What could account for this?
But the president, whose popularity and powers of persuasion may well make him the reform effort's most effective spokesman, encountered the same difficulty he faced at a town hall meeting this week in New Hampshire: For the most part, the critics were nowhere to be seen.Goodness, how odd. It's like how last week he asked a little girl at random, who turned out to be the child of someone who had donated thousands of dollars to Obama. Just bad luck, I guess.
Some of you may recall that earlier this year, the Afghan government came under fire for approving a Shia marriage law that was unfair to women. It resulted in some protests by Afghan women, which are unusual, and so the government promised to go back to the drawing board.
The new law is reportedly not much better. Unfortunately, the text is not available online as yet. Human Rights Watch, which has taken quite a bit of criticism over the years, claims to have seen a copy of the final law.
The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her....This law sits in a very strange place in the Afghan legal system. The Afghan Constitution has some fairly clear and explicit statements about the rights of its citizens.
The law regulates the personal affairs of Shia Muslims - who make up between 10 and 20 percent of the population - including divorce, separation, inheritance, and the minimum age for marriage. The initial version of the law included articles that imposed drastic restrictions on Shia women, including a requirement to ask permission to leave the house except on urgent business, and a requirement that a wife have sex with her husband at least once every four days.
Article Twenty-TwoThe Shia "exception" is here:
Any kind of discrimination and distinction between citizens of Afghanistan shall be forbidden. The citizens of Afghanistan, man and woman, have equal rights and duties before the law.
Article One Hundred Thirty-OneFinally, there is a relevant article in the section on changing laws.
The courts shall apply the Shia jurisprudence in cases involving personal matters of followers of the Shia sect in accordance with the provisions of the law. In other cases, if no clarification in this Constitution and other laws exist, the courts shall rule according to laws of this sect.
Article One Hundred Forty-NineIt would seem that Article 22 is exactly the kind of "clarification in this Constitution" that Article 131 considers. It seems reasonable to believe that the law should be unconstitutional for that reason.
The principles of adherence to the tenets of the Holy religion of Islam as well as Islamic Republicanism shall not be amended. Amending fundamental rights of the people shall be permitted only to improve them.
The lady was handled as roughly and unfairly as anyone could dream, when she first came onto the scene; not only her, but her children. Yet Senators and Presidents recoil from her, and she presses her claim.One man shall drive a hundred,
As the dead kings drave;
Before me rocking hosts be riven,
And battering cohorts backwards driven,
For I am the first king known of heaven
That has been struck like a slave.
I join millions of Americans in expressing appreciation for the Senate Finance Committee’s decision to remove the provision in the pending health care bill that authorizes end-of-life consultations (Section 1233 of HR 3200). It’s gratifying that the voice of the people is getting through to Congress; however, that provision was not the only disturbing detail in this legislation; it was just one of the more obvious ones.In the fall, when the Senate and the House must come together in conference, perhaps it may not matter. Yet if it does, she will have won this battle as a private citizen, writing arguments on her Facebook page. She's nothing more than that: not a governor any more, not a candidate for any office. Just a blogger, really; another citizen, like any of us.
As I noted in my statement last week, nationalized health care inevitably leads to rationing. There is simply no way to cover everyone and hold down the costs at the same time. The rationing system proposed by one of President Obama’s key health care advisors is particularly disturbing. I’m speaking of the “Complete Lives System” advocated by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the president’s chief of staff. President Obama has not yet stated any opposition to the “Complete Lives System,” a system which, if enacted, would refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled who have less economic potential. Why the silence from the president on this aspect of his nationalization of health care? Does he agree with the “Complete Lives System”? If not, then why is Dr. Emanuel his policy advisor? What is he advising the president on?....
It's you, according to the Senate Majority Leader. He does have the good grace to be slightly ashamed of having said it out loud.
Mrs. Palin -- who, as a private citizen, has the honor of having the President address her arguments by name -- responds to certain claims today.
A few days ago, when we were discussing her earlier letter, I said that I didn't think she was talking about Sec. 1233. In today's piece, she discusses her reading of 1233 at length, since the President interpreted her comments as pertaining to it; but adds at the end:
My original comments concerned statements made by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy advisor to President Obama and the brother of the President’s chief of staff. Dr. Emanuel has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens....An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” Dr. Emanuel has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”I had a feeling that was where she was pointed, because that's where you get a "panel" whose job it is to make recommendations about who lives and who should be let to die. Pro-health-care-reformist Mickey Kaus notes that Obama's own words strongly indicate that he favors such a panel:
He's talking about a panel of independent experts making end-of-life recommendations in order to save costs that have an effect at an individual level. And he thought it would be in the bill that emerges. ... It's also pretty clear that something like the "IMAC" panel is what he has in mind. Whether or not the IMAC would actually do this--Harold Pollack says end-of-life issues are well down the curve-bender's list, for example--Obama thought it would do it. . .Indeed, what the President said was that "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill." If that's true, any savings would almost have to come out of care for them: almost all the money is being spent there to start with. Add in the fact that his advisor, Dr. Emmanuel, is pushing to focus our efforts on the remaining 20% of cases, and you can be pretty clear about what the President is thinking. We're going to save money, and we're going to do it by cutting the amount we spend on "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives."
Articles posted by Arts & Letters Daily are usually worth the time it takes to read them. Today, for example, there was a debate between two scholars of feminism, one of whom has been challenging that the other's data is a collection of garbage. The other -- one Nancy K. D. Lemon (presumably Dr. Lemon but never so titled in the article) -- makes the following defense. The particular item they chose as the focus for their dispute is somewhat amazing:
In regard to the rule of thumb, for example, she asserted that Romulus of Rome, who is credited in my book with being involved with the first antidomestic-violence legislation, could not have done this as he was merely a legendary, fictional character, who along with his brother Remus was suckled by a wolf.Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers (whose biography states that she is a doctor, though she is also not given a title in the piece) disputes that idea.
In fact, Plutarch and Livy each state that Romulus was the first king of Rome. He reigned from 753-717 BC, and created both the Roman Legions and the Roman Senate. He is also credited with adding large amounts of territory and people to the dominion of Rome, including the Sabine women. The modern scholar Andrea Carandini has written about the historic reign of Romulus, based in part on the 1988 discovery of the Murus Romuli on the north slope of the Palatine Hill in Rome.
Essentially everything in Professor Lemon's response is wrong.Well, it happens we have an expert on Roman history here among us. Mr. Blair, will you kindly give us a ruling on this dispute?
She confidently informs us that Romulus actually existed and ruled Rome from 753-717 BC. That is preposterous. She cites Livy and Plutarch as sources. These first-century writers did not claim to be offering historically accurate accounts of events that took place some 700 years before their time, but openly professed to be summarizing beliefs, myths, and legends that had come down through the ages. She also cites the contemporary Roman archaeologist Andrea Carandini—a maverick figure who discovered what he claims might have been a wall of a palace that could have belonged to Romulus. As the July/August 2007 issue of Archaeology politely notes, his suggestion "represents a sharp break with two millennia of scholarship."
"You know, this Congress comes home covered in a certain species of achievement. By the time the next elections roll around, it seems likely they will not only have spent more money than any other Congress in history, it's possible -- likely even -- that they will have spent more money than all the other Congresses combined."
"[Passing laws you have not read] is perilously near treason."
Bill Whittle, on the matter of the day.
Things are not going well!
FreedomWorks’ August Recess Call to Action encouraged grassroots citizens to attend Congressional town hall meetings and listening sessions. We asked everyone to voice their opinions and communicate their opposition to the President’s proposed hostile takeover of the American health care system. Apparently, the very act of showing up and having an opinion is, in effect, to act like a “thug.” Opposing President Obama’s policy agenda on health care is, in and of itself, unacceptable, and has no place in our democracy. Bottom line: it’s “disgusting,” according to our friends on the left.
We didn’t know this. Evidently, we also didn’t know best practices in a respectful, dignified policy debate, but our leftist friends were kind enough to “take FreedomWorks to school”, so to speak.
Specifically, “school” included phone call blitzes from MoveOn.org and the AFL-CIO that jammed FreedomWorks phone lines and filled up staff voice mail boxes. Callers’ consistently used profanity, vulgarity, ever-popular references to “Nazis” and “brown-shirters,” racial slurs targeting an African-American staffer, and even veiled threats of violence and bodily harm.
What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship.Is it unthinkable? Consider today's Day By Day.
I have a memo from SEIU Local 2001....The relationship between citizen and government has passed the point at which it's "unthinkable" that "one party" might "beat or kill" the other. Both sides have reasons to fear actual violence.
“Action: Opponents of reform are organizing counter-demonstrators to speak at this and several congressional town halls on the issue to defend the status quo. It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices.”
Now, this guy is carrying a legal weapon, says NBC News' Ron Allen. The local chief of police has no objections. Open carriage of licensed handguns is legal in New Hampshire, and the man is standing on the private property of a nearby church (!) that has no problem with an armed man hanging around.Now, I understand the fear. I regret that the author is so frightened of his fellow citizens that he refers to them as "these people," and suspects them of plotting murder. I hope that we can change that sense in the future.
But let's be clear: anyone watching the mounting rage over, of all things, health care — perhaps one of the most boring and complex policy subjects — has to worry that these people are going to try to kill Barack Obama. That's not an extrapolation from unhinged rhetoric, or a partisan reading of the imagined intentions of our political enemies. It's a rational reading of the anticipated behavior of a man who brandishes a gun at the location where the president is expected to imminently arrive while holding a sign that openly advocates his assassination. And the astonishing, breathtaking, maddening fact that he hasn't been violently taken to the ground by large men wearing suits and earpieces is an open encouragement to anyone else so inclined to give it a shot.
One of the fairest and most reasonable points that I've heard ObamaCare proponents make is that there is already "rationing" in our current system; it's just that the rationing is handled by the market, and particularly by the insurance companies. This lies at the heart of the claim that they are the "villains" of the story, because they make money while choosing who lives and who dies.
A lady speaks here with passion and fury about the death of her mother.
I’ve been part of a death panel conversation. I know about death panels.Unfortunately, we are not facing a choice of saving people or letting them die. What we are facing is the choice of who will decide when they die.
You have no idea what it’s like to be called into a sterile conference room with a hospital administrator you’ve never met before and be told that your mother’s insurance policy will only pay for 30 days in ICU. You can't imagine what it's like to be advised that you need to “make some decisions,” like whether your mother should be released “HTD” which is hospital parlance for “home to die,” or if you want to pay out of pocket to keep her in the ICU another week. And when you ask how much that would cost you are given a number so impossibly large that you realize there really are no decisions to make. The decision has been made for you.
Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.That's what Mrs. Palin was writing about, and what bothers her. It is a system forlorn of love, where the decisions are as sterile as the room in which they are made.
Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.
Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).
Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.
Lars Walker's blog, which I've been reading since I discovered that he had one, contains a review by one of his co-bloggers of Your Jesus Is Too Safe. I hadn't heard of the book before, though I suppose the only book about Jesus I've ever read besides the Bible is The Everlasting Man. Still, the review was interesting:
He doesn’t spend much time describing poor views of Jesus, like Hippie Jesus or the inhuman Flannel-graph Jesus. He touches on them in the context of healthy views on Jesus’ role as a shepherd, a judge, a prophet, a king, and many others.As to which, how about Jesus as horseman?
Saying, Go ye into the village over against you; in the which at your entering ye shall find a colt tied, whereon yet never man sat: loose him, and bring him hither.What happens when you sit a colt that no man has ever ridden before?
The PA shooting we discussed below had another victim: the theology of permanent security. Ideas have consequences, and if you teach that salvation is irrevocable no matter what you do after... well, you understand the point. His long-time preacher is said to be "really broken this week." Small wonder.
The same problem exists with predestination, which lies at the heart of the Presbyterian faith in which I was raised. If you're pre-destined, what you do doesn't matter: it may (or may not) be an indicator of how your destiny lies, but you can't change it. So why be good? God made up his mind about you before you were born.
The theology of peril is the best one.
When God put man in a gardenThe first time I read the Ballad of the White Horse, I thought the theological parts were tedious additions to an otherwise-great war poem. More and more, I realize that they were the most important parts of all.
He girt him with a sword,
And sent him forth a free knight
That might betray his lord;
He brake Him and betrayed Him,
And fast and far he fell,
Till you and I may stretch our necks
and burn our beards in hell.
Almost 100,000 Swedes, many of whom viewed the clip on YouTube, have joined a Facegroup group called “I am scared of the girl in the Apoliva commercial” (“Jag är rädd för tjejen i Apolivareklamen”) in reaction to the film. Several other related groups, both in favour of and against the ad, have popped up on the social media site as well....
The description of the Facebook group reads: “Those of us who have a TV and like to watch commercials can't be bothered to reach for the remote are facing a problem. Apoliva has begun to run a commercial that is frightening. A woman singing a Nordic/Swedish folk song in freezing rain with lightning. I am creating this group for those of us who need somewhere to seek support and talk things out. It's only a matter of time before it creeps into our dreams and terrorises us in our sleep.”
Tonight I took down an excellent cookbook, and made a bread described by its recipe as:
I substituted the dried fruit with fresh blueberries, as we have them on hand here.A Festival Bread
From the Land of King Arthur
