Does the destruction of human embryos amount to murder? White House spokesman Tony Snow put this question on the front burner last week when he described President Bush’s position as follows: “The president believes strongly that for the purpose of research it’s inappropriate for the federal government to finance something that many people consider murder. He’s one of them. The simple answer is he thinks murder’s wrong” (source).
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Bill Frist’s Incoherent Position on Embryonic Stem Cell Research
Senator Bill Frist is a political conservative. He is a Republican. He claims to be pro-life. And he is dead wrong on embryonic stem cell research.Senator Frist contributed an opinion editorial to the Washington Post on Tuesday titled “Meeting Stem Cells’ Promise — Ethically.” In this piece he makes an absolutely morally incoherent argument in favor of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Why is his argument incoherent? Because he claims to hold the pro-life convction that from conception all life has value, yet at the same time he claims that some of those valuable lives can and should be killed. In the first paragraph, he asserts his pro-life…
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Media Bias? Yeah, so what?
E. J. Dionne’s Washington Post op-ed really surprised me in its candor about media bias. Dionne articulates a strategy for Democrats and the media as they try to undermine Republican foreign policy. But Democrats (and, yes, the media) risk playing into Republican hands if they fail to force a discussion of the administration’s larger failures or let the debate focus narrowly on exactly what date we should set for getting out of Iraq (source). So there you have it. According to Dionne, Democrats and the media are united in their opposition to Republican ideals. If that’s not a clear admission of media bias, I don’t know what is.
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Ken Lay, R.I.P.
In May, I wrote about what I thought was the political significance of the Enron convictions and of the Ken Lay saga. It turns out that the end of the story happened this morning when Ken Lay died of a massive heart attack. R.I.P.“Enron Founder Ken Lay Dead of Heart Attack” – Washington Post
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July 4th and Jimmy Stewart Populism
Well, I guess I’m still a Populist. At least I felt like one as my family and I spent our July 4th evening watching Jimmy Stewart stick it to the man in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. There’s nothing like a little Jimmy Stewart to get you fired up about July 4th. Take a listen to a snippet from this speech from Mr. Smith. It’s almost as good as when Jimmy Stewart told off Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.Enjoy and happy 4th!
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James Taranto on Media Bias
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal compiles a summary of left-leaning media bias in reports on last week’s Hamdan decision. I think the summary deserves our attention: “The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration’s plan to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law. . . . The decision was . . . a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration.“–New York Times “The Supreme Court yesterday struck down the military commissions President Bush established to try suspected members of al-Qaeda, emphatically rejecting a signature Bush anti-terrorism measure and the broad assertion of…
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Where Atrocity Is Normal
Patrick Stone’s essay in Christianity Today is powerful and poignant. In “Where Atrocity Is Normal: Understanding Christian soldiers who have seen the horrors of war,” Stone recounts his own experience in Vietnam and reminds us of the atrocities of war and the impossible moral choices that face Christians who participate in them.Not only are the war stories tragic, but so also is his description of what his experience has been since coming home from Vietnam: Following my return from Vietnam I spent most Sunday mornings in a church pew wondering, “What does this have to do with what I saw and did in Vietnam?” . . . Since leaving Vietnam…
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Don’t Get in Peggy Noonan’s Doghouse!
Readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of Peggy Noonan’s weekly column in the Wall Street Journal (previous posts). I look forward to it every Thursday.Her piece this morning is a wry, free-wheeling commentary on sundry topics in the news and pop culture. One thing I take away from this article is that I never want to be in Noonan’s doghouse. She takes a whack at several personalities who she thinks are attempting to “spin” and manipulate Americans. Here’s a sampling: On Hillary Clinton: “Hillary . . . doesn’t have to prove she’s a man, she has to prove she’s a woman. No one in America…
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WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION FOUND IN IRAQ
If you were wondering whether the Mainstream Media (MSM) are biased in their coverage of the Iraq War, wonder no more. The MSM have been largely silent on the biggest Iraq War story since the capture of Saddam Hussein.On Wednesday John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, provided “an unclassified overview of chemical munitions recovered in Iraq since May 2004.” The following is direct quotation from the overview: –Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. –Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.…
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It’s a Baptist Thing, and E. J. Dionne Doesn’t Get It
Actually, it’s not just E. J. Dionne who’s offering an incorrect analysis of Frank Page’s election to the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Dionne and others are mistaking the dark horse for a trojan horse that would signal the beginning of the end of the conservative movement in the SBC. In a Washington Post editorial today, Dionne writes: Page’s upset victory could be very significant, both to the nation’s religious life and to politics. He defeated candidates supported by the convention’s staunchly conservative establishment, which has dominated the organization since the mid-1980s. His triumph is one of many signs that new breezes are blowing through the broader evangelical…