Discovery Blog

Today, The Wall Street Journal picked up on my blog about Saddam Hussein’s continuing WMD ambitions, which came to light in a 60 Minutes interview of his FBI interrogator, George Piro. I appreciate the Journal's decision to cover the story, and am thankful that it has now reached a much broader audience.

The Journal article can be read here (subscription required).

Ted Van Dyk is one of a small number of political sages who have something significant to say about the political process after taking active part in it over--is it possible?--some forty five years. I have found his new memoir, Heroes, Hacks and Fools (University of Washington Press) a surprisingly companionable accompaniment to the current primary election season.

Plunge back to the days when Van Dyk was a top aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and, page by page, share the fascinated horror as one catastrophe after another took place in that election year, includng the Bobby Kennedy assassination and the riots that nearly broke up the Democratic convention. Today's controversies are like the proverbial Sunday school picnic in comparison.

Van Dyk's observations on presidents and candidates he has known and worked for (up to and including Bill Clinton) are insightful and always candid. And so is his running comentary on the changing political process.

Once again, the primaries put polling in a bad light. The exit polls, of course, were not at all predictive, but everyone (including especially the professional pollsters) has known that for some time and newscasters were careful not to misuse the data this year. Rather, it was the pre-primary polls that were again surprisingly wobbly. Those polls, of course, got out. But even so, most media people are wary now of exaggerating their importance.

In California, the Reuters/Zogby poll had Romney ahead by seven points the day before the primary election. Then McCain won the next day by eight points. You can't easily explain away a fifteen point difference like that. It must be galling to John Zogby, whose accuracy since the famous Clinton/Dole race of 1996 has been his calling card.

The ubiquity of the McCain win in California was also notable, and it was missed by almost all reporting. Apparently, McCain won every Congressional district but two, one on the coast, one in the San Jaoquin Valley. If so, he gets 164 of the state's 170 delegates, quite a haul. (Romney gets six.) It has been hard to find this information anywhere besides the Secretary of State's office in Sacramento, unfortunately.

If nothing else, the difficulty of counting on polls in the age of cell phones and unlisted home phone numbers--not to mention the cursed sophistication of voters who no longer think it an honor to answer a lot of questions from a stranger--means that we really are flying by the seat of our pants now. That's an exaggeration, of course, but don't you think it is interesting, even exhilarating, that the two candidates--McCain and Huckabee--who long couldn't afford polls nonetheless have managed to win so many primary elections?

A call from almost anybody to accept Islamic "Sharia" law in Britain is the sort of thing that is sure to annoy ordinary citizens in that country. Sharia law is regarded as too harsh and inhumane to be employed even in much of the Muslim world today and few Muslims living in the West would want it employed in countries to which they or their parents have moved. In the UK sharia law would threaten Western civilization's carefully safeguarded tradition of individual rights and ordered liberty. The British people's contribution to that tradition may be regarded as their island's greatest accomplishment. In truth, it is the product of Judeo-Christian theology, interacting with Greek philosophy, tutored by the hard hard political and religious experience of centuries.

So, when the head of the Church of England, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams--of all people--suggested acceptance of Sharia law in some instances in Britain, open anger erupted. This was not a call from some nobody. Most shamed were Williams' fellow churchmen. http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23436203-details/Sharia%20law%20row:%20Archbishop%20is%20in%20shock%20as%20he%20faces%20demands%20to%20quit/article.do?expand=true#StartComments

The incident is a calamity for a state church that is already reeling. The Anglican Communion, Christianity's second largest body, is in especially bad repute in the "global South" because of its latitudinarian attitudes on sexuality. But if there is anything the African Christians care about even more than integrity of family life, it is their nearly constant battle against the infringements of an aggressive and intolerant brand of Islam that wants, above all, to implement Sharia law. Over half the Anglicans in the world now reside in Africa, a place, unlike Britain and North America, where missionary work is growing, not shrinking. If the African Anglicans were to adopt Archbishop Williams' advice in their own countries, they probably would have to give up and convert to Islam.

So it is that a soft-headed religious proposal has become a political issue of front rank. If it is treated as something less, it will only be because the Church of England no longer is taken seriously in its home land. And that is a sad commentary, indeed. The decennial Lambeth Conference of Anglicans worldwide takes place this summer at Lambeth Palace, the London home of the Archbishop. It might be a good idea if a new Archbishop of Canterbury were on hand to preside.

Caucuses turn out the party faithful. In the Democratic Party, that means disproportionately more liberals take part than typically show up in primaries, while the Republicans who come to caucuses tend to be more conservative than the party as a whole. As a consequence, conservative Republican activists and liberal Democratic activists both tend to prefer caucuses for the purpose of selecting delegates to presidential nominating conventions. Moderates in both parties prefer primaries.

That certainly is true in Washington State, where caucuses met today. Because there is competition among national presidential candidates this year, turnout was high. In overwhelmingly liberal Seattle, superficial evidence is that throngs came out (no numbers yet) for the Democratic caucuses. But Republicans apparently surprised themselves by also having a (relatively) good turnout. At the Republican caucuses for just one heavily Democratic legislative district in the central-north section of the city, some 400 or 500 Republican grass roots folk showed up. Moreover, they composed a lively, youngish crowd, with many minorities present. It looked a lot like the face of the future.

One criticism of caucuses is that they take too much time to decide something rather simple; namely, who do you support for president and who do you support to attend the next convention level that will select the national party delegates? Often in the past, the party operatives have held up the votes on those matters, monopolizing everyone's afternoon to make speeches on the gold standard or tax reform. But the caucus I attended today was brisk, friendly and over in an hour. Everyone seemed pretty cheerful and happy to meet one another.

The Democrats choose all their delegates in Washington State through the caucus process; the presidential primary that occurs in ten days will carry no real weight--though in a state that doesn't have official party registration, it will provide the Democratic state central committee a very good list of voter names. In order for your vote to count at all, you have to declare your party preference. Thus, an effective registration list is developed for the party, after all.

The Republicans seem to have come up with a somewhat better approach. The GOP caucuses continue to matter because just under half the national convention delegates will come from that process (filtered first through the state convention in May). But the winner of the February 19 presidential primary automatically will get the other half of the delegation (plus one). That appeals to another and genuine constituency--people allergic to meetings, for one thing--and it also produces at least as good a surrogate registration list as the Democrats will obtain.

Either way, it's democracy. If you are a former politician, like me, it is encouraging to see it in action.

The media mostly misinterpreted the caucus results for both parties in Washington State's caucuses on Saturday. You can't entirely blame them. Even party activists were confused. And shortly you are going to hear about further confusion over Washington State's presidential primary that follows next week, February 19. Complications begin with the fact that the Republicans and Democrats are running different, though related, delegate selection systems.

Let's start with the primary that will be held a week from tomorrow. Since Washington is moving to a nearly-all-absentee ballot operation in all elections, voters already have received--and many have cast--those ballots. Nothing is on most of them but the presidential primary choices. (The options, by the way,include candidates who have now quit the race, including John Edwards on theDemocratic side, for example, and Rudy Giuliani on the Republican, or, in the case of Mitt Romney, a candidate who has "suspended" his race.)

Independents can participate in the presidential primary in Washington, but to do so they have to declare a party preference. That means they no longer are really "independents", doesn't it? Some partisans who would like to vote for a person in the other party (a person who considers himself a Republican but would like to vote for Obama, for example) probably will be deterred by the prospect of recording themselves as members of a party with which they really don't identify. After all, both parties will have access to how voters have identified themselves, meaning that the state now has de facto party registration.

Some voters, rebelling against this pressure to settle on a party, have refused to list their party identification and have voted anyhow. Those ballots will be ignored, and voters who have voted already and have learned that they wasted their ballot are not happy. (They should have read the fine print.)

Further confusion: The Republican primary results will count--though only for 19
out of the state's allotted 40 national delegates. The statewide winner of the GOP primary will get ten of those 19, while another nine will be assigned--one each--to the winner within the confines of each of the state's nine Congressional districts. So, those nine could be the same as the statewide winner, or somewhat different.

As for the Democrats, the party authorities will surely make records of how the individual primary voters identify themselves by party, but the actual presidential vote outcome will have no binding status in selection of national convention delegates. This already is another cause of dismay among voters who, for whatever reason, didn't want to--or couldn't--attend the caucuses last Saturday and now feel abandoned and ignored. (Remember, only the Democrats, not the Republicans, fail to select delegates from the primary process.)

Meantime, with the caucus results from last Saturday, we have the spectacle of either real or feigned outrage from Huckabee supporters who claim that the Washington Republican Party chairman, Luke Esser, awarded the caucus victory to McCain before counting all the votes. Actually, all he did was give a preliminary result when the volunteer counters reached 87% statewide and wanted to quit for the night. The vote count continued the next day, but didn't change anything.

But confusion again was understandable. Even the participants at the Republican caucuses probably were perplexed. Upon entering, each participant registered a preference for president. Technically, it didn't matter much, because those votes
haven't even been counted and don't factor into what delegates will ultimately go to the national convention in St. Paul this summer. What was counted was the outcome of the subsequent decision by attendees; namely, the choice of the delegates to move to the next level of selection, the county GOP conventions that will be held in March and April. It was the total of those delegates' presidential choices that the party chairman cited in saying that McCain had "won". In fact, he was stating a contingent political reality, but not necessarily a permanent one. Not only were all the delegates votes not tabulated at the time he made the statement (the last few are being counted now), but, also, the delegates are free to change their minds before the county conventions. And delegates selected at the county convention could be differently committed at the state convention.

At the state convention, moreover, the 18 national party convention delegates that are to be selected solely through the caucus/convention process might be all pledged to one candidate, or allotted by some proportional formula arrived at then.

Finally, the Republicans in Washington allot three automatic delegate votes to the state party chairman and the party's national committeeman and committeewoman, thus giving the delegation 40 votes total.

The precinct caucuses showed a slight McCain edge over Huckabee (25% to 24%), with Ron Paul a close third, with 21%, and another 17% for Romney, and the rest scattered or uncommited. It is possible, therefore, that there will be many changes of position before the state convention meets in May, three months from now. Overall, at this point in the delegate selection process you would want to be McCain, not someone else, but it is still not at all certain how the Washington delegation to the national convention will be configured.

Washington State Democrats, meanwhile, will follow roughly the same process, but
will award all the national delegates by the caucus system, filtered through
county and state conventions, and will exclude any official consideration (as I
say still again) of next week's presidential primary results. Since Obama won the caucuses convincingly, I think it is clear that he will get the lion's share of delegates to the national convention in Denver. But the exact breakdown is still unclear.

There. If there are any questions, raise your hand.

Please! Not all at once!

One of the very best commentators on the current American political scene is Michael Barone, principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics and a senior writer for U.S. News and World Report. Here's his reaction to yesterday's blog (below):

"There is a question about which state has come up with the most abstruse, impenetrable and logically indefensible way to choose presidential national convention delegates. It seems to me that there is a case that this year Washington has won."



It used to rank with Washington's Birthday. Now they are both subsumed in some odd amalgam called "President's Day" that doesn't seem to mean much at all. Meanwhile, that preposterous concoction "Darwin Day" is probably getting more attention today than Honest Abe's celebration.

That's too bad. In the pantheon of greatness, Aristotle tells us, the greatest honors go to the "magnanimous man" who creates a state, the next highest to the one who preserves it. That would give us 1) Washington and 2) Lincoln.

Washington leaves us awestruck. His passions were real, but he controlled them so well that the force of his personality was concentrated almost exclusively on advancing his country's mission. His stamina and virtue were undimmed by time or usage. We owe him, among other things, that in over two centuries we have not been tempted to dictatorship. When, after the Revolutionary War, he was offered a kingship he turned it down. His reason for the decision was that such a role was beneath him, an insult to his character as a free man in a free country! What could be a more perfect response? Those who had offered him the crown, as it were, fell down in abject shame and apology.

Lincoln can't help but seem more human. He woos us with his deep love of country, justice and, yes, peace. His humor delights. His political warning should be heeded just now by politicians who hope to enrapture the public: "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."

A wonderful article on Lincoln's religious life appears in World Magazine, written by Marvin Olasky. I didn't realize before that Lincoln was a skeptic as a youth and only came to faith in the crisis of the war itself. It literally drove him to his knees, he said. People today feel so sorry for themselves because of the anxieties of our time, but Lincoln, like Washington, knew real peril. We should bow to give thanks for such leaders and ask our children to join us in paying respects.

Whenever you see the title "ethicist" today you are likely to find someone attacking real ethics, at least the ethics that lean on the tradition of moral understanding that has developed over thousands of years and the Judeo-Christian worldview. Unfortunately, big money is invested in creating "ethicist" positions at various institutions that desire to justify cold-hearted utilitarian interests, some of them financial. Have someone who calls himself an "ethicist" bless infanticide or assisted suicide or cloning and that is supposed to make it just fine.

Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith's blog, Second Hand Smoke, covers this territory regularly and I commend it to readers of Discovery Blog. If we could raise the money, Discovery would expand Wesley's reach and have a number of people working in this under-cultivated field. In fact, we are working on that problem and could use your assistance and leads.

Meanwhile, read this latest article length blog by Wesley J. Smith:

Promoting Infanticide in the HASTINGS CENTER REPORT

The Hastings Center Report is the world's most prestigious bioethics journal. Articles published in its pages are generally in the mainstream thinking of bioethics discourse and at the heart of the process of debate within bioethics that often leads to changes in public policy--such as the discussions in the 1980s about dehydrating the cognitively impaired led to routine withholding of sustenance today.

In the last several years, Report articles have promoted a "duty to die" and a right to assisted suicide for the mentally ill. In the most recent edition, it promotes Dutch style infanticide. From the article "Ending the Life of a Newborn," (Hastings Center Report 38, 1 pp. 42-51 ) by an American bioethicist named Hilde Lindemann and a Dutch bioethicist named Marian Verkerk (no link available). The authors approve of the so-called "Groningen Protocol," under which doctors murder dying and disabled babies in the Netherlands without legal consequence. (I call it murder because that is how it is still defined in Dutch law.) The Protocol permits babies to be lethally injected if:

1: they have no chance of survival (which is sometimes misdiagnosed); 2, if they "may survive after a period of intensive treatment but expectation for their future are very grim;" or, 3 they have an extremely poor prognosis "who do not depend on technology for physiologic stability and whose suffering is severe, sustained, and cannot be alleviated."

The authors defend the Protocol from most criticisms, even to the point that they believe killing the non terminally ill is more important that terminating babies about to die:

Critics charge that the protocol does not successfully identify which babies will die. But it is precisely those babies who could continue to live, but whose lives would be wretched in the extreme, who stand in most need of the interventions for which the protocol offers guidance.

They proceed to discuss at great length the issues involved in doctors and parents determining whether a disabled baby's future life will be worth living. Here is a sampling of their murder-promoting advocacy:

Where the Dutch go further than other countries is in their shared belief that even newborns have a fundamental interest in not prolonging a life that is or will become an intolerable burden to them. This understanding is buttressed by a consensus--within the National Association of Pediatricians, for example, but also in the wider community on some criteria regarding quality of life, including the amount of suffering that is to be accepted, the capacities for communication(nonverbally as well as verbally),the capacities to live a self-supporting life, and the dependency on care institutions. It is one of the harsh realities of twenty-first-century medicine that quality-of-life judgments must be made. What we must not do is pretend that we do not already make them, and that there is somehow something morally different about doing it for a newborn baby.

One might object that even if we do make quality-of-life judgments for others, there is surely a moral difference between killing and letting die. In fact, sometimes there is, and sometimes there isn't. As James Rachels has famously argued, whether you drown your six-year-old nephew in the bathtub so that you can collect his inheritance or merely refuse to intervene as he slips and hits his head and falls face down into the bathwater, either way you are a murderer. [Me: And both are evil, just like infanticide.] We agree with Rachels that actively ending a life can sometimes be more humane than waiting for the person to die, and that in the desperate cases where death does not come of its own accord to end unendurable suffering, the morally right thing to do is to summon it.

The article assumes that guidelines will protect against abuse, but infanticide is by definition abuse. Moreover, the euthanasia guidelines for adults and teenagers have not held, so why should anyone expect that those being established in the Netherlands for legalized infanticide will? Even the authors understand that mistakes will happen and, typical of the mindset, assume that if murder of the helpless is committed in front of an open window it is somehow more acceptable:

Determining in an instant case whether the protocol is applicable will always require judgment, and because the stakes are inordinately high no matter what is decided, the judgment must be made with fear and trembling. That said, however, we believe that transparency in the deliberations concerning the ending of an infant's life--which is just as important as it is in the deliberations concerning euthanasia in adults--is adequately promoted by the protocol's requirements.

Concerning the larger question of whether the practice for which the protocol was developed can be morally justified, we think it can in the Netherlands, at any rate. When a tragically impaired infant is born into a society that is hospitable to its children, offers universal access to decent health care, and promotes an ethos among its citizens whereby they look after each other as a matter of course, we believe that the doctor's ending the baby's life could be the best, most caring response.

It wasn't many years ago that almost everyone accepted that infanticide is intrinsically and inherently wrong. No more. With personhood theory and the "quality of life ethic increasingly permeating the highest levels of the medical and bioethical intelligentsia, we are moving toward a medical system in which babies are put down like dogs and killing is redefined as compassion.

But bigotry is bigotry even if you spell it c.o.m.p.a.s.s.i.o.n. And to think, after World War II German doctors were hanged for doing precisely what is being promoted in "prestigious" the Hastings Center Report.

Anti-trade, anti-business rhetoric works like flypaper for Democratic candidates for president. They are helplessly attracted to it, get stuck on it and...die. It happens every presidential election season. The exceptions were the two Bill Clinton election years (1992 and 1996), when, by the way, the Democrats won.

This year both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have enjoyed large donations from business people--bigger than McCain's or Romney's, in fact. Supporting "Change!" and "Hope!" is more fashionable in corporate boardrooms these days than Friday casual wear, and no more expensive. However, now that the general call for "change!" is beginning to get some specific definitions behind it, and starts to look like another mask for a government attitude that punishes innovation and investment, business support for the Democrats may be jeopardized.

Big business, especially, is made up of people who tend to be social issues liberals and practical skeptics of wars like the one in Iraq. (Wars are costly, waste resources and distract from commerce.) But on the subjects they know first hand, businessmen tend to be conservative, seeking tax rates that stimulate investment and regulations that don't let the government pick winners and losers. Threats to free trade do not amuse people with MBAs. Business leaders who have been touched by opportunistic lawsuits--and that is most of them--tend to prefer judicial appointees who interpret the Constitution rather than make law according to their own ideological views. So, when presidential candidates start talking class war and berating certain industries, let alone business in general, the ardor of their support in corporate circles starts to cool. A little question clouds the horizon of the businessman's mind, "These people couldn't be serious, could they?"

Read the revealing article from the front page of today's Wall Street Journal, below.

Democrats' Attacks
On Business Heat Up

By LAURA MECKLER and KRIS MAHER
February 16, 2008

As the Democratic presidential contest moves to the distressed industrial Midwest, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have ratcheted up their antitrade, anticorporate rhetoric.

The candidates have made broad attacks on corporate wealth and tax cuts they say tilt toward the rich, along with more specific attacks against health insurers and oil companies, among other industries. On Friday, Mrs. Clinton began airing a TV spot in Wisconsin in which she says, "The oil companies, the drug companies, have had seven years of a president who stands up for them.... It's time we had a president who stands up for all of you."

Both candidates increasingly sound like former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards as they pursue his endorsement and the voters -- particularly union members -- who were drawn to the populist candidate before he dropped out last month. Illinois Sen. Obama got a boost toward that goal Friday with the backing of the Service Employees International Union, one of the most politically powerful labor organizations.

SEIU long was too divided to make a national endorsement, but Mr. Edwards's withdrawal and Mr. Obama's momentum made a choice easier. Now the union has organizers on the ground working for the Obama campaign in Wisconsin, which holds the next primary Tuesday. "It has now become clear the members of our union and the leaders of our union think that it is time to become part of an effort to make Barack Obama the next president of the United States," said Andy Stern, the union's president, during a phone conference with reporters.

One factor in the endorsement is the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and blamed by many unions for sending jobs to Mexico. Sen. Obama has increasingly hit Mrs. Clinton on Nafta.

"People react very strongly against Nafta," said Anna Burger, head of SEIU's political program, in an interview. "We've seen job loss in this country as a result of Nafta. She's speaking out against Nafta now, but she has ties to it. That's been a high hurdle for her to overcome."

Wisconsin offers a test for the antitrade rhetoric, as a state where the number of well-paid manufacturing jobs has steadily declined over the past decade. Two recent polls have given Mr. Obama an edge there, and he is widely expected to carry the state.

Battered Ohio, which votes March 4, offers an even bigger test. It currently stands as the No. 1 state for home foreclosures in progress, with 3.7% of homes with outstanding mortgages affected, according a recent report by National City Corp. in Cleveland. The state is a must-win contest for Mrs. Clinton, who has lost a string of contests to Mr. Obama since Feb. 5. She has a large lead in recent Ohio polls.

Besides wooing voters, both candidates are trying to win favor from Democratic leaders in these states who serve as superdelegates. Superdelegates -- members of Congress and other prominent party figures -- aren't bound by the results of the primaries or caucuses in their states. They could help decide who wins the nomination.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio), one undecided superdelegate, won election in 2006 with a populist message and said he is pleased that the presidential candidates are now following suit. "They were both a bit slow to get there, but they both have genuine beliefs about the middle class and working families and they're going exactly in the right direction," he said.

Business groups are dismissive of the Democratic attacks. "They should be talking about ways to grow the economy such as deregulation and lessening burdens on employers, rather than criticizing them with simplistic politically driven rhetoric," said Randel Johnson, a vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Obama's growing backing from labor leaders may help him more with the working-class voters being wooed by those appeals. Beyond Wisconsin, SEIU's endorsement could help him in Texas, which also has a primary on March 4. The union organized 5,300 janitors in Houston in the past few years and is expected to call on its strong staff there to mobilize voters.

SEIU's backing came on the heels of an Obama endorsement Thursday by the United Food and Commercial Workers, which has 1.3 million members. Overall, though, the labor movement remains divided between the two candidates. Mrs. Clinton has far deeper support from unions representing government workers, teachers and machinists, among others.

Substantively, the two Democrats agree on most economic issues. Even as they debate whether Mrs. Clinton supported Nafta too strongly in the past, for instance, both promise to try and renegotiate the agreement to get better terms.

Their rhetoric, too, is remarkably similar.

In Cincinnati Friday, Mrs. Clinton described herself as the "candidate of, from and for the middle class of America" to roundtable of voters in Cincinnati.

"We're going to end every single tax break that still exists in the federal tax code that gives one penny of your money to anybody who exports a job. Those days are done," she said. "It is wrong that an investment money manager in Wall Street making $50 million a year gets a lower tax rate than a teacher, a nurse, a truck driver, and autoworker making $50,000 a year."

She has taken a number of opportunities over the last week to denounce corporations. On Thursday, she responded to reports of possible airline mergers. "We will have to take a hard look at the potential effects on workers and consumers," she said in a statement. "It is also vitally important that any proposed merger preserve the jobs and worker protections on which thousands of families rely." A spokeswoman for Delta Air Lines Inc., which people close to the matter say is in merger talks, said any merger decision would be made with the long-term interests of employees and customers in mind.

On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton jumped on news that Blue Cross of California was asking doctors to provide personal medical information about their patients that could make them ineligible for insurance (a practice the company has since reversed). "This is only the most recent example of how insurance companies spend tens of billions of dollars a year figuring out how to avoid covering people with health insurance," Mrs. Clinton said in a statement.

Mr. Obama's language has the same ring. On Tuesday night, as votes were being counted in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., Mr. Obama (who won all three of those contests) was in Madison, Wis., denouncing Nafta for shipping jobs overseas and, he said, forcing "parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Wal-Mart."

"That's why we need a president who will listen to Main Street, not just Wall Street, a president who will stand with workers not just when it's easy, but when it's hard," he said.

The next day, he was at a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wis., to deliver an economic address in which he again denounced free-trade agreements. "Decades of trade deals like Nafta and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear," he said.

He has repeatedly accused Mrs. Clinton of supporting Nafta in the years after her husband signed it into law. Mr. Obama has sent a flier into Ohio homes that shows a locked gate, presumably to a factory, with a large "Closed" sign hanging. It says, "Hillary Clinton believed NAFTA was 'a boon' to our economy. See inside..."

It seems that Mrs. Clinton never used those exact words, and Mrs. Clinton has accused Mr. Obama of peddling "all sorts of false claims."

We need more debates. Hillary Clinton demanded another of Barack Obama before the Wisconsin primary (and was turned down). Obama pointed out that they had had eighteen debates, wasn't that enough? But on FOX, survey expert Frank Luntz found that his focus group members were still confused about where the candidates stood. They'd like some more confrontations. The Democratic candidates have had eighteen debates, Luntz fairly shouted at them. What do you want, Oxford style? ("Yes," someone quietly piped up.)

Actually, old fashioned classical debates where people don't interrupt each other and the moderators don't dominate the show are best. Let the college debate professors set the rules and moderate the proceedings, I say. Leave the journalists out of it.

We should have many such debates. The best thing would be to really test the candidates on specific areas, such as, say, the war on terrorism or the economy.

The latest non-political example of how revealing debates can be was the set-to a couple of weeks ago at Stanford University on intelligent design and atheism. Atheist author Christopher Hitchens insulted, sulked and raved. Quite a show. Jay Richards, co-author of The Privileged Planet, followed the rules of the debate (as he made a point of noting) and also presented evidence--evidence, what a concept!--on behalf of his case. Hitchens was faking it, because he doesn't really understand the issue as a matter of science. Nor do most Darwinists. They always resort to name calling and think that does the job.

Apparently, the audience disagreed with Hitchens and mostly appreciated Richards. We heard excellent reports to that effect, but had to discount them to some extent, coming as they did from friends. However, now we have this account from the Stanford Review. Most of the audience, apparently came in friendly to Hitchens, but he disappointed them.

Do you see why I like debates?

Here's the Stanford Review article (the magazine also contains some good interviews of Richards and Hitchens and the moderators, Ben Stein and Michael Cromartie): http://www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XL/Issue_3/News/news1.shtml

This is ridiculous. We have "President's Day" celebrated today and the only sign of it, other than empty schools and government offices, are the ads for white sales at the department stores and a funny television ad I saw for "Millard Fillmore Soap on a Rope."

Thank you, Richard Nixon. Until his President's Day proclamation in 1971, and subsequent legislation, we had separate holidays for both Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and George Washington on February 22. Not all states celebrated both, and the days came close together, but so what? School children routinely made studies about the lives of these two great leaders, usually regarded as our two most significant presidents, and in the process each generation learned some history. Now the dates pass unobserved because we are saving ourselves for "President's Day", when, however, the kiddies go on vacation.

Why is it that whenever we add new school curricula goals we effectively "pay" for them by neglecting studies that occupied students in the past? The price we pay is growing ignorance of American history and our representative form of government (once studied as "civics").

What we get now is this February oddity. What is President's Day, anyhow, other than an excuse to sweep two previous holidays into the closet where the Nehru jacket and Grandma's dial telephone are stored?

Accordingly, George Washington is regarded today almost as a cartoon figure, someone whose name, if mentioned, leads people to talk of silly irrelevancies, such as the legend of the cherry tree or his use of wooden false teeth in old age. These are ways to trivialize the greatest statesman of the Western Hemisphere when, instead, his life's story should be used to inspire. In country after country some leader is revered as "the George Washington" of that land. But in America, Washington is treated as a place name, at best.

Around the hearth of our televisions and computers, we now express ourselves in the style of irony, seek sensation, and at least pretend to cherish sarcasm. Like teenagers, we delight in bad taste. Washington, on the other hand, stood for idealism, reflection, self-control and public spirit. Do we secretly resent him?

Where are the newspaper essays today on Washington, the magazine articles on his sense of honor and decorum, the way he maintained a politically neutral public face while helping forge political unity behind the scenes, his establishment of the principle of civilian authority over the military, his advancement of religious liberty, and his myriad contributions to establishment of constitutional government? Washington was a smart man, exemplary in his piety, an innovator, a force in the development of the new American capital city that was to be named for him later.

Holidays are teaching occasions, not just excuses for taking vacations.

As a practical suggestion, the Congress could authorize states to recognize either Lincoln's birthday, or Washington's, as a holiday; or it could make the birthdays alternate as official national holidays on the annual calendar--one year Lincoln would be honored, the next Washington.

Giving these great leaders their due only every other year would, in reality, give each 100 percent more attention than either is getting now.

One is impressed immediately with the daring vision of Ave Maria, the strangely named university and new town emerging rapidly from the scrub pines and palmetto palms of rural south-west Florida. As former Chancellor Fr. Joseph Fessio (who is now Theologian -in-Residence) once quipped to some other Christians, "It's the only university whose name is taken directly from a passage in the New Testament." ("Ave Maria," of course, is Latin for "Hail, Mary!", what the angel announced to the lowly virgin betrothed of the carpenter, Joseph.)

The unusual name probably puts off some people; it sounds almost medieval and certainly very Catholic. Yet it also attracts. Here is a new physical community built around an ideal of social community. If you envision a utopian or millenarian setting of the kind that Americans attempted in the 19th century, forget it. Ave Maria is not exclusionist in any sense (an early legal aspiration to ban pornography was abandoned as impractical). Yet it does have an unmistakable Christian and Catholic sense to it. Some religious orders are sending members there and one or more may open houses. Christians may find in it a haven; others will be satisfied that it is stimulating, pretty, clean and safe.

Thomas S. Monahagn, the Domino's Pizza founder, decided a decade or more ago to spend much of his fortune on building a university that was strong on the Western scholastic tradition and clearly orthodox. He started with a law school in Michigan and hoped to develop a full university, but he ran into local zoning problems. Then, as a good entrepreneur as well as a pragmatic visionary, he decided to re-locate the university to somewhere it would be welcomed, and that turned out to be the still-capacious open country west of the Everglades and northeast of Naples.

Monaghan and his associates also saw the benefit of developing a new town around the university. The idea was to sell homesites and homes to adults who would like to pioneer living in a university town. That would provide a profit stream for the university (which will lack much of an alumni base for some time, after all), while providing a wholesome environment for students and a unique living experience for residents.

Traveling from Sarasota to Miami recently, I veered off of Interstate-29 on Florida's West Coast, taking a 15 mile detour to Ave Maria. The freeway rush yielded to standard off-ramp convenience stores, and finally woods and ranchland. Then abruptly, one has the pleasant sensation of arriving at a distinctly defined place that--like a gold rush town, but with good taste and planning--is going up so fast that in a month from now it probably will look different--and different again another month later.

There seem to be cranes and construction sites around each corner. Because the design controls are so sound, moreover, there is no sense of waste or quality erosion. About half the shops in the small downtown are either occupied or in preparation for tenants. One restaurant is open now, with three more about to appear. There are subdivisions under different developers' direction, one big golf course already in use, assorted new park and recreation facilities, a "water park," at least one school I found, and, naturally, many new university buildings.

But the beating heart of downown is the Oratory, a striking, stone and steel church whose design derives from the idea, if not the style, of a Gothic cathedral. It was just being completed when I visited. The diocesan bishop has not yet authorized dedicatory religious services, but about 800 to 1000 visitors are appearing each weekend just to look around. (Masses currently are being given in the university's Student Union Center.) In my imagination I could see that the Ave Maria Oratory is going to produce many happy memories of academic ceremonies for years to come, not to mention the diurnal doings of community masses and prayer vigils. This is a church that will be in use constantly.

A major reason the Oratory works aesthetically is its setting within a town plaza whose design might be called Florida Italian Rennaissance. If somehow an earthquake leveled a lovely northern Italian Hill Town and the people wanted to rebuild, the town plaza might be reconstructed along these lines, with the intimacy of antiquity, abetted by air conditioning and modern plumbing. Ave Maria, the town, is literally centuries away from the unhappy sprawl typical of the shopping areas of cotemporary America and the somewhat anodyne feel of many new towns. Where a community like Celebration near Disney World in Central Florida seems to pretend that religion is not entirely appropriate to its public spaces, Ave Maria puts faith at its hub. Even many of the street names evoke saints and sacred places ("Mother Teresa", "Assissi", for example). What Fr. Richard John Neuhaus bemoans as "The Naked Public Square" isn't naked in Ave Maria.

Nicholas Healy, the President of Ave Maria University, and I talked upon my return to Seattle. He explained that the University, having moved from temporary quarters in Naples, is up to 400 students this year, with 600 expected next fall. The town has about 600 residents and is adding more weekly. The population could double in another year. While developers are experiencing the same downward housing pressure as the rest the country, and especially Florida, there is still an overall forward momentum at Ave Maria because of its unique appeal.

Houses are priced at very reasonable amounts, from $225,000 "carriage homes" to spectacular $650,000 condos overlooking the plaza. I expected that many of the buyers would be snowbirds who anticipate a sun-filled college town environment with outdoor activities and a vital church life for a few months each year. But, in fact, it seems that most purchasers are moving in for year-around residency. There could well be 10,000 people in Ave Maria in another decade or so, and 40,000 eventually. When that happens, the "old" town plaza will groan with people-overload and have to be reproduced in the neighborhoods nearby. That's what happened in the Italian Rennaissance, after all.

If you hear young adults talking about politics and making fools of themselves in television and radio interviews you might wonder why. The answer isn't hard: many no longer learn much history in school, they no longer study "civics" (the way our form of representative government functions) and they are ignorant of the crucial cultural legacies of our civilization (from the Bible to Shakespeare to you-name-it). They always were ignorant of basic economics, and, of course, still are; but that is another story. USA Today has word on the latest study here.

What can be done about it? Amazingly, there are few resources. The general paucity of philanthropic interest in the transmissiion of traditional culture shows up with a vengeance here. There are lots of grants for ethnic studies, but few for what unites us. The government is not much interested, either.

A quick check by one exceptional young adult--Hans Zeiger, an accomplished writer studying at Pepperdine University--comes up with this short resource list on one element of the subject, education in representative government:

1) Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence, Hillsdale College, MI (Dr. David Bobb: hillsdale.edu/seminars/oncampus/cte/default/asp)

2) TeachingAmericanHistory.org and Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs, Ashland College, OH (teachingameericanhistory.org/about/html)

3) Center for the American Idea, TX (americanidea.org/index.html)

4) McConnell Center, University of Kentucky, KY (louisville.edu/mcconnellcenter/civicseducation/)

There have to be more resources, naturally, but they don't exactly leap to mind, do they?

The USA Today story speculates that current emphasis on basic reading and math skills may drive out attention to the humanities, but that cannot be correct. For almost two centuries American students were drilled in English and math skllls, and still had ample time for history and civics education.

A better explanation is that today's political correctness emphasis and feel good, everyone-is-a-winner psychology drive out attention to traditional humanities studies. Not only is class time lacking for teaching the history and culture of our civilization, there sometimes is almost a hostility to these topics ("dead white males" and all that). As a result, our children have been cheated of their cultural birthright as Americans and newcomers are not exposed to the best in our system of government--the things that make "E Pluribus Unum" a meaningful commitment.

Thomas Jefferson, who developed and spread the principle of free education, argued that instilling good citizenship was the very first argument for such public expenditures. Jefferson's argument often is not even regarded as relevant now.

We may be squandering the finest heritage in history. We could be left culturally and politically vulnerable to all manner of extremism and unreason. For virtue to prevail in public life, it has to prevail in the polity, and that virtue has to be taught and made a habit of the mind.

In their Ohio debate last night it was dismaying to see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama compete for the the strongest denunciation of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Obama "won" the political coverage, it appears, though they both found nothing much to praise in the trade pact.

The Democratic candidates' treatment of the economy overall is like a series of leftist political cartoons. (See businessman Sam Zell's comments here.) But, specifically, to trash NAFTA after all it has done to improve the economies of all three participant nations --the United States, Mexico and Canada--and get away with it is an indictment of the media and the Republicans, if nothing else. Worse, the candidates are pandering to public ignorance on this issue. They are smart. They surely know better.

How many more Mexicans would be coming accross our border if NAFTA had not helped stimulate the improvement of life in Mexico? We hear about U.S. jobs that have been "lost". How many American jobs that exist now would have been absent without NAFTA? Overall, free trade has been a huge boon for America as well as the world.

So who is going to wise these people up, and who is going to wise up the public about them? This morning they were chastised by the Canadian finance minister and even by the opposition Liberal Party. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/02/27/flaherty-nafta.html. Good for them.

Alas, the only real difference between Senators Clinton and Obama on this vital issue is that the latter is more skilled at making his unreasonable position sound plausible to a layman.

Former colleague Richard Rahn writes in The Washington Times that inflation is high or low depending on what you are buying and how you are living. High technology products actually are making many activities more efficient and cheaper. See below:

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

What is Measured?
By Richard W. Rahn
Published February 29, 2008

Do you think inflation is rising faster than the government says (an annualized of 4.1 percent in December)? Many people do, because they are keenly aware of supermarket and gas station prices, but that is not the whole story.
Inflation is defined as an overall increase in the price level, but the "inflation" that each individual faces is different. Over the last year, there has been a big jump in the price of gasoline and in many foods, such as milk and bread. (The increase in food prices is almost entirely due to the government"s foolish policy to subsidize corn for ethanol, thereby driving up the price of not only corn, but every crop that competes with corn for field space.)

However, if a person spends a lot of money on electronic items and communications, and does not drive much, his or her total expenditures might have declined as a result of the continuing rapid drop in prices of most electronic items and communications.

If you bought a Blackberry or Apple iPhone, you purchased an item that can replace your computer for Internet and e-mail access, cell phone, Rolodex and calendar, camera, calculator, global positioning navigator, personal music and video player, etc. To replicate all the things you now get in one Blackberry or iPhone would have cost you many thousands of dollars even a decade ago (even if available).
In the late 1990s and the early in this decade, inflation as reported by the government was quite low, though asset prices, such as homes in many areas, were rising at double digit rates. Now prices of homes and HD flat-screen TVs are falling.
Government economists and statisticians responsible for measuring inflation do not have an easy task, which is only getting more difficult. As the rate of technology change increases, the goods and services we consume radically change, so historical measures become less and less relevant. Yes, bread and milk prices have not changed much, but as people become more affluent, the portion of income they spend on such staples becomes smaller and smaller.

At the same time, the Internet, which for most people is only a decade-old, has caused prices to drop for millions of items — most information now is almost free as are international phone calls using Skype and its competitors.

If inflation becomes more and more difficult to measure, how can central bankers determine how much money to produce to keep a stable price level?
Some call for a return to the gold standard, but that is not the panacea some may think. Gold prices over the last three decades have swung back and forth between $250 and the current $900 per ounce. Sales of gold by governments, as well as global market psychology, can cause substantial price shifts; and the additions to the gold supply each year tend to be less than the potential increase in global GDP, which can have a deflationary effect. Despite these problems, gold may be better than some other alternatives.

For readers desiring a more in-depth, but clearly written and brief discussion of the pros and cons of alternative money systems, I highly recommend a new book with the off-putting title, "One Currency for Bosnia," by Warren Coats. Mr. Coats is a highly regarded monetary economist who has specialized in setting up new monetary and banking systems for countries whose economic systems have collapsed because of war or revolution (i.e., Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq, Afghanistan, many of the former communist republics, et al.).

The book is a riveting tale of how Mr. Coats and his International Monetary Fund teams have quite literally risked their lives to help rebuild the economies of war-torn countries. And it is also a wonderful and easy to understand primer on money and banking, in which key concepts are presented in succinct inserts.
Measuring the value of money and inflation within a national economy is difficult enough; but when it comes to measuring real global price changes, the problem is greatly magnified. Why should the cost of a Big Mac (identical to one in America) be 50 percent more in some European countries, even where their real wages are lower than in the United States?

Why should the value of the euro and the dollar swing more than 60 percent against each other in only five years? These relative currency and price swings wreak havoc with global business people who engage in long-term contracts or build manufacturing operations in several different countries. While the search for a global monetary constant will always remain elusive, there is a need for a more stable reference point than either gold or any national currency can provide.

A highly regarded nongovernmental private organization, with no vested interest (other than enhancing its reputation), could provide a greatly needed service by creating an artificial monetary unit to measure against the price of any good or service on the globe. This unit would need to be a transparent basket index of standard goods and services produced and/or consumed in many countries (the index would evolve over time — like the Dow-Jones stock index — as technologies and global consumption patterns change). Once established, contracts, and even interest-bearing securities, could be written in the monetary unit. Such a widely accepted unit would substantially add to global economic stability and better resource allocation, leading to higher global economic growth.

Richard W. Rahn is the chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.