Samuel Alito is the new nominee for the Supreme Court.
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
Some Folks DO Want To Make Halloween Too Scary
In fact, they want to SCARE CHILDREN AWAY FROM HALLOWEEN.
Jack Chick, for example.
Joe over at Evangelical Outpost has
THIS DECONSTRUCTION OF ONE OF CHICK’S ANTI-HALLOWEEN TRACTS.
Tomorrow IS A Holy Day Of Obligation
If you’re a Latin rite Catholic in the United States, that is.
It’s the solemnity of All Saints, so be sure to either go to evening Mass today or make plans to go to Mass tomorrow.
New Computer
The problems with my computer were sufficiently grave that I determined it was time to buy a new one, so I did.
Will try to suck the data off the old one and (if possible) get it repaired to use as a back-up, but I am now back up to speed blogging. (I even have a good chunk of this week’s entries written in advance.)
Am still getting my old programs installed on the new one and figuring out what it’s individual quirks are since it’s a different model than my previous one.
Spent more than an hour Saturday morning trying to figure out what the speakers that had been working the night before were no longer emitting sound.
Did all kinds of troubleshooting. Could see that the unit was trying to produce sound (sound programs were displaying graphical wave formations or otherwise behaving as if they were producing sound), the speakers just weren’t emitting any. All the software seemed to be working. It seemed like a mechanical device problem.
It was.
Turned out that the new computer has a rotating volume control on the front of the unit near the touchpad and my thumb had apparently set it to zero without me realizing it was there.
D’OH!
That’s an hour of my life I won’t get back.
Having a physical volume control on the front of the unit is a handy thing–IF YOU KNOW IT’S THERE.
Feddie’s Out On A Limb
Steve Dillard of Southern Appeal and Confirm Them has gone out on a limb and made a prediction as to who George Bush will nominate to the Supreme Court.
THE L.A. TIMES THINKS HE’S WRONG.
But in Feddie’s favor, he was right when–just prior to the beginning of the Miers debacle–he predicted that Bush would choose badly.
Now he thinks the replacement choice for Miers may be stellar.
I hope he’s right.
We’ll probably know Monday.
Sick Computer
I’m sorry, folks, but my computer was very, very sick last night and I spent all evening babying it, trying to get it well, and so I was unable to do any blogging.
I may be able to do a bit this morning, but can’t promise anything given how ill my computer has been.
I think it caught the flu from someone at Mass.
And Now A Word From My Pastor
Y’know those "From the pastor’s desk" items that they run in Sunday bulletins? Whether in Protestant churches or Catholic churches, I’ve always found those to be largely . . . what’s the right term? "A waste of space"? No, that’s probably too strong. "Useless"? No, sounds too negative. How about: "Of rather limited value." Yeah, that’ll do.
We’ll, here’s one that’s actually GOOD!
It appeared in this last Sunday’s bulletin at the parish I live in:
FROM THE PASTOR’S DESK The word is out–this is supposed to be a really nasty FLU SEASON. I prefer to have healthy parishioners, and as such, support any of you who prefer to shy away from the handshake/hug as a sign of peace, as well as holding hands during the Our Father. As a courtes to your fellow parishioners, I do encorage you to offer a gentle nod, a friendly smile and the words "Peace be with you" at the appropriate time. Laurie has suggested also that we catch sneezes or coughs in the crooks of our elbows rather than in our hands, helping to contain any germs on our own clothing–the less airborne, shared actvity the better!
YES!
A voice of sanity!
Only thing I’d tweak is that people who are contagious SHOULD NOT BE AT MASS AT ALL.
Breaking News: Miers Withdraws!
It’s already been noted in the combox below, but I thought it deserved its own post:
Follow-up memo to Jeb: This does not mean that you don’t still need to pick up the phone and call your brother. He needs to understand, in no uncertain terms, that his next nomination has to be in the Scalia-Thomas mold.
Even another Roberts — as vast an improvement as that would be over another Miers — isn’t remotely going to cut it at this point.
More to follow…
“That’s Mojave. That’s Where I Was Born.”
While I’m linking places I’ve seen in my travels to sci-fi, lemme mention a connection to the Mojave Desert, whose southern edge I skirted on my recent road trip.
To the left is a frame from the original pilot for Star Trek. The pilot was called "The Cage" and did not feature Jim Kirk as captain of the Enteriprise. Instead, the ship was captained by Christopher Pike (played by Jeffrey Hunter).
NBC liked the pilot, but not enough to pick up the show. So they took the unusual step of ordering a second pilot, for which they gave Gene Roddenberry a lot of "notes" (directives for what to do differently).
Among the notes were that Roddenberry needed to LOSE the Number One character (an emotionless female HUMAN first officer played by Majel Berrett, later Nurse Chapel, later Majel Berrett-Roddenberry, later Lwaxana Troi and the Federation Computer Voice) AND he needed to lose the pointy-eared character Spock.
Roddenberry sacrificed the first in order to save the second.
Whether he also needed to lose Jeffrey Hunter as Christopher Pike or whether left for other reasons, I dunno.
But in the original pilot we were treated to an interesting story that was significantly similar to . . . and significantly different from . . . later incarnations of Trek.
(The footage from "The Cage" was also later almost all used in the Star Trek two-parter "The Menagerie"–the one featuring a horribly disfigured Captain Pike [now played by Sean Kenney] in a wheelchair)
In "The Cage," Captain Pike is captured by aliens who can read his mind and give him any fantasy he wants. They’re doing this to try to get him to hook up with a human female they also have so that the two can become the progenitors of a new race on their dying planet.
In one scene (pictured above), they give Pike a fantasy of going back to Earth, where he is married to the captive human cutie and lives in his home town of Mojave (mo-HAH-vee), California.
Upon seeing the ultra-futuristic sci-fi city, Pike declares:
I used to ride through here when I was a kid. Not as pretty as some of the parks around the big cities, but. . . . That’s Mojave. That’s where I was born.
Later, his imaginary wifey remarks:
They say that in the olden days all this was a desert–just blowing sand and cactus.
That’s a pretty good clue that we’re talking about a not-yet-built city in the Mojave Desert, which has been terraformed into being like a more garden-like part of Terra.
But there are a couple of problems:
1) The Mojave Desert ain’t just a bunch of dunes. Like many deserts, it doesn’t fit the typical sand dune model that we have in mind from TV and the movies. Instead, much of it is filled with scrub and there isn’t a sand dune in sight, as my recent post showed.
But this is somewhat soluble since there IS a section of the Mojave Desert that is filled with sand dunes. It’s called the Kelso Dunes (below), and is presumably where Captain Pike’s hometown was built. (Obviously a serious blow was done to LEAVE-IT-ALONE-AT-ALL-COSTS!-environmentalism between now and then. Maybe World War III did that.)
But there’s also a second problem:
2) THERE ALREADY IS A MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA!
It’s near Tehachapi.
I mean, it’s not a BIG town–in 2000 the town only has 3,800 inhabitants–but then Captian Pike indicated that his Mojave was a smaller place.
It also seems to be in at least a semi-desert area, though I have no indication that there are sand dunes there.
So either this Mojave doesn’t exist in the Star Trek universe or it ceased to exist between now and Captian Pike’s time (maybe World War III did that) or it’s been renamed–or something!–and a new Mojave has been built in the Mojave Desert, as the pilot implies.
In any event, the real world Mojave is about three and a half hours north of San Diego.
Maybe someday, I’ll go there, too.
Jeb, Call Your Brother NOW!
It’s time for an intervention in the Bush family.
I know that, as governor of Florida, you are very concerned about the troubles your state is in as a result of Hurricane Wilma. You have a lot of troubles on your plate right now, and our prayers are with you and the Floridians who are suffering from this natural disaster.
But there is another matter that you and other family members must attend to. The Bushes are a political family that seeks to be one of the premier families of American politics, like the Kennedies used to be. But your brother, the president, is rapidly destroying the family’s chances of continuing to play a leading role in American politics.
Your father, it must be admitted, is not fondly remembered. He was elected in order to continue the conservative vision of Ronald Reagan but instead he is judged to be as a mediocre successor who made glaring mistakes that have permanently tarnished his reputation. Chief among these were raising taxes, failing to deal with Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War, and appointing the walking abomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court.
Your brother is in the process of making parallel mistakes.
Though he was smart enough to pass tax cuts that have stimulated the economy, his flagrant and unconstrained government spending is likely to eradicate the good done by lowering taxes.
The current Iraq War is, as you know, a real political albatross. Your brother’s intentions may have been good and going to war may have been the right decision at the time, but the failure to find WMDs and the ongoing insurgency have given your opponents all the resources they need to use this war as a colossal embarrasment to your brother.
Now we come to the Harriet Miers situation.
As you know, it’s a catastrophic mess that was created when your brother went against the advice of his advisors and picked a stealth nominee who also plays into the cronyism charges to which your brother is vulnerable. The problems with Harriet Miers are so numerous that I can’t possibly go into them now, but the important point is that your brother has totally welshed on his promise to appoint justices like Scalia and Thomas.
He has stabbed the conservative movement in the back at a moment that should have been the culmination of thirty years of intense effort to take back the Court from the justices who have been usurping the democratic process in this nation and imposing their own values on the land.
Your father is ill-remembered for his "Read my lips: No new taxes" promise, which the then broke. Your brother is now in the process of similarly destroying his own reputation with conservatives by breaking his promise to appoint justices like Scalia and Thomas.
For further background on the scope of the disaster, please read
AND THIS ARTICLE BY THE WASHINGTON POST ON MIERS’ JUDICIAL PHILOSOPHY
I mean, you read these things and it’s simply flabbergasting. The incoherence and inconsistency of Miers’ views cries out for explanation, and the likely explanations are not good ones. One of my blog readers insightfully commented:
When she sent back the pro-life questionnaire, she was running for
political office as a conservative in a conservative city. I think
political exigencies are enough to explain it, especially considering
the paucity of other evidence as to her being pro-life (like church
attendance and paying the minimum to attend a pro-life dinner once).
Choosing between the quesionnaire filled out while running for office
and the speech given while not running for office, I give the speech
more weight, especially since it is at a later date after the election
of Bill Clinton and after the Casey decision. At best, she plays to the
crowd she’s with and that is a very bad thing for a prospective justice to do.Before reading that article, I thought she was probably O’Connor II
with fewer qualifications. Now I think she’s as likely to turn out to
be Harry Blackmun in a dress, both in terms of mediocrity and in terms
of judicial philosophy.
Blackmun in a dress is very possibly correct! She may actually be worse than Souter!
The longer her nomination remains in place, the worse things are for your brother. His bridges to his base get more burned with every day that goes by. It’s time for a swift and dramatic course correction.
This is not only for purposes of salvaging your brother’s reputation and his ability to accomplish anything in his remaining three years in office, it’s also for purposes of protecting the family’s legacy and political future.
I mean, your father was something that conservatives had to overlook in nominating your brother for the presidency. "Yeah, we know the first Bush was bad–a phony conservative–but this one is better–he’s a real conservative" was the message.
Now it looks like that is not the case and that your brother is a phony conservative, too.
Frankly, I don’t care what his personal views are as long as he delivers where it counts, and where it counts is the Supreme Court.
So let me tell you what will happen if the Miers nomination goes forward and (God forbid) she gets on the Supreme Court and turns out to be anything other than a firm originalist: Conservatives will not trust your family with the chance to run for the presidency again.
The first President Bush was a "fool me once" situation, and the second President Bush is turning into a "fool me twice"situation. There will be no third President Bush.
The message that will be driven home to the conservative base is: "You can’t trust the Bushes. They’re phony conservatives who will lie to get into office and then stab you in the back by breaking their most important campaign promises. They’re Big Government big spenders, they’ll get you into bungled wars in the Middle East, and they’ll put walking disasters on the Supreme Court. You simply can’t trust them. Find someone else."
Now, as a Bush, you presumably have a much more positive image of your family than this, but this is the image of your family that will be confirmed in the minds of the conservative base if things are put right in a hurry.
Your brother being notoriously stubborn, though, means that he may dig in his heels and resist putting things right.
That’s where you (and other family members) come in.
For the sake of your brother, the sake of your family, and the sake of the nation, it is time for an intervention in the Bush family.
Please, Jeb, pick up the phone.