Faithful Presbyterians may start new denomination

Members of the Presbyterian Church-USA who believe themselves bound by Christian sexual ethics are considering following the lead of ELCA conservatives and starting their own denomination.

It remains to be seen whether the new church body repeats the mistakes of the Lutheran Churches in Mission for Christ and the North American Lutheran Church  by ignoring the prohibition of women's ordination in 1 Timothy 2:12 and disregarding the theology of I Corinthians 11:17-37 by embracing the "anybody who likes crackers and wine come on down" approach to the Sacrament known as open communion.

Having learned nothing from history, the LCMS and NALC are doomed to repeat it. They will be smaller versions of the ELCA within a generation.

'Doomsday Comet' Elenin fizzles

Comet Elenin- discovered last December, thought to be a sure-bet naked eye comet, and even said by some to be on a collision course with Earth- is breaking up.

Hey, it happens. The first potentailly spectacular comet I personally looked for was the infamous Comet Kohoutek, which fizzled in 1973

On the average, great comets (comets of significant brightness and visibility, and hence of historic significance) come every ten years. Since the last one was Comet McNaught, in January of 2007, we would have been six years ahead of schedule. But after all, great comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp were only a year apart, in 1996 and 1997.

I'm disappointed that we won't get to see Elenin (I missed McNaught, procrastinating until cloud cover hid it permanently from view in the Northern Hemisphere; its best showing was in the Southern Hemisphere, anyway). But not getting nuked by a potentially extinction-inducing snowball from outer space is nice, too.

Some people just don't learn

Our beloved Vice-President says what America needs to do is spend more.

That's what "stimulus" means, in English.

Of course, as Warren Buffett observes, we already have quite a sizable stimulus going.

It's called the deficit.

"Bombs bursting in air" unacceptable at Goshen

Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana is the alma mater of a former girlfriend of mine. Since it's a Mennonite school, I suppose that it's understandable that it finds the lyrics of The Star Spangled Banner too violent for the pacifist sensibilities of its constituency.

Still, it seems a bit excessive that its Board of Directors has banned even the music.

At the same time, the decision is less outrageous than it sounds. Apparently the college would have no problem with playing, say, America the Beautiful at sporting events and suchlike. They say they're simply interested in finding a way to honor America that is a little less martial. Which, in a diverse society that respects the First Amendment, this seems reasonable to me.

I must confess , though, that I don't see anything terribly warlike about the music to The Star Spangled Banner.

HT: Drudge

I don't know about Lucy being in the sky, but....

Astronomers have discovered a crystaline planet orbiting a distant pulsar that might be made of diamond.

Unfortunately, it's too late for the royal wedding. Or even Kim Kardashian's. Still, maybe Kim should check it out; an earing made out of this sucker would be hard to lose!

Pulsars are rotating neutron stars which radiate electromagnetic beams
that seem to flair when they sweep into Earth's line of sight. The effect is something like a the beam of a lighthouse.

Carbon planets such as "Planet Tiffany-" the highly unofficial name for the newly-discovered object- have been widely accepted as theoretical possibilities. Its official name is J1719-1438, and it's five times the size of Earth.

Perhaps the pulsar should be named "Lucy."

Was today's USA Today the Pennsylvania Dutch edition?

Either that, or Yoda wrote the headline:

Libyan Oil Industry May Fast Recover

Oh, yes. Good news at the pump, that would be.

There is a certain symmetry here

The East Coast earthquake has cracked the Washington Monument.

Now the politicians aren't the only things in Washington that are cracked.

HT: Drudge

Oh, joy.

Barack Obama and Congress will add $1.3 trillion to the deficit this year.

HT: Drudge

Trent? Vatican II? JDDJ? Unam Sanctum? Was gibt?

Is the Roman Catholic church on the side of the angels, or...er, not so much?

Does it agree with us Lutherans (and with Paul) that we're saved by grace, for Christ's sake, through faith (as Vatican II and the JDDJ would seem to indicate, or does it believe (as the Council of Trent insisted) that we Lutherans are going to hell for believing that very thing?

THe dilemma is a real one, since according to Roman Catholic teaching both Vatican II and Trent are infallible, and both represent the church's official teaching.

A church which soundly embraces the liturgical and sacramental character of biblical Christian faith and staunchly defends the rights of the unborn and the sexual ethics taught by the apostles on one hand, while continuing to make presumptuous claims for itself institutionally and managing to simultaneously both condemn and endorse the Gospel itself on the other, is a puzzle oft remarked upon by confessional Lutherans. But there's something about a video (especially this guy's videos) that gets the point across in a way that mere words can't.

Which is it, Roman Catholic brothers and sisters? Are we your brothers and sisters, fellow combatants in the battle for the Faith Once Delivered? Or are we heretics and schismatics, or saved from that status only by the accident of our having been born centuries after the Western Church was sundered by the Reformation? And ELCA and LWF folks... how can even you be post-modern enough to think that in light of the paradox described below the JDDJ is worth the paper it's printed on?



HT: Beggars All

Huzzah!

Beggars All, one of my all-time favorite Lutheran blogs, is back!

We've missed you, guys!

With Hendry gone, I can follow the Cubs again

I neglected to note this a couple of days ago, when it became public. But it's worth mentioning.

My condition has been met. Tom Ricketts and the Cubs have signaled that they care by firing GM Jim Hendry. As of now, I"m following the Cubs again.

I was a Hendry defender for years. He was, after all, the most successful Cubs general manager of my lifetime, presiding over three division championships and coming within five outs in 2003 of presiding over our first pennant winner since 1945. I'll never forget how he turned the essentially worthless Todd Hundley (and minor league outfielder Chad Hermanson) into gold- or more precisely, Eric Karros and Mark Grudzielanek- two fine players who were key parts of that 2003 team.

But the hangup over the Trib's sale of the Cubs got in the way, spiking a trade which would have brought Jake Peavy- and perhaps another championship- to the North Side. And Hendry shot himself in the foot, tying up the team's resources with a number of long-term free agent contracts for players like Alfonso Soriano and Koske Fukudome, who never produced results in keeping with their paychecks. For me, the last straw came  when he traded second baseman Mark DeRosa- an invaluable utility man in addition to being a key regular and an important element in the chemistry of the team- for essentially nothing, simply because he hit from the wrong side of the plate. That season, third baseman Aramis Ramierez- for whom DeRosa had subbed so well in the past that Ramierez's absense was barely missed- was injured for almost precisely the same number of games the Cubs finished out of first. But DeRosa wasn't around to pick up the slack. As soon as I heard that DeRosa had been traded, I made up my mind to stop  following the Cubs until such time as Hendry was let go.

When two consecutive division champions were swept out of the first round of the playoffs in as many years, Hendry's only moves weakened the team rather than strengthening it. The Cubs- who suddenly turned into the Bad News Bears as soon as October rolled around- were broken, and instead of fixing them Hendry made a bad situation worse. Many Cub fans- including long-time Hendry defenders such as myself- became convinced that the Cubs would remain mediocre at best until Hendry was replaced by somebody who would aggressively- and intelligently- go about cleaning up the mess that had been made on Hendry's watch.

Long-time Cubs exec Randy Bush has taken over as acting GM. Greg Maddux has been suggested as Hendry's permanent replacement. But whoever gets the job, he'll be treading on thin ice. Expensive long-term deals with potential stars who simply didn't live up to their billing was, in large measure, Hendry's downfall, and it seems inevitable that the Cubs will go after either Prince Fielder or Albert Pujols during the off-season. The new guy won't get much of a honeymoon before he's on the spot, too.

Secularist McCarthyism: Bachmann, Perry and the 'Dominionism' smear

Here we go again. The Republican primaries are six months away, and already news stories are raising fears on the left about “crazy Christians.”-- Lisa Miller, The Washington Post, August 18, 2011

Folks, when the Washington Post comes to the rescue of conservatives being libeled by the secularist Left, you know that the charges in question are nutty.

But when the author of the article in question is Lisa Miller- the  über-secularist religion editor of Newsweek, responsible for the magazine's notoriously eisogetical piece purporting to build a biblical case for same-sex "marriage-" is the author of the defense, you know that the charges spring from more than the ordinary amount of ignorance and/or malice.

Miller wrote precisely such a piece for the Post in the wake of a bizarre meme on the far Left of the blogosphere charging Minnesota Congressman Michele Bachmann and Texas Governor Rick Perry- both candidates for the Republican presidential nomination- with association with a movement in the of Evangelical church called dominionism. As presented by the secularists, it is nothing more or less than an attempt to turn the United States into a theocracy governed by a Christian version of sharia.

The trouble is that while everybody agrees that "dominionism" has to do with the relationship between Christian faith and public policy, the term is defined differently by different people.  Many of those definitions- and certainly any of them which are applicable to Bachmann or Perry on the basis of things which they themselves have said or written- are very much in the tradition of Martin Luther King, the abolitionists, the religiously motivated crusaders against child labor, and various other religiously-motivated individuals from American history ranging from the innocuous to the illustrious. No sharia here; just the application of the principles of their religion to their personal political agendas, much in the fashion endorsed by Barack Obama in his eloquent speech on the relationship between religious faith and public policy made while he was stil a senator. Some thoughts of my own on that remarkable speech can be found here.

I'll say it again: the meme does not cite positions taken by Bachmann or Perry themselves. The extreme positions identified with Bachmann and Perry are in every case cited merely because one or the other has had contact of some kind with people who hold them. The "dominionist" charge is entirely a matter of guilt by association. It kind of makes you think that Joe McCarthy has risen from the dead, and switched parties.

The meme seems to have originated with the New Yorker's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza,  who did hit pieces on Bachmann for his magazine and for NPR. Among other things, Lizza smears  Francis Schaeffer- the late "theosopher" cited by Bachmann as one of the main influences on her thinking- as an extremist crackpot, and actually accuses him of advocating the violent overthrow of the government!

While it's true that late in his life Schaeffer did advocate civil disobedience in situations in which one's religious faith and the demands of the government conflict, this is no more  than the apostles themselves advocated in Acts 4:19 and Acts 5: 29, and which is also embraced in the writings of various abolitionists and crusaders for women's sufferage and against child labor, as well as by Martin Luther King. Jr. in his  Letters from a Birmingham Jail). Otherwise, Schaefer's writings- including How, Then, Shall We Live?,  the specific document Bachmann says was so influential in forming her own thought- fall clearly within foul lines traditional among religiously motivated reformers like those in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war and abolitionists movements.

Richard Weikart, a history professor at Cal State-Stanislaus, pretty much demolishes Lizza's outright lies about Schaeffer here

The theme was expanded on by liberal journalist Sarah Posner, who supported Lizza's thesis and expanded on it. She charged Bachmann with a second crime: attending O.W. Coburn School of Law, at which the ideas of crackpots Herb Titus and R.J. Rushdoony figured in the curriculum. Nowhere did Posner establish that Bachmann herself has ever held such views, or anything like them.

In Perry's case, Posner- without attribution- claimed that his autobiography is "steeped" in influences from Schaeffer (gasp!) and Rushdoony. A third source- Forrest Wilder, writing in leftist Texas Observer, shockingly reports that Perry asked a pair of Dominionist ministers to pray for him at an event at which he appeared on the same stage. It's worth nothing that nowhere does the libelous article in question relate anything which would lead a reasonable person to conclude that Perry endorsed their beliefs. In fact, he has made it very clear that he does not.

Contrast Perry's behavior with that of Barack Obama, who attended a church whose minister hates America and damns it from the pulpit for twenty-five years and had him baptize his children, but cannot even be properly criticized for this. When the Right did nothing more or less in Obama's case than Lizza, Posner and Wilder have done with Perry and Obama- implyng that Obama must therefore share Jeremiah Wright's anti-Americanism- the Left quite rightly cried foul.

In his book, On My Honor (published in 1998), Perry wrote,  "Let's be clear: I don't believe government, which taxes people regardless of their faith, should espouse a specific faith. I also don't think we should allow a small minority of atheists to sanitize our civil dialogue on religious references." And on  August 2011, at a prayer event in Houston, Perry observed that "God is wise enough not to be affiliated with any political party."

A veritable arsenal of clips from various extreme secularist sources supporting the libel can be found here. Notably lacking from all of them is any form of documentation that Perry or Bachmann in fact hold the views attributed to them. They are nevertheless remarkable for the way several of them simply assume that Perry or Bachmann are indeed guilty by association, and run with the idea.

I am, as recent readers of this blog are aware, no fan of either Bachmann or Perry. But the hypocrisy and journalistic shoddiness of these attacks cry out for response. Only three years ago, the Left was up in arms when John McCain and Bachmann dared raise a rhetorical eyebrow at the fact that President Obama had attended a church for a quarter century whose minister hates America and all its works. "McCarthyism!," they cried. "Guilt by association!"

But apparently it's OK to leap to all sorts of conclusions on the basis of what law school a person attended, or whom he has asked to pray for him.

Once.

Just what we need: another Republican candidate who foams at the mouth

Remember my post from earlier in the week, where I said that Texas Gov. Rick Perry might be electable?

Well, forget it.

Yesterday the newest entry in the GOP presidential race said that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's monetary policy is "almost treasonous," and claimed that if the Fed "printed more money" between now and the election it would be "playing politics."

Really, Governor? Aside from the over-the-top nature of charging the Fed chairman- an honorable man and a patriotic American, whether you agree with him or not, and someone with whom you're going to have to work if you are elected to the White House- do you really believe that anybody who tries to get the economy moving between now and the election is "playing politics" and trying to help President Obama? That kind of thing might play in Texas. But in the rest of the country, it just gets you labeled as a fanatic.

The irresponsibilty of Perry's comments is compounded by his refusal to withdraw or modify them even after the uproar they caused. At least Michele Bachmann had the grace to back off from her notorious comments on MSNBC's Hardball, with Chris Matthews about the patriotism of Barack Obama and unspecificed Democrats in Congress. And in fairness to Bachmann, even though her statement was over the top, at least Mr. Obama's past association with people like Ayers and Wright was legitimate ground for the raising of eyebrows. Bernanke's monetary policy is not- unless you're sufficiently hard-core to be beyond rational discourse on the subject.

Neither Bachmann nor Perry are electable- nor should they be. The last thing America needs is more division and more wild-eyed indictments of people on the other side of the political fence, whichever side that might be.  If Republicans want to win- or even to nominate somebody with their head on straight- it's looking more and more like it's going to have to be one of the Mormons- either Romney or Huntsman.

And for anybody who believes in the Two Kingdoms, that shouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, I have a hunch that many of my fellow confessional Lutherans aren't quite confessional enough when the rubber meets the road to support somebody for office in the Kingdom of the Left Hand whose errors lie in the Kingdom of the Right.

Silly season in Ames

One of the drawbacks to Iowa's prominent position in the national political process is that an abnormally large percentage of the folks in both parties are, to use Alan Simpson's phrase, "a couple of tacos short of a combination platter." Mitt Romney got a good sample of the result last Friday at the Iowa State Fair, when he strove in vain to convince a gaggle of rabid Democrats that it's stockholders- many of them ordinary people, who rely on corporate profits to fund their 401k's- rather than CEO's who own corporations (that's the context of the quotation I predict you'll hear out of context through the whole campaign next year, if Romney is the nominee: "My friend, corporations are people."). "No!," the crowd kept shouting. "They (the corporations) keep it all (the profits) for themselves!"

In Ames on Saturday, their Republican counterparts had their day. The two crackpots in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, finished first and second. The only electable candidate in the running at Ames, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, got less than half the votes of either. On Sunday, Pawlenty quit the race.

Paul is merely a distraction. His followers, while few in number, are very, very loyal- and very, very vocal. They are also often- like their candidate- quite eccentric. At my precinct caucus in 2008 they harangued us at length on the imminent threat of national ID cards, which they said were predicted in the Book of Revelation, and the acceptance of which would entail eternal damnation. Paul- an old-style Republican isolationist and a somewhat selective libertarian (he's strongly pro-life)- has some rather unique ideas concerning economics as well. He may very well make another impressive showing in the Iowa Caucuses next year, before repeating his 2008 pattern and quickly fading from view once the race moves to less balmy (in the English sense of the word) climes.

Bachmann, on the other hand, is a real threat. While she would have absolutely no chance of defeating President Obama even in very bad economic times (she would simply scare off the independents and centrists with her extremism), she is quickly establishing herself as the Mad Hatter of the Tea Party movement, and it's not impossible to imagine her riding that role to the nomination.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas also got into the race Saturday. He'll compete with Bachmann for the social conservative vote. He, too, is a small-government economic conservative, although less strident than Bachmann. He has been an outspoken critic of Arizona's immigration law, and is on record as being pro-amnesty and as recognizing the impracticality of deporting all the illegal immigrants currently in the United States. This bit of realism will probably hurt him as much with Republican true believers as it has helped him to make Bush-style inroads in to the Hispanic vote in Texas.

Perry may possibly be too... well, Texan for the nation as a while. He's a big gun fan, and is on record as being one of the many Texans taken in by the urban legend that the treaty by which the Republic of Texas agreed to annexation by the United States guaranteed it a right to seceed if it chose at some time in the future. I don't know if anybody has set him straight on this point, but expect the Democrats and their allies in the media to talk about it a lot if the Perry candidacy prospers.

Perry might be electable. Or he might not. The jury is out. It will be interesting seeing how he handles himself in coming months. If he can position himself as a somewhat more experienced and less wild-eyed alternative to Bachmann, he could well be the nominee. He's especially well-positioned to be the alternative if Bachmann and front-runner Mitt Romney deadlock.

But with Pawlenty out, other than (possibly) Perry the only electable candidates are the two Mormons in the race, Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. Huntsman stands to inherit Romney's mantle as the candidate of the "establishment" wing of the Republican party if Romney stumbles. But he's in favor of civil unions (NOT "marriage") for same-sex couples, a position which will make him a hard-sell to social conservatives despite a very strong pro-life record. And he figures to remain in Romney's shadow until and unless the former Massachusetts governor somehow falls be the wayside; despite a resume that is probably better than any presidential candidate of either party since George H.W. Bush (Huntsman has been a White House staff assistant to President Ronald Reagan, Assistant Secretary of Commerce,  U.S. Ambassador to Singapore ,U.S. Trade Representative, and U.S. Ambassador to China as well as govenor of Utah), Huntsman lacks Romney's name recognition.

If Republicans want to win, it will have to be Perry (maybe) or one of the Mormons. In any case, the silly season known as the Ames Straw Poll is now history. More silliness is yet ahead, and we will probably hear at least a little more from Ron Paul when the Iowa Caucuses come.

But as of now, the 2012 presidential race has begun in earnest, too. Bachmann- unelectable though she is- is a formidable candidate for the nomination. And Romney and Perry seem, at the moment, to be the alternatives.

Obama, too, bears his share of the blame

Well, the deficit deal didn't work. Standard and Poor's thought that less than three trillion out of a fourteen trillion dollar deficit wasn't good enough- and was convinced by the Tea Party's and the GOP's brinksmanship in holding the economy hostage to blackmail  that our national leaders at present lack both the will and the common sense to handle the situation like grownups.

S&P downgraded us to AA+ rating. For the first time in our history, we are considered a less reliable national credit risk than Canada, Germany, and the UK. The very thing the Tea Party tried to blackmail us with happened despite the deal (though probably not in as severe a form as would have happened if we'd defaulted; we still maintain our AAA rating with two of the three rating agencies).

Two things need to be borne in mind in assessing blame. The first is that it is very likely that the downgrade could have been avoided if the Republicans had accepted Obama's original deal, and committed to cutting the deficit by 6.3 trillion over ten years.

The problem was that the Obama proposal included tax increases, which the Republicans wouldn't accept. But anybody who thinks we're going to dispose of a $14 trillion deficit without tax increases- by cutting spending alone- is smoking illegal herbs.

That said, there is a far more significant reality here. That the media is silent on this point is evidence of its liberal bias as powerful as anything that has come down the pike in decades.

How did we get the huge national debt which resulted in Standard and Poor's lowering our rating? We hear a great deal about the "Bush deficit" from Democrats- and from their allies in the media. But the Bush deficit totalled $800 billion- not the 1.3 billion President Obama claims. Now, admittedly, that's not chicken feed. When Dubyah took office, the national debt was $ 5, 768 trillion.  When he left office, it was $10,626 trillion.

But even if we accept Mr. Obama's distorted figures, that means that he racked up a bigger deficit in his first two years in office alone than Mr. Bush did in all eight of his years.

During the Bush administration,  the national debt rose an average of $607 billion a year. During the Obama administration thus far, it has risen an average of $1,723 trillion a year. To be fair, it was the Bush administration that submitted the 2009 budget- although without the ineffectual and wasteful $410 billion "porkulus" bill. None of this, of course, includes the $341 billion Obamacare will add to the national debt by the end of 2019..

Bush deficit? Come off it. Admittedly, Dubyah spent like a drunken sailor. But next to Barack Obama, he was a miser.

Yes, the Republicans screwed up- and the downgrade by Standard and Poor's can be directly attributed to the impression of instability created by the debt limit hostage crisis. But we weren't downgraded when George W. Bushw as president.

It look Barack Hussein Obama, the most reckless spender in our nation's history, to pull of that historic achievement.

The S&P downgrade is the fault of the Tea Party and its allies

Here is Standard and Poor's explanation for its decision to lower America's credit rating:

We have lowered our long-term sovereign credit rating on the United States of America to 'AA+' from 'AAA' and affirmed the 'A-1+' short-term rating.We have also removed both the short- and long-term ratings from CreditWatch negative.

The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics.

More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.

Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government's debt dynamics any time soon.The outlook on the long-term rating is negative.

We could lower the long-term rating to 'AA' within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case.

Special attention should be paid to the second and fourth paragraphs. To summarize, the debt deal didn't go far enough. Had President Obama's "big solution- the deal he originally proposed, which Republicans rejected because it included tax increases (as any realistic plan to seriously address a $14.5 trillion deficit necessarily will have to)- we would have had a deal which would have cut the debt in half in ten years, taking
it well below the its level when the economy collapsed in 2008.

Standard and Poor's expanded on the fourth paragraph this way:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.

Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. public debt burden in a manner consistent with a ‘AAA’ rating and with ‘AAA’ rated sovereign peers (Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K.).

When all is said and done, the downgrade is the direct result of the decision of Congressional Republicans- and especially the Tea Party- to hold the debt limit increase and the American economy in general hostage in order to secure a jerry-rigged series of spending cuts which would not, in the long run, have seriously addressed the deficit. The result will- at the very least- be a substantial increase in the deficit, the fall of the United States from its premier positon as a world economic power, and the prospect of contined brinksmanship and partisan games at a time when both parties need to pull together to work out a realistic plan to seriously address the national debt the only way it can be seriously addressed: by both cutting entitlements and raising taxes. The problem is far too big to be solved by either expedient alone.

Yesterday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) claimed at the Republican presidential debate here in Iowa that she had been "proven right" by the S&P decision to downgrade our national credit rating.

Wrong, Congressman Bachmann. S&P downgraded us in no small measure because of the decision by the Tea Party and its congressional allies to hold the debt limit hostage. And the position taken by you, Ron Paul, and the others who refused to support an increase in the debt limit under any circumstances are even more responsible for creating the impression at S&P that when it comes to addressing our national obligations, America's political leaders are simply not serious or responsible people.

You'd never know it from the State Fair, but there are things that even Iowans won't eat.

I've derived many an hour's pleasure from The Virtual Autopsy, a site maintained by a British medical school. There, medical histories, autopsy findings, and even pictures of the autopsied organs of folk who have shuffled off this mortal coil are provided, together with the opportunity in each case to choose among multiple possible causes of death and then have your "findings" critiqued . I actually got rather good at it, and wish that there were many, many more cases to "solve." In fact, the site almost makes me think I would have been a good  forensic pathologist!

Almost. Chemistry was never a strength of mine, and I"m afraid that it can't be avoided in pathology- or in most medical specialties, actually.

Anyway, one of the cases the web site presents involves a teenaged girl who died after eating  "a chip butty" (above). Being an American, I had no idea what a chip butty was. So I asked a friend of mine in the UK. He tells me that it's essentially a french fry sandwich.

Yes, that's what I said. I cannot conceive of such a thing, but apparently the Brits not only can, but do. And they not only can conceive of such a monstrosity. They actually eat them. But then, they also eat steak-and-kidney pie.

I tried steak-and-kidney pie at the Folk Fair at Navy Pier in Chicago several decades ago. It tastes very much like I imagine the straw would on the floor of a well-populated and not very well kept barn.

Lately I've noticed that Denny's, the sponsor of the The Late. Late Show with Craig Ferguson, has been advertising what it calls its "Midwestern Meat and Potatoes Sandwich." It's essentially pot roast, cheese, some kind of white goop, and french fries on a bun. Now, having grown up in the Midwest and lived here most of my life, I can assure you that it was Denny's, and not the notoriously sensible people of this region, who conceived of this disgusting item. Why would anybody (outside Great Britain, apparently) think that a starch sandwich is a good idea? It's true that Chickies- an Italian beef and hot dog stand on Pulaski Road back in the Chicago neighborhood where I grew up- used to top of its hot dogs with an order of fries. But they were not meant to be an actual part of the sandwich.

But this is not to say that we in the Midwest don't have our culinary peculiarities. Goulash, everywhere else on the planet (and especially in Hungary), is cubed beef in a spicy paprika gravy, served over flat noodles. But in Iowa and Nebraska, it's elbow macaroni and other stuff mixed together in tomato sauce- sort of chili mac, but without the chili beans. My mother used to add ground beef to a similar dish, and called it "concoction" (though when I was small, I knew it as "concussion"). I gather that Iowans and Nebraskans use a similar sort of logic in using the word "goulash," which kind of sounds somehow like it ought to be the name of something that results almost by accident from throwing various cans of this and that together. The only problem, of course, is that the Hungarians already use that word for a very different dish.

The Iowa State Fair is always the occasion of gastronomical enormities, as well as gastronomical wonders. The devouring of a shiskebob at the Lamb Producers' Pavilion is a ritual I observe ever time I go to the Fair, as is the eating of a inch and a half-thick Iowa pork chop on a stick and a beef sundae (mashed potatoes topped with beef and gravy and crowned by a cherry tomato). But I avoid the deep-fried Twinkies and Snickers bars. I may be something of an omnivore, but even I have standards. And arteries.

This year, the State Fair menu includes the ultimate artery-buster, one that grosses even the Brits out: fried butter (right). Apparently they prevent the butter from melting by utilizing the same mysterious principles employed to prevent  ice cream from melting when it's  baked in order to make Baked Alaska.

But no matter the depths to which we sink, we Midwesterners have our pride.

No, we do not eat french fry sandwiches. Or things that taste like the floor of the cattle pavilion.

Liberal fascism at its finest

Readers of this blog know that I am no fan of the Tea Party- which, I believe, along with other Republicans who choose to create the artificial crisis of the debt ceiling controversy at a time when confidence in the economy was low- is directly responsible for the current historic drop in the stock market.

But John Kerry- long a prime exemplar of the "liberal" fondness for seeking to suppress any voice that differs from leftist orthodoxy- has come out with a particularly blatant example of that tendency.

He says that the media have a "responsibility" not to give the Tea Party equal time with its opponents.

Now, nobody on the right gets equal time with the left. The unselfconscious irony with which "progressives" mock the bias on Fox News (not altogether without cause) ignores the fact that the whole rationale of Fox News was to create at least one spot on the dial free of the equally egregious left-wing bias of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC.

Kerry's comments, I think, are another manifestation of the general "liberal" conviction that any viewpoint with which liberals disagree ought to be suppressed.

On the other hand, I happen to agree with this statement by Sen. Kerry. Even kooks have a right to be heard- but that doesn't make them anything other than kooks.

And then, there was one

Astronomers at the University of California- Santa Cruz have proposed a new explanation for the presence of the lunar highlands on a body whose general topography and geological deadness make them something of a mystery.

Some have conjectured that they might be the result of a collision with another planet, approximately the size of Mars. But the UC- Santa Cruz astronomers suggest that originally, the Earth had two or even more moons- and the highlands are the result of crashes which destroyed the others.

HT: Drudge

Just plain silly

A new USA Today-Washington Post poll shows that Americans believe by a 2-to-1 margin that the deal to raise the debt ceiling will make the economy worse rather than better.

Apparently they think that default, the downgrading of our national credit rating, the resulting increase in the deficit and the inevitable plunge back into recession would be preferable to... I don't know. It's not clear exactly what bad things are anticipated here.

But wait. Perhaps the article linked to above has the explanation:

The dyspeptic view may reflect less an assessment of the plan's particulars than dismay at the edge-of-a-cliff negotiations to reach it.

"Most people assume that whatever came out of this horrible process was pretty crappy," says Joseph White, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who studies budget policy.

Perhaps. But it's harder to understand the reaction of folks who ought to know better.

Incredibly, the entire Iowa delegation to Congress voted against the deal- voted, in effect, for default and a renewed recession. Sen. Grassley opposed the deal because of the potential for tax increases- which , Earth-dwellers know, are going to be necessary to balance the budget at some point. Sen. Harkin voted against it because he somehow felt that it would be disasterous for the economy.

And default and a renewed recession would have been better?

Professor White says- and doubtless he is right- that "most people assume that whatever came out of this horrible process was pretty crappy." But whatever rational moved each of our clueless Iowa congressional delegation, the result of defeating the last-minute deal would have been far crappier by far for all of us.

Congressmen Boswell and Latham, who will be running against each other in my district next year due to redistricting, have a great deal of explaining to do before I'll buy the notion that either of them has all their marbles, and a great deal more before I'm convinced that either of them deserves my vote. This budget deal may not be the greatest in the world for all sorts of reasons. Liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, all can find plenty about it not to like.

But there is no rational argument that, given the real-world choices Congress faced when it voted on the deal, defeating it would have been infinitely worse for everybody.

I've been saying it for quite a while now

A new cold war between the United States and China is inevitable.

The collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1989 only prepared the way for a new and far more formidable rival for the political, economic and military leadership of the world. The rise of China poses a challenge to the United States to which the Obama administration and the talking heads seem utterly oblivious.

HT: Real Clear Politics

Disaster averted- maybe

It's as good a deal as we realistically could have gotten.

Now hopefully the wingnuts and moonbats won't mess it up.

HT: Drudge