The Big Chill

The weather guy says today's high was about 28 degrees, and this time, I believe him.

No Motown on the household soundtrack today, though. Nothing against the Motown sound; we like it. But while making a late breakfast this morning, I listened to most of the music in the sidebar. Badfinger's "Baby Blue" is a good cold weather tune, and I've always been partial to the gunfighter ballad "El Paso."

After Thomas and Jane got tired of sledding down the closest hill, they parked themselves on our sofa for some fun with the Beatles edition of "Rock Band." By then even the family pets were sacked out. We have beer and milk, but sadly, we're out of Coffee Mate.

String theory starts to fray

Surfer (and theoretical physicist) Garrett Lisi has the scientific establishment in a tizzy.

North by (okay, to) Northwest

Gary North wrote a good speech for Sarah Palin. Three key paragraphs:

You have heard the old saying, "Support your local sheriff." The sheriff is the armed law enforcement agent of the county government. You had better get control [of] the government that hires the local sheriff. Then support him.

I am going to be on the road. I will do my Fox News show, but I will be appearing all over the country on a regular basis. I will not be running for anything. I will be training people to run for everything: school boards, county commissions, everything.

When the officers of the Federal government come to town to tell folks what to do, they will be greeted by citizens who know their rights and who are willing to sue the Federal government for any violation of any of the ten amendments. My favorite is the second amendment, but they are all great . . . and they are all being violated by Washington.

The only point North doesn't make while ghosting for Sarah is that when the feds don't violate rights per se, they often violate standards (of decency, for example) instead, while justifying their behavior in creepy or tone-deaf ways, (Bookworm has one example, Neo has another).

Just because I like this story about Baltic the Dog

The story of the dog stranded on the ice floe ended happily. The photo is by AP photographer Rysazrd Moroz.

First Affirmative Constrructive

What sometimes happens when you climb up on a bloggy soap box. Thanks to Retriever for the find.

On creating or saving high-speed rail jobs

President Obama flew to Tampa, Florida today to hand out candy (i.e., grant money) to special interests. While there, he mentioned something about how Americans should be saying that there's no reason why other countries can build high speed rail networks and we can't.

May I borrow a trope from the Saturday morning cartoon characters, Phineas and Ferb?

It's time to say "Why yes, Mr. President. Yes there is a reason."

An old railroad guy told me that if you want high-speed rail, you need tracks used exclusively by bullet trains. The American rail system is built for mixed use, and any track that takes a daily pounding from freight trains will not also accommodate passenger trains designed to go more than 100 mph.

That's why high-speed trains along any given rail corridor are expensive, and a whole network of high-speed rail is unlikely, especially if you remember that the average distance between stops or stations in the United States is likely to be greater than the average distance between stops or stations in countries like France and Japan.

UPDATE, February 10: Donald Lambro vindicates my position.

Suuure, he saved the economy

I don't much care what the president says he firmly believes, because Andrew Wilson made a good case to the contrary, at least on the economic end of things, and even the anecdotal evidence augers ill for Democratic claims.

Meanwhile, editors at the Washington Times tried to put the whole State of the Union address in context, as did Daniel Goldman over at First Things. Nile Gardiner "cannot think of a US president in modern times who has attached less importance to human rights issues." Sarah Palin was not impressed. And Gerard had the president pegged long ago as "the very model of a modern metrosexual."

I missed the best part of the kabuki theater (over to you, Randy Barnett), but without having seen that thoroughly unpresidential moment, one thing I noticed right off the bat is that after alluding broadly to prosperity and want in American history, the president's "takeaway" thought was "It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable."

I am not so tempted. But then I don't have his unbridled faith in progress.

For a good illustration of how the president thinks -- or how his speechwriters think he thinks -- see Joe Carter's word cloud comparisons of various SOTU addresses. George Will one-ups that by talking about the president's "divided brain."

Two parting questions: what is this "fiscal restraint" you speak of, Mr. President? And what did Christopher Buckley say about the state of the union speech that merited such a vulgar but hilarious evisceration from Ace?

Capping a week of prayer for Christian unity

To be honest, I'd forgotten that the octave between January 15 (the feast of Saint Peter's Chair) and January 25 (the feast of the conversion of Saint Paul) was being observed with special prayers for Christian unity.

It's a wonderful intention.

This sermon from Dr. Stanley Hauerwas fits the same theme, even though he orginally wrote it for delivery on October 31st ("Reformation Sunday" on calendars I don't typically use)

Related: The pope encourages priests to blog. Some, of course, already do, and I especially appreciate those who engage in myth-busting.

Overblown fear

Matt Welch on why the "corporate takeover of politics" is more myth than reality:

Jeff Milyo, an economist at the University of Missouri, has compared states with strict bans on corporate contributions to political parties against those with no limits at all. "There is just no good evidence that campaign finance laws have any effect on actual corruption," he said.

Toldjah so

Sister Toldjah's thoughts on the recent 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade are compelling. Good for her for not accepting Hillary Clinton's lame attempt to equate the vile Margaret Sanger with the flawed-but-admirable Thomas Jefferson.

Nothing to say and saying it anyway

Mark Steyn on the occupational hazard of putting too much stock in your own eloquence when you're elected to the Oval Office.

Has the political theater worn thin? The NYPD is not amused by the president's modus operandi, and neither are a lot of veterans.

Palin making a mistake

Sarah Palin has announced plans to stump for Senator John McCain in Arizona. Bad move on her part. McCain welcomes her help, and doubtless she's correct to think of him as a war hero and statesman, but he's also an "establishment Republican" rather than a conservative, and "maverick" only in the sense that he's more willing to veer left than some Republicans of shorter tenure in the U.S. Senate. One does not get the impression that McCain listens to wise words from people like Thomas Sowell.

Michelle Malkin is right to say that Sarah Palin is "caught between a loyalty rock and partisan hard place," but -- as Malkin also intimates -- the "dance with who brung ya" mindset doesn't suit Palin nearly as well as her red jacket and black pencil skirt.

Hello! McFly? The guy whose signature legislation just got eviscerated by the Supreme Court is not the guy whom Sarah Palin or Scott Brown (bless him) or any other Republican with name recognition needs to be stumping for.

Now that District of Columbia deadbeats and Bay State brahmins have been disabused of the notion that there is or was a "Kennedy seat" in Massachusetts, making the same people think that there's a "McCain seat" in Arizona would be counterproductive. Palin is not making a Ted Olson-level mistake, but she can do better.

I'd much prefer to see John McCain retire honorably at the end of his current term, while Sarah Palin adds her considerable charm and facility with expression (in speeches and on Facebook) to a campaign for accuracy in labeling before the Tea Party movement is too firmly saddled with the sexual innuendo that progressive attempts at mislabeling are forever trying to advance. There's malice in the words they use, and Sarah Palin could help to expose it.

Samuel Adams and the patriots of his generation knew a tea party when they saw one or borrowed from its customs ironically to make a point with King George III, but with a few brave and honorable exceptions, the patriots of our own generation stand idly by while leftists re-purpose vocabulary to no good end. Some deft quipping or argument from a well-coiffed hockey mom would go a long way toward mitigating that willful misuse of language and of people.

Huzzah the Princess Bride

One of my favorite parts of pop culture strikes again, and this time it's used artfully by the Anchoress in an economic and political context, with reference to current unemployment numbers.

Shocked to find gambling going on in a casino

Lot of commentary going up late about today's Supreme Court torpedo for large parts of the McCain-Feingold "Campaign Finance Reform" Act, and much of that commentary is from people having a hissy fit, but I think I'm with Frank Ross on this one.

The Supreme Court majority just got around to remembering the First Amendment. Trying to keep money out of politics is a losing game. Better to set up full disclosure (i.e., transparency) and then say "spend as much as you want."

I like this bit of perceptive reporting in the Washington Post. Staff writer Robert Barnes explains a point of disagreement between Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the majority, and Justice John Paul Stevens, who dissented from the majority opinion together with three other left-leaning justices, in part by appealing to precedent that the majority had just overturned:

Roberts bristled at Stevens's charge that the majority's opinion showed it was not "serious about judicial restraint."

"This approach is based on a false premise: that our practice of avoiding unnecessary (and unnecessarily broad) constitutional holdings somehow trumps our obligation faithfully to interpret the law," Roberts wrote. "It should go without saying, however, that we cannot embrace a narrow ground of decision simply because it is narrow; it must also be right."

Roberts seemed to be speaking to liberals when he wrote that stare decisis cannot be seen as an "inexorable command."

"If it were, segregation would be legal, minimum wage laws would be unconstitutional and the government could wiretap ordinary criminal suspects without first obtaining warrants," he said, referring to previous court decisions.

Perhaps with the nation's editorial writers in mind, Roberts also pointed out that an exception in the McCain-Feingold law for media companies was "simply a matter of legislative grace."

Roberts warned: "The fact that the law currently grants a favored position to media corporations is no reason to overlook the danger inherent in accepting a theory that would allow government restrictions on their political speech."

In other words, people opposed to the decision will paint it as conservative-style "judicial activism," but there was no attempt at social engineering by legal fiat here; the majority was just playing defense for the First Amendment -- as well they should.

Look for the union label

Daniel Henninger:

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.

This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.

They broke the public's bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.

They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn were tethered to a real world of profit and loss.

Read the whole thing. Henninger also notes that nobody in the Obama Cabinet has private-sector experience.

Reax on Brown and Coakley with an aside for Andy

Wizbang has an entertaining post-mortem on the Senate election in Massachusetts.

Andrew McCarthy says this was not just about health care reform.

Michelle Malkin, who seems to get by on less sleep than the rest of us, has had an analysis of her own up since way too early this morning.

Democrat Lanny Davis in the WSJ is interesting, but I'm partial to Instapundit's measured perspective on this race and its outcome, myself.

Andrew Sullivan deserves a mention that he rarely gets around here, not because I agree with him, but because people I know sometimes applaud his alleged clarity of thought.

Just yesterday, Sullivan was thinking in apocalyptic terms, and invoked even God while pleading with Massachusetts voters to support Coakley. Coakley lost, so today Sullivan is stomping his way through sour grapes (the relevant post heading is "Now: Call the GOP's Bluff").

That's a curious heading. There may be some bluffing from establishment Republicans, who as a rule are no more principled than establishment Democrats (pace Thomas Sowell, and a pox on both their houses!). But smart Republicans are not bluffing.

Brown, by all accounts, is smart. He's certainly quick on his feet. And he got more "Tea Party" help than RNC help.

Sullivan thinks Obama was conciliatory toward Republican critics of his health care initiative, which means he's forgotten that the president basically subcontracted that flagship legislation out to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who belatedly realized that they had to throw a little bone to their own "Blue Dog" Democrats (sometimes through outright bribery, as was tried with Congresscritters from Louisiana and Nebraska). Radio host Neal Boortz and others continue to point out that more than a few Republican ideas were ignored. For example, have you heard much about allowing individuals to write off the cost of privately-purchased health insurance on their taxes, the way corporations already do? I didn't think so.

Moreover, Sullivan labors under the delusion that Obama and his team made their signature health care reform effort(s) "budget neutral." I guess it doesn't matter to Sullivan how many times the Office of Management and Budget and other analysts all say that postponing accounting does not magically make drunken-sailor-on-shore-leave spending "budget (or deficit) neutral."

Predictably, Sullivan thinks that most of the blame for yesterday's hit to Democratic party fortunes lies with a "dysfunctional Democratic party" rather than its titular head, the president who invariably introduces weasel wording by saying "Let me be clear..." while accepting bouquets in the first-person singular and posing challenges in the first-person plural (Ace over at Ace of Spades noticed this rhetorical trick first; now the Associated Press does the same thing in Obama stories).

Sullivan wants "new reformist ferocity," but only on Obama's terms. He suggests that President Obama "won the election with a new coalition" (a debatable point) but has "had to govern through the existing system, which is essentially broken beyond repair."

In previous blog posts and essays, Sullivan made clear that he thinks George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh are the people most responsible for breaking the existing system, although Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid made the mess worse.

Among other things, Sullivan doesn't get what Jon Stewart does, which is that GW Bush managed to pass legislation without ever having the "supermajority" in Congress that Obama and his acolytes depended on to an unseemly degree. As a result of unspecified but transparent and likely Bushian malfeasance, Sullivan sighs, President Obama is "as stranded as the country." Can you hear the violins?

What's funny to me is that despite the entirely uncharacteristic if glancing appeal to God in his election day post, Sullivan lapsed back into form hours later by declaring that President Obama is "all we have left."

When the president said today that "the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," Sullivan called his assessment "pitch perfect," though neither he nor the president entertained another plausible theory: that what swept Brown into office was a repudiation of the initiatives that President Obama wants to double-down on, rather than undifferentiated impatience with the status quo or the increasingly well-known horrors of legislative "sausage making."

No, Andy, Obama is not "all we have left." That's not even true for the progressives to whom you were writing. "Put not your trust in princes" is still good advice-- on both sides of the aisle.

(I updated the original post with additional hyperlinks to reinforce certain points)

Reading the tea leaves

A summary quote from today's "Prowler" column in American Spectator Online:

"You know what scares our people more than the fact that they lost Ted Kennedy's
seat and the Obama mystique may take a huge hit [today]?" says the DNC adviser.
"The fact that Democrats and the media can no longer make the tea party types
out to be irrational, inflexible ideologues who are supporting nothing but
extreme right-wing candidates. The tea party movement supported Brown, raised
millions for him and worked for him, and he is not necessarily their kind of
guy. Brown proves the tea party movement can be tapped politically for
Republican candidates anywhere in the country if they are basically sound on
taxes and small government. That is huge."

And the lights all went out in Massachusetts?

(So I grew up listening to the Bee Gees-- here's a roundup of interesting stuff)

Tom Maguire looks at telling differences in the New York Times profiles of Martha Coakley and Scott Brown.

Ann Coulter fires a preemptive round down range, anticipating arguments from Democrats that they were saddled with a poor messanger rather than a poor message. Coulter's point is that there is no shortage of "poor messengers."

Michelle Malkin keeps a weather eye on voter fraud, because lately people expect to see it.

Neo-neocon captures the mood of the electorate in comments about an essay in the Washington Post.

Jim Geraghty tried for political perspective.

Meanwhile, Haiti still needs help, though maybe not the standard-issue help, and there are strange doings in Germany (to be fair, they're no stranger than Avatar winning a Golden Globe award for "Best Picture.")

Do not confuse the scientist with the director

Michael Mann the film director knows his craft well, as witness 1995's "Heat" and 1999's "The Insider."

Michael Mann the scientist has some 'splainin' to do.

Papal efforts duly noted

By Christoper Johnson, in bestowing an award that is actually more prestigious than it might at first sound:

"...the Editorial Board of the Midwest Conservative Journal (which would be me and an MCJ teddy bear I bought once) are pleased to announce that this year’s winner of the Ridley-Latimer Prize is Pope Benedict XVI. This prize is given to that Christian who most respects Anglican Christianity even while those represent that tradition relieve themselves all over it."


Chris, riffing on a religion story in the Washington Post, also covers at least part of the reason why Pope Benedict won.

For a fuller explanation of Pope Benedict as "the pope of Christian unity," see Father John Zuhlsdorf, or ponder this quote from a 1977 interview with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger:

"The summons to the peace of Christ is not to be confused with a longing for that good nature that is, in reality, only weakness, that would like to shield itself from the vexations that arise when one openly defends his convictions. The demand for unity in the Church is not, then, to be identified with the wish that everyone would agree about everything. Just being together is not unity, but ultimately an evasion of it. The admonition, ‘Be nice to one another’, is certainly not to be scorned, but it does not reach the height of the Gospel because it spares us the effort of setting out on the way to truth and so of really coming together."

BONUS! Fr. Z. also has good stuff up about Pope Pius XII and the New York Times. And (as of January 22) so does Peter Sean Bradley.

Thinking about that wedding feast at Cana

Julie pointed me to this gem from Dr. Gerard. She excerpted the wisdom of the doctor's nine-year-old daughter, which is definately worth reading, but didn't add that the same post includes great stuff from Saint Ignatius of Antioch writing to the Christians at Ephesus.

What Ignatius writes about the "harmony of unity" might be of special interest to my friend Gary, not least because we've discussed authority in the church several times.

Dr. Gerard's post ties well with Rod Bennett's excellent book, "Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words"

Righteous anger from Colonel Peters

New York Post columnist Ralph Peters (who, let's not forget, retired from the U.S. Army as a lieutenant colonel) lowers the boom on the fatally flawed Fort Hood report (UPDATE: he's not alone in doing so):

Hood massacre report gutless and shameful
By RALPH PETERS

Last Updated: 9:12 AM, January 16, 2010

Posted: 12:25 AM,
January 16, 2010

There are two basic problems with the grotesque non-report on the Islamist- terror massacre at Fort Hood (released by the Defense Department yesterday):

* It's not about what happened at Fort Hood.

* It avoids entirely the issue of why it happened.

Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It's so inept, it doesn't even rise to cover-up
level.

"Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood" never mentions Islamist terror. Its 86 mind-numbing pages treat "the alleged perpetrator," Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as just another workplace shooter (guess they're still looking for the pickup truck with the gun rack).

The report is so politically correct that its authors don't even realize the extent of their political correctness -- they're body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that
murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian.

Reading the report, you get the feeling that, jeepers, things actually went pretty darned well down at Fort Hood. Commanders, first responders and everybody but the latest "American Idol" contestants come in for high praise.

The teensy bit of specific criticism is reserved for the "military medical officer supervisors" in Maj. Hasan's chain of command at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As if the problem started and ended there.

Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks why they didn't stop Hasan's career in its tracks.

The answer is straightforward: Hasan's superiors feared -- correctly -- that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.

There's more at the link, and it's all worth reading.

And it's not just certain Army report writers who are tone-deaf. The same could be said for Martha Coakley and most of the Kennedy famliy.

The last ten years in movies

I know that people who compile entertainment-oriented lists for a living had stuff like this out two or three weeks ago, but better late than never, eh?

My favorite movies of the last decade, approximately in order:

1. The Lord of the Rings (all three films)
2. The Passion of the Christ
3. The Incredibles
4. United 93
5. Gods and Generals
6. Taking Chance
7. Hotel Rwanda
8. Mystic River
9. The Blind Side
10. Charlie Wilson's War

Honorable mentions from the same decade: Black Hawk Down, Miami Vice, Michael Clayton, Enchanted, Little Miss Sunshine, Gran Torino, In the Bedroom, Where the Red Fern Grows, Whale Rider, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Likely to have made one of these lists if I had seen them: The Lives of Other People, The Hurt Locker

Muscular and feminine

Dani Dufrene writes eloquently about how it's possible for women to be both muscular and feminine.

An equal and opposite reaction

On Facebook, operatic disdain from a man whose name I won't post here for the sake of his reputation:

"Frankly, anything that hurts the evil, brain-dead, vindictive Palin politically, is good for our country, democracy, and the world."

On the Ace of Spades blog, a show plug for Glenn Beck (yesterday) with a wonderfully humorous pop culture reference that Facebook Man would never dream of, though it fits the conversation between Beck and Palin perfectly.

It's conservatives who have a sense of humor.

On Haiti, Pat Robertson is a moron

I'm with Pete Wehner in his criticism of Robertson's stupid theology. You'd think Robertson had never read anything scriptural about wheat and weeds, or rain falling on the just and unjust alike, or God caring even for the lilies of the field, or any number of other verses (not to mention the whole Book of Job). Robertson's blithe fallback to "earthquake = divine judgment" is the flip side of the so-called "Prosperity Gospel," but even more misguided because it's more hard-hearted. Worse, he's not alone in that kind of stupidity

Anchoress has the video clip and a roundup of reaction, but this sort of thinking is laughable even to agnostics, and the only reason anyone is wasting any time with what Robertson thinks is that too many people still regard him as a credible face for evangelical Protestant Christianity and/or right-wingery in these United States.

He's successful, but not credible. There is a difference.

UPDATE: Look at the contrast in theological statements by Robertson and Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York. Dolan believes in God's judgment, both particular and final, but unlike Robertson, he doesn't forget mercy, cheapen suffering, or reduce the problem of evil to the same transactional level as feeding a quarter to a gumball machine.

Amateurs talk strategy

...and pros talk logistics, or so the saying runs. That seems to be true in earthquake-ravaged Haiti as recovery and relief efforts crank up, with the U.S. military in the vanguard (as it usually is when disaster strikes anywhere in the world).

UPDATE: See also this from Varifrank, which was written in 2005 (before he went traveling) but still applies. Excerpt:

Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro collegues tossed this little turd out to no one in particular:

"See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there's a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier..."

After which he and many of my Euro collegues laughed out loud.

And then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster [it was the Christmas Day tsunami in Indonesia]

I'm afraid I was "unprofessional." I let it loose --

"Hmmm, let's see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster, now what kind of ship would we want?

Something with its own inexhuastible power supply?

Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?

Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it?

Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies?

Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier?

Well "Franz", us peasants in America call that kind of ship an "Aircraft Carrier". We have 12 of them. How many do you have?"

Thank you, Brandon Darby

Orrin Judd highlighted this true story, and I think it deserves more notice. As Matthew Vadum writes, "You’ve probably never heard of Brandon Darby. The former community organizer who saved American lives by undermining a left-wing terrorist plot at the 2008 Republican convention used to be a proud member of the radical left."

[...]

"Darby has learned that if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Dutch tourist Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero, but disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by left-wing fundamentalists and you might as well be a terrorist yourself.

This is because among many on the left — even some moderate liberals — there is a presumption of good intentions by terrorists who claim to pursue social justice ideals."

Two other people whom I would gladly raise a glass for: Miep Gies and Mukul Asaduzzaman

Nicknames in the Old West

About Doc Holliday's sometime consort, "Big Nose" Kate Elder, and other people in the American West between the end of the Civil War and the 1887 surrender of Geronimo:

"The real Kate appears to have been a tough, practical frontier immigrant who, her nickname aside, was supposed to have been a very attractive woman when young. (The most commonly reproduced photograph of her, used in scores of coffee table western books, shows her as stout and plain. The photo has now been proved to be bogus.) No one knows just how or why she got her famous nickname. It wouldn't have been necessary for her to have had a big nose; most western nicknames had nothing to do with the people who acquired them. Wild Bill Hickock wasn't wild; he wasn't even a Bill (his real name was James Butler). Billy the Kid was a kid, but he wasn't a Billy (his name was Henry McCarty). Black Bart wasn't black; Dirty Dave Rudabaugh was no dirtier than most of his friends; Hurricane Bill Morton was mostly hot air; Indian Charlie wasn't an Indian; Mysterious Dave Mather wasn't mysterious; Buffalo Bill didn't kill any more buffalo than a couple of hundred other men; and Wyatt Earp's friend, Texas Jack Vermillion, when asked why he was called Texas Jack, said, "'Cause I'm from Virginia." All one can say for certain about frontier nicknames is that once acquired, they stuck for life, and in some cases considerably longer."

-- from Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends, by Allen Barra.

(It's a fascinating book filled with little-known information and marred only what looks like an aversion to copy editing at the publishing house. Barra's thesis is that Wyatt Earp and his brothers were more complex and less violence-prone than their detractors made them out to be, either in their lifetimes or later; he praises "Tombstone" as the most accurate of many Earp movies, uncovers evidence of a 19th-century conflict between Republicans and Democrats that shaped the Earp story, and comes down solidly in the pro-Earp camp in the controversy over the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral-- which, BTW, the world's toughest dentist and most loyal friend, John H. "Doc" Holliday, participated in but did NOT start).

More reading to do

Because I respect Jennifer's judgment.

I also trust Cassandra's judgment, albeit not necessarily in the same things.

Debunking the idea of faith as a private matter

The idea that faith is just between a person and his or her God is pernicious nonsense, writes Selwyn Duke. And I agree, especially with reference to Christianity ("Great Commission," anyone?)

The only way that faith can be an entirely private matter is if it has no bearing on public conduct, in which case it's hardly deserving of the name "faith." (in Mark Shea's paraphrase of Ross Douthat, "there is no wall of separation between Church and everything.")

Many people, including the current pope, have made the same point through the ages. Saint Thomas More springs immediately to mind. And a generation or so ago, Frank Sheed alluded to this argument in his masterful Theology and Sanity, when writing about the relationship between those things.

As a better-known philsopher put it, "Stupid is as stupid does." Christopher Johnson is among the many who would agree. We might also remember that Robert A. Heinlein, although no one's religious role model (as far as I know) had it right when he famously wrote in disdain for what would later become known (thank you, Bill Clinton) as "compartmentalization" that "specialization is for insects."

UPDATE: Peter Sean has been grappling with similar issues.

Editing for fun

Amy Ridenour takes a red pen to New York Times columnist David Brooks, who needs one.

Local color

Of course I ate the peanuts. I like Martha Bassett's music, too, though it was Don McClean's "American Pie" that the children and I were singing along with on the way to school today.

Wake County schools had a delayed start in anticipation of less than an inch of snow that Wake County never actually got, despite the rain last night. Tomorrow's forecast is colder.

But on this 75th birthday of Elvis Presley (the original rock star), I begin to think that Basia on Chincoteague Island was right to say that "the weather channel always lies."

Godspeed, Berkeley

Berkeley Johnston shuffled unexpectedly off this mortal coil on the Feast of the Epiphany. He was a fine man who leaves behind a wife, three children, and many grieving friends. I did not know him as well as some of our mutual friends did, but he was definately one of those people whom Louis L'Amour long ago described as "men to ride the river with." Rest in Peace, Berkeley.

The photo of Berkeley above was taken four years ago by our mutual friend Mr. Bill.

Review: St. Damien of Molokai, Apostle of the Exiled

Few of my book reviews warrant "full disclosure" right off the top, but that convention applies here, because while I am older than one of the authors of this affecting biography of Fr. Damien de Veuster, I remember Matthew Bunson positively from our high school days together in Hawaii.

Bunson has since made a name for himself in Goth, Sherlockian, and Catholic publishing circles. That unusual trifecta testifies to the range of his interests. The professor and theologian now works, I think, from Indiana, where (like Amy Welborn, whose name has currency with many readers of this blog) he writes sometimes for Our Sunday Visitor.

Rookie biographers writing about someone with the stature of Fr. Damien de Veuster might have made the mistake of delving right into his 16 years as a missionary priest among leprosy (Hansen's disease) patients on the island of Molokai, but Matthew Bunson and his mother and co-author Margaret are not rookies. They place Fr. Damien's apostolate in the context of 19th-century Christian missionary work (both Protestant and Catholic) throughout the Pacfic. They also have a keen eye for politics and personalities in the Kingdom of Hawaii at that time. These points of emphasis strengthen an already-strong story.

Fr. Damien gained renown that he never sought because, as the Bunsons note, this short-tempered Belgian priest tamed his own forceful will to the service of God. He was not the first to care for lepers in Hawaii -- set apart from other Hawaiians by a law promulgated in 1865 -- but he had a tremendous work ethic and an unflagging compassion for his parishioners. By the end of his life, "His landing on Molokai had changed the world's awareness of leprosy. It became a medical condition and not a biblical punishment." In other words, the Bunsons add, "Damien brought the light of Christ into a scene of horror, and by bearing the ravages of that affliction, he taught the modern world to recognize leprosy as a suffering, not a curse from an angry deity."

The Bunsons describe the travails of leprosy vividly, and while such paragraphs are sometimes hard to read and more gruesome than sepia-toned photos of Damien's scarred and bespectacled face under his flat-brimmed hat, they do bring home the seriousness of the disease. The same kind of vividly descriptive imagery is also used -- less effectively, I think -- in making the beginnings of a case for Fr. Damien as a mystic toward the end of his life. That Fr. Damien had more than a few "dark nights of the soul" cannot be doubted, but because by then we've grown to admire Fr. Damien as an indefatigable man who volunteered for the mission assignment in his scholarly older brother's place, then built churches and houses and 600+ coffins by hand, the shift between "practical" and "spiritual" is not always seamless (I say that knowing that "grace builds on nature," and knowing that the great Mark Twain grappled with the same problem in his too-little-known biogoraphy of Saint Joan of Arc).

I invariably find lapses of editing in the books that I read (my day job involves correcting such things), but to its credit, this biography had only two such lapses I could find: first, an unproven assertion that Fr. Damien's way of looking at people and events was "remarkably unique" (as though there were degrees of unique-ness), and second, a confused chronology with respect to one of Fr. Damien's champions, the Rev. Hugh B. Chapman.

Rev. Chapman, an Anglican clergyman, is described as having heard about Fr. Damien from various newspaper articles "such as the one that appeared in The Illustrated London Times soon after Damien's death." That would not be problematic, but for the fact that two pages later, "The Reverend Mr. Chapman first wrote to Father Damien in February 1888," and Fr. Damien was alive to receive his letter.

Those nits aside (where they belong), this biography does a yeoman job of introducing readers to a great man, while also offering penetrating insights into his associates, some of whom, like Union Army veteran-turned-missionary Brother Joseph Dutton, were heroic in their own right.

I knew a fair bit about Fr. Damien before reading the book (the Irish Christian brothers at Damien Memorial High School cared more about its namesake than the teachers at William Tecumseh Sherman School seem to care about General Sherman), but the Bunsons shed light on many things I did not know, like the fraternal support that Fr. Damien and other Sacred Hearts priests received from Fransicans in the California missions, the esteem in which Fr. Damien was held by people like Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and President Theodore Roosevelt's salute to the memory of Fr. Damien via a "change course" order to the admiral commanding the Great White Fleet in 1908, so that the fleet sailed close enough to Molokai to be reviewed by Brother Dutton from shore.

It's no surprise that Our Sunday Visitor asked the Bunsons to revise the manuscript they'd written some years ago so that it could be republished in time to coincide with last year's canonization of Fr. Damien. The resulting biography (a shade over 200 pages, not counting appendices) is a keeper.

(My review copy of this paperback book came through the good offices of Chris Cash at The Catholic Company; the book itself was sole compensation for the review)

Krupp for the defense of a mensch

I found this through the Curt Jester. It's good stuff from Gary Krupp, defending (Venerable) Pope Pius XII. Here's a taste:

A recent papal decree moved Pope Pius XII, among others, closer to sainthood -- returning to the forefront the controversy over his role in World War II and the Holocaust.

Growing up Jewish in Queens, I never dreamt I would be defending the man I once believed to be a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. But my work since 2002 with my wife, Meredith, and the Pave the Way Foundation has led me to this point.

We founded Pave the Way to identify and eliminate nontheological obstacles between religions. Thus, despite our early prejudices, we decided to investigate the papacy of Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), one of today's greatest sources of hurt between Jews and Catholics.

After years of research in documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony, what we found shocked us. We found nothing but praise and positive news articles concerning Pius' actions from every Jewish, Israeli and political leader of the era who lived through the war.

A few articles in the postwar era suggested that he should have done more to confront the Nazis -- but it wasn't until 1963, in the wake of the fictitious play "The Deputy" (written five years after Pius died), that accusations began flowing that he had failed to act, that he was a cold-hearted Nazi sympathizer who couldn't care less about the Jewish people.

The evidence strongly suggests this was part of a KGB-directed and -financed bid to smear Pius, a Soviet disinformation campaign meant to discredit the Catholic Church, which at that time was profoundly anti-Communist.

In any case, the facts simply don't match what so many have come to believe about Pius.

It is unquestionable that Pius XII intervened to save countless Jews at a time most nations -- even FDR's America -- refused to accept these refugees. He issued false baptismal papers and obtained visas for them to emigrate as "Non Aryan Catholic-Jews." He smuggled Jews into the Americas and Asia. He ordered the lifting of cloister for men and women to enter monasteries, convents and churches to hide 7,000 Jews of Rome in a single day.

Among the 5,000 pages of documents that Pave the Way has located, there is abundant evidence that Pacelli was a lifelong friend of the Jews.

All roads lead to racism (or sophistry)

That seems to be the way that progressives have mapped the world, notes Neo, in her effective Socratic fashion. Comments from Ace on the same White House photo and "controversy" are also worth reading.

Teacup tempests like the one over the officially-released photo of the President standing scornfully next to the Vice-President tend to obscure more significant lapses on the part of this administration, like its rhetorical crutches ("let me be clear"), its poor vetting process, and its obfuscations.

I begin to think that President Obama treats "common ground" the way Gollum treated the Ring of Power. It takes more than a "beer summit" to broker honest compromise.

As big picture-guy Bill Whittle of Pajamas Media says on a related note of impatience (with a nod to Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain), it's an election year: time to "flush from Congress the big state, race-baiting dependency-mongers."

A musical irony

The tambourine line in Edwin Starr's "War (What is it good for?)" requires more of a virtuoso hand than the tambourine line in the Bob Dylan song "Mr. Tambourine Man" or its best-known cover version by The Byrds.

Memery (all alone in the moonlight?)

(Photo taken in Baltimore on Dec. 30)

I found this book meme over at Anne's place, and like her book list arrangements, it's worth borrowing. It also pairs well with the book list tracking I've done previously:

How many books read in 2009?
33

How many fiction and nonfiction?
21/12

Male/Female author ratio?
29/4

Favorite book of 2009?
Like Anne, I can't pick just one!
~ He Leadeth Me, by Fr. Walter Ciszek
~ Without Warning, by John Birmingham

Least favorite?
~ A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler (because very little actually happens)

Oldest book read?
~ A Coffin for Dimitrios (Ambler, 1937)

Longest and shortest book titles?
~ How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business
~ No shortest title, because more than six books I read had two-word titles

Longest and shortest books?
~ Reckless Homicide (I think)
~ Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions

Any re-reads?
~ Introduction to Christianity, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Favorite character of the year?
~ (tie) Rakim Epps (the conflicted Muslim protagonist of Ferrigno's "Assassin" books)

~ (tie) Jules (the beautiful and over-educated smuggler in Without Warning)

Which book wouldn’t you have read without someone’s specific recommendation?
~ A Wrinkle in Time (thanks, Julia!)

Which author was new to you in 2009 that you now want to read the entire works of?
~ Robert Ferrigno
~ John Birmingham

Did you read any books you have always been meaning to read?
~ Define "always" -- the one in my queue longest was A Meaningful World.

Did you learn anything about yourself and blogging this year?

~ Some things (like the traffic accident that Jane and I were in and its aftermath) either call for restraint or can't be blogged effectively, at least by the likes of me.

~ Friends who start political arguments on Facebook are more easily addressed on this blog (if the spirit so moves me) than on their Facebook pages.

The Doctor is In

That would be Dr. Krauthammer, here writing about the president's "What? Me Worry?" response to the Underwear Bomber:

If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator -- no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.

The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist(s)."

A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.

Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.

Maureen Dowd, of all people, is singing the same tune:

"If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?"

Nice Deb has more, including a nifty compare-and-contrast exercise. Meanwhile, James Taranto is in his usual funny (but perceptive) form.

The toast of elves and hobbits everywhere

Happy Birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien!

Looking back at 2009

Happy New Year! May it be blessed for you and yours! Thank you for reading these thoughts I choose to share. You all make "paragraph farming" a worthwhile hobby.

The yearly "top ten" lists are out, and more ambitious media outlets spent the last week rating stories of the last decade. I thought it would be fun to take an idiosyncratic look back at big stories from 2009.

In terms of their significance, I think last year's top three stories are the pope, the climate change data scandal, and the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Where I part company with a lot of other people is not mentioning the economy-- which was tanking before George W. Bush left office-- and in ranking the pope, climate, and Barack stories in that win, place, and show order.

Four years into his papacy, Pope Benedict continues to confound everyone who thought he would be known only as Pope John Paul II's doctrinal enforcer, and everyone who thought age would make him a placeholder for the next guy. Benedict is what the brainier hosts on sports radio call a "game changer." While safeguarding the deposit of faith left to us by the apostles (as of course he must do), he's already tried to restore the Latin Mass to its rightful place, mend wounds within the church, and remind us about the questions of justice that impinge on economics but cannot be answered without recourse to Judeo-Christian faith. As even the Archbishop of Canterbury might privately admit, every one of those actions, and perhaps even his recent visit to Africa, is more consequential over the long term than the election of a junior senator from Illinois to the American presidency.

The climate change data scandal broke comparatively late in the year, but proved to anyone paying attention that when it comes to issues that Al Gore and his acolytes are heavily invested in, ideology trumps science. Climate change apologists hastened to say that monkey-wrenched and lost data was evidence of pettiness rather than dishonesty, but that sort of whitewash does not explain the kind of "corruption at the root" revealed by damaging email and the spinning subsequent to it. The scandal also exposed an international meeting in Copenhagen for the sham it always was. Were climate change something we ought to spend billions of dollars to mitigate, Danish authorities wouldn't have been importing limousines from Germany and Sweden to supplement those already in Denmark because everybody and his brother needed 24/7 access to high-end transportation for more than a week.

Barack Obama's election to the presidency takes third in this listing of the big events of 2009. On the positive side, it was an affirmation of the American ideal. We can all be proud of that, though I don't think we've yet come to the full fruition of Dr. Martin Luther King's dream, because the color of Obama's skin helped him more than the content of his character. On the negative side, his election was greatly asssisted by the weakness of his opponents in the primary and general elections (Hillary Clinton is not the epoch-maker she thinks she is, and John McCain plays maverick in a decidedly "establishment" corral). Obama's election was also helped by his own willingness, at least initially, to be all things to all voters (which is not hard to do with a thin resume, moneyed accomplices, and a polished speaking style). It's not like we didn't see this coming, although one wishes it weren't so glaring a triumph of hope over experience. Obama might not look like some of the luminaries on American currency (that phrase from his campaign stump speech remains an odd and scare-mongering formulation), but he stands for good or ill on their shoulders. He also owes a considerable debt to a mixed bag of contemporaries and near-contemporaries whom he too seldom acknowledges, including Jesse Jackson, Alan Keyes, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Saul Alinsky, and Bill Ayers.

So those are my picks for the top stories of 2009. If you've a taste for other such lists, Bookworm has a typically helpful roundup posted. Meanwhile, Nice Deb opts for pith.

My favorite movies this past year were Gran Torino, The Blind Side, and Where the Red Fern Grows.

Gran Torino came out in 2008, but I didn't see it until 2009. Where the Red Fern Grows is another oldie; we watched the movie version from 2003 over Christmas weekend and thought it was great.

Now it's time to put politics aside for the Rose Parade. Kudos to ABC for letting Hannah Storm co-host its parade coverage. Good choice!

UPDATE: I agree with what Peggy Noonan says here. Let's not forget the misison.