IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776.
THE UNANIMOUS
DECLARATION
OF THE
THIRTEEN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

WHEN, in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's GOD entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the Separation.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their CREATOR, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that Governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.

HE has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.

HE has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

HE has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyranny only.

HE has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures.

HE has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.

HE has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining, in the mean Time, exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convulsions within.

HE has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

HE has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

HE has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.

HE has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance.

HE has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent of our Legislatures.

HE has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

HE has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

FOR quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us:

FOR protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

FOR cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World:

FOR imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

FOR depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury:

FOR transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences:

FOR abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule into these Colonies:

FOR taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

FOR suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.

HE has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection, and waging War against us.

HE has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.

HE is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with Circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.

HE has constrained our Fellow-Citizens, taken Captive on the high Seas, to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

HE has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.

IN every Stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every Act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.

NOR have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them, from Time to Time, of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native Justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our Connexions and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the Rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

WE, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CONGRESS Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connexion between them and the State of Great-Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of Right do. And for the Support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of DIVINE PROVIDENCE, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honour.

John Hancock.
GEORGIA, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, Geo. Walton.
NORTH-CAROLINA, Wm. Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn.
SOUTH-CAROLINA, Edward Rutledge, Thos Heyward, junr. Thomas Lynch, junr. Arthur Middleton.
MARYLAND, Samuel Chase, Wm. Paca, Thos. Stone, Charles Carroll, of Carrollton.
VIRGINIA, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Ths. Jefferson, Benja. Harrison, Thos. Nelson, jr. Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton.
PENNSYLVANIA, Robt. Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benja. Franklin, John Morton, Geo. Clymer, Jas. Smith, Geo. Taylor, James Wilson, Geo. Ross.
DELAWARE, Caesar Rodney, Geo. Read.
NEW-YORK, Wm. Floyd, Phil. Livingston, Frank Lewis, Lewis Morris.
NEW-JERSEY, Richd. Stockton, Jno. Witherspoon, Fras. Hopkinson, John Hart, Abra. Clark.
NEW-HAMPSHIRE, Josiah Bartlett, Wm. Whipple, Matthew Thornton.
MASSACHUSETTS-BAY, Saml. Adams, John Adams, Robt. Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry.
RHODE-ISLAND AND PROVIDENCE, &c. Step. Hopkins, William Ellery.
CONNECTICUT, Roger Sherman, Saml. Huntington, Wm. Williams, Oliver Wolcott.

IN CONGRESS, JANUARY 18, 1777.

ORDERED,
THAT an authenticated Copy of the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCY, with the Names of the MEMBERS of CONGRESS, subscribing the same, be sent to each of the UNITED STATES, and that they be desired to have the same put on RECORD.
By Order of CONGRESS,
JOHN HANCOCK, President.

BALTIMORE, in MARYLAND: Printed by MARY KATHARINE GODDARD.

The oil price has doubled in the past year because the US Federal Reserve panicked over risks to the over-leveraged financial system and flooded markets with excess liquidity. The world is willing to pay arbitrarily high prices to hedge against inflation, but the cost of inflation hedges drags down the world economy. Last week's spike in commodity prices and swoon in global stock markets points the way to a deep and prolonged fall in economic activity.

And here is Forbes:

What is happening now is not demand destruction, it is a financial disaster. The U.S. consumes 21 million barrels of per day. At $135 per barrel, the U.S. spends $1.0 trillion per year on oil, which is equal to 15% of the $6.8 trillion in take-home pay of everyone who pays taxes. If oil prices rose to $200 per barrel, the U.S. would spend $1.5 trillion per year on oil, which would be equal to 22% of take-home pay. Moreover, those percentages of 15% and 22% do not even include the cost of coal or natural gas. In other words, the U.S. will be broke long before oil prices hit $200 per barrel, and the rest of the world would be sure to follow.

Still think it is the speculators driving up the price of oil?  The ever prescient Robert Samuelson explodes that myth in today's must read:

Speculator-bashing is another exercise in scapegoating and grandstanding. Leading politicians either don't understand what's happening or don't want to acknowledge their own complicity. (snip)

Politicians promise to tighten regulation of futures markets, but futures markets aren't the main problem. Scarcities are. Government subsidies for corn-based ethanol have increased food prices by diverting more grain into biofuels. A third of this year's U.S. corn crop could go to ethanol. Restrictions on oil drilling in the United States have reduced global production and put upward pressure on prices. If politicians wish to point fingers of blame, they should start with themselves.

At least McCain is for drilling off-shore and expanding our nuclear energy capacity. Obama and the Democrats seem to be putting all there eggs into the renewable fuel basket.  Only a fool would think that somehow solar and wind energy will even come close to meeting our energy needs in the short, medium and even distant future.  Fossil fuels must remain part (I said part) of the energy solution.  But not if you are the majority leader of the United States Senate, who took a short break from looking for unicorns to unload this whopper:

While Barack Obama was urging supporters not to devalue the military service of rival John McCain, an informal Obama adviser argued Monday that the former POW's isolation during the Vietnam War has hobbled the Arizona senator's capacity as a war-time leader.

“Sadly, Sen. McCain was not available during those times, and I say that with all due respect to him," said informal Obama adviser Rand Beers. "I think that the notion that the members of the Senate who were in the ground forces or who were ashore in Vietnam have a very different view of Vietnam  and the cost that you described than John McCain does because he was in isolation essentially for many of those years and did not experience the turmoil here or the challenges that were involved for those of us who served in Vietnam during the Vietnam war."

One would hope that the rank stupidity of these remarks should be obvious (e.g., McCain had limbs broken, teeth broken, and was subject to brutal physical and mental torture, but he didn't experience the "turmoil" of Vietnam?). 

This is a pattern.  When Bill Clinton ran against legitimate war heroes in George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, military service meant nothing.  When it was Al Gore and John Kerry running against George W. Bush, their Vietnam experience was crucial, indeed for Kerry is was elemental to his campaign.  To even question Kerry's rendition of facts of his service was to "swift boat," now a verb of opprobrium indicating a false and unfair attack (even though even Kerry had to admit that parts of his story were false, namely that the "Christmas in Cambodia" that had been "seared" in his memory never actually happened).  But apparently that truth is no longer operative and today's truth is the John McCain didn't serve in the right way, making him ill equipped to be commander-in-chief. 

From the Jerusalem Post:

Anyone can talk about "supporting our troops"; the McCains serve. McCain's father and grandfather were respected American admirals. Of McCain's four sons, three have gone the military route. One was a Navy pilot like his father, one enlisted in the Marines at age 17 and recently completed a tour in Iraq, and one is completing his education at the Naval Academy (raising the strong possibility that, for the first time in half a century, the United States will have a president with a son at war).

Yet, likely because of those same values, McCain maintains a strict code of silence about his sons' military service, no matter how legitimate his pride or politically useful their military status. Through 2007, McCain was the strongest Senate advocate of vastly increasing troop levels in Iraq, strongly influencing the administration's wildly successful "surge" strategy.

Yet McCain never brought up his own son's service in some of the roughest areas of Iraq. His principled refusal of political advantage from his son's Iraq service extends to refusal even to be interviewed on the subject, or to introduce his son to campaign audiences.

Some experts have told Congress that speculation in oil futures could be adding a $40-a-barrel premium to the price of oil, which translates to about $1 a gallon at the pump.

But critics say that policing the financial markets, much like a windfall profits tax, would do little to increase worldwide oil supplies, which some energy analysts see as the root of the problem.

Would do little?  How about nothing!  How would regulating speculators and taxing oil companies magically make more oil come out of the ground? 

I have often commented that by attacking the oil companies we really injure the average Joe who makes his living in the oil fields.  Attacking oil industry profits won't affect the lifestyle of the Exxon corporate board members, but it might cost a North Dakotan or South Dakotan a job. The high price of oil is causing oil wells in Harding County to open up and money to flow into that sparsely populated part of the state:

For the past few years, rooms at the Tipperary Lodge motel in Buffalo that sat empty in winter have been full.

Truck drivers, road builders and laborers have been busy, and a revenue source for Harding County that brought in about $1.6 million in 2007 already has added $1.4 million to the public coffers this year.

While everyone with a car or truck in South Dakota feels the pain of record fuel prices and President Bush calls for drilling in environmentally sensitive areas that have been off limits to oil exploration for decades, for the little oil patch in the northwest corner of this state the astronomical run up in oil prices has ignited something of a boom.

Read it all here.  You see, when you attack the oil companies you don't hurt the fat cats in Houston, you hurt Diane Haivala, owner of the Tipperary Lodge in Buffalo, SD.

Meanwhile, the oil boom is creating millionaires in North Dakota.

State and industry officials say North Dakota is on pace to set a state oil-production record this year, surpassing the 52.6 million barrels produced in 1984. A record number of drill rigs are piercing the prairie and North Dakota has nearly 4,000 active oil wells.

I wonder how many people those evil oil companies are employing in North Dakota?  I happen to know that there are people from Lemmon, SD who now work in oil fields in North Dakota.  That's oil company profits and speculation putting people to work. 

Here is Joel Dykstra on this issue:

We need to take action to reverse years of neglect by Washington incumbents. We need to open up areas of American territory in Alaska and off-shore to exploration to get more oil and gas flowing to American consumers from American reserves. We are the only country in the world that imports more oil from overseas without utilizing its own God-given resources.
 
Senator Tim Johnson voted at least five times to keep parts of Alaska off-limits to oil exploration. If these areas had been opened instead of blocked we could be using American oil now instead of importing more from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela - two countries who use our dollars to work against American interests around the world.

The divide between philosophy and the natural sciences is deep.  In general, the modern scientist, qua scientist, does not believe that we can say anything authoritative about that which is not measurable and quantifiable.   Thus the complaint, for example, that political science is not a "real science," try as it might to ape the natural sciences.  There is the derision of the humanities as "soft." 

Prof. Blanchard and others are admirably attempting to bridge this gap.  But it does not change the fact that when a modern scientist says America has a "scientific soul," he does not mean we are a nation of Aristotles.  In short, he does not mean by "science" what Prof. Blanchard means. 

I have many times on this site voiced my opposition to the death penalty.  But my view is prudential, not categorical.  In a world confused about the value of human life, I'd prefer that we err for the time being on the side of life even with the worst criminals.  Even if I was categorically opposed to capital punishment I would not be so arrogant or ignorant to suppose that the Constitution prohibits that which it clearly allows.  In short, I would not read my own values into the Constitution.

For a legal analysis of the case, see Scott Johnson, Ed Whelan, Matt Franck, and the editors of National Review. 

Obama's rejection of this decision would be more edifying if this is not exactly the type of decision one can expect from Obama's "living Constitution" judges.  Says Jonah Goldberg:

To his credit — or to the credit of his realpolitik advisers — Obama came out against yesterday's decision. But, that doesn't change the fact that he would appoint judges who would vote the same away and has voted  against judges who voted the right way. 

The 'living Constitution" is one of the hallmarks of the Progressive philosophy.  Let me quote from Sidney Pearson's introduction to Herbert Croly's Progressive Democracy. 

For Croly, the Constitution was a "living Constitution," which is to say that it was not bound by the principles of the Founders.  It could evolve into some other than what the Founders would have intended.  Croly described this as a "strength," but the implications were clear; a "living Constitution" could be interpreted and reinterpreted to the point where the original principles were lost altogether....The virtual elimination of the Constitution as a source of permanent principles was necessary because Croly well understood that as a practical matter there was not likely to be a new Constitutional Convention to draft a new document. (emphasis mine)

Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and other Progressives wished to replace the Constitution with the more enlightened view of their age (the Progressives were not the first nor last to believe that intellectual evolution had peaked with themselves).  This turns the judicial branch from an institution which uses its judgment to an institution that asserts its will.  Thus Obama and others like him don't really have a legal argument against the Court; they merely have a policy disagreement.  And that is what the "living Constitution" does. It turns the Supreme Court into just another policy making body.  So the opinion of five judges overrules the people of Louisiana (to say nothing of the jury), an overruling based on a whim. 

We are now in a legal position where our imperial masters on the Supreme Court believe that a man who perverts his role as a caretaker by raping his young step-daughter has so much dignity that the Constitution forbids the public from executing him.  But, the unborn have so little dignity that the Constitution demands that the public allow women to kill their unborn child for any reason at any point in pregnancy. 

Here is Alexis de Tocqueville, From Democracy in America:

The legislators of the United States, who have mitigated almost all the penalties of criminal law, still make rape a capital offense, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion. This may be accounted for; as the Americans can conceive nothing more precious than a woman's honor and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will. In France, where the same offense is visited with far milder penalties, it is frequently difficult to get a verdict from a jury against the prisoner. Is this a consequence of contempt of decency or contempt of women? I cannot but believe that it is a contempt of both.

This is one of the implications of the Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid," to which I referred yesterday.  The author, Guy Billout, discusses the work of Fredrick Winslow Taylor, who in the late 19th Century timed the activities of various workmen in an attempt to find inefficiencies in their behavior.  Obviously the more efficient they could become in the use of their time the more money was to be made by industry.  Taylor wrote a book, The Principles of Scientific Management, aiming to turn the management of men into a science.  In this way, the worker became almost literally a clockwork man.  When man becomes a mere machine, it is easy to see him as something to be manipulated and conditioned, just as we might manipulate our car engine or computer.

This past weekend in Minnesota I was paging through a book at Barnes and Noble that was worried about the potential loss of America's "scientific soul."  This was another in a long series of "evolution good, intelligent design bad" books, perhaps matched only by the "intelligent design good, evolution bad" books (for the record, I am an "evolution controversy" agnostic).  I seriously doubt American ever had a "scientific soul," and if it did it is a good thing to remove.  When we view humanity simply through the eyes of science it is all too easy to start seeing man as a clockwork machine, a thing to be manipulated for good and for ill.  Man, of course, is a machine of sorts, but not only a machine. 

In a Sherlock Holmes story I listened to during my recent road trip, Holmes laments while in a posh London neighborhood that while his friend Watson can appreciate the beautiful architecture of the homes, Holmes himself can only see places where crimes might take place.  His dedication to his science has made him immune to beauty.  What a pity if that is how we start to see humanity and nature, unable to appreciate their beauty, only able to see a machine.  

He said state officials will return to the Legislature next year to seek money for a fourth year of the laptop program, and they will try to do a better job explaining how important it is.

"Technology, we all agree, is the wave of the future," Dilges said. "We can't afford not to go forward with this."

The idea that "technology is the wave of the future so we have to have laptops" is, frankly, lame.  The least problem our students have is that they are insufficiently adept at computer technology.  All the wizbang technology in the world serves no purpose if our students cannot read, cannot carry on a sustained thought, and cannot do math.  Laptops are of no use for any of these skills. 

It just so happens that my column today in the American News is on this subject, focusing on Mark Bauerlein's Dumbest Generation book.  If I may quote myself (and I may):

Graphic-heavy software and Web sites do little to raise the vocabulary of young people. The complexity of the written word and the plot intricacy of novels, even pulp novels, build vocabulary while encouraging contemplation and complexity of thinking.

But computers, video games and television, Bauerlein writes, condition the mind “against quiet, concerted study, against imagination unaided by visuals, against linear, sequential analysis of texts, against an idle afternoon with a detective story and nothing else.”

It is no accident that the National Association of Manufacturers lists low reading and writing skills as the No. 2 deficiency of employees.

Read the whole thing.  Also, read the Atlantic Monthly piece "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" to which Prof. Blanchard referred recently.  The piece is a little longer, so if you are the typical internet user you might struggle to get through it.  Leonard Pitts has some thought on that article here.  The author of the piece, Guy Bilout, writes:

[University College London researchers] found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

(snip)
“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Obama has done the right and honorable thing by not accepting public funding.  For far too long politicians from both sides have taken advantage of U.S. taxpayers in fuding their campaigns.  I would think that Conservatives, "True Conservatives" would actually aplaud the Obama move on not accepting campaign contribuitions.  But, alas, they keep proving me wrong as usual.  Nothing new here. 

Of course, the complaint from conservatives is not the fact that Obama is opting out of public financing.  I and many (probably most) conservatives do not believe in the public financing scheme.  I am with GG that politicians should not use the tax payers to fund their campaigns.  I have yet to read  criticism of Obama from a conservative on this issue based on some conservative support for public financing of elections.  GG is just making that up.  Perhaps, though, GG should have a talk with his candidate, who said in rejecting public money, "It's not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections." So GG doesn't even agree with his candidate, but, as we see, his candidate's actions don't match the candidate's words.  I guess that's what GG calls "right and honorable."  Others might call it expedient. 

This is the criticism.  Obama claims to be a new politician, open and honest with the people.  A man of his word.  But what has he done? Via Yahoo News.

Last year, Obama filled out a questionnaire where he vowed to "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election." But since clinching the Democratic nomination earlier this month, Obama has not broached the subject with McCain. The only discussion occurred about two weeks ago between Obama's and McCain's lawyers,

Obama lawyer Robert Bauer said he discussed the public financing issue for 45 minutes on June 6 with McCain counsel Trevor Potter. In interviews and e-mails, both Bauer and Potter agree that Bauer raised concerns about McCain having a head start because he had secured the nomination in early March and Obama did not until June 3. Potter said he told Bauer that given Obama's fundraising "I was sure there would be no McCain advantage by the end of the summer."

That meeting, Potter said, "was not part of any negotiation" on public financing.

"There was no aggressive pursuit of negotiations with the McCain campaign, there was no pursuit, period, of negotiations with the McCain campaign," Potter added later in a conference call with reporters.

Obama wants all the appearances of being a new politician without actually acting like one.  Relatedly, he apparently is now claiming that he "extended health care for wounded troops who had been neglected" even though he didn't even vote on the bill he cites as evidence.  Whoops. 

To be clear, Obama's rejection of public financing is a smart move.  He has a fundraising and organization edge over McCain.  His prodigious fund raising is a sign of his broad support.  There is nothing dirty in not accepting public funds or being strategic in one's choices.  Yet, Obama did say he would take public funds and now has rejected those funds when they are inconvenient to him. This is a pattern with Obama: take the bold stance until it thwarts his ambitions, and then chuck his alleged principles overboard.  All politicians change their positions from time to time, and certainly electoral considerations take part in this calculation.  I for one hope John McCain changes his position on drilling in ANWR.  But Obama's actions just go to prove what I said yesterday: Obama claims to be a new politician, but in actuality he is just like the old.  So it is worth pointing out that one of his fundamental campaign themes is a house built on sand. 

Obama argued that he'd meet unconditionally with our enemies, but when he came under attack for that position he said he'd have "preparation," but not "preconditions," as if  there is a difference. 

He argued that Iran was no significant threat to the U.S., but then when criticized he backtracked saying that he has always thought that Iran posed a "grave" threat to the U.S.

He railed against NAFTA while having his surrogates assure the Canadians that  he didn't mean it. 

He recently called for an "undivided" Jerusalem, but when he found out that those are fighting words in the Middle East he had to back off. 

He swore his fidelity to public financing of presidential campaigns until that became inconvenient so now he has forsaken such financing. 

He says he won't be swayed by the special interests and greedy corporations, but, according to Brooks, he has a "phalanx" of corporate leaders bundling money for him. 

He tells us that he won't make promises he can't keep, yet he also promises $900 billion in new spending with only $40 billion in new revenue, all the while insisting that he'll balance the budget. 

He was opposed to the war in Iraq in 2002, but in 2004 he said his position was pretty much the same as George Bush's, and now of course he claims to be the pure anti-war candidate. 

He tells audiences that he is for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, but is apparently telling members of the Iraqi government that he won't act too quickly. 

He claims to have a new politics, but he is a conventional liberal, ranked the most liberal member of the US Senate by National Journal.

Relatedly, he claims to offer a new politics, but he is a product of the corrupt Daley machine in Chicago, hiring Daley's right-hand man, David Axelrod, as his spokesperson.  He got a sweetheart deal on a $4 million mansion from corrupt Chicago business man Tony Rezko.  But Obama says he is shocked to find out Rezko is a criminal. 

He makes claims to "post-partisanship," yet he has voted with his party 97% of the time in the US Senate.  You almost can't get any more partisan.  One reason he talks so much about the ethics bill he supported is that it represents the only evidence of bipartisanship he has and is the only piece of significant legislation he has any association with.

He claims to offer bold leadership, but as Brooks documents, throughout his career he has avoided making tough votes, choosing instead to vote "present."   

He claims that he sat in the seats at Trinity Christian "every Sunday" yet was unaware that his pastor was an anti-American racial separatist.  He said he could no more disown his pastor than he could his own family, but he then disowned his pastor only weeks later.

Obama is just like other politicians, only a lot more charming and not quite as competent at governing.   

Franken's foibles have now made the Washington Post in a column by Michael Gerson.  Gerson considers the notion that Franken is engaged in serious comedy, the activity of the satirist:

Satire has been called "punishment for those who deserve it." Writers from Erasmus to Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have used humor, irony and ridicule to expose the follies of the powerful, the failures of blind ideology and the comic weakness of human nature itself.

So what is Franken's "provocative, touching and funny" contribution to the genre? Consider his article in Playboy magazine titled "Porn-O-Rama!" in which he enthuses that it is an "exciting time for pornographers and for us, the consumers of pornography." The Internet, he explains, is a "terrific learning tool. For example, a couple of years ago, when he was 12, my son used the Internet for a sixth-grade report on bestiality. Joe was able to download some effective visual aids, which the other students in his class just loved." Franken goes on to relate a soft-core fantasy about women providing him with sex who were trained at the "Minnesota Institute of Titology."

Orwell would be so proud.

"Porn-O-Rama!" is a modern campaign document every voter should read -- the Federalist Papers of lifestyle liberalism. It has the literary sensibilities and moral seriousness of an awkward adolescent nerd publishing an underground newspaper to shock his way into campus popularity. But, in this case, the article was written in 2000 by a 48-year-old man.

As they say, read the whole thing.

An important distinction to be made here is between public and private vulgarity or crudity.  Most men (and probably quite a few women) have been around and perhaps engaged in what we can call "locker room" conversation.  Crude, off-color humor is often part of this jocularity.  It is one thing to do this in private, away from the public ear.  It is another to present is an acceptable mode of public discourse, as the way adults talk to each other.  Gerson is correct; Franken uses his freedom of speech they way an adolescent would: to say naughty words and giggle at them. Franken appeals to the low in us, not the noble. 

Franken's sex talk appears to sink to the level of the puerile, never to rise again.  This is not to say sex jokes are never appropriate. Shakespeare has plenty of sex jokes (think of the bawdy talk from Mercutio and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet). But this bawdy talk serves a purpose, to prevent us from talking sex too seriously, either over-romanticizing it or over analyzing it.  In either case, Shakespeare's bawdy talk serve to provoke thought, Franken's to end it. 

As Gerson suggests, Franken's endorsement by his party likely serves to lower the quality of our discourse. Franken's humor is not just vulgar, it is mean.  The word "mean" literally has the connotation of small or petty (as in "no mean feat").  Franken makes us smaller, a lesser people.  His election would represent a loss for simple decency. 

The Democrats targeted the current office holder, Sen. Norman Coleman, as one of the easiest targets.  Perhaps they nominated one man capable of losing to Coleman.  Either way, whether Franken gains the seat or not, the Democrats come out as losers.  They either lose an election or their dignity. 

OMAHA, Neb. -- A Labrador retriever lived up to its name Friday when he plucked his 12-year-old owner out of the Platte River, near North Bend.

Tony Bailey can usually swim in the river, but recent rains have pushed it up higher than normal and whipped up unusual currents. When Tony jumped into the Platte on Friday, he was quickly sucked in.

"It was, like, over my head and I couldn't touch," he said.

He was only a few feet away from the shore, but the river current was strong enough that it was pulling him down and under. He said his cries for help weren't being heard by anyone, except Jake, the 4-year-old Lab.

"I was saying, 'Help, help,' and I saw him jump in, and then my head went under, and when I came up, he was right here by me," Tony said.

Tony said the dog swam out next to him and he grabbed the dog's neck. The dog swam back to shore with the boy in tow.

Follow the link above for video about Jake the Wonder Dog. 

I am currently writing this post at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, IL.  The use of a laptop and a wireless connection allows me to do this.  On our trip down here from Aberdeen, we listened to an excellent version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles, downloaded from emusic and played on an Ipod.  We found our way around using the GPS device on my cell phone and kept up with Iowa flood information with the cell phone and computer.  Today I needed to run an errand in Springfield.  I simply typed "Walmart" into Verizon Navigator on my phone. It found the nearest Walmart in Springfield and told me how to get there.  I also listened to part of yesterday's Dennis Prager show today while at the library.  Technology does make our lives more convenient and enjoyable.

On the other hand, today I held letters written by Ulysses Grant and William T. Sherman.  That doesn't suck either.  Tomorrow I plan on doing more of the tourist thing in Springfield.  I am sure all readers eagerly await the report. 

This picture is taken from the car on I-80 in Des Moines.  As you can see there is a baseball park under water.  The water was precariously close to the interstate here.

Just outside of Des Moines we stopped for gas in the town of Colfax.  A fork of the Skunk River (hopefully not named for its smell) had flooded.  The gal at Caseys said that the river had crested, but still seemed to be rising.  The road heading off the interstate was closed one mile from here, according to signs.  Here are a couple pictures from the Caseys store. 

As I said, we crossed Old Man River at Burlington, IA.  I have never been to this town, but it appears to be a beautiful, quaint river town.  This weekend they were to have their river fest.  Instead they appear to be sand bagging and putting up barriers.  Naturally all the water from the flooding to the north of here eventually ends up in the Mississippi.  The Mississippi is already over its banks here, and getting higher.  The first picture is of what used to be a street.  Now it is under water, with concrete barriers and sandbags bordering it. 

And here is the municipal auditorium. This is to the left (roughly east) of the picture above.  The parking lot is all under water and they have barricaded the entrance to keep some of the water out.  This looks like an old historic building.  Let's hope it makes it through this with minimal damage.
 
Up river, to the north, is this building, which is essentially right in front of where I was photographing.

This is the bridge across the river.  As you can see, on the Illinois side, the river is getting close to the bottom of the bridge.

These pictures were taken Saturday afternoon.  Who knows what has happened since.  One can assume the the river has gotten higher.  As I said, we turned south just west of Iowa City.  Unfortunately, this is what we saw to the north, right where the flooding is the worst (yes, this picture was taken by me while driving on the interstate at over 70 MPH):
 

The forbidden-laptop zone is territory into which few professors dare tread. Students have been known to protest when laptops are banned from a classroom, and even claim that they are being denied a proper education. Professors who have taken the bold step, though, sound like they've experienced an epiphany.

"Not only was I stunned by how much better the class was, the students volunteered that it was much better." says Don Herzog, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. He tried a one-day ban as an experiment.

When Mr. Herzog returns to teaching this fall, after a sabbatical term, he plans to keep the machines out of his class for good.

I take it that the situations talked about in this article are those where students bring their own laptops to class (the story concentrates on law schools).  So what if you had a regime where students were forced to purchase or lease laptops and the curriculum was redesigned to suit the laptop?  That'd go against the experience of a growing number of schools as well as individual teachers and professors. 

Are we seeing the end of freedom in Canada?  Will the good men be punished while the bad prosper?

Will we change the way we live due to high fuel prices?  Rod Dreher and Prof. Deneen see a return to thrift.    I especially commend Deneen's post.  Will our politics see the rise of real conservatives, those who are not mere cheerleaders for consumption?

We are now in the midst of a great redefinition of what it means to conserve, and the people who seem still not to have gotten the message are most of our "conservatives" who are defending nothing other than the legacy of Woodrow Wilson (including a good deal of his international dream of world democracy) - the utopian vision of Progress that requires no costs and has no consequences.

Note that by throwing "conservatives" in with Woodrow Wilson, Deenen has no special love for the left.  His argument is that both conservatives and liberals worship the god Progress, and he is a false god.

Will the end of cheap oil mean the end of the New South?  Unable to pay for the air conditioning that makes the South livable, maybe people will head north.

Maybe Cory is right and we will change the way buy food.  Maybe the era of big agriculture is over.  The Monsantos of the world will give way to local producers. For more on this, see lawyer Epp's article on intellectual property in agriculture.   My thanks to Todd for passing it along. 

Maybe we'll see the rise of nuclear Iran, sitting on the second biggest oil deposit in the world.

But there is no reason why the President of the United States should not talk to any leader in the world as long as we negotiate from a position of strength and don't expect too much.  If Churchill and Roosevelt can talk to Stalin, Obama can talk to Chavez (recognizing important dissimilarities between the two examples).  The tyrant only gains stature if the President treats him as an equal, which he doesn't have to do.  It might do some good for a Pres. Obama to have a press conference with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and publicly denounce Ahmadinejad's antisemitism and Holocaust denial. 

Similarly, McCain's proposal for a League of Democracies is a brilliant stroke. 

Meanwhile, last month Mr. McCain addressed the fellows of the Hoover Institution, telling them he would in his first year "call a summit of the world's democracies" to "start bringing democratic peoples and nations from around the world into one common organization, a worldwide League of Democracies."

Mr. McCain's idea stems from an understanding that the utopian principles of the United Nations, forged by Franklin Roosevelt in the dying days of World War II, have been persistently betrayed by its nation members and its bureaucracy, leaving it in a state of discredited, sclerotic impotence.

The problem with the United Nations is that is does not speak for the people of the world; it speaks for the governments of the world, only some of which can legitimately claim to speak for their people.  For example, the Bush Administration is chided for not getting UN approval for the war in Iraq, perhaps rightly so.  Yet, precisely what moral legitimacy stems from getting the approval of China and Russia?  And if those authoritarian governments refuse to give approval, how does that make one's efforts less legitimate (granted, failing to get French approval is more problematic)? 

The Bush team might have been wrong about the presence of massive quantities of WMDs in Iraq, but it does [not] mean it lied about it.  But to accept the "wrong" versus the "lie" version, one has to start thinking about how intelligence is gathered, how intelligence is interpreted, and how intelligence is disseminated.  But for the left, for whom hatred for George Bush looms high as their motivation for everything, these questions about intelligence are too, well, boring, and don't fit with the storyline that Bush is malicious and evil.

Yes, digging out this old post I found an egregious typo, a rather important "not" missing from the first sentence.  What seems accurate, though, is that both the president and Congress looked at the intelligence provided to them and concluded that Saddam had WMDs.  As I pointed out here in 2005, people from the Clinton administration originally supported the war, including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore.  Unless you believe the facts changed rapidly from January 2001 to September 2002 (when Bush first started articulating his case for war), Bush had largely the same intelligence they had when they were in the White House and came to the same conclusions. 

And it even seems a bit dubious to say that no WMDs were found.  What we know from the Kay report and from statements from captured Iraqis, including Saddam Hussein, is that the WMD capabilities were there, if not the WMDs.  Saddam's strategy was to keep his programs ready for re-initiation at a moment's notice while he waited for the world to tire of watching him. While no large stockpiles existed, the capacity to quickly create those stockpiles did. 

Nonetheless, our intelligence agencies produced estimates that were widely off the mark.  This goes to show what I have argued many times, namely that one should not base strategic decisions on intelligence.  The world of intelligence is inherently murky and uncertain.  If Bush made an error it was basing the war on intelligence  rather than a spirited defense of American strategic interests.

On a final note, what motivates Senate Democrats to release a report so obviously political in nature and false in its reporting during an election year?  In years past, the Bush administration took considerable heat for using the war to its political advantage.  Will the same happen here?  Will we remember that Tim Johnson once called the intelligence leading up to the war "obviously fabricated," a statement by Johnson that itself was obviously fabricated?  One doesn't hold out much hope.