Andrew Busch explains that the Democrats are in trouble over their intransigence on Bush’s Social Security proposals (it is not yet a plan). Andy is right, the Demos attitude is exactly what the Republicans should want; it’s as if Karl Rove had set the whole thing up...Oh, never mind. We don’t have to go that far. A sample, but read the whole thing.  

We, of course, know Henry Clay as either the "Great Compromiser," or, as Lincoln described the man as "him whom, during my whole political life, I have loved and revered as a teacher and a leader." (1861) Or, as Mr. Lincoln put it, in a debate with Douglas: "Henry Clay, my beau ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life." (1858) Anyway, it turns out that Henry Clay had some good horses at Ashland. The blood of his two foundation mares and his foundation stallion pulsed through the veins of not less than 12 Kentucky Derby winners. I didn’t know that. Thanks to Jay.

Fidel Castro has announced--in a speech lasting over five hours!--that he will make available to all Cubans pressure cookers and rice steamers, in an attempt to control the economy even more so than he now does. This is an attempt to overcome (Castro) "the errors, deviations and confusions" in economic planning of the recent past. You see, home made pressure cookers are five times less expensive than the ones folks can buy in stores, so that’s what they buy. Ergo, Castro will make avaliable 100,000 imported pressure cookers each month at the price of the home made ones. There is no reason for any initiative or private production to go on now, is there? Read the whole of this AP dispatch, and note that what little private enterprize there has been allowed in recent years, will end. Why? Note this:

Cuba was forced to allow some private business beginning in the mid-1990s amid an economic crisis in the years after the withdrawal of Soviet aid and trade. Those modest reforms were seen as temporary, but necessary, evils. But after a slow recovery, recent discoveries of oil deposits off Cuba’s coast and economic alliances with Venezuela and China, Castro clearly believes the island is strong enough to return to a more centralized economy.

The Belmont Club has some interesting observations on what is likely to happen in Lebanon. Read the whole thing, good links. This is his last paragraph:

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has an excellent article today discussing judicial nominations and the use of the filibuster. In my view, the Plain Dealer hits the nail right on the head:

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

Colin Benbow
Gary Mauer
Paulette Layton
Bill Bayne
Ken Limmer

I had made a comment on the Woods-Mickelson event a few days ago. A thoughtful reader sent this:

On your posting on Tiger Woods vs. Phil M. Yes, good stuff. Someone once said that golf doesn’t build character, it reveals it. Very much like boxing. Boxers, of course, undergo direct physical risk, but if you’ve heard them talk, that’s not what scares them. It’s the fear of being exposed, of having one’s manhood stripped away in front of the world -- not because one might be beaten, but because of disgrace in how one was beaten. You can’t hide in a ring surrounded by 20,000 people. Or on a golf course surrounded by as many people, with millions watching on TV.

According to Hillary Clinton, President Bush endangers the lives of women.

From the pages of the latest Atlantic, here are some fascinating numbers to ponder:

For every 15-point increase in IQ score above the average, a woman’s likelihood of marrying declines by nearly 60 percent. It isn’t clear, however, whether this is the result of men being intimidated by bright women, or of smart women being less willing to put up with us.

"Every 10 percent increase in the excise tax on beer reduces the gonorrhea rate by 4.7 percent among males aged fifteen to nineteen, and by 4.1 percent among those aged twenty to twenty-four." Yes, folks, those beer goggles have now been statistically proven to work.

Is at it again. Read the whole thing. Here’s a taste to whet your appetite:

Why now? Because until now the forces of decency in the region were alone and naked, cynically ignored by an outside world content to deal with their oppressors. Then comes America, not just proclaiming democratic liberation as its overriding foreign policy principle but sacrificing blood and treasure in the service of precisely that principle.

It was not people power that set this in motion. It was American power. People power followed. Which is why the critics of the Bush doctrine take refuge in a second Bush-free explanation. They locate the reason for this astonishing Arab spring, if not in people power from below, then in rot from above. These superannuated dictatorships, we are now told, were fossilized and frail, already wobbly and ready to fall, just waiting to be undone by the slightest challenge.

Interesting. If the rot was always there, why is it that these critics never said so before? They never suggested that we challenge these wobbly despots? In fact, they bitterly denounced the Bush doctrine for presuming to destabilize the region in pursuit of some democratic chimera?

The March issue of The New Criterion has a very fine article by Harvey Mansfield on the manliness of Theodore Roosevelt. It is part of his forthcoming book, "A Modest Defense of Manliness", which will be published next year. I have been teaching TR recently and this essay is very useful and rather convincing, and of course, reveals my imperfections in thinking it through. TR’s virtues--and flaws if you like--are well revealed in this piece. This is a must read.

Nothing was more obvious than Roosevelt’s manliness because he made such a point of it not only in his own case but also as necessary for human progress. It was being a progressive that made him so eager to be manly. Here is gristle to chew for liberals and conservatives, both of whom—except for the feminists—have abandoned manliness mostly out of policy rather than abhorrence.

Here’s a very nice defense of the nominee. A taste:

Bolton -- whom I’ve met but don’t know well -- is blunt, which is an advantage in an institution where words are more often used to disguise meanings than to elucidate. He is unafraid of being disliked, which will be an advantage in a place where everyone will dislike him. In the past he has been unafraid of arguing his points, even in Europe, where they are deeply unpopular. Most of all, though, Bolton, who has been writing about the United Nations for decades, is one of the few people in public life willing to draw the distinction between what the United Nations actually is and what everybody would like it to be.

Another:

The trouble with many U.N. defenders is that they refuse to see this fundamental problem, and demand a constantly expanding role for the United Nations without explaining how its lack of democratic accountability is to be addressed. The trouble with many U.N. detractors, in Congress and elsewhere, is that they see the corruption and nothing else. But there is a role for U.N. institutions -- in Afghanistan, or in international health -- as long as that role is limited in time and cost. And there is a desperate need for U.N. reform. In defense of John Bolton: He may, if he can get confirmed, be one of the few U.N. ambassadors who has thought a good deal about how to set such limits and make such reforms. And if he isn’t invited to a few cocktail parties along the way, at least he won’t mind.

Joseph Knippenberg blogged recently in praise of an article by Michael Novak and Christopher Levenick on “Religion and the Founders.” At the beginning of the article Novak and Levenick criticize someone for having said that "[o]ur nation was founded not on Christian principles, but on Enlightenment ones." In response they write:

“What a strange distinction! It certainly would have been foreign to the Founders, who thought the moral precepts of Christian faith indispensable to the survival of the infant republic. And it’s a distinction that remains foreign to the vast majority of Americans today.”

This claim is insupportable. Most of the founders believed that a reasonable or civil religion was necessary for good government but this was not revealed religion and certainly not “the moral precepts of Christian Faith.” The civil religion most Founders thought important for politics did without the first four of the ten commandments.

Toward the end of their article, Novak and Levenick return to this point:

“Every single one of the Founders believed that, at the level of both individual morality and public policy, the demands of reason and of revelation powerfully reinforce one another. They understood that with respect to the ultimate questions — the creation of the universe, the purpose of human existence, and the hope of life after death — faith and philosophy might differ. In the practical world they inhabited, however, the Founders believed that both Socrates and Jesus enjoined their followers to accord all persons truth, justice, and charity.”

It is true that on the surface some of the dictates of reason and some of the dictates of revealed religion overlap but this does not mean that the United States was founded on the dictates of revealed religion or Christianity. On the contrary, Washington appears to have been indifferent to revealed religion and Jefferson and Franklin were hostile to it. But we can look beyond the Founders to judge the religious character of the founding. At the time of the Founding perhaps no more than 20% of Americans belonged to a Church. America became a Christian nation and religious after the Founding. Church membership increased throughout the nineteenth-century. The figure for Church membership today is several times higher than it was at the Founding.

This last point is worth pondering. It leads one to suspect that, precisely because America is now more Christian and religious than it was at its founding, some people feel the need to make the Founding appear more Christian and religious than it was.

For those of us who miss the Duke, there is always Eastwood. John Vincour (International Herald Tribune) talks to Clint Eastwood about his next movie, to be released in 2006, based on "The Flags of Our Fathers." Vincour gets all sophisticated, but Eastwood clarifies:

"This is about the spirit of those guys who fought and a whole country behind them and what happened. No delayed-stress syndrome classes. It’s something people should know about now. But it’s part of an America that people doubt is still there."