The death of Pope John Paul II came at a time when Americans have been engaged in an unusual moment of national reflection about mortality. The long, bitter fight over the unknowing Terri Schiavo was a stark contrast to the passing of this pontiff, whose own mind was keenly aware of the gradual failure of his body. The pope would certainly never have wanted his own end to be a lesson in the transcendent importance of allowing humans to choose their own manner of death. But to some of us, that was the exact message of his dignified departure.

SUMMARY: THE DEATH OF POPE JOHN PAUL II

- POPE JOHN PAUL II DIES AT 84
- TENS OF THOUSANDS THRONG TO ST. PETER'S TO PRAY FOR POPE
- FUNCTIONS OF THE CAMERLENGO FOLLOWING THE POPE'S DEATH
- THE 26 YEARS OF JOHN PAUL II: 3RD LONGEST PAPACY IN HISTORY
___________________________________________________________

POPE JOHN PAUL II DIES AT 84

VATICAN CITY, APR 2, 2005 (VIS) - Holy See Press Office Director Joaquin Navarro-Valls made the following announcement this evening:

"The Holy Father died at 9.37 this evening in his private apartment.

"At 8 p.m. the celebration of Mass for Divine Mercy Sunday began in the Holy Father's room, presided by Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz with the participation of Cardinal Marian Jaworski, of Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko and of Msgr. Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki.

"During the course of the Mass, the Viaticum was administered to the Holy Father and, once again, the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick.

"The Holy Father's final hours were marked by the uninterrupted prayer of all those who were assisting him in his pious death, and by the choral participation in prayer of the thousands of faithful who, for many hours, had been gathered in St. Peter's Square.

"Present at the moment of the death of John Paul II were: his two personal secretaries Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz and Msgr. Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki, Cardinal Marian Jaworski, Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko, Fr. Tadeusz Styczen, the three nuns, Handmaidens of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who assist in the Holy Father's apartment, guided by the Superior Sr. Tobiana Sobodka, and the Pope's personal physician Dr. Renato Buzzonetti, with the two doctors on call, Dr. Alessandro Barelli and Dr. Ciro D'Allo, and the two nurses on call.

"Immediately afterwards Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano arrived, as did the camerlengo of Holy Roman Church, Cardinal Eduardo Martinez Somalo, Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, substitute of the Secretariat of State, and Archbishop Paolo Sardi, vice-camerlengo of Holy Roman Church.

"Thereafter, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, dean of the College of Cardinals, and Cardinal Jozef Tomko also arrived.

"Tomorrow, Divine Mercy Sunday, at 10.30 a.m., a Mass for the repose of the soul of the Holy Father will be celebrated in St. Peter's Square, presided over by Cardinal Angelo Sodano.

"At 12 noon, the Marian prayer of Easter time, the Regina Coeli, will be recited.

"The body of the late pontiff is expected to be brought to the Vatican Basilica no earlier than Monday afternoon.

"The first General Congregation of Cardinals will be held at 10 a.m. on Monday April 4 in the Bologna Hall of the Apostolic Palace." OP/DEATH:POPE JOHN PAUL/NAVARRO-VALLS VIS 050402 (380)

TENS OF THOUSANDS THRONG TO ST. PETER'S TO PRAY FOR POPE

VATICAN CITY, APR 2, 2005 (VIS) - Pope John Paul died at 9:37 this evening as more than 70,000 faithful were gathered in St. Peter's Square to pray the rosary. They had been flowing into the square all day long - as they had all day yesterday - in ever increasing numbers, of all ages and from all continents and walks of life, families large and small, Catholics and non, cardinals and bishops, priests and seminarians, men and women religious.

Following the rosary, presided over by Cardinal Edmund Szoka, and the announcement by Archbishop Leonardo Sandri to the crowd in St. Peter's Square that the Pope had died, Cardinal Angelo Sodano led a prayer for John Paul II. Archbishop Sandri then announced that Cardinal Sodano would preside at Mass tomorrow morning at 10:30 in St. Peter's Square. People remained in the square for further prayers as the bell in the left tower of St. Peter's Basilica began its death toll, one of the signals to the world that the Pope has died. .../.../... VIS 050402 (190)

FUNCTIONS OF THE CAMERLENGO FOLLOWING THE POPE'S DEATH

VATICAN CITY, APR 2, 2005 (VIS) - In Pope John Paul II's 1996 Apostolic Constitution "Universi Dominici gregis" on the vacancy of the Apostolic See and the election of the Roman Pontiff, paragraph 17 reads as follows concerning the duties of the camerlengo of Holy Roman Church, who currently is Cardinal Eduardo Martinez Somalo:

"As soon as he is informed of the death of the Supreme Pontiff, the Camerlengo of Holy Roman Church must officially ascertain the Pope's death, in the presence of the Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations, of the Cleric Prelates of the Apostolic Camera and of the Secretary and Chancellor of the same; the latter shall draw up the official death certificate. The Camerlengo must also place seals on the Pope's study and bedroom, making provision that the personnel who ordinarily reside in the private apartment can remain there until after the burial of the Pope, at which time the entire papal apartment will be sealed; he must notify the Cardinal Vicar for Rome of the Pope's death, whereupon the latter shall inform the People of Rome by a special announcement; he shall notify the Cardinal Archpriest of the Vatican Basilica; he shall take possession of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican and, either in person or through a delegate, of the Palaces of the Lateran and of Castelgandolfo, and exercise custody and administration of the same; he shall determine, after consulting the heads of the three Orders of Cardinals, all matters concerning the Pope's burial, unless during his lifetime the latter had made known his wishes in this regard; and he shall deal, in the name of and with the consent of the College of Cardinals, with all matters that circumstances suggest for safeguarding the rights of the Apostolic See and for its proper administration. During the vacancy of the Apostolic See, the Camerlengo of Holy Roman Church has the duty of safeguarding and administering the goods and temporal rights of the Holy See, with the help of the three Cardinal Assistants, having sought the views of the College of Cardinals, once only for less important matters, and on each occasion when more serious matters arise." .../CAMERLENGO FUNCTIONS/... VIS 050402 (360)

THE 26 YEARS OF JOHN PAUL II: 3RD LONGEST PAPACY IN HISTORY

VATICAN CITY, APR 2, 2005 (VIS) - At 4:45 in the afternoon of October 14, 1978, ten days after the funeral of Pope John Paul I, 110 cardinal electors, and 88 persons selected to assist them, entered into conclave, sealed off from the world, to elect his successor.

At 6:18 p.m., on October 16, white smoke appeared from the small chimney of the Sistine Chapel, thus signaling that the cardinal electors had chosen a new Roman Pontiff. Twenty-seven minutes later, Cardinal Pericle Felici appeared on the central loggia of St. Peter's Basilica and announced the election of Pope John Paul II to the See of Peter with the words: "Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum Habemus Papam Carolum Wojtyla, qui sibi nomen imposuit Ioannem Paulum II."

At 7:15 p.m. the new pontiff, clad in the traditional papal white, appeared on the same balcony and spoke in Italian the words now familiar to tens of millions of people around the world: "Praised be Jesus Christ!"

"Dear brothers and sisters," he continued, "we are still all very saddened by the death of the very dear Pope John Paul I. And now the most eminent cardinals have called a new bishop of Rome. They called him from a far-away country, ... far, but always near in the communion of faith and the Christian tradition. I was afraid in receiving this nomination, but I did it in the spirit of obedience to Our Lord and with total trust in his Mother, the Most Holy Madonna.

"I don't know if I can express myself well in your - in our - Italian language. But if I make a mistake, you will correct me. And so I introduce myself to you all, to confess our common faith, our hope, our trust in the mother of Christ and of the Church, and also to begin again on this path of history and of the Church with the help of God and with that of men."

John Paul II, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow, was elected as the 264th Pope on the second ballot of the second day of the second conclave of 1978, just five months after his 58th birthday. Six days later, on October 22, 1978, his pastoral ministry was inaugurated.

Today, April 2, 2005, marked the 9,664th day of his pontificate, calculating from October 22, 1978.

His is the 3rd longest pontificate in the history of the papacy. The longest was that of St. Peter (precise dates unknown), followed by Pope Pius IX (1846-78: 31 years, 7 months, 17 days).

In his 26 and a half years as Pope, John Paul II held nine consistories in which he has created 232 cardinals, of whom one is "in pectore." He has created all but three of the 117 cardinal electors who will enter into conclave.

From the start of his pontificate, the Holy Father named over 3,500 of the world's nearly 4,200 bishops. He met each of them a number of times over the years, particularly when they fulfill their quinquennial obligation of a visit "ad limina Apostolorum."

He has written 14 encyclicals, 14 apostolic exhortations, 11 apostolic constitutions, 42 apostolic letters and 28 Motu proprio in addition to hundreds of other messages and letters. In preparation for the Jubilee Year 2000, Pope John Paul wrote the Apostolic Letter "Tertio Millennio Adveniente," dated November 10, 1994, and published four days later. He also created the Committee for the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000.

He wrote five books: Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994), Gift and Mystery (1996), Roman Triptych (poetry, 2003), Arise, Let us Be Going (2004) and Memory and Identity (2005).

The 84 year-old Pope presided over 15 synods of bishops: six ordinary (1980, 1983, 1987, 1990, 1994, 2001), one extraordinary (1985) and eight special assemblies (1980, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998 (two synods) and 1999).

Over the years, the Holy Father undertook 104 pastoral visits outside Italy, the last of which was to Lourdes in August 2004. He made 143 trips within Italy and nearly 700 within the city and diocese of Rome, including visits to 301 of the 325 parishes of the diocese of which he is bishop, in addition to religious institutes, universities, seminaries, hospitals, rest homes, prisons and schools.

With his 247 foreign and Italian pastoral visits, Pope John Paul II reached the 1,167,295 kilometer mark (700,380 miles), that is, over 28 times the earth's circumference or 3 times the distance between the earth and moon.

While in Rome, the Pope welcomed an average of one million people per year, including between 400,000-500,000 who attended the weekly general audiences in addition to those who came for special liturgical functions such as Christmas and Easter Masses, beatifications and canonizations. He also received approximately 150,000-180,000 people per year in audiences granted to particular groups, heads of state and governments.

At the start of John Paul's pontificate the Holy See had diplomatic relations with 85 countries. It now has relations with 174 countries, as well as with the European Union and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. It has relations of a special nature with the Russian Federation and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

According to the Office of Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, over the past 26 years the Pope has proclaimed 1,339 Blesseds in 143 ceremonies and 483 Saints in 52 ceremonies.

He founded the John Paul II Institute for the Sahel in February of 1984, and the "Populorum Progressio" Foundation for the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America in February of 1992. He also founded the Pontifical Academies for Life and for Social Sciences. In addition, he instituted the World Day of the Sick (celebrated annually on February 11) and World Youth Day (WYD). The 20th youth day will be celebrated this August in Cologne, Germany. The Pope himself chose the themes and developed its contents in an annual Message to the Youth of the World.

Karol Jozef Wojtyla, known as Pope John Paul II since his election over 26 years ago, was born in Wadowice, a small city 50 kilometers from Krakow, on May 18, 1920. He was the second of two sons born to Karol Wojtyla and Emilia Kaczorowska. His mother died giving birth to a third child - stillborn - in 1929. His eldest brother Edmund, a doctor, died in 1932 and his father, a non-commissioned army officer, died in 1941.

He made his First Holy Communion at age 9 and was confirmed at age 17. Upon graduation from Martin Wadowita high school in Wadowice, he enrolled in Krakow's Jagiellonian University in 1938 and in a school for drama.

The Nazi occupation forces closed the university in 1939 and young Karol had to work in a quarry and then in a chemical factory in Solvay to earn his living and to avoid being deported to Germany.

In 1942, aware of his call to the priesthood, he began courses in the clandestine seminary of Krakow, run by Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha, archbishop of Krakow. At the same time, Karol Wojtyla was one of the pioneers of the "Rhapsodic Theater," also clandestine.

After the Second World War, he continued his studies in the major seminary of Krakow, once it had re-opened, and in the faculty of theology of the Jagiellonian University, until his priestly ordination in Krakow on November 1, 1946.

Soon after, Cardinal Sapieha sent him to Rome where he worked under the guidance of the French Dominican, Garrigou-Lagrange. He finished his doctorate in theology in 1948 with a thesis on the topic of faith in the works of St. John of the Cross. At that time, during his vacations, he exercised his pastoral ministry among the Polish immigrants of France, Belgium and Holland.

In 1948 he returned to Poland and was vicar of various parishes in Krakow as well as chaplain for the university students until 1951, when he took up again his studies on philosophy and theology. In 1953 he defended a thesis on "Evaluation of the Possibility of Founding a Catholic Ethic on the Ethical System of Max Scheler" at Lublin Catholic University. Later he became professor of moral theology and social ethics in the major seminary of Krakow and in the Faculty of Theology of Lublin.

On July 4, 1958, he was appointed auxiliary bishop of Krakow by Pope Pius XII, and was consecrated September 28, 1958, in Wawel Cathedral, Krakow, by Archbishop Baziak.

On January 13, 1964, he was named archbishop of Krakow by Pope Paul VI, who elevated him to the cardinalate on June 26, 1967.

Besides taking part in Vatican Council II with an important contribution to the elaboration of the Constitution "Gaudium et Spes," Cardinal Wojtyla participated in every assembly of the Synod of Bishops since it was created by Paul VI in 1967.

I'm an atheist; the notion of a diety, to me, is an absurdity. But whatever my belief, or yours, this Pope was a great, great, man and we shall all miss his moral stature. He spoke for goodness and the dignity of humanity in a way that transcended matters of faith so it would be understood as universal truths. We should consider ourself extremely lucky to see anyone like him again in our lifetime.

I wish folks could have seen Keith Olberman last night. Someone read to him a passage from JPII's masterwork on the Theology of the Body, in which he writes about the importance of sexual fulfillment, and Olberman was both blushing and confounded. "There is no area he hasn't touched on, seemingly," he marvelled. "

I am deeply saddened by the death of His Holiness, Pope John Paul II. The pontiff was a world statesman whose leadership played a key role in the fall of Communism and the democratic transformation that swept Europe in its wake. In the 26 years of his papacy, Pope John Paul II's advocacy for human rights and human dignity never wavered. The wisdom and universality of his teaching will continue to guide all of us who, like Pope John Paul II, believe in freedom and faith.

Karen and I have been blessed to have the opportunity to meet the Pope on five separate occasions, three of which we were privileged to receive mass from him in his personal chapel. On one occasion, six years ago, Karen and I, and our children met the Pope in his personal chapel. As we received mass, we were struck by the fervor in which Pope John Paul II prayed. As he knelt at the altar, he deeply and intensely involved himself in prayer.

On that same visit, we learned first hand how the Pope was so very much like Christ. Each time the Pope stepped down to kneel before the altar, his face brightened and he would smile at one of our children. He looked and smiled at each of our children throughout the course of the mass, and hugged and kissed each one of them after mass. Pope John Paul II was a man deeply devoted to children and faithfully exemplified Matthew 19:14 when Jesus says, "Let the little children come to me." On that day, his noticeable love and passion for others touched our lives and the lives of our children. We love the Pope and will miss him dearly.

Pope John Paul II’s compassion for children extended not only to our family but to all corners of the world. As a great communicator for freedom and human dignity, he urged the world to break free from the culture of death that surrounds us and to uphold a culture of life.

We should remember Pope John Paul II not just as the greatest Pope of modern times but also as a valiant fighter for the truth," she said.

His life was a long struggle against the lies employed to excuse evil. By combating the falsehoods of communism and proclaiming the true dignity of the individual, his was the moral force behind victory in the Cold War.

Millions owe him their freedom and self respect. The whole world is inspired by his example.

Laura and I join people across the Earth in mourning the passing of Pope John Paul II. The Catholic Church has lost its shepherd, the world has lost a champion of human freedom, and a good and faithful servant of God has been called home.

Pope John Paul II left the throne of St. Peter in the same way he ascended to it -- as a witness to the dignity of human life. In his native Poland, that witness launched a democratic revolution that swept Eastern Europe and changed the course of history. Throughout the West, John Paul's witness reminded us of our obligation to build a culture of life in which the strong protect the weak. And during the Pope's final years, his witness was made even more powerful by his daily courage in the face of illness and great suffering.

All Popes belong to the world, but Americans had special reason to love the man from Krakow. In his visits to our country, the Pope spoke of our "providential" Constitution, the self-evident truths about human dignity in our Declaration, and the "blessings of liberty" that follow from them. It is these truths, he said, that have led people all over the world to look to America with hope and respect.

Pope John Paul II was, himself, an inspiration to millions of Americans, and to so many more throughout the world. We will always remember the humble, wise and fearless priest who became one of history's great moral leaders. We're grateful to God for sending such a man, a son of Poland, who became the Bishop of Rome, and a hero for the ages.

As a mark of respect for His Holiness Pope John Paul II, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half‑staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset on the day of his interment. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half‑staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

Here's a more favorable note:

Jonah:

I am a liberal and am naturally more likely to buy Chait's argument than yours, but I think you got the best of him in your exchange. The thing is, there certainly are a lot of emperically disproven arguments on the conservative side-- biblical Creationism is one example (I'm not talking about all conservative religion here, just the "earth is 6,000 years old" variety), and the economic effects of the 1993 tax hikes are another. But Chait is trying to tie particular examples of conservative disregard for empiricism into a blanket conservative rejection of empiricism-- along with a claim that liberals are non-ideological empiricists-- and that's just wrong and silly.

It is quite obvious that liberals disregard the empirical results of their policies too when they have ideological reasons for their positions. You probably don't hit him hard enough about his claim that liberals would stop supporting redistribution of wealth if it were proven that conservative policies helped the poor as well as the rich. Come on! Economic fairness is a fundamental principle for liberals, and not just socialists. Liberals write all the time about the GAP between rich and poor widening, without regard to whether the poor are doing better. (They also argue the poor are not doing better, but that doesn't mean liberals aren't concerned about income inequality.)

And as you point out, there's nothing wrong with using ideology as a filter. Conservatives should care about whether tax increases impinge on individual freedom, even if they do achieve the policy ends that liberals seek from them (and even if they achieve a policy end that conservatives support as well as liberal). And liberals should care about income inequality, even if a conservative economic policy puts more money in the pockets of the poor as well as the rich.

I wish Chait and others on my side would stop propounding a General Theory of Conservativism as being unconcerned with facts that get in the way of their ideology. There's plenty of factual critiques of conservatives that are valid, and plenty of ideological critiques of conservatives that are also valid. (And ditto with liberals.) We should all be making them. It's comforting to think that one's political opponents are out of touch with reality while the folks on your side are not. But that view adds little to the discourse.

Quite a few have chimed in along these lines. I think they offer a fair complaint. The problem, of course, is that whenever one begins a sentence "liberals think" or "conservatives believe" you are automatically being unfair to some liberals and some conservatives because neither camp is ideologically or intellectuallyhomogeneous. Anyway, the email:

Jonah-- Your correspondent says that liberals want a "more equal" world. But it's not true. He can't cite any Democrats saying so, just Thomas Sowell. In fact, liberals want greater equality of opportunity.

I read the Corner because I have much more exposure to liberal
conceits than conservative ones in daily life. So now I know that
conservatives are equally smug, self-satisfied, and unwilling to
engage with certain unpleasant facts. It is a great disappointment to
see the Opinion Duel, which could be a place for engagement, made into
a place to show off for the home crowd.

Also, your correspondent backs up Chait's point-- he wrote that
liberals are driven by empirics, while conservatives are driven more
by ideology. Your correspondent wrote that "people are seeking
different ends." Are you endorsing this bit of relativism and
conceding Chait's point? ("There's no such thing as empirical truth--
tax cuts are good!") Or just passing it along?

It is a common conceit among conservatives that liberals want wealth
redistribution. But there's no evidence of that in the actions of
Democrats, unless you caricature support for a given proposal as a
desire for naked wealth transfers.

Jonah:

Being exactly the kind of guy who enjoys "highly geeky insidery snarky stuff," I consider your debate with Jonathan Chait to be great fun and pretty interesting. I would, however, like to reinforce one of the points you made about Chait's argument: Doesn't he MOTHER!@#$%!* understand that there is no such GOD@$&! thing as "works better" if people are seeking different ends!!!

This is one of things that infuriates me (though I obviously do a fabulous job of concealing my anger) about pointy-headed liberal types.

And one more thing before my blind rage totally consumes me, Chait writes, "Whereas if you could prove that tax cuts for the rich really could produce enough growth that the revenue would replace itself, every important liberal pundit would support them anyway." I feel compelled to call complete and total bullsh*t here. If modern liberalism has any organizing principle, it is that it seeks a "more equal" world. Even if tax cuts for the rich doubled government revenues, liberals would still be opposed to them because the gap between rich and poor would widen. As Thomas Sowell says, "If everyone woke up twice as rich tomorrow as they are today, the headline of the New York Times would be: Gap Between Rich and Poor Widens"

Keep up the great work,

I think the pope has to be a prophetic figure, somebody who changed humanity. What he offered, what he suggested, the road laid out, if followed, would have transformed humanity in a spiritual sense. He was calling at the end of the twentieth century for a spiritual life to become the center of man's humanity, for all men, and certainly for all Catholics and all Christians to rediscover spirituality as the guiding force in their lives. If he had accomplished that, he would have been a millennial figure, not the man of the century. Somebody who produced much grander changes than that.

Instead he is a historical figure, he's somebody who lives within the period of time, who had a message that had impact, that changed events, that changed lives, but did not nearly reach the dimensions that were the ambitions that its author set out.

At the end of the day, when you look at this extraordinary life and you see all that he's accomplished, all the lives he's touched, the nations whose history he's changed, the way he's become such a powerful figure in our culture, in all of modern culture--among believers and not--taking all of that into account, you're left with one very disturbing and difficult question. On the one hand, the Pope can seem this lonely, pessimistic figure--a man who only sees the dark side of modernity, a man obsessed with the evils of the twentieth century, a man convinced that humankind has lost its way. A man so dark, so despairing, that he loses his audiences. That would make him a tragic figure, certainly.

On the other hand, you have to ask, is he a prophet? Did he come here with a message? Did he see something that many of us are missing? In that case, the tragedy is ours.

The Schiavo case only looks unprecedented: For decades, women seeking to terminate pregnancies have faced gantlets of screamers, invasions of privacy, violence in the name of "saving babies," charges of murder and of evil motives, politically motivated legal obstacles, spurious medical "expertise" (abortion causes breast cancer; Terri Schiavo just needs therapy). There is the same free-floating vitriol: Abortion is the "Silent Holocaust," while, according to Peggy Noonan, those who support Ms. Schiavo's right to die are on "a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz" ...

[T]he Schiavo case reveals the true priorities of the right: they are happy to abandon the principles of federalism if the issue is related to questions of "life." But if they are willing to cast aside federalism in the Schiavo case, won't they be willing to do the same in the context of abortion? And if they are, won't that inevitably lead to attempts to pass federal legislation banning abortion?

The Holy Father is love personified in so many ways. He taught us how to live as a Christ taught and surrender all to God . He had a special love for persons the world sees as lacking value. During his wednesday audiences he saved the "best seats in the house" for those in wheelchairs. When he was able to move easily he would come and bless and touch individually each person in a wheelchair in the audience hall . I know because in July 1991 I was blessed by the pope from my special front row seat in my wheelchair and that day I looked into the face of a saint . He taught us all how to love no matter how challenging our every life is and he taught that the suffering we have has value even when we don't understand it.

May God give us all the great consolation as we face a world without our beloved Pope John Paul II.

Lost of this sort of email:

Jonah, Although I am not Catholic in exactly the same way you are not Catholic, I think I will take the time to grieve Pope John Paul II. Because it is human to do so, yes, but also because after being constantly reminded over the past couple of weeks how less than ordinary most of us are, it makes me sad and lonely to lose someone that is extraordinary.

It's been almost ten years since my father died. He had a feeding tube because of a tracheotomy caused by cancer in the throat (L.S.M.F.T). I did not allow him to "dehydrate to death" nor would I have starved him. He went quietly to the Kingdom of God during his sleep after a continuous decline. I think the Dr's a little hypersensitive but given his job and what he sees daily I would be too.

VATICAN CITY (AP) -- The Vatican says the pope's breathing "has become shallow" and his kidney function is deteriorating.

Jonah- I am in a 230 person lecture right now and someone has purchased a remotely controlled fart machine and it may be the funniest thing i have ever heard. Gets all the serious stuff today slightly out of your head.

Bosley's comments are Barbara Boxer-level wacky. "Fertilized embryo" is--how shall I put this?--a non-concept. The point Bosley is missing (or trying to evade) is that embryos can be brought into being in two (in fact, more than two) distinct ways: by fertilization of an egg cell by a sperm cell OR by somatic cell nuclear transfer. Either way, if the process is successful, what you end up with is a nascent human being--a whole, living member of the species homo sapiens--who will, if provided with a suitable environment and adequate nutrition, soon be conjugating verbs and then asking for the car keys. Now, of course cloning can fail; so can fertilization. Embryos can be defective, and can be defective in ways that will prevent implantation. In the case of cloning experimentation, many embryos will be defective. Yet they are embryos, just as retarded children are children. At the same time, sometimes failures of fertilization or cloning processes are so severe that embryogenesis doesn't take place. What is created is a non-embryonic growth, such as a complete hydatidiform mole or a teratoma. These are disorganized, tumor-like entities, rather than embryonic members of the species. But this is not what Bosley has in mind (to the extent that he can be said to have anything in mind).

''I can't quite figure out where the governor's objections are coming from," said Representative Daniel E. Bosley, the North Adams Democrat who is shepherding the bill in the House. ''Somatic cell nuclear transfer involves transferring a nucleus into an egg, not an embryo. It is then tricked into thinking it is fertilized. It is not a fertilized embryo. Many scientists feel that it cannot be implanted, and, if it is implanted, that it will not grow."

From the Donovan:

Simple. What he did was far worse than what Martha Stewart did. One can only wonder what the thinking was on the side of the Justice Department.

If it were me - I'd have a lifetime revocation, large fine - and depending on the documents... jail time. Mind-boggling to those of us who have lived our professional lives under those rules. And since when do the Feds have a 'misdemeanor' equivalent? Is he pleading guilty under a civil charge, or criminal? Somehow, however, I don't think Mr. Berger will be selling his house to cover his debts and asking people, "You want fries with that?"

Cheers,

Yer Military Guy

NRO's editors did not, contrary to Derb's dissenting neurosurgeon, overreach in posing the rhetorical question " Why not kill Mrs. Schiavo quickly and efficiently, by depriving her of air to breathe?"...[D]on't forget that Judge Greer also prohibited feeding Terri by MOUTH, thereby depriving her of any opportunity for sustenance and analogous to depriving someone of any opportunity for respiration--"artificial" or otherwise. Greer's dual prohibition's against feeding Terri orally or by feeding tube is akin to removing not just a respirator, but all of the air in the patient's room as well.

Let's accept a few obvious facts. Sandy Berger had good legal representation. Sandy Berger is a man of considerable political ambition. Sandy Berger is a man who values his reputation.

Given these facts, I think this plea agreement is pretty astonishing. He's thrown away almost any chance of serving in government again and he's admitted to a crime that cannot be spun as anything other than serious. I mean given all of the charges about intelligence screw-ups and secret agendas over the last five years, isn't it interesting that the Clinton administration is still generating criminal charges in these areas?

I'd be curious what Shannen and Andrew think of this since they know this stuff. Am I wrong?

Mr Derbyshire---

'Why not kill Mrs. Schiavo quickly and efficiently, by depriving her of air to breathe?'--NRO editors.

I am a practicing neurosurgeon. At least several times a month, I care for patients with severe brain damage (usually from a hemorrhage or traumatic injury) with no hope for neurological recovery. These are patients who are in deep irreversible coma but may not meet all the criteria for brain death. Some of them have spontaneous reflexive respiration.

I have seen and dealt with hundreds of patients like this and observed colleagues care for hundreds more. I am generally conservative and agree with NRO editors on most issues.

I routinely advise family members to allow removal of artificial respiration if there is no hope for recovery. This is standard paractice and occurs in every hospital routinely. According to the NRO editors, am I 'suffocating' these patients and 'killing' them? I believe I am doing neither.

By the logic of the NRO editors, all of these patients should receive a tracheostomy and be ventilated until they die of some other cause. Were this to be done, there would be thousands of near-brain-death patients admitted to ventilator wards every week receiving futile care.

While there may be doubts about the Schiavo case on other grounds, the NRO editors have over-reached with this statement.

[Name withheld]

When the issue surfaced last year, Mr. Berger insisted that he had removed the classified material inadvertently. But in the plea agreement reached with prosecutors, he is expected to admit that he intentionally removed copies of five classified documents, destroyed three and misled staff members at the National Archives when confronted about it, according to an associate of Mr. Berger's who is involved in his defense but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plea has not been formalized in court.

''The House of Representatives voted significantly in favor of helping children and people of all ages who suffer from debilitating diseases and illnesses," said House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi. ''I think this is a giant step for medical research."

The Massachusetts State Senate approved Senate Bill 2028, endorsing research on human embryos and human cloning by a vote of 35-3, with only Senators Knapik, Lees and Moore opposing the bill (Senators Berry & Shannon were absent). There was no debate and lots of speechmaking by senators touting their handiwork and predicting their supposedly prominent place in history.

Even though the bill endorses experiments on human embryos and requires the destruction of cloned human embryos after 14 days of existence, some senators characterized it as a pro-life measure. Senator Jack Hart told the Senate that "This is the most important, significant legislation that I have and that we will ever see in our legislative careers. I am pro-life. I am a pro-life Democrat and yet I believe in this bill and I believe in this science." Senator Bruce Tarr said that the bill "is a matter of life. A matter of cherishing, strengthening, and preserving life on this planet" because "by allowing people to do experiments they will unlock the greatest mysteries of science."

I’m looking forward to reading Stanley Kurtz’s thoughts on the latest report out of Columbia. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting this post on the relatively new website CampusJ, which relates that the university gave first dibs on the committee report to the New York Times, along with the Columbia Spectator, in exchange for the papers’ promise that they would not solicit any comment from the students who made the complaints. (See also this article in the New York Sun.) According to CampusJ, the Times article was released before students were even permitted to read the committee report. (Ariel Beery, one of the most involved of the students, confirmed this in an e-mail: “The Times published on-line as we were waiting in a hallway for Provost Brinkley to let us into his office--and even that was hard-won, with us waiting for him in the cold for three hours until the administration would meet with us.") Putting aside for now the report’s content, this detail alone should raise serious doubts about Columbia’s commitment to seeing the controversy fairly resolved.

Update: In fairness to the Spectator, it should be said that their initial articles on the committee report did contain student quotes. According to the paper's editor (you may need to scroll down), they were given the same ground rules as the Times but somehow managed to evade the "no students" condition.

Your post on Romney and the Globe edit is reminiscent to me of an argument I've heard by opponents of private social security accounts that, since most proposals offer only a number of government-approved funds for investment of these accounts, they don't really offer that much choice, which is one of the reasons conservatives have promoted them. Of course, they don't offer as much choice as the right might like, but we try to play nice....

This all goes to show why, the next time a judicial nominee is filibustered, Bush should nominate Bork in his place.

From a friend:

Jonah,

I'm sorry you didn't mention the crux of the K Street problem: the more
issues are put under the control of political decision-makers (as
opposed to economic or other factors), as folks like Yglesias would
have us do, the more important it becomes to more people to influence
them. Their money flows in and people can make their living as
middle-men. If you want to get rid of K Street, reduce the scope and
budget of the federal government. Many of the lobbyists will have to
move to state capitals (if issues devolve) or get real jobs (if the
issues are removed from the political process).

Today millions of Americans are saddened by the death of Terri Schaivo. Laura and I extend our condolences to Terri Schaivo's families. I appreciate the example of grace and dignity they have displayed at a difficult time. I urge all those who honor Terri Schaivo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others. The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life....

Matt Yglesias (I know, two mentions in one day: sigh), hates the consumption tax and says George Will should be ashamed of himself for hawking it. The merits of his complaint seem worth debating and pondering. But then Yglesias offers this absurd, ruthlessly naive howler:

The way to curb K Street's influence over policy in Washington would be to replace the current crop of shameless, endlessly corrupt individuals who are running the country at the moment.

Me: Hey, I've got no love for K Street and rent-seeking Republicans, but c'mon: Who honestly believes that K Street was demonstrably less corrupt and infested with racketeers during the Clinton administration? I know Matt likes to mention how he wasn't in Washington during the Clinton years, but that's no excuse for writing as if they didn't exist.

The problem of businessmen, grafters, hucksters and others seeking favor from government not only predates Bush and Clinton, it predates the Republic -- and quite probably -- the invention of the wheel.

For years, family doctors and hospitals have made discreet use of the kindly overdose of morphine. But law is uncomfortable operating in the shadows. Where should its lines be drawn? Politics can teach us nothing about moral philosophy, but it does train us in figuring out who is winning, who is losing. When we look at the dynamics of life and death, which side is sweeping all before it? Is it the Christians praying in the street outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice? Is it Congress, whose two-party system is the serious and the showboaters? Is it George and Jeb Bush? Or is it a handful of medical experts, and the judges who heed them? Two branches of the federal government wrapped themselves in awesome majesty to save a woman’s life, but the bench held firm. In Europe, the tide is even stronger. The Dutch practice euthanasia so briskly that they will kill themselves even before the Islamists get around to it.

It's painfully frustrating to see people speak this way, and other people fall for it. So the cells don't go into an embryo but into an egg...and it's not a fertilized embryo...ah huh. OK. So what is it? And if you implant it and transfer it, what is it then? What is Dolly? An unfertilized sheep? And these people are supposedly on the side of science.

This New Jersey bill is telling. Research-cloning (so-called "therapeutic cloning") advocates routinely argue that they are only interested in research on early embryos — that there could be a 14-day cutoff. Of course, for those who believe that an embryo is a human life from the get-go, that's no ideal. On the other hand, an argument could be made for the virtues of baby steps (versus deadlock — which in this case is no prohibition on the cloning of humans). But the New Jersey bill moots that option — it casts doubt on the willingness of the biotech industry to stop after 14 days.

It's not a huge surprise. For instance, during a June hearing before the presidential bioethics commission, Michael Werner of BIO, biotech's lobby group, had this exchange with commissioners:

PROF. GEORGE: So if there were promising lines of research that would require implantation, you would not be in favor of pursuing those lines of research?

MR. WERNER: Yes, that's correct. Having said that, I will be fair and say I think that — No, I think that it's fair to say that, you know, science advances, ethical thinking advances. We constantly are re-examining our views and our principles.

I think it's okay for us to say we've said it throughout history with new technology. It's okay to say, you know, this is something that's troubling, but now, you know, umpteen years later we for some reason feel like, you know, we can re-explore whether that's an appropriate limit. I will tell you that I have no view that, sure, we're going to move the goal post. I would say our view is 14 days because the primitive streak seems like an appropriate boundary, and that's where we are. PROF. GEORGE: So for you that's a principal limit.

CHAIRMAN KASS: For the time being.

MR. WERNER: Yeah.

PROF. GEORGE: Well, that's the question.

MR. WERNER: Now. That's correct. No, look. And you know, for what it's worth, I understand that that's frustrating, and that's why I sort of hesitated to say it, but I do think that that's where we are, and I don't know that it's appropriate to say that limits on scientific research should stay static over the course of decades as things change. That boilerplate 14-day limit will be history, in New Jersey at least, if A2840 gets a nod from the assembly during next week's lame-duck session — a dangerous precedent liable to have a domino effect nationally. Despite a fierce misinformation campaign the state over, groups like the New Jersey Right to Life Committee and the New Jersey Catholic Conference will continue to rally their troops throughout the weekend, to stop it. When the clone-and-kill bill passed the state senate last December, five Republicans voted for it — no doubt fearing the political fallout from opposing a bill Christopher Reeve testified in support of. And it's hard to believe none of them will go to the vote untouched by biotech lobbying. Consider a not-so-small detail: One Republican county chair is a partner in a public-relations group that has flacked for one of the state biotech firms. In recent days, "Dear Colleague" faxes have included recycled material from Republican Utah senator Orrin Hatch and Nancy Reagan, who support federal legislation that would allow for "therapeutic cloning"; neither has supported the expansive New Jersey bill explicitly, however. No doubt that nuance is easily lost in the heat of the session-close ruckus on a debate that has now dragged on for over a year in the New Jersey statehouse.

From a somewhat perturbed reader representing other perturbed readers:

Jonah, is your letter writer insinuating that, under our current system of government, parents pay the full support of their own children? What rubbish!

Last year, my property taxes were nearly $4,000 (on a home appraised at
$163,000). The bulk of that went to pay for local schools -- schools in
which I do not have (nor have I ever had) children. I've paid property taxes
(either directly or as a portion of rent) for over 20 years.

Now, I would not dispute the notion that good schools come under the heading
of "the greater good." But let's recognize that everyone, whether they have
children or not, contributes to the raising of the next generation.

Let us mourn, but not be discouraged. Let us forgive those who have acted wrongly in our name, even as we beg forgiveness from the Author of Life for whatever failures and delinquencies on our own parts have contributed to the culture of death. We are all sinners, and have fallen short; and the wages of sin truly are death. Let us resolve that Terri's death shall not have been in vain. In her name, let reform and renewal be our undoubted mission. Let us now, even in the depths of sorrow, rededicate ourselves to our ancient creed, affirming that every human being, as a creature fashioned in the divine image, possesses a profound, inherent, and equal worth and dignity--a worth and dignity that it is the high duty of the officers and institutions of constitutional republican government to respect and defend.

From a reader in the know:

Jonah,

There is a growing body of literature showing the link between expansive public retirement systems and low fertility rates as well as low human capital investment per child. Our current public retirement system, in essence, transfers 10% of the labor earnings of each generation of workers to it parent's generation. The problem is that each retiree get benefits without regard to the production of their own children or whether they even had children.

Think this doesn't matter? Try a mental experiment. What if instead of getting money from the working-age population as a whole, each retiree couple got 10% of its own kids' labor earnings. Some families would have more kids, and almost every family would put more effort into raising them into productive citizens. So putting your kid into day care might make sense now, but what about later on when they might earn less because of that choice? Do you re-model your kitchen or buy a few extra years of private school? Let them watch all the television they want? ...etc.

About halfway through our inquiry, Congress passed the Intelli­gence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which became a sort of a deus ex machina in our deliberations. The act created a Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The DNI’s role could have been a purely coordinating position, with a limited staff and authority to match. Or it could have been something closer to a “Secretary of Intelligence,” with full authority over the principal intelligence agencies and clear responsibility for their actions— which also might well have been consistent with a small bureaucratic super­structure. In the end, the DNI created by the intelligence reform legislation was neither of these things; the office is given broad responsibilities but only ambiguous authorities. While we might have chosen a different solution, we are not writing on a blank slate. So our focus has been in large part on how to make the new intelligence structure work, and in particular on giving the DNI tools (and support staff) to match his large responsibilities.

These are errors—serious errors. But these errors stem from poor tradecraft and poor management. The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.

From a reader:

From The Washington Post (Braniagan):(my emphasis)

The death of Schiavo, 41, ended the court battle that had pitted her husband, who wanted to take her off artificial life support, against her parents and siblings, who sought to keep her alive at all costs. But the death appeared unlikely to quell the broader controversy fueled by the Schiavo case, one that set right-to-life, antiabortion and conservative religious groups -- with backing from President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress -- against advocates of a "right to die" when the brain no longer functions.

An Alternative Version...

The death of Schiavo, 41, ended the court battle that had pitted her estranged husband, backed by his current girlfriend and his quirky attorney George Felos, who wanted to end her life and cremate her remains, against her parents and siblings, who sought to keep her alive in the hope that she might yet recover.. But her death appeared unlikely to quell the broader controversy fueled by the Schiavo case, one that united a wide range of views, including civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson, and Pro-Life campaigner Randall Terry, to pretest her mistreatment by the Florida judicial system -- with backing from President Bush, his brother Florida Governor Jeb Bush and a bipartisan group of legislators in Congress -- against advocates of euthanasia on demand.

From a reader:

Spot on, Jonah!

You don't get from, say, Barry Goldwater to Condoleezza Rice by virtue of a series of Meetup.com events. Yglesias may be catching on to that,
and I think that both of you understand that it took decades of debate,
research, thousands of hours of "Firing Line", hundreds of NR issues,
"Human Events", the Reagan Insurgency, to come up with a coherent world
view called "Conservative Republicanism".

Conservatives are torqued with Bush and Rove because many of us are
convinced that the Reagan heritage that had its origins in Goldwaterism
(and you are correct, the two strands are different) is being
consciously rejected by this White House. Bush can get away with much
because of the War. However, the corner has been turned on this war,
and with victory in sight, the seams in the Party are apparent. No
crackup, to be sure, but seams that can be exploited by a canny
Democrat like our friend Hillary.

In a sense, Andrew Sullivan's jeremiads have been prescient. He is
worth listening to when it comes to government spending, while we can
safely ignore his base killing advice on gay marriage. As for the
Donks; if you go to the magazines or to the websites, where -is- the
intellectual vitality (other than Peter Beinart, John Chait, and
several others) that separates thinking liberals from the
"BushHitler-Lied-They-Died" Crowd?

The fact that millions of liberals flocked to see "Farenheit 9/11" and
believed what they saw as received fact should tell you all you need to
know about modern liberalism and the far Left's hold on it today.

...the parents and their two other children "were denied access at the moment of her death. They've been requesting, as you know, for the last hour to try to be in there and they were denied access by Michael Schiavo. They are in there now, praying at her bedside."

Come to Atlanta and see me prove that wrong.

Note: Nothing in above post should be construed as a declaration that fifty chicken eggs will actually be eaten on the evening in question.

"We believe they are behind those attacks," the first senior U.S. official said. "We're concerned that they want to foment the kind of bombings and dislocation that the Lebanese fear could happen -- and that will allow the Syrians to say this is what happens when we remove our forces from your country."

Throughout the 1990s, therefore, the Intelligence Community assumed that Saddam’s Iraq was up to no good—that Baghdad had maintained its nuclear, biological, and chemical technical expertise, had kept its biological and chem­ical weapons production capabilities, and possessed significant stockpiles of chemical agents and weapons precursors. Since Iraq’s leadership had not changed since 1991, the Intelligence Community also believed that these capabilities would be further revved up as soon as inspectors left Iraq. Saddam’s continuing cat-and-mouse parrying with international inspectors only hardened these assumptions.

These experiences contributed decisively to the Intelligence Community’s erroneous National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. That is not to say that its fears and assumptions were foolish or even unreasonable. At some point, however, these premises stopped being working hypotheses and became more or less unrebuttable conclusions; worse, the intelligence system became too willing to find confirmations of them in evidence that should have been recognized at the time to be of dubious reliability. Collectors and ana­lysts too readily accepted any evidence that supported their theory that Iraq had stockpiles and was developing weapons programs, and they explained away or simply disregarded evidence that pointed in the other direction.

Even in hindsight, those assumptions have a powerful air of common sense. If the Intelligence Community’s estimate and other pre-war intelligence had relied principally and explicitly on inferences the Community drew from Iraq’s past conduct, the estimate would still have been wrong, but it would have been far more defensible. For good reason, it was hard to conclude that Saddam Hussein had indeed abandoned his weapons programs. But a central flaw of the NIE is that it took these defensible assumptions and swathed them in the mystique of intelligence, providing secret information that seemed to support them but was in fact nearly worthless, if not misleading. The NIE simply didn’t communicate how weak the underlying intelligence was.

I may have taken it on the chin yesterday on the gas tax stuff, but I'm still intrigued by the consumption tax. George Will's column only heightens my interest.

This reader raises an interesting point. Maybe the Greater Internet is like a microwave oven which can cook ideologies in half the time as conventional ovens. I kind of doubt it -- in part because ideas need to seep into the public consciousness -- but I think it's a really interesting question to ponder. Anyway, from the reader:

Jonah:

I appreciated your post on Matt Yglesias' piece. But I have one
question: Are we SURE that the maturation of a new political movement
can't happen overnight? Everything is faster these days, thanks to the
Internet and other means of communication. Information can be
disseminated and processed in greater volume and frequency than ever
before. I'm not sure that comparing Moveon.org to the Goldwaterites of
1964 is apt given the huge technological advances in between. Did the
Goldwater/Reagan movement require decades to mature because it required
slow chin-pulling? Or would it have matured much faster if All the Young
(Conservative) Dudes had had wifi networks to hash over all this stuff
24/7? Food for thought.

I should add in a collegial spirit that Ramesh is the pundit least prone to this analysis around today. Indeed, much of his writing's force comes from the fact that he stands in the pocket between "good" politics and good policy and so he rarely confuses the two. That's why you'll find him making these distinctions time and again on issues like abortion and the difference between the GOP's success and the conservative movement's success. And no, I don't owe him money. I've just always been envious of his ability to see these distinctions immediately and seemingly effortlesssly when the rest of us have to work to separate the two (though many pundits make no effort in this regard at all and blithely write as if their policies and their politics are perfectly in synch internally and with the American people).

I'm getting a lot of interesting grief for the concluding paragraph of yesterday's column. I wrote:

Personally, I dislike much of Bush's "compassionate conservatism." Indeed, I find it astounding that even as Bush has moved the Republican agenda leftward in many key respects, the left has screamed all the louder about how "right wing" he is. But simply because I think Bush is wrong about, say, Medicare, it doesn't mean I think it's a sign the conservative movement is falling apart. Lots of folks thought FDR's New Deal was a disaster at the time, and look how that turned out.

I could have been less cute and more clear I suppose, but I was pressed for time and sleep. My point here was this: The folks peddling the crack-up thesis look at bad policies and think they must translate themselves into bad politics. The confusion of personal policy preferences for smart political moves is one of the most common bad habits among all political commentators. Lefties like Thomas Frank want the Democrats to embrace radical populist economics. But they cannot content themselves with arguing in favor of the policy, they also have to believe it would be smart politically for the Democrats to return to the days of FDR or William Jennings Bryan. For example, a while back Andrew Sullivan argued that it would be both good policy to embrace gay marriage but, hey, Republicans would even pick up a few gay votes. Now, I have no problem with Sullivan or anybody else who favors gay marriage making their case for gay marriage. But the idea that gay a pro-gay marriage stance would be a net gain for Republicans at the polls is silly.

Anyway, all of the folks telling me that the New Deal was a "disaster" miss my point entirely. Yes, it may well have been a policy disaster in many respects. But what serious historian or political analyst would call it a political disaster? Who would argue that liberalism fell apart -- i.e. cracked-up -- because of FDR. Liberalism surely changed -- I think for the worse -- because of FDR and, interestingly, this was when the libertarians (then called "traditional" or "19th century" liberals) bolted from the Democrats (and, oddly, the Communists) and increasingly became the intellectual shock troops of the American right. There's a reason the first chpater in George Nash's history of the post-1945 Conservative intellectual movement is titled "The Revolt of the Libertarians."

Anyway, Rove and Bush are changing the Republican Party and of necessity the American right. I don't like all of these changes. Some of these changes may have been inevitable in the wake of the Cold War and with the advent of new technologies, globalization etc. I don't which were inevitable and which were whimsical. I agree with my libertarian friends that many of the changes are troubling or at least worrisome. And sure, some libertarians may well feel the need to jump ship. But let's keep in mind, the story of modern American conservatism is also the story of libertarians jumping ship and either drowning on their own, setting-up shop on tiny islands no one cares about, or eventually swimming back to the boat in the hope being taken back.

Regardless, I don't confuse these changes as a political calamity. Keep in mind: The reason Bush & Rove are changing the party is in order to get more votes. In other words, political success can be the source of ideological calamity -- and vice versa. There's a certain amount of narcissism involved when a commentator says "I don't like their policies, therefore the whole thing will surely blow up." You'd think by now conservatives and libertarians would recognize that the mass of American people don't always share our views of ideal policy outcomes.

I think Matt Yglesias offers a pretty useful corrective here on the subject of liberals' overestimation of the Goldwater movement's success. Obviously, I don't share much of the anti-conservative bias Yglesias brings to the subject, but I think his point is basically right. However, I think he gets the history a little bit muddled, if not necessarily wrong. He writes:

For one thing, it's really not the case that the Goldwater Republicans "didn't try to become Democrats" after losing in 1964. Goldwater ran on a platform of eliminating Social Security, opposing the Civil Rights Act, opposing the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and opposing a federal role in education finance. By the time Ronald Reagan brought the conservative movement to power in 1981 he had abandoned all of those planks and also had to accept the existence of the EPA and various other innovations of the 1970s. What he did once in power was basically scale back to some extent programs that didn't even exist when Goldwater ran.

Me: What's left out of this timeline is Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party. The GOP did in fact become like Democrats. This happened when Eisenhower affirmed the bipartisan nature of the New Deal. In 1960, Goldwater rallied conservatives against Ike's "dime store New Deal" and Nixon's disastrous "Pact of Fifth Avenue" with Nelson Rockefeller which made Nixon promise to put all sorts of liberal planks in the platform (Nixon was triangulating in the big leagues when Clinton was triangulating in his crib). There was all sorts of great invective against the pact. Lots of conservatives called it "Munich on the Hudson" and Goldwater called it "The Betrayal in Babylon."

Despite a strong draft Goldwater movement, Goldwater bit the bullet and promised to be a loyal Republican. He delivered his "let's grow up Conservatives!" speech and implored the the insurgent Right to stay in their historic home and support the nominee (which, was a bit of a stretch since the Republican Party wasn't in fact always known as the indisputably more conservative of the two parties). The conservatives supported Nixon and when Goldwater got his turn in 1964, the ungrateful, petulent liberal Republicans refused to help (remind you of anybody Sens Chafee, Specter & Jeffords?). Goldwater lost in a landslide. And, somewhat contrary to Yglesias' (and Bill Bradley's) history, Nixon and the GOP did in fact become like the Democrats. Nixon of course was a spectacularly liberal and statist president. He also won elections handily.

In some respects I think the comparisons between Nixon and Clinton are revealing. Both men won the presidency by trimming the differences between their party and the other party. Both presidencies left their respective parties weaker and more shorn of principles. The good news for the GOP was that conservatives had stuck around to take up the fight and eventually -- via Reagan -- win back the Oval Office and Congress. Yglesias is right that the Reaganized conservative movement wasn't as purely libertarian as the earlier Goldwater movement. But then again, the Goldwater movement lost the White House in a landslide. The Reagan movement was more fusionist in that it had a much broader coalition -- Southerners, evangelicals, anti-Communist "neocons," Reagan Democrats, free markerters etc.

The problem for the Democrats is that their corresponding Reagan movement seems a less likely candidate for similar successes. First, who is their Reagan? Second what do they believe? Third, What movement? Surely the MoveOn crowd isn't remotely up to snuff. People forget that Goldwater-Reagan movement spent decades working on ideas, magazines, think tanks etc. Listen to liberals today and you get the impression that that sort of internal debate and ferment can happen over night. It can't. The Goldwater analogy falls apart, on this point alone. If liberals really want to follow in Goldwater's footsteps they'll either have to embrace a serious left ideology the American people won't accept or they'll have to go back to square one.

How do we know that the Hippocratic Oath "survived" several millennia (if by this you mean that it was used in its classical form from the time it was created to sometime in the last couple of decades)? Do we know anything at all about the percentage of doctors who took the oath at the time of the birth of Christ, in 500, 1000 or 1500 A.D.? Even the website to which you link says that only about a quarter of American medical students took the oath in the 1920s. And if most doctors took the oath in 938 or 1428, did they take the same oath?

The old oath was inconvenient to modern medicine and so has been rewritten variously in different med schools. For more information, look here, but the important finding runs as follows: "According to a 1993 survey of 150 U.S. and Canadian medical schools, for example, only 14 percent of modern oaths prohibit euthanasia, 11 percent hold convenant with a deity, 8 percent foreswear abortion, and a mere 3 percent forbid sexual contact with patients -- all maxims held sacred in the classical version."

Hi K-LO, Maybe you aren't destined to fly. I had a dream right after you announced the Atlanta shindig that you, Jonah, Rich, Derb, and a few others showed up in a mini-van at my house in Chattanooga, TN, to pick me up on your way to Atlanta! So maybe you're really supposed to be driving instead of flying...you could turn your trip South into a bus tour! Think of all the red-state NRO fans you could see!

At first glance, the ASME-nominated abortion essay by Martha Mendoza—a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for investigative reporting—seems like classic feminist material, but according to Ms. Lafferty, it was the source of another struggle between herself and the publishers. In “Between a Woman and Her Doctor,” Ms. Mendoza recounts the agony she went through to obtain a late-term abortion after she found out, 19 weeks along, that the baby growing inside her had died.

However, according to Ms. Lafferty, Ms. Spillar objected to the language describing the “baby” and its body parts. From Ms. Lafferty’s perspective, the piece transcended politics, but concerns about the political use of language in the abortion-rights controversy are a major preoccupation for feminists at the moment; for some feminists, using the word “baby” (instead of “fetus”) in a story about abortion violates a cardinal rule. Ms. Spillar said that she “had no recollection of any conversation like that” and added that, in general, “publishers and editors go back and forth all the time.”

That story Ramesh posted about Bill Kristol getting smacked with a pie reminds me: I'll be at Ithaca college on April 6 talking about diversity & stuff.

I suppose Bill responded the correct way, but transforming oneself into a helicopter of fists certainly has its appeal as well.

The more I read aboutt Michael Jackson the more I'm convinced he shares a sexual abnormality similar to Troy McClure's. Recall this conversation (I know I've mentioned this before):

Selma: Are you gay?

Troy: Gay? I wish! If I were gay they'd be no problem! No, what I have
is a romantic abnormality, one so unbelievable that it must be
hidden from the public at all cost.

An email raises another point:

"I'm pro-Roe-- but this sounds quite weird. A bit of weirdness you didn't go into:

"'Internationally, pro-life red-staters may find travel and business dealings difficult among Europeans'

"But merely overturning Roe wouldn't turn the U.S. into some weird outlier compared with European countries. Roe is the outlier. A constitutionally- (or, if one prefers, "constitutionally-" with scare quotes) mandated prohibition on any restriction of abortion for two trimesters and little constitutionally permissible space for regulation even in the third trimester-- this is unique. The combination of extremely liberal abortion laws for six months and the constitutionalization of such laws isn't some kind of requirement for OECD membership.

"Do, say, Germans find it uncomfortable to travel in Europe? Germany's abortion law is much more restrictive than anything I'd expect to see in a post-Roe federal legal code, or in the post-Roe legal codes of any but a few states or jurisdictions such as Louisiana and Guam.

"As I said, I prefer the US approach here. But it's silly to offer, as a defense of Roe, that it allows us to fit in with Europeans. (Well, it'd be silly even if its factual premise were true. But it's even sillier since the premise is false.)"

has a bizarre cover story (not online yet) in which Elizabeth Thecla Mauro worries that Roe v. Wade may be overturned prematurely. Or something. It's hard to make heads or tails of her essay. So I'll skip over the many disgressions and concentrate on what seem to be the main points.

She seems to be worried about two prospects. First, that the end of Roe "could actually lead to a full-blown schism" within the Catholic church, with parishes breaking away, battles over property ownership. "Such an event could be ruinous for the fiscal health of the Roman Church." Her second worry is that the end of Roe, and the resulting political battles in the states over abortion policy, would "have family members, parishes, and ultimately whole communities choosing sides and growing in distrust and dislike." She continues, "Internationally, pro-life red-staters may find travel and business dealings difficult among Europeans. . . . Domestically, resourceful, blue, pro-abortion states could do serious economic damage to landlocked and less monied pro-life red ones." ("Some of what I'm saying," she writes, "must surely sound over-the-top." Well, yes.)

So instead of overturning Roe, Catholics should instead have their church spread a new message "emphasizing not law and legalism and duty, but mercy and tenderness and love," and explaining that abortion is "the Destroyer of Love."

This is pious nonsense.

First of all, it's worth noting that the Catholic church doesn't own the pro-life issue. Are evangelicals supposed to accept the killing of unborn human beings for as long as ending it would inconvenience that church's accountants? Is Nat Hentoff supposed to as well? And why should Catholics hold these priorities? They're supposed to believe that their Church has a guarantee of eventual triumph.

Second: It's a mistake to view changing the law and changing the culture as wholly separate enterprises. Our government teaches that abortion is a right guaranteed by our fundamental law. Overturning Roe is a step toward changing the culture by ending that teaching.

Third: Once Roe went, we'd be fighting not just over "abortion rights" in the abstract but over particular policies that Roe now bars: tighter parental-consent laws, bans on late-term abortion, etc. Why should those fights be any more divisive than the fight over the Supreme Court?

Fourth, there's the matter of the Constitution. Do we really have to wait for the Catholic bishops to get their communications strategy in order before we're allowed to get it back?

In response to several emailers, I was not lobbying for the Carlson show. Seriously. I knew that there was no way I could make that point without some people thinking that was my motive. But it wasn't. But just so folks don't think I'm entirely without ambition, Beinart & I have discussed the idea of a Beinart & Goldberg show a la Kudlow and Kramer, which I think would make a lot of sense. But that's a project for a post-book world.

"Tony Blair's plans for defence cuts are a "stab in the back" for the men and women he has sent to war, Michael Howard, the Tory leader, has said. Infantry battalions are being reduced from 40 to 36 under a shake-up which will create a new Scottish "super regiment". But the Conservatives have pledged to spend £2.7 billion to save the regiments if they are elected.Mr Howard today accused the Prime Minister of taking a "gamble with our national security". He said: "Anybody who has given serious thought to the threats we face today could not conclude that we currently have enough soldiers in the infantry."But Labour have let Armed Forces' manning levels drop 3,000 below establishment. On top of that, the Government has announced a further cut in our infantry levels of four battalions."What a stab in the back for the men and women Mr Blair sent into the line of fire." Mr Blair's "obsession" with Europe was also damaging Britain's defence capability, Mr Howard said. EU proposals to lift the arms embargo on China, opposed by the US, are a prime example of the way Europe was working against British interests, he said. George W Bush, the US president, has signalled that UK and European defence contracts could lose contracts while EU forces could be denied US technology if the embargo is lifted. "The attitude of Mr Blair's Government at best has been ambivalent," Mr Howard said. "Let us remember this is an arms embargo - not a trade embargo."

The Tories are terrible, but Tony Blair is far, far worse. Chuck him out.

I will be on this Friday, but that's not the point.

I also just received a press release announcing that Tucker's show is going off the air. They attribute it to the fact that Tucker's new MSNBC gig -- and relocation to New Jersey -- makes the show untenable. That's unfortunate and understandable, but not to be too crass, why not find a new host? Tucker's good and the show was/is good. But surely the rationale for the show extended beyond merely the need to get Tucker on PBS. CPB -- run by Republican appointees -- is the chief funder of the series and might want to ponder, say, "Rich Lowry: Undiluted" or "Mark Steyn: 99 & 44/100ths Pure."

that President Bush is helping the Democratic party by selling the public on an idealistic foreign policy with which Democrats will, in the long run, be more comfortable than Republicans. "It's not a given that Democrats will be able to rise above their partisan dislike of Mr. Bush's war, and their broader suspicion of United States power, in order to embrace democratization. But by 2008 the job of consolidating democracy will probably be primarily nonmilitary in nature. It will involve financing and training indigenous political activists, helping to build highways, schools and hospitals, and nurturing democratic institutions like a free press and labor unions. Which is to say, all the things Republicans roll their eyes at and Democrats have long embraced."

Now let's assume that the top foreign-policy issue of 2008 will be training activists abroad, etc.; that Democrats will be more enthusiastic about this agenda than Republicans; and that the public will support this agenda. Even if all these conditions were met, how much would the Democrats really be helped? If that's what the foreign-policy debate looks like in 2008, then foreign policy isn't going to be much of an issue in the elections that year.

Now that would certainly be better for the Democratic party than if foreign policy were a big issue that hurt it, as in 2004. But the party's increased fortunes would owe entirely to the fact that the foreign policy issue had gotten less politically salient. It would not be because Bush had sold the public on Democratic ideas.

From a reader:

Jonah,

I know you wonked as a population policy guy, and you have from time to time opined on the subject of population versus environmental capacity, resource scarcity etc. I think that you basic large point is a very good one –i.e. that people are intelligent actors and so trendline predictions are often wrong (ie. Europe DE-populationg etc), and that market mechanisms tend to take care of scarcity by disinsentivizing consumption and incentivizing finding alternates etc.

What I find frustrating is the tendancy, which you have shared sometimes, of conservatives to totally dismiss the environmentalist/ overpopulationists/ Malthusians claims without recognizing the true components or using very bad counter arguments. Specifically, it is seldom acknowledged that some of the things that seemed to specifically disprove Malthus’s population vs. arable land equation in history weren’t general phenomenon but one time off events. Population pressure and farm land shortage in Europe was relieved by the one time event of discovering a new continent with huge amounts of arable untilled land. Agricultural yields were doubled or whatever by discovery and exploitation of natural deposits of large but finite sources of organic fertilizer material –i.e. guano and then oil. Once those are used up, as guano already is, we can’t just use sand (unless you subscribe to a cold fusion techno magic deux-e-machina faith/ solution). Using these events as economic ‘proof’ that resources don’t run out is just silly. Just because my gambling addiction didn’t bankrupt my family because my rich uncle died and I inherited wealth just in time, is not proof that my gambling habit is sustainable in the future.

Another bad argument about population that your are guilty of sometimes tapping is the ‘vast open spaces’ one, and the related ‘but look at Holland (Japan, Singapore…). Just because x number of people can physically fit on y area of moon surface does not mean that the moon has carrying capacity for them (you know, the whole earth’s population could fit in east Texas thing), the important thing is the amount of land to grow food per person, the amount of land to grow plants to exchange their oxygen, filter their fresh water etc., and wide open desert doesn’t count as ‘available land’. Some economists say “but look at Holland (Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manhattan…) to point out that more people equals more prosperity etc. But Manhattan requires a mostly empty, unpolluted, undeveloped majority of upstate NY to give it fresh water, and lots of Ohio and Idaho to feed it, so the idea that you could fill those places up like the island of Manhattan is silly.

Finally, the great weakness in the market argument is that some resources, like clean air and fresh water, are not demand flexible or substitutable, so using the fact that we don’t run out of copper because industry finds ways to do more with less, use other materials etc. is not a very good analogy to these items. And placing faith in ‘Star Trek’ solutions dependant on infinite energy from matter/antimatter reactions to create and change matter at a whim are not very good arguments either.

Anyway, I imagine you know these things, which is why I write. I wish you would write a thoughtful column on the subject that is less of a swipe at the hysterics and exaggerators on the other eco side and more an attempt to lay out the truth on the matter.

disagrees with my take on the budget plan of Colorado Gov. Bill Owens--but I can't quite figure out where it is we are supposed to disagree.

Poulson accuses me of "overlook[ing] several factors" that have contributed to the state's budget problems. The first is the absence of a rainy-day fund in the budget--to which I alluded when I noted that the state's budget rules don't take adequate account of the effects of recessions. The second is the state's constitutionally mandated education spending--which I explicitly mentioned. I may not have gone into these things in as much detail as Poulson preferred, but that's not the same as overlooking them.

Poulson also objects to my statement that "Owens's plan foresees a tighter constraint on the growth of the budget than the rule that ALEC and the National Tax Limitation Committee want other states to adopt." Again, it's not clear what substantive disagreement he has with me here. The ALEC rule, as Poulson notes, is to restrict revenue and spending growth so that they grow no faster than inflation plus population growth. My point was that under Owens's plan, over a ten-year period revenue and spending growth would be even lower than that. Poulson does not dispute that.

And both of us think that Colorado voters should reject the governor's plan. So what's his problem with me?

Here's what the man writes in today's Times: "During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We [Republicans] believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive."

Baloney. During the first Bush administration, Congress imposed regulations on the private sector far more substantial than any it has passed during the last five years: the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Restoration Act, for example. Danforth voted for the former and was the lead sponsor of the latter. He voted for the first Bush's tax increase in 1990. And he voted for the first major regulatory initiative of the Clinton administration, the Family and Medical Leave Act. Republican congressmen have become less pro-regulation, not more, and it is partly because they are no longer burdened by the likes of Senator Danforth.

You name your kid "Princeton," that's pretty much a guarantee that he'll grow up to be an ambassador. Or a snotty, rich brat in an 80's movie. Or both.

Since Cruising is little more than gay porn with a plot, let me try to put an end to this thread before we start listing films which have no place being mentioned on a family website.

The Great Escape
No Escape
Lawrence of Arabia
Resevoir Dogs
Das Boot
Sleuth
Saving Private Ryan
(John Carpenter's) The Thing
Twelve Angry Men
Rambo: First Blood
My Dinner With Andre

Now obviously, this list is not exhaustive. There are also many movies readers cite which I would not. For example "The Dirty Dozen" has both high-class German ladies at the big party and it has cheap hookers earlier in the film (much to the chagrin of the absurdly named "maggot"). But while it's true that the women don't play big roles, we're now competing in a field where even tiny roles for women are problematic.

Anyway, I say all of this in the hope that I can beat back the flood of email on this topic -- which was initially appreciated but now I think it's moment has subsided.

A reader reads a lot of nice things into what some might call the fetal crouch I fell into on the whole gas tax thing:

And this is precisely why liberalism is sinking like a stone: The presence of debate in conservative Corners and the absence of it on the left.

You floated an idea that – well, it wasn’t workable, regarding oil price fixing. A number of lucid, credible arguments came streaming into your inbox regarding why the idea wasn’t workable. You may have had some insults and what-not, but that always happens. The good arguments were there.

Moreover, you dignified these arguments by posting them, for all to see, followed by the ever-humble “message received.” I saw more honor, dignity, and maturity in this one little exchange than I’d seen from CBS in the entire documents flap. Nobody impugning someone’s motives; nobody hurling names (at least that was made public).

And *that* is why you guys rock.

I think never mind should be one word.

I've been reading a lot of old (1920-1940s) newspapers this year and it amazes me how much words, usage and spelling change. For example, in the 1940s the Washington Post used the word "indorse" instead of "endorse." Candidates received "indorsements" etc.

So, I think there's room for growth with "never mind." If nonetheless can be one word and insofar (but not "insofaras" -- even though nobody uses insofar without the "as") why can't never mind be economised to nevermind.

On the wisdom of this insight, there can be no debate.

This reader's thinking outside the box:

Nevermind banishment, let's bring back gladiatoral games! For death penalty cases only of course. Think of the spectacle! And who wouldn't want to see Richard Ramirez vs. Scott Peterson?

I understand the appeal of the idea. But I do have a few reservations. If a guy is convicted of robbery is it really fair to send him to an island where he'll get killed? Isn't that just a death sentence, once removed? Also, is it remotely conceivable that environmentalists would allow us to send men to an uninhabited island and develop it agriculturally? I doubt it.

Anyway, I bring this up because of this email:

Jonah, While I agree that 'No Escape' is a bad movie, what I thought was interesting was that the writers somehow thought placing the country's hardest and most violent killers on an island surrounded by mines and guarded by helicopter gun ships was wrong. Of course they make the warden and the criminal justice system to be the bad guy however wouldn't things be interesting in the community of criminals if they truly had to live in a society of their own design? Place them on a respectable island that can sustain some kind of agriculture with a boy scout handbook and let them fend for themselves. No worries about death penalty cases and the such.

Meeting the NR editors in person…was an incredible experience. I learned that Jonah Goldberg is taller than a Wookie, and that Ramesh Ponnuru knows how to party. I also learned how The Corner was born from Rich Lowry: “I received an email from Jonah with 10 ideas on how to improve NRO. The first nine were terrible. The last one was The Corner.”

Here are a few:

Mr. Goldberg, If we were to fix oil prices by raising taxes on them whenever the price dropped below it, would the sellers really be daft enough to sell below that price? Furthermore, the reason why high prices encourage alternatives is because the alternatives are preferable to the high prices but not the low ones -- otherwise we'd already be seeking those alternatives. Artificially raising the prices of gas in order to gain some laudable objective is simply forbidding the best of three options in order to take the second best -- it must decrease total utility and value. More or less by definition. I'm all in favor of taxes designed to internalize externalities (the cost of carbon and other pollutants, for instance, or wars and other foreign policy costs attendant with our consumption of foreign oil). But with all due respect to yourself and Mr. Krauthammer, there's a reason why price fixing is generally considered a bad idea by economists.

And...

Jonah, Put down the banana peels my friend. You've jumped off the deep end with this adjustable tax to keep oil prices stable. Haven't we already learned this lesson in innumerable ways that the government and more specifically the politics that drive it are a very poor substitute for a free market. Btw, why are you proposing a tax increase of any kind? What happened to shrinking the size of the government. Lets push to kill obsolete departments instead. P.S. Can the real Jonah come out and play? P.P.S. Love your work. :-)

And...

Here's my concern on this, Jonah: If we opted for stable pricing, and a notionally adjustable tax, then this pegging would distort the wholesale market price, since consumer demand would be factored out, and intermediaries could, in essence, take the Treasury's share of the revenue. In short, it will not work. Taxes are instruments of confiscation, not market control. The only way it might work is if the USG has a monopoly of oil distribution, so that it could buy on the world market and sell to all the refiners at the pegged price, and the retailers had a fixed markup from the crude price. I suspect that's more market changes that we would want. Now, if you want to make the tax 90% of the price, like in Europe, then you will be able to curb the swings in the pump price, but you damn well better spend all the money on hydrogen fuel cell development.

And...

Jonah:

We do more with oil than make gasoline. The problem with oil is it comes from places with bad governments run by bad men. If oil came from Iowa we would not care whether it was highly taxed (and would no doubt be against it). In order to have energy companies invest in other fuels/syntheticproducts/energy and improve our trade balance deficit foreign, non-Nafta oil should be taxed at some dollars a barrel.

Gas taxes kill Republicans, a national security enhancing, "protectionist" measure might not.

And...

Jonah,

When I hear conservatives talking about raising taxes at
the pump, I know that bad times are ahead.

For automobiles, development of alternative technologies is
well underway. This year will mark the introduction of several
new hybrid vehicles, a point that Jerry Flint at Forbes
highlights in a recent article (http://www.forbes.com/flint/).
Fuel cell technology continues to improve, and the stocks in
the companies developing them continues to rise. Everyone
knows a breakthrough is coming, and soon. Toshiba is now
talking about a Lithium Ion battery for a car that can take
a full charge in a minute (see http://slashdot.org over the
next couple of days). We'll have a wide selection of
alternative fuels soon.

In the meantime, a hike in gas taxes is simply guaranteed to
make everything more expensive. My family owns one car (not
two), a Honda minivan. I have three children, and routinely
carry more, so there is justification for the vehicle.
The recent increases in oil prices have made a sizable dent in
my family budget. (I'm a 36 year old graduate student.) If you
think raising taxes is anything but a loser for conservatives,
you've got too much disposable income. And if you think 'other
taxes' will be cut to offset, then you need to back off on the
drug habit.

Of course, if transportation goes all electric, I hope we have
enough copper for the motors.

Me: Message received.

Half of my mail is about gas taxes and their many flaws or few advantages. The other half is about movies that had few women. For the record, several readers have claimed that the Hunt for Red October had only a femal flight attendant. Not so. It also featured Dr. Jack Ryan's wife -- played by that woman who also played the insufferable Dr. Beverly Crusher on a show we shall not name. I did like this email though:

Hi Jonah!

The movie "Gettysburg" (1994) had only one female with a speaking role. "I
thought the war was in Virginia!" was her only line. Other than not being
an action film and not being commercially successful, this film should
qualify for the "commercially successful action film relatively devoid of
females" category.

Thanks!

Maybe it's the nitrogen bubbles in my brain or the afterglow of reading Bob Samuelson's column today, but I finally feel willing to float a trial balloon in the Corner which, I admit, has been launched more times than the Goodyear blimp: Increase gas/oil taxes.

Admittedly, current high oil prices have caused pain for some and are probably a drag on the economy in significant respects (the airline industry, for example), but the negative effects certainly don't track with the predictions of doom and gloom which typically accompany fuel tax proposals. Clinton's 4.3 cent a gallon tax elicited howls that the economy would go off the rails, for example. Well, now gas prices are much higher than they were in 1996, though still lower -- adjusted for inflation -- than they were in the early 80s. And, more to the point, the economy seems to have absorbed high gas prices better than most would have predicted.

Anyway, since it's impossible to deny that our dependence on Middle East oil -- or our dependence on foreigh oil, a lot of which comes from the Middle East -- skews our foreign policy in undesirable ways (and enriches folks we'd rather see make their money from ordinary development), it seems worth considering a tax system which weans us of oil as much as possible. Demand from China and India will be putting upward pressure on oil prices for decades to come. And since I'm increasingly sympathetic to consumption taxes in general, it seems to me a fuel tax is a good place to start. I kind of like Charles Krauthammer's idea to peg oil prices at a stable level and try to keep to keep it there by adjustung taxes accordingly. If oil prices skyrocket, lower the tax. If oil prices plummet, raise the tax -- But keep prices at a sufficiently high -- or "realistic" -- level to encourage more efficiencies and investments in alternative fuels and to protect the economy from volatility as much as possible. I'm not talking about a net hike in taxes. I'd be delighted to see a cut in other taxes to accomodate the rise at the pump. And I have no problem whatsoever with investing lots and lots of money in nuclear power.

This didn't take long. From a reader:

Sir,

"Master and Commander" had exactly one woman in the
entire two hour plus film. She was in the picture for
precisely seven seconds and had no speaking role.

From a reader:

Jonah,

I remember noticing the same thing years ago, when I, er, saw it in the
movie theater. Maybe it illustrates that to have a tolerable action movie,
one must not only have chase scenes, objects exploding, hand-to-hand combat
and fighting, etc. but one must have scads of supporting sexy women (or
one, if she is the heroine). I wonder if there are any action movies that
have lacked the presence of the fairer sex and have succeeded commercially?

Amidst such hysteria, is it any wonder that some champions of "life" are making death threats against judges and legislators who have ruled or voted the "wrong" way?

I don't like to exaggerate but if you don't go to the Atlanta shindig you will be the greatest fool on earth since that judge who refused to affirm Lionel Hutz's lawsuit against the makers of "The Never Ending Story" for false advertising.

Besides, the money goes to a good cause. Why I bet you think we fancy-pants conservatives work in skyscrapers and wear belts.

blog has a lot of lengthy, interesting posts.

I think he goes interestingly wrong in this digression in a post on Schiavo:

"Let me make an analogy. The reasoned, absolute pro-life position holds, for example, that personhood begins, from a moral and, those who reason thus hope, one day from a legal perspective, when sperm meets egg. The reasoning is impeccable, in that this is a bright-line test that works: an event actually happens, on one side of which there is an entity with a full complement of genes and the natural ability, in the proper environment, to develop into a full-grown baby. It is, as Ramesh Ponnuru likes to say, exactly what a human being looks like at that stage of development.

"But it is also a biological fact that our reproductive system disposes of such human beings willy-nilly. The death rate is, I think, something like 30%. If we are really supposed to believe that these entities are morally no different than other humans, then that loss is an enormous tragedy, far greater, numerically, than the losses due to abortion. Does it make a moral difference that these losses are natural -- that they are part of how we are designed? The rights-based account of why abortion is wrong would suggest that it does not: death is death, and if we're on the side of life then just as we have an obligation not to take life we have an obligation to try to save it. If that means redesigning how human reproduction works, I should think the moral case would favor such an effort.

"Hopefully, my readers would agree with me that such a conclusion is absurd. . . ."

This reader agrees that the conclusion is absurd, but also thinks that it is not entailed by a pro-life position. There is a difference between acts and omissions, between acts intended to end human lives and acts (or non-acts) that merely allow human lives to end. (That's one reason the debate about Schiavo has so often turned on the question of whether removing the tube amounts to "killing" or "letting die.")

Let me make another analogy. There have, I assume, been times and places where infant mortality rates have been as high as 30 percent; but few people would conclude that infanticide would therefore have been morally defensible in those circumstances. For that matter, I imagine that a lot of 91-year-olds don't make it to 92; that doesn't make it morally defensible to kill 91-year-olds.

It is a good thing when medical (and other) advances lower the infant mortality rate and the miscarriage rate and extend the lifespan. But nobody is under the same moral obligation to work to lower the infant mortality rate that he is to refrain from killing infants, nor under the same moral obligation to extend the lifespan as to refrain from killing the elderly. I wouldn't concede that the rate of spontaneous abortion--whatever that rate is (and keeping in mind that embryo-like growths that are not human organisms should not be counted in the total)--should have any bearing at all in moral judgments about abortion and related matters.

has another excellent article on TCS today.

I imagine that while Feser believes that beliefs that are both "rational" and "religious" can legitimately be brought to bear on public policy, he also believes that not all moral norms that are both rationally and theologically grounded should be enforced by the state. It might have been wise for him to include a caveat to this effect in his essay, so as to ward off misunderstanding.

I think he goes slightly wrong at the end, too, with these lines: "This is not to deny that the fact of pluralism poses a serious political problem: it does, and I frankly confess that I have no idea how to solve it. But then, neither does the liberal, whose favored 'solution,' as I have argued elsewhere, basically amounts to the proposition that all views in a pluralistic society can be tolerated only so long as they submit themselves to the liberal's own idiosyncratic and highly contestable conception of justice." Why should we imagine that there is a solution to the problem of pluralism (if, indeed, it is right to think about it as a problem)?

Kathryn:

Although I do not normally spend $500 for dinner, I have justified it as a 'networking' opportunity. So hopefully everyone will be bringing their business cards.

Ok, I admit, I just want to meet Derbyshire.

SIMON & SCHUSTER/POCKET BOOKS' NEW IMPRINT

ACQUIRES MARY CHENEY MEMOIR

Publication in Spring 2006

New York, N.Y., March 29, 2005 - A memoir by Mary Cheney will be published by the newly minted imprint under the direction of conservative strategist and commentator Mary Matalin, it was announced today…

The plane from Morgantown to Pittsburgh was delayed this morning. And, since that flight is a gut-wrenching adventure of shrieking terror, we decided it'd be better to drive back rather than wait and risk near certain death in the flying death box. So we rented a car. The good news is that Peter Beinart got in the car a Fabian Socialist and after three or four hours of sustained Sam Kinison style "persuasion" from me (God likes tax cuts! Say it! Say it!), he is now a dedicated conservative stalwart. The bad news is that I'm now exhausted.

You are sadistic. It is none of your business that the husband wants to treat his wife like a human, while you prefer to treat her like a bunch of bones. No decent person would treat a sick dog like that.

I am going to create Kevorkian Airlines, named for our national hero, Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I could sell 1,000,000 tickets in the first five minutes. It will fly a mile high, a hundred miles over the ocean. Just push the needle, kick open the door, and wonderful, there would be nothing sick people like you can do to stop real people wanting too be treated like real people. There is dignity in life, there must be dignity in death....

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. (CNN) -- The Rev. Jesse Jackson will not be permitted to see Terri Schiavo on Tuesday, a member of the Schindler family and another person close to the family told CNN.

Michael Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman's husband and legal guardian, determines who can visit her. There was no immediate word from him or his attorneys.

Bobby Schindler, Terri Schiavo's brother, invited Jackson to Florida to visit her.

Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist who has acted as a spokesman for the Schindler family, told reporters Jackson was speaking with Florida state lawmakers Tuesday morning.

subject: wow

I haven't read anyone who's as wrong as you on the Shiavo situation.

You have exposed yourself as shill for the Christan Right.

Where's the sanctity of marriage now you hypocrite?

I will be cancelling my subscription to your once great publication that you have run into the ground in the name of your buddy Jesus.

I think it's valid to question whether you indeed are in a persistent vegetative state.

Arguments about Terri's case centered on something described as a "culture of life." It is an empty suit of a phrase, absent an individual to give it shape. There is no culture of life. There is the culture of your life, and the culture of mine. There is what each of us considers bearable, and what we will not bear. There are those of us who believe that under certain conditions the cruelest thing you can do to people you love is to force them to live. There are those of us who define living not by whether the heart beats and the lungs lift but whether the spirit is there, whether the music box plays…

JEFFREY BROWN: Dr. Portenoy, a final medical question. When Miss Schiavo does die, what will she die of?

DR. RUSSELL PORTENOY: Well, patients who have hydration and nutrition develop biochemical changes in the blood. These biochemical changes progress and at a certain level of abnormality they are associated with abnormal heart beat, arrhythmias of the heart. And so ultimately she will die when her heart stops.

JEFFREY BROWN: All right. Dr. Russell Portenoy and Professor Robert George, thank you very much

for linking to Tom West--always a good thing, to my mind.

The link follows this passage from Sullivan: "It's been striking lately how the rhetoric of some conservatives has morphed into revolutionary tones. Bill Kristol, at heart an ally of religious radicalism, calls for a revolution against the independent judiciary we now have. Fox News' John Gibson has argued that 'the temple of the law is not so sacrosanct that an occasional chief executive cannot flaunt it once in a while.' Bill Bennett has said that the courts are not the ultimate means to interpret law and the constitution, that the people, with rights vested in the Declaration of Independence, have a right to overturn the courts if judges violate natural law precepts such as the right to life. Beneath all this is a struggle between conservatives who place their faith in the formalities of constitutionalism and those who place their literal faith in the God-revealed truths they believe are enshrined in the Declaration, truths that alone give meaning, in their eyes, to America as a political project."

I disagree with Gibson's views and will therefore not try to defend them. Kristol and Bennett, meanwhile, are being caricatured. To argue (as Kristol does) that the courts have assumed too much power in American life over the last few decades and need to be divested of some of it is not necessarily to argue that their "independence" should be threatened. The discussion of Bennett is hopelessly confused. To affirm that the courts are not the ultimate interpreters of the Constitution is not to say that anyone may rightly ignore the Constitution (nor need anyone who thinks that there are occasions when the courts should be overruled on a point of constitutional interpretation feel obligated to confine those overrulings to occasions when the natural law is violated). Finally, the question of whether (and to what extent) the Constitution should be read in light of the Declaration of Independence doesn't underlie any of this. It is perfectly possible to be skeptical of grandiose claims for the authoritativeness of the Declaration on legislators and courts while also believing that the courts don't have a monopoly on constitutional interpretation. There are conservatives who believe both these things. (I'm one of them.)

Basically, Sullivan is tossing everything he dislikes about various conservatives into a bag, shaking it up, and pouring it out. This may be what happens to otherwise "sane, moderate, thoughtful people" who start trying to lead a "purge."

Advocates of using federal power to keep this woman alive need to seriously study the polling data that's come out on this," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who has been talking to both social and economic conservatives about the fallout. "I think that a lot of conservative leaders assumed there was broader support for saying that they wanted to have the federal government save this woman's life."

Addendum: That is unless they're black conservatives or blacks who say some conservative friendly things (a la Cosby). Then the refrain is "serves 'em right."

I'm debating 'em at West Virginia U tomorrow (monday) night. Details here.

Via the Sunday Telegraph:

”The French judge who first uncovered the corruption scandal engulfing the country's most senior politicians has claimed that bribery and cronyism are still rife at the highest levels of government. Eric Halphen, whose investigations into kickbacks from public works programmes led to a number of President Jacques Chirac's closest allies going on trial last week, said that the prosecutions "in no way" signalled an end to the corruption that has blighted French politics for decades.”

And it’s no great surprise to read this:

"Investigating judges have said that there is "strong and concordant evidence" that Mr Chirac was at the very least aware of the kickback scheme. They established in 2001 that he had paid the equivalent of about £330,000 in cash for dozens of luxury family holidays between 1992 and 1995. The source of this money has never been established. They also unearthed evidence that Mr Chirac had spent about £3,500 of City Hall funds each week on family groceries, including foie gras and truffles, much of it paid for in cash. Some of the reimbursed food bills were found to have been faked. Mr Chirac may still face charges in connection with a fake job scam while he was the mayor of Paris, and could lose his immunity from prosecution when his presidency ends in 2007. Yet his success in avoiding indictment has led to scepticism that "Supermenteur" (Super-liar), as his critics call him, will ever face a court.”