. No surprise here:
 | You scored as Batman, the Dark Knight. As the Dark Knight of Gotham, Batman is a vigilante who deals out his own brand of justice to the criminals and corrupt of the city. He follows his own code and is often misunderstood. He has few friends or allies, but finds comfort in his cause.
Batman, the Dark Knight | | 88% | Lara Croft | | 75% | Maximus | | 67% | Indiana Jones | | 67% | Neo, the "One" | | 67% | William Wallace | | 54% | The Amazing Spider-Man | | 42% | El Zorro | | 38% | James Bond, Agent 007 | | 38% | The Terminator | | 33% | Captain Jack Sparrow | | 25% |
Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com
Posting will be light for the rest of the week.
A smear job by some uglo-American left-wing hack is appropriately fisked by Powerline: Froomkin goes beyond arrogance and audacity when he reaches the merits of the pre-war intelligence issue. First, he asserts "Far from being baseless, the charge that [Bush] intentionally misled the public in the run-up to war is built on a growing amount of evidence." Froomkin points to no such evidence. Instead, he hides behind the story by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus. But Froomkin knows that this story provides no evidence that Bush intentionally misled the public about WMD. In fact, Milbank and Pincus concluded thatThe administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.
Froomkin lacks the integrity to mention this dispositive admission. If the overwhelming intelligence consensus was that Saddam had WMD, then Bush did not mislead the American people in making that claim. On this crucial point, Froomkin shows himself to be more partisan and less honest than Milbank and Pincus.
I swear, I don't have their patience. If I saw Froomkin, I'd slug him. His lies are disgusting and deserving of contempt. This smarmy, self-righteous attack on the President's decision to go to war is outrageous. Bush may have faults, but he saw the same intelligence as the Democrats and rightly concluded that after September 11, it was not enough to rely on the words of a madman like Saddam Hussein, and that if Saddam didn't come clean we would make him come clean. But slimy little j**zbuckets like Foomkin don't care about that. They only have one agenda, which ironically enough is spelled out in another Washington Post column written by Fred Hiatt: Whether Iraqis are in fact committed to a life-or-death struggle for democracy will become clear as its army does, or does not, continue to shoulder a greater burden. But the aptness of Mahdi's view of the United States is already evident in Congress, which pours most of its Iraq-related energy into allegations of manipulated intelligence before the war. "Those aren't irrelevant questions," says Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.). "But the more they dominate the public debate, the harder it is to sustain public support for the war." What Lieberman doesn't say is that many Democrats would view such an outcome as an advantage. Their focus on 2002 is a way to further undercut President Bush, and Bush's war, without taking the risk of offering an alternative strategy -- to satisfy their withdraw-now constituents without being accountable for a withdraw-now position. Many of them understand that dwindling public support could force the United States into a self-defeating position, and that defeat in Iraq would be disastrous for the United States as well as for Mahdi and his countrymen. But the taste of political blood as Bush weakens, combined with their embarrassment at having supported the war in the first place, seems to override that understanding.
No kidding. Hiatt goes on to say that a true wartime President would be assuaging Democrat demands, by meeting with them over strategy and bringing them into the war effort. But that complaint is baseless. The Democrats making these arguments aren't patriots at all. They want America to lose in Iraq (meaning soldiers must die) and their constant questioning of pre-war intelligence is a proxy fight, designed to hide their commitment towards RETREAT, because it'd be too embarassing otherwise to directly call for a return of the troops. They don't have the guts for that argument. And a President running a war can't afford to make friendly with an opposition party that wants America to be defeated, purely for partisan purposes. In fact, the President should continue to call them out for the gutless cowards that they are. All in all, it proves that Democrats can never be trusted with national security issues at all. They never could, and they never will. UPDATE: TKS points out a perfect example of why Democrats cannot be trusted on national security: "[Senator Rockefeller] is suggesting that the President and these forces could bring in Zarqawi if he and they wanted to, and they simply haven't. Zarqawi roams freely, plotting more terrorist attacks, because the President and U.S. military want it that way. If this is what Rockefeller's point is, then this is paranoid nonsense, and it is baffling to see not just any member of the Senate, but the top-ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee saying this." Not baffling to me, when you consider that they are so twisted around the pursuit of political power that they'll believe the most ridiculous things in order to criticize the President.
The fact that a person can read and actually understand the Constitution is news today: Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion" in a 1985 document obtained by The Washington Times....
[He wrote:] "I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." Whattya know? The Constitution requires equal protection under the law and that means ethnic quotas are illegal. Who would've figured? And the Constitution also says nothing about abortion, too. Fancy that! This is news to those who don't read the Constitution and want it to say other things entirely. But for the life of me, I can't find the Affirmative Action clause or the Abortion clause. I do, however, know that the Constitution has an Equal Protection clause and a 10th Amendment (confirming that states have Police Powers, which the Federal government does not). Of course, this supposedly bombshell news is spun by Republican committee staffers to try to play to the Democrats, again. It's spun this as a denial about how Alito would rule on Roe v. Wade: A leading Republican involved in the nomination process insisted that this does not prove Judge Alito, if confirmed to the Supreme Court, will overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that made abortion a constitutional right. "No, it proves no such thing," said the Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "In fact, if you look at some of the quotes of his former law clerks, they don't believe that he'll overturn Roe v. Wade."...
"Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a long history of advocacy on behalf of liberal causes, but she was evaluated on her 13-year record as a federal judge and her jurisprudence, not her belief that there was a constitutional right to prostitution or polygamy." It's true that Ginsberg advocated on behalf of liberal causes, and while she's a smart judge, she is unquestionably also a Judicial legislator. Alito will not legislate from the bench, but if Alito retains any of the brains he had when he wrote that memo, he should overrule Roe v. Wade if it ever presents itself again. One doesn't ratify abortion rights while sincerely believing that the Constitution does not protect them. If he does and fails to overturn Roe, he'll betray his inner logic regarding the Constitution, and would be establishing himself as a legislator rather than an impartial umpire. If the people want abortion-rights, they can write and pass an abortion Constitutional amendment. Otherwise, pipe down, NARAL. It's not likely that Alito will transform into a Supra-Legislator on the bench, however: "In the field of law, I disagree strenuously with the usurpation by the judiciary of decision-making authority that should be exercised by the branches of government responsible to the electorate," he added.... "In college, I developed a deep interest in constitutional law, motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment." A-frickin'-men. Alito apparently reads, and understands, the Constitution. Wow. What's strange is that while Republican committee staffers want to avoid the issue of Roe v. Wade, they DO want to evaluate his judicial temperment: Republicans are relishing the opportunity to defend Judge Alito's support for judicial restraint, saying it puts him squarely in the majority of American public opinion.
"We're delighted to have a debate over judicial philosophy and the proper role of courts in America," a Republican strategist said. "That's a debate the Republican Party wins every time." But if they debate his judicial philosophy, it will necessarily involve a debate about Roe. The Republicans don't seem to understand that. If Alito firmly establishes himself as a person who rejects judicial legislating, then absent some irrational protection of precedent, he should overrule Roe. Judicial temperment might be an adequate proxy substitute about Roe, especially since the source of decisions like Roe is the faulty temperment and inflated sense of superiority in the Court. But Democrats aren't idiots and know what a fight over judicial temperment means. It's strange that the Republicans want a fight about that, but not about Roe. Perhaps they're merely too afraid to state the obvious: a restrained Judge who sincerely reads the Constitution could never support a ruling like Roe, and has a duty to overrule it. And if they really believe it's a debate the Republican Party wins every time, then they should follow its logical conclusion. Still, this news is very satisfying. I was beginning to have doubts about Alito. Now, I'm a lot more satisfied. Update: Further Discussion from Captain Ed. And Jay Anderson says this will make both the left and the right happy. Patterico says he was happy to get Alito without a fight, but that it's likely we'll get the fight we were looking for all along. More from Stop the ACLU (crossposted at Prolife Blogs) as well as Blogs for Bush, and ConfirmThem. Further Update: Professor Bainbridge says that this "unequivocal statement of commitment to conservative values" means that Alito is the anti-Miers. He's right. This is no stealth nominee, and should forever destroy the notion that a conservative must be stealthy in order to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. More importantly, he notes that "only by standing up to Bush and the party loyalists were conservatives able to get a judge who gives us a shot at advancing movement concerns." You can say that again. We cannot let up in our demands for conservativism in ALL branches of government. The Prof. isn't quite as happy as me on this news though, noting that Alito wrote this before the Casey decision and thus could be further influenced by precedent. But hopefully Thomas and Scalia's influence will shoot that lingering concern down, if it is a lingering concern.
Well, I thought that Hugh Hewitt had jumped the shark when defending Hariett Miers, placing his politics ahead of his principles. But look who's making the case for retribution against the cowardly Republicans who voted against dtilling in ANWR? If the party isn't dedicated to being a majority party organized around the core issue of national security seriousness, it won't last as a majority anyway. Exiling the weak-kneed on a national security issue is exactly the sort of action that will underscore the seriousness of the party on these issues. Hugh makes the claim that the GOP cannot afford to have individual views trump the party's agenda on national security issues, and suggests that the members who voted against drilling in ANWR be stripped of their committee and subcommittee chairs. Fine with me. I'd also refuse to send them any national campaign money, and the GOP should encourage primary opponents to run against them. Liberal Republicans, as a rule, should be punished. Of course, the common thread with Hewitt is that, as with Miers and here, he views his own agenda as being equivilent with the agenda of the GOP, which should be defended at all costs. He viewed those attacking Miers as the ones pursuing their own individual agendas at the expense of the party. But when discussing the agenda of "the party," numbers are what counts, and the numbers were against Miers from the beginning. Here's a thought, though: I wonder when Hugh will take his own advice on party discipline and purge the pro-abortion GOP members? That should be just as important as making national security a party agenda item. But, maybe Hewitt HAS learned something from the Miers episode after all. He actually makes the suggestion that if liberal Republicans keep scuttling a conservative agenda, conservatives won't vote Republican next time around: Pro-ANWR exploration Republicans from competitive districts ought to realize that their "colleagues" are endangering not only the majority but their seats as well. It might be unpleasant to deal out some party discipline, but a whole lot less unpleasant than having Nancy Pelosi as the Speaker. Darn right, Hugh. About time you learned it.
Jane Galt over at Asymmetrical Information has a lot of posts on abortion. She links to this post, which puts my "Aggressive Conservative" name to shame (the title of his post is called " Why Roe V. Wade Must Be Overturned, Encased in Lead, and Sunk to the Bottom of the Marianas Trench There to Lie Forever Among Tubeworms and Busted Russian Submarines"). A little excerpt: "Roe V. Wade has had a disastrous and insidious effect on the highest judicial process in the country. It has hijacked an entire branch of the United States government, which means we only have two left. It has reduced all public discussion of constitutional law to one word: ABORTION. The grand legacy of John Marshall, John Jay, and Oliver Wendell Holmes is now represented by a single lump of tissue: ABORTION. The evolution of judicial thinking in the greatest nation on earth has been stopped dead by ABORTION. The vitally important democratic function of reviewing and choosing suitable candidates for the greatest court in history has been gruesomely hewed down to a single splinter: ABORTION. Blind-folded Justice is almost mute; she can only croak the word ABORTION.
Socrates, what is truth? ABORTION. Conan, what is best in life? ABORTION. What's the atomic weight of Germanium? ABORTION. What is the very meaning of existence itself - what single word breaks the silence of those infinite spaces that filled great Pascal with dread? ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION, ABORTION...
Now this is a sad state for this once-great court to have fallen to, and makes me wonder if we don't need another court to assume the neglected responsibilities of the current one. Then the Abortion Toggle Switch could be moved to some remote corner of the public's attention, and the various abortion partisans could play their endless game of Keep Away without buggering up the entire constitutional process.
However, this would require amending the constitution itself, with all attendant fuss. The simpler course is to push for Roe V. Wade to be overturned, so that the Supreme Court can get out of the abortion business. And stay the hell out of the abortion business, forever. At once the Pro-Choice legions arise in anguish, complaining that they will never be able to survive the savage Darwinian environment of American politics without the protection of Roe V. Wade. Well, cry me a freaking river. It's about time that you gelatinous sob sisters learned to paddle your own canoe. If you haven't got the guts to make it in the real world, you'll have to use something other than the United States Constitution as an artificial life support system." Wow. Read the whole thing. Like I said, it puts this blog's name to shame. Some might think it funny, and it is, but it's also very very hard-hitting. I also should note that his insight is precisely the same as Justice Scalia's dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which he wrote: "Not only did Roe not, as the Court suggests, resolve the deeply divisive issue of abortion; it did more than anything else to nourish it, by elevating it to the national level, where it is infinitely more difficult to resolve. National politics were not plagued by abortion protests, national abortion lobbying, or abortion marches on Congress, before Roe v. Wade was decided. Profound disagreement existed among our citizens over the issue -- as it does over other issues, such as the death penalty -- but that disagreement was being worked out at the state level. As with many other issues, the division of sentiment within each State was not as closely balanced as it was among the population of the Nation as a whole, meaning not only that more people would be satisfied with the results of state-by-state resolution, but also that those results would be more stable. Pre-Roe, moreover, political compromise was possible.
Roe's mandate for abortion on demand destroyed the compromises of the past, rendered compromise impossible for the future, and required the entire issue to be resolved uniformly, at the national level. At the same time, Roe created a vast new class of abortion consumers and abortion proponents by eliminating the moral opprobrium that had attached to the act... Many favor all of those developments, and it is not for me to say that they are wrong. But to portray Roe as the statesmanlike "settlement" of a divisive issue, a jurisprudential Peace of Westphalia that is worth preserving, is nothing less than Orwellian. Roe fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general, and has obscured with its smoke the selection of Justices to this Court, in particular, ever since. And by keeping us in the abortion-umpiring business, it is the perpetuation of that disruption, rather than of any Pax Roeana that the Court's new majority decrees.
In truth, I am as distressed as the Court is -- and expressed my distress several years ago... about the "political pressure" directed to the Court: the marches, the mail, the protests aimed at inducing us to change our opinions. How upsetting it is, that so many of our citizens (good people, not lawless ones, on both sides of this abortion issue, and on various sides of other issues as well) think that we Justices should properly take into account their views, as though we were engaged not in ascertaining an objective law, but in determining some kind of social consensus...
What makes all this relevant to the bothersome application of "political pressure" against the Court are the twin facts that the American people love democracy and the American people are not fools. As long as this Court thought (and the people thought) that we Justices were doing essentially lawyers' work up here -- reading text and discerning our society's traditional understanding of that text -- the public pretty much left us alone. Texts and traditions are facts to study, not convictions to demonstrate about. But if in reality, our process of constitutional adjudication consists primarily of making value judgments; if we can ignore a long and clear tradition clarifying an ambiguous text, as we did, for example, five days ago in declaring unconstitutional invocations and benedictions at public highschool graduation ceremonies; if, as I say, our pronouncement of constitutional law rests primarily on value judgments, then a free and intelligent people's attitude towards us can be expected to be (ought to be) quite different. The people know that their value judgments are quite as good as those taught in any law school -- maybe better. If, indeed, the "liberties" protected by the Constitution are, as the Court says, undefined and unbounded, then the people should demonstrate, to protest that we do not implement their values instead of ours. Not only that, but the confirmation hearings for new Justices should deteriorate into question-and-answer sessions in which Senators go through a list of their constituents' most favored and most disfavored alleged constitutional rights, and seek the nominee's commitment to support or oppose them. Value judgments, after all, should be voted on, not dictated; and if our Constitution has somehow accidently committed them to the Supreme Court, at least we can have a sort of plebiscite each time a new nominee to that body is put forward...
...By foreclosing all democratic outlet for the deep passions this issue arouses, by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight, by continuing the imposition of a rigid national rule instead of allowing for regional differences, the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish.
We should get out of this area, where we have no right to be, and where we do neither ourselves nor the country any good by remaining." And Jane keeps blogging, musing about abortion-supporters: "I am amazed that half the chattering classes really purport to believe that the single most important issue facing the courts is whether or not ten or so low-population states will, or will not, be allowed to outlaw abortion. More important than civil liberties? More important than towns condemning any old house they feel like it to build a strip mall? The highest cause in the land, the only one that really matters, is making sure that nothing interferes one iota with the free and unfettered scraping out of uteruses from sea to shining sea?" Jane, you'd be surprised how many people support evil when they have their entire lives invested in it. They might never even have an abortion or know someone who would. But those who worship at the altar of abortion know that if they give it up, they're giving up the Sexual Revolution. They need that. It's their 20-something fantasy that they hold onto, whether they're actually 20-something or 50-something. Scalia is right that the Court is being destroyed by abortion. But so is the country, and our humanity. Roe v. Wade must be overturned. But even more important, abortion must be attacked from every side. Now that the abortion debate was brought to the national level, it should be finished at the national level. It's not enough to hope like Scalia or Jane that returning it to the states would settle the matter. Like its victims, it will not die unless we destroy it. Abortion should be outlawed entirely, with a Constitutional amendment. I want to bury Roe and its legacy into the ground, for good. And its supporters should be shunned for their support of a murderous ideology of sexual fanaticism and amoral narcissism. No question about it, abortion is today's slavery debate. Slavery consumed the politics of the young Republic for nearly 70 years before the Civil War. How long will abortion consume the politics, and the people, of America? And like slavery with all its evils, I think it will see its red day before the end. In fact, that would probably be the BEST outcome we can hope for (since it's naive to believe that the abortion-worshippers won't give up without a real violent fight). Because the alternative outcome is complete and utter surrender, and the masses of people giving in and accepting abortion and all its logical consequences: cloning, euthenasia, genetic manipulation, legalization of all sexual deviancies, and state sanction and monetary support to allievate the obvious social problems that are caused, war of the clones, war of the genetically superior over the inferior and their eventual enslavement or holocaust, economic dislocation, poltiical persecution of Christians, the end of parenthood and the family, the rise of nihilism, mass suicides, and the depopulation and eventually moral hollowing-out of the West - leading to Islam's resurgenace in the world and its ruling power of Terror. If any of that happens, it's all because of abortion. Abortion is a maggot-worm that has wriggled its way into the heart of humanity and is killing us all. You'd think that the widespread practice of murdering innocent babies worldwide wouldn't cause our modern-day philosophers to think twice about this matter, that perhaps maybe Barbarity and all its horiffic glories aren't so chic. It's going to be a long, long winter... UPDATE: Amy Wellborn notes a positive piece on the Mirror of Justice blog by Greg Sisk about the good that would happen from overturning Roe. It's a good mirror to my aggressive mood here.
I saw a report on local Fox 5 news here in New York the other night. They had a segment on rich parents who outsource their parental duties so they can spend time doing other things. The local newscasters treated it as if it were a wonderful thing that parents could pay someone, not just for day care, but to do all the "work" of being a parent. Such things include: - Paying a professional bicyclist to teach your kids how to ride a bike.
- Paying a person to sit up all night to comfort your child if he wakes up, so you can get a full night's sleep.
- Paying a person to help your daughter organize her room.
- Paying a person to teach your kids not to suck their thumbs.
- Paying a person to play with your kids
The only evidence of the segment I could find on the internet was this contact information on Fox 5's website, that lists 2 of the people providing their services. It's treated as a viewer resource, like it's a good thing. Throughout the segment, it was made clear that the parents who outsourced their "duties" weren't off working a busy job, they were just doing other things that they wanted to do instead of spending time with their kids. The only semblence of balance in the entire report was a developmental psychologist saying how necessary it is for kids to bond and spend time with their parents. But that advice was treated with utter skepticism and contempt by everyone else. Needless to say, any parent who has to pay someone to teach their kid to ride a bike because they don't want to do it is a terrible parent. Do I have to mention that the services were so expensive that the "luxury" of spending time away from your kids could only be done by the filthy rich? They should be ashamed of themselves, those self-centered, narcissistic, egomaniac jerks.
What did the self-appointed guru of Christianity have to say now? All eight Dover, Pa., school board members up for re-election were defeated Tuesday after trying to introduce "intelligent design" - the belief that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power - as an alternative to the theory of evolution. "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city," Robertson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club."
Yeah, because the last thing we want are people turning to God when they realize they need Him. There are plenty of problems with unorthodox Catholic priests and bishops. But thankfully we don't have Robertson to deal with. Can't someone pay this man just to shut the heck up?
The Anchoress has words for the Republican Party: If your plan was to make people so disgusted with your cowardice, your disorganization and your political tone-deafness that they either stop contributing to the RNC, or they decide to just sit out the next election (because what’s the point), or they decide to vote out every stinking one of you in the next elections, because you freaking well deserve ouster for literally doing nothing constructive and squandering your majority…well…you have succeeded spectacularly! Beyond your wildest imaginings, I am sure.
I can’t think of a single reason to vote to re-elect a any one of you....
You seem directed toward nothing more than keeping your almighty Senate or House seat in your name. You give away your power, you give away your advantages in committee, you leave in place utterly feckless people like Arlen Specter and then, when you finally seem like you are on the cusp of doing something productive and right, like investigating the CIA or okaying drilling in a bare, muddly, uninhabitable tundra, you fall into a faint and go slinking back to your states and districts to gladhand and pump for money and then gladhand some more. Michelle Malkin has been posting reader emails who are increasingly disillusioned with the GOP for breaking away from its campaign promises. John from Right Wing News says that "Voting to allow drilling in ANWR should be the easiest decision the clowns up in Congress ever had to make -- and they still can't get it right. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic." The Republicans are going to get their butts handed to them in 2006. They seem not to care about the people that voted for them. The only thing they can count on is the Democrats acting even dumber by continuing to stage useless Senate shutdowns. But that won't work forever (Hillary Clinton is no moron). A surefire way to be defeated is to piss off the conservative base that elected you. I can't imagine why the Republicans think that's a good thing. Update: Professor Bainbridge says that Bush is a conservative impostor. I should note that the Professor Bainbridge is now against the war in Iraq. [Edit. I mistakenly said Anchoress was against the war.] I'm not. I was for it, and I'm still for it. But their other criticisms are fair: Bush has mangled domestic policy, spent a lot of useless money, let the Democrats and RINOS run circles around him, and has done a poor job of managing things within his control. I like Bush personally, but he's becoming the leader of a failed Republican coalition. Right Wing News proposes an agenda of the Republican Party post-Bush, but frankly it should've been his agenda all along. If the Republicans want to get anywhere, they should take a hard look at it and start implementing it now, or else they won't be in a position to implement it after Bush leaves office.
(this is an expansion from a comment I tried posting at Mark's blog; I don't know if it successfully posted b/c of Internet problems.) Mark Shea, commenting on the role of a Catholic Supreme Court judge and the Constituion's "cruel and unusual" clause, says: I think the death penality is an intractably moral question. I think judges have to draw on some kind of moral tradition if they are to decide it. And as a Catholic, I would prefer that the moral tradition they draw on would be the one revealed by the Son of God, as distinct from whatever they happen to pull out of their butts, as Harry Blackmun's was. First, as a cautionary note towards those that argue against the application of the death penalty, as some of Mark's commentators are: murders happen in prision. Life imprisonment is no guarantee against preventing crime. There is an excessive amount of crimes committed against other inmates in prison, from rape to murder. A man already serving a life sentence in a state with no death penalty is immune from punishment if he kills another inmate. And that is an injustice, to be sure. On the greater issue of how to interpret the Constitution with Catholic values verses originalism / textualism, the issue bears greater scrutiny than I think Mark has undertaken. Mark, I know I've criticized you in the past for a shoot-at-the-hip attitude of not looking into the details on things, but in this case I think a sincere re-examination would do all of us a lot of good. Professor Bainbridge had a great thread about this on his blog, which he updated with supplemental posts ( here, and here), that responded to critiques about why bishops don't deny communion to judges. I believe Amy Wellborn linked to that thread; I don't know if Mark did. Basically, a judge, acting prudently and sincerely, has an obligation to interpret statutes and constitutions with plain meaning (textually) and if the meaning is vague (as it may be with a word like "unusual"), to use the original understanding of the term. A judge should not legislate from the bench, period. An originalist judge is, for lack of a better term, a REAL judge. A judge that legislates from the bench is not a REAL judge. However, that is not to say that a Catholic understanding of Right Reason cannot guide him. I agree with Mark that Catholic values should inform a judge, but ONLY because those values are correct. Using Catholic values is not, however, "legislating from the bench." Catholic judges can be REAL judges, and in fact many are. But, how to distinguish between a Catholic properly using Catholic values to inform him, and a judge who lets post-modernist secular values inform him? How can I fairly say that a Catholic judge using his Catholic values could be a "REAL judge?" Critics will say that I merely want to have the cake and eat it too; why cannot postmodern humanist secular values guide a judge if it's ok for Catholic values? The difference is, as things stand now, Catholic values are fully consistant with sincere and honest efforts at judging (meaning that they're fully compatible with originalism). I have said over and over, from the Roberts nomination until today: There is NOTHING in the Constitution incompatible with Catholic values. Nothing. (usually, people make the mistake of assuming the Constitution requires abortion as a fundamental right when it does not. Once that assumption is out of the way, it's easy to see that the Constitution and Catholicism are perfectly compatible.) In contrast to that, secular humanist values often interfere in properly judging the plain meaning of the Constitution. Secular humanist values must re-write the Constitution to create fake rights to abortion, euthenasia, affirmative action, etc. Judges with secular humanist values are often corrupted into legislating from the bench. An originalist, Catholic judge need not do such a thing, and in fact will not do that, ever. However, on Prof. Bainbridge's blog, I brought up, and could not answer, the hypothetical of a Catholic judge interpreting a Constitution that explicitly said in plain text that abortion was a fundamental right. I was stumped by that example, because it would be an instance of Catholic values clashing with the clear role of a judge in plainly interpreting text. But that example does not, in my view, exist at this point in time (even on issues like the death penalty). Given the POSSIBILITY of that example, it's important we have this conversation. Also, we should bear in mind that even though we KNOW that Catholic values are right, we cannot use that as an excuse to say that it's ok to use them while saying that a secular humanist cannot draw on his "values". We have to come up with better reasons, and unfortunately that's what I'm struggling with. As long as the Constitution remains as it is now, there should be no problem. But if the Constitution were ever to explicitly include plainly evil things (such as an explicit, fundamental right to abortion), then Catholic judges would be in a real bind, and would probably either have to serve under false pretenses or not serve at all. Update: Professor Bainbridge links to a book review that Justice Scalia recently wrote, which talks about how to interpret the law. I read this article a while ago, and now I think it provides a clue to my thinking. In Scalia's concluding words, he notes that secular humanist judges are essentially searching for God in their search for the law. Catholics have no such mysteries, since we know who God is. He is our savior. He is Jesus. Catholics are not forced to look for the mysteries of the universe and define them in our law, as those who legislate from the bench are prone to do. Scalia notes: If, as Smith contends, a hypothetical author is not up to the job of resolving law’s quandary [of what it means], neither, it turns out, is Smith himself. His book describes what he believes to be the quandary but does not resolve it, examining and rejecting various solutions—except, of course, the classical one, which is out of bounds because it violates the “norm prescribing that religious beliefs are inadmissible in academic explanations.” The book’s last paragraph acknowledges that “perplexity is not a resting place” but concludes that “we would perhaps be wise to confess our confusion and to acknowledge that there are richer realities and greater powers in the universe than our meager modern philosophies have dreamed of.”
Hmmm. Richer realities and greater powers than our modern philosophies have dreamed of. Could there be a subversive subtext here? Why does Smith bring in at the outset of his book a third ontological category—religion—which he immediately disclaims, not because it is wrong, necessarily, but because it violates academic ground-rules? And why does his book repeatedly point out how the “classical school”—premised, alas, upon religion—was coherent where modern jurisprudence is not? And why does his penultimate chapter describe at length (though with the academically correct acknowledgment that it is “foreign to prevailing ontological assumptions”) the work of Joseph Vining, which speaks of a hypothetical author who “would need in some sense to be actually present,” and “to display qualities of caring, and of mindfulness”? Lawyers, Vining says, either “must believe what they do with legislation is often foolish and deceptive; or they do believe and confess a belief in an informing spirit in the legislated words that is beyond individual legislators.” Holy cow! Could it be that . . . ?.....
Could it be,...that Smith is inviting, tempting, seducing his fellow academics to consider the theological way out of the quandary—the way that seemed to work for the classical school?As one reaches the end of the book, after reading Vining’s just-short-of-theological imaginings followed by Smith’s acknowledgment of “richer realities and greater powers in the universe,” he (she?) is sorely tempted to leap up and cry out, “Say it, man! Say it! Say the G-word! G-G-G-G-God!” Surely even academics can accept, as a hypothetical author, a hypothetical God! Textualists, being content with a “modest” judicial role, do not have to call in the Almighty to eliminate their philosophical confusion.
Scalia sums it up perfectly. Textualists do not have to call in the Almighty to eliminate their philosophical confusion of the law. We merely need to look to the text of things and figure out its plain, basic, understandable meaning. And that need not change unless the Constitution begins to plainly and expressly permit explicitly evil things. Further Update: Steve Dillard at Southern Appeal, responding to Mark, notes: "Catholics should be extremely leery of condoning any form of extratextual reasoning that is not already enshrined in the Constitution. The Constitution's meaning is fixed in time, except to the extent the document is amended to alter its meaning. " This statement would be fine as long as the Constitution did not expressly permit or mandate anything evil. But if there were ever an amendment that explicitly said that abortion was a fundamental right, faithful Catholic judges would be strangled in their attempt to interpret it. In a July 3, 2004 letter to Cardinal McCarrick, Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) made clear that Catholic judges cannot enforce clearly evil laws: "A member of the judiciary ordinarily does not have the same capacity to initiate change that a member of the legislature has. . . . While acknowledging the difficulties and limitations inherent in each level and branch of government, the Church urges public officials to be aware that they cannot hold themselves excused from their duties as disciples of the Lord. They must be able to stand before the Lord with a clear conscience and say they defend the rights of all human beings, at every stage of existence, to the best of their ability. They must never take refuge in the specious argument that they must enforce the law, whatever it may be. Persons of good conscience must refrain from seeking office if the price of holding office is the enforcement of evil laws which allow the killing of the innocent. " Since the Constitution right now doesn't state that abortion is a fundamental right, or any other evil thing, then Catholic judges have no problem. But the fact remains, if the Constitution were amended to become a document of evil, then Catholics could not honestly serve as judges (it's an open question whether they could licitly serve as judges while doing everything in their power to destroy the evil effects of such a law).
Want to know why the approval ratings of President Bush, and the Republicans in Congress, is so low? Perhaps because they don't know the first thing about running a political office, as politicians. In calling for an investigation into the leak of possible secret European terrorist detention centers, which would turn the leakfest of the Valerie Plame matter back on those hostile to the President's foreign policy, Senate Majority Bill Frist screwed up big time: A leak suspected to have come from the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) complicated, confused and nearly derailed a joint effort by Senate and House Republican leaders to seek an investigation of the unauthorized release of classified information. Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) both eventually signed a letter Tuesday calling for the Senate and House intelligence committees to conduct a joint investigation of how The Washington Post discovered of the existence of CIA-run detention and interrogation facilities in eight foreign countries.... The leak appeared to pressure Hastert to sign the letter before he or Frist intended to. But then something happened that lawmakers and political observers surmised made Frist hesitant to sign it. CNN reported earlier in the day that Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) had said a Republican senator may have leaked information about the so-called black sites to the Post. Lott told reporters yesterday that he had been talking about another Post article. He said he was not talking about the article about the detention and interrogation facilities.... The lack of confirmation about Frist’s support raised the specter that Hastert would be left alone in calling for the investigation. That would have likely been a source of major irritation for House Republicans since the idea for the investigation originated with Frist office, said a senior Senate GOP aide.... Another complication created by the snafu is that it forced lawmakers to answer questions about a letter they were not sure Frist had endorsed.
Read the rest of the article just to see how complicated, confused, and derailed these politicians are. Honestly, it's like watching slapstick, as things get worse and worse. Frist is an idiot, and he employs idiots. The delayed timing of the release meant the news trickled out, instead of providing a bombshell announcement with clear House-Senate Republican support. The Republicans looked feckless. I remember seeing Drudge's teaser and wondering when the heck the "official" announcement would come. I remember wondering what the heck was taking so long. Now it's clear. Frist bungled the politics of it. Friggin' idiot. I just can't believe how stupid this is.
France Burns: The police union Action Police CFTC called for curfews to be imposed in all riot-hit areas to combat the "civil war that spreads a little more every day". The mayor of one town, Raincy, north of Paris, announced a late-night street ban on children to "avoid a tragedy". The union also urged the government to send in troops to defeat the trouble-makers, mainly mobs of young people from poor estates dominated by Muslim families whose origins are in France's former colonies in north and sub-Saharan Africa...
More than 1,400 vehicles were destroyed, two policemen were injured by birdshot and petrol bomb attacks were launched on schools, churches and public buildings. A country that continuously chides America while letting its elders die in a heat wave, that created a bureaucratic superstate in the European Union, that kisses the ass of Saddam Hussein, that todies for Iran's terror-masters, that looks whistfully on the days of its Revolution and the La guillotine, might finally have a serious wake up call. But I highly doubt it. France is a nation of sycophants. They are incapable of decisive action and cutting through the grey to see the stark choices they face. They are so wedded to leftist political ideology that its logical nihilism will soon be upon them. Better to burn than to fight back against an oppressed Muslim. Needless to say, I don't even think they have the guts to fight back - hence, there will be no "civil war." France will capitulate. It's what they do. I'm reminded of the words of Denethor: "But soon all shall be burned. The West has failed. It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended. Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!" But that may be France's destiny. It is not America's. Americans for the first time in my memory seem not to care a whit what Europeans think — to the great consternation of our elites on the East Coast. Heartland Americans think the French are ridiculous, and seem almost to welcome Gallic disdain. Most of us out here, far from being deprived yokels, have a clearer appreciation of the quite profound amorality in Europe than anyone in the Ivy League: we detect a cynical, self-loathing paralysis of cheap talk and aristocratic banter on the continent that never leads to any real good physical deed: prancing and preening in Brussels and Paris, but paralyzing fear when the real innocents are being butchered in Serbia a few miles away. Tough talk to a democratic and humane America, not so tough talk to nightmarish killers in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. I had a conversation not long ago with a European, who typically so, began with the pained look of someone who was methodically entering a long grandfatherly lecture about the American pathologies of "unilateralism" and "exceptionalism." When I laughed and told him he should worry more about keeping us in NATO than threatening to leave, more about America turning its attention to Russia, India, Japan, and South America than to Paris and Rome, and expect pride rather than guilt that we stopped the Russians, fought the Gulf War, kicked out Noriega, and bombed in Serbia. In short, when I made it clear that Europe is irrelevant, he was shocked — and, mon dieu!, of all things, hurt! Europeans, I think, are going to learn that their real fears are not that we wish to control them, work with them, influence them, or corrupt them, but rather that we simply prefer to forget about them. They are rapidly becoming little more than an old windy Nestor — wordy, impotent, and full of empty advice about a glorious past in someone else's busy present...
Let the Europeans be toadies and fear these abjectly bankrupt regimes; let Americans worry more about the poor half billion people who have had to suffer and endure under them. Europeans, not us, are on the wrong side of history — and it is more embarrassingly apparent each day of this present crisis. Like the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, what is ahead is fraught with uncertainty and fear, but it is also, in some strange and macabre way, full of rare hope as well.
Night lies over Paris. If it does not burn, it will only be because they've abandoned their pretentions and have decided that Western Civilization is worth saving. It remains to be seen.
I see that Chirac is now trying to appease the rioters that are slowly but surely marching towards Paris after 6 nights of rioting. "The law must be applied firmly and in a spirit of dialogue and respect," Chirac said at a Cabinet meeting. "The absence of dialogue and an escalation of a lack of respect will lead to a dangerous situation." Oh yeah, I'm sure those thugs, who have taken over 9 towns already, really respect you, Jacques. The rioting, which spread Tuesday night to at least nine Paris-region towns, has exposed rifts in Chirac's government, with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy — a potential 2007 presidential candidate — being criticized for his tough talk and police tactics....
That Chirac intervened personally was a measure of the crisis. He acknowledged the "profound frustrations" of troubled neighborhoods but said violence was not the answer and that efforts must be stepped up to combat it....
Sarkozy — blamed by many for fanning the violence with his "zero-tolerance" approach to suburban crime — defended his approach and vowed to restore calm. He recently called rioters "scum" and vowed to "clean out" troubled suburbs. This Sarkozy guy is probably the only hope that the French have to fight back against the Islamist hoardes that threaten the cities. Naturally, the French hate him for having the slightest bit of backbone. Chirac's appeal to the thugs is ridiculous, a craven position fueled by weakness and cowardice. There is one way to deal with the rioters: tear-gas and deport all of them. End of problem. Of course, they won't do that, and as the Muslim rioters realize that they will grow more brazen. France is screwed. Prior post in this series: The Fall of France.
I suppose I'm late in commenting on this, but Katelyn Sills, a 15 year old girl attending Loretto High School (a Catholic school) who exposed to her Bishop a teacher who was eventually fired for aiding and abetting abortion, has been expelled. Katelyn has been commenting on her blog, Stand Up and Speak Out. The comments from her schoolmates are disgusting. Many of them are gleefully attacking Katelyn for getting what she supposedly deserved. They are almost all sympathetic to an abortion-helping teacher instead of an innocent girl who speaks the truth. Contact information for the Loretto administration is here. Personally, I hope the Bishop fires every single administrator who had a hand in expelling Katelyn. He should wade in there and indiscriminately cut them down like a scythe through grass. It's time to clean house. The "Catholic" school was reluctant to fire their pro-abortionist teacher, but they have no problem expelling a little girl who only went to her Bishop. If they lose their jobs, they should consider themselves lucky. As it is, Katelyn could probably sue the pants off of them. She should, irrespective of the merits of her case, because it will put the administrators through a hell they want to avoid. Time to rake them over the coals. There's a long thread over at Amy Wellborn's blog on this topic, and Mark Shea has a thread about it here. UPDATE: Katelyn has posted a press release on her blog.
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