Following the House defeat of the modified Paulson bill—a defeat not merely enabled but actively encouraged by the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi—and the subsequent cratering of the stock market, the Senate decided to stand up and act like the adults on the Hill, passing a modified version of the bill in pointed fashion. Amazingly, it was even a more conservative version of the bill (despite the added pork), though I doubt it was enough so to be worth the cost of the bill’s failure the first time around. In any case, this time, Speaker Pelosi took the hint and actually decided to do her job, and the House fell in line and passed the bill, 263-171. It’s always nice to see our politicians acting like grownups for a change. (Even so, I still think a lot of these folks—Speaker Pelosi first and foremost—need to be swept out like yesterday’s dustbunnies.)Update: obviously, the rescue bill hasn’t stopped the stock market’s slide to this point; part of that, I expect, is the market principle “buy on rumor, sell on news,” which has always seemed stupid to me but is very much part of the pattern of the markets. Part of it, too, is that the markets expect an Obama victory and don’t like what they think that will mean. Even so, I remain convinced that those who opposed the bill on the grounds that it was bad for the free market were wrong; rather, as an editorial in Investors’ Business Daily, argued, the bill gave the government necessary tools to help heal the free market. Here’s hoping they’re used wisely and proactively.
Monthly Archives: October 2008
On Iran: WWRD?
Which is to say, what would Reagan do? It seems to me that the counsel he offered with regard to Khrushchev and the Soviet Union in his 1964 convention speech is well worth hearing today with regard to Ahmadinejad and Iran:
“A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.”—Alexander HamiltonIt seems clear to me that we cannot afford to continue our appeasement of Iran; we need to stand up now and tell the ayatollahs that we will no longer enable them in their pursuit of their agenda. We need to stand up, assert ourselves, and take the opportunity to strangle their adventurism while they’re still economically vulnerable to such an approach; we can cut them off at the knees by doing everything possible to bring crude oil prices down, and then cutting off their supply of refined fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosene), and we need to do just that. We cannot afford to keep selling them the rope with which they intend to hang us.“Where then is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all: you and I have the courage to say to our enemies there is a price we will not pay—there is a point
beyond which they must not advance.”—Ronald Reagan
And another one bites the dust
Another one of Barack Obama’s friends, that is, who was just raided by the FBI; this would be Larry Walsh, his poker buddy, a good friend from his days in Springfield, for whom he’s requested millions in earmarks. Given that Walsh’s use of federal grants appears to be at the heart of the federal investigation, this does not reflect well on Sen. Obama’s judgment. (It does, however, suggest a plausible reason why Sen. Obama didn’t have any of his friends involved at the convention in Denver: he doesn’t want the public to recognize their names when things like this happen.)
Sarah Palin’s greatest qualification: integrity
Thanks to Beldar for pointing this out, because I wouldn’t have found it: the Baseball Crank has a great post on Gov. Palin’s long and strong record of integrity as a politician (one which, along the way, refutes a number of media misrepresentations from primary sources). Apparently, this is the first of a three-part series examining each of the four main national-ticket candidates in this regard, so I’ll be interested to see the next two as well. It truly is a superb piece, and well worth the time it takes to read it (it isn’t short).It should also be noted that the whole site is worth exploring, especially (but not only) if you like baseball; I’ve been a big fan of serious analysis of baseball ever since I first ran across Bill James 20 years ago, so I think I’ll add this one to the blogroll. I was particularly intrigued by his short post on “Bill James, Sabermetrics, Conservatives, and Bloggers” (which, as you can probably guess, generated a heated response from liberal baseball fans wedded to the stereotype of conservatives as nasty, irrational Neanderthals); I don’t know that he’s right in his conclusions, but he offers some interesting thoughts.
Vindication 2.0
Strong debate performance tonight from Sarah Palin (and maybe the best of Joe Biden’s life as well); aside from Internet trolls, the worst anyone can say is “she helped herself but she didn’t help John McCain.” It may well have been a draw, but given the strength of Sen. Biden’s performance (which was helped by his willingness and ability to twist the truth into pretzels), that’s no knock on Gov. Palin; and where it matters most, it was a clear win for her—namely, giving clear evidence to her mishandlers in the McCain campaign that they need to let her be herself rather than trying to reshape her.Count me in with those who wish she’d had the freedom to depart from the McCain campaign’s unprofitable lines on things like Fannie, Freddie and the financial crisis, though.
Is there a yardstick for the Spirit?
Jared has a great post up at GDC on spiritual maturity and the ways we in the church try to measure it; I commend it to your reading, because I think he raises some important questions and concerns.
But generally speaking—and here I’m not at all picking on the REVEAL survey but on the evangelical Church’s approach to gauging spiritual maturity in general—our measuring stick amounts to Participation and Feelings.And here’s where I get hung up: I’m not sure spiritual maturity can be quantified that way. . . .The way this gets boiled down so often amounts to “How much church stuff do you do?” and “How do you feel about yourself?”And frankly, some of the most spiritually mature people I know are very insecure about their sin and their own brokenness and are struggling to find their place in the modern church.
One wonders what we would make, given this approach, of someone who led a major ministry and spoke all over the place, yet confessed privately that they had no sense at all of the presence of God in their life. Would we conclude that Mother Theresa was spiritually immature?The truth is, I think Jared’s right: I don’t think we can measure spiritual maturity. I don’t even think, as he suggests, that we can count on time to bring spiritual maturity—in my experience of the church, I’ve been sadly disappointed on that score more than once. You can’t put a yardstick on love, or weigh out joy on a scale, or measure the volume of someone’s peace with a tablespoon. Ultimately, I think when it comes to spiritual maturity, we have to borrow a line from Justice Potter Stewart (used of a very different subject, of course) and just recognize that we can’t define it, but we know it when we see it.This is, I think, even true on the church level. I do believe that a more spiritually mature church will tend to pray more, be more involved in missions, and so on, but correlation is not causation; there are churches that do a great deal but are very shallow in their corporate theology and relationship with God. Contrariwise, Aberdeen, Scotland’s Gilcomston South under the Rev. Willie Still had very few programs but grew deep, strong, mature Christians. (I trust that it still does, but I have no direct knowledge of it since his death.) I understand the desire—I want to know if the church I lead is growing spiritually, if the work I’m doing is bearing any real fruit—and I think these questions are worth asking, because they do give us real information; we just need to be careful to recognize what they aren’t telling us.
Does Biden on a stage trump a grizzly on the car?
I don’t think so. Check out this profile of Sarah Palin from today’s Washington Post.HT: Beldar
Mark Driscoll on the atonement
Mark Driscoll is a difficult figure for a lot of folks in the American church, for a lot of reasons, which mostly seem to boil down to him having a lot of difficulty keeping himself reined in in various ways; but for all that, I have a great deal of respect for him, because he’s been used of God to build a church and grow a lot of serious Christians on serious theology in a very, very difficult environment in which to do so. What’s more, in his writings, for all the complaints about his irreverence and his rough edge, he’s consistently made the case for Reformed theology in a context (the emergent and emergent-sympathetic church) which tends to slide in some very different directions.His latest book, Death by Love, looks like one I really need to get, going by Tim Challies’ review; it’s a book on the atonement that looks at the various different angles on our understanding of Christ’s work on the cross in their appropriate pastoral contexts. As Challies writes,
Following the model of the biblical epistles, Driscoll writes letters to his congregation—individuals who have come to him for pastoral counsel through the years of his ministry. He writes letters to address their issues in light of the gospel. “Our approach is an effort to show that there is no such thing as Christian community or Christian ministry apart from a rigorous theology of the cross that is practically applied to the lives of real people.”
This is an important thing to do, making biblical and systematic theology pastoral theology—giving counsel which is, to borrow Martin Marty’s phrase, “theologically practical.” I look forward to seeing what the Rev. Driscoll has done in applying this fundamental truth of the Christian faith to the fundamental realities of hurting people’s lives.HT: Justin Taylor
HuffPo makes a discovery
Namely, don’t buy the Left’s wishful thinking on Sarah Palin; they now feel compelled to warn their fellow liberals that she’s “a better debater than you think.”Indeed. If they hadn’t tried so hard to dismiss her as a lightweight, they might not have fallen into the trap of believing their own spin; they might even have taken her seriously enough to figure out what those of us who’ve been paying attention already know: she’s a gifted and capable politician who’s shown a considerable knack in her career for taking on and beating formidable opponents. Calling her unqualified doesn’t make her so.
HT: Power Line
Barack Obama, censor
It’s odd—liberals have beaten up Sarah Palin for “wanting to ban books” because of a comment she made to the librarian in Wasilla while she was mayor, even going so far as to invent a list of books she supposedly wanted banned (scroll down to #40-43), all the while ignoring the far worse assault on free speech by Barack Obama and his campaign. I’ve been wanting to post on this for a while, but it’s been hard to keep ahead of the occurrences; for the moment, I’ll just direct you to Andrew McCarthy’s helpful rundown. He doesn’t mention everything (for example, he notes the Obama campaign’s orchestrated effort to shout down Stanley Kurtz, but fails to mention they did the same thing to David Freddoso, author of The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate), nor does he provide all the links, but it’s a good overview of the Obama campaign’s highly troubling behavior, and an excellent commentary on why we should be worried by it. For my part, I think Missouri Governor Matt Blunt is completely justified in decrying “the stench of police state tactics”; if this tells us anything about how a President Obama would respond to opposition, we should all be very worried indeed.