August 18, 2008
BONA FIDES:
Getting to Know John McCain (KARL ROVE, April 30, 2008, Wall Street Journal)
When it comes to choosing a president, the American people want to know more about a candidate than policy positions. They want to know about character, the values ingrained in his heart. For Mr. McCain, that means they will want to know more about him personally than he has been willing to reveal.Mr. Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I told you I would make you a cripple."
The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day's will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at "a goofy angle," as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.
But it didn't heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day's splint in place.
Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complimented the treatment he'd gotten from his captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was Dr. McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again.
Another story I heard over dinner with the Days involved Mr. McCain serving as one of the three chaplains for his fellow prisoners. At one point, after being shuttled among different prisons, Mr. Day had found himself as the most senior officer at the Hanoi Hilton. So he tapped Mr. McCain to help administer religious services to the other prisoners.
Today, Mr. Day, a very active 83, still vividly recalls Mr. McCain's sermons. "He remembered the Episcopal liturgy," Mr. Day says, "and sounded like a bona fide preacher." One of Mr. McCain's first sermons took as its text Luke 20:25 and Matthew 22:21, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." Mr. McCain said he and his fellow prisoners shouldn't ask God to free them, but to help them become the best people they could be while serving as POWs. It was Caesar who put them in prison and Caesar who would get them out. Their task was to act with honor.
While his opponent becomes more ethereal with exposure, Maverick becomes more substantial. And there are three months of exposure left.
TALK ABOUT IDENTITY POLITICS:
The Unicorn Rider obviously ought to appeal to fellow mythological creatures.
FORTUNATELY, THE KID WAS IN THE CARE...:
Premature baby 'comes back to life' (THE JERUSALEM POST, 8/18/08)
A premature baby who was pronounced dead "came back to life" Sunday after five hours in Nahariya Hospital. [...]The woman underwent an abortion and the baby, weighing 610 grams, was extracted from her womb without a pulse, hospital officials said.
A senior doctor pronounced the baby dead and she was transferred to the cooler.
Five hours later, the woman's husband came to the hospital to take what he thought was his dead baby girl for burial.
When the baby was taken out of the cooler, she began to breathe.
...of someone above Barrack Obama's pay grade.
THE BRIGHTS HARBOR THIS DELUSION THAT NUANCE IS HARD FOR US STUPID'S TO COMPREHEND....:
Worlds Apart: McCain's Clarity vs. Obama's Nuance (Sally Quinn, August 18, 2008, Washington Post)
McCain did a great job of making me feel confident. He was clearly in his element at Saddleback, among supportive evangelical Christians, and he went a long way toward alleviating their fears about his inability to communicate with them in their own language.Obama came first, and he handled himself well in front of an audience that clearly disagrees with him on many issues. He also managed to put to rest the notion that he is a Muslim, which 12 percent of Americans still believe he is. He talked directly to Rick Warren as though they were having a real conversation, whereas McCain played to the audience, rarely looking at Warren. He was low-key, thoughtful and nuanced.
That kind of nuance is hard to understand sometimes -- it's unclear, complicated. Obama's world can be scarier. It's multicultural. It's realistic (yes, there is evil on the streets of this country as well as in other places, and a lot of evil has been perpetrated in the name of good). It's honest. When does life begin? Only the antiabortionists are clear on that. For the majority of Americans (who are pro-choice), it is "above my pay grade," in Obama's words, where there is no hard and fast line to draw on what's worth dying for, and where people of all faiths have to be respected.
I would rather live in McCain's world than Obama's. But I believe that we live in Obama's world.
Afterward, the commentators talked abut how Obama needs to have better stories, to be more accessible and less aloof, and to have sharper, shorter, simpler answers rather than be so cerebral. But Obama is authentic. He is who he is.
...when the reality is that we recognize it for what it is, the absence of a moral compass.
IF YOU WERE WRITING A DYSTOPIAN FICTION...:
What's so great about Dinesh D'Souza? An interview (Bernard Chapin, August 18, 2008, Enter Stage Right)
BC: It has been suggested by Richard Dawkins that atheists now term themselves "brights" in keeping with their supernatural-free worldviews. That is a loaded term to say the least. In your estimation, how closely is atheism tied to elitism? Could it be that a certain segment of humanity is offended by the notion that anyone or any entity stands above them?Dinesh D'Souza: Well, this whole business about the brights goes back a couple of years. Atheists sat around and said to themselves "we sound too negative" because to be an atheist means being against something. How could they rephrase their identity in a positive manner? Well, "brights" is what they came up with. They must have thought, "We all agree that we're extremely smart," so that's where the term comes from. Dennett and Dawkins wrote articles about this. The term conveys a comical pomposity but when you look at their work it is understandable. Atheists stand on a metaphysical platform grounded in faith but they are the only ones who don't recognize this fact. They assume that our five senses give us complete knowledge of reality.
...you'd, likewise, call them something like The Brights.
AND BY "FOLKS" I MEAN "I"
Obama Facing Attacks From All Sides Over Abortion Record (RUSSELL BERMAN, August 18, 2008, NY Sun)
The presumptive Democratic nominee responded sharply in an interview Saturday night with the Christian Broadcast Network, saying anti-abortion groups were "lying" about his record."They have not been telling the truth," Mr. Obama said. "And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying." [...]
At issue is the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, a bill in the Illinois state Senate that sought to protect against bungled abortions by requiring that a fetus that survived an abortion be defined as a person. Fearing that the legislation could be interpreted more broadly to protect fetuses that were not yet viable — thus threatening Roe v. Wade, abortion rights advocates pushed for an amendment that explicitly limited the scope of the bill to infants "born alive."
"Nothing in this section," the added sentence reads, "shall be construed to affirm, deny, expand, or contract any legal status or legal right applicable to any member of the species homo sapiens at any point prior to being born alive as defined in this section." A federal version with that added clause passed Congress unanimously in 2002, with the support of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Kennedy, among others. Mr. Obama said in 2004 and again on Saturday that he would have supported the federal version. [...]
Indeed, Mr. Obama appeared to misstate his position in the CBN interview on Saturday when he said the federal version he supported "was not the bill that was presented at the state level."
His campaign yesterday acknowledged that he had voted against an identical bill in the state Senate, and a spokesman, Hari Sevugan, said the senator and other lawmakers had concerns that even as worded, the legislation could have undermined existing Illinois abortion law.
If you want to win the Democratic nomination you have to be pro-death. If you want to be president you can't be seen to be. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were able to fudge the matter successfully. The Unicorn Rider is having a harder time doing so.
MORE:
Barack Obama Repeats False Claim Abortions Haven't Declined Under Bush (Steven Ertelt, 8/17/08, LifeNews.com)
"The fact is that -- although we have a president who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years -- abortions have not gone down," Obama said.Yet that claim doesn't square with the latest national abortion numbers put forward by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a research firm associated with Planned Parenthood, the abortion business that has endorsed Obama.
In January, AGI reported that the number of abortions nationwide have fallen to their lowest point in 30 years and have declined 25 percent since 1990 -- with half of that time period coming under pro-life presidents.
The number of abortions are now at their lowest point since 1.179 million in 1976, AGI said.
Meanwhile, research from a nonpartisan political watchdog group finds the claim false when compared with national and state abortion statistics.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania says that claims that abortions have not decreased under President Bush are "not true."
"Politicians from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Howard Dean have recently contended that abortions have increased since George W. Bush took office in 2001," the researchers have written.
"This claim is false. It's based on an opinion piece that used data from only 16 states."
LOSING AMERICA WAS ONE THING...:
Theory needs a paramedic, not more cheerleaders (Denyse O’Leary, 8/16/08, Calgary Herald)
Textbook examples of evolution often evaporate when researchers actually study them (instead of just assuming they are true).For example, the peacock’s tail did not evolve to please hen birds; hens don’t notice them much. The allegedly yummy Viceroy butterfly did not evolve to look like the bad-tasting Monarch (both insects taste bad). The eye spots on butterflies’ wings did not evolve to scare birds by resembling the eyes of their predators. Birds avoid brightly patterned insects, period. They don’t care whether the patterns resemble eyes. Similarly, the famous “peppered moth” of textbook fame has devolved into a peppered myth, featuring book-length charges and countercharges.
And remember that row of vertebrate embryos in your textbook years ago? It was dubbed in the journal Science one of the “most famous fakes” in biology—because the embryos don’t really look very similar. And Darwin’s majestic Tree of Life? It’s now a tangleweed, or maybe several of them.
We seldom see evolution happening. Michael Behe’s Edge of Evolution (2007) notes that for decades scientists have observed many thousands of generations of bacteria in the lab. And how did they evolve?
Well, they didn’t. Worse, when evolution is occasionally observed (and widely trumpeted), it often heads the wrong way. For example, bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance by junking intricate machinery, not by creating it. Cave fish lose their eyes. But we don’t need a theory for how intricate machinery gets wrecked. We need a theory for how it originates and how it develops quite suddenly. Evolution, as we understand it today, apparently isn’t that theory.
We aren’t going to improve science education by teaching Darwinian fairy tales.
Breakenridge informs us that in a recent Angus Reid poll, “A shockingly low 37 per cent of Albertans supported the position that humans beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.” Well, good, let’s drive the numbers lower still. That position is an article of atheist dogma. Evidence for it is hailed as a truth we must all embrace; evidence against it is shrugged off as a temporary setback. Try doubting the dogma, and you could end up starring in Ben Stein’s Expelled, Part II.
...we're notoriously anti-Enlightenment, but Canada?