Here’s George Will, who writes a column devoted entirely to how John McCain and Sarah Palin don’t understand the Constitution. In doing so, he peddles such nonsense about the thing that I’m left curious where, exactly, he got his copy. From his strange desire to make himself look smarter than Sarah Palin, he winds up making her look like the second coming of John Marshall in comparison. I hope Will one day regains his senses and is embarrassed about this.
Apollo posted this at 12:02 AM EDT on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 as Conservatism, We don't need no stinkin' Constitution, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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From CNN:
Motorcycle accidents have killed more Marines in the past 12 months than enemy fire in Iraq, a rate that’s so alarming it has prompted top brass to call a meeting to address the issue, officials say.
Twenty-five Marines have died in motorcycle crashes since last November — all but one of them involving sport bikes that can reach speeds of well over 100 mph, according to Marine officials. In that same period, 20 Marines have been killed in action in Iraq.
That’s quite an odd way to spin such news, but I’m hardly surprised. Also of note is that — assuming recent figures remained constant — significantly more US Military personnel died this year from illness, homicide, and suicide than from hostile action. I’m calling for an investigation.
Tom posted this at 10:34 AM EDT on Friday, October 31st, 2008 as Journalism, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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Jonathan Chait does a puppet show. It must be seen to be believed. The staff here at The Federalist Paupers is not liable for any emotional damage sustained by so viewing the aforementioned show.
Hubbard posted this at 3:08 PM EDT on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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At least if you’re Madonna:
Lawyers for the singer, who was widely believed to be the dominant partner in the marriage, are putting together a dossier of incidents.
They include allegations that he told her she ‘looked like a granny’ on stage compared with her younger backing dancers. He is also alleged to have declared that she could not act, and was ‘past it’ after she turned 50.
On the one hand, a few white lies may be necessary for the maintenance of a good marriage. On the other hand, if you’re Guy Ritchie and you wake up one morning and notice that the woman you married suddenly looks like this, perhaps it’s time to tell the truth. If she takes your words to heart, perhaps she’ll realize that aging gracefully is more attractive than the result of fighting nature tooth and nail. And if she doesn’t…well, at least you no longer have to sacrifice virgins each night to keep your wife looking like that.
Apollo posted this at 5:09 PM EDT on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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So what happens when a long-time stalwart of the anti-abortion movement endorses Obama and then spends months writing op-eds explaining his decision? Doug Kmiec is no longer in the anti-abortion camp:
Sometimes the law must simply leave space for the exercise of individual judgment, because our religious or scientific differences of opinion are for the moment too profound to be bridged collectively. When these differences are great and persistent, as they unfortunately have been on abortion, the common political ideal may consist only of that space. This does not, of course, leave the right to life undecided or unprotected. Nor for that matter does the reservation of space for individual determination usurp for Caesar the things that are God’s, or vice versa. Rather, it allows this sensitive moral decision to depend on religious freedom and the voice of God as articulated in each individual’s voluntary embrace of one of many faiths.
So because people disagree over the subject, we can’t make laws protecting human life. You say it’s one thing, I say it’s the other, so let’s just let everyone do their thing. But of course, that’s the case for every law. If people always agreed with the laws, there would be no criminals. Because the mafia thinks extortion is a proper way of life, should that also be legalized? Who are we to judge how God’s voice is articulated in each individual’s voluntary embrace of one of many faiths?*
But of course, extortion isn’t commonly seen as a religious issue. Neither should abortion be seen as such, and it makes me cranky that Kmiec is now giving into the pro-abortion position that differences over abortion are simply religious differences. We’re not talking the final resting place of souls or at what point in time transubstantiation occurs. We’re talking about the willful destruction of things that can only be described as human beings. No one looks at murder or rape as religious matters, they are correctly seen as moral matters that should be addressed by people any or no faith. Abortion should be no different.
Even if every organized religion on earth said that abortion was permissible, that would not make it so as a moral matter. The faiths of the planet were once united behind the permissibility of slavery, but no one now addresses what the voice of God articulates to each individual about enslaving other men. Slavery is wrong because it is wrong; it defies and defiles the natural law that we all understand within ourselves, independent of our interpretation of the almighty.
So Kmiec here has done several wrongs. He has spent time encouraging those who oppose abortion to support the most pro-abortion** candidate in the history of the country. He has defined down abortion to a mere theoretical religious question to be bickered over, instead of a legal regime that allows millions of human beings to be destroyed. And he has talked himself into accepting the position of the other side in the most contentious social issue of the last two generations. This should indeed be a lesson for abortion foes who vote for a pro-abortion candidate and attempt to rationalize it.
*Isn’t that one of the most flippantly relativist lines imaginable? I can’t think of anything it wouldn’t excuse.
**Would anyone call a mid-19th century politician “anti-slavery” if he supported and defended Dred Scott’s expansion of legalized slavery over the whole of the country, but then said what we should be doing is persuading southerners to free their slaves under the current legal system? That is what Obama does when he calls himself “anti-abortion.” Slavery is wrong because it destroys the freedom of one human being for the convenience of another. If abortion is wrong, it is wrong because it destroys a human being for the convenience of another. If you believe that to be the case, you cannot support the legalization of abortion, even if you accept that others disagree. Such a position might make sense on tax policy or other issues where the moral imperatives are not so pressing. But if you think the destruction of human life is merely a matter of individual interpretation, you are not anti-abortion.
Apollo posted this at 1:59 PM EDT on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 as Kulturkampf, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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From the usually sensible Volokh Conspiracy, regarding the last weeks’ financial weirdness:
And I don’t know about you all, but really, I sure wish that we had someone like Sarah Palin calling the shots here — nothing like someone who knows absolutely nothing about the issues to steer us through a potentially planet-wide financial meltdown, eh?
As opposed to Barrack Obama, John McCain, or, really, any number of political whiz kids who understand this issue completely? I agree that I’m not confident in Palin’s knowledge of this issue, but I can’t name a single politician whose knowledge I would be confident in. Perhaps Phil Gramm, but I wouldn’t trust his political abilities to get his fixes through.
The Palin attacks that drive me nuts are the ones that are applicable to everyone but only get pointed out for her. After her speech the Democrat talking point was that she *gasp* had a speechwriter. Now she doesn’t know anything about the financial “crisis.” But, of course, the last president who had a broad understanding of economics before being elected was Herbert Hoover, and look where that got us.
What’s more distressing than Palin’s presumed ignorance on this subject is Obama and McCain pretending like they’re not ignorant of the subject. If one of the candidates knew what he didn’t know, that would be a lot more comforting.
Apollo posted this at 4:18 PM EDT on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 as Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!, Audacity of Hype
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As Hurricane Ike passes, there’s certainly a lot of destruction. My part of Texas didn’t get more than a little wind last night, but the images look bad for Galveston and elsewhere.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people from Houston in the last week, and the first hurricane they always mention is Rita, which seems to be a joke with a self-contained punchline. Back in ‘05, in the face of dire predictions of destruction, oodles of people suffered through long, congested, and hot evacuations to avoid Rita, only to have the storm go somewhere else entirely. At least until yesterday, simply saying “Rita” was a fully sufficient reason not to evacuate, no matter what the predictions. We’ve heard lots of people on the radio and television describe distrust of government predictions as their reason not to evacuate.
Whatever destruction Ike leaves behind, the fact is that it cannot possibly live up to the standard of destruction those boobs at the National Weather Service have predicted. I’m not sure who came up with the idea to tell people that they faced “certain death” by remaining in Galveston, but he should be fired.
The deadliest hurricane in American history was the 1900 Galveston Hurricane. At the time, no point on the island was as much as 10 feet above sea level, and there was no sea wall. There was also 19th century quality construction and medical care. After the storm the first outside help took a day to arrive. That hurricane produced winds well over 120 miles per hour, and a 15 foot storm surge that simply washed across the island from front to back. The city was caught largely at unawares. Out of 42,000 residents, 8,000 died. That’s 19%, nearly one in five. Even if 4 out of 5 people survived, those are terrible odds to risk your life in, and obviously the most intelligent thing to have done, had they known it was coming, would have been to evacuate.
But, importantly, even that terrible storm did not produce anything approximating “certain death.” In fact, it produced something more like “strong likelihood of survival while suffering trauma of some sort.” Given the differences between quality of construction in 1900 and 2008, the presence of a 15 foot seawall, the certainty that outside help would arrive within a few hours…”certain death” was several steps above and beyond hyperbole.
I am not saying that people should have stayed; I would have evacuated had I been near where the storm made landfall. But what I am saying is that each time some government agency uses over-the-top dire predictions, that just means more people will discount what gets said the next time. If a Category 2 storm produces predictions of “certain death,” what sort of language can be used to describe future, worse storms? “You will be vaporized”? “This hurricane will hunt down your family members in other states and remove your genes from the evolutionary pool”? “This hurricane will travel back in time and kill your mother before you were born”? Once you’ve used the “certain death” line on a Category 2 storm, I just don’t know what you say for a Category 4 or 5. But I do know that whatever gets said, more people will ignore it than would have if the National Weather Service consistently used believable predictions of damage and risk.
Apollo posted this at 4:40 PM EDT on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 as Politics and the English Language, Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!
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