Doesn't pass the smell test

Nearly always, when a politician is accused of sexual misconduct, either it immediately and obviously fits the person's overall character and personality, or does so after a bit more about the person comes to light. In the case of the Hermanator, though, the reason these charges that came to light in a Politico article last night seem unlikely at best and more probably impossible is that they are so utterly at odds with what we know about the man.

Two more green firms run out of your money

Beacon Power and Nevada Geothermal Power, recipients of federal loan guarantees like Solyndra, are not making it financially. Beacon is filing for bankruptcy and Nevada Geothermal is probably close behind.

Not so fast

Richard Muller of UC Berkeley, got FHers of the green variety all - go ahead and wince at the pun - hot and bothered last week with some interviews and a WSJ piece claiming that the team on which he's been co-leader for the last couple of years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team, had determined, using methods such as weighting data more heavily toward dry land temperature fluctuations, that the globe is indeed warming rapidly. Claims the findings had converted him from sceptic to believer.

Now his Best co-leader, Judith Curry, chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Insitute of Technology, says that he obscured the data everybody's known for some time, that there's been no warming in the last ten years. She and others are also disparaging his having gone to the mainstream press before publishing his conclusions in a peer-reviewed journal. Also, several people who would chime in with objections are bound by confidentiality agreements.

So up with the floodlights and thermostat.

Let's start the week with a little ray of light

This is an uplifting story in a world that could use some uplift. An Afghan woman has opened a bowling alley in Kabul and in the month it's been in operation, it's a hit.

Our enemies smell weakness - today's edition

Thirteen US troops dead in a Taliban attack on a NATO convoy in Kabul.

Wahhabi Muslim attack on US embassy in Sarajevo.

Iranian Navy commander reiterates his country's intention to deploy ships near the maritime borders of the United States.

Al-Qaeda flags showing up all over Benghazi in Libya, including atop the courthouse.

More outrageous by the hour - today's edition

The MEC regime is pressing ahead with more solar-energy activity, even as the Solyndra scandal widens.

The Department of the Interior has identifed seven sites in Western states - sites no private investors were interested in - for conducting solar-panel research.

there is no money for this. Why is the regime choosing winners and losers in the energy marketplace by doing this while it holds up permits for fossil-fuel exploration?

Hustling offense may be a sleazy way to make a living, but I guess it puts chow on the table

This post covers one of those stories you may well have already seen elsewhere: the D.C. Human Rights office's investigation (which is going to take six months; what's up with that?) into Catholic University not providing a prayer-and-contemplation space for Muslim students that is free of Christian iconography.

Apparently this righteous-indignation-hustling attorney who filed the complaint has an obsession with causing hassles for CU. He has filed previous suits regarding alleged discrimination against women and homosexuals.

The obvious question that arises is "What the hell are Muslims doing at a Catholic school?" If the answer is something like "It has programs and departments that particular Muslim students want to enroll in that aren't available at most places," well, the obvious rejoinder is, "Hey, all life's a trade-off, Mustafa. You want that program? Here are the conditions."

A bracing 7 AM splash of cold water

I had the pleasure of addressing the local Sunrise Rotary Club this morning. Here's a transcript of my remarks:

Thank goodness for my blog. It permits me to address, one by one, specific issues and developments on the national and world stages at leisure. Well, maybe not leisure. After all, I call it Late in the Day in order to convey some sense of the urgency of our juncture as a civilization.

I have to approach my opinion column for The Republic somewhat differently. Since it only appears every six weeks, I feel like each installment should be as comprehensive a snapshot as I can take of the economic, cultural and geostrategic state in which we find ourselves. There is no aspect of that, it seems to me, that can be given short shrift.

History shows us that there is always an ample supply of pressing, and distressing, developments on humanity’s plate. Clearly, though, there are periods in which they are piled particularly high. I am firmly convinced that, in the 56 years I’ve been traipsing this globe, I have never seen such a towering mountain of peril.

I’ve concluded that the terms “grown up” and “civilized” are at least largely synonymous. If you think about the traits one ascribes to someone fitting either description, there is a lot of overlap. “Wisdom,” “initiative,” “dignity,” “self-restraint,” “loyalty,” “logic,” “refinement,” and “ability to see one’s long-term best interest” are common to both characterizations, are they not?

And collectively, we have descended from our peak of each. Indeed, we have fallen far. We have fallen so far that Western civilization probably won’t last much longer.

I wish I could accurately be accused of hyperbolic alarmism in making such an assertion. I’d rather be brought up short for shortcomings as a cultural observer than to experience what I am going to experience as the decline becomes exponential.

Because a twenty-minute talk sports similar constraints to a once-every-six-weeks, 600-word column, I won’t delve into the arcane details of any one front of our current predicament, which might, as the clock ticks, be done at the expense of others that are equally important. You’re all smart people. You’ll get it if I employ some shorthand for each of them.

The economic front: Greek taxi driver riots in the face of austerity measures to get another round of still-inadequate bailout money. 45.75 million Americans on food stamps. US federal debt growth in the last three years that took from 1776 to the mid-1990s to achieve the first time.

The cultural front: Lady Gaga performing for a former president. Jersey Shore. Transgendered bathrooms. Occupy Wall Street. Channeled-entity seminars. Speech codes.

The geostrategic front: Iran’s nuclear program. Continued North Korean extortion tactics in talks about its nuclear program. Pakistan’s ISI’s involvement in attacking the US embassy in Kabul. The Islamist character of the Arab spring. Hezbollah training facilities in Venezuela.

Once one begins unpacking just about any of these phenomena, it becomes plain that there are implications on several fronts.

The Solyndra bankruptcy makes for a fine case in point. I remember helping to install a solar panel on a vegetable-drying shed at a hippie commune in Tennessee in the summer of 1980. By then, there was a confluence of such factors as the whole get-off-the-power-grid / ascribe-cosmic-significance-to-sunlight / Mother Earth News / sustainability impetus, as well as the alarmism spawned by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Erlich’s population predictions, as well as the New Left notion that there was some kind of monolithic power structure behind society’s industrialization. At that point, solar panel-ism, which I’m using as shorthand to also include wind turbines and biofuels, wore the smiley face of the pony-tailed hammer-swinger in the backwoods, whistling his day away providing for his family, which, according to him, consisted not just of spouse and offspring, but all the inhabitants of his collective farm. Then came the fraudulent notion that “the planet” was in some kind of dire trouble, rapidly cooling or warming or flooding or drying up. Big-money investors in enterprises that were going to make this stuff on a mass scale, as well as a United Nations panel and several university research institutes devoted to perpetuating this fraud, pushed the idea on the public that it was urgent to sign on to alternatives to fossil fuel. Now we’re at the point where ridiculously inefficient solar panels, hybrid cars and wind farms get propped up - have to get propped up in order to survive day-to-day - by federal subsidies. And that paves the way for good old-fashioned cronyism on a large scale not only distorting the market value of every kind of energy, but lining the pockets of ambitious politicians with madly utopian aims. In the Solyndra case this was exemplified by investor George Kaiser, who visited the White House numerous times around the time that the Department of Energy cut loose the government guarantees for Solyndra. Then there’s the ever-more-stringent EPA regulations on matters that ought to be between consumer and producer, such as mileage standards for vehicles, not to mention the wince-inducing spectacle of vehicle and engine makers obsequiously acquiescing to the leviathan state’s demands.

It’s all based on a cartoonish notion that actually profitable enterprises that efficiently produce energy at prices consumers find appealing would foul our air and water without hesitation if they weren’t constrained by state edict and state-subsidized “competition.” That notion is a manifestation of an even more basic perversion, namely, that there is something morally flawed with fundamental aspects of the human character such as ambition and progress.

In his new book After America, Mark Steyn makes the point that, since the 1970s, the only area of invention and leaps forward in the way human life is condiucted has been the realm of information. Yes, since then, we have gone from mainframes to smartphones. But it’s been decades since we made anything comparably revolutionary to the automobile or the airplane. We quit going to the moon after three years. We’re not even doing shuttle flights anymore. NASA now exists, in the words of its current administrator, to “make Muslim countries feel better about themselves.”

Speaking of Muslims, let’s look at how this whole business about “diversity” plays itself out in postmodern America. Here’s a really recent example: earlier this month, an organization formed at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s called Students for Justice in Palestine held a three-day training program at Columbia University to prepare students around the country to participate in next year’s annual Israel Apartheid Week. How obscene is that? “Apartheid” was, of course, South Africa’s official policy of strict racial segregation that was ended by referendum in 1992. Israel, the only Western nation in the Middle East, has, while it asserts a Jewish national identity, Muslim Arabs serving in its legislature, teaching in its universities and engaging in the country’s commercial life alongside Jewish citizens. Most Israeli Arabs have no interest in moving to the West Bank and certainly not Gaza. Per the SJP’s website, its endorsers include MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Princeton University professor Cornel West. It receives funding from the Muslim Brotherhood.

In February 2010, at UC Irvine, Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech was disrupted by students shouting “Mass murderer!” Granted, eleven of them were arrested and sentenced to community service, but this was no isolated incident.

In March of this year, according to Stella Paul, writing at the American Thinker, “Jessica Felber, a twenty-year-old student at UC Berkeley, filed a federal lawsuit against UC's Regents, accusing them of failing to protect her civil rights as a Jew. Felber was holding a sign saying "Israel Wants Peace," when the head of Students for Justice in Palestine rammed her with a shopping cart, requiring her to get medical care. Her assailant was a known provocateur who'd been implicated in other assaults, without disciplinary repercussions.”

How pervasive is this trend? Well, in 2003, Barack and Michelle Obama attended a dinner in Chicago for Rashid Khalidi, a former PLO advisor who was moving to New York to take a teaching post at Columbia. By the way, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were at that dinner, too. Anyway, Obama gave some warm remarks, saying that his times at the Khalidi home had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.”…

Why is any of this central to a discussion about our advanced stage of civilization rot? Because, as I say, Israel is the only Western nation in the Middle East. It occupies one-sixth of one percent of all the land in the Middle East. It is a representative democracy with a vibrant economy. It is home to the roots of our philosophy of law, our notions about how what a family is, and our understanding of the nature of our creator and our relationship to Him.

That must be considered when one contemplates this administration’s attempts to demand that Israel cede sacred land for the creation of a Palestinian state. Simply put, do you want the Garden of Gesthemane under Hamas jurisdiction?

This comes down to the same self-loathing that is at the core of the environmentalist example. It’s been central to the anti-West impulse going back to the days when New Left academic pioneer William Appleman Williams, who taught history at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, introduced the doctrine of moral equivalence. In his time, he was speaking of equivalence between the West and the Soviet bloc. The basic concept survived the Cold War, though. Witness the number of people who have disparaged the measures America took in response to 9/11.


And the foundation of all this is a worldview based on relativism. An absence of absolutes. That leads to a lackadaisical attitude toward completely changing the meaning of terms whose dictionary definitions have been established for centuries, basic terms such as “man,” “woman” “parent” and “family.” We’re at the juncture where any mom or dad watching “Dancing With the Stars” with her or his eight-year-old is faced with the question of how to explain Chaz Bono.

Now that we live in an age in which ephemeral “feelings” are the prime gauge by which we should set a course of action, we can invent ourselves moment by moment, completely on impulse. That’s called narcissism.

Narcissism leads to chaos, because no one can depend on the permanence of any of society’s institutions. I am what I say I am. God is what I say God is.

That leaves a fertile hunting ground indeed for those whose main aim is power over a mass of human beings bumping into each other like corralled cattle. They may exercise that power in the name of social justice, or they may exercise it in the name of sharia law. Whatever they call their ideology, it amounts to convincing us that fairness is the most important condition of human well-being rather than freedom, and that they, in their self-proclaimed wisdom, reserve the right to define “fairness” for the rest of us.

When nothing really means anything to us anymore, well accept state-issued gruel as our lot. In fact, we’ll do so convinced that it’s the noble thing to do.

Is there a way to take a detour before this scenario becomes inevitable? There is. It starts with each of us insisting that what is ours is really ours, and refusing to accept the accusation of selfishness for so insisting. It involves placing the highest priority on common sense, so that we don’t accept intrusions into modern and perfectly harmless ways of conducting our lives. It entails a willingness to look at why the wisdom of the ages, such as sacred Scripture, has been considered as such.

If you want to feel a sense of urgency about something, feel it about the slip that humanity has made from its peak. Think about how dulled so many spirits have become. Insist on your nobility as a member of a species distinguished by having a soul.

Mean what you say and insist that words you hear in conversation have real meaning.

This is how we’ll rescue our civilization.

It’s doable, but it’s very, very late in the day.

In case you'd started thinking that Hillary Clinton looked like some kind of smart elder statesperson by comparison . . .

She tells BBC Persia that her State Department is trying to issue more visas to Iranian students and that it's also still trying to diplomatically engage the mullocracy.

The underlying problem still looms

Mike Shedlock at Townhall says that this latest "deal" for bailing out Greece will fizzle because European banks and the ESFS still aren't facing the first law of economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

The invevitable implosion of OWS

Volunteer kitchen staff going on strike over having to work 18-hour days feeding ungrateful drifters.

This guy is out to purposely destroy the U.S. economy

The Most Equal Comrade announces a new plan - that he intends to implement without involving Congress - that will use federal funds - which, of course, are really just increasingly worthless IOUs to bondholders of federal debt - to make up the difference in student loan balances for college graduates who voluntarily take "service" jobs that pay pauper-level wages instead of going after the best salary and most promising career track they can.

It's on purpose. The MEC is so dangerous, so disastrous, so radical and so arrogant that we can only pray that he does not complete his evil designs before we can send him packing.

I just can't see this being a winning meme at this late date

The MEC is going to run his re-election campaign on a platform of blatant statism and telling the American people that it's great to be cattle.

And how's this for talking out of both sides of one's mouth? In the very same speech, he says Americans have lost their ambition and imagination.

So much for the prognostications of the pointy-headed, chin-rubbing establishment types and Reasonable Gentlemen who no longer have their finger on the pulse of the nation

Per a CBS poll, the Hermanator now leads Mitt Romney by 25 to 21, which is outside the margin of error.

East-coast media darlings, even - perhaps particularly - those who give lip service to conservative principles, no longer, if they ever did, understand how clearly most Americans - certainly most rank-and-file Republicans - grasp the urgency of our nation's situation. We will not settle for coronating the ovbvious next-in-line candidate. (For one thing, GOP heirs-apparent are always glaringly problematic.)

No one articulates that urgency as forcefully, plainly and naturally as Herman Cain, not even his fellow conservative candidates. People are starved for that kind of clarity.

Everyone needs to understand that we really mean it.

Why I haven't posted much about OWS

Believe me, I'm aware of how misguided the drum-circle element within the movement is. I'm well aware of how destructive it is wherever it has appeared around the world. I'm keenly aware of the Communist and anarchist orchestration of it.

Every time I read about it or even think about it, though, it just makes me wince. It makes me embarrassed for my species. As J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker puts it, "They [the OWS foot soldiers] are the third wave of the transcendental slob movements, behind the hippies and the grunge kids." And it doesn't take particularly keen powers of observation to see that with every wave, there has been a dumbing-down and coarsening that has left little room for anything resembling basic dignity. At least the hippies aspired to somekind of literary and musical sophistication, with their interest in Romantic poetry, Indian music and the like. It took a while for that wave to devolve. The OWS kids came right out of the gate as feral animals.

I cringe because it is the overall culture in which we all maneuver that produced them. Their demands, as incoherent as they are, are rooted in an insistence that the comfort and convenience in which they grew and came of age be guaranteed in perpetuity. They were raised on the television, cinema, fast food, sex education, lame pseudo-spirituality, and rock and roll that we as a society bottle-fed them.

To what extent is OWS a force to contend with? I think we can safely say they aren't interested in forming factions or caucuses within either of our major political parties. They won't be fielding any slates of candidates for anything. They won't be starting any cultural trends. In fact, all they represent on the cultural level is the last tired vestiges of the transcendental-slob-ism to which Dunn refers. They are what's left after every possibility of anything esoteric or subtle has been drained from the basic stringy-haired impulse.

As I have said before when I have written about them, the genuinely disturbing aspect of OWS is its wantonness. In that sense, the OWSers are heirs of something even more universal that has been metastasizing over the last few decades. They are of a piece with those who destroyed Watts and Detroit in the mid-1960s, the Iranian "students" who took over the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, the rioters that set whole Parisian neighborhoods ablaze over the past few years, the Islamists who we can now see were the guiding force behind the Arab spring, the Greek rioters who will not tolerate any lowering of their government-guaranteed retirement age, and the flash mobs that terrorized American cities earlier this year. At the heart of their worldview is an unfocused nastiness and nihilism that confirms that human progress is not a continuous upward trend after all.

Finally debating about the right things

I like Rick Perry's 20 percent flat tax.

I like Herman Cain's 9-9-9- plan.

What I like best of all is that the Pub prez candidates are now vying to see who can come up with the best plan for letting Americans keep most of their money. Their time, too, when one considers the man-hours this country wastes on the doo-dah required to comply with our current tax code.

A continent at a dire juncture

The facial expressions of the European national leaders gathered for a group photo accompanying this article tell the story.

The clock is ticking and none of the fancy new mechanisms and funds being devised or considered is adequate to what Europe is facing.

The money has to come from somewhere.

It's late in the day.

Our main enemy is licking its chops

. . . now that the MEC has announced a total drawdown of troops in Iraq.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The U.S. will likely suffer a second credit-rating downgrade this year.

Arab Spring frost warnings

Libya's interim leader starts implementing specific sharia laws, such as allowing polygamy and banning interest on bank transactions.

This is - excuse the pun - rich

OWS is acquiring all the trappings of square old normal-people capitalist America (in its-late-in-the-day stage of progression) - a bank account, squabbles over who controls it, internal decay of its culture (in the form of vandals destroying drum-circle instruments), declarations of the need for law and order, and formation of splinter groups.

Joe Biden, that exquisite combination of idiot and Freedom-Hater

Mark Steyn unpacks the outrageousness of the veep's remarks about school funding to a fourth-grade class last week.

And let me fend off any charges of over-the-top snarkiness right now. I fully stand by the term "idiot" because Plugs clearly can't graps the most elementary law of economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

The Most Equal Comrade, losing supporters everywhere

Ata meeting last year, Steve Jobs told him he'd be a one-term president because of his rabidly anti-business stance.

Per an AP-GfK poll, more than half of Americans doubt the MEC's ability to do a stinkin' thing to improve the economy.

A mixed bag

The Senate conducted some late-night business overnight, some of it good, but most of it awful:

Freedom-hating, pretend-energy-loving, pro-subsidy John Bryson was confirmed as Commerce Secretary.

Home loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac can now be increased.

Killed a Pub-led effort to bar civilian trials for foreign terror suspects.

On the plus side:

Put the nix on subsidies for farmers who definitely don't need them.

Killed some key provisions of the MEC's bill to funnel yet more federal largesse to government indoctrinators (also known as public school teachers)

Why the Hermanator, even with his need to brush up on a few things, is still the best Pub prez candidate as of now

He speaks plain truths plainly, such as the need to keep any truly vialble inner-city Opportunity Zones free of unions and free of the minimum wage.

Why we call them Freedom-haters - today's edition

The essence of the OWS movement.

Israel has no partner in any peace process

. . . and the Washington Post willfully obscures that fact. Completely omits any coverage of Abbas's welcome-home to the terrorists exchanged for Gilad Shalit, in which he called them "holy warriors."

Lenin in a designer dress

Mrs. MEC, at a White House lawn pow-wow for a Department of Agriculture program that wastes our tax dollars doing busybody nanny-state food indoctrination in government schools, sang the praises of government's ability to "shape who [children] will be."

These creatures are among the vilest that have ever drawn a breath.

Bet this makes Sarkozy, Merkel et al feel really great about sweating out another bailout agreement for these swine

Greece erupts in violence in protest against the austerity measures the government agreed to in order to get the next tranche of EU bailout money.

There's one aspect of the OWS movement that greatly pleases our worst enemy

Iran applauds the Jew-hatred element of the Poopstock phenomenon.

There won't be a moment of everybody in this particular nation singing the same tune until the real victory has been achieved

Michael Rubin at Commentary says that the release of Gilad Shalit does not bring any kind of unifying closure to the Israeli populace. Only an insistence on the sovereignty of a Jewish state with a capital in Jerusalem can begin to help the families of those slaughtered by Palestinian jihadists see the possibility of a future in which their anguish is not unanswered.

Because spouting hooey about "fairness" is more important than actually ensuring the nation's survival

The Most Equal Comrade is stringing along those who still extol the CLASS provision of FHer-care, even as Comandante Kathleen says it's dead because there is nowhere for the money to come from.

The Hermanator sets the record straight

9 direct responses to 9 specific attacks on 9-9-9.

"Probably the best in the field" is not the same thing as "no shortcomings"

Herman Cain needs to bone up on foreign policy big-time.

He needs to do a retreat for a couple of days with John Bolton, Dick Cheney and Michael Ledeen.

Apples and oranges

Bob Owens at Pajamas Media on the AP's attempt to draw an equivalency between the W-era Operation Wide Receiver and the current Fast and Furious situation.

"The distinction between private capital and taxpayer guarantees"

Matthew Continetti at The Weekly Standard on the attempts by Jay Carney and other FHers to draw an equivalency between a government subsidized firm like Solyndra going belly-up and a bankruptcy of a normal-people, actual private business.

They're either disingenuous as hell or pathetic as hell.

When the MEC does something right, it's right to acknowledge it

Sending 100 advisory-capacity troops to Uganda to help fight the Lord's Resistance Army is a good move.

One of those delicious moments when the FHers are forced to publicly acknowledge the unworkability of one of their harebrained schemes

Kathleen Sibelius pulls the plug on CLASS, a provision of FHer-care that was to be sort of a socialist version of a combination of Aflac and Visiting Angels, funded Bernie Madoff-style and not paying benefits until it had been collecting premiums for five years (in order to get a good CBO score).

FHer-care is so bad it's already starting to kill itself.

One of these days the full organizational infrastructure behind this garbage is going to be made plain

The "Occupy" movement goes international.

The reason Western civilization is more likely than not in its last throes is that fewer people every day wish to make sense, and fewer people every day care that that is so.

And aspiring totalitarians have found a way to use those two facts to their advantage.

About those missing Libyan surface-to-air missiles . . .

A whole bunch of them are turning up on the Gaza - Israel border.

Conservatism, the movement based on ideas and principles

Paul Ryan and Arthur Laffer have both waxed enthusiastic over the Hermanator's 9-9-9 plan. Heavy hitters adding heft to the hooplah.

Cough up the documents, comandante

Darrell Issa subpoenas Eric Holder in the Fast and Furious matter.

The key question: how will we respond?

The Iranian terror plot is sensational and chilling, and it's heartening to know it was thwarted. But the bottom line is that if the US government treats it as a mere law enforcement issue and does not hold any and all Iranian officials clearly and directly implicated accountable, we will see more of the same. After all, we're talking about a regime that has been the world's number-one terror sponsor for decades.

This is what I mean; this mentality has come to prevail all over the Western world

Greece is grinding to a standstill as various sectors of its workforce - starting with sanitation workers, leading to garbage pile-ups in Athens, and soonm to include hospital personnel and even tax collectors - stike in repsonse to the government's new austerity and deregulation measures. These are, of course, absolutely crucial to solving the country's debt crisis and moving its economy off of flatline status.

Still, the cattle stampede when the government-issued cud supply is brought into question.

Dog-whistle politics

What a can of worms Jonah Goldberg has opened in my early-morning reading, leaving my mind chewing on a host of questions and thoughts as I embark on my day.

That Jeffress minister who used his introduction of Rick Perry at the Value Voters Summit to sound the dog whistle - that is, to let a certain audience know that they are to pick up on certain rhetorical signals - and make a clear distinction between Mormonism (Romney's faith) and what Jeffress considers the only definition of Christianity that is real, sure did "go there."

Mark Davis, Rush's substitute host on Monday, got into this bag of snakes with a caller on Monday's radio show as well. As Goldberg says in his Townhall column, there are a whole lot of reasons Republicans ought not to pick up this hot potato.

As I've said at this blog before, my Facebook profile states that my religious status is "leaning toward Christianity." There are so many infinitesimally fine theological points that I consider crucial to have nailed down - and don't yet - that that is the best I can do.

I know; it points to a weak spot in my generally absolutist character. Yes, I'm aware that it's the oh-so-open approach to Scripture that has led to the social gospel, liberation theology, flirtation with earth-worship and similar doctrinal cotton candy that has been emptying the pews in NCC-affiliated denominations for decades. (That was the subject of my master's thesis when I was a graduate student at Butler in the 1980s.) I am aware that a Christianity worthy of the label has to place the redemptive power of Jesus Christ's life, death and resurrection at the center of - well, everything.

Still, this Jeffress smells a lot like every fundamentalist zealot who has ever told me to forget my remaining questions and just get on board.

I'm no atheist, and I wouldn't even apply the label "agnostic" to myself. I am after real faith, the kind that permeates the bones and the core of the soul. It's my experience that real anything is rarely obtained by signing on without a thorough understanding of the fine print.

UPDATE: It sounds as if Bill Bennett delivered a sharp rebuke to the reverend at the same summit on Saturday.

The view from the sewer

A snapshot one would take of America on any given day is going to be even more dismaying than the previous one. That's just where we are.

Much ink and airtime has been devoted in recent days to the significance of this "Occupy" phenomenon. It started with Wall Street, spread to DC, and now there are little tent cities full of bratty, clueless neo-hippies and their union-thug masters in such cities as Fort Worth and Des Moines. (Gateway Pundit calls these outposts "poopstocks.") All I would add to the mix of observations is that in its coarseness and incoherence it is utterly to be expected. This is the state of our culture. If it's rough, crude and conceptually mediocre, it merits a prominent placing on the Yahoo browser. Exhibitionists with idiotic names get top billing in the circus that is our culture. Lady Gaga and Rhianna graced my homepage today. So there's no surprise that this "Occupy" franchise chain is a warmed-over display of the same countercultural snottiness we've seen in every decade for the last five. The tie-dye-and-dreadlocks crowd was out of ideas, even for names for its musical acts and protest rallies, years ago.
Then there is the spectacle of Herman Cain having to take time away from his message of free-market economics, personal excellence and American greatness to address the embarassingly infantile charges of racial inauthenticity hurled by such moral dwarves as Cornel West, Harry Belafonte and Lawrence O'Donnell.
The way has been paved all year, starting with SEIU goons and teachers with phony sick-leave documentation storming the capital rotundas in Madison Wisconsin and other Midwestern seats of government. Then there were the fast-food-restaurant beat-downs and flash-mob riots that proliferated over the spring and summer.
Of course, the economy isn't improving, and the Freedom-Haters in government and among the pundit and academic classes couldn't be more delighted. America, the repository of all they wish to destroy, is being brought to its knees.
And presiding over all this is a figure who, by an increasing number of first-hand accounts, is so aloof to it as to invite speculation that he is shutting down emotionally, giving up on even trying to really lead anybody or anything.
Anyone who remembers what the terms "dignity," "nobility," "excellence," "loyalty," "initiatve," "fun" amd "joy" mean has an obligation to live in such a way as to try to encourage those traits to thrive in our society. One must do so, however, with the full knowledge that it is largely a thankless task. Striving to extol those virtues means nothing to most people anymore. Still, if one doesn't so strive, one has gone over to the ranks of the barbarians, and the ranks of those who give a flying frick abour safety, freedom and happiness will have just decreased by one.

"We were under strict instructions to do nothing"

So says a police official in Pakistan's Rawalpindi district after over 60 masked men invaded a girls' high school and beat students and teachers for not "dressing modestly." The whole Rawalpindi school system was so terrified it shut down afterward.

All cultures are not equal.

The Arab Spring, Egyptian style, ain't working out so good for one group in particular

The Coptic Christians, that is.

Well, agreeing to that is something, I guess

After their meeting yesterday, Merkel and Sarkozy announced to the media that they came to an agreement that Europe's fiscal and financial crisis is really bad, and the solution to it has to be big.

They also said that, after exhaustive back and forth that at times grew testy, they agreed that the sky is blue.

"Americans do not work so their government can take risks, calculated or otherwise, with their tax dollars and discuss burn rates and business development stages"

Today's must-read: Dan Holler's Townhall column "The Real Problem with Solyndra."

We are so far removed from a clear notion of what a proper and constitutional use of our tax dollars is - and is not - that we are now inured to our own doom.

It's not just Solyndra by a long shot

Deroy Murdock at NRO lists the other green-energy companies that have received federal largesse and then gone belly-up, as well as those which produced a paltry number of jobs that wound up being in effect subsidized.

The MEC sounds silly indeed trying to take an ultimatum stance

Peter Wehner at Commentary on yesterday's prez presser and the spectacle of an utterly failed and irrelevant MEC acting as if his approval numbers were still in the 60s.

So you turn a phrase that your fans tweet about; you're still full of it

Neo-neocon on the way Upper-East-Sideism combined with the primal need to be seen as a clever-yet-uniquely-insightful writer causes Maureen Dowd to write NYT columns that are utterly divorced from reality.

What happens when one aspect of the Freedom-Hater agenda runs into another

Such as when Walmart wants to put a grocery store in a Boston "food desert," but runs into union opposition.
Then there's the level on which political back-scratching decides much of how it turns out. In the case of Boston's Dudley Square area, the result is city officials deciding what constitutes "unfair competition," even as area residents have to pay higher prices at their existing options than they would at the proposed-and-shot-down Walmart.

Economic freedom is not only right, it's so much simpler.

Not if pro-freedom grassroots activists have anything to say about it

Georgette Mossbacher is a vile chunk of dog vomit, the kind of so-called Republican that makes it possible for FHers to lob arguments our way about what Pub presidents and Congressional leaders who are not conservatives at all have supported as policy. The struggle goes on to eradicate their effete, east-coast, opportunistic asses from the party that, if America is to survive, must be the home of actual conservative principles. If they think their fundraising prowess is the only factor in this race, they are sadly mistaken.

Doing foreign policy on the fly can have long-term implications

The MEC's first national-security advisor (09 - 10) tells the US Chamber of Commerce that America's Persian Gulf allies no longer completely trust it in the wake of the way it ushered Mubarak out of the Egyptian presidency.

Dick Durbin, chaos-inciting scumbag

John Ransom at Townhall on why the Illinois senator ought to be indicted. His state, like many others, has a law on the books prohibiting the willful encouragement of bank runs.

Yes, Bank of America is a big, unwieldy, impersonal organization and you'll have a better relationship with and get better service from a local or regional bank, but the point here is that BoA felt the need to impose the debit-card fee as a result of the ramifications of Dodd-Frank. It has to cover its costs like any other business.

Freedom-Haters count on you to be dumb, to willfully behave like cattle. Don't play your part in this grim scenario. Understand and assert basic economic concepts when vile chunks of dog vomit like Durbin start demagoguing.

It's late in the day.

My, aren't we touchy

White House and DOJ officials yell, scream and cuss at CBS's Sheryl Atkisson for asking about the Fast and Furious scandal.

This'll chill your bones

Photos of the MEC marching with the New Black Panthers in 2007.

Does a critical mass of America understand that these people are idiots?

I hope so. If not, we will be next year's Greece.

Maybe the era of the lockstep march is over

The founder of the Black Entertainment Network says the MEC needs to stop attacking wealthy people.

This should eradicate every last lackadaisical attitude in the world about racking up debt

Stocks tank around the world on Greece's announcement that it still won't meet debt-reduction targets.

As I say, this ought to get anybody and everybody to straighten up. Don't count on such a change in America's Freedom-Haters, however.

Tofu, sprouts and social justice - or, maybe quarter pounders, McNuggets and drum circles

Ace of Spades remarks on the Wall Street tantrum-throwers and the media coverage thereof.

Fr. Jenkins and Notre Dame got taken for saps by the Most Equal Comrade

. . . when they let that foul monster who has nothing but contempt for their view that life is precious and holy give the commencement address in 2009.

He had every intention even as he stepped to the podium that day of making them foot the bill for the extermination of fetal Americans.

The problem is socialism, not softness

Erik Erickson at Red State on the MEC's "America's gone soft" remark.