Around the Horn

• Tim Challies has written the best thing I've seen yet on the Ted Haggard scandal. It needs to be read and reread.

• It's been widely linked on the Internet already, but if you haven't yet read Dilbert creator Scott Adams' account of his sudden recovery from an incurable disease that had taken his voice for a year and a half, you really should. It's fascinating. (HT: Jollyblogger)

• Geoff Robinson meets up with anti-religious zealot Richard Dawkins and has an interesting exchange. And he finds Dawkins being inconsistent.

• A couple of (world champion) St. Louis Cardinals are actively opposing the cloning/embryonic stem cell ballot initiative in Missouri. [This is the infamous initiative that prompted Michael J. Fox to make an ad for Senate candidate Clair McCaskill.] In my recent visit to Missouri, I was pleasantly surprised to see the pro-life passion on this issue and the degree with which even the average St. Louisan is now able to articulate the crucial difference between adult stem cells (which do not damage embryos and which have been used to develop truly amazing treatments already) and embryonic stem cells (which kill embryos and which have produced zero treatments).

• I know the participants are all distancing themselves from it (mainly complaining that they had been assured it wouldn't run until after the elections), but this preview of a piece to run in Vanity Fair in which "neocons" Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and others who were among the strongest voices advocating war in Iraq, is absolutely brutal. The president is in deep trouble on this war.