President Obama did not mean to say that the question of what is a person is above his pay grade. He meant to say that it was 3/5ths above his pay grade.

For those in the area, I want to bring to your attention a talk I am giving on January 28, the Feast Day of St. Thomas Aquinas, at St. Matthew Cathedral in South Bend, Indiana. I will be speaking on my return to the Catholic Church, the topic of my new book, Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic (Brazos Press, 2009). The talk is scheduled for 7-8:30 pm. Perhaps I will see some of you there.

(Update: I just found out that there is a sample of the audio version of Return to Rome. You can listen to it here)

Ew:

A mistrial was declared Monday when a home-invasion robbery suspect smeared human feces on his attorney’s face then threw more at the jury.

Weusi McGowan, 37, was upset because San Diego Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Fraser refused to remove Deputy Alternate Public Defender Jeffrey Martin from the case, prosecutor Christopher Lawson said.

Sounds like it worked. Not only will he get a new attorney, but a psychological evaluation as well.

I only note this because I was an avid, if irregular, reader of Mad Magazine until around 2001 when it got a new editor and started printing advertisements.  Mad simultaneously began to become much more outwardly left-wing. Political statements were not merely included as parts of actual jokes, but in mini-rants. When Mad started its “20 Dumbest” things of the year feature, it was natural that about a quarter of them be conservative things that were supposedly “dumb.” Oh, and it also printed stuff from Ted Rall.

Mad’s founder, William Gaines, was an old-fashioned FDR liberal, but he had enough respect for his profession (and hopefully for conservatives as well) to keep the political stuff low-key and ensure that it was always attempting to be humorous.  He never would have tolerated the proverbial middle-finger that the rag gives to conservatives these days. Perhaps that’s part of why it hasn’t been a commerical success. That type of restraint seems old-fashioned these days.

Clayton Cramer has a good post today summarizing why Obama’s plan to increase Corporate Automobile Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards represents a retread of bad ideas that have failed to work in the past — hardly the “change” we were promised during the dubious marketing scheme that was his campaign.

The bottom line is that if Obama had any political courage, and wanted to decrease fuel consumption, he would simply jack up gasoline taxes. That would be effective (i.e., there would be no rebound effect where people drive because they’re saving money on gas) and it would also not have the unintended consequences of CAFE (i.e., the downweighting of vehicles that increase fatalities in accidents). Obama, like his predecessors (including Republicans) would prefer to take the easy route and avoid the wrath of voters who don’t want to pay more for gasoline.

For the record, I don’t support either CAFE or higher gas taxes. I’d just prefer greater honesty out of politicans who believe that the government needs to take action.

Just one more, lyrics follow.

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Lyrics follow:

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In an often forgotten passage,  Dr. Martin Luther King writes in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963):

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According to the student paper of the school on whose faculty he sits, Pepperdine University:

….Kmiec, who has also served as legal counsel under Presidents Ronald Reagan and [George] Herbert Walker Bush, confirmed that Obama may be considering appointing him to the position of Vatican Emissary. “The President is nowhere close to determining such things because of the order of events … everyone’s first order of business is economic recovery,” Kmiec said. “At the appropriate time, when diplomatic relations through the State Department need to be addressed, I think my name would be part of the discussion.”

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A new website.  This is its mission:

Moral Accountability: An Open Letter
January 21, 2009

In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, a small group of Catholic and Evangelical Protestant intellectuals and activists, while saying that they personally support legal protection for the unborn and oppose the redefinition of marriage, promoted the candidacy of Barack Obama, who made no secret of his intention to wipe out the entire range of laws restricting or discouraging abortion and embryo-destructive research, or of his opposition to all state and federal initiatives (such as California Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act) to preserve marriage as the union of a man and a woman. These men and women assured their fellow Christians and other social conservatives that Obama’s economic policies would reduce the incidence of abortion, and they promised that Obama was being honest when he said that he was opposed to “same-sex marriage.”

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Hans von Spakovsky has a brilliant piece in today’s Weekly Standard containing the REAL truth about hiring in the Justice Department, especially the Civil Rights division. Hans is a brilliant and principled lawyer. I challenge the Washington Post and New York Times to actually report on Hans’ easily investigatable claims about lefty bias among career employees at Justice. Of course they won’t. The double standard still applies: Political considerations are okay if done by lefties, but evil if used by conservatives.

For what it’s worth, the Environmental Crimes Section of DoJ’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division (and indeed, almost certainly the entire division) is similarly staffed almost entirely with lefties. Do a Google search or an FEC or Open Secrets search on the political donations of the division’s attorneys, and you will see: Democrat after Democrat, lefty after lefty. Yet it is only conservatives who are run through the ringer for “politicized” hiring. This is an outrage.

For an example of the evil — yes, EVIL — that can be done by ideologically left, officious prosecutors, see all four pieces (follow all the internal links) in my Washington Examiner package yesterday on a case study that might literally make you cry, about a sweet, earnest inventor now sitting in a federal prison for 21 months for “abandoning” hazardous waste that he didn’t really abandon and that was neither waste nor even, in the form that he packaged it, hazardous.

We’re in for a rough ride, folks.

The audio version of my latest book, Return Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic (Brazos Press), can now be purchased through Amazon or Christian Audio. It is narrated by one of the great voices in audiobooks, Grover Gardner, who, ironically is a frequent commentator on Southern Appeal.

Best. FOCA. T-Shirt. Ever.

Gran Torino is good, really good.  For a long time, I’ve heard writers and film directors talk about the importance of showing people something instead of telling them.  The best films are those that set a scene which demonstrates a fundamental truth about people’s lives instead of having some character give a dramatic speech spilling out an entire philosophy of HOW IT IS and HOW IT OUGHT TO BE.  Gran Torino succeeds on that score.  Eastwood as the director working from a masterful script rolls out scene after scene revealing truths about our lives to us.

Is this a film, which the trailer portrays, in which we get to see Eastwood doing his Dirty Harry thing?  There is some of that.  No question.  That’s what I went to see.  But Gran Torino rewarded me with a deep reflection on America, on faith, on family, on immigration, on aging, and on heroism.  Who are we as Americans?  We’re immigrants.  To some degree we’re nationalistic, chauvinistic, racist, aggressive.  But there’s something else about us, too.  We tend to come out of the right side of things.  We love justice more than anything else.  Gran Torino shows us all of that.

Nothing preachy here.  Just solid, solid storytelling.  Everything works.  I can’t imagine anyone seeing this movie and feeling disappointed, as I did with the much splashier and showier Quantum of Solace, which left me empty and relatively unthrilled.

I’ve been waiting until the new messiah–’scuse me, the new president, took the throne–I mean, the office to post, because I figured by now that there’d be parsnips aplenty and a gold-plated chicken in every platinum pot. Is that the case? Or should we give the messiah–DANGIT!–the president a week or so to whip everything into shape?

From SeattlePi.com:

A contrite Mayor Sam Adams apologized to Portland for lying about a sexual relationship with a male teenager he was mentoring, but asked the city to consider it an anomaly in two decades of public service.

“I screwed up. I blew it. There’s no way to sugarcoat it,” Adams said during a news conference at City Hall Tuesday.

Now, that’s a stimulus plan!

Today, we enter into the wilderness. And deservedly so.

Conservatives now have a choice: We can either spend the next four years attacking every move that President Obama makes, or we can chart a new course based on long-standing conservative principles. As for me and my house, we will choose the  latter.

In the meantime, I wish the new president well. For the sake of the country, I pray that the economy recovers in the  near future, that our troops come home as soon as possible, and that there are no terrorist attacks on American soil under President Obama’s watch. I also pray that President Obama’s record on life issues is far better than Senator Obama’s, and that he continues President Bush’s tremendous and noble work fighting AIDS in Africa. He will certainly be in my daily prayers.

And while I cannot say that I favored President Obama’s election, I will celebrate today. I will celebrate a peaceful transition of power (something we take for granted as Americans). I will celebrate that children of every racial, ethnic, and socio-economic background now have a tangible example that they too can one day rise to become president of these United States. Finally, I will celebrate the fact that I can disengage from the political process for the foreseeable future. A man can only take so much.

Robert P. George is arguably the most potent conservative in the academic firmament. Through his scholarship and the outstanding programs of the James Madison program at Princeton University, George has contributed powerfully to the philosophical debate over the sanctity of life, marriage, and religion in the public square.

Next month, Union University in Jackson, Tennessee is holding a conference in honor of the 15th anniversary of the publication of George’s outstanding book Making Men Moral. The roster of speakers is quite good. In addition to Professor George, Hadley Arkes, James Stoner, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and many others will be in attendance. I’m not certain of it, but Francis Beckwith may also be there.

Richard John Neuhaus had been slated to attend before his death last week. I imagine most of those attending this conference will be his friends and admirers. Informal tributes may bloom.

For those who don’t remember, Union University is the school that rebounded so admirably from a devastating tornado strike last year.

Check out the website for the conference here.

According to reports, Cass Sunstein, Obama’s choice to be his Regulation Czar, is anti-hunting.

Sunstein has made no secret of his devotion to the cause of establishing legal “rights” for livestock, wildlife, and pets. “[T]here should be extensive regulation of the use of animals in entertainment, scientific experiments, and agriculture,” Sunstein wrote in a 2002 working paper while at the University of Chicago Law school.

While I haven’t taken a look at the paper or done any other due diligence, it is safe to say that there needs to be extensive questioning of Mr. Sunstein about his views on these issues before there is a vote on whether to confirm him.

Many of us remember the U.S. victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid. It came at a good time.

We all know the story. The 1970′s had been hard on America. We were beginning to look like losers buffetted by economic uncertainty, high inflation and unemployment, the loss of prestige on the international stage, the looming threat of nuclear war . . .

We often point to Ronald Reagan’s election as where it all turned around, but that hockey game at the Olympics, a moment when Americans (college kids, no less) rose to the occasion against all expectations, seemed to be part of a comeback in the public consciousness.

I had a little of the same feeling this morning while listening to Mike and Mike on ESPN Radio interview a guy who was seated on the exit row in the US Airways plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River. He described a scene where people didn’t panic, but instead did what they needed to do in an orderly fashion to survive. Everyone, from the pilot to the crew to the passengers to the ferry operators and other rescuers, worked together to bring life out of a deadly situation.

This is a proud moment. It comes at a time when we’ve been smacked around by crisis and negativity. We have had a feeling of looming disaster. We walk around psychically hunched, braced for a hit. The actions of everyone involved in the miracle on the Hudson shows that we may be better suited to weather a storm and to rebuild than we thought.

I didn’t have anything to do with this wonderful story, but these people are my countrymen. I’m standing a little taller on the inside today. This may be the start of our turnaround.

Okay, this is the post I can’t put up at American Spectator. This is the kind of post for which personal blogs were made.

I have long been troubled by the choice of many to be cremated. I far prefer the practice of Christian burial, which leaves the body intact as a sign of the dead person’s hope in resurrection by the Lord.

There are people in my family who are Christians and who prefer to be cremated. This disturbs me. I want to visit those who predecease me at their graves. I want to visit them where they lay, not look at some urn or think about how we scattered an incinerated body over a lake or something like that.

So, I have been trying to think about how to convince people not to be cremated. Some of my Christian relatives and friends are annoyed by my strong preference against the practice of incinerating the dead. They accuse me of having too little faith that God will raise whom he will raise regardless of the state of the body. He will raise even a body that has been burned into ashes.

I suspect they are right. I doubt God would refuse to resurrect or admit to the afterlife someone who requested and received cremation. Still, I think we call it Christian burial for a reason. It is a symbol, just like the wedding ring on a finger. We are signaling the world that we believe God has plans for us. He will resurrect the old body and transform it into an uncorruptible, glorified new body with a future we can only guess about.

But I titled this post “The Secular Case Against Cremation.” Here it is. You aren’t going to have to believe in anything more than the techological progress of man. If you are cremated and your physical body has been destroyed, then how are the incredibly advanced humans of the year 3500 going to reconstitute you by using your DNA? The graveyards are going to be an incredible bonanza of super advanced bio-archaeology. They’ll need a body or at least some old bones to work with! Then, you can hang around telling them about your world until the sun starts going supernova.

Chew on that for a while and see if you’re still so hot about making your final rest as a bunch of ashes in a coffee can. (I hope Heather Mac Donald and the rest of the “secular right” folks enjoy this exciting use of my secular reason.)

Cross-posted at my personal blog (www.hunterbaker.wordpress.com)

My buddy Ben Domenech attended Father Neuhaus’s wake and funeral, and recounts his experience here. 

It is well worth your time.

This will be ugly.

The US House recently passed the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the central provision of which is to restart the statute of limitations on an employment discrimination claim whenever the employee receives a paycheck.  In other words, it extends the statute of limitations until after the employee leaves the company.

I’ve been arguing with supporters of this legislation, and haven’t come away with the idea that good arguments exist in its favor. My take is that this legislation completely disregards the reasons why statutes of limitations exist, namely, to compel a plaintiff to bring suit in a timely fashion to avoid spoilation of evidence and allow potential defendants repose from the threat of potential lawsuits. 

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Soon after my return to the Catholic Church became public in early May, 2007, I found in my email inbox a message from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Dated 7 May 2007, it reads:

Dear Frank Beckwith,

As you will appreciate, the metaphor is inescapable: Welcome back home.

Do such decisions complicate our conversations with evangelicals? No doubt. Complicate and enrich. Your decision and the admirable way in which you have explained it will be welcomed also by evangelicals who understand that we are all called to exemplify fidelity and courage as we conscientiously discern the course of fidelity and courage.

The intentions of you and your family will be remembered at the altar.

Yours in Christ and his Church,

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

Lord, I was not worthy to receive that. Eternal Rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let Perpetual Peace shine upon him.

(Cross-posted on What’s Wrong With the World)

Part of the reason Richard John Neuhaus will be remembered is for his impact on Christians in higher education. There is no question that his seminal book The Naked Public Square and then his journal First Things changed the way many of us think about religion and culture. He also did something I think is nearly impossible with FT. He created a serious journal that causes many people (a great many of them professors) to do a little dance when they find it in their mailbox.

First Things is not an academic journal, but it is close and better. Instead of dividing knowledge up into a million little pieces and then writing ad nauseum about those subcompartments. First Things invites strong minds to contribute big essays about the intersection of religion, culture, law, politics, art, music, etc. The result is readable and edifying. When I was younger, I knew it was above my head, but I pursued it for improvement, just like a gangster listening to a pronounciation soundtrack to improve his speech. First Things took me places. Today, when I meet a fellow reader, I meet a friend.

Enough of the unsolicited advertisement. I saw a snippet of an email exchange about Neuhaus that is worth reproducing here. I won’t include the name in case the person wants that to remain private:

Converted (to Catholicism) about 1990 or 91. He is one of those Missouri Synod Lutherans who had a tremendous early education in their prep schools and liberal arts college…then a fine seminary education. It was the old German gymnasium system where young guys went off to prep school at 14 and learned German, Greek, Latin, church history, the confessions even before they got to college. The college at Fort Wayne gave them a terrific liberal arts education—classics, literature, history, languages—and then off to seminary. Pelikan, Wilken, Neuhaus, Marty, and many lesser lights came through that system. Valparaiso’s golden age occurred when these highly educated pastors also went into other fields and got doctorates. They had dual educations that made faith and learning engagement a natural thing. M.Divs with a degree in law, economics, literature. Very erudite types who occupied many positions at Valpo. But that has all disappeared….a great but probably necessary loss. How many families would send their boys off to prep school at 14 and what church could afford to run prep schools all over the country for their young men?

But Richard was one of that group….didn’t really need a doctorate.

No, he didn’t really need that doctorate. Wish we could reproduce that system for young people from families without tremendous means.

Richard John Neuhaus is dead.  We’ve lost some big ones in the last year. Many of you will not realize how big this one was.  I pray Jody Bottum and some of the others in the First Things (Neuhaus’ hugely influential journal) world can carry on his legacy.  Though Neuhaus’ death leaves a chasm to be filled, I think Dr. Bottum is the right man for it.

Anthony Sacramone is a former managing editor of First Things.  He is also one of my favorite writers.  So, I’m happy to bring you his wonderful tribute to Neuhaus.  Here’s a taste:

Woody Allen said that 90% of life is just showing up. Richard John Neuhaus showed up. Whether it was at civil-rights marches in the 1960s or pro-life marches of the 1980s, Richard John Neuhaus showed up. Whether it was at the altar as a parish priest or at the bedside of a dying friend, Richard John Neuhaus showed up. As writer, lecturer, editor, raconteur, counselor, teacher — Richard John Neuhaus showed up. Every day. Until today.

And by the way, the New York Times didn’t do badly, either.  I give them credit, particularly since Father Neuhaus spent part of his last column writing about how his desire to read the NYT had continued to slip.

Statement by President George W. Bush

Statement of House Republican Leader John Boehner

Statement of Senator Sam Brownback

“Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009” (Ben Domenech, RedState)

“Death on a Thursday Morning” (The Editors of NRO)

“Neuhaus” (Ramesh Ponnuru, NRO’s The Corner)

“Father Richard John Neuhaus: A Man Animated by His Faith” (Raymond Arroyo, WSJ)

“A Priest in Full” (Brian C. Anderson, The City)

“Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009:  A gaping hole in the public square” (Joseph Bottum, Weekly Standard)

Father Raymond J. de Souza (National Catholic Register) 

“Remembering Richard John Neuhaus” (Rod Dreher, Cruncy Con)

“A second brother dies” (Michael Novak)

“In Memoriam: Our Friend, Richard John Neuhaus” (The Catholic Thing) 

“Father Richard John Neuhaus, Politics, Books and Nakedness” (Alan Cooperman, WaPo)

“Priest, Conservative Richard Neuhaus” (Alexander F. Remington, WaPo)

“The Father and the Farm Kid” (Jordan Hylden of CT)

NYT Obit of RJN

Ed Whelan (NRO) (more…)