is the newest member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

In the appointment announcement, John Boehner, who made the appointment, said:  

The commission’s goal is to highlight serious threats to religious liberty throughout the world so the President and Congress can make measured and wise decisions in response.  The work of the commission is as important now as it ever has been.  

Despite the threats at home and abroad, you will recall that not that long ago, the future of the Commission itself was uncertain. 

So in the 11th hour, all the stars aligned (cliché-tyranny warning) for the underdog mom/rancher and her mostly forgotten, no-dough, no-choice-but stealth campaign. While John Bruning and Don Stenberg, her two foes in Nebraska’s GOP Senate primary, had been beaten to pulps, courtesy of beaucoup negative ads by Jim DeMint and the Club for Growth, the state Senator parlayed a week-to-go poll (showing her a close third, closing fast, with lots of momentum) into a huge Sarah Palin endorsement, into an as-important Congressman Jeff Fortenberry endorsement, into a big final-weekend assist from businessman Joe Ricketts (whose Ending Spending Action Fund ad nuked Bruning), into a not-even-close 10,000-vote win last night.

The result: Fischer 41 percent to Bruning’s 36 percent to poor Stenberg’s 19 percent. An absolutely fascinating finish. Political junkies will find good on the scene analysis from Leavenworth Street blog and the Omaha World-Herald. As to what’s ahead – the Fischer v. Bob Kerrey November election – Leavenworth Street opines:

Oh, and we will tell you right now, that of the three, Deb Fischer is the one the Kerrey camp has feared the most. (There have been Democrat operatives literally skipping around with a plan to take down Bruning and enshrine Bob Kerrey. They may have been wrong in the end, but that was absolutely the CW in DC and beyond.)

Deb will still have work ahead of her. She will have to be much more diligent about raising money, though that should also come a bit easier. And she will have to be a quick study on some of the international issues that may come up. But she is not going to be seen as some ultra-partisan who Kerrey thought he was running against. And oh my, but Bob Kerrey has a Congressional voting record to look back at.

But Nebraska Republicans picked a game changer. Get used to the idea of Senator Deb Fischer. (And that’s “Senator” without the “state” in front of it.)

U.S. feeds drone intel to Islamic supremacist government of Turkey, which uses it to accidentally kill 34 civilians. Solution: Let’s just sell them the drones — that way, they can not only handle the air strikes but do the intel gathering themselves and (bonus!) share it with their friends the Iranians. Not kidding.

One number in isolation has to be treated with care, but this, via the Daily Telegraph, is worth watching:

08.20 Another major upset is the news that Greeks are pulling their euros from the country’s banks, afraid of their savings being rapidly devalued if the country does leave the single currency.

Central bank head George Provopoulos told President Karolos Papoulias that savers withdrew at least €700m on Monday.

“Mr Provopoulos told me there was no panic, but there was great fear that could develop into a panic,” the minutes of a meeting with political party leaders quote the president as saying.

“Withdrawals and outflows by 4:00 pm when I called him exceeded €600m and reached €700m,” the President said. “He expects total outflows of about €800m.”

There are no signs of a full-on run on the banks yet, no queues outside banks in Athens or anything like that, but the situation is being closely watched…

Late last year, I took a  look at how another flawed currency system, Argentina’s dollar/peso peg,  had splintered during the course of 2001, concluding as follows:

[W]hen the dominoes of finance finally fall, they fall quickly. To return to the IMF’s grim textbook: “The crisis broke with a run [on] private sector deposits, which fell by more than $3.6 billion (6 percent of the deposit base) during November 28-30.” At that point the game was up. The authorities’ response (notably the introduction of the corralito) should alarm depositors throughout the PIIGS as they mull how their governments might stop precious euros escaping to safe havens abroad in the wake of bank runs at home.  The corralito limited cash withdrawals from individual bank accounts to the equivalent of $250 a week (the dollar value would soon fall sharply). And the response to it should worry those now running the PIIGS. Argentinians took to the streets and reduced the country’s political order to chaos. Depending on how you define the term, Argentina had five presidents in less than a month, but none could change the inevitable. The country defaulted on its debt, the peg was scrapped, the peso tanked, and the corralito was replaced by the corralón, the centerpiece of an even tougher regime. Depositors were allowed to withdraw a little more money than before, but only in heavily depreciated pesos. Term deposits were frozen, and transfers of money out of the country heavily restricted. Not so long after, dollar deposits were switched into pesos, and the ruin of Argentine savers, many of whom lost their jobs as the economy crashed, was complete.

 History does not always repeat itself. Maybe those remaining Greek depositors are confident that, however battered their nation’s finances, its guarantee of bank deposits up to some $135,000 will hold up through the toughest times. Maybe they have faith that Greece will stick with the euro. And maybe they trust that, should the walk from Greek banks turn into a run, the European Central Bank will do what it takes to put things right. But if they do have any doubts, they can, for now, easily move their euros to a part of the eurozone—Germany, say—where there is no currency risk and bank deposits are blessed with a guarantor that is, you know, solvent. Thinking like that is how a run on the banks can begin. Paranoid? Well, if you were a depositor with a Greek bank, what would you do?

 And, if you were a depositor in an Italian bank, watching all this and aware that money is ebbing away from Italy too, what would you do?

 I know what the Argentine advice would be. Run.

And if the Greeks run, and the Italians run, who will be next?

And that was written before the hard-left Syriza party was surging in Greek polls…

Four years ago, the winning message was “hope and change.” This year, Romney advisers tell National Review Online, the election is about “eHarmony versus Monster.com.”

Taking a few cues from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, Boston is framing 2012 as a contest that, more than anything, is about the president’s stewardship of the economy. The pithy website comparison, sources say, has become popular among Romney’s senior team. Obama (eHarmony) may be well liked, but it’s Romney (Monster.com) who will help you get a job.

Connecting Obama to the trauma and suffering of millions of Americans who are out of work is as important as touting Romney’s leadership qualities, one insider explains. A video released by the Romney campaign today echoes this outlook. Over the course of three minutes, a handful of unemployed, blue-collar Iowans describe their economic troubles.

“I’ve been looking for a job for two years,” Deborah Ragland, of Webster City, says. “Haven’t found any. My unemployment benefits did run out, and we’re just trying to get by.”

Other featured Iowans, such as Troy Knapp, who digs graves for extra cash, and Jason Clausen, a father who struggles to support his daughter, lament Obama’s failure to lead.

“That’s the problem,” Knapp says as a slow piano tune plays. “A lot of people around here when Barack, you know, was running and all that. Everyone believed, everyone had hope. They all thought, ‘Man, this guy’s going to get something done.’”

Back in January, when Romney won the New Hampshire primary, he tested out his campaign’s current theme. “Because [Obama] has failed, he will run a campaign of diversions, distractions, and distortions,” Romney told his supporters in Manchester. “That kind of campaign may have worked at another place and in a different time. But not here and not now. It’s still about the economy — and we’re not stupid.”

That line was a wink at James Carville’s take on 1992 — “It’s the economy, stupid” — but with a Romney spin. Now, as the general election heats up, Romney strategists will push related slogans, including “eHarmony versus Monster.com,” which contrasts Obama’s favorable personal rating with Romney’s pledge to encourage job creation and economic growth.

The visible church — by which I mean all organizations in which people unite for the specific purpose of worshiping Christ as their Lord — has a divine mission, but it is also, and unavoidably, a human institution. In Episcopalianism, one is regularly dismayed by the vicious invective of liberal Episcopalians against conservative ones, and vice versa; similar phenomena afflict all groups and denominations. Sometimes, though, it’s good to focus on this aspect of church relationships precisely to be reminded of the fundamental (not just Protestant, but generic-Christian) insight that man is not, finally, saved by his own virtues and exertions but by the grace of God.

The Liturgical Press, of Collegeville, Minn., has just published a blisteringly honest personal document that shows the very human side of the church. My Journal of the Council makes available, in English translation, the diary Father Yves Congar kept at the Vatican II Council, chronicling his immediate impressions day by day, almost minute by minute, of the passionate struggles among ecclesiastics trying to set the course for the Roman Catholic Church in the post-war world. The Vatican is devoted to religion, but it is also, much like our own Pentagon or EPA, a bureaucracy; and so, much space in the book is devoted to minute accounts of committee hagglings over the wordings of proposed documents. That, too, is a very human element; homo bureaucraticus is a legitimate part of the inheritance of our species. But every few pages, something like this leaps out at the reader: “That an imbecile, a sub-human like [Giuseppe Cardinal] Pizzardo should be in charge of the department for universities and seminaries is scandalous and extremely serious. . . . This wretched freak, this sub-mediocrity with no culture, no horizon, no humanity. . . . This Pizzardo, who has red pyjamas and underpants, [this is a joke about the love some senior clerics have for red cardinalatial finery — MP] . . . who haggles over the purchase of a newspaper . . .  What a frightful comedy!”

Tell us what you really think, Father Congar! That is what LBJ would have called “history with the bark off.”

Father Congar’s side — for want of a better word, the liberals (the prominent theologian Josef Ratzinger was one of his allies) — generally prevailed at Vatican II, with consequences that are still controversial to this day. He died in 1995 — but not before having been himself named a cardinal by Bl. Pope John Paul II. So the next time you get into a heated argument with someone on church matters, picture to yourself the late Cardinal Pizzardo greeting Cardinal Congar laughingly at the Pearly Gates: “Hey, Congar! What color are your pyjamas?” Think of that as the ecclesiastical equivalent of the old public speaker’s strategy of picturing the audience in its underwear: We all do our best to advance the opinions we’ve developed, but the final disposition is in wiser Hands than ours, and we should prepare ourselves to let go of our personal animosities. Winning votes in a church council, or a secular parliament, is not our ultimate destiny, and our goal and hope is to meet in a different sort of place entirely.

My Journal of the Council is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the nitty-gritty of church history. Many of the details will bore non-specialists, but the personal nuggets — funny, angry, wistful — frequently remind the reader that this is a scorchingly honest book. We’re lucky to have it.

In the week that Newsweek hailed Obama as America’s first Gay-for-Pay president, let us not forget another shatterer of the glass ceiling – Harvard Law’s “first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren”:

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”

Do they need a second woman of color? I’m thinking of applying.

Dan’s hilarious post was referenced on Special Report with Bret Baier.

The amateur reviewers on Amazon are mostly raving, but occasionally ranting, about Jonah’s new book, The Tyranny of Clichés. While it has racked up a bunch of five-star reviews, some of the cliché-ridden one-star rants might be even better candidates for an inside-cover blurb on the next reprint:

- “Mr. Goldberg is the ultimate kettle calling the pot black… He is the ultimate Freedom Fighter who wants to destroy our freedoms.Mr. Goldberg is unfortunately the price we must pay for Democracy.” [Just $16? What a bargain!]

- “Jonah Goldberg has made his fortune by being a rabid, non-stop manure-slinger for various conservative organizations… [T]he republican party is the party of all-out furious, maniacal manure slinging… highly skilled at their uniquely republican style manure slinging, deception and misdirection.” [Just who is slinging the manure here?]

- “Yet another childish, incoherent rant by a corporate communist.”

Of course, most of the negative reviewers don’t seem to have made it past the dust jacket, which is about par for the course for a conservative book on Amazon. One user even titles his one-star evaluation, “Review of title only”:

“Tyranny? Cheat? Those are loaded words. Billions, yes with a B, have been spent by conservative think tanks over decades to see what resonates with human emotions because neuroscience has discovered the huge role that our emotions play in our thinking.“

Even more strangely, another one-star reviewer uses the headline “good book” and then admits “I did not read the book. . . . I cannot rate the book because i did not read it yet.”

Almost all of the real reviews are positive, but you’d have to be a manure-slinging, freedom-fighting, corporate Communist to believe them.

On Friday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman expressed his strong unhappiness with me and urged all of you to never believe a word I say — ever.  Then he proceeded to prove me wrong by showing that 1. Ireland has tried austerity, 2. Ireland did cut spending, and 3. increases in spending driven by automatic stabilizers or spent on bank bailouts shouldn’t be counted as spending increase.

As it turns out, I never said that there was no austerity in Ireland or that spending wasn’t cut. In fact, until today, I never wrote about Ireland. I haven’t said that there has been no austerity in Europe either. But his readers wouldn’t know since he failed to link to my work.

As you may recall from my previous posts, my position about austerity in Europe — and why it hasn’t worked– is that in most cases austerity measures have taken the form of some spending cuts mixed with tax increases. With rare exceptions like the Baltic states and Sweden (countries that are growing today), most countries have adopted the “balanced approach” to austerity. And yes, my position about austerity in Europe is that, contrary to the headlines or to Krugman himself, overall spending wasn’t “slashed” or the cuts weren’t “savage.“

The same is true for Ireland: Eurostat data show that spending in the country went down between 2010 and 2011 by €27.9 billion, after going up by €25.7 billion the year before. That’s a €2.2 billion drop from 2009 to 2011.

Keep reading this post . . .

As Nicholas noted, anti-Israel activists around the world are protesting Israel’s founding.

We still remember the Nakba, or “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding and the displacement of Palestinian Arabs, because Palestinian refugee camps remain densely populated even after 64 years. But it’s also worth remembering the millions of Jews who fled Arab lands following Israel’s founding.

Matti Friedman has an excellent account of the “Jewish Nakba“:

On November 30, 1947, a day after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two states, one for Arabs and one for Jews, Aleppo erupted. Mobs stalked Jewish neighborhoods, looting houses and burning synagogues; one man I interviewed remembered fleeing his home, a barefoot nine-year-old, moments before it was set on fire. Abetted by the government, the rioters burned 50 Jewish shops, five schools, 18 synagogues and an unknown number of homes. The next day the Jewish community’s wealthiest families fled, and in the following months the rest began sneaking out in small groups, most of them headed to the new state of Israel. They forfeited their property, and faced imprisonment or torture if they were caught. Some disappeared en route. But the risk seemed worthwhile: in Damascus, the capital, rioters killed 13 Jews, including eight children, in August 1948, and there were similar events in other Arab cities.

[ . . . ]

In many Arab towns and cities there is an area where Jews used to live. In some cities, like Cairo, this area is still called harat al-yahud, the Jewish Quarter. Reporting there several years ago I found people who could show me the location of a certain abandoned synagogue, which they knew by name. A man who once showed me around Fez, Morocco, knew exactly where the old Jewish neighborhood, the mellah, had been, though there was not a single Jew there and had not been for many years. There are remnants like this in Aleppo, Tripoli, Baghdad and elsewhere. The people who live in or around the Jews’ old homes still know who used to own them and how they left; this extinct Jewish world might have been forgotten elsewhere, but millions in the Arab world see evidence of it every day.

As I have reported this nearly invisible story, it has occured [sic] to me that we often hate most the things or people that remind us of something we dislike about ourselves, and that here lies one of the hidden dynamics of the Israel-Arab conflict. It is one papered over by the simple narrative of Nakba Day, which posits that a foreign implant displaced a native community in 1948 and that the Palestinian Arabs are paying the price for the European Holocaust. This narrative, chiefly designed to appeal to Western guilt, also conveniently erases the uncomfortable truth that half of Israel’s Jews are there not because of the Nazis but because of the Arabs themselves.

Read the whole thing.

At the top of the list of people annoying me today is Prof. Anne Curzan of the University of Michigan, who has taken to the virtual airwaves to vandalize the English language on an episode of the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate, specifically by encouraging the use of they as a substitute for he in situations in which the sex of the party being referred to is not explicit. Students who have endured my writing course will recognize that as a 30-point number-agreement error, the source of much grade anxiety on their part and angry marginalia on mine.

Example: “When a person does not know to which sex they are referring, they should write ‘they’ instead of ‘he.’” This is ungrammatical (and ugly) because the singular noun “a person” does not fit with the plural pronoun “they.” Fortunately, the English language provides us with a perfectly good pronoun to use in such instances, and that pronoun is he.

He no more constricts the sex possibilities of a sentence than the masculine gender of fungus in Latin implies that all mushrooms are boy mushrooms. The form of words is not necessarily connected to the meaning of words, and that is true when it comes to grammatical gender and biological sex. Students of Latin will of course be familiar with this fact, inasmuch as there are a number of grammatically masculine words that have feminine-looking spellings: No Roman thought that the typical horseback-mounted archer (hippotoxota) or banker (danista) gladiator-school operator (lanista) or sailor (nauta) was a woman, in spite of the superficially feminine construction of the words. Presumably, everybody understood that the Roman general who conquered Britain, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, was a man, in spite of the fact that his cognomen (meaning “farmer”) ended in –a (associated in Latin with feminine nouns) rather than in –us (associated in Latin with masculine nouns). Spelling, as it turns out, is not destiny.

It is not difficult to identify a similar dynamic in English. There is no confusion about the sex of Pepsico’s Indra Nooyi, even though she is identified as “chief executive officer and chairman of the board.” (Imagine writing that: “There is no confusion about the sex of Pepsico’s top executive, even though they is identified as ‘chief executive officer and chairman of the board.’”)  When the NAACP named Mary White Ovington its “chairman” in 1919, her sex was not in doubt.

Of course there are associations that go along with particular words. Nurse is a word that we think of as feminine, because once upon a time the great majority of nurses were women. Would we have thought of the word as less feminine if we had known that it is derived from from the masculine Latin word for “foster father” (nutricius), which itself is derived from a feminine noun (nutrix) derived from a verb (nutrire)? Does Chuck Norris (whose surname comes from the related French word norrice) have a sex-identification problem because his family name is derived from a word meaning “to suckle babies”? I doubt it.

If there remain people careering around the English-speaking world believing that a woman cannot be a committee chairman or that a man cannot be a nurse, the problem is not spelling  – the problem is imbecility. Making English a bit less structurally elegant would not solve that problem. As I learned in college, the worst thing about feminists is listening to them talk. 

Noted leftist Noam Chomsky and Sarah Palin agree . . . about Barack Obama’s failures. In an interview with Democracy Now, the MIT professor offered his opinion that underneath the president’s soaring rhetoric is very little substance.

You can always count on your fans cheering no matter how absurd your comments.

Watching the video from The View, it is hard to know what Obama meant by the line. Noah’s right that it didn’t sound like he was claiming the forces of bigotry are always going to make things difficult for a guy named “Barack Obama,” though that’s how it reads on paper. If that is what he meant, it’s an awfully uncharitable description of the country he is supposed to be representing and leading. The forces of bigotry could only make the election tight if they exist in sufficient numbers to constrain the share of votes available to a black president with a “foreign” sounding name. Is that really something the man who gave that One America speech in 2004 wants to be saying? It’s also pretty ludicrous given that he had the biggest margin of victory for a Democrat in nearly a half century.

Joy Behar clearly thought that’s what he meant — why else throw in the bit about his middle name? Behar’s attitude is precisely that sort of smug self-righteousness that will hurt Obama in this election. Recycling the tired narrative that voting for Obama is a way to prove you’re not a bigot won’t work the way it did in 2008 because Obama actually has a record now. His presidency isn’t an abstraction, it’s something people have lived with.

Obama recognizes this, at least a little, which is why he went on to talk about the real reason this election will be tight: People are deeply dissatisfied with the state of the country.

As for the other possible interpretation, that things are “cool” when Obama’s on the ticket, this is at best a juvenile argument for reelecting him. It would be interesting to know what the people in the audience thought Obama meant when they cheered his comment like a bunch of Justin Bieber fans.

It’s not just elections. When your name is Barack Obama . . .

. . . the unemployment rate is always above 8 percent.

. . . Midwesterners are always bitter and clinging to their guns.

. . . gas prices are (almost) always above $3 a gallon.

. . . you’re always leading from behind.

. . . the borders are always open.

. . . you’re always fundraising.

. . . things are always perfectly clear.

. . . the national debt is always above $11 trillion.

. . . gunrunning to drug cartels is always fast and furious.

. . . the reset button is always being hit.

. . . the deficit is always greater than $1 trillion.

. . . missile defense is always being cut.

…your position on marriage is always evolving.

… mandates are always constitutional.

…there’s always a moratorium on oil drilling.

…it’s always about you.

Eleven years ago, I wrote this piece on the enduring alliance between dogs and humans. It’s an abiding interest of mine, as Corner readers know well enough. (I’ve even fiddled with writing a book on the subject). Well, new research suggests that we owe dogs more than we may have realized. Without them, we may not have crushed the Neanderthals.

In other news, cats waited it out until they were sure the Neanderthals were going to lose, and then betrayed the Neanderthals to the humans. In an effort to gain human trust, the felines even launched an insurrection against their Neanderthal rulers at the eleventh hour. Some (and by some I mean me) contend the Neanderthals called this last-minute treason, the “Meow-Meow uprising.”

George W. Bush this morning, on the elevator: “I’m for Mitt Romney.”

It must be nice to be a liberal columnist for the New York Times. There are apparently so few editorial demands. For years readers have been treated to a series of never-ending rants from the likes of Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and others — rants that read more like the stereotypical “angry blogger in his mom’s basement” than the thoughts of leading public intellectuals. Today’s Times features a classic example: former food critic and current columnist Frank Bruni unloads on . . . Bristol Palin.  It begins:

Say what you will about Bristol Palin, she’s a quick study. It didn’t take her long to master the ways of her elders on the censorious right and decide that personal circumstance and past error needn’t prevent someone from claiming righteous leadership. Uncle Rush must be proud.

Clever writing, that. And the intro is his launching pad into several paragraphs of precious New York Times space devoted to a negative recounting of the facts of Bristol’s life. He winds up the anti-Bristol diatribe like this:

I hesitated before picking on Bristol because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.

But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.

What caused the sushi expert to attack? He was offended that Bristol criticized Obama for admittedly taking his cues from his daughters’ alleged moral sensibility about gay parents. On her blog, Bristol made the point that fathers should provide moral leadership for children, and she also pointed out the double standard applied to conservative women who are often closely questioned about the role their husbands will play in office. 

Keep reading this post . . .

President Obama appeared on The View today. When asked whether he thought the upcoming election would be tight, he responded, “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always tight.” Joy Behar reminded him, “Barack Hussein Obama.”

The implication seems to be that many Americans would rather not vote for a black man with an exotic-sounding name. Obama’s delivery, though, seemed comic — not what you would expect for a statement about America’s supposed xenophobia. “Tight” is also slang for cool, so it’s possible the president was just commenting on his own coolness.

Here’s the video:

Those lovable anti-Assad, er, rebels expel all families from a Christian village in Hama. Robert Spencer has details, translated from Arabic of a UPI story.