The Huckster

While driving to work this morning, my wife called me on the cell phone. She wanted to know if I had herad Mike Huckabee's interview on NPR just then. I had caught the end of it while flipping stations. The portion I heard involved Huckabee decrying the damage done by 527 organizations to the candidate they are intended to help. My lovely partner was impressed with how he not only talked sense but just how genial and nice he came across. I agreed, of course. Not only because she is right 95% of the time but because Huckabee is very charming in an interview.

Rewind to Christmas 2007. Mike Huckabee's famous reason-for-the-season ad and the bookcase. Some pointed out that the lit portions of the bookcase in the background were intended to not-so-subtly superimpose a cross with the candidates image. On MSNBC's Morning Joe program, Huckabee laughed it off claiming that he was also blinking a secret message to Evangelicals in Morse Code. He was very witty, charming and earnest through it all.

It was during that interview that my highly attuned Manipulation Alarm (patent pending) started going off. Yes, Mike Huckabee is cute and probably a sincere and nice guy. Bowling anyone? That said, it is apparent that he is also a skilled speaker and has honed his ability to disarm critics over his whole life. No one is this glib by accident. Even if unconsciously (he's no Romney), Mike Huckabee has probably learned that he will be more successful if he can lull people into a less defensive posture by appearing witty and charming. He bumps up against the line of Slick so tightly that you can barely see daylight through the gap.

Okay. So I am pathologically sensitive to being manipulated. I am too sensitive. Perhaps, but I refuse to believe that his campaign staff was so obtuse and unprofessional that they did not notice a giant glowing cross in their Xmas video. I also point you to his squirrelly Fair Tax plan of replacing the income tax with a 25%+ national sales tax and monthly rebate checks to every citizen while claiming that the current system is too bureaucratic and susceptible to fraud.

Finally I draw your attention to the item below. Even if your are not scared shitless by the prospect of amending the U.S. Constitution to bring it in line with Washington's view of God's Will, the fact that Huckabee is tossing this red meat to his theocratic supporters ought to expose his aw-shucks farm boy routine for the act that it is. Huckabee is a politician and play acting in a politician, while common, is no virtue.

Needs More God?

I admit that I was intrigued with Mike Huckabee. Maybe a "real" Christian - you know, one who cares about the poor and junk - would show all those nut jobs how Jesus meant for it to be done.

Now it turns out that Huckabee is going around saying that the United States Constitution should be amended to come into line with "God's standards." He just lost me big time! Even the blog at Christianity Today is taken aback.

The sad thing is that he is so glib and witty that he will try to laugh it off on al the cable shows.

Parlez-vous, Anglais?

I recently download an audio book from my library for my new MP3 player. The book was an Agatha Christie Poirot mystery. In this story, the hero, Hercule Poirot, peppers his speech with French phrases. These are not your average "Mon Dieu!" Many of these expressions are central to the flow of complex dialogs and there is little context to hint at the meaning of these utterances.

I studied French for a number of years and was able to more or less follow Poirot's polyglotic outbursts. My question is - How much French is the average British reader expected to know? Does England's proximity to their oft-reviled neighbor demand a working knowledge of the tongue? Perhaps the Texan-in-the-street has a similar fluency in Spanish.

Huckabee

Is it apparent to anyone else that the reason Mike Huckabee is suddenly rising in the polls is that Fred Thompson has been such a flop. It has been well publicized that conservative evangelicals are been waiting for a candidate that they can support with some sort of enthusiasm and that neither Guiliani nor Romney fit the bill. Then there was the stirring of excitement that Fred Thompson, an plain-spoken good ol' boy from Tennessee was entering the race. Another Ronald Reagan, people whispered. Unfortunately, Thompson's campaign has struggled to reach lack luster and Fred has turned out to be something less than a fire-breathin', Bible-thumpin', pew-jumpin' True Believer.

Enter Huckabee. Sure, the ConEvangels all knew that Huckabee was an ordained Baptist minister but they really wanted something more sexy, something straight out of Hollywood casting. They didn't get it. With no other alternative in sight, the man-on-street conservative Christian is gravitating toward the former Arkansas governor. Whether he keeps them or not remains to be seen but the progression seems perfectly natural to this novice political observer.

Doing Their Work For Them

The revelation in the latest National Intelligence Estimate that Iran abandoned it's nuclear weapons program in 2003 leads me to several questions, the principle one being; Why 2003?

The answer that leaps to my mind is that Iran was rushing toward a nuclear weapon because Bush had declared that our invasion of Iraq was to prevent just such a development by Saddam Hussein. When Iran heard this, it would not be able to help noticing that no one was invading North Korea which was believed to already possess such weapons. The obvious conclusion of everyone in the world except George Bush was that countries opposed to the US were in danger of invasion unless they figured out how to build the Bomb, and quick!

Come Fall 2003 and the invasion of Iraq is in full swing. Bushies might claim that we had frightened Iran into abandoning their WMD program by the shear awe of our military operations. That of course would be assuming that our military operations, however brilliant, were successfully controlling the country and overcoming the Baathist Plan B - guerrilla warfare. By that time, it was becoming clear that the US occupation was inept and the US military incapable of threatening any other country for a good long time.

If you are not convinced that the US struggles in Iraq were discernible in 2003, then you must admit they were glaringly obvious by 2004/2005. If Iran had been frightened into abandoning nuclear ambitions by Shock and Awe in 2003, then they would have been able to start back up in 2005 with no fear of invasion by the US. On the other hand, if, based on the evidence on its doorstep, Iran calculated that the US was not a military threat to the regime then the urgency to gain nuclear weapons disappears and other means for regional influence and protection become more attractive priorities.

What this NIE shows most of all is that the Crazy Man theory of international diplomacy is bankrupt. If it can be applied to Kim Jong-Il, that is its limit. As for the rest of the world, even the meanest despot is working from a position of self-interest that may be potentially understood and influenced. We will not always win or get everything we want in the world but basing policy on the proposition that our adversaries are "crazy" is a recipe for unmitigated disaster, failure and decline.

A Virtue

"What on earth gives Christians [the] right to assume that love and self-sacrifice have to be called Christian virtues? They are virtues, full stop."

Philip Pullman, quoted in Christianity Today

A Clone By Any Other Name

It looks like promising news, human skin cells have been coaxed into growing human neurons.

Of course, social conservatives are gloating. They knew all along that we didn't need to Play God in order access the potential cures hinted at by stem cell research. We liberals need to just shut up and take their word as gospel in the future.

We don't know whether embryonic or the newer model of stem cells will revolutionize medicine - it's just too early. Leaving the vagaries of scientific research aside, there is another issue that most of these culture warriors haven't hit upon yet. What happens when you create a perfect stem cell without destroying an existing embryo? Mission accomplished, right? I don't think so.

It seems to me that the perfect stem cell would be so close to the hallowed, one-cell fetus that the technology to create an new embryo from it would be well within grasp. It seems inevitable that some lab, somewhere in the world will make the attempt, no?

If life starts at conception, is a lab-produced, pluripotent cell a human life as well. This is a really big question that the conception-equals-baby crowd needs to start thinking about.

Great Quote

“When you mix politics and religion, you get politics.”

Rev. Gene Carlson
former Pastor of Westlink Christian Church, Wichita, Kansas

Where Does It Say That?

Via Dan Froomkin, Washington Post:

Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush's nominee for attorney general, was asked whether the president is required to obey federal statutes. Judge Mukasey replied, 'That would have to depend on whether what goes outside the statute nonetheless lies within the authority of the president to defend the country.'

Back up the Unitary Executive Bus! Where in the United States Constitution does it say that the President has the authority to "defend the country." The Constitution provides the following role for the President vis-a-vis National Defense:

Article II, Section 2 The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;...

That's it - Nothing more.

The Congress, on the otherhand, is given responsibility to "provide for the common Defence... declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;... To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces ... " (Article I, Section 8).

Seems pretty clear that the Founders intended Congress to have an active, if not dominant role in defending the country. The President's role as Commander-in-Chief is a command role. Period. He is the top, albeit civilian, General Officer with all the boundaries on authority that any commander faces. There is absolutely nothing in the President's warrant that provides him the arch responsibility for "defending the country." In fact, the text can be "strictly constructed" to provide no strategic or decision making role whatsoever.

This power grab by the current President not only poses a clear and present danger to our democracy but paves the way for further erosions of our birthright by future residents of the White House. Our predecessors had the unique wisdom to construct a government based on the mistrust of accumulated power. Let us not trade this gem for the illusion of security.

This is Cool!!

The story goes that the other great apes, gorillas, chimps and orangutans, possess 24 pairs of chromosomes. Humans possess only 23. This situation suggests that, if we share a common ancestor, humans probably lost one pair instead of the other guys all gaining one. When the human and chimp genomes were sequenced, scientists were able to poke around and see if the genes on the extra ape chromosomes appeared somewhere in the human DNA.

Well, it turns out that they do indeed exist. It is quite clear that two pairs of chromosomes merged sometime after humans and chimps diverged from their common ancestor. You see, not only did they find the gene sequences from the missing chromosome but they found the original telemeres (bits of DNA that form a sort of "cap" on the ends of chromosomes) right in the middle of the human chromosome 2. Plus, they found the extra centromere (a bit of DNA at the center of the chromosome), deactivated, sitting exactly where it was leftover from the extra chimp chromosome.

This way cool. If God did it, he was very messy, leaving extra bits in their like some sort of appendix - but that's another story.

Check out this video explanation