From the Washington Post:

The Senate gave final approval last night to legislation authorizing the construction of 700 miles of double-layered fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border, shelving President Bush’s vision of a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. immigration laws in favor of a vast barrier.

. . .

The Secure Fence Act authorizes the construction of at least two layers of reinforced fencing around the border town of Tecate, Calif., and a huge expanse stretching from Calexico, Calif., to Douglas, Ariz. — virtually the entire length of Arizona’s border with Mexico. Another expanse would stretch over much of the southern border of New Mexico, with another section winding through Texas, from Del Rio to Eagle Pass, and from Laredo to Brownsville.

The final vote in the Senate, last night, was 80-19. Keep in mind the fence serves to channel immigration to areas where it can, hopefully, be managed.

A big study of American religion was released this week by researchers at Baylor U. Mark Tooley wrote about it for the Weekly Standard. Much more, including streaming video, is available through the Baylor website.

Also earlier this week, USA Today ran two stories on the differences between married and unmarried voters as to party affiliation. No real surprises, I guess, but the magnitude of the gap between the parties was larger than I would have guessed.

Another very interesting paper along these lines, “Myths and Realities of American Political Georgraphy,” by Edward Glaeser & Bryce Adam Ward, appeared in the Spring issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.  You can read it online, here.  Here’s the abstract:

The division of America into red states and blue states misleadingly suggests that states are split into two camps, but along most dimensions, like political orientation, states are on a continuum. By historical standards, the number of swing states is not particularly low, and America’s cultural divisions are not increasing. But despite the flaws of the red state/blue state framework, it does contain two profound truths. First, the heterogeneity of beliefs and attitudes across the United States is enormous and has always been so. Second, political divisions are becoming increasingly religious and cultural. The rise of religious politics is not without precedent, but rather returns us to the pre-New Deal norm. Religious political divisions are so common because religious groups provide politicians the opportunity to send targeted messages that excite their base.

As I’ve noted on more than one occasion, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute does vital work.  It recently launched two new websites well worth a look:

Civic Literacy Report features ISI’s recently-released report, The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions. It is based on a survey of 14,000 randomly selected college freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities across the country, who answered 60 multiple-choice questions.  The report concludes that 

• There is trivial difference between freshmen and seniors in their knowledge of America’s heritage.
• 16 of 50 schools surveyed exhibited negative learning.
• Overall, seniors failed the civic literacy exam with an average score of 53%.

You can read Pete DuPont’s Opinion Journal column describing and discussing the study by clicking here.

The Culture of Enterprise site showcases a new ISI initiative to encourage study and scholarship on the topic through an essay contest, book and article awards, and a book publishing program.  Here’s hoping this effort enjoys great success.  

Turner Classic Movies is scheduled to show a lengthy 1972 interview of Hitch by Dick Cavett, this evening at 7:00 and again at 10:00, Central Time.  In addition, TCM is showing Suspicion, Foreign Correspondent, and North by Northwest.

Lunatic Howard Dean:  “We are going to take back Texas….”

Me:

I just can’t figure out which angle to believe.

Was it the oil companies gauging us when gas prices rose to $3 a gallon?

Or (now that the price has fallen precipitously — like 80 cents in a month) is it the car companies desperately trying to save the internal combustion engine by keeping the price of gas artificially low?

Or is it just good, old-fashioned supply and demand?

I’ve posted here before about the fiction of Lars Walker. I didn’t mention that he is a shrewd commentator on political and cultural matters, as well. I offer you a taste of his take on the Pope’s comments and the Islamic reaction:

Any reasonable person would recognize that rioting and murdering people are a self-contradictory means of proclaiming one’s peacefulness. And the fact that a large part of the Muslim world fails to get the joke (such as it is) pretty much says it all.

But the Islamic world doesn’t care. Because they’re not involved in a struggle of ideas, but a struggle of honor.

Honor, and honor cultures, is one of my hobbyhorses. I believe (perhaps wrongly) that my study of Viking sagas has taught me something about the subject.

I want you to go read the whole post, so I’ll leave the rest of it at Lars’ site. Check it out and discover how to deal with honor cultures.

Michelle Malkin has this story about the demise of positive role models for young girls in popular culture (see, e.g., ”Bratz”), and of Charlotte Church in particular.  For those familiar with what made Ms. Church famous in the first place – singing beautiful sacred songs and outwardly portraying the beauty of piety and modesty — this is a sad, shocking tale.  Her poor decision has led some to stop selling her earlier works (see here, scroll down to story on right hand side).      

Update: see this story on school officials trying to deal with their students’ ”free speech.”  Ugh.  Even if it kills me, my children will never see the inside of one of these schools.  The very idea that this would be a “tough problem to solve” is ridiculous, but because these are government schools the problem has been made tough.  God save us.

Peter Bergen,  the author of the New York Times best-seller Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, has a good essay up over at Mother Jones.  The essay is actually a couple of years old, but Bergen was right on the money.  Here is a taste:

Even Kenneth Pollack, one of the nation’s leading experts on Iraq, whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq made the most authoritative case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, says, “My instinct tells me that the Iraq war has hindered the war on terrorism. You had to deal with Al Qaeda first, not Saddam. We had not crippled the Al Qaeda organization when we embarked on the Iraq war.”

The damage to U.S. interests is hard to overestimate. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan academic who is regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on Al Qaeda, points out that “sadness and anger about Iraq, even among moderate Muslims, is being harnessed and exploited by terrorist and extremist groups worldwide to grow in strength, size, and influence.” Similarly, Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counterterrorism at the CIA under presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says the Iraq war “accelerated terrorism” by “metastasizing” Al Qaeda. Today, Al Qaeda is more than the narrowly defined group that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001; it is a growing global movement that has been energized by the war in Iraq.

For a very complete story on how Veggie Tales got to the inconceivable point of trying to remove all references to God and/or the Bible from the show to be aired on NBC, check out Phil Vischer’s blog.  He takes you all the way from the founding of the company in 1990 to bankruptcy due to lawsuit and then to where we are today.

For those outraged Veggie Tales fans, the short answer is that Phil Vischer no longer has any control over the show whatsoever and that clearly hurts.

Weird Al is calling your name.  Answer.  Answer and feel the freedom.

Well, I lost an appeal yesterday on an equal protection issue.  I wanted to run the issue by SA readers to see if you think justice was done.  At base, the issue was whether a statute prohibiting in-house physical therapists employed by a physician practice from receiving referrals from the pratice denies the PTs equal protection of the laws.  I represented as amicus curiae a group of patients who wanted the statute struck down.   

I argued that because of the statute, South Carolina now has two classes of health care providers. The first class, encompassing all licensed, certified, or registered health care providers who are not physical therapists, may receive in-house referrals.  The second class, encompassing only  physical therapists, may not receive in-house referrals.

In summary, I contended that there is no rational basis for prohibiting physical therapists from receiving in-house referrals from the physicians who employ them. Self-referral concerns about escalating health care costs, conflicts of interest, and excessive profits apply to all South Carolina health care providers and not just to physical therapists. 

I conceded that classifications among health care providers are tenable if the classification at issue relates to the different functions of the various licensed health care providers. For example, if the classification related to the performance of surgery or the dispensation of controlled substances, physical therapist (and many other licensed providers) would not be similarly situated to physicians.  In those cases, the General Assembly would be correct to differentiate between physicians and other health care providers.

The present case, however,  has nothing to do with the type of medical service provided by various health care providers.  The classification is not based on the core functions of health care providers.   Instead, the classification at issue concerns the receipt of in-house referrals, i.e., whether a physician can employ a physical therapist and refer patients to that physical therapist. All licensed health care providers, regardless the specific services provided, are similarly situated when the issue is solely the permissibility of referrals from their employers.

The state Supreme Court, in a 3-2 opinion, did not buy it.  Whatchaa think???

Since I’ve posted a couple of items about this movie, I feel duty-bound to report that reviewers are panning it with enthusiasm.  The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern lit into it on Friday:

What a botch.  “All the King’s Men” . . . has no center, no coherence, no soul and no shame.  What it does have is a preening lead performance; a bizarre concatenation of accents; a dreary, pseudo-gritty look; a nonsensical change of period; a surfeit of soul-sickness and a score that could be used for torturing prisoners without violating the Geneva Convention.

There.  You’ve been warned.

William, not to jump overly ugly with a co-blogger here, but your conclusion that “It was a mistake to invade Iraq-Bush ignored warnings and now has simply made the terrorism problem worse” is bunk.

Was it “Dubya’s” invasion of Iraq which gave rise to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993? The attack on the Khobar Towers in 1996? The attacks on the African embassies in 1998? The attack on the USS Cole in 2000? The failed Millenium Bombing? The 2001 “shoe bomber”? September 11 itself? (Not to mention, if you believe the overwhelming evidence set out in Jayna Davis’ fine book The Third Terrorist, the Oklahoma City bombing)?

And in the three years since the invasion of Iraq – which you claim has made the terrorism problem worse – the terrorists have staged attacks where exactly? In New York? NO. In Washington? NO. Los Angeles? NO. Chicago? NO. Domestic US air flights? NO. International air flights into or out of the United States? NO. If there are, in fact, a plethora of new terrorists that have been spawned by the war in Iraq, then where are they? And if your answer is “Setting off suicide bombs in Baghdad,” or “Planting IEDs in Ramadi,” then my response is “Better there – where we have 100,000+ troops who can steps to both protect themselves and fight back – than in Jersey City, or Evanston, or Sacramento.”
The fact is that the bureaucracies behind this report are the same bureaucracies who have been wrong about the threat posed by Islamic terrorism for decades. It appears to me that even the Pope has a better understanding of the nature of our enemy than do these agencies. And that is the tragedy.

UPDATE: The Counterterrorism Blog recounts the checkered history of past National Intelligence Estimates:

But it’s also true the NIEs have certainly included some major blunders. The 1997 NIE, the last one before the 9/11 attacks on global terrorism, mentioned bin Laden in only three sentences as a “terrorist financier” and didn’t reference al-Qaeda at all. And of course, it was the October 2002 NIE which was a significant factor in the decision to use force against Iraq by famously asserting, “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”

And Michelle Malkin has a massive roundup, including the text of the White House’s response to the leak.  Also check out Ed Morrissey’s article and the comments thereto, which features this insightful observation:

Unfortunately, [after the first Iraq War] we decided to allow Saddam to survive, and then got caught up in a 12-year war that only occasionally looked like peace. We had to keep tens of thousands of forces staged in Saudi Arabia, the action that prompted al-Qaeda’s formation and mission in the first place, for a dozen years while we allowed Saddam to continually defy both the cease-fire agreement and sixteen UN Security Council resolutions. Either we had to acknowledge defeat in that war and retreat from the region after 9/11, or we had to end that twelve-year war in order to prosecute the war on terror in the region where terrorists lived.

Did that make Islamists more angry? Yes, I’m sure it did, and it probably did give them a great propaganda tool for recruitment. However, here’s the crux of the problem: no matter what we do to fight the Islamists and to establish liberal thinking in opposition to them, they’re going to get motivated because of it. Even an abject surrender and a return to isolationism will not work, because their victory over us will be an even greater motivational force for Islamist expansion.

Indeed.

I’ve blogged on the Beckwith tenure story quite a bit the past several months, so I’ll conclude simply by saying that hearing Dr. Beckwith got his tenure was one of the happiest moments in my life.  When he was denied several months ago I felt the emotional turmoil that comes with witnessing injustice and not being able to do anything about it.  Now, I know that justice is good for the soul.  Congratulations to Dr. Beckwith.  Congratulations to Baylor.  Congratulations to President John Lilley and Provost Randall O’Brien for doing the right thing.  Congratulations to the Regents of Baylor University.  This is a great day and one that gives real hope for the future of the Baylor 2012 Vision begun by Robert Sloan.

Ok War Hawks, don’t shoot the messenger.   In a report titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” US intelligence agencies report that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has heightened the threat of terrorism and increased the number of terrorist groups.

This is not a shocker.  As I said at the time the War on Terror began, the attack against Afghanistan was a proper and measured response to deal with bin Laden and his organization.  A mistake was made when Dubya lumped Saddam and bin Laden together as twin evils.  Saddam was cruel, but he was a secular tyrant who feared and distrusted bin Laden as much as we did.  The Middle East is much less stable without him and Iraq is now a haven for terrorists. It was a mistake to invade Iraq–Bush ignored warnings and now has simply made the terrorism problem worse.

when, while being interviewed post-game, you saw him turn and say “get the team over to the band.”  Given MSU’s response last year at ND, after beating the Irish, Weis’ call to assure sportsmenship and safety, was the best coaching of the day.

Former Mississippi governor Ronnie Musgrove (served 2000-2004) looks like he may some uncomfortable days ahead of him. He’s been legally representing the philanthropic Maddox Foundation, headed by its director and trustee Robin Costa, in a legal dispute with Tommye Working Maddox, the step-granddaughter of the foundation’s founder, Dan Maddox, over Costa moving the organization (including it’s money, of course) from Nashville to Hernando, MS (just south of Memphis). Maddox’s lawsuit states that Costa has badly managed the foundation and used funds for her personal benefit. In the course of the court proceedings, the 2004 deposition of former foundation employee Tera Hermansen was unsealed Tuesday which revealed that Costa had told her and other employees of her, uh, “special sessions” with Musgrove while he was governor.

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So ruled the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Services. 

Discussions of the ruling are available here:

Volokh

Surburban Guerrilla

SCOTUS Blog

SCAL Blog

In the latest in the totally irrational response to the Pope’s “remarks,” a large group of Muslim clerics has recently demanded the Pope’s removal. Obviously, this group does not understand the nature of the Papacy, the Church or its governance. The group says:

Benedict “should be removed from his position immediately for encouraging war and fanning hostility between various faiths” and “making insulting remarks” against Islam, said a joint statement issued by the clerics and scholars at the end of their one-day convention.

The “pope, and all infidels, should know that no Muslim, under any circumstances, can tolerate an insult to the Prophet (Muhammad). … If the West does not change its stance regarding Islam, it will face severe consequences,” it said. (more…)

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan says the United States threatened to bomb his country back to the Stone Age after the 9/11 attacks if he did not help America’s war on terror.

Rangel and Pelosi sayin’ it like it is. Good for them.

I often like the commentaries of Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford.  But he’s got this odd tic that just drives me up the wall.  Take his latest column, prompted, I’m guessing, by the complaint that Tiger Woods was being unpatriotic for rooting against American Andy Roddick and for the Swiss Roger Federer in the U.S. Open final.  There – as he has done several times – Deford lambastes Americans for being a “a narrow, jingoistic sports country.”  You see, he’s upset that we don’t appreciate “‘furriners” and pay attention only to sports where Americans are dominant.

Gosh, that’s shocking.  Do you mean that people prefer their own, in general?  That people pay more attention to the goings-on of their own countrymen (and women) than others’?  I’d bet that if we got Mr. Deford in a room and had a bit of time to, er, “interrogate” him (Sen. McCain notwithstanding) we’d figure out pretty quickly that his distaste for the preferences of the people that allow him to pursue a pretty nice life as a sportswriter and commentator runs right along with distaste for what he sees as our “current American tendency toward arrogance and imperiousness” in the world at large.  In other words, those know-nothing red-staters are boobs in sport and politics, don’t ya’ know?

Perhaps more to the point, maybe the explanation for his phenomenon is a bit simpler – maybe the sorts of sports he would like us to take an interest in just aren’t all that interesting to Americans.  Deford made this sort of complaint previously when Americans, in his view, were only paying attention to the Tour de France because an American, Lance Armstrong, was winning.  Well, why else would anyone watch hours upon hours of a cycling race?  “Well, Jacque, the strange beast known as the peloton has continued to move along all together now for five straight days – but, my, isn’t that a lovely thatched roof on that shed and, look, some excitement now, the French along the roads look like they’re trying to surrender to the German cyclist!”  (Sorry, lost control a bit there…)  Ditto goes for soccer – er, excuse me, “football” – European basketball and don’t forget 24-hour Le Mans racing!  You’ll be at the edge of your seats for that one!

Finally, who says we don’t root for foreigners or take interest in them?  Sergio Garcia is one of the most popular players on tour; people love Ernie Els.  If Vijay Singh weren’t such a prickly fellow, he’d be a bigger hit than he is.  I’ve even heard tell that there a few – just a few – players born outside of the US that are pretty popular among American baseball fans.  I mean, c’mon, didn’t we root for the Red Sox in the World Series a few years go – what’s more foreign than Boston?
(Oh, and as an aside, the only thing more silly than complaining that Tiger Woods was rooting for Federer is believing that it actually had anything to do with their “friendship.”  Yep, all those pictures inside the locker room didn’t have anything to do with the fact that their both Nike guys or that they have the same agent.  Nope – theirs is just a mutual admiration society, that’s it…)

Michael Moynihan over at Reason has a good article up on the recent elections in Sweden and what that means for the welfare state. 

as this article explains, but Christian pharmacists will be forced to dispense a drug the operates to destroy human life.  

I discovered last night while reading The Dream of Scipio:

Because civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in.  It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark.  These people [the Romans] gave in.  They stopped caring.  And because they did, this land fell under the darkness of a barbarism which lasted for hundreds of years.

Finally….. I agree with Chavez on something.

Maybe we have to put the United Nations somewhere else; maybe a city of the south. We’ve proposed Venezuela.

Excellent idea…….. jerk.

A mysterious debris field around the space shuttle is vexing the NASA folks. Magnified image of the space bag revealed……

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Apropos Feddie’s post below, Muskrat asks whether “we” are on board with this kind of program.  Well, I don’t know if there’s much of a “we” here on this part of the question, but let me pose a couple of points.

First, it seems obvious that some of the things offered by, say, Democrats for Life are things that, if they would work, would be, all things considered, good things.  (Put aside for a moment support for contraception as a matter of public policy).  Efforts that reduce the numbers of abortions have to be good things, right?  It seems to me a no-brainer.  (Of course, the fact that Sen. Kerry’s proposals go hand-in-hand with what almost have to be – if he’s going to get NARAL’s support – state-funded abortions makes his proposals much less serious).
But, second, there’s a danger here in focusing too much on abortion numbers.  It’s very good to save lives – I’m far from a “no compromise” guy on the matter – but a political system that allows abortions, especially for contraceptive purposes, is still a system that sanctions and protects a grave evil.  The protection of abortion rights doesn’t just allow the killing of human beings, it corrupts all parts of our social and political fabric.  It would be as if it were 1850 and we outlawed field slavery but allowed people to keep house slaves.  Sure – the number of slaves would be greatly reduced and we would have made real strides in reducing injustice, but that wouldn’t have been enough.  If we only think of the abortion question in terms of how many, it seems to me that we’re missing the bigger picture.

I’d be interested to hear what the rest of the crowd here thinks…

Christianity Today’s cover story carries the title above.  The opening line: “Calvinism is making a comeback — and shaking up the church.”  The article is somewhat lengthy, but provides a great look at how, and why (e.g., the emphasis on doctrine), young people are moving towards Reformed Theology.