Congratulations to this month’s winners of a No Left Turns mug! The winners are as follows:

Ryan Demro
Tucker Bacquet
Joseph Griffo
Janni Ingman
Grace Morgan

This NYT article raises some questions about his investments. This one notes Obama’s recognition that too close a public connection with the senior pastor of his church might be a political liability.

Michael Novak has more to say after his debate with Joseph Bottum, noted here. Here’s his conclusion

President Bush has defined a new kind of conservatism. It is legitimate to criticize it, even to oppose it vigorously. But to do so honestly and accurately, one must note the change in method that President Bush has quietly and successfully been enacting. As often as possible, in as many ways as possible, he is using as the dynamo of personal choice and the methods of the market, not direct state-management, in order to make government programs more effective and more efficient. That is why Democrats, both of the old New Deal-type and of the new Clinton-type, oppose him so fiercely. They seem to see what he is up to better than many uneasy conservatives do.

Try to imagine the conservative future as Bush is trying to: Old-age assistance is mostly achieved by personal tax-exempt pension accounts. Medicare and other health expenses are paid for by means of personal, tax-exempt medical accounts (partly used for catastrophic insurance, mostly for ordinary health spending, and with a new incentive to watch over normal expenses carefully). Parental choice and market mechanisms help to weed out failing schools, replacing them with better ones.

Note that these new pension, medical, and school mechanisms deeply affect families, not simply individuals. This greater reliance on familial choice re-introduces a reliance on family, rather than on the state, as the chief agent of health, education, and welfare.

Bush has begun a major turn from the state toward the “little platoons” once celebrated by Burke, the “mediating institutions” that Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus emphasized twenty years ago. This is a profoundly conservative impulse.

That John Edwards says that the size of his home is less important than what goes on in it:

What matters is what happens inside that physical structure, and what kind of values and beliefs and faith are taught inside that structure. And so, you know, I come from a very modest place and I’ve done well and we have a very nice physical structure. It’s completely unimportant. What matters is what happens inside that structure.

Jeff Jacoby has an interesting response to the entirely predictable ruling in Parker v. Hurley.

HRC’s Selma speech is a much weaker and more conventional effort than Obama’s. The problems and policies she mentions are for the most part indistinguishable from those mentioned by Obama, but her approach is much more demagogic:

But in the last two presidential elections we have seen the right to vote tampered with, and outright denied to too many of our citizens, especially the poor and people of color. Not just in Florida, Ohio, and Maryland, but in state after state. The very idea that in the 21st century, African-Americans would wait in line for 10 hours while whites in an affluent precinct next to theirs waited in line for 10 minutes, or that African-Americans would receive fliers telling them the wrong time and day to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

She quotes two Bible verses, one from the Old Testament (Ps. 118:24) and one from the New Testament (Gal. 6:9), which I found cited in two other speeches. In one of them (not Hillary’s), Paul’s line is actually used more or less properly.

I’ve read Obama’s Selma speech, which has its moments of strength. It is in the first instance very Old Testament, with lots of references to the civil rights generation Moseses, to which Obama and his contemporaries play Joshua. (I note in passing that Generation Joshua is a label already appropriated by someone else.)

While a good chunk of the spech consists in a litany of conventional big government progams, Obama, to his credit (yes, you read that), takes a page from Bill Cosby:

Government alone can’t solve all those problems, but government can help. It’s the responsibility of the Joshua generation to make sure that we have a government that is as responsive as the need that exists all across America. That brings me to one other point, about the Joshua generation, and that is this -- that it’s not enough just to ask what the government can do for us-- it’s important for us to ask what we can do for ourselves.

One of the signature aspects of the civil rights movement was the degree of discipline and fortitude that was instilled in all the people who participated. Imagine young people, 16, 17, 20, 21, backs straight, eyes clear, suit and tie, sitting down at a lunch counter knowing somebody is going to spill milk on you but you have the discipline to understand that you are not going to retaliate because in showing the world how disciplined we were as a people, we were able to win over the conscience of the nation. I can’t say for certain that we have instilled that same sense of moral clarity and purpose in this generation. Bishop, sometimes I feel like we’ve lost it a little bit.

***

[E]ven as I fight on behalf of more education funding, more equity, I have to also say that , if parents don’t turn off the television set when the child comes home from school and make sure they sit down and do their homework and go talk to the teachers and find out how they’re doing, and if we don’t start instilling a sense in our young children that there is nothing to be ashamed about in educational achievement, I don’t know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs was something white.

We’ve got to get over that mentality. That is part of what the Moses generation teaches us, not saying to ourselves we can’t do something, but telling ourselves that we can achieve.

***

We have too many children in poverty in this country and everybody should be ashamed, but don’t tell me it doesn’t have a little to do with the fact that we got too many daddies not acting like daddies. Don’t think that fatherhood ends at conception. I know something about that because my father wasn’t around when I was young and I struggled.

***

Don’t tell me that we can’t do better by our children, that we can’t take more responsibility for making sure we’re instilling in them the values and the ideals that the Moses generation taught us about sacrifice and dignity and honesty and hard work and discipline and self-sacrifice. That comes from us. We’ve got to transmit that to the next generation and I guess the point that I’m making is that the civil rights movement wasn’t just a fight against the oppressor; it was also a fight against the oppressor in each of us.

Sometimes it’s easy to just point at somebody else and say it’s their fault, but oppression has a way of creeping into it. Reverend, it has a way of stunting yourself. You start telling yourself, Bishop, I can’t do something. I can’t read. I can’t go to college. I can’t start a business. I can’t run for Congress. I can’t run for the presidency. People start telling you-- you can’t do something, after a while, you start believing it and part of what the civil rights movement was about was recognizing that we have to transform ourselves in order to transform the world. Mahatma Gandhi, great hero of Dr. King and the person who helped create the nonviolent movement around the world; he once said that you can’t change the world if you haven’t changed.

Read about the duelling visits to Selma here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Anthony Esolen says all manner of interesting--and, in some quarters, provocative--things after enjoying a visit to Hampden-Sydney College, one of two remaining all-male four-year colleges. (He’s forgotten about Deep Springs.) Here’s his conclusion:

{Hampden-Sydney is] a far cry from "college" as commodity. It also gives the lie to what some Biblical complementarians say, I think incautiously and without any real historical awareness. They say that women civilize men. If that’s the case, I don’t understand why the college where I teach -- a very fine college, I’ll affirm -- is a walk down Skid Row by comparison with the civility and order at Hampden-Sydney. I don’t understand why the all-male high schools up here produce gentlemen, and the other schools, public and private -- well, it’s a real crapshoot. Now I know perfectly well that boys will sometimes form timocracies of wickedness: gangs, for instance. But even in that case you have a polity; gangs wouldn’t be near the problem they are if they did not operate by pretty clear rules and lines of authority. Women do not in fact civilize men; they domesticate men, as I’ve said before. Men civilize men. There’s a difference.

What is that difference? A soldier in a cavalry unit who spends most of his time in barracks or under the skies,may well be more civilized, more trained to think of and to act for the common good, to command other men or to obey, than many a high-priced lawyer or even college professor. He’s not domesticated, though, and his new bride at first might find him pretty hard to live with. On the other hand, men who live comfortable lives apart from other men, taking no initiative for the common good, considering only their wives and children and not the welfare of anybody else’s children, never to be relied upon in time of public need, may be domesticated but not civilized. You might find plenty of men of the former sort at the inception of a great nation. You will find plenty of men of the latter sort at its decline.

Read the whole thing.

Most incongruous booth in the exhibit hall: The ACLU. I did a doubletake myself when I saw them. To be sure, they were over in a corner that got the least amount of foot traffic, but even if they’d been next to Bloggers Corner they would have been the loneliest guys around. The Pro-American Muslims table got more traffic and excitement (and they were genuinely nice and sincere people, not some obviously politicized PR front group).

In a previous post, I named the Brownback legions as the winner of my prize for Best Imitation of a Carnival Barker at CPAC. They got their revenge. A Brownbacker managed to paste a Brownback bumper sticker on my shirt without my noticing, and I paraded around with it on for more than half an hour before I detected it.

We should wish, I think, for a Republican cndidate who could actually explain clearly and with conviction what ROE v. WADE and PLANNED PARENTHOOD v. CASEY etc. actually say and why they were wrongly decided. It would be ever better if this candidate could go to explain all that is implied in the very loose, polemical, and evolutionary interpretation of "liberty" in LAWRENCE v. TEXAS. We’ve NEVER had such a candidate, and in 2008 the lucid and principled case against judicial activism would be more appealing to the American people than ever. I’m too lazy to link to studies, but they show that the young are increasingly pro-life, and that support for the woman’s unlimited "right to choose" is fading across the board. And of course most Americans don’t believe that there’s a constitutional right to same-sex marriage enforceable by federal courts.

Giuliani has the brains but not the conviction to make such a case. Romney also has the brains, but his conviction and desire to understand what’s really at stake are in question. Brownback has the conviction, but his prudence in general is in question. And his campaign is unlikely to take off anyway.