Echoes in Eternity

Mark Steyn has an excellent article here about the need to define our countries and cultures as more than just our shared entertainment interests. Being an American is not defined merely as someone who enjoys apple pie, baseball or football, and movies with guns and explosions. We need to teach our children the grand history of our nation and the ideals that have made it great.

The British went through this routine in the days after the London tube bombings--perpetrated, you'll recall, by British subjects, born and bred. For a moment, this shocked the opinion-makers: we need to teach our young persons to feel British, they twittered. And what does being British involve? Drinking 28 pints after the Man United game and then staggering down the street baying and mooning and urinating in people's gardens before passing out in a pool of vomit? Er, well, no, that's too British. But golly, how about fish'n'chips and cricket and liking caterwauling popsters? Then a picture of the four bombers appeared on the front page of the tabloids: they were whitewater rafting in Wales. They were dressed as any other young Britons. They loved cricket and fish'n'chips. One of them left a video message to be broadcast on al Jazeera. He did all the usual jihadi-blather but in a broad Yorkshire accent: "Eee-oop, Allahu akbar!" If Coronation Street had been looking to introduce an Islamist cell into the Rover's Return, he'd have been perfect. These men were entirely assimilated--if being assimilated means chips and cricket.

The Dutch, on the other hand, acknowledged that there's more to being a citizen of a pluralist democratic state than junk food and sports teams. Four or five years ago, I had a fascinating conversation with some Dutch cabinet ministers about the need to ensure that immigrants understood what they would be required to assimilate with. So I was interested to see what they'd come up with. It turned out to be a video which they distributed to every embassy around the world to play to anyone thinking of moving to the Netherlands. It showed a topless woman on the beach and two guys kissing. Message: If you're uncomfortable with this, you might prefer to emigrate somewhere else. Except that they added a rider to say that, if you are uncomfortable with this because you're a Muslim or whatever, then you don't have to watch it. And that pre-emptive negation of the entire point of the exercise said more about the real state of the Netherlands than anything on screen.

Islam is a challenge to the West because of the assumption behind the Mississauga lady's injunction: being Muslim is not just a religious but a civil identity. There is historically no distinction in Islam between rendering unto God and rendering unto Caesar. By contrast, to be Canadian or British or Dutch seems less and less a civil identity and more and more just a smattering of local colour. If you're a travelling salesman who likes donuts in Toronto and chips in London and a spliff with a legalized prostitute in Amsterdam, presumably you're impeccably Canadian, British and Dutch.

This is a sad and reductive idea of national identity. And it's the vacuum into which pan-Islamism flowed--not for everyone, not for all Muslims, but for enough for it to have metastasized around the world into the most profound challenge to the nation-state. Another Dutch cabinet minister remarked a few months ago that if a majority of the electorate voted to introduce sharia that would be OK. In other words, as long as the tyranny is ushered in constitutionally (as it was in Germany three-quarters of a century ago), it's fine by him. Not by me. Liberty is a 24/7 condition, not merely a trip to the voting booth every few years. If a cabinet minister in a settled parliamentary democracy doesn't understand that, then why be surprised when the fire-breathing imams don't get it?

The nullity of the modern multicultural state is the heart of the problem. We talk airily about "moderate Muslims," but the reality is that Islam is moderated mainly by the overarching culture--often a dictatorial culture, such as the Soviet Union or the Suharto regime in Indonesia, but sometimes something less so. There is no reason for Islam to moderate itself in a land that declares we worship only donuts or topless sunbathers. We have to teach our children an "heroic national narrative" (in the splendid words of Australia's John Howard), one that teaches them their history warts and all, as opposed to (as now) warts only. A nation cannot survive as merely a big zip code: it has to be understood as the physical expression of certain ideas and the ongoing projection of a grand inheritance. If we can't articulate why sharia is wrong even if it's legitimized by plebiscite, then we fully deserve to end our days living under it. It's not about Islam. It's about us.

Here is a good column from the City Journal about the fruit which one aspect of Bush's No Child Left Behind policy has reaped. Read it if you get the chance, the mainstream media won't ever mention this.

At $1 billion per year, Reading First, part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, accounts for just 2 percent of federal education spending. Yet this program for lifting reading achievement, always the apple of George W. Bush’s eye, is already delivering promising results. The commonsense idea informing it—that the best scientific research should guide the teaching of reading—was one of Bush’s signature education initiatives since his days as Texas governor, and it makes even more sense today.
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To see clearly what’s at stake, we need to remind ourselves of the gravity of the national problem that Reading First seeks to solve—and of how it proposes to solve it.
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After a century and a half of universal public education, and despite the highest per-pupil expenditure on public elementary and secondary education in the world, 40 percent of U.S. fourth-graders are reading below the minimally acceptable level, according to the gold-standard NAEP test. For minority students in inner-city schools, the reading failure rate is a shocking 65 percent. This educational failure bodes ill: children who don’t read by fourth grade almost always fall behind in all other subjects, often wind up in costly special education programs, and, as adults, have higher rates of drug addiction, incarceration, and welfare dependency.

Making the situation more tragic, nineteenth-century American children learned to read very well, thank you, in one-room schoolhouses, with nothing more than a single determined teacher wielding Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller and the McGuffey readers. Even before a public school system existed in America, Alexis de Tocqueville had marveled at the country’s extraordinarily high literacy rates.

Happily, recent developments point the way to a solution to the nation’s reading woes. For the past several decades, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a wing of the National Institutes of Health, has sponsored reading research at universities across the U.S, with scientists from cognitive neuroscience, pediatrics, genetics, educational psychology, and child development publishing hundreds of peer-reviewed studies that describe not just how children learn to read but why so many fall behind—and how schools can best keep it from happening.

The converging scientific evidence confirms what our great-grandmothers knew intuitively. The most effective reading instruction for most children—especially for those from disadvantaged homes—begins by training them to recognize the relationship between letters and the sounds they make (phonemic awareness), moves on to teaching them how to sound out whole words (phonics), and then focuses on fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Reading science has also developed effective new technologies to assess students’ progress in mastering the skills they need to decode written language. To make an analogy with medical science, reading science has discovered not only the educational equivalent of treating diabetes but also the technology that monitors how the treatment is working.

Unfortunately, the similarities between reading science and the medical kind end there. A breakthrough in medical research soon leads to new clinical practice. In education, however, the science has collided head-on with the ideologies and economic interests of the panjandrums of public education.

Reading science is a mortal threat to what E. D. Hirsch has called the “Thoughtworld” of American education—the system of “progressive” beliefs about classroom instruction promulgated by the ed schools that monopolize teacher training. The Thoughtworld has a cult-like attachment to a Romantic theory of reading instruction called “whole language,” which recently morphed into “balanced literacy” to make it sound more reasonable to dubious parents. Balanced-literacy true believers claim that to subject children to the “drill and kill” of direct phonics instruction is a form of child abuse.

The balanced-literacy cultists believe that learning to read is a natural process and that most children can intuit the alphabetic principle and the meaning of printed words with a little guidance from a teacher and through pleasant cooperative classroom activities such as “shared reading” and “reading circles.” Basically, this approach says that kids can learn to read by reading—by immersing themselves in print. And for some children from literate homes, where print and articulate conversation abound, this approach can work.
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[T]he evidence is starting to come in. More than 5,600 schools in 1,700 school districts nationwide have received Reading First grants. The participation level is impressive in itself. It means that state education agencies and a large number of districts have pledged (in writing) to use Reading First grants exclusively to teach according to the principles of Scientifically Based Reading Research—a phrase that appears so often in the legislation that it has become an acronym, SBRR. So unless officials are lying and just grabbing the money, we now have a critical mass of educators willing to try the pro-science side of the reading wars.
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A comprehensive study by an outside evaluator will appear in 2007, measuring Reading First’s influence on student achievement nationally. But some states and districts are already seeing significant improvement. When the relevant congressional committees hold hearings on NCLB reauthorization, they might start by looking to neighboring Virginia, where they’ll discover a dramatic example of Reading First’s power. With apologies to Dickens, we might call it a tale of two school districts—one welcoming Reading First, the other disdaining it.

The first, Richmond, offers a classic profile of an inner-city school district. Of its 25,000 students, 95 percent are black, more than 70 percent are poor enough to be in the free-lunch program, and 44 percent change schools during the year. Until 2001, Richmond’s student test scores were among Virginia’s worst. Only five of the district’s 51 schools achieved the status of full state accreditation.

But 2001 is also when Richmond school officials embarked on an ambitious reform, whose centerpiece was a standardized reading program based on evidence from the NICHD studies. By the time Reading First funds were available in 2002, Richmond was already up and running with a phonics-based reading program called Voyager Universal Literacy. The district channeled the modest $450,000 Reading First grant into a handful of its lowest-performing schools. But the principles of scientific reading instruction took hold throughout the district.

Since then, Richmond’s test scores have skyrocketed. By 2003, the number of the district’s schools achieving full state accreditation had climbed to 22. The next year, it rose to 39 and has now reached 44.
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[T]he $6 billion for Reading First has more generally been one of the best investments ever in federal education spending. It has already brought some remarkable reading breakthroughs in many parts of the country and among at-risk students. It has spread awareness of what should be going on in the classrooms and in the teacher-training institutions. It has shown that a comprehensive solution to the nation’s reading crisis is right in front of our noses. If, in another decade, an unacceptable proportion of America’s children still can’t read by fourth grade, don’t blame George Bush. Blame the education leaders in our states and cities who, offered the solution, didn’t grab it.

The graduation ceremony practices at UCLA were not known to me until today, but they do not surprise me. According to John Leo, the university has numerous commencements for almost any ethnic, racial, or sexual orientation group one could think of. The word "absurd" comes to mind.

Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, “Raza,” is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later.
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Some students are presumably eligible for four or five graduations. A gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino mother could attend the Asian, Filipino, and American Indian ceremonies, plus the mainstream graduation and the Lavender Graduation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered students.

Graduates usually wear identity-group markers—a Filipino stole or a Vietnamese sash, for instance, or a rainbow tassel at the Lavender event. Promoters of ethnic and racial graduations often talk about the strong sense of community that they favor. But it is a sense of community based on blood, a dubious and historically dangerous organizing principle.
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[T]he core reason for separatist graduations is the obvious one: on campus, assimilation is a hostile force, the domestic version of American imperialism. On many campuses, identity-group training begins with separate freshman orientation programs for nonwhites, who arrive earlier and are encouraged to bond before the first Caucasian freshmen arrive. Some schools have separate orientations for gays as well. Administrations tend to foster separatism by arguing that bias is everywhere, justifying double standards that favor identity groups.
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As in so many areas of American life, the preposterous is now normal.

Dr. Kevorkian was freed a month ago after serving 8 years for assisting a person in his own suicide. Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent job offer for him here.

Before he turned his attention to mercy killing, Kevorkian argued for a new branch of medicine—namely, physiological experimentation on those condemned to death and about to be executed. His oddity is suggested not merely by the proposal itself, but by his surprise that his colleagues did not jump at it, and instead condemned it roundly. He attributed their resistance to conservatism, this being a pejorative term, of course.

Now it so happens that on the very day on which Kevorkian went free, 310 prisoners in Italy, condemned to life imprisonment for murder, petitioned the Italian president, requesting the reinstatement of the death penalty. An imprisoned chief of the Sicilian Mafia, Carmelo Musumeci, was the prime mover behind the petition, which read in part: “We ask that our life sentences be transformed into a death sentence. Our life is totally useless and means infinite suffering: a sentence that makes the future the same as the past, a past that crushes the present and eliminates any hope for the future.”

Surely there is an opportunity here for international cooperation of the best kind? It has long seemed paradoxical that many of those most strenuously opposed to the death penalty most fervently favor euthanasia, and not always the voluntary kind. It is seldom that such an ideological paradox can so neatly be resolved.

Avanti, Dr. Kevorkian! You have new worlds to conquer, especially since a condition of your parole is to take no part in euthanasia or assisted suicide. A change of jurisdictions would be just the thing. And I am sure that Signor Musumeci, as a small token of appreciation for being put out of his misery, would be happy to be experimented upon.

As I'm sure most of you are aware, Michael Moore (of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame) has come out with his newest documentary, Sicko. As is his style, Sicko runs by Moore's typical modus operandi, which entails telling only his side of the story and not allowing any worthy dissenting views to be shown. The film consists of Moore's opinion that America needs to go to a universal, government-run health care system; which he attempts to prove by showing the viewer the WONDROUS health care systems in Canada, France, and (irony alert!) Cuba. I have not seen it as of yet, but here is a good review by someone who has, a physician no less.

Sicko is not a documentary; it’s a cartoon, without animation. In the real world, health-care policy involves a sixth of the national economy, hundreds of government programs, thousands of private insurance plans, and hundreds of thousands of health-care workers; it is extraordinarily complex. In Sicko, by contrast, there are no nuances, no exceptions, no grays. Americans are exploited; insurance companies are bad; politicians are impotent.

Perhaps most remarkably, Moore finds perfection in Canada, Britain, France, and, yes, Cuba. He gushes that everyone in Canada enjoys coverage, and yet costs are lower there. Could there possibly be a tradeoff for this? In Sicko, there doesn’t seem to be any. Moore visits an ER in London, Ontario, and asks people how long they’ve waited for care. No one has cooled his heels for longer than 45 minutes!

Sicko’s depiction of Canadian health care is a complete misrepresentation. I grew up in Canada, so stories immediately jump to my mind: the relative who almost died of an acute abdomen, first waiting hours to see a doctor in an ER, then sent to another hospital for an ultrasound, and finally shipped back again by ambulance for the needed surgery; a woman with cancer who broke her hip (because of metastasis) and had to wait a dozen hours in an ER before being sent home.

Don't know if everyone realizes this, but we have a day of remembrance coming up tomorrow, not just a day off from work. In our historically-ignorant society, most of our holidays - religious or otherwise - have lost most of their original significance. Now President's Day is a chance to get a day off and go shopping at Sears, while Washington and Lincoln's birthdays are almost completely forgotten. What can we do to combat this? Dennis Prager suggests having a form of a Seder for the 4th of July, much like the Passover Seder.

Perhaps the major reason Jews have been able to keep their national identity alive for 3,000 years, the last 2,000 of which were nearly all spent dispersed among other nations, is ritual. No national or cultural identity can survive without ritual, even if the group remains in its own country.

Americans knew this until the era of anti-wisdom was ushered in by the baby boomer generation in the 1960s and '70s. We always had national holidays that celebrated something meaningful.
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Unfortunately...Columbus Day is rarely celebrated since the European founding of European civilization on American soil is not politically correct.

Christmas has become less nationally meaningful as exemplified by the substitution of "Happy Holidays" for "Merry Christmas."

Memorial Day should be a solemn day on which Americans take time to honor those Americans who fought and died for America and for liberty. But, again, fewer and fewer Americans visit military cemeteries just as fewer communities have Memorial Day festivities.

We come, finally, to tomorrow, the mother of American holidays, July Fourth, the day America was born. This day has a long history of vibrant and meaningful celebrations. But it, too, is rapidly losing its meaning. For example, look around tomorrow -- especially if you live in a large urban area -- and see how few homes display the American flag. For most Americans it appears that the Fourth has become merely a day to take off from work and enjoy hot dogs with friends.

Our national holidays were established to commemorate the most significant national events and individuals in our history; they now exist primarily to provide us with a day off. This was reinforced by the nation's decision to shift some of the holidays to a Monday -- thereby losing the meaning of the specific date in order to give us a three-day weekend.

National memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies. That is the secret at the heart of the Jewish people's survival that the American people must learn if they are to survive.

When Jews gather at the Passover Seder -- and this is the most widely observed Jewish holiday -- they recount the exodus from Egypt, an event that occurred 3,200 years ago. We Americans have difficulty keeping alive the memory of events that happened 231 years ago.

How have the Jews accomplished this? By the ritual of the Passover Seder. Jews spend the evening recounting the Exodus from Egypt -- and as if it happened to them. In the words of the Passover Haggadah -- the Passover Seder book -- "every person is obligated to regard himself as if he himself left Egypt." The story is retold in detail, and it is told as if it happened to those present at the Seder, not only to those who lived it 3,200 years ago.

That has to be the motto of the July Fourth Seder. We all have to retell the story in as much detail as possible and to regard ourselves as if we, no matter when we or our ancestors came to America -- were present at the nation's founding in 1776.
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But someone -- or many someones -- must come up with a July Fourth Seder. A generation of Americans with little American identity -- emanating from little American memory -- has already grown into adulthood. The nation whose founders regarded itself as the Second Israel must now learn how to survive from the First.

We sang America the Beautiful in our church this past Sunday, in anticipation of the upcoming Independence Day. Then today, I saw that Mark Steyn had made it his Song of the Week.

This Fourth of July, Americans will sing the first verse, which at most performances nowadays is all we hear. But Miss Bates had more to say than mere topographic description. "America" is a fusion of the beauty of the land with the glory of the idea. As she wrote in the second verse:

Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law...

Which is a more controversial notion in Massachusetts today than it was back then - that liberty operates best within self-imposed restraints.
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For what could be a better summation of the nation than a patriotic anthem born in the majestic sweep of the Rockies and over the steaming hot dogs of Coney Island?

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Once again, more stories of disappearing freedoms are coming out of Europe. Last week in Germany, a Lutheran pastor was sentenced to one year in prison for comparing abortion to the Holocaust. Elsewhere in Europe, there was nearly a vote today (at the last minute it was canceled/postponed) by the Council of Europe to ban the teaching of intelligent design and fight any mention of it on the Continent.

The news media tend to live by Jesus' maxim to worry about one's own faults before bothering with others. However, in a slight modification of Christ's words, instead they anguish over the speck in this country's "eye" while mostly ignoring the huge "planks" in foreign countries. One such plank is mentioned here regarding the tens of thousands of South Koreans who were abducted and never seen or heard from again by North Korea during the Korean War. Many wives and thousands of children lost their spouse and/or parent(s) due to the evils of Communism.

On June 25, 1962, the 12th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, Sung Kap Soon opened her diary and began to write.

"My dear husband, each night my pillow is soaked with tears of longing for you," the 38-year-old mother of three wrote. "Life goes on, but my body is torn to pieces by thoughts of you."

She noted in her diary that the country had marked the anniversary with a low-key government ceremony but little mention of the tens of thousands of South Korean civilians, including her husband, Ha Kyok Hong, who had been seized and taken away by North Korean troops.

On Monday, too, South Korea observed the war's 57th anniversary with scant comment on the fate of these largely forgotten victims of the war.

Fine, some people say, Communism was evil. However, they would point out, the most malignant forms of it are shadows of their former selves. Russia, while still struggling with democracy, is no longer ruled by a Communist party. North Korea, while still ruled by a lunatic, has begun to open up toward the outside world. Cuba is now ruled by a bunch of senior citizens who likely will all be dead within the next decade. And they would, for the most part, be correct. The dangers of Communism seem very much removed from our world today. However, as with everything (from pop cultural fads to worldviews), there is a cyclical nature that needs to be understood. Communism and all of its excesses as carried out by Stalin and Castro made it mostly a pariah among those who had lived through it or even saw its evils from afar, so that even people who would normally be quite sympathetic to the basic ideology of communism were scared off by how it had been applied. However, we now have an entire generation that only knows of communism from what they have read in history books. So, like the American clothing fashion of the 80's, socialism and communism are beginning to rise again.

A great example of this new boost in popularity is how many people in this country frequently give praise to the dictator president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. Yet I've given examples before of the totalitarian communist methods that he employs. And once again, here is another article about his extreme views.

President Hugo Chavez urged soldiers on Sunday to prepare for a guerrilla-style war against the United States, saying that Washington is using psychological and economic warfare as part of an unconventional campaign aimed at derailing his government.

Dressed in olive green fatigues and a red beret, Chavez spoke inside Tiuna Fort—Venezuela's military nerve-center—before hundreds of uniformed soldiers standing alongside armored vehicles and tanks decorated with banners reading: "Fatherland, Socialism, or Death! We will triumph!"

"We must continue developing the resistance war, that's the anti- imperialist weapon. We must think and prepare for the resistance war everyday," said Chavez, who has repeatedly warned that American soldiers could invade Venezuela to seize control of the South American nation's immense oil reserves.

We better start taking this nutcase seriously. After all, who in their right mind would think that the U.S. would actually invade Venezuela? Venezuela!?!? Of course, if this narcissist continues on his path to significant military buildup and wanton destruction of his beautiful country, maybe we will end up in there.

When it comes to worldviews, they never die; they only take a break for a season or two.

Mark Steyn pointed out this little tidbit from Los Angeles...

The founder of an antiviolence group called No Guns pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal weapons charges.

Hector "Big Weasel" Marroquin is accused of selling an assault rifle, a machine gun, two pistols and two silencers to undercover federal agents last fall. He could face up to 50 years in prison if convicted.

Marroquin, 51, of Downey, is a onetime member of the 18th Street gang who founded No Guns in 1996. No Guns received $1.5 million from the city as a subcontractor on anti-gang efforts, but its contract was canceled last year.

Here is a great article detailing just how polluting ethanol production truly is. Basically, more pollution is created than avoided by switching to ethanol. Replace gasoline with the bigger "evil" of ethanol. Again, this is another example in the long line of proofs that the leftist agenda is about feeling good, not doing good.

Other examples?

Welfare
Universal Health Care Coverage
No Death Penalty
The ONE Campaign against Global Poverty (GASP, did I just say that?!?)
Almost all global warming solutions (nevermind that human-induced GW doesn't exist)

That's enough, you get the point. If anyone would like further explanation for any of these examples and how they are "feel good" issues but rarely do they have a positive effect, please ask.

This is a letter written by Bishop Thomas Tobin in response to an invitation he received to attend a Rudy Giuliani fundraiser.

I have no idea why I received an invitation to Giuliani’s fundraiser. I don’t know the mayor; I’ve never met him. I try to avoid partisan politics. Heck, I’m not even a Republican. But most of all, I would never support a candidate who supports legalized abortion.

Rudy’s public proclamations on abortion are pathetic and confusing. Even worse, they’re hypocritical.

Now, this is what we get from Rudy as he attempted to explain his ambiguous position on abortion in a speech at Houston Baptist College earlier this month: “Here are the two strong beliefs that I have, here are the two pillars of my thinking . . . One is, I believe abortion is wrong. I think it is morally wrong . . . The second pillar that guides my thinking . . . where [people of good faith] come to different conclusions about this, about something so very, very personal, I believe you have to respect their viewpoint. You give them a level of choice here . . . I’ve always believed both of these things.”

What? This drivel from the man who received high marks, and properly so, for his clear vision and personal courage in healing New York City, and by extension the nation, after the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11?

Rudy mentions the two pillars of his position. But you know what happens if you sit on a stool with two legs? Yep, it collapses. And so does Rudy’s position, and along with it his integrity and reputation.

Rudy’s explanation is a classic expression of the position on abortion we’ve heard from weak-kneed politicians so frequently in recent years:

“I’m personally opposed to but don’t want to impose my views on other people.” The incongruity of that position has been exposed many times now. As I’ve asked previously, would we let any politician get away with the same pathetic cop-out on other issues: “I’m personally opposed to . . . racial discrimination, sexual abuse, prostitution, drug abuse, polygamy, incest . . . but don’t want to impose my beliefs on others?”

Why is it that when I hear someone explaining this position, I think of the sad figure of Pontius Pilate in the Gospels, who personally found no guilt in Jesus, but for fear of the crowd, washed his hands of the whole affair and handed Jesus over to be crucified. I can just hear Pilate saying, “You know, I’m personally opposed to crucifixion but I don’t want to impose my belief on others.”

While I completely agree with the Bishop Tobin about never voting for a pro-abortion candidate, I am not sure what I will do if the choice in November 2008 is between Clinton and Giuliani. I have heard good arguments from the likes of Dr. Dobson and Nathanael Blake for not voting if such a situation arises. I've also heard Dennis Prager address this issue on his radio show during an interview with Giuliani this week. To summarize the primary pros and cons of voting for Giuliani rather than abstaining in the Presidential General Election next fall...

Pros:
- Not enabling Hillary Clinton (or whatever Democratic candidate he would face) to gain office
- Giuliani appears to completely understand the threat that radical Islam poses to this country and the world at large, something that dunderheads like John Edwards will never understand
- Giuliani will probably be as likely to nominate conservative judges as any of the other Republican frontrunners, while who knows what scary second comings of Ruthie Ginsburg a Clinton or Obama administration would drum up

Cons:
- Enabling the Republican party to ignore the social conservatives in the future by showing them proof that a pro-choice candidate is viable within the party
- Giuliani's personal life (three marriages, his family in tatters) doesn't bode well for the chances of him conducting himself in a "presidential manner"
- Giuliani's history of fighting against 2nd Amendment rights in NYC
- Giuliani might flip flop and nominate pro-choice candidates for our courts

Hopefully I won't have to make that decision next November.

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the Battle of Normandy. During the few days of that battle, approximately 50,000 Americans lost their lives fighting to end tyranny. Kinda puts the Iraq War into perspective. Read this account from Omaha Beach, the bloodiest landing on that day 63 years ago. 3000 soldiers were killed in just a few hours.

We must preach the coming of the Lord, and preach it somewhat more than we have done; because it is the driving power of the gospel. Too many have kept back these truths, and thus the bone has been taken out of the arm of the gospel. Its point has been broken; its edge has been blunted. The doctrine of judgment to come is the power by which men are to be aroused. There is another life; the Lord will come a second time; judgment will arrive; the wrath of God will be revealed. Where this is not preached, I am bold to say the gospel is not preached. It is absolutely necessary to the preaching of the gospel of Christ that men be warned as to what will happen if they continue in their sins. Ho, ho, sir surgeon, you are too delicate to tell the man that he is ill! You hope to heal the sick without their knowing it. You therefore flatter them; and what happens? They laugh at you; they dance upon their own graves. At last they die! Your delicacy is cruelty; your flatteries are poisons; you are a murderer. Shall we keep men in a fool's paradise? Shall we lull them into soft slumbers from which they will awake in hell? Are we to become helpers of their damnation by our smooth speeches? In the name of God we will not. It becomes every true minister of Christ to cry aloud and spare not, for God hath set a day in which he will "judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel." As surely as Paul's gospel was true the judgment will come. Wherefore flee to Jesus this day, O sinners. O ye saints, come hide yourselves again beneath the crimson canopy of the atoning sacrifice, that you may be now ready to welcome your descending Lord and escort him to his judgment-seat. O my hearers, may God bless you, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

- Charles Spurgeon, July 12, 1885

Douglas Wilson and Christopher Hitchens have wrapped up their 6-week debate on Christianity Today's website regarding Christianity and its positive or negative influence in the world. Hitchens is a very intelligent man and shrewd debater, but Wilson handily won their exchange. Hitchens was ultimately unable to explain from whence he gets his moral belief system and how that morality is good and, say, a pyschopath's is evil (rather than the two people just having different beliefs). This is the problem for all those atheists who, like Mr. Hitchens, believe in right and wrong actions (though not necessarily the same ones as you or I) yet are unwilling to ascribe their morality to a supernatural source. If a person's moral being is defined completely by himself, and if said morality is itself a product of humanity's cultural and physical evolution, who is to say that the cultural mores of today are any more viable than those of 1000 years ago or of those that may come in the future? And if that is the case, what makes our "Judeo-Christian" cultural standards any more authentic (or good) than those held by much of the Muslim world (of which Hitchens is often a critic)? Atheists in such a predicament are, as Mr. Wilson mentioned, "like the minister in the story who wrote in the margin of his notes, "Argument weak. Shout here."

You can find the whole debate in my links to the left.