly politics and commentary leading up to the Copenhagen summit, and it is a profoundly spiritual challenge that provides deep questions about the faithful and responsible life, questions that serve the Christian far more than anything we will read in the papers and blogs in the days of Copenhagen. 

In The Gift of Good Land, Berry writes: 

The difficulty but also the wonder of the story of the Promised Land is that, there, the primordial and still continuing dark story of human rapaciousness begins to be accompanied by a vein of light which, however improbably and uncertainly, still accompanies us. This light originates in the idea of the land as a gift—not a free or a deserved gift, but a gift given upon certain rigorous conditions.

It is a gift because the people who are to possess it did not create it. It is accompanied by careful warnings and demonstrations of the folly of saying that “My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:17). Thus, deeply implicated in the very definition of this gift is a specific warning against hubris which is the great ecological sin, just as it is the great sin of politics. People are not gods. They must not act like gods or assume godly authority. If they do, terrible retributions are in store. In this warning we have the root of the idea of propriety, of proper human purposes and ends. We must not use the world as though we created it ourselves.

Only in the NY Times will you find an article about how charities are attracting money that could, instead, be funneled through the inefficiency of a government bureaucracy. 

The $300 billion donated to charities last year cost the federal government more than $50 billion in lost tax revenue.

"Lost" tax revenue?  It’s not lost if it wasn’t yours in the first place.  But apparently, the Times, and reporter Stephanie Strom, thinks that’s the ‘default’ position; your money belongs to the government, except that which it loses to charities.

And as Don Surber sarcastically notes:

Why by collecting $300 billion a year from donors to provide social services, those charities are cheating the federal government out of $50 billion — money that could be used for, well, social services.

Hey, let’s try something.  If you get a mail appeal letter from the Salvation Army, reply to it and let’s steal more money from the government.  And it’ll hack off the NY Times, to boot!

1. The power of negative thinking.
2. Women in Pakistan.
3. The beltway and Hoover.
4. West on West.
5. That would be it (the end) … what other conclusion could you draw?
6. Patriarch Pavle and a poem.
7. Software and science.
8. La chocolate and sin.
9. Oops.
10. If true, this should be a damning indictment of government roles in healthcare.
11. Logic and evangelism.
12. Verse.

Click on the video to see the story and prepare to be outraged. 90 year-old Colonel Van D. Barfoot who served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor this week was served with a notice from his homeowner’s association to take down his flagpole because it violates the association’s bylaws. This is nitpicking by the homeowner’s association. I sincerely hope that they realize what a tremendous debt we owe to Colonel Barfoot and millions of others like him who have faithfully served their country. Perhaps his homeowner’s association could find a way to exercise some grace and allow him to keep his flagpole.

Hat tip: Townhall

Yes, we’re in that time of year when people scurry about, putting up holiday decorations, baking holiday treats, purchasing holiday gifts, writing holiday cards, attending holiday parties, and even trimming holiday trees. And all the while, we’re told by an impotently paranoid culture that we cannot utter the name of THE holiday that all our December actions are based on. Heaven forbid we should actually mention the holiday that everyone KNOWS is being celebrated.

Beginning just prior to Halloween, Disneyland re-decorates their “Haunted Mansion” attraction to combine aspects of both Halloween and that unmentionable day of celebration (which happens to be sometime near the Winter Solstice). Jack-O-Lanterns are mixed with images of Sandy Claws and the like. As one enters the attraction, it is interesting to note the canned narration inviting guests to “come inside and see what happens when two holidays collide!” Well, it’s obvious that one of the holidays is Halloween, but which holiday is it colliding with?

Kwanzaa?

Festivus?

Hanukkah?

Ramadan?

However you celebrate the holiday formerly known as [strong throat clear], take the time to read two sites, written by my friend Ilona, dedicated to the Advent of that colliding holiday (see here and here).

1. Contra the “emails at CRU change nothing” argument.
2. A conversation on climate. More on the same here.
3. International politics, economics, and climate.
4. Higher education and Mr Obama.
5. Standing against a casino.
6. An explosive situation in Russia, so to speak.
7. Putin may want a balanced view of Stalin … Ukraine not so much.
8. Russian intellectuals.
9. Speaking of which … bombs and the Evangelicals.
10. Heresy.
11. Noting history and Jesus.
12. A book.
13. That price tag seems high.
14. Risk assessment.