Jim Wallis is speaking truth to power again today. By his lights anyway. He’s certainly entitled to his prudential judgment about how best to address the needs of the poor, but calling those who disagree with him "unbiblical"? Will Americans United chastise him for his theocratic tendencies? Will the pundits at The Nation and Mother Jones tut-tut about the diminishing difference between Jim Wallis and Osama bin Laden? Will Maureen Dowd wring her hands?

Let me repeat what I’ve said before on the subject of poverty and religion. There are reasonable disagreements about how best to assist the poor. That we have a duty to do so doesn’t mean that we have to duty to support large government programs.

The Washington Post runs this piece by a Marine officer about to deploy to Iraq for the third time. Here’s a taste:

We know the streets, the people and the insurgents far better than any armchair academic or talking head. As military professionals, we are trained to gauge the chances of success and failure, to calculate risk and reward. We have little to gain from our optimism and quite a bit to lose as we leave our families over and over again to face danger and deprivation for an increasingly unpopular cause. We know that there are no guarantees in war, and that we may well fail in the long run. We also know that if we follow our current plan we can, over time, leave behind a stable and unified country that might help to anchor a better future for the Middle East.

You might want to read my latest TAE Online column, in which I give some attention to Samuel Alito’s 1985 abortion memo and its context.

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

Greg Wallace
Carol Drury
Tim Craig
Joel Charles
Betsey Kelly

Is here. Steve Hayward needs to have a word with his former friends.

My own recommendations?

I’m partial to Robert D. Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, for reasons I have begun to develop here: it’s an excellent and vivid account of the varied and innovative activities undertaken by the U.S. military all over the world.

Rick Brookhiser is trying to be our Plutarch. I’ve read and enjoyed his little book on George Washington and wouldn’t object to seeing his books on Alexander Hamilton and Gouvernor Morris under the Christmas tree.

The same goes for Jerry Weinberger’s Benjamin Franklin Unmasked.

Speaking of Christmas, everyone should get a copy of this book, so that they can think about how to avoid the fate described in this book.

For kids who have read Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling, I’d recommend this series, which features martial mice, formidable badgers, and rapacious rats, among others.

I could give you many more, but that’s what’s on my mind now.

Hunter Baker agrees with me. I, by the way, have yet to speak to anyone who didn’t like the movie, though, as they say, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Carol Platt Liebau observes that we seem to be O.K. with salacious advertising in the public square, but not with religious symbols. If I’m offended by the former, I’m told that I can simply avert my eyes. And if I become politically activist about such things, I’m told that I’m at best a prude and at worst a theocrat. What does this say about our culture?

I made a vaguely similar point about sex and religion in schools here. We can talk about sex in the schools because it’s a public health matter, even if sex and sexuality are also fraught with religious and moral significance. But let’s not talk about religion....

The Quote of the Day at Booker Rising comes from a Ghanian libertarian named Franklin Cudjoe:

This article explores the issue, citing Colby College philosophy professor Cheshire Calhoun, high profile GWU law professor Jonathan Turley, and Georgia State University professor (African-American Studies) Patricia Dixon as advocates of legalizing the practice and suggesting that there are 30,000 to 80,000 polygamous families in the U.S. right now.

While advocates of gay marriage deny that their position leads inexorably to polygamy, it’s remarkable (or perhaps not) how similar the rhetoric is:

Decriminalization of polygamy would bring shared health benefits and other legal privileges of marriage, they say, but the bigger issue is recognition.

"People assume they have the right to look down on us or treat us badly because in a lot of people’s opinions, we’re just bad," Poppa says.

"We’re consenting, nobody was forced," Momma says. "What I want is to be accepted as a wife. I want to be accepted as a family. I don’t want to be looked down upon."

The lead editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, "Immigration (Spin) Control," uses all the rhetorical tricks normally associated with the far left in its continuing assault on those who seek enforcement of our immigration laws: Straw man argument, definitional legerdemain, playing fast and loose with statistics, mischaracterizations, false accusations, and outright lies. So who’s doing the "spin" here?

Only from its myopic perch in Manhattan could the WSJ editorial board subscribe to the view that Senator John Campbell won the California special congressional election to replace Chris Cox "in a walk." The district is one of the most solidly republican in the state, and State Senator John Campbell, a popular elected official (and a good man, too) was the party’s only candidate on Tuesday, yet he managed only 45% of the vote in a district with a 65%/35% major party registration advantage (and better than 50% Republican registration overall, even including the nearly 20% "Declined to State" number). And he received a smaller percentage of the vote in the run-off than he had received in the primary election, in which he faced 11 other republicans. Jim Gilchrist, on the other hand, running as a minor-party candidate (and not an enviable minor party at that) went from 14.8% in the primary to 25% in the run-off election, despite his party’s 1.8% registration in the district. In other words, Gilchrist drew almost all of the votes that had gone to other republicans in the primary.

Worse, calling Jim Gilchrist a "restrictionist", and falsely accusing those who supported him as being anti-immigration (rather than anti-illegal immigration, a big difference) is beneath the editorial pages of the WSJ. Using the double speak of the left is likewise. "Law-abiding businesses that happen to hire illegals"--that would make the businesses not law-abiding in most folks’ definition--is as bad as the left’s use of "undocumented" as a euphemism for illegal. And it is simply false to assert, as the WSJ does, that these businesses can’t tell the difference "between real and fake immigration documents." As surely even the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal knows, that ignorance (if it ever existed at all) lasts only as long as employers’ first quarterly filings of withholding taxes, because they receive a letter from the government notifying them that the Social Security number does not match the employee’s name. "As if anyone could tell the difference" indeed.

"But we need the labor," pleads the WSJ, and the only way to get it is via immigration. If true, then lets raise the quotas for legal immigration and streamline the process. Why is it that the WSJ is not pushing for such an easy legislative fix? My guess: legal immigration labor would not be much different than citizen labor; same wages, same workplace rules, same withholding taxes, even the same resort to the tort system. The only way to get the financial bang from immigrant labor that the WSJ seems to want is to have a slavish pool of illegal migrant workers. This is starting to bear an uncanny resemblance to John C. Calhoun’s positive good arguments for slavery, and it is making me sick to my stomach. It should make us all sick.

This WaPo article makes it seem as if the voting rights lawyers in the Justice Department are disinterested solons, whose advice the politicos at the top are ignoring, as in the Georgia voter ID case. My guess is that many of the non-political appointees are much more like the ex-employee quoted in the article, people committed to a particular vision of civil rights enforcement at odds with that offered by the Bush Administration. In other words, these bureaucrats aren’t offering neutral expertise, which the Bush Administration is ignoring or overturning; they’re pursuing an agenda that is as political as that pursued by the Bush Administration.

If you’re not up to speed on this case, the page containing this WaPo article also has links to the memo some disinterested politically neutral bureaucrat leaked. Here’s another WaPo article that provides crucial background (note the corrections at the top of the page). The money quote comes from Roger Clegg:

To Roger Clegg, the situation is also perfectly understandable. A former civil rights deputy in the Reagan administration who is now general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, Clegg said the civil rights area tends to attract activist liberal lawyers who are philosophically opposed to a more conservative approach.

"If the career people are not reflecting the policy priorities of the political appointees, then there’s a problem," Clegg said. "Elections have consequences in a democracy."