Okay, I've tried really hard, but I just can't seem to get myself excited about the California governor recall. Yes, Gray Davis is an idiot, and yes, the people of California (if they have any remaining self-respect) should throw him right out on his deficit.

But while the blogosphere has been obsessed with the recall, and while I support the California citizenry in their exercise of their rights under their state constitution, when all the chips are down, I just don't care. Never have respectable guys like Hugh Hewitt worked harder and more obsessively for a pro-abortion, pro-sodomy, pro-welfare candidate.

One thing in this race has interested me, though: Maria Shriver. Time is an enemy to all of us. But is it my imagination, or has Maria just recently taken that first tiny, tentative step on the road from "hot babe" to "brittle, scary-looking Kennedy battle-ax"?

Hey, I'm just askin'.


(AP photo)

How many leagues will have to fold and how much money will have to be wasted before everyone finally realizes that Americans don't give a flying rat's behind about soccer?

This year, it's the folding of the WUSA, which is a women's professional soccer league that I didn't even realize existed until today. This league now joins the ranks of the literally dozens of flopped American professional soccer leagues over the years. Apparently, this particular league wanted to cash in on the brief flash-in-the-pan of the 1999 Women's World Cup championship won by Team USA. People got excited for about two weeks, and somebody thought they could build a business out of it.

According to the article in today's SportsLine.com:

But the attention the Women's World Cup received faded over the years, leaving the WUSA foundering. TV ratings were almost nonexistent and the league had trouble finding fans who weren't under 18 and play on a soccer team. Average attendance slipped from more than 8,000 the first season to about 6,700 a game last season.

I could have told you that four years ago.

Let me say it again for anyone who has a few million bucks they're planning to waste on starting the next failed U.S. soccer league: Americans are about as interested in soccer as they were in Yahoo Serious. Like Mr. Serious, soccer is a third-world entity that just doesn't play in civilized countries. In America, where we can afford baseball gloves and football helmets, a bunch of people running around aimlessly in circles for two hours not using their hands, resulting in a 1-1 tie, is not entertainment.

There is another tangent bearing investigation here, which is the systematic foisting of women's sports on an unwanting and thoroughly uninterested American public. But that's another post for another day.

As a St. Louis Cardinals fan, it greatly pains me to say: Stick a fork in 'em. They're done. After being swept by the division-rival Astros, the only question remaining is whether or not Albert Pujols can win the Triple Crown. What a shame to waste one of the great individual seasons in baseball history.

I've come to understand over the past few months that so-called "paleoconservatives" are people with whom I have a good deal (though not everything) in common. Frankly, I probably have more "paleo" visitors to this blog (as a scan through the blog roll will show) than those from just about any other identifiable group. I once had major concerns about the "paleo" movement, but many of them have been alleviated by my regular "paleo" visitors here. The militancy of a couple of "paleo" adherents had once led me to hold a rather dim view of the group, but I'm learning that this handful is probably not representative, which I think is fortunate for me and for paleoconservatism.

Interestingly, one of the more rabid, self-identified "paleoconservatives" who visits here on a regular basis (and who greatly contributed to my original antipathy for the movement as a whole) says that Alan Keyes, while articulate, is a "neocon" to whom we should not listen. Thus proving that "neocon" is a stupid term which has ceased to have any useful meaning in public discourse.

As a "neocon," Keyes wants to abolish the federal income tax, government welfare, the Federal Reserve system, and opposes increased involvement in the U.N., and favors educational choice and keeping the the federal judiciary out of state business (like in the Alabama case).

And here's what Keyes has to say on issues relating to the recent Iraq war:

I would want to renounce the idea that we have the right to interfere, in an aggressive way, with the affairs of other [nations]. I think we can play a constructive role in trying to bring about diplomatic solutions in different parts of the world, but I do not believe that when our ideas are rejected, we should resort to war in order to force people to accept a deal that's dictated on our terms.

Yeah, that's some "neocon."

As we now know, "neocon" only means "someone who doesn't agree with me on every single jot and tittle of minutia." We are now free to completely ignore the term and regard it as merely a subjective fit of petulance on the part of the user.

More Alan Keyes:

The notion that government can be "neutral" on the issue of God by driving His name out of every vestige of public life is absurd. It is, in fact, the very sort of imposition of a state religion that the Constitution explicitly forbids.

Playing the devil's advocate (literally), I asked Dr. Keyes if groups like the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State were motivated by a desire to keep religious expression free for everyone. He responded:

They mean to establish a uniform regime of atheism, at every level of public life and government in the United States. That’s clearly contrary to the Constitution, which forbids national establishment. In other words, the Constitution of the United States leaves it up to the states so that there will not be a nationally imposed regime with respect to religion in America. That’s supposed to be left up to the people of the states. But using this abuse of the federal courts, the ACLU and others are seeking to impose a uniform national regime of atheism on the people of the United States, driving God and every reference to God or anything that smacks of religion from every area of our public and political life.

That's a powerful (and manifestly true) phrase: a uniform national regime of atheism. The term a-theism literally means "no god." And that is precisely the religious system being imposed on the American people by the runaway judiciary.

Two years ago today, Mohammed Atta and 18 of his friends woke up in hell, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. They expected to be greeted by scores of virgins, and instead were greeted by unthinkable torment. Two years down and infinity to go.

Eternity is an awful long time.

I had the opportunity to interview former presidential candidate Alan Keyes at his home in Maryland for an hour or two yesterday. What a brilliant, passionate man this is.

Keyes has been deeply, tirelessly involved in the Alabama Ten Commandments situation (I watched him do probably five telephone interviews during the time we were setting up the TV equipment in his sitting room), and has written the best popular-level treatise on the matter that I've seen yet. The important point that only he (as far as I know) is bringing out is that there is a constitutional remedy for a runaway judiciary, and we've come to the time when it needs to be put into action.

Ambassador Keyes told me that he believes the war will never be won on the battlefield of judicial nominations; we're long past that point. He also rejects as an unnecessary redundancy a constitutional amendment (as some have called for), saying, "The Constitution already speaks clearly on the matter." Instead, it is time for Congress to act. As he points out in the WorldNetDaily piece:

...the U.S. Constitution, after enumerating certain cases over which the federal judiciary would have original jurisdiction, gave it appellate jurisdiction "with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." Therefore, the federal courts are not the ultimate judges of the boundaries of their own power. Final responsibility in this respect rests with the Congress.

Congress has the explicit, constitutional right to circumscribe the jurisdiction of the federal courts. We're not without a remedy for a runaway judiciary. Says Keyes:

The Congress must pass legislation that, in order to assure proper respect for the first clause of the First Amendment, excepts from the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts those matters which, by the conjoint effect of the First and 10th Amendments, the Constitution reserves to the states respectively and to the people...This legislation would restore observance of the Constitution by preventing the federal courts from addressing any issues related to religious establishment (as the First Amendment requires), while leaving them free to deal with cases involving the free exercise of religion by individuals, since these do not fall under constitutional ban on federal legislation. In this regard, the only state actions that come under federal jurisdiction are those involving coercive interference with individual choice in matters of religion. State action that involves no such individual coercion (such as the placement of a Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of a state Supreme Court building) is outside the purview of the federal courts. (Emphasis original)

I told Dr. Keyes that it seemed unlikely that Congress would act unless they saw major public sentiment (read: votes) involved. They are, after all, political animals. "I think that poll last week showing 77% of Americans agreeing with Justice Moore will have piqued the interest of a number of them," he pointed out, smiling. There are votes--lots of them--to be had here.

There are only a handful of Americans who have the intellectual firepower, public notoriety, and rhetorical skill to articulate important issues from a passionate, Christian, constitutional perspective. Ambassador Keyes is one of them. Americans should listen to this man.

Since I created this blog last winter, I have struggled with the issue of how much of my own life to put in here. I'm generally confident that most visitors here are not all that interested in the ups and downs of a day with the Rabe family. I also don't care to have a ton of my personal information floating around on the 'net. Therefore, I've mainly focused on observations about the outside world.

Now, the dilemma. I happen to have, by the grace of God, a job in which I get to occasionally spend time with well-known people who are directly pertinent to the issues I talk about here. As a television researcher/producer, I get chances to interview and be around people in whom you might be interested. I've (mostly) avoided mentioning these encounters for fear of appearing to be name-dropping. The last thing I want to be is the kind of person who says, with studied casuality, "Oliver North (or whoever) said something amusing to me about that the other day..." But another part of me thinks that some of that stuff would be at least as interesting to you as my dopey opinions on Whoopi Goldberg.

The conclusion I've come to is this: people who come here regularly must be at least mildly interested in my opinions, whether to agree with them or to see what ignorant, uninformed thing I'll say next. Therefore, my occasional professional encounters with fascinating people would probably be the one thing of value I actually have to offer. Or at least that's a little more unique than my own dime-a-dozen opinions about national affairs.

So I think I'm going to mention some of that stuff from time to time in the future, starting in my next post. I hope that it will not be seen as immodesty, because as one wit once said, "I have plenty to be modest about." I'm not powerful or influential. I'm not meeting with these people because they have a strong desire to spend personal time with me. My only entrée with most of them is fact that I have a television cameraman to bring with me. I'm quite certain that most of them forget me before the door has even closed on my way out.

God, in His providence, simply plopped me into a job two years ago where I have the opportunity to have some interesting conversations with people. I wasn't all that qualified for it, and they certainly didn't chase me down to come have me do it. I hope you won't mind if I let you in on a bit of what comes into my path from time to time.

My man Discoshaman has called to my attention another proposed design for the new World Trade Center. In my book, this one has moved to the front of the pack.

I generally like Cal Thomas, and I believe that he is a fine, if sometimes misguided, Christian gentleman. That having been said, occasionally he is so monumentally wrong that it's mind-boggling. Case in point: this stinking, steaming little pile of column from a couple of days ago, wherein he waxes idiotic on the Judge Roy Moore situation. I can't even begin to count the errors (factual, historical, logical, and theological) in this column, and can instead only say that Christians can thank the Cal Thomas mindset for the horrid situation in which we find ourselves in 2003's America.

Thomas begins by taking aim at former Senator Mark Hatfield, who at the height of Watergate in 1974 proposed a Senate resolution for a "national day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer" in order to "repent of our national sins." This Thomas ridicules, saying:

It's worrisome when Congress thinks it needs to defend or proclaim faith, especially when it has difficulty solving the temporal problems members have been elected to address. And I worry more when people who say they serve a King and Kingdom that is "not of this world" call upon government to proclaim their particular faith.

Incredible. A Christian arguing against a call for repentance before God. Thomas then links this to the Roy Moore case, saying that the Chief Justice's case was merely a fundraising grandstand, and that there are bigger fish to fry:

My worry is not for the reasons stated by those bringing lawsuits to cleanse the public square of any reference to God. It is for the believers who are distracted from the main and more difficult task their heavenly Commander-in-Chief has called upon them to do. They are focused on trivialities and diverted from more important work.

Hey, Cal, tell it to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, respectively. Each, as president, proclaimed national days of fasting and prayer. Or tell it to President George Washington, who in his Thanksgiving Proclamation said:

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me "to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness":

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation...

But evidently Cal Thomas knows better than the Founders of the country what propriety demands under our form of government. Knock it off, General Washington, you're being distracted by "trivialities" from your "more important task."

Thomas believes that a Christian's job is strictly evangelism, and that everything else is merely a "distraction." Meanwhile, he works towards a state (whether actively or through neglect) in which it will eventually be illegal to do even that. When the time comes that it is illegal to mention God anywhere outside of one's own home, Thomas will be wondering how we got there.

Thomas even helpfully offers the secular media some hints on how they could sandbag his fellow Christians protesting on behalf of Judge Moore at the judicial building in Mongomery:

Some reporter should have asked today's Alabama protesters how many of the Commandments they could recite. Probably not many. The protesters say American law is based on the Commandments. A reporter should have asked, "All of them?" There are only two commandments that relate to secular law (not counting the one about adultery, for which you cannot legally be deprived of life or liberty, property being a matter for divorce courts). One prohibits murder, the other outlaws stealing. The rest are about relationships between God and man and between humans. Do the protesters want laws that force people to honor their mothers and fathers, or not "covet" their neighbor's property, or "honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy," or worship only their God? Isn't state religion what we're fighting against in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Ugh. Tell me he can't be this thick.

A few years ago, Thomas co-wrote a book in which he excoriated many Christians (such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and D. James Kennedy) for being too "political." He says we need to be doing God's "real work" (as though God's command to have dominion over the culture is not His "real work"). Odd for a man who makes his living solely via political punditry. To this day, I've never been able to discern his rationale. It seems to be something like "Christians ought to keep their noses out of politics. Except for me. I'm going to blather on incessantly about them."

American Christianity has been long infected with a strain of theology called "dispensationalism," which among other errors teaches a sacred/secular distinction that encourages Christians to abandon all efforts at applying the truth of God to every area of life and culture. I'm increasingly convinced it's a cancer, and dupes like Cal Thomas are only helping to spread it.

It's no secret that the Republican Party has been utterly unable to win the black vote in America. There is a deep, widespread perception in the black community that the Democratic Party is their friend and the Republican Party is their enemy.

However, the evidence is stacking up in a decidedly different way, and Thomas Sowell says it's time that the Republicans began pointing it out--boldly and clearly. Sowell says:

Education is the most obvious example. Poll after poll shows that most blacks want school vouchers. But Democrats -- black and white alike -- bitterly oppose anything that would offend the teachers' unions, who are among their biggest political backers, in terms of money, votes, and the ability to mobilize precincts on Election Day with manpower and phone banks.

The teachers' unions are the 800-pound gorilla of the Democratic Party. So there is no way the Democrats can match what the Republicans can offer black parents on vouchers.

Dennis Miller, a former Democrat, says it was the Democrats' stance on this issue (with the "pro-choice" party being decidedly anti-choice) which finally caused him to jump ship. The GOP needs to make an issue of Democrat hypocricy in this matter

Sowell also points to the Democrat stance on environmental issues, which has had a very real (and very negative) impact on blacks:

When they make it an ordeal, and sometimes virtually impossible, to build homes or offices, for fear that some toad or worm will be inconvenienced, that means sky-high housing prices that working people cannot afford and fewer businesses to provide jobs that they need.

Census data make it painfully clear that blacks are being forced out of many communities where affluent liberal Democrats have had unchallenged control for years and have let the green agenda run amok. In such communities on the northern California coast, the numbers of blacks have fallen absolutely, even while the population as a whole has grown.

Conservatives have done a generally poor job of explaining how real conservatism benefits everybody. As Sowell points out, if they stopped trying to be faux Democrats and instead sold the true strenghts of conservatism, they could win elections in landslides for years to come.

If "Jaws" were real and it happened today: a Fox News panel

It seems that many of the enlightened, more-progressive-than-thou denizens of Seattle actually hate young, predominantly disadvantaged children. At least to use liberal logic, they do. Though many of these same folks would be champing at the bit to jack my taxes up for their sanctimonious pet causes, it appears that they are outraged over a proposed 10 cent-per-drink espresso tax that would transfer wealth from presumably well-to-do Starbucks customers to preschool and daycare programs.

C'mon, you progressive Washingtonians! What have you got against school kids? Why the sudden tax reticence? Oh, because you'd have to pay it?

Something that has bothered me for months was dredged up again last night. I hate the new World Trade Center design.



I watched a documentary on it on Discovery last night, and the thing is just wretched if you ask me (which nobody did). It was designed by some artsy-fartsy Karl Lagerfeld wannabe who looks like a Will Farrell SNL parody.

Now I'm just imperialistic/jingoistic/arrogant enough to want the tallest tower in the world built on exactly that spot. What was destroyed ought to be built defiantly bigger and better. When completed, the tower will be nearly 300 feet taller than the next largest structure in the world, and for that I'm grateful. But the design for the entire site is completely incoherent. It's a bunch of jagged, random edges which to me bears a suspicious resemblance to that place in the North Pole where Superman used to live:



In my own humble but most accurate opinion, the runner-up design was so far superior as to be inarguable. It properly memorialized the original design in a striking way, echoing (but transcending) what was lost.

In 20 years, the design they did go with is going to look as dated as a lava lamp.

Apparently there were post-race fisticuffs at the NASCAR event this past weekend, with the teams of two drivers mixing it up near pit row after the race. Fortunately, however, none of the dozen or so participants in the melee lost his tooth.

Their sisters have threatened to divorce them if it happens again.

Henri? Fabian? Okay, I have to ask: what's the deal with the totally gay storm names?

I watched the Rob Reiner-directed movie "The American President" a couple of weeks ago on television. I can never resist watching, at least to see the hilarious part where Michael Douglas, as the president, valiantly defends himself against charges (lodged by his evil Republican foe, Senator Bob Rumson) of being "a card-carrying member of the ACLU."

"Yes, I am!" Douglas bravely intones. "But the more important question is, why aren't you, Bob? Now this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question, why would a senator, his party's most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the Constitution?"

Sometimes I laugh so hard that I spit soda through my nose. One suspects that this is actually the view of the ACLU held by Reiner, Aaron Sorkin, and much of the rest of Hollywood. The ACLU isn't a radical leftist organization pushing a particularly insidious agenda--it is merely the defender of the great rights given to us by James Madison, et. al.

In reality, of course, only the most delusional, burned-out hippies (or Californians) could still hold such a view of the ACLU. I was reminded of this while perusing a press release from the Northern California chapter of this courageous constitutional bullwark. The release was entitled "Landmark survey finds majority of state’s schools in violation of confusing sex education laws."

Apparently, the ACLU's beef is that sex education in California schools is not uniform and monolithic enough. The press release is in conjunction with a California Assembly bill that would impose more uniform standards on what sort of sex education can be taught there.

SB 71, authored by Senator Sheila Kuehl, updates the current laws and eliminates contradictions by establishing a new definition of comprehensive sexual health education, setting age-appropriate grade floors for required topics, creating a new uniform parental consent policy, and ensuring that instruction is age-appropriate, scientifically current, and bias-free.

Ah yes, bias free. That will certainly be nice. As it turns out, some bias has crept into California sex education regarding female contraceptives, for which the ACLU chides them. According to the full ACLU report, some of the nefarious schools:

...emphasize failure rates in their classes. One respondent stated that the primary message taught about contraception is that it has "low effectiveness." In fact, research shows that the failure rate for women using contraception correctly and consistently is less than 10% for nearly all methods--in comparison to an 85% failure rate when no method is used and a 25% failure rate for women using periodic abstenence.

The ACLU is similarly irked about the teaching on condom use for preventing STD's and pregnancies:

Nearly 10% of schools that cover condom effectiveness stated that they emphasize the failure rates and ineffectiveness of condoms in their classes. Some of the comments were: “Not a safe method of prevention of HIV and pregnancy,” “ineffectiveness and risks are emphasized,” and “failure rate may be as high as 25%.” In fact, research shows that male condoms are 97% effective in preventing pregnancy in perfect use and 86% effective in typical use.

Are you catching the drift of this yet? The ACLU is annoyed with many California public schools because they are failing to give school children enough faith in Trojans. It's not that they are refusing to mention contraceptives, mind you. The flaw is that they are not presenting them optimistically enough. They are not working hard enough to give kids confidence in condoms. While some schools are saying to kids "Condoms may still not protect you from pregnancy and disease," the outraged ACLU is saying "That's a lie! Condoms will protect you from all those things! You have nothing to worry about!"

So just remember, the ACLU "is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights." And of course, right there in the Bill of Rights you'll find it in plain black and white: "No teacher shall ever give children a conservative estimate of the effectiveness of contraception. They must never err on the side of safety, but rather must instill boundless confidence in America's youth that as long as they use a condom, everything will be fine."

So why aren't you a member, Bob?

I know I'm hardly the first person to lament the death of good manners. But it's not a superficial issue. Manners are the grease in the cogs of a society. When you lose them, you ultimately lose your society. Of course, there are many other factors involved, many of them much more important than manners. Manners are probably more symptomatic than causitive. But they're a good indicator of where a society is at.

It is not infrequent that I can now go through an entire drive-through food transaction without ever once being spoken to by the person in the window. Somebody has to speak with you when you actually place your order through the little speaker, but after that, you're on your own.

This is now a fairly typical drive-through transaction in South Florida:

A little screen near the window shows the amount owed. The slack-jawed cashier silently sticks his hand out the window and stares at me, awaiting the cash. I hand the cash to him and the window closes. A minute later, the window opens again, and the cashier hands out my change and then a bag of food, without ever actually looking at me. He then stands there, staring blankly off into space. "Uh, are we done? Is that it?" I ask him, not sure if my order has been completed or not. The cashier responds by grunting in the affirmative and closing the window.

It's not much better at the counter. In fact, at the counter, they don't even have to speak to you to take your order. When your turn comes up in line, the cashier will often just look at you silently in a way that says "Well?"

Now I know that teenagers are generally punks, and most of the people working in these positions are teenagers. Hey, when I was a teenager, I was a punk. But when I had jobs in high school, my bosses still at least made me do the things that were conducive to good business. Though teenagers are generally a sullen, uncommunicative lot, management at least recognized this and worked on making them presentable. I'm not talking about having tea with the Queen. I'm talking about "hello" and "thank you."

A few months ago, I took my kids to McDonald's as a treat. The gal behind the window smiled at me, asked me how I was doing today, and thanked me after she handed me our food. I would have jumped out of the car and kissed her had I not been afraid of being maced. I wanted to write a letter to somebody. I wanted to nominate her for employee of the month.

I have to give the Blockbuster folks some credit in this department. They say "hello" to every single soul that walks into that store. No matter what. In fact, they're almost militant about it. It can be intimidating. If you attempt to sneak past them, they will send someone over the counter to chase you down, corner you in the foreign films section, plant himself in front of you, and say "hello." They will badger you until they receive some reciprocal acknowledgment. Maybe if we could send all the slack-jawed drive-through cashiers down to Blockbuster a couple of times a week, they might become so edgy about not saying "hello" that they'll start to do it out of fear. Which would be better than grunting.

Jay Nordlinger did an interesting "Impromptus" yesterday regarding the racial silliness currently taking place in the NFL.

The column deals mostly with the $200,000 fine the league levied against Detroit Lions president Matt Millen, who hired Steve Mariucci to fill his head coaching opening without first interviewing any "minority" candidates. According to a relatively new rule in the NFL, for each coaching opening, a team must now interview at least one "minority" candidate (I keep putting it in quotation marks because, as Nordlinger points out, "'minority' is merely a euphemism for black. We're not talking about Vietnamese or Inuit coaches here").

It was widely known around the NFL that Millen coveted Mariucci, and there was little question as to whom he would hire once Mariucci became available. Because everyone knew Mariucci was his guy, each of the black "candidates" who received Millen's obligatory call refused to be interviewed for the job. According to Nordlinger, players union chief Gene Upshaw (who is black) foresaw this eventuality back when the silly rule was being considered, saying "it will lead to sham interviews and sham lists [of coaches]."

I've talked about this sort of nonsense frequently, most recently in connection with the Supreme Court's awful ruling in the University of Michigan case. But Nordlinger provided another strong example of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" (to use President Bush's excellent phrase) which begs to be passed along. As Nordlinger relates the story:

An infamous and signal event occurred in 1989. In that year, a couple of Detroit reps in the Michigan state legislature threatened to withhold funding for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra unless it hired an additional black player, pronto. (The orchestra had only one.) The DSO — like all other self-respecting orchestras — had always had blind auditions. You play behind a curtain: They can't see you. They're not supposed to tell whether you're young or old, a man or a woman, or whatever.

But that was the problem, as far as the racialists were concerned. So, the symphony extended an offer to a black bassist, who, to his shame, accepted. He said, "I would rather have auditioned like everybody else" — but he didn't. Black musicians all over the world were outraged; they felt kicked in the stomach, as, in a way, they had been. A black trombonist in the Atlanta Symphony observed, "It doesn't do any good for players' self-esteem if they feel the rules were bent for them."

Nordlinger continues:

In time, the DSO approached conductor James DePriest to be its music director. (DePriest is black, and, in fact, the nephew of the great American contralto Marian Anderson.) DePriest told them, in so many words, to shove it: "It is impossible for me to go to Detroit because of the atmosphere. People mean well, but you fight for years to make race irrelevant, and now they are making race an issue."

Now, the present issue is complicated a bit by the fact that the NFL does have a dubious history with regard to racial issues. For years, NFL teams' avoidance of black quarterbacks in the annual draft was almost comical. Players like Warren Moon and Charlie Ward were either undrafted or drafted in the final rounds, while stiffs like Heath Shuler regularly rolled off the assembly line straight into the league.

You can say "Well, Kurt Warner didn't get drafted either, and look at him!" But Warner is an anomaly who went to a nothing college and of whom nobody inside or outside the league had ever heard before the Rams gave him a desperation shot. Warren Moon, on the other hand, was a star quarterback at a Pac 10 school (and was the MVP of the Rose Bowl), yet had to prove himself for years in the Canadian Football League before even getting a chance in the NFL. Despite losing years to the CFL, Moon still put together a Hall of Fame career in the NFL once he got the shot.

The barrier was finally broken a couple of years ago, with Steve McNair, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, and a number of other black quarterbacks being given a legitimate shot right out of college. But the overall NFL record has been poor, and hard to find an innocent explanation for.

Still, the fact remains that even where racial bias does exist, race-based preferences never provide a solution. Instead, they lead to a sham dog-and-pony show which encourages dishonesty and casts suspicion on those who have attained their positions through talent and hard work. If the NFL still has a problem in this area (which is arguable), they will have to find a different way to solve it. The "one-interview rule" might satisfy shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson and Johnnie Cochran, but it ultimately serves to hurt, rather than help, the situation.

I had almost forgotten something that I heard on the local all-news station on my way to the airport last week. They were breathlessly beginning each half hour with an ominous banner headline: "Guess who's going to end up footing the bill to upgrade the nation's outdated power grid? You are!"

Well, if I could use some vernacular from my junior high days, duh. The all-news station was stating it as though it were some sort of outrage. But really, who else is supposed to pay for it? Are the power companies supposed to have some other source of income from which to draw funds for the upgrades aside from customers?

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I have a sneaky suspicion that there was an implication underlying that headline: you are going to end up footing the bill instead of the government, which really ought to be paying for it.

I never fail to be astounded at how many people do not understand one simple fact: the government doesn't have any of its own money. When it spends money, it spends your money. And usually much less effectively than a private company spends the money you give them.

Yes, when the power company needs to upgrade its equipment, it draws from the money you pay them with your monthly bill. And when the phone company needs to install some fiber optic lines, the money they use is the money you've been paying them. And when Baskin-Robbins puts a new neon "31 Flavors" sign up outside the door, they do it with the money you've spent there on ice cream. Where else would they get the money, if not from their customers?

The tyrannical rule of our judicial monarchy continues. The 9th Circuit Court, perhaps the most activist court in the land (which is really saying something), has by judicial fiat swept aside more than 100 separate court decisions in three different states, completely emptying out the death rows of two of them.

Though they attempt to draw retroactive legal rationale from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 2002 (in which even Antonin Scalia ruled that only juries can sentence a defendent to the death penalty), what has essentially happened is this: the 9th Circuit Court has decided that it doesn't like the death penalty, despite the citizens of the majority of American states being overwhelmingly in favor of it. Therefore, the court has decided to excercise raw judicial power in overturning the will of the people, their legislatures, and the lower courts, instead imposing their own notions of justice on all.

It's actually possible that the 9th Circuit is on the correct side of this issue. Scalia's concurrence in the Ring v. Arizona case (which the 9th Circuit used as justification) saw that ruling as a remedy to judicial activism, not wanting to allow judges to be empowered to sentence beyond what the jury would sentence. But if they did come to the correct conclusion, you can be sure that it was merely by accident. There are no judicial conservatives in the 9th Circuit. They showed that rather baldly by retroactively applying the ruling to hundreds of cases, applying the famous "substantive due process" standard which has cloaked most of the judicial mischief of the past 75 years.

You are simpy kidding yourself if you think you live in a representative republic anymore. You do not. You live in a monarchy, where judges are the royalty.

Al Mohler today boldly points out the culpability of his (and my own) Southern Baptist Convention in leading to the skewed view of church/state separation being promulgated by today's courts.

It's almost too easy to make fun of Hollywood liberals these days, but I heard something yesterday that genuinely stunned me.

I was listening to the Sean Hannity show, which I didn't even realize was on in South Florida until I stumbled upon it yesterday. It may have been a repeat or "best of," since it was Labor Day, but in any event, his guest was Ed Asner. Now I know that Ed Asner is the nuttiest of the nutty Hollywood leftists. Though I think Lou Grant on the old "Mary Tyler Moore Show" is one of the great sitcom characterizations of all time, it's no state secret that Asner went 'round the bend on political issues long ago.

Still, I was not prepared for what I heard. Hannity said to him something like "You really, honestly still think we haven't given Communism a fair chance in this country, don't you?" To which Asner responded (paraphrasing): this country has been whipped into an irrational frenzy about Communism since 1917. They've never really heard what it's about because of all the negative propaganda.

I suppose I believed intellectually that such a species as Asner belongs to still existed, but to actually find a specimen in captivity is nearly staggering. This is a system that has conservatively resulted in over 100 million murders in the past 85 years, and we haven't given it a fair shake. I've concluded that Asner is actually a right-wing ploy to motivate conservatives. He's collecting a check from Richard Mellon Scaife. There's simply no way in the year 2003 that this guy can be for real.

A wonderful quote found at Dr. G's Blog last week that's worth printing up and hanging on the refrigerator:

According to Charles Haddon Spurgeon, “Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather it is telling the difference between right and almost right."

We here at Rabe Ramblings have our finger on the pulse of American pop culture.

Someone just reached us by the following Google search: "Whoopi Goldberg" + "no eyebrows".

I checked out Kevin Costner's new flick "Open Range" yesterday, and was impressed with it. Though story-wise it has nothing new to offer (being a fairly typical showdown-style Western), the appeal of films like this is usually in the characterizations, and Robert Duvall and Costner bring a lot to the table in that department.

Duvall makes me happy whenever he pops up on a movie screen, and though it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion of a hairline on the aging Costner, I'm glad to see him back in top form again. The characters are affecting without the movie ever lapsing into sentimentality, and the film is beautifully, breathtakingly photographed. The fact that they shot footage like this on something like a $20 million budget makes me wonder what all the $40-$50 million movies are wasting their money on. That must be some mighty fine on-set catering.

It's not perfect by any stretch (with an ending that is probably too pat for the tone of the rest of the movie, and one stunning blasphemy early in the film that virtually negated the entire thing for me), but I found "Open Range" overall to be a satisfying, black hats vs. white hats, old-fashioned Western, featuring two of the more likeable actors of this generation. Costner (who directed) mercifully eschews the recent moral ambiguity so vogue in recent anti-hero westerns, and instead returns to the clear good guys/bad guys formula that established the genre as a classic in the first place.

Oh yeah, and I wouldn't be at all shocked to see Duvall get a best actor Oscar nomination for it.

Charles Bronson may not have had great range as an actor, but he appeared in many of the greatest "guy movies" in the history of cinema. Though people tend to mostly think of him as having starred in the mediocre "Death Wish" series, they forget that he was also a supporting player in "The Magnificent Seven," "The Great Escape," and "The Dirty Dozen," arguably the three best ensemble "guy movies" of all time. He also made the classic "Once Upon a Time in the West" with Henry Fonda, and the highly underrated bare-knuckles boxing flick "Hard Times," one of my dad's favorites.

With McQueen, Coburn, Marvin, and now Bronson gone, a certain breed of actor has almost left us. At least we still have Clint Eastwood.

Al Mohler has an excellent post on his blog today succinctly tracing the fallacious path by which courts began building a "strict wall of separation" between church and state. Mohler says:

The First Amendment does not even mention the separation of church and state. Who came up with this? As most Americans know, it was Thomas Jefferson, who in a now-famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut stated, "I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and state."

With one letter, Jefferson set the course for a reinterpretation of the First Amendment. His terminology of a wall of separation between church and state, once widely adopted, would become the catalyst for a legal and political revolution at the intersection of government and religion. Generations of judges came to understand their role to be the protectors of Jefferson's wall. The historical sequence that leads from Thomas Jefferson's letter to Judge Myron Thompson's order is clear and undeniable.

It's also interesting that Thomas Jefferson has become the Rosetta Stone by which judicial activists interpret the First Amendment of the Constitution. Do you know where Jefferson was during the framing and ratification of the Constitution? Thousands of miles away in Paris, where he was the U.S. ambassador to France. Thomas Jefferson did not write or ratify one word of the United States Constitution.

I had a chance to interview Herb Titus, who is one of the attorneys for Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, on a radio program here in South Florida yesterday. Titus made a wonderful statement, and while I know it has been said before by others, it bears repeating over and over again. Listen up, Richard Land and Jay Sekulow: "The rule of lawyers is not the same thing as the rule of law."

If Land, Sekulow, and others think that Moore is violating the "rule of law," I'd love to ask them a simple question: What law? What specific law has Moore broken? Answer: there is none. Judge Myron Thompson cannot point to a single law that Chief Justice Moore is (or was) in violation of.

My apologies for the slowness of things around here for the past ten days or so. I had an unusual spate of travel which took me on seperate trips to the Washington D.C. area and Philadelphia. I don't have any immediate future travel plans, though, so hopefully I'll be back to daily posting again.

One brief note on the Roy Moore affair, which has unfolded quite a bit in my absence: It's sad to see how deeply even conservative evangelical Christians have imbibed the notion that the federal government has ultimate jurisdiction in every conceivable matter. I watched Richard Land on O'Reilly last night saying that Judge Moore is "hurting the cause" by "defying" the law. Of course, Judge Moore's position all along has been that the federal court has no jurisdiction in the matter. To say that he is defying the law by ignoring the federal court order is to assume the very premise being challenged. If the federal judge is not the rightful authority in this matter, than Judge Moore is certainly not defying the law.

We've become so brainwashed by the notion that the federal government is supreme in all matters that we a priori rule out even the possibility of ever challenging its jurisdiction in any specific case. Under Land's (and those like him) reasoning, all that is now required for a federal judge to have jurisdiction in a case is for that judge to decree that he has jurisdiction. At that point, the matter is closed, because any questioning of it would be "defiance."

Okay, I know I've been a little superficial lately, since I've been travelling, and haven't had much time for in-depth reflection and punditry on the day's news.

That having been said...

More on Whoopi. What's the deal with the eyebrows? I mean, she doesn't have any! Who in the world shaves their eyebrows? When you look at her, you don't immediately notice that she has no eyebrows--it is instead just part of the overall disturbing effect. I just can't imagine her looking in the mirror and saying "Oh yeah, this is almost the look. It just needs one more thing. Hmmmmm. Wait! I've got it! Eyebrow removal!"

My hope that Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's case could be a turning point in the federal judiciary's monarchial reign over the American people is fading rapidly. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court (unsuprisingly) rejected Moore's request for an emergency stay of the appellate court ruling that the Ten Commandments monument must be removed from the judicial building.

The deadline for the removal of the monument passed about 45 minutes ago (as I write this), and it appears that some prominent Christians are beginning to get cold feet about the case. Sadly, this includes Alabama attorney general Bill Pryor, of whom I wrote glowingly only a few weeks ago. Rather than taking a stand against the judicial monarchy, Pryor has apparently decided to heel.

An email newsletter from Doug Phillips' Vision Forum provided the best synopsis I've seen today, and since I can't find a link for the same piece on their website, my hope is that they won't mind my quoting at length from it. I think it's that important. Says Phillips:

This Friday, the Supreme Court of Alabama will meet to consider holding Chief Justice Roy Moore in contempt of court for his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama State Judicial Building. Also to be determined is whether the other justices will invoke a procedural technicality in the law by which they can independently act to remove the monument.

We are looking at the very real possibility that the finest, most courageous, and most godly Chief Justice this nation has seen in more than one-hundred years will be routed by a man slated by President Bush to join the very same court that has declared it unconstitutional to acknowledge God as the source of our laws.

The proposed coup d’état against Chief Justice Moore was initiated and staged by Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, who has vowed to remove the monument. Pryor, who originally claimed to support Justice Moore, has been under tremendous pressure from groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State to act against the Chief Justice, or suffer severe political consequences. Pryor was recently nominated by President Bush for a spot on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Earlier today, the United States Supreme Court denied a petition by Chief Justice Moore to block the federal courts from acting to remove the Ten Commandments monument. Counsel for the Chief Justice made the case in their filings before the Supreme Court that he should be allowed to “establish justice by acknowledging the guidance and favor of Almighty God, placed upon him by his oath of office and the Constitution of Alabama.”

Unfortunately, Moore now has unneeded opposition from his Christian flank:

Among those who seek to rally behind the Chief Justice, a growing number are expressing profound disappointment with Christian commentators who have used the Ten Commandments debate to attack the Chief Justice for his strategy, including Jay Sekulow, Marvin Olasky, and Richard Land - three Christian leaders who have publicly criticized the Chief Justice before the press for his strategic stand.

Sekulow, the founder of the American Center for Law and Justice, expressed public concern that the Chief Justice was pushing a constitutional showdown. Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention described Chief Justice Moore’s actions as “deeply disturbing.” Appearing on The 700 Club, WORLD Magazine editor Marvin Olasky twice criticized Chief Justice Moore for choosing to fight on “the wrong ground.”

Those who are close to the case recognize that such criticisms are rooted in fundamental misconceptions about the constitutional issues present, as well as an implicit capitulation to the philosophy of pragmatism, a philosophy Olasky recently defended in a WORLD Magazine article.

The strength of Chief Justice Moore’s strategy is precisely that he is challenging long-held faulty premises. He is standing on the foundations. Howard Phillips, father of yours truly and founder of the Conservative Caucus, responded this way: “We should recognize that there is a division within the Christian community between Christians who take the Bible and the Constitution literally, as distinguished from those who give priority to commentaries and who rely on Supreme Court rulings which are themselves unconstitutional to the degree they disregard and set aside the plain text and precise words of the Constitution.”

Phillips then concludes with a call to action:

....your phone call to the Governor and the Supreme Court Justices might make a difference. The governor has it in his power to stop the efforts of the Attorney General. Furthermore, there are three Supreme Court seats up for office in 2004. The current Supreme Court Justices need to know the broad grassroots opposition to any decision to support the federal court’s unconstitutional and extra-jurisdictional demand that Alabama be prohibited from acknowledging God, as required by the state constitution.

Please consider calling the following numbers to urge the leaders of Alabama to stand by the Chief Justice in acknowledging God as the source of law.

Attorney General Bill Pryor: (334) 242-7300
Governor Bob Riley: (334) 242-7100
Justice Gorman Houston (Senior Associate Justice): (334) 242-4588
Justice Harold See: (334) 242-4608
Justice Champ Lyons: (334) 242-4352
Justice Jean Brown: (334) 242-4245
Justice Bernard Harwood: (334) 242-4594
Justice Tom Woodall: (334) 242-4578
Justice Lyn Stuart: (334) 242-4585
Justice Douglas Johnstone: (334) 242-4598

If Christians don't have the guts to take a stand here, they may as well never take a stand against judicial tyranny again. "Oh goodness, a Constitutional crisis! We can't have that!

I just don't get it: some further entries

* Tom Green

* Rosie O'Donnell

* Tim Allen

* Chris Tucker

* Garrison Keillor

* Rob Schneider

What can I tell you? I just don't get it.

Auto racing is not a sport. If it were, the car would be the athlete. Keeping a machine working well may require much skill and endurance, but so does brain surgery, and that's not a sport either.

Other things that, while perhaps skillful, perhaps challenging, perhaps beautiful, are not a sport:

* Horse racing (see above, but substitute "horse" for "car")

* Figure skating

* Synchronized swimming

* Skateboarding

* Weightlifting

* Anything else where the result is based on subjective judging rather than objective scoring (that means you, ballroom dancing and any boxing match where nobody is knocked unconscious....)

* Anything you can smoke a cigarette and drink a beer while doing (sorry bowling and golf....)

I'm glad we cleared that up.

Whoopi Goldberg--I just don't get it.

Though you probably wouldn't have known it by watching the news over the weekend (where there seems to have been almost a total media blackout), a crowd of thousands turned out for the rally in support of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in Montgomery on Saturday.

A constitutional crisis is brewing, and it's not just a "Christian" issue. This represents the best opportunity in recent years for taking a stand in challenging the federal government's right to interfere with the self-government of a state.

Augustine, Aquinas, Edwards, and Isaac Newton--What Retards!:

I don't even know where to begin with this op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in today's New York Times. Sadly, this is about as good as Christians will ever get from the Times, since Kristof is the one person at the paper who has been publicly willing to admit that the Times is totally out of touch with tens of millions of Americans. Evangelicals are as alien to the Manhattan denizens at the Times as steak sauce is to Sudanese kids.

In the piece, Kristof says that the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world is religious faith.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary. In France, only 13 percent agree with the U.S. view.

Now to me, that fact alone ought to be proof-positive of the virtue of religious faith and the deleterious results of the neglect of God. But in reading the article, one gets the vague sense that Kristof actually sees this as some sort of negative. As if we ought to be emulating the French.

What it all seems to boil down to for Kristof is a dichotomy he perceives. There are intellectuals, you see, and then there are stupid religious people. And never the 'twain shall meet:

The faith in the Virgin Birth reflects the way American Christianity is becoming less intellectual and more mystical over time. The percentage of Americans who believe in the Virgin Birth actually rose five points in the latest poll.

My grandfather was fairly typical of his generation: A devout and active Presbyterian elder, he nonetheless believed firmly in evolution and regarded the Virgin Birth as a pious legend. Those kinds of mainline Christians are vanishing, replaced by evangelicals. Since 1960, the number of Pentecostalists has increased fourfold, while the number of Episcopalians has dropped almost in half.

The result is a gulf not only between America and the rest of the industrialized world, but a growing split at home as well. One of the most poisonous divides is the one between intellectual and religious America.

On can be religious or one can be intellectual. Kristof's grandfather was evidently one of the "good ones"--the ones who disingenuously denied the tenets of the faith they had sworn to uphold. The ones who made up their own religion as they went along, denying anything the Bible said that didn't fit their own preconceived notions of what God is capable of. This denial has, of course, eviscerated the mainline denominations, which Kristof laments. As it turns out, a god who does nothing miraculous or supernatural, and instead only has a few moralistic fables to tell us, doesn't really motivate anybody to get out of bed on Sunday morning.

If only those nutty Christians would stop actually believing that God might be who He says He is, America, the most successful and powerful nation on earth, could become more like France--an embittered, impotent, also-ran. Which is what the New York Times has desired all along.


(Addendum: I see that Hugh Hewitt has an excellent--and much more eloquent--post today dealing with Kristof's column. Hewitt points out that in addition to his bias, Kristof also demonstrates extremely shoddy academic research.)

If you want to get goosebumps, take a listen (on Windows Media Player) to Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's comments today as he announced his intention to defy the federal circuit court ruling that the Ten Commandments monument must be removed from the state's judicial building.

Moore says:

Now, once again, Judge [Myron] Thompson seeks to force his will on the people of this state, afflicting the judicial system, and threatening to drain huge amounts of public funds from the state of Alabama. But this time, this time, the object is to take away our right as a state to acknowledge God. Our state motto is "We dare defend our rights." We should never allow the threat of financial penalty to deter us from the defense of an inalienable right. Alabama will never give up its right to acknowledge God....I have no intention of removing the monument of the Ten Commandments and the moral foundation of our law.

I'm telling you, this could end up being a Very Big Deal.

There is a great truth here somewhere:

The other day, our 11-year-old son asked my wife "Why are girls always so worried about who's mad at each other? I don't care about all that stuff--I'm just looking for someone to play baseball with."

As much as I hate to admit it, Fox News is dead wrong in their dopey lawsuit against Al Franken. First of all, there is (and ought to be) a pretty wide legal berth given to satire. And secondly, all they are doing is adding to Franken's cache with his target audience.

According to Drudge today, the book is now sitting at the top of Amazon.com's sales rankings a month before publication. His sources say that Fox News filed the suit at the urging of Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly and Franken have been trading barbs since an ugly incident a few months ago at a booksellers convention, where the two wound up shouting at each other (with Franken coming off as an unhinged crybaby) on C-SPAN.

As an aside, can I just say that I find Bill O'Reilly to be a pompous, opportunistic putz? His Howard Beale faux-populism strikes me as hollow and calculated, and one gets the impression that he would change his views tommorrow if he sensed such a thing would buy him greater success. It's ironic that Franken apparently attacks O'Reilly in his "Look at the Right," since O'Reilly isn't on the "right" even by so-called "neocon" standards. He has no identifiable principles--everything appears to be based on off-the-cuff gut reactions.

Fox News' suit won't even make it into court, nor should it. O'Reilly has a nightly pulpit (and a fair amount of book sales to his own credit) which ought to be the proper forum to address Franken if he's feeling defensive. But he oughtn't go running to some judge. It makes him look like a sniveling, thin-skinned whiner.

There's an article (registration required) in the newest issue of World magazine about the impending confrontation between the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. A massive rally is planned in Mongomery for this Saturday in support of Chief Justice Roy Moore, and I've been told by someone close to the situation that Judge Moore is planning to have a press conference on Thursday evening. In it, he will announce how he plans to respond to the court order to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building.

My money is on him not budging. It promises to be an interesting and crucial weekend for this case.

Badonicus goes on a field trip

Dennis Prager has written a wonderful column today on the pathology of liberalism. "How," he asks, "can decent and often very smart people hold liberal positions?"

Though Prager is not a Christian, he precisely demonstrates why one cannot be consistently Christian and politically liberal (at least as it is defined today):

..."feelings" and "compassion" are two of the most often used liberal terms. "Character" is no longer a liberal word because it implies self-restraint. "Good and evil" are not liberal words either as they imply a moral standard beyond one's feelings. In assessing what position to take on moral or social questions, the liberal asks him or herself, "How do I feel about it?" or "How do I show the most compassion?" not "What is right?" or "What is wrong?" For the liberal, right and wrong are dismissed as unknowable, and every person chooses his or her own morality.

This explanation is so simply, yet so demonstrably, true. Speaking as a former flaming liberal, I can attest to the revulsion of absolutes that underlied my philosophy.

Liberals may caterwaul about Prager's characterization, but I defy them to disprove it.

All those jokes you were making in the security line at the airport about strip-searches are no longer parody, at least not in my neck of the woods. According to today's South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

A Miramar man says an overzealous security guard at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport ordered him to remove his pants and then fed them through an X-ray machine at a checkpoint as bystanders looked on.

Martin Holness, a 34-year-old truck driver, said he was humiliated when he was forced to stand in his gray-and-black boxer shorts before his trip to Chicago on July 17.

The airport denies it, but neither side disputes the fact that this guy was standing at the checkpoint in his underwear. According to the folks at the security checkpoint, he took off his pants by his own volition.

The guard countered that Holness pulled down his own sweat pants and handed them to the officer after two quarters in his pocket set off the metal detector. According to a written incident report, Holness lost his composure after setting off the metal detector, barked that he had "nothing to hide'' and removed his own pants without provocation.

It's difficult to know whose version is true, but this much I do know: I'm flying next week for a business trip, and I'm going to pick out my dainty unmentionables extra-carefully that morning.

I've just discovered that at 6 foot 2, I've squeaked into my own special interest group! According to columnist John Leo, the founder of the new Tall magazine is calling for "an inspirational culture of height."

I've never thought of myself as unusually tall, but according to the magazine's founder, in order to be a member of Tall Culture, one only need be a 6 foot 2 man or a 5 foot 9 woman.

And it even turns out that I've been experiencing discrimination and didn't know it! As Leo points out:

Associating tallness with menace has been a recurring theme in popular entertainment. Many 7-footers have never fully recovered from seeing those sky-high characters in "Yellow Submarine" trying to slaughter everybody with apples. You can't do this with short or handicapped people. Depicting tallness as evil may well be the last safe prejudice to have in America.

Not to mention knee-bruising airline seats and humiliating foreign car egresses. However, such discrimination is an outrage, and it cannot stand for long.

This is why activists are demanding a height-friendly college curriculum (reading "Wuthering Heights" is a must). On the agenda, too, are height-themed dormitories where tall and pro-tall students can mix their distinctive cultures. Maybe a Ph.D. could be offered in tallness studies. There is even talk that dismissive phrases like "That's a tall tale" (which sadly associates height with lying) may be declared hate speech by the Irish parliament, or even by the whole European Union.

It's about time.

I was watching the old Cary Grant movie "The Bishop's Wife" the other night, when a nauseating thought occurred to me: the bishop's wife is now a guy.

I watched the driving/nursing/child-endangering mom on O'Reilly last night, and the verdict is in: guilty of extreme creepiness. She was found innocent, however, of child-endangerment, though she was using her child as a potential airbag on the Ohio Turnpike.

Both she and her husband turned out to be hyper-verbal, high school forensics types, who also apparenly do all sorts of stupid and/or dangerous things in an effort to challenge the government's authority.

Memo to "Christian" moms (actually, not all of you--just those of you in sects/cults/fringe groups who will loudly claim to be Christians in court) who are planning to murder your children, group-marry one guy, or suckle your infant while hang-gliding: when you show up in court, would it be asking to much for you to slap on a little makeup and wear something besides the roomy burlap jumper? I'm not saying you have to change your whole way of life--I'm only talking about the public appearances in court and on Good Morning America. You'd really only have to jettison the Rapunzel-haired, Patti Smith-in-a-nursing-bra look for a couple of hours.

My wife's an actual Christian, and I don't like to see her stereotyped as a bland, hollow-cheeked Stepford drone, but some of you cult gals are making it difficult. Thanks for your consideration. Now you can go back to filling up the bathtub.

Two outstanding things I saw in a recent issue of World Magazine, which are worth a look. They require a free registration to view, and if you aren't already signed up, you ought to be.

First was an excellent column by Russell Board, a missionary to Japan, called "Everything in its place: The triumph of secularism is its ability to tell society what goes where." In it, Board gives one of the most beautifully concise appraisals of secularism and its largely successful effort to marginalize Christianity that I've seen. Observes Board:

The secularist neither affirms nor denies the existence of God. He simply dismisses the issue by insisting that it doesn't matter. It is only a religious dispute after all; it doesn't affect real life. Stock prices and soccer practices are more important, more real to him, than sacred precepts or speculative philosophy.

Today's ACLU types insist that the Founding Fathers intended a purely secular government. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, but the secularist agenda has now pervaded all of our institutions.

The secularist takes church-state separation as a prescription for all of life. He places religion in an isolated compartment, quarantined away from the school, the workplace, and the halls of government....To the secularist, freedom of religion means the liberty to put whatever you want in the box labeled "religion." Just be sure to keep your boxes in order. No religious stuff in the boxes labeled "government," "science," or "public education." Got it? A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Indeed.

The other piece in the same issue is an instructive look at the tolerance mavens who comprise the National Education Association (NEA). The story centers on the NEA's recent annual convention, and relates the treatment of David O'Neal, a California convention delegate.

Poor Mr. Neal made the mistake of simply proposing a motion that the delegates affirm (as the entire U.S. Congress has done) that the words "under God" remain in the Pledge of Allegiance. One delegate after another then took the podium amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth to denounce such a motion.

The assembly's jumbotrons showed a delegate intoning, "Might does not make right. The majority cannot bludgeon the minority!" even as the NEA's majority bludgeoned Mr. O'Neal...

..."Fellow delegates!" a male teacher huffed in opposition to affirming God in the pledge, "what is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right!"

After a while of this, O'Neal withdrew his motion, though that didn't calm the ire of his fellow teachers:

Soon several delegates circled the defeated Mr. O'Neal amid the convention aisles. "You are trying to force God on me and I don't appreciate it!" one man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggy shorts yelled, pointing his finger in Mr. O'Neal's face. An older man with gray hair pulled back in a ponytail nodded in agreement.

Guess what, folks? If you have kids in the public schools, these are their teachers. Good luck.

Bret McAtee attempted to post some observations in the "comments" section here yesterday, but unfortunately my new system apparently ate them. He has since posted those observations at his own blog, which you can check out here.

Through all of this recent controversy, I've learned a number of positive things about the paleoconservative movement. While I certainly don't agree with everything the movement seems to believe, I think many of them would be suprised to know that I share their views on an increasingly substantial number of things (though the personal abrasiveness of some of them can make it a difficult movement to stomach). I have been heartened to see many of the paleoconservative stripe come here to unambiguously condemn the racist rantings of a few who claim the "paleo" banner.

Bret's article is a good contribution, and I think he makes some valid points--even the ones directed at me. Where I disagree with Bret is in an analogy he uses in discussing my (and others) recent characterizations of paleoconservatism:

The problem of course is that all of this is what is called the genetic fallacy or more familiarly known as guilt by association. These moderates that are on crusade against classical Conservatism are by in large fine Christian gentleman, even if their politics is at war with their Theology, but one wonders what the level of their own angst would be if others tried to tar them with the David Koresh brush. David Koresh was a Christian. These neo-con's are Christians. Therefore David Koresh and Neo-cons have a great deal in common.

I do not think this analogy holds up because one would be hard-pressed to find any links to David Koresh (or the like) on any randomly chosen Christian site. One would have to make at least several degrees of link-to-link-to-link to find anything like Koresh and his ilk. However, I found links to the racist swill at the Little Geneva site through the blogs of most of the people here who identify themselves as paleoconservative.

Please understand, I'm not attributing the views expressed at Little Geneva to the majority of paleos who visit here. Most have made it clear that they do not share those views. What I am pointing out is that I didn't have to go very far to find it in the literature that they linked to. It was only one degree of separation away.

Simply being a Christian does not put me in the same league as Koresh, the Ku Klux Klan, or Fred Phelps. On that, Bret and I are agreed. However, if one were to find on my blog all sorts of links to folks who spoke glowingly of Koresh or the Klan, I would have, at the very least, opened myself to the accusation of being sympathetic to such groups.

As I become more and more convinced that racism and anti-semitism does not lie at the heart of the paleoconservative movement, my hope for them is that they will turn their attention towards expelling the racists, who currently don't feel all that uncomfortable there, from their movement. The movement will not take any ground if racists are allowed to comfortably hold their views within it. As Mark Horne (himself a paleoconservative) said in a recent post, "don't even be seen with them."

For those who are interested in the television pundit shows, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is scheduled to appear on Hannity and Colmes tonight on Fox News.

If you are unfamiliar with him, Judge Moore (who is a Christian) installed a 2 1/2 ton granite monument in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building depicting the Ten Commandments, which are, of course, the basis for all law. Needless to say, militant secularists were crawling all over one another to sue him (mostly the usual suspects: the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, etc.), and a federal appeals court recently ruled that Judge Moore must remove the monument. Though Moore is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, the circuit court this week lifted a stay, and ordered the monument removed by August 20.

It could get very interesting, because Chief Justice Moore is enormously popular in the state of Alabama (whose people elected him to his current positon after a similar dispute when he was a lower court judge), the governor is on his side, and he has shown no inclination to remove the monument whatever the ruling.

I've had some firsthand experience with the enormous personal appeal of Judge Moore, and his enemies are making a huge mistake if they underestimate him. He appeals to people on a very gut level, and also brings some refreshing, long-overdue Constitutional argumentation to the table. While too many Christians have tried to play within the boundaries set by liberal, activist courts (i.e. trying to prove that whatever it is that they want to do fits within the court-imposed "Lemon test," for instance), Moore is challenging the entire edifice that the liberal innovations have been built upon. He doesn't try to play by the Lemon test--he rejects the Lemon test. It's his postion that the federal courts have no jurisdiction in the matter, let alone any authority to force him to disobey the Alabama state constitution, which invokes "the favor and guidance of Almighty God" to "ordain and establish the...Constitution and form of government for the State of Alabama."

The militant secularists hate him in a way they hate few others, a fact which becomes evident in any Google search on his name. They know that this is a strategic case. There could be a lot riding on this, and Chief Justice Moore might just be the right man to stand for truth in the coming tumultuous days.

I'm having trouble figuring out the mass appeal of the Kobe Bryant case. I'm not talking generally about why some cases (particularly those involving celebrities) become massive media events; I understand that well enough. What suprises me is the extent to which this case in particular has grabbed the attention of the entire nation.

When I was doing sports radio, I used to gauge the relative celebrity of an athlete by applying what I called the "Mom Test." My mom is not a sports fan. I can recall her watching maybe two sporting events in her life, and even then under duress. Thus, for an athlete to break into her consciousness, he has to have reached an unusual level of celebrity; he (or she) has to have achieved noteriety and name recognition among non-sports fans. When my mom knows who an athlete is, he has pervaded the culture enough to pass the "Mom Test."

I understood the interest in the O.J. Simpson case because he shattered the Mom Meter. There wasn't a person in America who didn't know who Simpson was even before he hacked his wife and her friend to death. Other athletes, past and present, who would pass the Mom Test: Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Pete Rose, Wilt Chamberlain, Muhammed Ali, Mike Tyson, and Michael Jordan, to name a few. Even Shaquille O'Neal, Bryant's teammate with the Lakers, appears to pass the Mom Test, probably because of his unlamented movie career and ubiquitous commercial presence.

Which brings me to my dilemma: Kobe Bryant does not pass the Mom Test. Sure, she knows who he is now. But before this case, she didn't know him from a hill of Beans. I also asked a notoriously sports-ignorant co-worker of mine if he had ever heard of Kobe Bryant. "No, not before this," he said. Kobe Bryant is a basketball superstar, but as best I can tell, his pre-rape fame was mainly confined to sports fans. Any case involving a famous athlete would be big national news, no question. But this case is reaching O.J. proportions, without Bryant having nearly the pre-alleged-crime celebrity that Simpson did. Last night, they were actually breaking in on radio stations to carry that little, useless pre-trial hearing live.

So what is propelling this case to the heights it's reaching? In the Simpson case, though the coverage was outrageously overblown, I believe the media was merely feeding a pre-existing national appetite for coverage. It seems like in this case, the media is trying to recreate the "glory" of that case during the dog days of summer.

The whole thing reminds me of a funny scene in the movie "Groundhog Day." Bill Murray, after reliving the same day hundreds of times, finally spends a nearly perfect day with the object of his affection, Andie McDowell. The day culminates with a completely spontaneous snowball fight between them and some kids, and at the end of it all, McDowell is falling in love with Murray, having seen his spontaneous, loveable side. Then Murray wakes up the next day only to find that he's starting the same day over yet again. Wanting to get back to the point where he had nearly won her, Murray tries to recapture the magic by recreating the the events of the previous day, this time going through the same motions stiffly and awkwardly, culminating with a bizarre, completely non-spontaneous snowball fight with the same kids.

I get that same feeling from this case. The media is trying to recreate the day, mechanically going through the motions of throwing the snowballs. They're trying to create an appetite rather than feeding one. In the movie, Andie McDowell was repulsed, In real life, the American people seem to love the counterfeit nearly as much as the original.

Discoshaman's Blog Has Moved:

For those of you who, like me, enjoy Discoshaman's pungent observations (and especially for those of you who don't, but can't live without him--you know who you are), be aware that his blog has moved to a new location. Make sure you update your links and blogrolls accordingly! The address is now: http://www.postmodernclog.com

While we have gone 'round on some serious theological disagreements, kudos to Mark Horne for his well-stated observations on the perniciousness of racism, the Christian's biblical obligation to renounce it, and the paleoconservative movement's need to flush such nonsense out of itself: Some free anonymous advice for a paleo-something blogger friend

Here's a frightening story run on AP and the Washington Post over the weekend that a friend just sent me. If you've been disturbed by the decision-making "process" of the Supreme Court lately, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Conservatives have long known that the Supreme Court has little regard for the American Constitution and the intent of its framers anymore, but it is still jarring to see it stated as baldly as this. According to the story:

The Supreme Court is looking beyond America's borders for guidance in handling cases on issues like the death penalty and gay rights, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Saturday.

As you may have seen, the Court cited international law in the Lawrence and Bollinger cases last month, which drew withering criticism from Justice Antonin Scalia. But according to Justice Ginsburg, this is the way it ought to be. It would be mere chauvinism to believe that Americans ought to be governed by their own laws and their own Constitution.

"Our island or lone ranger mentality is beginning to change," Ginsburg said during a speech to the American Constitution Society, a liberal lawyers group holding its first convention.

Justices "are becoming more open to comparative and international law perspectives," said Ginsburg, who has supported a more global view of judicial decision making.

But she's not done yet. She sends the American Constitution Society out with a word of encouragement:

"While you are the American Constitution Society, your perspective on constitutional law should encompass the world," she told the group of judges, lawyers and students. "We are the losers if we do not both share our experiences with and learn from others."

What world opinion has to do with the U.S. Constitution is a mystery to me, but it does affirm what we already knew: whatever criteria are being used to "interpret" the Constitition at this point, what it actually meant to those who wrote it is not among them.

But hey, on the bright side, at least the Associated Press finally identified someone as a "liberal group."

Okay, it's quiz time again. Who said the following?:

President George W. Bush, squirming like a worm on a hook trying to explain why after 90 days we've found no evidence of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, keeps calling up the past.

"We know Saddam had chemical weapons because he used them on his own people," Bush says quite often with his little-boy smile, as if that explained everything. Of course, what he neglects to mention is that the incident he is referring to occurred in 1988 — 15 years ago. Since then, Iraq has never used chemical or biological weapons on anybody.

Pausing to note the conspicuous absence of the word "nuclear" in the "no evidence" declaration, was it:

A). Howard Dean

B). Reuters

C). Maureen Dowd

D). Molly Ivins

E). Another of the kooks on the "paleoconservative" right

If you answered "E," you're catching on. The article even cites approvingly, as evidence against Bush, a "well documented article" from--get ready for this--an Australian publication called Green Left Weekly. That article goes on to mostly rehash another article from the meticulously well-documented New York Times.

As Discoshaman so excellently pointed out recently, the paleo movement has suddenly woken up a little drunk in bed naked with Noam Chomsky. The fact that this movement is even reading the Green Left Weekly to try to find stuff on George W. Bush shows that it does not have nearly so much to do with "conservatism" as it does with hating the president.

I had forgotten, until I saw it again over the weekend, how terrific Martin Scorcese's seriously underappreciated 1983 film "The King of Comedy" is.

It is a darkly funny, often surrealistic look at celebrity fixation in American culture, and it presciently anticipated where we were headed--in a world before the term "stalker" had become a household word. It's a topic with which Scorcese has more than a passing interest--psychotic drifter John W. Hinkley once shot the President of the United States to impress Jodie Foster, whom he had become obsessed with after seeing her in Scorcese's "Taxi Driver."

"The King of Comedy" is one of Robert DeNiro's finest performances, and Jerry Lewis is suprisingly strong in a straight role as a Johnny Carson-type late night talk show host. Knowing what we know now, it's one of the rare films that's actually better twenty years after it was made.

It also inspired the best line from one of my favorite shows ever. On "The Larry Sanders Show" (Garry Shandling's brilliant, erstwhile, behind-the-scenes satire of late night comedy), sidekick Hank Kingsley begs for a shot guest-hosting in Larry's absence, and is finally granted the opportunity to audition in a test program. When Larry later checks in with producer Artie to see how the disasterous audition has gone, Artie replies to him, "Does the name Rupert Pupkin mean anything to you?"

Okay, the new comments system is up and running, replacing the extortionary scam perpetrated by the godless jackals at SquawkBox.

Happy commenting to all.

Please excuse me for a moment while I post a few words for the benefit of new bloggers doing Google research out there on the SquawkBox comments system:

SquawkBox.tv

Unethical business practices

Rip-off, ripoff, rip off

Scam

Cheat, cheated, cheaters

Extortion racket

Reputation

Unreliable, reliable

Bait and switch

Hijacked

Thank you for your patience. Now back to our regular programming.

After posting a message at Squawkbox's "customer service" forum pointing out that I hadn't really been "asked" to upgrade, and asking just exactly what the policy is on how much usage is considered "heavy," I received this reply:

You have been banned from this forum.

I'm getting a sneaky supicion that they don't really want to talk about this....

The Continuing Saga of the Hijacked Comments System

SquawkBox, instead of communicating by email, has a forum where support questions can be posted. I started a thread over there pointing out that I was a bit nonplussed to find my comments suddenly being held for ransom. I explained that I normally get no more than five comments per day on my blog. Here's part of the response from the kid from Squawkbox:

Typically, 5 posts a day for a week is not sufficient to fall into the "heavy usage" category. It's the aggregate activity on the account since creation, plus various other criteria that determine usage.

In other words, "we make it up as we go along." He then adds:

I hope you can appreciate that by asking people who make sustained/heavy use of the service to upgrade, we can keep the service running for everyone.

Now, apart from the fact that I'm being "asked" to upgrade the way that Charles Lindbergh was "asked" to donate to the Hauptmann family scholarship fund, hadn't he just told me before that five posts a day would not fall into the "heavy usage" category? And what does fall into the "heavy usage" category? Would it be too much to ask that they pull that secret formula out of the vault and let their customers have a look-see at it? Am I paranoid to think that this is the very definition of "arbitrary?"

It's their product, they have a right to be totally arbitrary if they want. But it seems to me like that might not be the best way to build a product or develop a customer base.

As you may have noticed, the jackals at SquawkBox are holding my comments system hostage until I send them some money. I have a free account, but they have decided that I use it too much (though they don't actually tell you how much is too much--they just flip a coin somewhere and pull the plug). Without notice, they simply say "We've decided that we want you to send us money now."

Here's the message you'll receive if you click on the comments box:

This commenting account (SBX-GWPXCDUDJ) has expired.

This means that the account owner has not renewed or upgraded their account. SquawkBox Basic/free accounts must be upgraded if they are heavily used over a prolonged period of time.

Here's the fun of it. How "heavily used?" They don't say! Over how "prolonged [a] period of time"? They don't tell you! Apparently they decide the way the Supreme Court does these days: if it feels heavy and seems prolonged to them, then that's that. I had a lot of activity for 48 hours this week. Evidently that is "prolonged."

Of course, it's free (initially) and it's theirs, so they can do whatever they want with it. Still, good faith would seem to call for at least some honesty and candor up front when bringing people into their system. They could do a six-month free trial, for instance, or set a limit on the number of comments allowable under the free system (and actually tell their customers what it is). But instead, they're more interested in sucking you in for a while and then slamming down the money hammer.

My comments will be down until I can get things straightened out. I apologize for the inconvenience, and I apologize in advance if any or all of your previous comments end up disappearing permanently. (Part of the beauty of pulling the plug in the middle of the night without notice is that the victim cannot back up his comments files. Just a coincidental benefit to them, I'm sure). If I do end up paying for a commenting system, it certainly won't be with SquawkBox. I would take my $22 (or whatever it is) and set it on fire in my front yard before I'd send it to those weasels now.

Tim Berglund, I'd look elsewhere right now if I were you, before they get you dependent on them and then pull their extortion racket.

I'm not a big fan of the president's spending policies so far. However, I am a big fan of the notice I got in the mail yesterday informing me that my child tax credit (read: refund) will be arriving in a few weeks.

Of course, the Democrats are even using this is a club against Bush. They claim it's unfair to the poor, since the poor don't get a check in the mail for their kids.

Which has given me an idea. Tonight, I'm going to go down to Pro Player Stadium and demand a ticket refund from the Marlins. When they ask what game I had tickets for, I'm going to say "What tickets? I didn't buy anything. If you're going to sit there and tell me I had to buy tickets first just to get a ticket refund, you'll be exposing your horrid prejudice against people who can't afford tickets. Tommorrow, I'll have thousands of people down here who've never bought a baseball ticket in their lives to picket you. Now knock off the unfair behavior and give me my refund."

I'll let you know how it goes.

Okay, just a little more fun before we're done. Despite delicate conditions at home, Little Geneva (see controversy below) has boldly posted today's observations. In them, he laments the fact that:

to speak out in this way against Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus or atheists in general elicits little or no protest from fellow Christians.

He then goes on to speak out against...well, I'll let you guess. But I'll give you a hint: it's not Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or atheists in general...again.

But before the rant begins, he provides a little humor to lighten the mood, since things have been too serious lately:

For additional context, it is helpful to know what Martin Luther thought about Jews. (For those who don't know, Lutheranism is the official Christian flavor in Germany.) But first, a little joke from Luther: "Did I not tell you earlier that a Jew is such a noble, precious jewel that God and all the angels dance when he farts?" Yes, that's a real quote from his book On the Jews and Their Lies.

Are your sides splitting with laughter yet? Me too! I'll bet he's got a million of 'em! Or maybe two million at most. Certainly not six million--that would be a gross Zionist exaggeration....