Plans for Tonight: Better Than a Movie

What are you doing this weekend?

If you are planning to spend this evening seeking some entertainment, we urgently recommend a better choice than going to any of the pretty good or not-so-good movies at the local multiplex.

Go to Cincinnati's Blue Wisp and catch jazz trumpeter Pat Harbison with the quartet that he's leading tonight, the end of a two-night gig. We were there last night and mark the evening as just about the best entertainment we've had for less than $20 per person in just about 50 years.

For those unfamiliar with jazz in general, the Wisp in particular and the esteemed Friend of SWNID Mr. Harbison in more particular, we offer the following introductions.

Jazz is American improvised music, combining European instruments and harmonies with African rhythms (far too simple and narrow a description, this must suffice for a beginners' introduction). Like a lot of art forms, it rewards the listener who has some knowledge of its history, but it also rewards the neophyte who simply approaches it with some curiosity and openness.

In typical jazz setting, the musicians will play a melody through once. Then the musicians will take solos, in which they improvise variations on the melody, often quite complex, following the harmonic structure of the main tune. After the solos, they'll return to playing the melody again, generally with some little variations thrown in. It's the rhythmic and melodic invention and interaction of the musicians, all maintaining the "swing" of the music's pulse, that fascinate anyone who pays attention.

The fun of jazz for people who who are new to it is in taking in the musicians' inventiveness and musical communication with one another. The audience witnesses the creation of a new piece of music on the fly, different from any performance before or after. Like all music, it's best appreciated live, where one can feel and see as well as hear.

The Blue Wisp is a delightful and accessible jazz club in Cincinnati's downtown, on Eighth near Sycamore, an area rather desolate at night but entirely safe. Parking is available on the street or in nearby garages.

The club charges a "cover" to pay for the music ($10 tonight, a true bargain). It also serves drinks. Those who like SWNID eschew alcoholic beverages to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in recovery are more than welcome to order from the soft drinks, juices and coffee that are always available (our favorite is pineapple juice, sometimes mixed with orange or cranberry). We have never observed a patron of the club who was overserved. It's a pretty staid group.

Jazz clubs have a reputation for being smoke-filled. The Blue Wisp once was, especially in its former location, a basement on Garfield Place. But the new joint has massive ventilators and is now protected by Ohio's marvelous no-smoking law (our favorite example of big government). A trip to the dry cleaner or the emergency room after the show is no longer necessary.

In the club, one sits in a rather spartan commercial chair at a vinyl-covered table, presumably with other friends at the table. This facilitates conversation among friends between numbers and sets. Some patrons talk through the music, a habit that would be expected to discourage musicians but which musicians condition themselves to overlook.

The staff at the Wisp is courteous; the clientele, multigenerational and multiethnic. Sometimes the club is crowded, but a reservation is seldom necessary, especially for those who arrive in time for the first set.

The first "set" (a period of about an hour when the musicians play continuously) is scheduled for 8:30 p.m., but those who arrive by 8:40 probably won't miss a note. The band will play three sets, though the fatigable SWNID rarely makes it to the third.

Note that it is customary to applaud at the end of solos and at the end of an entire number. When in doubt about the propriety of indicating one's appreciation, there are two options: (a) applaud when others do; (b) offer a few claps or a shout whenever you hear something you like. This is not a classical recital hall. The players appreciate some interaction. Just remember that people are there to hear the music, not the guy who hollers "oh, yeah" all the time.

Pat Harbison is a member of the music faculty of Indiana University, formerly a member of the faculty of UC's College Conservatory of Music, a SWNIDish friend for well over a decade, and a man who is extremely serious about his music, his family and his faith in Jesus Christ. He is also a great wit. And he can really blow.

Last night, appearing with local talent Art Gore on drums, Mike Sharfe on bass and Jim Connerly on piano (the same appearing tonight, except Steve Schmidt replaces Connerly on piano) played with energy, enthusiasm, creativity and the kind of interaction that fans love to see and newbies can't help but notice. Always a virtuoso player, Pat is at the peak of his powers, always incorporating new ideas and new approaches to his music, finding new ways to express what's in his gut. With these guys, he sounds especially fine.

To put it differently, the quartet peeled the paint off the walls. It was tremendous to hear these guys pursue their craft with such joy and skill. The rhythm section (piano, bass and drums) laid down grooves with a vicious swing, onto which Pat laid leads that teased and danced with joy, pathos and imagination.

We remarked last night to Pat that the band sounded like it has played together for years (this remark takes its point from the fact that groups like this one are formed by experienced musicians on the spot and play without rehearsal: the program is even decided by the musicians in between numbers). Pat noted that it's nearly true that they play all the time together, since he's played with these guys repeatedly over the last 25 years.

It shows. And it's good.

Don't miss it.

You'll still get enough sleep to get up for church on Sunday.

We Mutter a Bitter Prognostication

We don't generally prognosticate on this blog. We like being Seldom Wrong, so we avoid statements about things that haven't happened.

Take this as a comment on the present more than a prediction of the future, though formally it is the latter.

The Democratic Party will nominate Hillary Clinton for President and Barak Obama for Vice President. The Republicans will nominate John McCain for President and Like Anyone Will Care for Vice President.

The Democrats will win.

This is our reading of the present trends and present polls, which we divine as follows:

• Hillary's "finding her voice" by sobbing a sob in New Hampshire has captured the soft hearts of the Democrats. She will surely turn to her erstwhile opponent to tap into his power over the wealthier, younger and more idealistic elements of her party, plus the independents that he brings along.
• McCain is the only R who shows an ability to get votes nationwide. He's first choice for a lot of the GOP and second for everyone else. No one else can conjure up enough traction to overcome that.
• This sets us up for a replay of 1996, with McCain in the role of Bob Dole as Old Republican Senator and Clinton in the role of Clinton.
• Voters get tired of Republicans after a few terms. Republicans tell people to be responsible. After awhile, we'd rather be taken care of, just what the Democrats offer. Now is one of those times.

How Much Is Too Much? A Response to Barney Frank

Monday's Financial Times carried a significant and timely column by Congressman Barney Frank (D-People's Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts). And while the Honorable Mr. Frank probably deserves all the opprobrium he continues to receive for years ago having facilitated his same-sex partner's prostitution business, he is nevertheless a thoughtful and articulate spokesman for the social and economic left.

His article was entitled Why America Needs a Little Less Laissez-Faire. That by itself articulates a thoughtful position. The question is not whether free markets are good but the degree to which they require regulation to achieve better performance at any given moment. Economic debate should be framed on such terms, not with the class-warfare rhetoric in which many in Frank's party indulge.

So a serious article deserves a serious response. And we intend to give such. Here it is, point by point.

Frank writes:

As we prepare for this autumn’s election, the results are in on America’s 30-year experiment with radical economic deregulation. Income inequality has risen to levels not seen since the 1920s . . .

And we respond:

You had our interest from the title up to the word "radical." Few who work in American business would say that the burden of their regulation is less than it has been historically. Few who know the American business environment would say that it is more radically unregulated than other countries. A recent evaluation ranks the United States the fifth most free country economically, behind Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland and Australia. Those ahead of us are notable for their aggressively rising levels of prosperity. Ireland is the economic story of the last decade.

What's worse, he notes what Democrats are really on about. They're not saying that the poor are getting poorer or more numerous, because they aren't. They're saying that the rich are getting richer much faster than everyone else is getting richer. Somehow, the fact that Bill Gates has hundreds of billions hurts someone like SWNID who lives in the middle of the economic landscape, despite the fact that I enjoy a lifestyle unknown a generation ago. And I should be angry about it.

Frank continues:

. . . and the collapse of the unregulated portion of the mortgage and secondary markets threatens the health of the overall economy.

We respond:

Aha! Here's what's up. Something bad happens economically. People who lost money as a result are portrayed as victims. Government promises to step in to prevent such things happening again. The consequences of the actions that led to the economic losses should be lesson enough for the future, but politicians create laws that outlaw what has just occurred, and which no one who pays attention would do again. Those laws in turn have unanticipated effects that drive down economic growth and do nothing to prevent the next problem brought on by unwise business decisions.

A prior case in point: Enron collapsed, taking shareholders' wealth with it. Accountants were complicit. New laws (Sarbanes-Oxley) were passed to prevent accountants doing what no business that wanted to avoid bankruptcy would ever do if it paid the least attention to Enron. Those laws make it more difficult for financial service companies to do business in the United States. So they move to London and elsewhere.

The current case in point: brokers made bad mortgages to people who shouldn't have borrowed so much money to begin with. They then distributed those loans in derivative instruments that broke them into so many pieces and layers that no one knew what loans they were buying. Then the loans started to go bad, and no one knew whether their derivatives had good or bad loans in them, making all of them impossible to value. So now no one will ever do that again (at least at the derivative level), but Frank thinks that the barn door should be closed now that all the animals are gone.

So Frank will say that more laws will make me better off by taking more money from rich people and preventing bad things from happening to people who make bad decisions. We are being offered to trade away some economic freedom for the promises that rich people will be less-richer than we and that economic losses from bad investments will be regulated away. Hmm.

Frank continues:

These two economic failures will be major issues in the forthcoming presidential election, and, importantly, there is an emerging Democratic consensus standing in sharp contrast to the laisser faire Republican approach.

There are two central elements of this consensus. Democrats believe that government’s role as regulator is essential in maintaining confidence in the integrity and fairness of markets, and we believe that economic growth alone is not enough to reverse unacceptable levels of income inequality. In the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, credit markets round the world contracted sharply in response to concerns among market participants about the value of exotic and opaque securities being offered in largely unregulated secondary markets. This staggering implosion and its damaging and widespread reverberations make it clear that a mature capitalist economy is as likely to suffer from too little regulation as from too much. . . .

We respond:

So there we have it again: linking income inequality (not inadequate incomes but unequal ones) and the mortgage credit problem.

First, these are completely unrelated.

Second, it is the very presence of regulation which sometimes throws kerosene on the fire of imprudence. An investor thinks, "This might not be a wise investment. But the government surely would have outlawed it if it weren't safe. And if it goes bad, they'll probably bail me out." Similar thoughts course through the brain of the mortgage lendee as well.

Frank continues:

With respect to income inequality, since the end of the last recession – a period of steady economic growth – average earnings for the vast majority of workers have fallen in real terms. During this period, after-tax incomes of the top 1 per cent nearly doubled.

Whether because of globalisation, technology or other factors, it is clear that market forces have produced too much inequality and government has not adequately used its capacity to mitigate the impact of these forces.

We respond:

Since the end of the last recession, two significant socio-economic developments trump any theoretical decline in "real wages" as calculated by some formulae. First, the number of households receiving public assistance has dropped significantly, thanks to welfare-to-work legislation. Meanwhile, the percentage of households in poverty has declined slightly while the percentage of households classed as "upper income" has increased significantly. In other words, the middle class has been squeezed because some in the middle class have been getting rich while few have become poor, fewer than in the past.

Can government "mitigate" the effect of globalization and technology? The truth is that those individuals and communities that determine to adapt to the changing marketplace are the ones that will prosper. Depending on government to soften the blow de-incentivizes the changes needed to adapt. If there is work for the government to do, it is in encouraging people to retrain and relocate for productive work in the changing environment. But we doubt that Rep. Frank intends as much.

Frank continues:

Conservatives have long argued that government efforts to address these issues would damage the economy. They are, of course, the same people who predicted
that there would be an economic disaster after Bill Clinton and the Democratic Congress raised marginal tax rates in 1993, and who opposed other tax increases on upper-income people. Economic growth in the ensuing years was among the strongest in the postwar era. It is now clear that growth in the private sector
is consistent with a far greater variation in many aspects of public policy – including taxation and regulation – than conservatives claim. In fact, appropriate intervention with respect to prudential market regulation is necessary to promote growth, and its absence – as we have learned – can retard it.

We respond:

We first thank Rep. Frank for not saying that Clinton's tax increases caused or helped the prosperity of the 1990s. What he's saying is that they didn't hurt it. That says more about the robustness of the economy in that period than it does the value of tax increases.

But the fact that tax increases by themselves didn't hurt the economy doesn't mean that the economy is ready for a beating with other kinds of regulations, which is Frank's implication at the end of the paragraph. What kind of regulation is necessary at this time, Congressman? What does our economy need government to do? If it's raise taxes, the only thing that you've mentioned specifically, what good will that do for anyone?

We will ignore for now the ad hominem aspect of Frank's rhetoric, since there's so much less of it than is typical of members of his party.*

Frank continues:

As recently as a year ago, one often heard the argument that US financial activity would migrate offshore unless we moved to further deregulate markets. There is little evidence to support this claim. . . .

We respond:

Actually, there's a lot of evidence for this. After Sarbanes-Oxley, London experienced a boom of firms that expanded there and not in NYC. The London Stock Exchange has benefited from New York's problems with its regulatory environment. And that isn't just a theoretical issue: jobs that would have been in the United States went elsewhere, and so did the jobs that depend on those jobs.

Frank continues:

In fact, it is now clear that what has been migrating to the rest of the world are the problems associated with securities based on bad loans – often originated by unregulated institutions in the US. Banks in the UK and Germany were forced to close, either as a result of holding large portfolios of these securities or because they could not roll over debt backed by them. Widespread securitisation, and use of the “originate to distribute” model, has turned out to be far less than the unmitigated boon it had once appeared.

The market did its job with great efficiency in exploiting the benefits of securitisation but government failed to make good on its responsibilities. The failure of regulation to keep pace with innovation left us with no replacement for the discipline provided by the lender-borrower relationship that securitisation dissolves. Increasing and largely unregulated leverage multiplies the corrosive effect of this change.

In response to the current crisis, it appears that the regulatory tide may, at long last, be turning.

We respond:

This is the truest part of the essay. It just doesn't support what Frank says. Yes, the markets didn't function well when the originator of the mortgage had no stake in its value. But that's yesterday's story. Regulations to curb that are unnecessary now, because few will repeat the mistake. Zealous regulations will instead interfere with other, productive forms of investment, to the loss of everyone who would have benefited from a more prosperous economy.

But truly, the tide on regulation is turning. Too few remember the 1970s, with price and wage controls, rampant inflation, stagnation, fuel shortages, and high unemployment. What we enjoy now is not a result of the regulations that led to that mess. Many of us want to go back to that as much as we want to go back to listening to KC and the Sunshine Band.

Moreover, the global credit crunch has to do not just with the mortgage problem in the US but with the global decline in real estate prices, something that has been punishing Japan for several years now. We didn't export this. It happened to everyone.

We've been through a real estate bubble like the dot.com bubble of the 1990s. But as no one believed that "profits don't matter" after that previous bubble, so now no one will believe that the orignator of a mortgage should be without a stake in its value. We didn't need laws to regulate startups then, and we don't need whatever Frank has up his sleeve now.

Frank continues:

In 1994 a Democratic Congress – the last before the Republican takeover marked the arrival of the deregulators – passed the homeowners equity protection act, giving the Federal Reserve the power to regulate all home mortgage loans. The avatar of deregulation, Alan Greenspan, then Fed chairman, flatly refused to use any of that authority.

In contrast, today’s Fed will soon issue rules using that authority. That represents a significant repudiation of the previous view. While the proposals made by the Democratic presidential candidates differ in detail, they are to a substantial extent consistent with the argument I have made here. Their Republican counterparts continue to advocate the hands-off approach pursued by the Bush administration. As a result, we are likely to have a healthy debate about the role of government in supporting a robust capitalist economy in the 21st century. It is important to note that this debate is not about policy details but represents fundamentally different views about the nature of our modern economy.

I believe the American people will decide that we should enact policies that seek to curb growing inequality and provide some check on market excesses.

We respond, finally:

We note in passing that the Fed chairman whom Frank derides as "avatar of deregulation" was enthusiastically reappointed by Bill Clinton, who at least followed a reasonably sound economic policy despite his willingness to exploit class envy

But in the end, we see what's up. Frank hopes to use resentment against the wealthy and economic naivety to convince an electorate tired of Republicans that Democrats can regulate them into economic safety and prosperity. All he can name in the process is more regulation of the mortgage industry, likely keeping more people from building wealth over generations by buying a family home, and more taxes on the rich, which will benefit no one but the government that spends it on who knows what.

If you like the sound of that, vote for Mr. Frank's party in November.

If you think that people need opportunity, not protection, vote for the party that began with a platform of ending slavery and allowing free settlement of the frontier.
__________________
*That was our own ad hominem.

SWNID Quotes Self: What's Silly About the Fair Tax

Our SWNIDish gripe with Mike Huckabee is that he has a miserable grasp of economics. In a recent email, a devoted, gentle reader asked us to be specific about Huckabee's enthusiasm for the so-called "Fair Tax," a peculiar proposal to replace all federal income taxes with a large federal sales tax of about 30%.

For economy of time and benefit of all gentle readers, we quote our email, with modifications to fit the rigid style requirements of our blog:

[We] think that the "fair tax" is a bad idea because it does nothing that its proponents claim. For example, FT proponents say that drug dealers and prostitutes don't pay income taxes on their earnings, but with the FT they'll pay the FT on their purchases. True enough. But under the FT, drug users and johns won't pay the FT on their drug and prostitution purchases. There's no gain there.

The FT will also distort certain areas of the economy. With the FT, there's a huge incentive not to buy a house to live in, since you'll have to pay a whopping tax on it that you won't recover when you sell the house (example: Bob buys a house for $100k and with tax pays $123k for it; three years later he moves and sells for $110k, the buyer paying $135.3k for the house, leaving Bob with a theoretical capital gain of 10% but a cash loss of $23k). Also with the FT, businesses that don't buy stuff will pay nearly no tax at all. Investment bankers are an example.

Worse, the FT offers no improvement on the complexity of the tax code. With income tax, the question is what constitutes income and at what rate particular kinds of income (again defined per the code) will be taxed. With the FT, the question will be what constitutes a sale and at what rate particular kinds of sales will be
taxed.

All high sales taxes encourage the growth of black markets, of course. The FT will certainly do that. Tijuana, Mexico will become a very big retail site if this ever happens.

What puzzles [us] about Huckabee's support for the FT is that all this seems to be so obvious. [We] don't see why he doesn't get it. [We] have to assume that he's simply trying to tap into the hostility that people have for income taxes. But this will be no better.

Let's add a few points to these, while we're at it:

• What we illustrate above with houses would also be true with cars. Currently a new car depreciates significantly as soon as it is bought. The FT will add 30% depreciation right off the bat. All new car buyers who purchase with a loan and without trade-in or cash worth 40% or more of the purchase price will find themselves "upside down." We expect that consumers, if they can afford a new car at all, will demand replacement-value insurance policy just about all the time, the higher premiums for which will suck more productive money out of the economy.
• FT proponents are misstating the rate at which the tax will stand. You'll hear that it's a 23% tax, but that's really 23% of the cost to the consumer with the tax added. If the percentage is calculated as a percent of the pre-tax cost, like state sales taxes are, it's 30% as currently proposed.
• The FT will be inherently regressive, i.e. taxing people at the bottom more than the top than is true currently. FT proponents talk about providing a "prebate," a check that Uncle Sugar sends to lower-income taxpayers at the beginning of the year to subsidize their payment of the tax through the year. However, one should keep in mind that the bottom 50% of American taxpayers pay only 3% of total federal individual income taxes, and there's no way that the prebate can be big enough to cushion the blow for them. The less well off always spend more of their income than the more well off, and the FT allows now difference in rates for different incomes apart from the token "prebate."
• If there is significant tax reform to be made, it's in the corporate tax rate. Our Republic taxes for-profit corporations at 35%, significantly higher than the rate of industrialized economies, like Wonderful Ireland, that have faster growth, stronger employment and higher tax revenues with lower corporate tax rates.

For more on this subject, check out Bruce Bartlett in WSJ from August. Nothing has changed since then.

Reality Check on So-Called Universal Health Care

As the electorate's memory fades, notions that voters previously rejected for good reasons start looking attractive to them. While this strikes us as much the same effect that alcohol consumption is said to have on the drinker's perception of the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex, we nevertheless hope that some rational discourse can bring the body politic back to sobriety.

Our concern is for Democrat proposal for so-called universal health care, which is really about health insurance, not health care, and is about greater government control of the same. On this subject, we point gentle readers to James C. Capretta's column at NRO.

To summarize Capretta's admirably brief and demonstrably logical piece, here are some key points:

• While all Democratic proposals currently involve both private and public insurance, they do so only to give the appearance that people's present health insurance, which most voters like, will continue.
• But all such plans involve a "pay-or-play" provision for employers: employers must either provide a health plan for employees or be taxed for participation in a new government plan.
• The projected tax for the government plan is significantly lower than the average cost to employers of current health insurance plans.
• Few employers will hesitate to opt for the government plan if it appears cheaper.
• Insurance companies will therefore be driven from the market.
• The government plan will then be in a position to dictate what services are available and how much providers will be paid, driving providers out of the market as well.

SWNID normally doesn't heed warnings about slippery-slopes. This one, however, looks dangerously slippery to us.

And to those who think that the bottom of the slope, that is, a health-care system run paid for entirely by the federal government, is fine, we urge a trip to the local VA hospital. Our limited experience in such institutions, viewed through the lens of our more extensive experience with single-payer systems in another place, tells us that we can all expect that level of care, or worse, from Uncle Sugar.

Take the Church Resource Download Survey

In our ever-vigilant effort to assist all who deserve assistance, we urge gentle readers to take the survey, conducted by our friends at Standard Publishing, on downloadable resources for ministry. Access it here.

And remember, gentle readers, sarcasm has no place in answering serious surveys, though it does on blogs like this one. And that is not a sarcastic remark. Really. We mean it. It's a serious survey. Don't mess it up.

More on Bumper Stickers

Now that John Kerry has dumped on his '04 running mate and endorsed Obama, will all the people with Kerry/Edwards 2004 bumper stickers kindly remove them?

Take the Elder Survey

We urge gentle readers who are church elders (no presbyterial impersonation, please) to respond to the survey of elders run by Arron Chambers of Christ's Church (Jacksonville, FL).

This is part of the very timely "Year of the Elder" emphasis at Christian Standard. Those who didn't see the outstanding first issue on the theme (January 6) should get it and read it, or access it through the archive here.

Do it because we said so, and we are an elder to whom you must submit.

Bumper Sticker Juxtapositions

We know why we saw these two bumper stickers on the same car:

Left Side: End at-will firing: employment equality for all!

Right Side: Republicans for Voldemort

But what is one to make of this combination:

Left Side: My child got smart at a charter school.

Right Side: Kerry/Edwards 2004

Paglia Empties Rhetorical Revolver on Hillary

Camille Paglia may be a left-wing nutjob, but she's an articulate one. Today she vents serious spleen on a certain Junior Senator from New York who seems to be in the news a lot.

Here are some especially juicy bits:

Hillary's willingness to tolerate Bill's compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause -- which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition. . . .

Hillary's disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip. Steinem's fawning, gaseous New York Times op-ed about her pal Hillary this week speaks volumes about the snobby clubbiness and reactionary sentimentality of the fossilized feminist establishment, which has blessedly fallen off the cultural map in the 21st century. History will judge Steinem and company very severely for their ethically obtuse indifference to the stream of working-class women and female subordinates whom Bill Clinton sexually harassed and abused, enabled by look-the-other-way and trash-the-victims Hillary. . . .

But Hillary herself, with her thin, spotty record, tangled psychological baggage, and maundering blowhard of a husband, is also a mighty big roll of the dice. She is a brittle, relentless manipulator with few stable core values who shuffles through useful personalities like a card shark ("Cue the tears!"). Forget all her little gold crosses: Hillary's real god is political expediency. Do Americans truly want this hard-bitten Machiavellian back in the White House?

Read this piece in its entirety for Paglia's insights that connect Hillary's upbringing and her adult behavior. They may not be accurate, but they're vividly put.

What Gentle Readers Have Been Waiting For: The SWNID Superlatives for 2007

Having patiently waited out the flurry of journalistic retrospectives at year end, we here present our annual SNWIDish reflection on the year just completed.*

Most Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing: The Golden Compass. The movie opened with a bang of controversy over its atheism. It is ending with a whimper of failure at the discount theaters. Be warned, Hollywood, and learn the lesson of Joel Osteen: God is more commercial than anti-God.

Most Positive Political Development (Western Hemisphere Division): Venezuela’s defeat of Chavez’s president-for-eternity referendum. We congratulate again Venezuelan friends and neighbors for demonstrating again the spirit of Simon Bolivar.

Most Positive Political Development (Eastern Hemisphere Division): General Petraeus’s success in pacifying Iraq. We now can begin to glimpse the benefits of the Bush Doctrine: American or American friendly power is firmly projected on two sides of Iran, three sides of Syria and, thanks to a brilliant diplomatic move with India, two sides of Pakistan. There may be trouble ahead, but while there are soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines in the neighborhood, there will be less trouble.

Biggest Historical Farce: The so-called Jesus Tomb, probably the most egregious example of P. T. Barnum’s riposte about suckers since his own petrified man. Runner Up (Continuing Saga Division): The Gospel of Judas, now exposed as mistranslated by the clever Coptic scholars employed by National Geographic. Upcoming question: what “revelations” will Easter 2008 hold?

Most Good Money After Bad: Mart Green’s $70 million gift to Oral Roberts University. How much bad architecture and bad leadership does it take to disqualify a “Christian” university from support?

Most Misunderestimated Public Figure: Dubya. The Ds in Congress got approximately 0% of what they sought. We expect the end of the Bush administration to be themed as “Strange New Respect” for 43’s accomplishments, and we expect historians to laud Bush for his aggressive stance toward Islamofascism and his forward-looking positions on education, Social Security and health insurance (the latter two still unrealized).

Most Embarrassing Christian (National Division): Three-way tie between John Hagee (Christology Subdivision), Richard Roberts (Graft Subdivision) and Pat Robertson (Legacy subdivision). Honorable mention: James Dobson (Political Meddling Subdivision).

Most Embarrassing Christian (Local Division): Darlene Bishop, Queen of the Church of Butter Jesus, a.k.a. Solid Rock Church. Her opulent lifestyle and tacky taste have now been complemented by accusations of malfeasance from family members. We pose the rhetorical and theological question as to whether it honors the Christ of the cross to claim to have been miraculously healed by the power of his Spirit while carrying out such a lifestyle.

Biggest Political Disappointment: As we have said many times before, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Calculating that he couldn’t beat Hillary and Obama, he sold his political soul with a ridiculously extreme pose on Iraq to get into Blair House. Bill, you could have been a contender!

Biggest Entertainment Disappointment: 24. Poor Jack is becoming a self-parody. As we have said, we now watch for the same reason we go to Reds games: we know that what we’re seeing isn’t that good, but maybe we’ll see something that we haven’t seen before.

Biggest Entertainment Fulfillment: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The ease with which some point out the weaknesses of the Potter saga is ironic testimony to its impressive intergenerational and intercultural narrative power. Our generation is unlikely to experience again a phenomenon like this one.

Greatest Political Naivety: Randall Balmer, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, Bruce Larsen and other spokespeople of the resurgent Christian Left. We say again that intentions are not the same as outcomes, that socialism is proved to impoverish and pacifism proved to kill. We also say that those who chase trends, in this case hatred of Bush and disillusionment with the Reagan Revolution, are destined to be quickly out of fashion. Oddly, in Mike Huckabee the Christian Left has a candidate who espouses most of the policy positions that they love and all of the subcultural characteristics that they hate.

Most Left-Wing Consolation Prizes: Shadow President Al Gore, winner of the Oscar and co-winner of the Nobel Prize, and all for a movie that overtly distorts facts. When the Left can’t prevail on the big prizes, it substitutes those under its complete control. When one reflects that Rocky and Yassar Arafat were also winners of said prizes, the shine is off the proverbial apple.

Most Egregious Uses of the False Choice and Slippery Slope: Answers in Genesis and its Creation Museum. We assert yet again, in case there are those who still haven’t heard, that there are more alternatives than atheistic Darwinism and young-earth creationism, which alternatives in our view are more powerful to explain both the sacred text and the created world, and that those alternatives do not lead inexorably to universal social degradation. We will return to our “Day in the Museum” series as our precious time permits, but in the meantime we pose the following rhetorical question: If belief in a young earth leads so surely to saving faith and social order, and if Adam and Eve presumably knew the age of the earth and communicated it to their offspring, why did Cain kill Abel?

Most Successful Politician (Cincinnati Division): Mark Mallory. The quiet consensus builder had by the end of the year managed to get City Council and the County Commission together on The Banks and effectively silence the anti-Mallory opportunists among local politicians.

Most Accurate Fulfillment of SWNIDish Expectations by a Politician (Ohio Division): Ted Strickland. We tagged him as a party functionary of no wider consequence. His major achievement for his first year has been to prove that the Ds’ first loyalty is to public employee unions as he appeased the Ohio Federation of Teachers with opposition to charter schools and school vouchers. He remains popular precisely because he is so inconsequential.

Best Development in Cincinnati Economic and Social Life: The reduction in homicides and resurgence of downtown (tie). We can’t ignore the former, though it leaves lots of work left to do, especially in interrupting the drug trade and incarcerating drug traders before they become murderers and victims. We draw attention to the number of people who are going to events and lingering downtown now that a critical mass of attractions is regrouping downtown, especially the redeveloped Fountain Square. We offer the following unsolicited advice on the subject: Graeter’s, please keep the Fountain Square location open later, so that theater goers and sports fans can get a dip after the game or show is over.

Worst Proposal for Cincinnati Economic and Social Life: Having seen the price tag, we withdraw an earlier opinion to label as “worst” the proposed downtown-to-Over-the-Rhine streetcar. Cincinnati’s once powerful public transportation base is languishing, but this hugely costly project will have no impact on it whatsoever. Take the money and put it in more bus routes and bus trips, then couple it with incentives to get people out of their cars. But a streetcar for $100 million? How about a battleship?

Most Missed Musicians: Cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich; drummer Max Roach; pianist, electronic keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul; and pianist Oscar Peterson. Each was among the most successful and admired in their crafts. Each has left a long and extensive legacy of recordings for us who live on to enjoy. None will have a peer in the next generation, though the number of gifted musicians seems to increase geometrically.

Sports Figure of 2007 Most to Be Watched in 2008: Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher and slugger Micah Owings, who pitches better than most rookie pitchers and hits better than most veteran position players. Note to Reds management: make a deal for this guy before he catches on.

Best Strategy for Reducing Greenhouse Gases, If Such Matters: Megabus. The innovative provider of cheap, safe, clean and quick intercity bus travel is attacking the market by making it silly to drive between major cities. We know for a fact that people who would not take a bus otherwise are taking Megabus. And their latest promotion is to reduce their $1 teaser fares to $0 (to take advantage and get a chance at a free fare, enter the code WIN2008 on checkout at http://www.megabus.com/).

Better Choices for Person of the Year Than Time’s Choice of Vladimir Putin: Either General David Petraeus or the Mid-Level American Military Officer in Iraq. Putin’s growing nationalistic fascism is significant and troubling, but it’s mostly troubling if you’re one of the decreasing number of Russians in the world, for whose benefit Putin does his theatrical saber-rattling. For Time’s main market, Americans, the success in Iraq is most significant. For that we have to thank Petraeus for his superb anti-insurgency plan and, less noted but no less significant, American Army and Marine (mostly Army) officers at the ranks of colonel, major and captain. These latter have done superb work in building local alliances to quash al Qaida in Iraq. One whom we mention is Army Colonel Richard Welch, recently decorated with the Bronze Star, whom we were privileged to have taught some Greek once upon a time. Of course, who could accuse Time of wanting to ignore the success in Iraq for ideological reasons?

Best Choice for Republican VP Nominee to Arise in 2007: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Graham has been right about the war, though a critic of the later Rumsfeld (non)strategy. He is a formidable speaker, well informed on foreign affairs, conservative without being a stereotypical conservative and appealing to Southerners without being a stereotypical Southerner. No one will doubt that he can step into the Oval Office if called upon. Plus, if the Dems try to look strong by nominating Jim Webb, we can look forward to more confrontations like the one on Meet the Press where Webb went postal on Graham for Graham's suggestion that the American military might be able to prevail in Iraq.

Legislative Body Even Less Productive Than the Iraqi Parliament: The US Congress under the leadership of Pelosi and Reid. No need to point out the obvious irony that the Congresswoman and Senator routinely point out the failures of their Iraqi counterparts, all of which is George Bush’s fault, of course.

Least Commonly Observed Distinction in Political Discourse: That health care is not the same as health insurance. In the United States, millions lack health insurance, though they can and generally do still receive health care. Observing this distinction would go a long way toward clarifying debate on this difficult subject.

Most Pointless Foreign Trip by a Politician: Nancy Pelosi’s Hermes-scarfed visit to Syria. It was embarrassing to thoughtful Americans at the time, though historic for histrionic Democrats. The embarrassment has faded with time, as embarrassments do. But now for her own party, the trip is a bad memory of how the regal Speaker has overreached and undergrasped.

Most Missed Higher-Education Story: That the kind of boozy sexual exploitation that led to the (demonstrably false) accusations against Duke lacrosse players is an ordinary part of most university campuses and though not limited to sports teams is often nurtured among them. Sooner or later Uncle Sam should decide whether Title IV funds should go to universities that compromise education with the toleration of binge drinking and consequent exploitative sexual behavior.

Most Wished for Event That Didn’t Happen: The death of Fidel Castro. Well, there’s always 2008. Maybe we can all celebrate New Year’s Eve in a free Havana.

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*Normally, we hyperlink SWNIDisms to relevant web sites. For this article, we forgo that service, suggesting that we would not be the blogger that gentle readers deserve if we did for them what they can do for themselves. So we recommend that gentle readers wanting background use the convenient “search blog” feature at the top left of the page, then open another window or tab on their browsers and do additional searching.

Democrats: Party of Oprah, Maury

Iowa and New Hampshire prove that the ethos of the Democratic Party is now the ethos of the afternoon talk show.

Obama surged when Oprah endorsed him.

Hillary counter surged when for the cameras she wept about how hard her life is.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are deciding whether they are the party of the 700 Club* or 24.

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*Yes, we know that Embarrassing Pat endorsed OMR. But his viewers are voting Huckabee.

BBC Exposes Internationally Bogus University

In our perpetual vigilance to warn gentle reader of educational misadventures, we point out the recent report by the BBC on the so-called Irish International University.

In sum, the unconventional university operates without quality control and shamelessly uses promotional materials with images from Oxford and Cambridge. Somehow it has heretofore escaped the control of the massive UK bureaucracy.

We note that divinity is prominent among the offerings of IIU, as it seems generally to be among diploma mills. The willingness of the self-styled leaders of God's people to be duped is perhaps only rivaled by their willingness to dupe.

No need to email SWNID asking what we know about IIU. We like the British Isles for research degrees in divinity, and we're all for the unconventional when it does the job. But IIU is about "virtual" in a sense opposite "actual."

Go to Church with Obama

We tip the SWNIDish hat to, of all people, Christopher Hitchens for point us to the web site of Barak Obama's church. Trinity United Church of Christ, in Chicago's resurgent South Side, claims 8000 members and lists a whole bunch of ministries. Remarkably for a UCC congregation, we note that they have essentially nothing to say on homosexual matters.

Hitchens finds the whole Trinity UCC experience disgustingly plebian. How twee! And what church membership would the militant atheist find more suitable?

We draw no conclusions, positive or negative, from Obama's membership with this church. But they do have a nice web site.

Hillary: Cliches Make Me Cry

ABC News has some interesting video showing Hillary having a Muskie Moment in New Hampshire.

She either believes that platitudes like caring about your country are deserving of tears, is a terrific actress, or is crying about something other than what she's talking about. Or any combination.

At any rate, her handlers continue to try to show her softer side. We like it just as well as her other sides. She is as consistent as she is multifaceted.

Of Candidates and SWNIDish Support

Astute (and always gentle) readers have noted what our SWNIDish grammar might reveal about our political preferences of the moment. And we believe that our own consciousness is not so far removed from many who register their opinions in these times as to be entirely idiosyncratic. So we express our mind as a means of grasping the minds of others, even if they be by definition lesser minds. Further, it is our mission to inform others what to think. So to that end, we reveal what we think.

To wit: our enthusiasm for Mayor Giuliani as cooled somewhat. We are ready to date other candidates.

We still believe that the most successful American political executive of the last 25 years, excluding the beatified Ronald Reagan, deserves a shot at the office. We are less ardent about this for three reasons.

One, as we noted previously, is that the management of the Iraq War is now hardly an issue at all. Only a fool would mess up what's happening on the ground at the moment. We'll say more about fools below, but we don't think that most of the frontrunners are fools. So Rudy's ability as a problem-solver and crisis manager are not as significant as they once were.

The second, which we confess now, is that we are disappointed at the Giuliani campaign so far. We concede the possible electoral utility of his waiting for the big states, a strategy that Mrs. Clinton now assumes by default. But his waiting without initiative is not inspiring our confidence in Rudy's readiness for national leadership. By now we expected some bold policy proposals on health care, social security, taxes and education, maybe even abortion. But if he's got them, he's keeping them hidden. He's leaving us worried that he will do something like kiss his wife in public again and call that a bold move.

The third is that we are ready to forgive, at least conditionally, the prodigal John McCain. Having recently made a firm confession of faith in lower taxes, implicitly repenting of his opposition to the glorious Bush tax cuts, he has addressed our most pressing concern about him. Further, because no one, himself included, talks about his awful campaign finance reform law, we're ready to consider McCain-Feingold a regrettable mistake on the way to being forgotten. We are therefore ready to trot McCain out as the Republican who can appeal to people who don't subscribe to Focus on the Family publications, i.e. the one who can keep the White House in the hands of those who won't sell us down the road to serfdom quite so quickly.

McCain can certainly manage the remainder of the war: the credit he's currently claiming for changing the strategy is perhaps deserved more than any other credit currently being claimed by candidates. More importantly, he's the only candidate talking a lick of sense about immigration. The other Rs are dedicated to seeing who can promise to build the biggest wall and send the most illegals back the quickest. The Ds are trying to avoid any commitments, knowing that anything they say will get them in trouble with someone. McCain knows that we need workers and so we need immigrants, and he's willing to say it.

So on that score we say that McCain has the policies, while Rudy has the abilities.

Of the other Rs, we say the following:

Concerning Romney, he's Michael Dukakis only Republican. See Peggy Noonan's latest for an explanation. The man can't win a national election.

Concerning Huckabee, we've said a little before. But Huckabee has recently achieved something genuinely indicative of significance: George Will devoted a column to insulting him. We can add nothing to the diatribe from the dean of conservative columnists. "Histrionic humility, "curdled populism," "a compound of Uriah Heep, Elmer Gantry and Richard Nixon" . . . who can match such exalted phrases of loathsomeness . . . and aptness?

Underreported Reason for Change in Presidential Polls

So the frontrunners aren't in front any more.

We've heard lots of explanations why Hillary and Rudy have fallen as the extremely early nominating process proceeds. And we'll buy some of them. Yes, Hillary is very unlikeable, and the more people see of her, the more they respond to that salient characteristic. No, Rudy hasn't done much to calm the fears of conservatives about his candidacy, sending them off to look for a True Believer to support.

But here's what we see as the most significant point: thanks to General Petraeus's remarkable success, the Iraq War is no longer the major issue of the campaign. The frontrunners were running in front because they were seen by those in the center as the best potential POTUSes to fix what was a very nasty situation. But it's nasty no more.

Rudy was the candidate of Republicans like SWNID who saw the war as the critical issue trumping all others. Hillary was the candidate of Dems who wanted to placate their pacifist base but act with reasonable responsibility.

But now, the war appears to be on a glide path to reasonable success, regardless of who is in the Oval Office. So voters are free to indulge other interests.

Getting past the boilerplate about whether this helps Democrats or Republicans in November, we opine that the surge's success has given voters the freedom to think about unconventional candidates like Obama and Huckabee.

Of course, there's a problem in all this: the next POTUS takes office about a year after tomorrow's New Hampshire primary. For all we know, by then we could be back in trouble in Iraq or dealing with another military matter in some other part of the world.

A nominating process that nominates so far in advance threatens to leave us with choices best suited to a year-old situation. Suddenly the old system of party officials picking their nominees in August looks very appealing again.

Why Hillary Is Losing

This video is the psychological equivalent of a speech from Senator Clinton:

New Video Shows What SWNID Has Been Doing Instead of Blogging

Here's what we've been up to lately, instead of supplying blog content:



Ah, the respite of the holidays!

Barneycam 2007

In keeping with our annual tradition, we gladly link gentle readers to Barneycam 2007, the White House's annual Christmas video. This year's edition proves once again that

• the White House looks very tasteful at Christmas
• politicians are worse actors than we imagine them to be
• nearly all amateur video producers could stand to leave more footage on the cutting room floor
• everyone loves dogs

Holiday Music All in One Gulp

This video has been recommended to us by multiple gentle readers. For those who need to take their Christmas music like medicine, it's like an easy-to-swallow coated caplet. It's also an impressive, entertaining performance.

Reds Are Losers Because They're Clean?

Given the near-absence of Cincinnati Reds players in the Mitchell Report on performance-enhancing drug use in baseball, we true fans wonder whether our team's miserable performance over the last decade can be attributed to clean living. Current Red's relief pitcher Mike Stanton is named in the report as a user when he was a Yankee, but certainly nothing has enhanced his performance lately.

The Mitchell Report provokes a certain SWNIDish nostalgia for a book that we devoured in our formative years, Ball Four by Jim Bouton. Among the nefarious escapades detailed in that amoral memoir was the many players' habit of ingesting "greenies," amphetamines that raised their alertness and reflexes in the grueling schedule of a cross-continental, six-month, 162-game baseball season, the resulting fatigue compounded by frequent hangovers.

It has always been so among baseball players, it seems.

SWNID Holds Nose, Discusses Dems

We only do this kind of thing because you ask. It isn't easy for us.

Members of the gentle-reader community have requested that we provide SWNIDish analysis of Democratic candidates for POTUS. The request is not that we fillet and flambe the pathetic posse of poseurs who populate the party of "the people." Some cannot bring themselves even to consider a candidate of the GOP, thanks to that party's own rather embarrassing history of misdeeds and mismanagement (cf. human condition, which we excuse in Republicans). For these, we are asked to provide definitive guidance to their alternatives.

So we offer a summation of our SWNIDish view of the Democratic herd, alphabetically by last name and with as much sympathy as we can muster.

Note that we are not critiquing policy positions in detail. We offer the blanket admonition that the Democrats' current preoccupation with the socialism that impoverishes and the pacifism that kills makes it impossible for us to split out their candidates' nuances with any degree of confidence. To put it differently, our political soul asks, what is the point of deciding among people whose political philosophy is inferior to the alternative?

But you asked for it, and we try to oblige.

Joe Biden is at once among the most comical and the most serious of candidates. He's comical because it seems he's run in every election since 1952 that hasn't had a Democratic incumbent in it. He's serious because, unlike just about all the others, he has thoughtfully engaged the Iraq issue. In this matter events have overtaken him, as they have all the Democrats. But Biden deserves props for at least trying to find a thoughtful approach to Iraq that goes beyond the smokescreen of blame and promises.

Anyone who votes for Biden should remember that (a) he has an awful tendency to speak before thinking, a tendency that we recognize easily as a fellow sufferer; (b) he has no chance of actually getting the nomination. A vote for Biden is a vote that he be appointed to the cabinet by the next President, which strikes us as what he's probably after in his campaign, aside from the adrenaline rush of being near the action.

Hillary Rodham Clinton to her credit has staked out the most moderate positions among the major Democrats. And no one doubts her intelligence. The question is whether we want to get on the Clinton joy ride again.

Aside from her sanctimony-tinged ambition, what is Senator Clinton? How can one whose second-most familiar catchphrase is "the politics of personal destruction" allow her campaign to savage Barak Obama for things his kindergarten teacher says and then turn around days later and savage him with rumors of past drug use?

And who has any confidence that she'll be able to control the behavior of her husband if she's in office? One observes that she's had less than full success in doing so in the past. The whole thing starts to look like Putin's Russia, with the quasi-fascist, soon-to-be-ex-President manipulating his way into perpetual power. And further, we blessedly know nothing of the ex-President's "personal" life since he left office. What is he up to that might make him subject to the influences of blackmail when his wife is in office? We seriously doubt that as an old man he's anything other than the dirty kind.

In sum, we think that Hillary would probably not pursue a policy agenda that would damage the country as seriously as others. What should not be underestimated is the degree of risk that one takes with a President who so wholly has sold her soul to obtain political power.

Chris Dodd is, like Biden, a serious-minded Senator with no prospect of national election. Again, we think he's after a cabinet post or the veep nomination. We applaud his statement months ago that he doesn't really think Iraq is lost: events have proved him more right than he could possibly have imagined.

John Edwards is probably the candidate that we SWNIDishly despise most. Edwards has the most obvious connection to the Democratic Party's collocation of special interest groups: among union members, government employees, ideological left-wing counterculturalists, academics, African-Americans and trial lawyers, he is a member in good standing of the last group, an attorney retired from a mega-rich tort practice.

This makes his populism faux populism. Edwards could buy and sell the little guys he claims to stand for. And his roots weren't that humble to begin with: like a lot of overachievers, his family was in middle management, not the working class.

Nevertheless, what makes Edwards abominable is not that his populism is faux, it's that it is empirically false. Edwards's proposals for restrictive trade and labor policies would absolutely cripple American business, destroying the jobs and investment opportunities that his Ordinary Americans need. His solution is worse for the aggrieved than the problem. He knows it (how could he not?), but he's betting that the electorate is too stupid to realize it.

Edwards is still the tort lawyer who advertises on TV that he'll get you the money you deserve. What he doesn't tell you is that the money comes at an enormous cost to everyone--and that he takes his share off the top. This time Edwards isn't taking cases to win settlements that earn him big fees: he's running a campaign on a set of propositions that all self-conscious beings recognize as false in hopes of gaining power, and he's doing it all for poor folks who are powerless to help themselves. How kind of the Great Man!

Mike Gravel is obviously one of that fascinating, ever-changing (except for Alan Keyes) cast of characters who run for President without any hope of getting even a single delegate at the national convention. Let's all be glad that we live in a Republic that still recognizes the doom we'd all face if someone like Gravel were taken seriously.

Dennis Kucinich is reason enough for the rest of Ohio to force Greater Cleveland to secede and join Canada. We know that this nutjob gets a thrill from his occasional appearances on the national stage. We ask another question: what salary does he draw from his campaign?

Barak Obama was best summed up last week by senior statesman and plain-talker Andrew Young. Those who heard only the sound bites should listen to the entire statement, which is a gem of experience and wisdom. We especially note his admonitions that Obama should let his kids get older before he goes for the big prize, not to mention his warnings about suffering.

Obama is perhaps the most gifted politician of his generation. But his youth and inexperience show right now. He doesn't have a clear policy position on anything except health care, the particulars of which were doubtless the product more of his handlers' estimates than of his particular convictions. "Hope" is not a position.

And Oprah shouldn't be a kingmaker. She's the lady who brought America Dr. Phil, for goodness' sake!

We think that Obama should be seen as a formidable personage for Democrats in the future. He should take a page from Hillary's playbook and take some time to build a record (as governor of Illinois, not Senator from Illinois), longer than she did because he's younger (and prettier, for that matter).

As a Republican, what we most fear is a Clinton-Obama ticket. We doubt that any Republican under any circumstances short of an enormous Democrat scandal could overcome it.

Bill Richardson is officially our Biggest Disappointment of 2007 politics. Richardson is far and away the best qualified Democrat in the field. He's not just widely experienced and accomplished; his record is notably rightward by Democrat standards. He understands economics and global politics and has demonstrated the capacity to govern.

The disappointment, of course, is that to separate himself from the crowd he rolled the dice and took the most radical position of Iraq imaginable: every American soldier and Marine out of Iraq in the first year of his administration. Imagine Thomas Dewey in 1944 running on bringing every American home from Europe and the Pacific in 1945. The irresponsibility of the position is unprecedented in a candidate of stature.

We are totally convinced that Richardson currently runs only to become Hillary's veep. He decided to run to the far left on the war. If the war went terribly, he could play his position to get the nomination. If it went even marginally better than that, he could run with Hillary and protect her left flank. We applaud the excellent political calculus and abhor the cynicism that it entails.

Shame on you, Bill! You could have been something special. Now, you're just another hitchhiker trying catch a ride on Clinton's bus. Again.

In sum, for whom should the dedicated Democrat vote? To make a stand on principle with no hope to influence the outcome, it's Biden. To cast a vote for the future with no regard to the present, it's Obama. To support the candidate with the best chance to govern effectively, it's (amazingly, desperately, convulsively) Hillary. But with the attendant risks of her presidency, we urge holding the Democratic nose and voting for Our Man Rudy, who is everything a Democrat should be except for pro-life and a faithful spouse, making him the best Democrat in the field.

Point of Information on Copyright

SWNID hears remarks. Sometimes we think that we ought to respond with SWNIDish wisdom. Generally, we restrain ourselves. This is not one of those times.

Of late we've heard at least two people offer remarks that reflect a widely held point of view that is inaccurate in a way that could prove damaging to people who hold the view. We herein provide corrective, protective service.

In essence, the false and dangerous view is this: that written material is not under copyright if the copyright has not been overtly declared by the author or registered with the government. Hence, if a person finds material in a publication or on the Internet that does not declare a copyright or indicate its registration in Washington, the material is free for the taking. That is, the material may be used without attribution in student papers or even attributed use in reprinting.

Such, of course, is not the case. Copyright exists whether it is explicitly declared or not and whether it is officially registered or not. If disputed, it is easier to prove if declared or registered. But intellectual property doesn't need to be branded as such, any more than a TV set is less mine because I didn't engrave my social security number on its chassis.

And it matters not that the re-use of another's written material is not for profit, as in a student paper, for example. The material belongs to the author or the person to whom the author assigns rights. That person has the right to forbid its publication entirely, if he so chooses. That's what the "right" of "copyright" is: the power to decide whether and how written work will be copied.

Students who do such are not just representing another's work as their own. They are also using another's property without permission.

The same, by the way, is true of oral discourse. Using another's sermon, sermon outline or sermon illustration as if it were one's own is a tawdry example of intellectual theft, even if it is a relatively common one.

Of course, it should go without saying that one can never distribute copies of another's work without that person's permission. That includes dissemination on the internet, by the way. Again, the absence of overt declaration of copyright is in no way a surrender of copyright, any more than failing to double lock the front door means that a person who comes into the house without an invitation is therefore not trespassing.

So the rules are: (a) attribute quotations; (b) get explicit permission for any publication or distribution of portions beyond the bounds of limited, attributed quotation.

In this end of the academic season, soon to turn to the beginning of another, we mention this factoid to help our gentle readers avoid the embarrassment that comes when one inappropriately appropriates intellectual property.

Three Ways the GOP Is Diminishing Its Future

We note three trends in our political party of choice--the party of Lincoln, TR, Coolidge, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes, yea, even Nixon--that we believe are unnecessarily and unwisely mortgaging its hold on political power in coming years.

The appearance of theocracy. We think that fears of a Christian theocracy are overblown in this country. Fractious American Christians lack the will and the means to take over. Besides, a majority of American Christians aren't very Christian, so over the long term they're unlikely to vote in ways that would compromise their indulgence in things immoral that might be forbidden in such a regime.*

However, as long as many Christians who vote Republican use overtly religious criteria for choosing a candidate, plenty of secular types--and we speak of ordinary folk, not media elites and such--will blanch. They don't want a pastor running the country.

So we think it's a terrible thing for Republicans that many are refusing to consider Romney because he's a Mormon. It's no better that many Republicans become so preoccupied with a single issue, important as it genuinely is, that they won't vote for a candidate like Giuliani who is mildly pro-choice, even though in the last 28 years, 20 years of pro-life presidents haven't moved Roe v. Wade an inch. And we think it's weird that Rs are at the moment psyched about Huckabee, whose positions on economic matters are awful and whose record of executive achievement is short, largely because he is clearly an ideologically and religiously orthodox candidate.

All this feeds the perception that Rs want a theocracy: they'll take the less accomplished, less generally appealing candidate purely because he's religiously one of them. And that perception will marginalize the party with everyone who isn't one of them and with many who are Christians but who worry about either the church being taken over by politics or vice versa.

The appearance of xenophobia. The Republican discussion of immigration is becoming a contest to see who can offer the most draconian measures against illegal immigrants. This is bad in multiple respects.

One is that it obscures the Republican insistence that natural law, or God's law, is greater than laws made by humans. The party began with that notion in its opposition to slavery (the Republic did too, of course, though it was proto-Democrat Jefferson who expressed it so well in the Declaration). The party continues with that notion as it stands against abortion.

For immigration, the natural/divine law issue is this: it is good for a person to work to support himself and his family, so to seek opportunities to do that is good as well. The vast majority of illegal immigrants are obeying that higher law. So for Republicans to insist that illegal immigrants be treated as lawbreakers for doing what is naturally right and good is paradoxical for them in ways that it would not be for Democrats, who in this day and age tend to see right as what the majority says and rights as what the government bestows.

A second problem is purely political: a harsh stance on illegals looks like hatred for Hispanics. Hispanics are now more inclined to vote Democrat than Republican than in 2004. That's going to make it tough to elect a Republican in 2008 and beyond. Hispanics, many of them seriously religious and family oriented, are a natural constituency for Republicans, who simply need to get their moral thinking straight to make the move that will also be politically expedient.

The appearance of racism. Nixon sadly squandered the Republicans' remaining appeal for African-American voters with his so-called Southern Strategy. By appealing tacitly to segregationists, he broke up the Democrats' Solid South but also wasted the legacy of Lincoln, TR, Eisenhower and Everett Dirksen (Republican minority leader in the Senate whose support of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, forming a coalition with progressive Democrats against segregationist Democrats, was decisive in its passage).

Since that time, Republicans with few exceptions have appeared unwilling to make appearances at African-American venues. Once it may have been their desire to keep the segregationist margins in their coalition, even if the candidates themselves had no intention of doing anything to support segregation. More recently it may be because candidates expect a hostile reception at black venues and don't want the negative publicity following them. Whatever the reason, the behavior continues to confirm for many African-Americans (and by many we mean 90-95%) that Lincoln's party would have preferred to send them back where they came from.

This problem is bad not just for Republicans, who could use some black votes in their coalition, but for African-Americans who are merely taken for granted by the party that they overwhelmingly support. As more black leaders sound themes of family, responsibility, education and hard work that naturally belong to the Rs, their agenda, the agenda needed by their community, will be ignored by a party that owes more to public employee unions dependent on dependency than to citizens at large who need the general welfare promoted.

Note that all these are matters of perception. Republicans are right when they say that they hate theocracy and love immigrants and minorities. But in politics, perception is reality.

We call on our party to do something to show what you really believe. We doubt that anyone is listening, but we call nevertheless.
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*Note that the church's obvious agenda to realize God's rule on earth should therefore be evangelism and edification, not politicking as such.

Golden Compass Evaluation

As The Golden Compass appears to be headed quickly to the discount theaters, we recommend the assessment of the books and movie on "tothesource," where Peter Vere and Sandra Miesel, authors of The Pied Piper of Atheism, are interviewed.

We note this remark from Vere:

I was asked to review the movie this past weekend. It exemplifies the one trait that will kill any epic fantasy at the box office: It's boring!

We SWNIDishly opine that atheism in all forms is extremely boring. Not to mention bleak, presumptuous, uncurious, and intellectually incoherent. If an atheist is interesting, it's despite her atheism. If a believer is boring, his faith is nevertheless interesting.

From our Correspondent in Venezuela

The best news from the western hemisphere this year is doubtless the defeat of Hugo Chavez's proposed constitutional amendments in Venezuela. The prospect of Venezuela becoming a permanently socialist state is seriously diminished by this amazing event.

But times are still hard in Venezuela. We quote one of our correspondents who describes the present situation:

There is a real crisis regarding basic necessities. There is a lack of milk, sugar, oil, toilet paper, etc. Sometimes you have to wait for hours in line to be given simply one package per person. I believe this is contributing to an environment of hate and violence, which is affecting everyone, even Christians. For instance, last week a lady asked me to pray for her – specifically, for God to remove that hatred she felt for the president and his followers. She said that this hatred was totally consuming her. So we prayed with her and tried to exhort her, but just as she said, many brothers and sisters in the church are feeling the same way too.

Press Conference with the Hero

Knowing that some of our gentle readers have accepted the grim responsibility to protect the general welfare and safety of others with the threat of deadly force, we point out the impressive press conference with Jeanne Assam, the security guard who neutralized the shooter at New Life Church of Colorado Springs.

Feel free to proceed with discussion as to the awful necessity of law enforcement using deadly force, the somber wisdom of concealed carry, the solemn inescapability of just war, or related topics. We stand aloof, as the matter is by now self evident.

Very Local Artistic Expression

Many readers of this blog will appreciate the local culture reflected in this fine "music" video:

From Our Correspondent in Iraq

This message comes to us from a brother who serves in the United States Armed Forces in Iraq (emphasis SWNIDishly inserted):

Iraq is getting quite boring, er...I mean stable. The Iraqis are doing a good job in taking back their country. Their army and police force grows by the day, and IED attacks are going down quite a bit. The region is not yet stable, but with time, it will be. I only hope the American public can grow to realize that to do anything worthwhile takes time.

No need for us to to editorialize.

Romney's Religion Speech: Well Done, Not Enough, Amusing on One Point

Yesterday Mitt Romney finally delivered his much-needed speech on his Mormon religion, read with interest by our SWNIDish self. We believe that the speech was superbly conceived and well crafted, contained all that it should have contained, sounded themes crucial to the American pluralistic republic, and will not prove sufficient to overcome people's reluctance about Romney's religion.

What's right about the speech was this: it clearly articulated the notion that voters should consider a candidate on the basis of the values that the candidate shares with the voter. And Romney can make a very strong case that as a Mormon, he shares values that other religious Americans share.

What's to us interesting about the speech is this: Romney did what in our experience LDS folk generally do. He tried to articulate common ground with Christians by making what is ostensibly an orthodox Christological confession. Of course, the problem with that is that many Christians know that Mormons don't mean what other Christians have historically meant when they say "son of God" or "savior of the world." Someone in his camp should have warned that people are very aware that he doesn't mean what they mean by these words. And indeed, Romney did acknowledge as much. But it seems to be part of the LDS DNA to say this nevertheless.

What's politically true about the speech, from our SWNIDish POV, is this: Romney probably took some gas out of Mike Huckabee's tank by shaming some evangelical voters into reconsidering Romney despite his Mormonism. However, we expect that the general reluctance to vote for a Mormon will nevertheless fatally handicap Romney in the end. And we think that for two reasons.

One is particular. As a Campbellite whose ecclesiastical experience has always been avowedly apolitical, we are amazed that many evangelical pastors consider it their responsibility to tell their congregations which candidate to vote for.* And quite naturally, those pastors who undertaken this responsibility and who have spent their time telling folks that the LDS church is a cult are highly reluctant to endorse Romney. We have heard such folk say as much, and we are once again prompted to thankfulness not to be saddled with such a problem for ourselves. But we expect that a significant minority of evangelicals will never consider Romney, forgetting that they are voting for a chief executive and not a theologian, thereby depleting his potential base of support.

The other is a bigger issue, we believe. In Papa George Romney's time, Americans thought that religion was what a person did at church and on holidays, that it has little influence on their decision making. That notion was reflective of the era and articulated in John Kennedy's justly famous speech in which he declared that the bishops wouldn't tell him what to do as President (and indeed, Kennedy's personal life demonstrated just how true that declaration was). However, today people have returned to the idea that what a person believes about God has a lot to do with the decisions that person makes on a daily basis. And most people, not just evangelicals, think that Mormonism is goofy. They can't bring themselves to take seriously the ideas that Jesus came to North America, that Joseph Smith got temporary loan of golden tablets and special spectacles, that when the right people die they start populating their own universes, and other distinctive Mormon notions. And they have trouble trusting a man who believes such things, despite his impressive record as an executive in business and government.

What is amusing to us is this: Romney equates the early persecution of the followers of Joseph Smith with the religious intolerance early in the history of the New England colonies. While there's probably much to dislike about the treatment of proto-Mormons, our take is that people thought that a polygamous religious group overtly trying to set up a theocracy was, well, socially threatening. In other words, it was precisely because they had rejected the theocratic intolerance of New England that they were hostile toward the Smith, Young & Co. This speech surely was not the place to admit that, but neither was it the place to raise the issue in a way that invited someone to point it out.

Finally, we declare again that we think Mitt Romney would make a fine President. With Our Man Rudy, he shares a characteristic not found among any of the other candidates of either party: significant and highly successful executive experience.

But Rudy remains Our Man. And here's why: we think that Romney might prove to be the Republicans' Michael Dukakis, that is, a demonstrably capable governor who proves too wonkish to woo a national electorate.

So we'll trade Romney's religious baggage for Rudy's personal baggage, admittedly an uneven trade, to get Rudy's passionate engagement.

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*Explanation of the obvious: yes, we know that we endorse candidates all the time here. But we do it not because it is some kind of pastoral responsibility but because we enjoy sharing our brilliant, Seldom-Wrong opinions. Further, we expect to persuade not because of our official status, whatever that is, but because of the impeccable reasoning that supports our views.

Editor's note: This posting exhausts our quota of colons for the 2007 blogging year. We will be forced to rely on other marks of punctuation until January.

Gospel of Judas Update

Scholarship takes time and the effort of many people. Making money on scholarship frequently undermines those necessities.

That's the lesson of today's NY Times op-ed by Rice University professor April DeConick, author of the new book, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. DeConick, one of the few people who reads Coptic, the language of the Gospel of Judas, has noted several ways in which the National Geographic's team of scholars obviously misread the manuscript.

The differences in content that she notes amount to this:

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

Not being among that small group of scholars who reads Coptic, we depend on DeConick's expertise, noting that the offering of a revisionist reading that ratchets down the public interest requires pretty solid evidence to be successful and so assuming that any rational scholar would have as much before going forward. If she proves right--and it will take time and collective effort to make that clear to us non-Coptic readers, another big story has gone bust.

The Easter-season historical blockbusters of the last two years, the Gospel of Judas and the so-called Jesus tomb, have now collapsed completely. Let's hope that publishers, and the scholars who work for them, think twice before trying to profit from the flash of religious interest that blooms and disappears like crocuses. And let's hope that the public decides it won't be fooled again.