Vox Popoli

I’m thoroughly sick of the historical revisionism of the secular separationists. Not only is their position manifestly absurd in light of the congressional prayers, inscriptions on the various Federal buildings and the wording of many historical speeches and documents, but they’ve twisted the concept of “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” wherein “Congress” means “anyone” and “make no law….” means “shall neither speak nor write any word in public relating positively in any way to the Christian faith.”

Among their cornucopia of errors, they insist that the Founding Fathers were mostly Deist. That’s true, if you cherry-pick from amidst the most famous names and ignore all those men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and were heavily involved in the Revolution from the start. The known Unitarian/Deists were: Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The known Christians were: George Washington, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Governor Morris and John Jay. And Deist is not atheist anyhow, as the Paris debates between Thomas Paine and French atheists should suffice to show.

In fact, there were more Christian Bible translators signing the Declaration of Independence than there were Deists. Charles Thompson translated the Greek Septuagint into English, Dr. Benjamin Rush founded the first Bible Society and Francis Hopkinson put together the first American hymnbook. The religious affiliation of the Signers was as follows: 34 Anglicans, 13 Congregationalists, 6 Presbyterians, 1 Baptist, 1 Roman Catholic, and 1 Quaker.

Now, the mere fact of church membership is not certain proof of an individual’s Christian faith, but as no one but God can judge the heart, it is the only reasonable method of determination available to us. One thing that is absolutely certain, however, is that none of them were godless secularists pledged to moral relativism. On this subject, as always, the Left resorts to the perversion of language in order to attempt to build a weak case from nothing. It is amusing that they should uphold the Deists while simultaneously attempting to strike out all references to the Deity.

I am a Christian and a libertarian. I, too, do not wish to see the State create a Church, but not because I care what it would do to the godless. (Nothing, most likely, considering the English example.) Instead, I fear what has happened in England, where the State has corrupted the Anglican church and sucked nearly all the Christianity out of it. If the Church is to thrive, it must never allow itself to be polluted by compromise with the State. But really, in the long term, the entire debate is almost irrelevant. When the American Republic is as dead and dimly remembered as its Roman predecessor, the Christian faith will still be strong, as implacable, inexorable and ineradicable as ever.

The Original Cyberpunk writes in alarm:

I have some shocking news about the upcoming and final Star Wars movie. Annikin Skywalker does *not* turn to the dark side! Rather, he’s *dragged* over to the dark side against his will by the evil, scheming, and power-mad Padme Amidala! Here’s the proof! My God, I just realized: maybe Luke and Leia’s mother didn’t die, and maybe the Emperor is not Senator Palpatine. Maybe Luke’s mother *BECOMES THE EMPEROR!*

That certainly would be a more interesting plot angle that what Lucas has got going now…

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. If you haven’t read the OC’s Headcrash, you are seriously missing out.

President Bush, seeking to mobilize religious conservatives for his reelection campaign, has asked church-going volunteers to turn over church membership directories, campaign officials said on Thursday. In a move sharply criticized both by religious leaders and civil libertarians, the Bush-Cheney campaign has issued a guide listing about two-dozen “duties” and a series of deadlines for organizing support among conservative church congregations.

A copy of the guide obtained by Reuters directs religious volunteers to send church directories to state campaign committees, identify new churches that can be organized by the Bush campaign and talk to clergy about holding voter registration drives. The document, distributed to campaign coordinators across the country earlier this year, also recommends that volunteers distribute voter guides in church and use Sunday service programs for get-out-the-vote drives.

“We expect this election to be potentially as close as 2000, so every vote counts and it’s important to reach out to every single supporter of President Bush,” campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

If the president had signed an executive order banning abortion, refused to sign the McCain-Feingold act gutting the First Amendment, declined to actively campaign for the liberal Republican who blocked Robert Bork from the Supreme Court, avoided publicly embracing Islam and openly declared his opposition to the fictional equation of any public mention of anything even remotely Christian with the written statement that “Congress shall make no law….”, he might have a shot with the Religious Right. But he’s done nothing except make the occasional pious statement. Bill Clinton did as much.

Perhaps, too, he should have refrained from criticizing Americans for speaking “in an ill-informed and insulting manner about the Muslim faith.” This, after the beheadings of Nick Berg and Paul Johnson. I can’t even think of a response to that that is either Christian or printable, so I shall say nothing except to say that I am very pleased to be voting for Michael Badnarik this fall.

I had thought Karl Rove was supposed to be some sort of political genius, instead, the president’s campaign lurches randomly about, devoid of principle and pinning its hopes on the self-destruction of its opposition. The president is lucky he’s running against a candidate as incompetent as John Kerry, because Bill Clinton would be wiping up the floor with him by now. When Massachusetts created homogamy, I wrongly assumed that Karl Rove and company would be all over the Democrats for pushing the homosexual agenda, but apparently they’d rather be PC than win. You know Lee Atwater would have created an ad showing John Kerry in a dress getting married to Ted Kennedy and blown Kerry out of the water by August.

As you may recall, I have insisted from the beginning that the current war is unconstitutional, that it has never been declared and that the Bush administration is operating outside the law in its use of military force around the world. There are those who have argued the opposite, insisting that the Congressional authorizations of the use of force is a “virtual” declaration of war tantamount to the real thing.

Perhaps the Secretary of Defense can settle the issue:

I think basically what we have is we’ve had over our history since World War II basically an idea that we were either in war or we were in peace and that we were in peacetime constraints. And of course, since we don’t have a declaration of war and we’re not in World War III, all of those peacetime constraints and procedures and auditors and contract rules and competitive bidding, all of that pertains. And the effect of it is that you end up in a war on terror, like we’re in, losing lives and yet you are still required to adhere to the rules of peacetime, because we don’t have gradations of between war and peace and therefore we need to find a way to live in this 21st century where threats can come at you from the shadows and from ungoverned areas in ways that are not predictable, as they were, for example, during World War II or during the Cold War, for that matter.

Or maybe, Donald, you might try actually paying attention to the Constitution and ask your boss to request a declaration of war from the Congress. Remember that oath of office you took a few years ago? By the way, this statement should also put to rest the notion that the administration is quietly implementing a secret strategy for waging war against expansionist Islam as well.

I don’t even know what to say about this. It’s as if the NFL somehow wound up with a Super Bowl of Detroit vs. San Diego – in the Ryan Leaf era, no less. Greece was a worthy winner, although the Czech Republic had numerous chances that it simply failed to put away. Rosicky, Koller and Barros all had excellent chances, and while the Greek defending was solid, the Czechs were clearly the better team even without Nedved.

The Greeks have had an unbelievable run, but I have to believe that it will all come to an end on Sunday. Scolari seems to have driven Portugal past its tendency to choke, they’re playing at home and it’s probably the last chance for their Golden Generation to win a major tournament. So, I predict a Portugal victory, 2-0.

A lot of great players are closing out their international careers with Euro 2004. Jap Stam, Philippe Cocu, Marc Overmars, Marcel Desailly, Lilian Thuran, Alessandro del Piero…. Other greats who may bow out include Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Christian Vieri and Pavel Nedved. It’s hard to imagine international soccer without them, and yet, the sport always moves inexorably on as the old lions step off the stage and are replaced by tomorrow’s stars.

Did many mutual fund managers break the law again Wednesday? It sure looks as though they did. Just as they have at the end of countless previous calendar quarters, it appears as though a number of fund managers on Wednesday engaged in illegal activity right before the close of trading. This had the effect of boosting their standings in the quarterly mutual fund rankings. The fact that fund managers resorted to such desperate tactics should not come as a surprise. Several finance professors discovered the behavior several years ago, and I wrote a column in the New York Times about it at the time. In addition, over the past year have devoted two of my MarketWatch columns to the topic.

Yet funds show no sign of giving up their wicked ways. Maybe fund managers think that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has bigger fish to fry. Or maybe those managers thought that, since all eyes Wednesday afternoon were focused on the Federal Reserve’s rate-hike decision, no one would notice. Regardless of their reasons, the consequences are clear: The mutual fund industry on June 30 achieved what would otherwise seem to be a mathematical impossibility. Like the children of Lake Woebegon, the bulk of them were above average.

Don’t believe it? Take a look at the chart below, which shows the performance on June 30th of the 13 Lipper mutual fund indexes that reflect the performance of different sectors of the U.S. equity market. Each of those indices reflects the average performance of the funds in its sector. Twelve of these indexes outperformed the S&P 500 on that day. And the 13th lagged the S&P 500 by just one basis point. This is a huge contrast to funds’ typical performance on all other days, of course. On average on those other days, around 80 percent of funds lag the market.

It’s just a coincidence, of course, not unlike the recent decision of the British bureaucrat responsible for the UK’s CPI equivalent to remove housing from the inflation equation. (Housing is already removed from the US CPI, as, increasingly, is food and energy.) This was necessary because the UK CPI was showing rampant inflation as housing prices increased 20 percent in the last year, and since the central banks have declared that no inflation exists, obviously the equation required changing.

You thought Enron, WorldCom and Arthur Anderson were bad? Just wait. The coming frauds, scams and bankruptcies coming to light in the next two years will make those disasters look like prudent financial management. How am I so sure? Because government-related fraud is always an order of magnitude worse, and we haven’t begun to see any exposure of them yet. But we will.

The corruption isn’t capitalism. It is the twisted mutation of semi-capitalist corporatism created by the constant and innumerable federal interventions in the free markets.

ABC News opines:

Please don’t call and e-mail us for confirmation every time Drudge runs something; his 37.8% accuracy rate and quirky sensibilities (that’s a euphemism) can have a disproportionate impact on the election, if y’all let that happen.

Over a third is pretty good by mainstream media standards. I’d guess that’s a good 5-10 percent higher than ABC would be able to manage. I’m interested, though, to see how they came up with that number. 37.8 sounds like a pretty tricky number for math-challenged liberal reporters.

Odds are that as with the degree of global warming, the acreage of timber being logged in the Amazon and the lethal results of carry laws, it’s just a number someone dreamed up out of thin air.

Evangelical Outpost posts some interesting quotes from what would appear to be an astoundingly politically incorrect British homosexual:

“So the idea of a gay fascist seems ridiculous. Yet when the British National Party – our own home-grown Holocaust-denying bigots – announced it was fielding an openly gay candidate in the European elections this June, dedicated followers of fascism didn’t blink. The twisted truth is that gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement that ever was – including the gay-gassing, homo-cidal Third Reich.

With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It’s a gay thing, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.”

[British journalist Johann] Hari, who lists “seducing straight men” as one of his favorite things, can’t be dismissed as another gay-bashing conservative homophobe. Nor should his detailed explication of the connection between gays and fascism be taken lightly. Beneath its homophobic veneer, European fascism has a long history of gay leadership. From Ernest Rohm, one of the founding fathers of Nazism, to the anti-Muslim Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, homosexuals have found a home at the top of fascist political organizations.

I don’t think Mr. Hari has all his details straight, as the ideology of the List Pim Fortuyn is rather less fascist than the American Democratic party, and Hari clearly fails to grasp the political spectrum as defined by the relationship between State and Individual. But his assertions are interesting, as one must note that the terms “faggot” and “fascist” share the same etymological roots, and certainly Freudians such as Camille Paglia would see the link between the homosexual’s eternal search for the father and the over-the-top authoritarian symbolism of historical German and Italian fascism.

I expect Hari’s statements will inspire more than a few hissy fits among the whitewash-prone gay community, but as always, the truth is simply what it is. And one can easily point out fascist tendencies at work in the homosexual activist community in their complete disregard for the truth, rigid enforcement of a party line and ruthlesss determination to completely redefine long-held concepts of good and evil.

Marc Cuban writes on his blog:

Let’s just hope the accountants for the Tribune Company have a higher regard for accuracy in reporting than Sam the Sham does. Perfect example of Sam in action is Jerry West going on the air during the draft saying the Grizz can’t afford to trade for Shaq. Then Sham chimes on the show saying Shaq is going to Memphis. Sam then does his daily rip on the Mavs and, in particular, our new draft pick, Pavel who he calls a stiff.

How about this for a challenge Sam the Sham Smith?…I will donate 10k dollars to the charity of your choice if you can prove that you have ever seen Pavel play in person or on tape — excluding the footage on the ESPN draft shows. Two minutes of ESPN tape doesn’t qualify as scouting. If you lose, you change your business card title and Tribune byline to “Sports Gossip Columnist”. I will even pay for the cards. Doesn’t the Tribune Company realize that you are a blight on the entire company? I brought this up to an exec I met who works at the company. He told me they knew it, but that you were like the crazy old uncle they had learned to live with. Great support from your company, Sam.

If they only knew how many times I have told brokers and possible investors that they shouldn’t buy Trib stock because if they can’t get simple details on their sports pages right, how can you trust their accountants? Corporate culture either values accuracy or it doesn’t. The Tribune Company obviously doesn’t.

******** Stop The Presses ********

No lie: After I wrote this blog entry, I sat down to read the NY Times and there in the business section is an article accusing (among others) the Tribune Company for inflating audited subscriber numbers…Maybe the company encourages Sam to lie…who knows…Is lying pervasive at the Tribune Company? Corporate culture is amazingly powerful…

******** We now return to our regularly scheduled blog entry ********

Brilliant stuff. I only wish there was someone like Cuban writing a blog about Wall Street.

At least if Michael Moore had asked us to eat of his body, we would have all eaten well. My friends at Fraters Libertas point us to these paired quotes from movie reviewers who seem to have overwhelmingly preferred the Corpulent One’s testimony of faith to Mr. Gibson’s. An example:

Jami Bernard, NY Daily News:

F9/11: I was in tears after first seeing “Fahrenheit” at Cannes.

Passion: The most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II.

Michael Moore is the Sweet White Savior who waren’t never a Jew for the ignorant hicks of the global Left. Large, fat and loud, Europeans love him because he personally confirms their view of the ugly American even as he provides cover for their political cluelessness. When I was in Venice a few years ago, I complimented an artist on how his work had captured the city’s moody, mouldering ambience, in contrast to the many nearby watercolorists whose cheerful, brightly colored paintings could have easily been mistaken for Florence had they only lacked the famous Venetian landmarks.

The artist asked from whence I came, and his eyes literally widened when I told him I am an American. “No, you cannot be, you are too cultured,” he said. Which is ridiculous, but demonstrates rather clearly that it is not only the European elite that has no understanding of America and Americans. Their portly pied-piper allows them to preserve an outmoded view of a world that is passing them by, as they blithely stroll towards the deep waters of Islamic electoral majorities.