I always vote “no” on spending. . . since usually they don’t ask. Culture of life voters should vote for 85 an abortion parental notification bill.

Your most important vote is for local judges. . . but in California this is confusing.
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Every election since I was a boy marked the “end of the Religious Right.” Every election since I was a young man marked the “peak of the Reagan Revolution” and the end of conservatives.

If you believe the media, then Republican wins are shocks and Democrat wins are natural.

One fact: no Democrat has won 51% of the vote since Jimmy Carter. I have never voted (I am 43) in a Presidential race in which the Democrats have received over half the vote. Republicans may lose the House and Senate, but it will be close and I don’t think it will happen. I am sticking with my prediction of the first of the year.

I am no prophet or son of a prophet, but I don’t think most people spend a great deal of time “doing politics.” They are worried about Iraq, tired of crisis, not thrilled with either party, but aren’t going to do much to rock the boat. Most people like their own folks . . . and will re-elect them.

My bet is that the party turn out in 2004 will be a lower version of 2006 (same profile minus Indie voters . . . which is good news for Bush this time). My assumption is that over-polling Democrats is getting worse (not better) and that most polls are “off” by about 2/3 percent.

My picks (with a short reason):

Senate: Republicans at 53. (Main Stream shocks: Chafee will lose, but Steele will win.)
House: Republicans will lose 16 seats, but gain 2 (at least one in Georgia) to retain thin control of the House. Nobody much is watching the weak Dem seats. House polling stinks and two of the supposed easy Dem pick ups are in Republican districts where pundits assume voters are too dumb to vote for the candidate they prefer . . . new media is educating these voters. Most pundits still do not understand how the new media can get information to target voters. Mid-terms are low turn out elections, which are all about getting out the base. Republicans are the best at this. . . and have been all my life.

The key is to ignore polling . . . listen to good radio like Pastore and Hewitt . . . and vote.

This discovery shocked even me:

The study also finds that more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges have only the most basic literacy skills, meaning they can’t do basic tasks like summarize the arguments in a newspaper editorial. On both measures, students at two-year colleges perform even worse.

Without literacy, most people will lack adequate vocabularies. An inadequate vocabulary leads to an inability to verbalize experiences or beliefs. This hurts the natural human desire to stand outside of self and ask hard, yes Socratic, questions. “Am I correct?” or better “To what extent am I correct?”

Words make the world wider by allowing humans to categorize experiences. Due to television, movies, gaming and other virtual reality technology, people have more experiences. We have increased visual intelligence, easily seeing the flaws in the most sophisticated special effects films, but we lack the vocabulary to talk about them . . . to reflect on our experience.

When someone tells you that the “new media” or the Internet is changing everything, ask them if arguments that form the basis of scientific, philosophic, and theological advances have changed. They have not. It is not just that we have not yet devised a way to create pictures of these things and get rid of words. . . it is the very ability of words to describe but not be reduced to our experience as easily as an image or icon must. Our failure to give our children the gift of language dooms them to serve those who have it, I fear.

Illiterate people are doomed to be slaves with souls stamped by tyrants to follow the will of those with words.

Yesterday the Republican Senate campaign was irritating with its foolish and humorless anti-Ford web site.

Today the Left was wicked when it decided to help spread vile rumors about a Republican Senator. This married grandfather denies the accusations and since there is no evidence for them . . . we shall have to accept his denial as an act of justice.

These two days sum up the problems of the two parties. Republicans have standards by which they can be judged. They sometimes foolishly fall short of those standards. The party of Lincoln should never run the “Fancy Ford” web site. It mocks their better angels.

Republicans are like your Uncle who is a terrible party guest, apt to say boorish things, but a great businessman. If you want to throw a great bash, leave him home. If it is time to invest your money, call him on the phone.

We are War on Terror and it is time to send the grownups back to Washington. They have been chastened by the scare we have put into them and know to keep their focus on the Big Issues (the War, culture of life judges, and the economy).

Nobody can accuse Democrats of being hypocrites, because they have become so libertine that there is no standard left to fail. Their only core value is hating Bush and Bush will never run for political office again. Their one or two grownups irritate them, so they decided to send Joe Lieberman packing.

When this generation of Democrats (ah for Truman!) are wrong, they are not just boorish, but vile. Leftists in 2006, following in the proud tradition of Leftist parties everywhere (ask your Polish friends about outings under Communism) have decided power and winning are the only standards. While they are slandering Republican grandfathers to end Republican control of Congress, Islamic fascists are planning the end of republican government. While sniggering in the corner of the Internet about train station trysts, terrorists plot assaults on our cities. While the Left whispers from their Blogs about human weakness, Bin Laden plans to impose Islamic law on them.

The Christian notion that nobody lives up to their ideals (Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me a sinner!) works in the Libertine Left as a justification for having no ideals.

I have great respect for the Old Left of Joe Lieberman. . . with its idealism on Civil Rights. I venerate the memory of the Civil Rights leaders even though I know some of their flaws. We are all flawed, but the new Libertine Left trumpets those types of flaws (in Republicans though not yet in the Civil Rights leaders thank God), rejoices in them, because it stills (for a moment) their own nagging doubts . . . the still small voice of conscience. Naked power has become their only god and the “good” that will be done fades further away.

Their first sacrifice is their own noble idealists, like Joe Lieberman, and even a grandfather who gets in their way must be slandered.

It is the old story that we saw in Russia only with no physical violence used (except against the silent unborn, sick, and old) . . . as those people who were idealistic, but wrong are shoved aside by those who are simply wrong. They use the poor for power. They talk justice for power. The Left in America, in Europe, and in Asia is about power by any means and I hope Americans do not trust them with it this Fall.

This morning while drinking my super-strong Joe to get ready for a discussion of Spencer and other fun . . . the Corner (NRO) tipped me off to what the Republicans have been doing with our money.

Long time readers might guess that I am a Republican . . . and I am proudly so as every member of my family has been since Mr. Lincoln called for loyal help in saving the Union and advancing the cause of liberty.

This is why I am particularly disgusted, that is not too strong a word, with this “anti-Ford” web site. Is this what the party of Lincoln must do to win? Am I the only conservative to see distasteful stereotypes in this juvenile and humorless site?

If we wish to expand the base of the party, and most of us do wish it, then it is better to lose in the short term than to destroy the future of the party by pandering to the worst in us.

On top of it all, this site is less humorous than a Hee-Haw rerun.

The witless, sophomoric hack who designed the site should lose his job for being artistically challenged.

The back-room living pol who thought that Republican voters were this stupid should be fired.

We are in a global War on Terror, millions of unborn children are dying, North Korea has the bomb and this is the best we can do? At a national level?

Send your money directly to candidates until this sort of thing stops. I would suggest:

Rick Santorum (my favorite Senator!)
and
Michael Steele (who could be!)

(more at Middlebrow…)

In this blog, breaking news on Nancy Pelosi!

Governor Romney can hardly cross the street without a reporter breathlessly asking, “Is America ready for a Mormon President?”

Harry Reid can hardly cross the street without someone asking, “Who is Harry Reid?”

The interesting thing is that no reporter asks, “Is America ready for a Mormon as Majority Leader?”

Yes, Harry Reid is a Mormon, though it does not appear to impact his views on the culture of death in his own party. If a Mormon is a Republican, then the brand of religion matters, but not if one is a Democrat and Harry Reid. Why?

Well, you see Republicans, the major media opines, are controlled by those evil traditional Christians and everyone knows (at least all thinking types) that such folk are as apt to Taliban each other as sing “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

(more at Middlebrow…)

An American in Paris . . . and Britain XI: The Biggest City in the World

Hay-on-Wye is the biggest city in the world if the ideas contained in a city available for purchase measure the size of the city. Actually they don’t, but it feels that way when you are in this nearly perfect place which is dedicated to books. . . used, hardly used, and new in mounds and shelves and barns without a Noble.

Hay-on-Wye contains the most used bookstores I have ever seen in one place. In the Age of Amazon, it is quaint to get excited about the ability to shop for hundreds of used books in person, but it is just more fun to touch the books you are buying . . . or to spend hours grazing over the stacks of books.

I am confident that I could have gotten it all on-line, but where is the joy in that?
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I am a big fan of Jim Dobson and his work with families. This blog has defended him against unfair attacks in the past, but he should avoid this kind of statement:

“I don’t believe that conservative Christians in large numbers will vote for a Mormon but that remains to be seen, I guess,” Mr. Dobson said on a syndicated radio program hosted by a conservative commentator, Laura Ingraham.

This is a cagey way of speaking. It does not endorse the attitude and later in the interview Dobson says some nice things about Romney, but this statement is a sad reminder of the “I am afraid America is not ready for a (pick an oppressed group) for (pick a high level job)” used to telegraph feelings about a group in the past.

This argument has a nefarious history in American politics. It allows the speaker to appeal to the prejudices of his followers while staying clear of them himself. I am confident Dobson (a good man) had no intention to do this, but it is a good example of accidentally falling into a dangerous language pattern that will allow his critics (and they are many) to paint him in bigot’s colors. Dobson is not so narrow and it would be a shame for him to allow the old-media room to attack.

So my advice: Oppose Romney for political reasons or if you oppose him for his religion, do so openly and not in the guise of “those other folk will not.” If you must make the argument that Evangelicals will not vote for a Mormon, do so using actual statistics to avoid the appearance that you are telegraphing your audience without stating your opinions (thus avoiding the need to defend them).

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Lately, I have been asked my opinion about a decade old movement (already aging) known as the emerging churches. The movement (sometimes labeled simply “Emergent”) includes house churches, prominent Gen-Xers (my millennial students show little interest in it) and remind many of the “Jesus people” of the 1960’s. Uncomfortable with failed Boomer churches too accommodating to the spirit of the age; emerging churches are attempting to rethink everything.

There is great danger in this and much that is easy to parody. As someone sympathetic to many of the movements goals (as I perceive them), I have been actively engaged in attempting to implement many of them for over a decade in Torrey Honors Institute.

The healthy goals of emerging churches are:
a desire for authentic community
a disposition to favor the intimate over the grand
a delight in blending the best of the all with the new
a disgust with the “overly contrived” like the four-d alliteration in this list.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Lepanto
a poem by G.K.Chesterton

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

(more at Middlebrow…)

Is Hugh Hewitt the only one not losing his head?

The best way to clean up Washington is to send better people there. The Democrats are, for the most part, not the best choice. There are good people running all over the country. . . and I want to point to one of them.

(more at Middlebrow…)

I am speaking at a wonderful conference where I will argue that the Christian story is so powerful that even very talented people like Joss Whedon cannot borrow from it without being controlled by it.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a deeply Christian show . . . despite vain attempts to hijack the vampire myth from its Christian roots. In any case, I get to define myth using Plato, look a bit at Stoker, and Dante so what is not to like? Here is the punch line of my paper:

(more at Middlebrow…)

Ever feel like things are getting worse? Afraid your values are for yesterday and that all the power is in the hands of tyrants?

Fear not! It has been worse. . . imagine being a Greek or a Jew at the end of the fourth century . . .

Socrates begat Plato, Plato begat Aristotle, Aristotle begat Alexander and the world of the classical Greeks came to an end. Alexander destroyed the old order but replaced it with nothing stable. The Mediterranean world entered a strange shadow time in the period from 323 BC to 30 BC almost waiting for the coming of the Romans to reunite and give direction to its history.

Alexander from Macedonia was not an ethnic Greek, but his father Philip had worked hard to make him culturally Greek. His father had also laid the foundation for the conquest of the Greek city-states that had proved impossible for the mighty Persian Empire. Alexander completed this project and prepared to strike against Persia. In this way he could compensate the Greeks for their relative lack of freedom by helping them strike against their ancient enemy. In his short career, Alexander swept away Persia and ended the pattern of one eastern empire succeeding the next to power in Mesopotamia. For the first time the center of cultural gravity had plainly shifted to the West.

(more at Middlebrow…)

An American in Paris . . . and Britain X

British people often laugh at American Christian reverence for C.S. Lewis and American Christian academics are generally sensitive to this laughter. Nothing makes an American academic more insecure than the well modulated sneers of his British counterpart. Americans are (it appears): loud, overly religious, patriotic in a brash way, and uncritical of their own nation. Lewis was from that sad period of British history when too many Brits were also jolly, pious, proud of their island nation, and willing to fight for King and country. Lewis is a bit of the crazy old uncle who managed to survive the Second World War only to linger too long. If he had lived longer he would sneered at Blair’s Britain making sarcastic comments about “Cool Britannia,” the Millennium Dome, and other far reaching cultural changes.
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An American in Paris . . . and Britain IX: On Seeing Julius Caesar: Shakespeare and the Noble Tyrant

Hugo Chavez rolled up to the podium at the United Nations and did what modern tyrants in the making do.He ranted and he roiled up the crowd by hating George Bush, but he fed nobody, helped no one, and gained nothing.

He is the people’s god, of the moment, hated by the worthless rich of his own nation, though the fact that bad men hate him does not wash him clean of his sins. Stalin’s hatred of Hitler did not make Hitler one bit less wicked, though Stalin was a very wicked man. And yet there is some part of America that wants to believe in Chavez . . . our home grown left moans after him this generation as their grandparents did after Castro. He is so forthright, so manly in his bright uniforms, and so sure that he can flog the rich and help the poor . . . and everyone knows the poor in Venezuela need helping.

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