Though the link to Valentine’s relics was appealing (see last post), let me offer you a better Valentine’s Day post even though you will probably see it the day after. Here’s a fun, artsy video of Anderson & Roe playing their arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”

I’ll be short tonight, I’m afraid. I have a dentist appointment coming up (God bless a dentist who schedules evening hours!), with all the gladness and merriment inherent therein.

By way of The View From the Foothills, here’s a neat little utility to clean up your computer desktop.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Although he’s one of the great heroes of my life, I’ve gotten into the habit of arguing against him in recent years. For instance, I consider his constitutional argument extremely weak.

And yet…

And yet, he operated from a transcendent vision of America. He truly believed that this country was the laboratory of the future, that a better world was being created in these states. Nothing, he believed, should be permitted to destroy what was being done here. Slavery was a double threat, first because it made a mockery of the American vision, and second, because it was a political threat to national unity and purpose. Abolitionists derided him as a weakling because he wasn’t prepared to go straight in and get it abolished. He preferred a gradual, peaceful approach. That approach became impossible, and so he made the fateful decision to go to war to preserve the Union.

He himself was the living embodiment of the American dream. He’d been born in a dirt-floored cabin, to people who many considered only marginally human. He’d taken the opportunities this country gave him and used them to rise to the highest office in the land. He believed that everyone should have the same opportunities, and he never wavered from that commitment. In the end he died for it.

I’ve been to his birthplace, one childhood home, New Salem, his Springfield home, the White House, Ford’s Theatre and his tomb. I can’t get free of the man, and I don’t want to.

Sometimes the road goes ever ever on; sometimes it runs under a landslide. New Line Cinemas’ plans to produce “The Hobbit” and another “Lord of the Rings” prequel film could have a big road block. The Tolkien estate and HarperCollins are suing the production company for royalities never paid.

Joe Carter is doing a four parter on saving conservative political discourse and policies in today’s more-hostile-than-yesterday climate. First, stop the bleeding, he says. Next, let’s kill all the lawyers. No, we’ll do that later. Next, start the breathing.

I don’t know that Joe nails in on every point, but he’s close to the mark. It seems to me there are well-defined conservative ideas and there are well-established conservative people who may or may not hold the conservative position on a certain issue. Calling the person a liberal would be unfair, even if you could make a case for his position on the one issue being a liberal position. That is McCain’s problem, as I understand it. It doesn’t matter to may voters and commentators I suppose that the American Conservative Union gives him an 80+% lifetime conservative record. It matters that on the issues McCain has taken leadership, he has led in a liberal direction. You could easily believe he voted with conservatives on their issues out of party loyalty instead of principle, so as president he would be more likely to lead according to his less than conservative principles.

But I’ll vote for him anyway–at least at this point. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

I want to be a good steward of my part of the earth. I think I always have. My parents taught me the evils of littering and some of the joys of gardening. I learned other joys on my own. All of my married life we have kept the house warm in the summer and cool in the winter to save energy (and perhaps our air conditioner). We’ve taught our girls not to waste water, especially during the last several months of the drought, and for watering our house plants we have collected rain water. I know I could do more, but it’s a challenge when it seems everything we’re told about saving the environment is hype and lies.

The latest is National Geographic’s upcoming special, “Six Degrees Could Change the World.” Will the ocean rise 80 feet? You can stop it by turning off your TV and recycling it. It’s an energy hog.

The magazine site states, “Obviously, the most straightforward way to stop the frighteningly rapid rate of climate change is to reduce humans’ output of carbon dioxide by 60 to 80 percent.” So do your part by breathing less, please.

I’ll try to heed Mr. McCain’s advice by calming down, but I hope if he is elected president, he won’t make me change my light bulbs. I don’t want the Department of Energy telling me I can’t use incandescent light bulbs when the alternatives, compact florescent bulbs, really aren’t much better. Their light spectrum is different than the one put off by incandescents, and what is this about special recycling? I can’t put them in the trash can? Is that on the packaging?

Sweden is supposed to be leading the way on this front, but apparently the great Swedish recycling success is as shaky as Ivar Kreuger’s wealth. I’m disenchanted. Who do you believe?

Back in November, NASA reported on its study of the Arctic Ocean. “Our study confirms many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming,” said the lead scientist from the University of Washington. And yet just last week NPR had a spot on a cruise of Antarctica which tried convince us that the cracking glacial ice was our fragile earth breaking up under our feet. I wonder if they question the cracking sounds in their freezers.

Environmentalists have no credibility with me, which is why I’m frustrated with our government’s refusal to drill for oil in the arctic wasteland and their capitulation on so many other points with people who appear to be striving for American failure, third world poverty, and in some cases the termination of undesirable people. What’s a descent steward of creation to do?

Things are looking better and brighter now. I’m not referring to the weather forecast, which calls for a cold snap over the weekend, but to my personal psychological climate. Yesterday’s storms have largely passed. You want to know more? Well, if you insist…



The first thing that got me down yesterday was Romney’s withdrawal speech at CPAC. I wasn’t enamored of him as a candidate, but he seemed to me the best of the field. I think my dislike for McCain, like that of many conservatives, is mostly feelings-based. He bugs me, and I’m pretty sure I’d bug him if he knew me. I suspect that whenever he finds an excuse to give the Christian Right a wedgie, he goes away from the finished task with a warm feeling of having made the country a better place.

That said, I’m really tired of the people who call into radio shows and bark that McCain’s a liberal and they’d rather see Clinton or Obama in the White House. You have to live in a very bizarre alternate reality, it seems to me, to say that. I’d rather hire a guy who does his job well and cares about the welfare of my business, but gives me a hard time now and then, than hire a guy who’s polite and empathetic and keeps giving the stock away.

I like hyperbole as a satiric technique. I’ve been a big fan of Ann Coulter’s until recently. But some people seem to be taking their own hyperbole seriously.

If I wanted to be a member of the Silly Party, I’d register as a Democrat. Continue reading Thursday post-mortem →

Sorry I can’t do a proper post tonight. I’m having a rather bad day (nothing terrible or life-threatening, just a pile of aggravations that ganged up on me all at once), and I’ll spend the evening putting out little fires. Metaphorically, of course.

Scholar Meir Soloveichik notes, “[T]he careful reader of the Bible and the Talmud cannot but conclude that the spirit of the law, if not the letter, is quite clear: Jewish men are encouraged to have beards.” Why? It has to do with a visible rejection of pagan hopes for immortality apart of the Lord of creation.

“By forbidding Jews to destroy their hair, the Bible warns them away from seeking the siren song of eternal youth. By encouraging Jews to grow beards, it reminds them that they will not be young forever, that they must prepare the ground for those who come after, just as their fathers did for them.” Is that why you wear your beard? (Thanks to Abe Greenwald)

The historical angle in this column by Tony Blankley is pretty interesting. He describes the men in the current GOP nomination process and looks at McCain’s potential nomination in light of the Goldwater campaign in 1964. No, no, it’s not that boring. Read it.

We were losing the decisive California primary until a few days before the vote, when Nelson Rockefeller’s new young second wife, “Happy” Murphy Rockefeller, gave birth to little Nelson Jr. — reminding social conservatives of his previous, presumed adultery. Goldwater won by a thin 2 percent.

We went on to the Cow Palace Convention in San Francisco, where we Goldwaterites and Rockefeller exchanged vulgar, angry epithets. Rockefeller, Mitt’s dad, George Romney, and other moderates refused to support Goldwater. Some moderates formed “Republicans for Lyndon Johnson.”

Will history repeat itself with the sides reversed?

I’m feeling low tonight. I think I may be suffering from chicken soup fatigue. And the whole thing’s frustrating. All winter I’ve been trying to get on a workout regimen, using my Nordic Track, and every time I get to where I’m starting to feel the benefits, I come down with another cold. And by the time I’ve recovered I’m back to square one.

Also I suppose I’m feeling guilty because I won’t be attending the Minnesota caucuses tonight. I’m staying away out of principle, you understand. The caucus system is a transparent attempt by The Man to disenfranchise the Avoidant-American community, and I refuse to prop up such an unjust system.

I’ve been listening to talk radio, too, and the calls have convinced me that both of the Republican frontrunners are probably Communist moles. Possibly alien pod people.

Anyway, if you haven’t checked Joe Carter’s Evangelical Outpost today, he has a great post on the true story of Galileo and the Inquisition. It’s not what they told you on the Discovery Channel. The reality was a lot more complicated, and Galileo wasn’t any martyr to science.

He’d have probably caucused, too. The sellout.