Now this is interesting. According to the latest information coming back from the Mars Global Surveyor, the red planet has been getting warmer over the past three years. Which obviously means one of three things:

1. Earth’s evil corporate polluters have found a way to beam their greenhouse gas emissions to other planets, or

2. Dick Cheney and his Halliburton buddies are intercepting the signals from the orbiter and are putting their own spin on it, or

I can’t help but see this as the opening move in the battle over the next nomination, something that becomes even clearer when you consider Leahy’s speech, which lays down a number of markers regarding this and future nominations.

Interestingly, the Times headline writers can’t bring themselves to announce the news, nor can the editors bring themselves to run the whole AP story.

Update: Ken Masugi links to the NYT piece that gets matters right.

I’ve mentioned before that President Bush’s recovery plan includes education vouchers, but, as this article makes clear, the scope of his proposal is larger than first indicated: if the President has his way, vouchers will go, not just to families whose kids were in private and religious schools before Katrina, but to any displaced family that wants to take that option now.

Clarence Page and Rich Lowry both like the idea. Here’s Page:

In fact, the president does not even have to try to imitate how liberals behave to come up with good ideas to help poor Americans improve their lives. Some of the market-friendly conservative ideas on his agenda show a lot of promise in helping poor folks in New Orleans and elsewhere rebuild their lives.

For example, nothing helps you build a better life more than a good education . Where there is space in good schools, public or private, the government should give the parents of New Orleans’ 77,000 displaced public school students full tuition vouchers so they can enroll their children in better schools.

Here’s Lowry:

The education vouchers, meanwhile, make private school available to kids who had suffered in the atrocious New Orleans public system and help preserve the choice many families had already made. Out of 248,000 students in the broader New Orleans area, 61,000 went to private schools. Opponents of the voucher proposals want to say to bereft families of those private-school students, "Congratulations, you lost everything, and we hope your children now get trapped in public schools on top of it."

I support it for the reasons they offer, and for one other as well: by leveraging private resources (those of the schools and families involved), it actually saves states and localities money. The voucher proposal offers up to $7,500 (90% of the state’s average per pupil expenditure), exactly the same as the impact aid. In the case of students attending public schools, the states and localities have to make up the difference. In the case of private and religious schools, either the families or the schools will cover the balance. In other words, as they always have, education vouchers empower recipients and save taxpayers money. And because the money follows the students, the per capita public school budget is in no way affected. Who could oppose this? (A rhetorical question: we know who can and will oppose it.)

Update: Katie Newmark (one of my best sources on voucher issues) has more.

A pretty good story on the elections in Afghanistan. Here is another, the more banal AP version. It seems to me that this should be more broadly reported. It is a significant event for the Afghans, and much good will come of it.

It seems that North Korea has agreed to stop building nuclear weapons and allow international inspections. Bush cautiously welcomes the news.

Thomas "T-Bone" Quinn has witnessed more than his fair share of bureaucratic nightmares this month. After surviving the ravages of hurricane Katrina, "T-Bone" was evacuated to the Los Angeles area and has been housed at the LA Dream Center. Grateful for the outpouring of generosity, "T-Bone" graciously offered to capture an illegally dumped alligator from Machado Lake free of charge. The 7-foot gator known as "Reggie" has eluded authorities ever since it was discovered more than a month ago. Los Angeles Councilwoman, Janice Hahn (sister of ousted mayor, Jim Hahn) enthusiastically agreed to "T-Bone’s" proposal. But poor "T-Bone" had hardly begun his efforts before the lawyers got to him. Since "T-Bone" had no proof of insurance or identity, he was called off the job. You can read more here.

Jim Stoner is the best and most sophisticated apologist for New Orleans that I have read. But what, we may ask him, is the relationship between the spirit of America that leads to the rebuilding of New Orleans, and the somewhat anti-capitalist spirit of New Orleans, which he also seems to cherish?

Update: Here’s Jim Stoner’s quite justified response to my post. I was too hasty and intoxicated by his Walker Percy intro to take adequate account of the "hard-headedness" that marked much of his essay.

I was a little taken aback by having my ’apology’ called anti-capitalist, since the thrust of the essay was about what would be needed to rebuild New Orleans, not as a big federal welfare project or a tourist trap, but as a great commercial port, as it once was. To be sure, I’m from the old ’two cheers for capitalism’ school, since I think there are things like family, faith, culture, and learning that are poorly understood if analyzed only in terms of self-interest and free exchange -- and I haven’t figured out how to add the principles of free gift and sacrifical love to an indifference curve. Still, New Orleans was from its foundation a commercial city -- okay, maybe more mercantilist than capitalist -- and my ’apology’ was to suggest a return to its first principles (leaving out, of course, those forms of commerce now properly suppressed). As for the ’third cheer,’ I would reserve it and remind my conservative friends that our state is consistently one of the mostly staunchly pro-life in America.

I’m home. Three weeks in a hospital bed have made me weak. During the last two weeks I have had to learn to walk, shave, and so on. A new world. But, I’m doing fine, still weak, moving slow, with that determined half speed you have seen aged men shuffle through long hallways. I’m told it will be another month before I am strong.

There isn’t much more to be said about this war my pancreas started. Most of you know more about the medical issues than I do. It was rough, although some of the roughest parts are better known by my fine doctor Dr. Robert Israel, and my loving family and noble friends who stood with me in the battle. Apparently, I came close to buying the farm, to use one of Dr. Israel’s technical medical terms. At some point, the good doctor and chief general decided that defense could not win the war, so he attacked. The offensive was enirely dependent on my lungs, which had been dormant because a machine had been doing my breathing. The lungs responded better than anyone thought possible; the counterattack was successful. In an attempt to pay back the debt I owe them, I have stopped smoking (maybe a good Cuban once or twice a year will be allowed!). My debt to Dr. Israel, of course, cannot be repaid, so I kindly and honestly thank him for his goodness and excellence, for his art.

David Brooks has measured the ambition of President Bush’s Katrina recovery plan, further elaborated here, here, and here. I think that Brooks has hit the nail on the head: this is GWB’s true experiment in compassionate conservatism. Traditional Republicans and Democrats have different reasons to be concerned, but I think Bush will seize the moment and push this plan very hard.

Update: Stephen Moore has many serious reservations about the plan, some more convincing than others. He can’t, for example, be serious in comparing the costs of rebuilding Chicago, San Francisco, and Galveston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the costs of cleaning up toxic muck and restoring transportation and communications infrastructure today. But waste, fraud, and mismanagement are a sufficiently serious risk that the President ought to appoint someone--please let’s not call him a czar and give him another layer of bureaucracy--to spearhead the reconstruction effort. I nominate J.C. Watts, whose support was central to the Bush Administration’s domestic policy initiatives in 2001, who has demonstrated the capacity to work well with non-profit and faith-based groups, and against whom it would be next to impossible to play the race card.

Update #2: The folks at the Heritage Foundation have some good ideas about how to make this program work.

Katie Newmark calls our attention to the WaPo’s Think Tank Town, a blog that covers, you guessed it, the think tank beat.

Ken Masugi has an excellent post, with good links. Most importantly, he calls our attention to a colloquy during the Roberts hearings between Tom Coburn--not a lawyer--and John Roberts, with the former pushing toward, and actually mentioning, natural law and the latter apparently resting content with the common law tradition. One can quarrel with Coburn’s characterization of the theological character of the tradition--natural law, after all, is a deliverance of reason, not revelation--but it is striking that Roberts, who by all accounts is a good Catholic, did not seize the teachable moment. One can only hope that it was his (flawed) political judgment that led him to remain silent.

Had Christopher Hayes demonstrated any awareness of God on the Quad, I might have been inclined to say this was a decent bit of follow-up reporting, accompanied by ideologically flawed analysis. He quite often lets his subjects speak for themselves, admits some variety and nuance in the position he examines, and does not snark too much in his own commentary.

Here’s an example of his analysis, taken from his discussion of the role of "Christian worldview" in evangelical higher education:

[T]he insistence on the quantity and even the rigor of the debate obscures the real issue: just what is subject to debate. What a worldview does is cleave the world into two, identifying in one column those first principles that are taken as given (there is a God, Jesus Christ is His only son) and, in the other column, the many beliefs, values, and positions that one might hold that are less certain (like under what conditions preemptive war is justified). Exactly which beliefs get put in which column is going to have profound political consequences, even if the worldview isn’t taught with an explicitly or predominantly political end in mind. If you suggest to students that an opposition to abortion and a defense of “traditional marriage” are foundational aspects of a Christian worldview, you will very likely produce reliable Republican voters.

As he comes back to it time and again, this appears to be pretty close to his real sticking point. His preferred position is what he calls the "fact-value split," which, he says, "embodies a kind of forced humility that, frankly, keeps the entire liberal democratic enterprise running." But he never explains why abortion and marriage are (or ought to be) "private matters of conscience," like "dietary choices" (note the word) or "which day to worship," and not "public matters of law." It sounds to me like he has a "worldview" that isn’t subject to debate.

Finally, his complaint that colleges and universities that teach a "Christian worldview" end up producing Republicans may say as much about the Democratic Party as it says about the colleges and universities. If the Democratic Party were genuinely a "big tent" on these issues, if it had not effectively become (as the Roberts hearings revealed all too clearly) essentially the "Party of Roe," then other issues--poverty, the AIDS crisis in Africa, and so on--might loom larger for students and faculty at these schools, with a somewhat different partisan split emerging as a result.

I am going to commit conservative heresy:

The rebuilding spending for New Orleans should be paid for with a tax increase. I would propose a one-year, 1% surtax on all income tax brackets (not just "the rich" as the liberals always fantasize). The fiscal purpose is obvious; we can’t let the deficit get totally out of hand. The political purpose is more important: all taxpayers should feel more directly the cost of the huge run up in government spending. Then maybe they’ll start to demand a bit less of it. And maybe it will provide some discipline to some of the slop that is no doubt going to be spent on the Gulf coast.

September 17th is Constitution Day, the day we commemorate the signing of our fundamental law in 1787. In honor of this day, Judge Alice M. Batchelder of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit will be delivering the Seventh Annual Robert E. Henderson Constitution Day Lecture entitled: The Judiciary: having "neither Force nor Will, but merely judgement"? The lecture will be at 7:30 pm this evening in The Ashbrook Center. If you are in the area, please come by for what promises to be a very timely discussion, and if you are not, you may listen live via the Internet here. For those wishing to learn more about Judge Batchelder, Christopher Flannery wrote an excellent article about her for NRO, and our own Peter Schramm describes her as "the judge Bush should get to know" here.