If you suffer from The Urge to Regulate, don’t watch the above video of San Francisco’s Market Street, taken a few days before the earthquake in 1906. Watch the one below, instead, taken in 2005. It will be easier on you. (If you suffer from the opposite malady, think about the unregulated buildings that were damaged in the earthquake.)
Washington Post headline: Abortion could be sleeper issue in Supreme Court confirmation process.
Wow. I’ve been away on a bicycle outing and haven’t had time to learn anything about Elena Kagan yet. But she must be really bad if the Obama administration is trying to use the abortion issue to distract attention.
Does anyone else remember when President Obama was against special interests? Seems like it was just yesterday.
Battle Creek Enquirer News item:
In a major victory for organized labor, unions will have an easier time signing up airline and railroad workers after the Obama administration today changed a 76-year-old rule on union elections.
The change is the most significant so far in a string of White House moves designed to boost unions, which are struggling to reverse years of decline in membership.
From an AP article at the Battle Creek Enquirer titled, “Court official: Militia members can be traced 24/7”:
The militia members are charged with conspiring to overthrow the government. They remain in custody, although a judge wants to release them.
A comment I posted in response:
A judge wants to release them??? Do we know that? We know that a judge ruled that they should be released, but that doesn’t mean that the judge wants to release them.
Your AP writer demeans our judicial system when s/he ascribes judicial rulings to the personal preferences of judges.
Today I got an e-mail from the Moonbat.org people with the subject line, “John: Save the soul of the Democratic Party.”
And then I read the message and found in the very first paragraph that they want me to send $5.
Isn’t that a lot like the indulgences that Martin Luther railed against?
The Senate primary in Arkansas is our best hope to save the soul of the Democratic Party and win real change in Washington. Every Democrat in Washington is watching to see whether corporate lobbyists or grassroots progressives will prevail. And this is the last chance to help out – the Halter campaign is making their final spending decisions in 24 hours. So we need at least 3 donations from Battle Creek today. Can you chip in $5?
Lyndal Roper says this pair of statues in the city market at Wittenberg is “disconcerting.” The wide-bodied man in the foreground is Martin Luther. The narrower one further away is Philipp Melanchthon. She refers to the statues in her essay in the April issue of American Historical Review, Martin Luther’s Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers:
The two Reformation heroes tower over the meat stands and vegetable stalls like two caged giants. But the effect of their being seen side by side like this, even with the nineteenth-century attempts to minimize the difference, is disastrous: the stout Luther confronts the cadaverous Melanchthon.
But her article, although it includes many portraits of the “stout” Dr. Luther, doesn’t feature a photo of the statues. It was harder to find one on Google than I would have expected, but I came up with the above from someone who seems to have vacationed in Wittenberg. (Click on it to go to his gallery at WebShots.)
The essay really is about Luther’s large physical body.
Luther was stoutly built. Saints and pious clerics tend, on the whole, to come in Melanchthonian shape, their thinness underlining their indifference to the temptations of the flesh.
Luther was not only different, especially as he grew older, but his iconographers found it important to picture him that way. It’s a good fit with Lutheran theology, too, and its treatment of the relationship between body and spirit.
You could say that Luther was a “get in touch with you body/listen to your body” kind of guy. He especially was in touch with its digestive and excretory functions. When it came to the latter, he recommended that the devil listen to his body, too. Roper calls it “integrating his anality into his theology”:
…Luther is able to joke about both the devil and excrement, and he integrates his anality into his theology rather than just projecting it onto others.
But he was more than anal. Even in something like the Eucharist, he saw no reason to give up the physicality of it, no matter how ae-reasonable it might seem.
Luther’s physicality was integrally connected to some of his deepest theological insights. It was central to his rejection of monasticism and its abhorrence of sexuality, eating, and drinking. It was also, one might suggest, profoundly linked to his intransigence on the issue of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, making it impossible for him to compromise with Ulrich Zwingli at Marburg and to find common cause against the Catholics, however advantageous to the movement that might have been. His insistence on the physical materiality of the Eucharist divided him from both Catholics and Zwinglians: for Catholics, the bread appears to be bread, but its essence is transformed into the body of Christ; for Zwinglians, the bread remains bread, but it symbolizes the body of Christ; for Luther, the bread was at once a material thing and the body of Christ. Tellingly, when Zwingli and Luther debated the issue, Zwingli adduced John 6:63: “The flesh profiteth nothing.” Luther’s position is well conveyed in the words attributed to him at Marburg: “The word says that Christ has a body. This I believe. The word says that the body of Christ ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God. This I also believe. The word says that this same body is in the Supper, and I believe this. Why should I discuss whether it is outside of a place or in a place? This is a mathematical argument. The word of God is above it, for God created mathematics and everything. He commands us to have faith in this matter.” Even if human rationality cannot comprehend how it is that Christ can be present in the bread and the wine, it remained true, Luther argued; it was a theological truth surpassing reason. It is surely not too farfetched to connect this insistence on the materiality of the Eucharist and the reality of Christ’s presence to Luther’s generally positive attitude toward the physical.
Roper is said to be working on a biography of Luther. I look forward to reading it when it comes out.
URL here even though it doesn’t do much good unless you have a subscription to AHR.
My comment on an article at the WSJ titled, “The ACLU Approves Limits on Speech.”
If there are such limits [on corporate campaign contributions], then congressional earmarks need to count as corporate campaign contributions. Not only that, but if a member of Congress gets to identify himself with a DOE grant or USDA grant in his state or district, e.g. by putting his name on press releases about it, then that needs to count as a corporate campaign contribution as well.
That will help even the playing field between incumbents and uppity upstarts. But even with that, we still need congressional term limits.
We could call it the O.J. Senate. Just as O.J. Simpson combed the Florida golfcourses looking for the real killer of Nicole Brown Simpson, Carl Levin has hauled Goldman Sachs into a Senate hearing room so he can look for the real villains in the financial meltdown. (His office can’t be that far away from Chris Dodd’s and Barney Frank’s, can it?)
When I heard about Marlin Stutzman’s campaign to become a Senator from Indiana, and then learned that he is a farmer from from Howe, I thought it might be good to support his campaign — even send him a campaign contribution.
Howe is one day’s bicycle ride from my home. Sometimes I camp at one or the other of two nearby campgrounds on my way to points further south. I’ve ridden on a lot of the roads in all directions from Howe, so I snooped on the Internet to find out just where Stutzman lived, in case it was a road that was familiar to me. After doing this search I think I’ve identified a rare stretch of road on which I haven’t yet ridden — the one where the Stutzmans live. But I think you would get to his home if you followed the road pictured above. It’s a photo I took on a day ride a few Saturdays ago on Mongoquinong Prairie, east of Howe. The town is barely visible in the distance. For all I know, the Stutzmans may farm some of the land shown in the photo. It’s close enough to their home that it might be feasible.
Unfortunately, while I would certainly vote for Stutzman if I lived in Indiana, I came away from his website with a sense of weary disappointment. It’s as though he’s just following one of the standard Republican formulas — pushing some of the standard buttons. It’s one of the better formulas, I suppose — at least it’s one of the more conservative ones — but it’s not good enough considering the unprecedented threat to our country and to human rights around the world that is posed by the Obama Juggernaut.
Here are my comments on some of the statements on the web site:
– He authored and voted for legislation that cut wasteful government spending, and streamlined state bureaucracies.
The problem is that streamlining state bureaucracies isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes it means removing necessary checks and making the regulatory process more corrupt.
– In 2008 he voted to pass the largest Property Tax Cut in state history.
– In eight years at the State House, he has never cast a vote for deficit spending, and has only cast votes for truly balanced budgets, stating, “The government must be limited and learn to tighten its fiscal belt just like Hoosiers have to do every day.”
No problem with this part. The concept of limits needs to be emphasized more often.
– He sponsored bills requiring education dollars to go directly to the classroom and less to administrative costs.
Homeland Security
I wish it was stated how he did this. I don’t know how this can be done except by decentralizing the educational system — breaking up larger districts and educational units into smaller ones. If he did that, he’s got something to brag about. Otherwise, I’d be suspicious that this is something like the paperwork reduction acts of the federal government that resulted in additional paperwork to certify compliance.
– In 2006 He co-sponsored HEA 1722 offering tax credits to bio-fuel producers which helped to bring 12 new bio-fuel plants to Indiana from ’02 – ’07.
This is the most disappointing part. Being a grain farmer I’m sure he can see the bright side to bio-fuels. But if he was a principled conservative, he’d want market forces, not subsidies, to make them work.
Back in the Gingrich days, it was rural congresspersons who wouldn’t give up their subsidies who were instrumental in destroying the one chance we had to bring government spending under control and within constitutional limits. I blame these subsidies, because in order to get support for those subsidies, rural representatives have to in turn support much of the leftist agenda. Withdraw that piece, and the whole corrupt house of cards will come tumbling down.
A rural Senator who could propose a plan to wean us off those subsidies would be extremely dangerous to leftwing hegemony. A Senator who did that would need good communication skills and tact to explain this to his farmer constituents and persuade them that it’s in the whole country’s long-term interest. He’d also need the wit to parry the attacks of the celebrity/media/left. Such a Senator would be a force to be reckoned with. But I don’t see any big difference coming from the platform that Stutzman lays out, especially given this part.
So I wish him well, but it’s hard to work up any great enthusiasm.
Oh, his web site also doesn’t say anything about repealing Obama care. Like I said, it’s hard to work up any great enthusiasm.
These are from a WSJ editorial, “On Presidential Rhetoric : Obama’s ad hominem method and the politics of polarization.”