Obama Reassures Despots - WSJ.com

Opinion: Obama Tells Arabia's Despots They Safe: America's diplomacy of freedom is officially over. - WSJ.com

Nanny state nonsense from the Canadian government

A Quebec father who was taken to court by his 12-year-old daughter after he grounded her in June 2008 has lost his appeal.

Next up: binding arbitration for your son's allowance.

Marriage and the Law

This past week saw two major news events in the ongoing  marriage wars. First, the Iowa Supreme Court found a right for same-sex marriage hidden in their Constitution (the relevant provisions of which, they note, are “identical in scope, import, and purpose” to those of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution). Second, the Vermont legislature voted to overturn their governor's veto on gay marriage, making Vermont the first state to enact a statute legitimizing these marriages. Interestingly, supporters of gay marriage are much more focused on exploiting the first victory rather than the second.

Voters all across the country find themselves increasingly removed from the political and legislative process that is by design theirs, removed by judges who believe they know better when it comes to making ethical judgments in public policy. One thing the decision doesn't contain is any reference to a history of British common law on marriage and family, which one would think would be appropriate in this context, referring only disparagingly to "strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion." 

It does contain an empty gesture to the people of Iowa while removing their sovereignty:  

Finally, it should be recognized that the constitution belongs to the
people, not the government or even the judicial branch of government. . . . While the constitution is the supreme law and cannot be altered by the enactment of an ordinary statute, the power of the constitution flows from the people, and the people of Iowa retain the ultimate power to shape it over time.

But elsewhere, they assert

Our responsibility, however, is to protect constitutional rights of individuals from legislative enactments that have denied those rights, even when the rights have not yet been broadly accepted, were at one time unimagined, or challenge a deeply ingrained practice or law viewed to be impervious to the passage of time.

However, the Constitution itself is a legislative enactment. It was ratified by those same Iowans who were too dim and retrograde to view rights as expansively as the current Iowa Supreme Court sees them. So the Constitution establishes rights that were unimagined to its drafters and are not broadly accepted by Iowans today. But of course, the Constitution "belongs" to those Iowans. 

So long as they don't attempt to use its provisions to actually pass legislation.

These are dark days for American self-governance.

Visualize a trillion dollars

The last graphic just makes me think of the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Now visualize a trillion dollars leaving. Bye!

It's official: no reason to read the Village Voice anymore

Nat Hentoff has been laid off. Back to Boston Boy, Speaking Freely, and the liner notes to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Who Are You, cowbelled and Walkened

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

This is better than the Band track -- The Who were made for this, it seems.

More cowbell for Levon Helm

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

morecowbell.dj allows you to add both cowbell and Christopher Walken to any MP3.

You're Welcome!

What'll it be, hmmm?

Just saw The Nutty Professor, the Jerry Lewis original, for the first time since I was in grade school. What a weird movie. Maybe the French are on to something.

Jerry Lewis - The Nutty Professor Cocktail
Uploaded by bhgbjazz

It's ok to steal in Japan

The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial about the recount in the Minnesota Senate race. Why do we see, over and over again (Florida Presidential race in 2000, Washington Senate race in 2004, and now in Minnesota), that in close elections where Democrats are in control, they are able to magically find votes just in the nick of time, appearing in the back seats of cars, or Democratic precincts? But, as they say in Casablanca, the establishment is as honest as the day is long. It's only conservatives who engage in fraud by demanding things like photo id.

A liberal acquaintance at work who is very proud of his Master's degree in political science informed me before the election that adding phony votes in an election is morally superior to blocking valid votes. My opinion is that they are both vote fraud. He claimed that when adding a spurious vote, the proportional count is changed by 1/(n+1) (where n is the number of legitimate votes) whereas the proportional count is changed by 1/n when deleting a legitimate vote. Hmmm. Well 1) there's no proportional count in this country, 2) if it's merely about the effect each incremental vote has, then by that logic, stealing Japanese money is not as evil as stealing American money, since the dollar trades at about 95 yen.

Printing's alive

Rahm Emanuel: "Pit Bull," "Hemorrhoid," "Toothache"

President-Elect Obama has made his selection for point man, Chief of Staff -- Rahm Emanuel, the man Fortune describes as a "pit bull." Clinton-era Democratic operative Paul Begala identifies Emanuel as having an aggressive style that is "a cross between a hemorrhoid and a toothache."

Regardless how much Senator Obama campaigned for changing politics and the nastiness of tone (and McCain tried to portray himself as above pettiness), politics ain't beanbag. Obama signals that he understands this with his first major staff pick.

This is brilliant

Does anyone find it amusing that a church that was famous for stretching the traditional definition of marriage in advocating polygamy is now depicted as nefariously plotting to rigidly define marriage as between a man and a woman and thus control the world (or maybe just California)? Just checking.

Time to take this out of mothballs

As the presidential election campaign draws to a conclusion, it's time to take this blog out and air it a bit. Those who occasionally peruse may find something of interest soon.

Definitive Catholic bathroom book

John Zmirak and Denise Matychowiak's The Bad Catholic's Guide to Wine, Whiskey & Song is a hoot. If you look up "snarky" in the Catholic dictionary, you'll find a picture of this book. You'll find the answers to questions like:

• Why do Kentucky whiskeys bear the name of the famous French royal house of Bourbon?
• How did pisco become the national drink of Peru? (See answer below)
• Is vodka Russian or Polish in origin?

It's a random walk through the history of Christendom, viewed from an epicure/enophile perspective. Thoroughly Catholic in its attitude and orthodoxy, chock full of recipes (Matychowiak is a chef), Guide to Wine takes the givenness and goodness of creation and physicality seriously. It's a funny celebration and will leave you chuckling and gabbing with friends. Highly recommended.

Oh, and about that pisco:

[Catholic clergy] march[ed] through the country on foot[,] learning a dozen languages to preach the Gospel without the benefit of gunpowder. . . . When the priests saw the conquistadors robbing the country of everything not nailed down, and enslaving the natives to work in silver mines, they started defending the Indians' rights and organizing them on farms. Jesuits taught the Indians to grow grapes and ferment them. . . . Enraged Iberian vintners — don't cross these people, trust us — rioted for their right to soak the colonials, and in 1614, the ever-meddling Spanish Crown outlawed the sale of Peruvian wine.

The ever-crafty Jesuits applied their scientific training to invent a new drink which fit neatly through a loophole in the law — a brandy that was soon named for the earthenware containers which held it, piskos. . . . "[P]isco" soon caught on throughout New Spain, and gave the long-suffering Indians an industry they could count on . . . .

Theresa Duncan, R.I.P.

The New York Times reports that Theresa Duncan took her own life earlier this month, apparently followed in suicide by her boyfriend Jeremy Blake.

Theresa Duncan was my colleague at a New Media startup in DC in the mid-90's. She and Monica Gesue were the creators of Chop Suey, a CD-ROM entertainment that was brimming with wit and whimsy. Theresa was sui generis: smart as a whip, ambitious, with a biting wit and a commanding presence. She was an outsize personality in every way -- a constant edge and a twinge of sadness. I remember being startled to find that a wisecracking fashionista was also a devotee of Martin Heidegger. It saddens me to think I'll never bump into her in NYC and have another startling conversation. Requiescat in pace.

UPDATE: Theresa Duncan created this charming clip below. Enjoy:

Scenes from a Marriage

Mike Aquilina's The Resilient Church is an effortless, respectful look at a number of episodes in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Not a comprehensive history (or even an attempt at a concise one), this book offers readers a number of vignettes from the life of the Church, through its encounters with heresy and holiness, scandal and salvation. Political events find their way in, but Aquilina's focus is on the Church as exemplifying one particular virtue: perseverance. Inasmuch as all Christian history is the story of a divine marriage, Christ and his Church, consider this book as an honest and sometimes humbling memoir of how that, as yet not fully consummated, marriage plays out in the lives of the faithful across millennia. It's an excellent read, and while not scholarly, the reader is bound to find something of interest. I particularly enjoyed the treatment of the Crusades. Inasmuch as the history of the West largely cannot be understood outside the history of the Church, this book is recommended for believers and non-believers alike.

Cheney attacks the Constitution?

Such a headline would warrant an impeachment, no? But of course it's not true. Michael Roston has another shocking headline: Cheney criticizes the Geneva Conventions in Military Academy commencement address. The Raw Story ran it, and Andrew Sullivan repeated the allegation here. Of course, it's not true, as is easily verified by reading a transcript of the actual speech.

The Vice-President's speech mentioned the Conventions exactly once:

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away. These are men who glorify murder and suicide. Their cruelty is not rebuked by human suffering, only fed by it. They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society. The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend.

One really must (forgive the term) torture a common sense reading of the speech to find a criticism of the Conventions. Cheney merely stated an undisputed fact, that terrorist killers demand Geneva and constitutional protections. It's in Al Qaeda training manuals, for pete's sake.

Cheney spoke of the Convention and the U.S. Constitution in the same sentence and in the same manner, because in both cases the question hinges not on the validity of the law, but on the applicability of some of its clauses to this group of people. If one posits that illegal immigrants should not be eligible for Social Security, that is an indictment of illegal immigrants, not the Social Security system. The link between the two bodies of law is revealing: neither Roston nor Sullivan tried to claim that Cheney was "criticizing" the Constitution of the United States, either because so obvious a lie would be more glaring, or because, in their minds, slagging an international treaty is a bigger travesty than trashing the Constitution (which the VP explicitly swore to uphold, twice), or both.

Those papists and their Romish ways

Is this political cartoon from Tony Auth intended to make us long for the days when vigilant citizens sought to keep Catholics in their place and keep them out of power?

One thing is certain: no one could do this sort of propaganda as well as Thomas Nast. Auth's version is . . . toothless, by comparison.

The battle is far from over

Ross Douthat, posting on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog at The Atlantic Monthly, says that claims of a sweeping pro-life victory in the Supreme Court's Gonzalez vs. Carhart decision yesterday are greatly exaggerated. Money quote, responding to Jacob Weisberg's claim on Slate that conservatives have consistently won on abortion and gun control:

In every state, it's illegal for minors to purchase any firearm. Does Weisberg really think pro-lifers are vastly closer to attaining their goal than gun control advocates?

Carhart is cause only for extremely guarded optimism. Pro-lifers still need at least one more Justice.

The Times on Benedict

This must be a sign that we are in the End Times. The New York Times has a reasonable, intelligent piece on Pope Benedict and his place in modern Europe. Infinitely better that the recent New Yorker piece -- a real piece of reporting that didn't seem phoned in, that actually had some analysis that required more than an espresso with Marco Politi. Carl Olson has a good review of it on the Ignatius Insight blog.