(HT: Hot Air)
Here’s the original:

Here’s the parody:

I can understand “Thirteen” from House. But Samantha Taggart from ER? For the love of God, not Samantha.

Obama’s company.

That Jennings knew of a sexually active 15-year-old, of any gender, involved with “an older man” and didn’t take steps to report that relationship to the student’s parents or to authorities has made him a target for criticism – long before he was put in charge of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.

Dear God in Heaven. Jennings is director of the Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools.

Maybe folks are waking up.

I have started a series on my personal blog where I take a look at each of the Federalist Papers.  Here is one, two, and three-five.  I will be cross-posting here as well from now on.

Read about it here. Kate Harding at Salon.com takes the lid off.

In case you were wondering, Woody Allen in fact did sign the “Free Roman Polanski Petition.” Cardinal Mahoney, however, did not, despite his ability to secure settlements on such delicate matters.

President Obama wants kids in school more hours per day, more days per year.

“We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day,” Obama said. “That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage.”

Please excuse the “un-American” children at 4:22.

(Cross-posted at Underdog Soldier)

“I have heard it remarked that the poor in Protestant countries, on the continent of Europe, are generally more industrious than those of Popish countries.

May not the more numerous foundations in the latter for relief of the poor have some effect towards rendering them less provident?

To relieve the misfortunes of our fellow creatures is concurring with the Deity; it is godlike; but if we provide encouragement for laziness, and support for folly, may we not be found fighting against the order of God and nature, which perhaps has appointed want and misery as the proper punishments for, and cautions against, as well as necessary consequences of, idleness and extravagance?

Whenever we attempt to amend the scheme of Providence, and to interfere with the government of the world, we had need be very circumspect, lest we do more harm than good.

In New England they once thought blackbirds useless, and mischievous to the corn. They made efforts to destroy them. The consequence was, the blackbirds were diminished; but a kind of worm, which devoured their grass, and which the blackbirds used to feed on, increased prodigiously; then, finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds.”

[1753]

_________________________
Addendum: Well, I reckon I should explain what kind of discussion I had in mind for this, because its implications are rich [and challenging] for American Catholic conservatives.

It seems a historical fact that in Franklin’s time that the Catholic countries made more provision for their poor than the Protestant ones. Therefore we have a cultural-philosophical tension between say, the US Catholic bishops, whose social policies [outside of pro-life issues] tend to harmonize with the Democratic Party’s, and Max Weber and the “Protestant work ethic,” which seems to be far more congenial to America’s Founding culture and today’s Republican Party.

(It’s likewise argued that the Catholic countries [Spain, Italy, South America] have developed far less well materially than the nominally Protestant ones [Britain, Holland, North America].)

There is also the tension in Roman Catholic social science especially in the past half-century that perhaps capitalism, via the Providence Franklin speaks of here, reinforces the idea that natural law requires one be industrious, not indolent, an idea agreeable to most Catholic conservatives.

So, as one who writes from the papist camp meself, I thought Franklin and Weber, and thereby folks like Adam Smith, are worth a listen, and by extension, Franklin’s words can be read not as an attack on Catholicism itself, but via natural law, on Ted Kennedy-style Catholic-Democrat-liberal thinking.

Or on the other hand, that Ted Kennedy was right and Franklin was wrong, and the former represented correct Catholic thought…

A moving video following a couple who discovered that the child they were expecting  had fatal trisomy 13, their decision to carry him to term, and their brief time with him.

Warning: this video is emotionally charged and contains medically graphic images

This is not the Southern Appeal I knew.  Four weeks into the college football season, and I have seen little smack talk taking place.  You’re leaving it up to the Yankee bastard (as I was affectionately dubbed by a college hall mate who – shockingly – went on to pledge KA) to put up a post.  But I think now is an opportune time considering that the Tide just rolled Arkansas and Charlie Weiss, despite winning another squeaker, is a week closer to getting the axe.  Oh and the Jets and Giants are a combined 6-0, but I guess y’all don’t care much about that.

THE NEW CONSTITUTION

1st Amendment
Congress shall make no law. It is General Zod who gives orders.

2nd Amendment
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, no longer has a purpose.

3rd Amendment
No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, who shall decide “yes, in the name of General Zod”.

4rd Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in the persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. If my administration has a need to search your belongings, it is reasonable, is it not?

5th Amendment
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous, crime, except to General Zod.

6rd Amendment
The accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial in a proper kangaroo court.

7th Amendment
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy is significant, the property shall be bequeathed to the state in tribute to General Zod.

8th Amendment
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted, unless by the new government.

9th Amendment
The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage those that serve General Zod.

10th Amendment
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution rest with General Zod.

HT: Zod

“I don’t think we put enough stress on the necessity of implanting in the child’s mind the moral code under which we live.

The fundamental basis of this Nation’s law was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings which we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days.

If we don’t have the proper fundamental moral background, we will finally wind up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the state.”

OK, OK, you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s not Glenn Beck.

The answer is

Harry S. Truman
Address Before the Attorney General’s Conference on Law Enforcement Problems
February 15, 1950

Now, I don’t necessarily agree with him chapter and verse, but it wasn’t all that long ago that such talk was uncontroversial.

Although these days it seems like a million years…

___________________
[HT: WorldTribune-Editor.]

Or so you would think given that Andrew is still entertaining the possibility that somehow Beck-Limbaugh-Fox News-and-Sarah-Palin’s children have made Southerners into Zombies that kill census workers because they’re upset at the federal government:

No Suicide

That’s the one thing we know for certain now in the case of the Kentucky lynching:

Two people briefed on the investigation said various details of Weaver’s account matched the details of the crime scene, though both people said they were not informed who found the body. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case. ”And they even had duct tape around his neck,” Weaver said. ”And they had like his identification tag on his neck. They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder.”

That’s the detail that makes you stop and think. If this was a revenge murder for stumbling upon a meth lab or pot plantation, it’s hard to understand why such a big deal would be made out of his census identification card. It’s possible, I suppose, that anger at the feds in general could make a drug dealer murder a census worker. But the most worrying possibility – that this is Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts – remains real. We’ll see.

Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity: the most likely and plausible explanation is that the census worker tripped over illegal activity and the perpetrators, who were probably high, stupidly thought killing him and making an example of him was the way to go. This is not uncommon at all as detailed in this morning’s Washington Post. Back off Southerners, Sullivan.

Her first book, Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation (HarperOne, 2009) is due out in a couple of weeks. If you go to the Amazon page for the book you can “look inside.” Just for the fun of it, see how many references to her brother Frank you can find.

Yosi Sergant, former Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts, and NOT a political hack attempting to hijack the NEA for partisan purposes, and assuredly NOT a member of any non-existent “cult of personality,” has resigned.

Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

An excellent piece in today’s issue of the American Thinker makes Glenn Beck’s point that, perhaps, Obama’s election will be better for America in the long run:

Would the country be as aware of the following if not for an extremist government in power in Washington?  Acorn and the “community organizer” groups have been revealed to be nothing more than corrupt partisan hacks exploiting the poor and the taxpayers.  The unions and their leaders exposed as power hungry ideologues with no interest in the long term well-being of their members.  The mainstream media’s willingness to lose all credibility with the vast majority of the public with its not so subtle cheerleading for their preferred politician has become obvious to all.  The Democratic Party, at one time the self-declared defender of the little guy, has openly declared war on small business and capitalism.  The Democratic members of Congress have been revealed to be indifferent to the voters, incapable of reading bills and fully in the pockets of liberal special interests groups.

This issue was debated in an earlier post. Read the rest of the AE piece here.

One of our commenters disputes there’s a “cult of personality” around our current president.

In the interest of fairness, we ask our readers to forward any similar renderings of Reagan or Bush, naked and triumphant. Unicorn optional.

—The Management

[As for naked paintings of Bill Clinton, let's just not go there.]

If I have to sell a kidney, I am going to do everything in my power to make sure my children do not attend public school.  This video is another reason why.

Ahh charming.  Little schoolchildren being taught a song in praise of our Dear Leader.  There’s nothing creepy at all about this.  This absolutely does not smack of totalitarian indoctrination a la North Korea. Nope.  Not at all.

Minter is also the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting Here’s a little gem from a review of The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide at Human Events:

Driven by his belief that “the U.S. has lost its code of honor…enumerated by the Founding Fathers” and his own harrowing personal experiences, Miniter has composed the book every father who loves honor and heartland-American-values will wish they’d written for their son. And everyone who reads this book will agree that it’s no exaggeration to describe it as Boy Scouts meet Marine Sniper, and Marine Snipers meet Frank Sinatra.

Read the rest of the review here.

(By the way, I’m back. I know you’ve all missed me.)

Doug Kmiec, a law professor, pro-life advocate, former Reagan Administration official, and evangelical-Catholic-whatever, took a lot of heat from us usual suspects for endorsing Barack Obama, perhaps the most pro-choice major candidate ever.

“A black man; a caring man; a talented man. A man different from conservative self and yet calling me to find the best of that self.”

Professor Kmiec has now been appointed by President Obama as America’s new ambassador to Malta.

A scene from A Man for All Seasons comes to mind, where Thomas More confronts his betrayer, Richard Rich:

There is one question I would like to ask the witness.

But for Wales?

Or Malta.

An old friend named “Winston Smith” stopped by our comments section the other day with this zinger:

“…is it merely coincidence that folks like Rush (Big Pharma) Limbaugh have flourished in a medium that doesn’t require its audience to know how to read?”

Hehe. Good one. Of course, it was pointed out that Limbaugh’s audience scored significantly higher than presumably more literate NPR listeners in a common political knowledge quiz.

And from over at Harvard, that ivory tower of knowledge and books and reading and progressive politics and other brilliant stuff, we get this report:

“Students at many of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a “D+” average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

“At the most expensive colleges, they actually graduate knowing less,” the executive director of the Jack Miller Center at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Michael Ratliff, said.

Either it’s all the bonghits and watching The Daily Show, or places like Harvard, which serves as the Democrat establishment’s farm team, just make you more ignorant than when you started.

That would explain a lot…

Well, here’s another conservative [besides me] determined not to go down with Beck’s ship:

LEVIN: How can you day after day and night after night correctly rail against Obama’s radicalism, how he’s undermining the Constitution, how he’s nationalizing our basic industries, how he has Marxists all around him, and then say in an interview with Katie Couric, I think John McCain would have been worse than Obama? Quote: “How about this? I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama. How’s that?”

That’s not good. McCain is no conservative, in fact in many respects he’s a progressive. Which is why I fought him. Day in and day out. Day in and day out behind this microphone. Not only fought him behind this microphone but wrote article after article — go ahead and Google it — rejecting his candidacy. But to say that he’d be worse than a president that’s a Marxist, who’s running around the country — I’m sorry, the world — apologizing for our nation, who’s slashing our defense budget, who’s nationalizing our health care system?

To say he would be worse is mindless, mindless, incoherent as a matter of fact. There’s our 5-PMer, on Fox … I don’t know who certain people are playing to, I don’t know why they are playing to certain people … I think there’s enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it’s not. It’s pathetic.”

Via the HuffPo.

I like Levin, a constitutional lawyer who’s said to have a face for radio but a voice for TV. He too has a shtick ["Now get off my phone, you big dummy!"], but he keeps it separate from his message— as opposed to Beck, whose sobbing populism is pure theater that appeals to the adolescent in us, not the adult.

Sadly, I can’t claim credit for this one.  I stumbled across this per a friend of a friend of a relation of a loose acquaintance (or something like that) online, but check out the acorns. Maybe I shouldn’t post this. I don’t want to give anyone ideas.

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ “—Revising history slightly in an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, Sept. 22, 2008

Since I stayed home with my 7-month old daughter Bernadette a couple of days last week, it afforded me an opportunity to catch a couple of Glenn Beck shows on Fox News.  It’s the first time I’ve really been able to see more than a few minutes of the program since he started, and I was a bit curious.  He’s no longer on the radio here in DC, so it’s really the first time I’ve seen or heard Beck at any great length in some time.  A few thoughts.

- For the first time in my life I thought to myself, “Gee, I could really go for a commercial break right about now.”  I believe the first segment on each show ran for almost 20 minutes uninterrupted.  I often complain that most talks shows – both political and sports – run far too many commercials, but that was just too much unfiltered Beck to take in one sitting.  Maybe MTV, even though I haven’t watched it in about 12 years,  has spoiled the way I look at television.  Whatever it is, there needs to be more breaks in the action just to slow down the pace of the show.  I realize that part of the problem is the idiotic bycott aginst Beck, but man, just throw it back to the studio or something if you can’t find advertisers.

- Beck’s at an 11.  He needs to be at a 7.  I appreciate the emotion, and it makes for an entertaining program.  But the constant drumbeat of “OH MY GOD WE NEED TO GET THESE RASCALS OUT NOW GRRRRRRR!!!!” combined with the hammy over-performance and the “I’m on the verge of tears and/or a nervous breakdown” is again too much to take.

- That said, I do not think he is a threat to the republic.  Yeah, he is a bit of a ham who tends to over-dramatize things, but I’ve seen far worse.  We’ve got bigger issues than whether or not Beck is an over-the-top performer.

But he does make me appreciate the truly good talkers like Rush, Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin all the more.  I have mixed emotions about Beck, quite frankly.  I appreciate his fortrightness and his true passion for trying to restore some of our Founding ideals.  But in a lot of ways he reminds me of Hannity – though, to be sure, he’s much better than Hannity.  Neither really offers up any unique insight.  It’s sort of the same old stuff packaged in a different way.  Rush, Laura, and Mark – say what you will about them – have unique takes on any given topic and offer fresh perspectives.  They go a little deeper and really make interesting connections.  Beck is more about throwing out the red meat.  There’s a place for that, but in the end it’s actually just a bit boring.

An AWESOME set of letters from this weekend’s WSJ on the debate they staged between Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong on the God question: (more…)

Missourah.com has produced a wonderful aid for all of us still confused about our real motivation for opposing Obama’s various initiatives.  Htip Powerline

via Big Government

Rep. Nadler (D-NY) claimed today that the Republican-led initiative to defund ACORN is an unconstitutional bill of attainder. I am no expert on bills of attainder but this does not seem like one. Rather than a punishment for past action without trial (i.e. a bill of attainder), voting to cease funding ACORN is more of a decision that the appalling, systemic flaws present in the organization make it unfit to continue receiving federal funds. I would think there is a key distinction between discontinuing funding and a punishment that requires ACORN to do something.

Any thoughts on this?

(Cross-posted on Underdog Soldier)

The Vatican’s position is that it opposes capital punishment. It’s the normative Roman Catholic teaching, although as far as I know, one can still be a Catholic in good standing if he or she still favors capital punishment.

Me, I think the arguments are stronger in favor of capital punishment: not so much about justice or deterrent value, but especially Dennis Prager’s argument that murderers tend to kill again in prison, guards or fellow prisoners. Once you can bring yourself to kill a fellow human being, adding another to your list isn’t a big deal.

So, Prager argues, if and when the murderer murders again, the moral responsibility lies with those who kept him from his deserved justice and fate.

I’ve tended to agree with that unassailable logic.

My nagging problem with that has been that executing a human being dehumanizes his executioners.

His name is Romell Broom. I could call him a convicted rapist and murderer—which he is—but I think we should call human beings by their names.

In Ohio a few days ago, the state sent Romell Broom to go meet his Maker. Mercifully, by lethal injection. In theory, you just go to sleep. Eternal sleep.

You can read about what happened here.

In short, they tried to find a usable vein to deliver the lethal injection but couldn’t find one. They tried for hours. Hours. In fact, Romell Broom tried to help them find one. He pinched his arm, he rolled over onto his stomach.

No luck.

Finally, the warden called the governor and told him of the difficulties. The governor postponed Romell Broom’s rendezvous with destiny for a week and the execution is scheduled for then.

“What Would Jesus Do” is an often-abused political question. But He wouldn’t do this or be any part of it, and more importantly, He wouldn’t ask his followers to do this, far lesser mortals than He.

He wouldn’t put them through administering this horror, no way, no how. And vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord, and that means vengeance belongs to God, not man. ["Vengeance" doesn't mean revenge, it means justice.]

Man should take that as a relief from the burden of playing God.

No to capital punishment. I guess I just made up my mind, finally. Wish I knew why it took me so long…