The great Polish composer, Henryk Gorecki (pronounced "go-RET-ski") died on Friday at 76. For most of his professional life, Gorecki worked under a Communist regime that opposed classical artistic forms, modernism, religious piety of any kind, and, when it comes down to it, beauty itself.

Gorecki responded by combining classical forms--particularly simple melodic lines in a relatively narrow tonal range, not unlike Gregorian chant or early polyphony--with a modern aesthetic that embraced a certain dissonance, writing music that was explicitly sacred, and astoundingly beautiful.

If you only listen to one piece by Gorecki, listen to "Totus Tuus," the choral work he composed for Pope John Paul II's 1987 visit to Poland. "Totus Tuus" was John Paul's personal motto, and Gorecki employed simple Latin lyrics in the work:

Totus tuus sum Maria,

Mater nostri redemptoris,

Virgo dei, virgo pia,

Mater mundi salvatoris.

Totus tuus sum Maria.

(One Ricochet member or another will be able to provide a more elegant translation, I'm sure, but very roughly: "I am totally yours, Maria, mother of our redeemer, virgin of God, virgin of piety, mother of the saviour of the world. I am totally yours, Maria.")

Listen to the way the simple lyrics rise and fall with the music, becoming like prayer--even like breathing. About two-thirds of the way through, notice the way Gorecki uses the phrase "Mater mundi salvatoris," repeating first the entire phrase, then merely the first two words, and then--and this is almost shockingly beautiful--the single word, "mater," or "mother," which suddenly breaks through the sense of a formal, almost liturgical attitude, replacing it, for a long, tender moment, with one of informal, direct address to Our Lady.

I suppose Catholics will find "Totus Tuus" easiest to appreciate--and I waited until Sunday to put up this post. But just think. Nineteen eighty-seven. The Communists remained in power. The Polish pope returned for the third time to his homeland. It was obvious by now that the regime was on the defensive, weak, alert to danger--and that, at a word from the pontiff, the Poles would do anything, including take to the streets. What happened instead? At a high mass in Victory Square in Warsaw, the pope and the Polish people, through the agency of a great artist, Henryk Gorecki, rededicated themselves to prayer, to beauty, and to the strongest, but also the tenderest, of beings: a mother.

Back in September, Peter dispelled the myth that the GOP was experiencing a Civil War between tea partiers and establishment Republicans, as the mainstream media said it was. The real Civil War, Peter alerted us, was happening within the Democratic Party as "more than 30 Democrats defied the President and Speaker, refusing—flatly refusing—to vote on the Obama-Pelosi tax hike. That’s civil war." A week later, Peggy Noonan, writing the WSJ, echoed Peter's point.

Now, in the aftermath of the midterm election, the Democrats' Civil War is really playing itself out. Politico reports on the turmoil in the Democratic ranks as everyone struggles for leadership posts:

There's a strong undercurrent of dissent building within Democratic ranks. It may not be enough to topple Pelosi or the other elected leaders — Hoyer, Clyburn, Caucus Chairman John Larson of Connecticut and Caucus Vice Chairman Xavier Becerra of California — but Democratic insiders say diffuse calls for change could gather when lawmakers congregate in groups next week for the first time since the election.

Sources point to a handful of meetings this week that could lay the groundwork for a rebellion -— major or minor — against the existing power structure. For example, the chiefs of staff for members of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition are scheduled to meet Monday, CBC members gather Monday night and Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) has called for a discussion among midwesterners on Tuesday.

On Sunday and Monday before election day, Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) took an extra step to try to help those candidates who'd signed the Repeal Pledge who were in tough but not hopeless races.

IWV deployed 1 million phone calls across 19 races that were rated a tossup or worse, and where we believed we'd add value with our different brand and message. (We leave the easily winnable races to others :) ).

We used real doctors talking from the heart about ObamaCare, and in each district called all Independents, conservative Democrats, and low propensity (i.e., infrequently voting) Republicans to help get out the vote. Even though these were recorded calls (yuck, I know), several candidates, post election, have reported singularly positive feedback.

Backing up a minute: the Repeal Pledge in just a few weeks had garnered about 112,000 citizen signatures (and that’s a clean count, removing duplicate signatures) and 117 candidate signers; 91 of those were Republicans, with the remaining 26 being Democrats, Libertarians, and Conservatives who were long-shots. Of the Republicans:

• 37 were running for seats that were that were safe for their opponent,
• 30 were running for seats safe for themselves, and
• 4 were not candidates (3 retiring, one a Senator not up for re-election this year).

That left 20 seats where the race going down to the wire was effectively a tossup or leaned or was even likely against our pledge-signer.

We made those nearly one million calls, and our pledge signers in tough elections prevailed in 13 of those 20 tough races.

That means right now we have 44 repeal pledge signers who will be serving in the 112th Congress, and 15 of those will be freshmen. But getting more signatures is still important; both senior Republican Members and Freshmen-elect have volunteered that they want to help, precisely because they realize this is an ongoing effort, and the more signers we get, the better able they will be to accomplish our goals.

I want to thank those of you who helped spread the word about www.therepealpledge.com, and encourage you to continue doing so. Ours is the only repeal pledge that is not only focused on full repeal, without qualification, but commits Members to go further to include defunding, overriding regulations, blocking provisions, and doing whatever is necessary to slow and stop implementation of ObamaCare.

It is the repeal pledge that says you are serious, and that’s supported by numerous conservative groups, including Americans for Tax Reform, Heritage Action, Concerned Women for America, National Taxpayer’s Union, 60Plus, Eagle Forum, and Contract from America, as well as doctor’s groups like the American Association of Physicians & Surgeons and Docs4Patient Care.

The Pledge had several purposes, and while helping elect serious candidates who understand the importance this issue was key, raising the importance of repeal to a top-three issue to give us a mandate to do the hard work we have ahead was very much part of the plan.

Indeed, it seems to have worked: Rasmussen concluded that the vote outcome showed extraordinary intensity on this issue, saying “Healthcare ranks just behind the economy in important issues facing the United States. Seventy-nine percent (79%) now say that health care is a Very Important issue for Americans – this is the highest importance rating that we have seen for healthcare since we started tracking it a year ago in August.”

Pat Caddell is particularly vindicating of our thesis: “The economy was, of course important, but these results point to health care being a decisive issue. …On healthcare repeal more than 1/3 of Democrats who want repeal voted Republican for Congress- a significant partisan defection. Most astounding were Independents who want repeal acting like partisan Reps- favoring the GOP candidates by 78 POINTS!.”

And it was gratifying to hear Sen. McConnell speak at Heritage last week, delivering what's been exactly our message.

Understand, though: we’re not stopping. We can do this. Just as we ran our ad, “Repeal”, before the election, our new ad, “Mandate” starts airing next week in DC on Morning Joe and elsewhere to remind our Representatives what we expect.

We’ve also created a new resource – a portal website that isn’t about promoting any one group, but promoting the entire effort: www.SavingOurHealthCare.org. Please visit, sign up for updates (we only send them when there’s something real and worthy of attention – all of us have inboxes that are too full), and share your suggestions for additional events or organizations that should be listed. SOHC is laid out on the blueprint of a hospital, and each wing links you to all the important events (you can look them up by state or zip code) and actions being taken, as well as to resources useful to anyone who wants to stay current on the fight against ObamaCare and wants to know what’s being done and how to help, including all federal legislation and state efforts.

We have a window before full implementation, we have 23 Senators who are going to get nervous about re-election, and we have a public that has spoken about as clearly as it's possible to speak. Onward!

For the politics of the moment, a military metaphor. (This may be a bit a of a reach. But what the heck. It's Saturday.) To wit:

"Fix and flank" represents, of course, the basic tactic of the U.S. Marine Corps. Frontal assault? Too costly. Instead, direct just enough fire on the enemy to fix him in place, then send your main force around him, on a flanking maneuver, to take him by surprise from the side or rear.

"Fix and flank" works well in politics, too, but only--well, consider an example, Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis. Insisting he was "not a crook," Nixon took on a bunker mentality, digging in. During the Watergate hearings, Nixon's antagonists in effect flanked him, going around the president to appeal directly to the public. Once he lost the support of a substantial portion of the public, Nixon had no choice but to surrender, resigning the presidency.

The trouble with applying "fix and flank" to politics, as you'll see if you compare Nixon, with, say, Bill Clinton, is that in politics you have to rely on your opponent has to "fix" himself. During the Watergate crisis, nobody forced Nixon to dig in. He just did. When Republicans captured the House of Representatives 20 years later, by contrast, Bill Clinton refused to dig in, instead changing his position by moving quickly and deftly to the center. Newt Gingrich was never able to "flank" Clinton because Clinton simply wouldn't stay put.

How does this apply to the present? Well, Barack Obama, the Democrats in Washington, and the mainstream media all seem intent on following Nixon's example, fixing themselves in position. Witness Barack Obama's press conference the day after the election, in which he admitted only that he had failed to communicate the rightness of his policies. Witness also the complete absence of any challenge to Harry Reid's intention to keep his post as Senate majority leader, or the insistence of a majority of House Democrats on supporting Nancy Pelosi to stay on as minority leader after she vacates the Speaker's chair. Or witness this, from Hendrik Hertzberg, a former Carter speechwriter now on the staff of the New Yorker, who summarized the lessons of the election as follows:

Part of the Democrats' political problem is that their defense...rests on counterfactuals (without the actions they gook...the great slump would have metastasized into a Great Depression), deferred gratification (the health-care law's benefits do not kick in fully until 2014), and counterintuitive propositions (the same hard times that force ordinary citizens to spend less money oblige the government...to spend more). Another part of the problem, it must be said, is public ignorance.

In other words, the liberals were right all along, and the American people were too deluded, impatient, and ignorant to understand. The liberals have, all Nixon-like, fixed themselves in place. Massive spending, a tax hike that would undermine small businesses, an vast health care bureaucracy that will raise the cost of health care, not contain it, and an insistence that the United States, no longer exceptional (if indeed it ever was) must become more like, let us say, Belgium.

That's the liberal program.

And they're sticking with it--enabling the likes of Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio to spend the next two years in a ceaseless flanking maneuver, appealing directly to the people on behalf of lower taxes, limited government, and the abiding, and singular, greatness of American values.

The Marines have landed--and their opponents have dug themselves in.

Sweet.

It just occurred to me that owing to the time difference, I won't be able to judge the Saturday morning Shakespeare contest. I figure the contest should close at sunset on the West Coast--using a kind of liberal, weekend definition of "morning"--but by that point I'll either be asleep or watching the movers break everything I own.

I have conceived of on an elegant solution to this problem. Members, would you please adjudicate the contest yourselves by voting "like" for your favorite entry? You're on the honor system: One vote, one member. And may I ask for a volunteer to count the votes and announce the winner? (Yes, this is technologically possible because we now have a member feed: Look at the tabs below the Ricochet logo.)

The contest remains open, if you'd like to submit a late entry.

For those who are tender-hearted about animals, the upcoming Feast of the Sacrifice here in Turkey is not a pretty thing to consider. I try not to read the local news at this time of year. I mistakenly read this article, though. If I look at it as unemotionally as possible, this really leaps out at me:

Municipalities and ordinary citizens should act responsibly when sacrificing animals during next week’s Kurban Bayram holiday and avoid the amateurish accidents that have sullied Turkey’s image abroad, an Istanbul veterinary official has said.

“Don’t poison the nation’s image during the Feast of the Sacrifice,” Dr. Muhsin Öztürk, assistant director of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s veterinary affairs department told a recent meeting of municipal employees of the Marmara Municipalities Union, or MBB.

It's all about image. If you want to persuade someone to do something in Turkey, appeal to their sense of shame. Not one word of this advice, as far as I can see, attempts to appeal to a sense of empathy or compassion for these mute, suffering, sentient creatures. It's not about that. It's about making sure others don't mock you.

There's no cause for anyone in America to feel smugly superior to Turkey when it comes to animal welfare. American slaughterhouses are God-awful places. Factory farming is an abomination. The animals suffer terribly.

Basically, pork producers figured out some years ago that if they packed the maximum number of pigs into the minimum amount of space, if they pinned the creatures down into fit-to-size iron crates above slatted floors and carved out giant "lagoons" to contain the manure - if they turned the "farm," in short, into a sunless hell of metal and concrete - it made everything so much more efficient. An obvious cost-saver, and from the industry's standpoint, that should settle the matter.

Veal, by definition, is the product of a sick, anemic, deliberately malnourished calf, a newborn dragged away from his mother in the first hours of life. Veal calves are dealt the harshest of punishments for the least essential of meats. And if you think people can get too sentimental about animals, try listening sometime to chefs and gourmands going on about the "velvety smooth succulence" of their favorite fare.

"Cost-saver" in industrial livestock agriculture may usually be taken to mean "moral shortcut." For all of its "science-based" pretensions, factory farming is really just an elaborate, endless series of evasions from the most elementary duties of honest animal husbandry. Man, the rationalizing creature, can justify just about anything when there is money in sight. It's only easier when your victims are so completely out of sight and unable to speak for themselves.

Over the years, one miserly deprivation led to another, ever harsher methods were applied to force costs lower and lower, and so on until the animals ceased to be understood as living creatures at all. Pigs, for example, aren't even "raised" anymore, a term that once conveyed some human attention and care. These days, in America's 395,000-kills-per-day pork industry, pigs are "grown," crowded together by the hundreds in the automated, scientifically based intensive-confinement facilities formerly known as barns.

No, no cause for a pose of moral superiority from the West. I just find it anthropologically fascinating that if I were to try to persuade an American to change his behavior, I would appeal to his compassion; if I were to try to persuade a Turk, I would tell him that others are laughing at him.

If over the coming days you read that I've adopted a few goats and camels, you'll know what happened.

In all the chaos of trying to organize the move to a new apartment in Istanbul, I very nearly missed this news.

Aung San Suu Kyi has been released.

In 1996, I was outside the house in which she has been imprisoned for most of the past few decades. There were crowds outside--waiting for her--so I think I can imagine what it looks like now. The driver who took me there told me with a shrug that the police would probably question him for it. (I wished I'd asked him, or thought of this, beforehand; I didn't like the thought that I would be responsible for this.)

I wish I could remember better whether I actually saw her: I have what feels like a memory of that, but I'm not sure whether I'm manufacturing it or fantasizing it. It seems as if I did see her, from a distance. I certainly remember the eerie atmosphere, the sense that this was, for those gathered there, a sacred and dangerous place.

Burma in 1996 was utterly beautiful, moving, mysterious, spooky and horrible. It had been simply frozen in time. I've never seen anything else like that. I have to imagine it's still much the same way.

I wonder what will happen next?

There's a growing trend, especially among public school officials, to usurp the personal liberty of students and parents in order to assure "child safety." This bogus trump card was played again this week and might have been successful, but for the swift and courageous response of one boy's family.

On Wednesday, in the name of "child safety," it was reported that a 13-year-old patriot named Cody Alicea briefly lost his right to fly an American flag on the back of the bicycle he rides to Denair Middle School in Denair, CA. Citing concerns about "racial tension" brewing among some students against Cody's outward sign of American patriotism, Cody was asked by the "campus supervisor" (we used to call these people "principals") to please remove the flag before arriving at school.

Just to be clear, the campus supervisor told Cody not to fly his American flag or display it on the campus of his American public middle school because fellow students, whose national loyalty presumably attaches to a country south of California, took offense and might just beat the snot out of him.

And we wonder why we have a bullying problem in our schools. But I digress.

Cody's family notified a local TV station, and the story exploded in less than 24 hours. The school was closed on Thursday -- Veteran's Day! Fly a flag! -- but on Friday the Denair school superintendent reinstated Cody's flag-flying freedom and assured that the students responsible for stirring up racial tension would be dealt with instead. Good idea!

"Child safety" is the magic answer for all sorts of screwy rules that impinge on personal liberty. Under the guise of safety, kids nationwide aren't permitted to ride bikes or walk to school, go home for lunch during the school day, or bring any number of harmless items for show-and-tell.

Now, the leftist diehards in American education use "child safety" to encroach all sorts of free speech. Just for fun, let's see how many examples we can come up with...

Here in China folks are a little sensitive about Americans carping on exchange rates. Prodded, they seem to acknowledge that the Rmb is undervalued, but they politely point out that its strengthening would not come close to solving America's economic problems.

They're right, of course. Every visit to China underscores how misleading it is to blame our struggles on others. Watching how hard people work, how seriously young people study, how fast businesses move, and how supportive of economic growth government is, reminds the traveler that the rebuilding of American greatness depends entirely on decisions we make.

The man in the photo is Mr. Lu Guanqiu, a legend in China, whom Americans first met on the cover of Newsweek in 1991. Mr. Lu has become a good friend, and now a co-venturer in electric battery technology with an Indiana firm to which I introduced him.

Starting from a bicycle repair shop in 1969, when those possessed by the spirit of enterprise were imprisoned or worse by the Cultural Revolutionists, Mr. Lu persevered and today remains fully engaged in running Wanxiang, one of the world's leading auto parts companies. Here we sit in Wanxiang's new all-electric bus, after a tour of the company's new e-car facility knowledgeably led by Mr. Wu himself.

It's hard to avoid thinking about the fact that Mr. Lu risked his life to create wealth for himself and others, at a time when the U.S. was the runaway world leader in invention and entrepreneurism. Today, it often seems easier to start and build a great business in other places, including his "communist" nation, than it is at home. Yes, we have work to do.

I'm supposed to be packing and moving to a new apartment this weekend, which of course makes it imperative that I adjudicate a poetry-quotation contest on Ricochet. Obviously this is an urgent issue of shared Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage, so it must take priority over readying my apartment for the movers. My cultural heritage needs me.

The rules: Choose a quotation, a stanza or a scene. Then explain, as you would to a bright teenager, why it's an example of Shakespeare's genius.

My father has volunteered to be the first contestant. Here is his entry, concerning The Phoenix and the Turtle:

About The Phoenix and the Turtle (Dove -- not reptile). This relatively short poem contains so many extraordinary examples of linguistic virtuosity that it might take a book to explicate them all. It is, of course, a superbly nuanced celebration of love; it contains, as every critic has noted, a remarkable anticipation of the metaphysical poets to come; but above all it is an example of how by setting the very tightest formal constraints on rhyme and meter, a poem can use them to splendid effects, thus suggesting an important principle of art itself.

Consider just the first stanza: Let the bird/ of loudest lay/ on the sole/ Arabian tree/ Herald sad/ and trumpet be/ To whose sound/Chaste wings obey. The word 'lay' in this context functions as a noun: It means a song, in this case, a threnody. But it also functions as a verb, and so introduces a play on words in the very first line. Both the metrical and the rhyme scheme are very tight. The rhyme scheme is ABBA and it is executed perfectly. LAY-OBEY; TREE-BE.

Now the meter is plainly trochaic, and I suppose the trochees are counted by stress: Let the BIRD/ of loudest LAY/ on the SOLE/ Arabian TREE/ Herald SAD/and trumpet BE/To whose SOUND/chaste wings OBEY. But when read this way, the poem has a wooden quality,and no one would want to read it this way. In fact, when the poem is scanned syllabically, as it would be in French, the meter changes dramatically. Let the bird -- three syllables. Of loudest lay -- four syllables. Shakespeare has stressed his poem in trochees, but he has introduced subtle variations in syllabification to break up the meter by varying the length of his phrases after the initial trochee of each line. The only exception is the last line, which contains only three syllables, and neatly returns the end of the stanza to its first line.

It would be extremely difficult for you or me -- or anyone -- to write four lines that made sense, and that exhibit the ABBA rhyme scheme, and that are expressed in trochaic form, and that contain the syllabic pattern of 3-4, 3-4, 3-4, 3-3. Just try it. To do this while expressing a vivid account of love, devotion, fate and at the same time expressing a subtle analysis of the nature of number, personality and division in nature, is nothing short of a miracle.

To make sure the fix isn't in, I'm hereby disqualifying my father. Truth be told, no one can beat him when it comes to Shakespeare--or poetry quotation in general. So the contest is wide open.

What else can I do to avoid packing, I wonder? You know, I've never really mastered the details of irrigation and water resource management in Ottoman Egypt. It seems quite important. Off I go!

Given the track record of the writer, Bob Shrum, this bodes well for the next election cycle.

AEI's political analysts have posted an eye-opening analysis of the mid-term election results.

This fact caught me eye.

Postgraduates, by which I believe the AEI analysts mean those with something more than a bachelor's degree, were 20 percent of the electorate. They went for Democrats by 52 to 46 percent. No surprise there. Obama, after all, is himself a creature of the university eco-system, and the way he talks reminds me of nothing more than a professor at a faculty meeting talking about changes to the grading curve. All those folks out there with M.A.'s and Ph.D's know one of their own when they see one.

Voters without a high school diploma were only 3 percent of the electorate, and they voted Democrat 60 to 36 percent. Presumably, this group benefits the most from the redistribution of income going on under the Obama administration.

Everyone else (high school grads, some college, college degrees) voted Republican. Democrats lost the middle class and more.

I've been trying to figure out what this means (aside from the amazing educational achievements of the electorate -- 97 percent had a high school degree or more). Does it mean that the over-educated have no more common sense than those with no education? Does it mean that Obama really only appeals to the extremes of the educational distributional curve because neither end really is responsible for making ends meet and balancing budgets? What do Ricochet members think?

This Christmas season, brace yourself for some atheistic evangelism headed your way through your television. David Gibson of AOL's Politics Daily explains:

It's two weeks before Thanksgiving and atheists who have tried to counter the religious reasons for the season with good tidings of godlessness have outdone themselves this year: They've launched publicity campaigns with a bigger ad buy than ever...

This year's [American Humanist Association] campaign...takes critical aim at "biblical morality and fundamentalist Christianity" by juxtaposing violent or sexist passages from the Bible and the Koran with more irenic quotations from nonbelievers like Albert Einstein and Katherine Hepburn, as well as AHA statements.

[...]

[T]his year's campaigns are more explicit in their aims of converting believers and rallying nonbelievers, or at least the growing number of Americans -- more than 15 percent of the adult population -- who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, or "Nones" in pollster parlance.

It's hard to discern whether the AHA's ad campaign is meant as an attack on people of faith, or rather as an attempt to validate those who lack faith. Whatever the case may be, I find it to be nothing short of downright depressing.

I admit it: I never expected my teen love of zombies would end up merely a drop in the sea of zombophilia that has given us the Resident Evil franchise, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and, now, the natural followup to this year's season of Mad Men: AMC's comic-book adaptation The Walking Dead.

So I sat down to watch the debut of the first-ever zombie TV series with the familiar combination of anticipation and dread. And to my immense gratification, episode 1 delivered. Never mind the seemingly derivative quality of the opening sequence, where Our Hero wakes up from a minor coma, much as the hero of 28 Days Later awoke, amid a major meltdown of human civilization. Here was an hour of TV that followed through on the great promise of serious zombie drama.

Consider the theatrical contrast between zombies and vampires. (A few people have weighed in on this subject, but not quite in the following way.) Vampire drama draws its power perversely from the depths of human hope: beyond transgressive erotic titillation, there's the semi-secret fantasy that life as a vampire can, ultimately, be successfully negotiated within the structures of normal human life. Vampires are like celebrities -- gaunt, exclusive, tormented -- but they're also just like us! Because, after all, they're us plus: not just alive, but too alive.

Zombies, of course, aren't too alive. They're not dead enough. And where vampire drama plays devilishly on our all-too-human hopes, zombie drama plows straight through our fears to hit us where it really hurts: at the level of human despair. Good zombie drama lowers us to the bottom of hopelessness, only to let us -- when the show's over -- return to the real world, in all its ordinary graces, stingingly thankful for the decencies, great and small, of nature and nature's God.

What can get in the way of such a powerful experience? Not much. But just as zombies are more vulnerable creatures than vampires, zombie drama can be cruelly deprived of its power in a way that vampire drama cannot. For when characters in vampire dramas utter forced, flat, lame, and soulless dialogue, we can have a laugh that merely puts the physical charge of the action in greater tension with the absurdity of talk. (Proof? Keanu didn't ruin Dracula.) But when characters in zombie dramas start speaking in Bad Screenwriter language -- as they did with stunning, disappointing consistency in episode 2 of The Walking Dead -- look out. The pathos of despair folds like a freshly decapitated revenant. Suddenly, the undead are more convincing, more real, than the living. We can't access the horror of hopelessness when the world's survivors interact like Laura Linney and Tim Curry in Congo. We're reduced to tallying up cheap gross-out thrills -- actually, inevitably, hoping that another one of humanity's last hopes falls prey to the claws and jaws of the hungry dead.

That, my friends, is a catastrophic failure of zombie drama. Let's hope The Walking Dead recovers this Sunday night. Otherwise, for we the living, it'll be a fate worse than death -- an evening of Tivo with The Vampire Diaries.

John Yoo, your comments yesterday provoke me to ask about remarks Justice Scalia gave recently, where he said "there's no such thing as a Catholic judge." I agree with him, and context is important.

He makes clear that the Constitution says nothing about abortion, and that, legally, under our constitution, the American people could vote for, or their elected representatives could pass, a law making abortion a right. On the Catholic left, they take that as an indictment that he is a positivist. It’s very silly. All he’s really saying is that judges do not have the authority to decide the morality of laws – they are deciding the constitutionality.

It’s the same thing he says on the death penalty. The idea that Scalia does not have strong feelings about abortion or the death penalty (though I think here he’s with me, that the morality does not prohibit capital punishment) is absurd. The reason this becomes an issue is the Democratic religious left, especially the Catholics. They’ve made their bed on abortion and can’t get out of it. Best they can do is say, “Scalia is as bad as we are – we’re bad on abortion and he’s bad on capital punishment.” Of course this fudges rather than makes important distinctions.

John, I assume you've experienced similar confusions on torture. First, that you were asked a legal and constitutional question and gave your answer. Again, the politics is similar here because the Catholic church teaches that (unlike the death penalty, but like abortion) torture is an intrinsic evil – ie., always wrong, never justified by circumstances. If you look at it more closely, however, the teaching is very very fuzzy. It says, “Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.” You will quickly see this says nothing about enhanced interrogation to extract information to save lives. In addition, if we are to say waterboarding is torture, and torture is an intrinsic evil (always and everywhere wrong), it would be an intrinsic evil to use it on our special forces the way we do for training.

To me it suggests that the aim here is not a moral debate on torture -- which might be useful. It is to shout “torture” to discredit Bush and Republicans.

Isn't there a similar question with law and morality – who makes the call, and how? President? Judge? Legislator? Citizen?

The bi-partisan debt-reduction commission has released its draft proposal. I'm no economist, but the proposal seems to have some real merit -- not just spending cuts, but slashing the corporate tax rate and simplifying the personal tax code. According to reports, the proposal favors spending cuts over tax increases by a ratio of 3:1. That, no doubt, is why Pelosi, the AFL-CIO, and many of the usual suspects have pronounced this proposal dead on arrival

Politically, I think the GOP leadership would be nuts if they don't immediately say: "this is a good start, we can work with this." That's all they have to say right now. It doesn't mean that they accept all the tax increases. It doesn't mean that the spending cuts go far enough. It doesn't mean that we don't also want to repeal Obamacare. But it does mean that Republicans are not the "party of no," and it puts Obama in the position of either joining with the Pelosi wing or fighting with his own party. If Obama doesn't make a good faith effort to meet Republicans on at least some of the proposals, then in 2012, the GOP can say that they tried to implement bi-partisan proposals to reduce the debt but were rebuffed by the Democrats.

I realize that the commission proposal is not perfect, but perfection is an awfully high standard. We're talking about politics, after all. I say, embrace it and work with it. What do you think?

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MANACEK > What Am I Missing?

My mother always hated hearing people talk about their dreams. No, not their hopes and ambitions, but their actual dreams—the nightmares, weird coincidences, strange monsters, elaborate fantasies, and “visitations” that unfold in our minds at night. (I always wondered why she never showed interest in my breakfast-table tales of the witch who rolled bowling balls at me.)

To my husband’s chagrin, I tend to agree with my mother. I’m much less patient with him about his sleep-scrambled tales of high school or little league than my mother was with me.

But you know what is fascinating? Watching the seeds of nightmares grow in your child’s brain. It’s also funny.

For the past two years, my kids have watched DVDs of the old Muppet Show from the 70s. They march around the house demanding “the Don Knotts one” or “the Steve Martin one.” And, until lately, one that got heavy rotation was “the Elton John one.”

Then, my 2-year-old apparently had a dream. When we put the DVD on now, he squeaks, shivers, and cries out in complete and total horror. Like I said, it’s actually a little funny. And, the evil mom that I am, I put it on for 2 seconds the other day so that my husband could see this wildly dramatic reaction. Just for a sociological experiment. Sort of. It was also hysterical. (Don’t worry, his sisters smothered him with hugs, and he was throwing Matchbox cars in glee a minute later.) But it’s clear he’s not getting over this any time soon.

If an Elton John song – or even one that sounds like Elton John (e.g. Billy Joel) -- comes on the radio, our Paddy freezes, drops his Play-Doh, and clutches at my pant leg. I assure him that Elton John is only on the radio, not here, and that Patrick is safe with mommy. Then I change the station.

But get this. I’ve just begun to talk to the kids about the holidays. How ChiChi and Grandpa and Aunt Colleen and Uncle Joe are all coming here for Thanksgiving. And how, best of all, at Christmas, his two cousins from Spain will be coming, with Aunt Virginia and….Uncle John.

Wait, Mommy. Did you just say Elton John is coming for Christmas?

Terror in the eyes.

No! No! No! Not Elton John, Uncle John.

He won’t be comforted. He doesn’t believe me. We have this conversation three or four times a day.

Is it possible to look forward to Christmas if you think the big man with the British accent, the feather boa, and the star-shaped purple sunglasses will be lounging by the tree? With his crocodiles?

Now, I'm not the kind of Harry Potter fan that ever lined up outside the bookstore when a new volume of the series was released--and I certainly won't be sporting a robe and wand to the premiere of HP7: The Deathly Hallows, Part 1--but I will now begin my official countdown to the film's U.S. premiere, which happens a week from today. Is anyone else as excited as I am?

T-7 days until good (!) defeats evil.

I'm up in Hanover, NH today on business and pleasure, and passing through some of my old haunts at Dartmouth, I picked up a copy of the daily campus publication, The Dartmouth. One of the stories on the front page is about a "beloved art history" professor who passed away yesterday morning. Strangely, there was no picture of the professor, Angela Rosenthal, to accompany and highlight the article. Wouldn't that have added a compassionate touch to the piece and made the news of her death more real? She died before her time too: she is survived by her parents.

Though the editors decided to forego a picture of the late professor, they did include one of some frat brothers playing football and another of a "film noir" expert delivering a talk.

Maybe I'm making too much of this, but it strikes me as disrespectful. Surely the untimely passing of a "beloved" professor, on a tiny college campus, is a more momentous event than the recreational activities of a few students or a talk being given on "film noir fatalism" by a "social thought" professor.

What gets me, too, is that in the online edition of the paper, the lead story today is about how faculty diversity on campus fails to match student diversity (my reaction: who cares). The news of the professor's death, meanwhile, gets pushed to the side.

Here is a picture of the professor, Angela Rosenthal. She is sitting in the Sherman art history library (which, coincidentally, is where I am typing out this post).

I bet you'd never have figured this out on your own, especially since you all seem pretty confused about plumbing.

Coming soon to a theater near me.

You know, I don't know why I was complaining about the YouTube ban. I was happier not knowing.

The filmmakers had a ten million dollar budget to make this pornographic trash. Okan and I tried to raise $18,000 to make a serious documentary about the same events. No one thought it worth funding.

We're still willing, if someone thinks it might be worthwhile to have another perspective out there. If not, Civilization, don't come back to us later and say we didn't try to tell you.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice is exceedingly pleased that owing to intense American lobbying, Iran will not be taking a seat on the board of the UN's new agency for women. Somehow we didn't manage to keep Saudi Arabia and Congo off the board, however. The board is comprised of ten members, so they'll be 20 percent of it.

Congo, you may recall, is famous for village agriculture, handicrafts, and rape. Saudi Arabia is famous for spending a great deal of money to keep anyone from loudly pointing out that women in Saudi Arabia don't have the right to drive or to expose their faces to sunlight.

Apparently, true to form, the Saudis just outright bought their seat:

Philippe Bolopion of Human Rights Watch (HRW) expressed relief that Iran was denied a seat on the board of UN Women. ... The Saudis had essentially been allowed to “buy their way” onto the board with a generous contribution, Bolopion added.

UN Women will have double the current combined budget of all the other existing UN Agencies with a brief for "gender equality" and "women's empowerment." Those would be DAW, INSTRAW, OSAGI, and UNIFEM, which are not precisely underfunded.

If I were the worrying kind, I might wonder if this new agency really has what it takes to empower women. But I'm not the fretful sort, so I say let's not be churlish about such minor technical quibbles as Congo's dubious authority on matters of women's rights:

And so as the sun dropped behind the soaring jungle here one recent day, little girls, mothers and grandmothers began heading home, some closing curtains and padlocking wooden doors. It was time, they explained, to lock themselves indoors.

"To avoid getting raped, after 6 p.m., women are not allowed to go out of the house," said Maria Bitondo, who said she was among three women attacked by a soldier last month. "With the soldiers here, no woman is safe to go out and walk. We do not even go to the bathroom at night."

This new "structure for the empowerment of women"--apparently the product of years of negotiation--has the wisdom and experience of Pakistan to draw upon. There's another member of the board with massive authority when it comes to the empowerment of women. So I'm sure it will be a smashing success and an excellent investment.

At least a lot of that is probably mostly Saudi money, not ours. I guess it's better that they waste it on this than on buying themselves a few thousand more terrorist-incubating madrassas in Pakistan.

Always look on the bright side, I say. My model in this attitude is Susan Rice, who really shines a light upon this benighted world with her power of positive thinking.

The next election cycle begins sooner than you'd think. Today former first lady Nancy Reagan announced plans to host the first Republican presidential primary debate of the 2012 election cycle during spring of 2011 at the Reagan Library. POLITICO and NBC News will co-host the event.

Good news for politicos. Bad news for everyone else, says National Review's Jim Geraghty:

Most Americans are not like you and me. They do not like political campaigns. They do not like two-year campaigns. They do not like debates for a general election roughly 20 months away, or a primary six months away or more.

If we have them in spring, then groups will be inviting these folks for additional events every month through 2011 and 2012. By the time anyone is actually voting, we will have had six or seven. Debates are a good thing, up to a point; when a cycle has 20 or 30, no particular debate stands out or ends up making much difference. There’s a reason that most presidential years have three or fewer.

I’m an editor at Ricochet: of course I love politics. But I just don’t see any benefit to getting started so soon. And besides, we really need a whole year to see if any natural leaders emerge. By forcing everyone to start campaigning so soon, there won’t be any time to actually govern (though I suppose you could argue that’s a good thing in some cases). Furthermore, there's absolutely no way that folks like Chris Christie or Marco Rubio will toss their hats into the ring if they're forced to do so at such an early point in their terms. And think of the campaign funds! They'll need to be bigger than ever to sustain candidates for 18 months of campaigning. Good grief.

The American Federation of Teachers is very, very pleased with three stories appearing in liberal publications that purport to debunk aspects of the excellent documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,'" a movie by "An Inconvenient Truth" Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim that exposes the sorry state of many public schools, particularly in poor urban districts, and pleads for more charter schools. This week the AFT sent out a press release happily including links to a would-be Diane Ravitch takedown of the film in The New York Review of Books as well as pieces in the Columbia Journalism Review and on a New York Times blog.The Times blog posting is a particularly substance-free attack on the film and an implicit defense of the status quo; it says that an impoverished Bronx mom who visited a dynamic Harlem charter school with her child then returned to the school with Guggenheim's cameras in tow to recreate the experience of her first visit. Quel scandale! The Ravitch piece makes only the mildest murmurs of protest about teacher tenure, which as the film demonstrates is essentially awarded to any pedagogue who can remain breathing. Ravitch says tenure amounts merely to giving teachers "due process." Well. It's a process that leads to three out of 55,000 tenured New York City teachers getting the sack. Maybe all the others are doing a fine job.

The documentary effectively poses the question, "Have our schools gotten so bad that we're willing to allow actual competition?" The teachers' unions and their water-carriers in the press suddenly sound conservative when it comes to threats to repair a broken system. Slow down! Let's think about this! What's the rush? They essentially argue: Our kids are poor (so what can be done?), charter schools don't always succeed (no one said they did: the point of free markets in anything is that bad businesses be allowed to fail, yet this principle is almost never applied to any obviously failing public school), the charter schools are cherry-picking motivated students (though why the best students at the worst schools should be damned to suffer a poor education is never explained) and, of course, that schools need to be lavished with ever-more "resources," though Guggenheim ably demonstrates that some charter schools that spend a fraction of what public schools do show substantially better results.

"Waiting for 'Superman'" has done well, though not spectacularly, at the box office, with receipts over $5 milllion. What the teachers' unions really, really don't want to happen is for the film to reap an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. Such an honor would entice many more Americans to see this vital film.

Over on Powerline, our friend Paul Mirengoff offers an arresting, and astute, observation. To wit:

Question: What do the following three current news stories have in common?

1. White House Gives In On Bush Tax Cuts

2. Coalition Government Formed In Iraq

3. Afghanistan war deadline grows hazy: Senior officials say White House backing off plan to begin leaving next year

Answer: They speak to the partial vindication, or at least the staying power, of policies at the core George W. Bush's presidency.

I don't know why this steams me so much, but it does. I'm not George W. Bush's biggest fan, but that's partly because I'm generally suspicious of all political figures. I give Bush high ratings for his recent Matt Lauer interview, and I certainly believe he had impeccable taste choosing our Bill McGurn to be his chief speechwriter. But, still, I didn't ever fall for him the way I have for, say, Chris Christie.

When I saw this story today, I shrugged. Ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is taking issue with a passage in Bush's new book, Decision Points, about a meeting between the two leaders regarding the Iraq invasion. Fine. Whatever.

But then this quote caught my eye:

"We noticed that the intellectual reach of the president of the most important nation at the time was exceptionally low," Uwe-Karsten Heye, who was Schroeder's spokesman at the time, told German news channel N24, according to the Telegraph. "For this reason, it was difficult to communicate with him. He had no idea what was happening in the world. He was so fixated on being a Texan. I think he knew every longhorn in Texas."

Has anything as rude ever been said about a US President by another country's administration? (If so, I'm sure you all will tell me.) As a voting American citizen, I also kind of take it personally.

Say what you will about small towns, out here amongst the "great unwashed," as Katie Couric affectionately calls us, they know how to honor vets. I stood, coffee in hand, with veterans from every conflict since WWII this morning, along with families and children, to soak in the atmosphere of a Veterans Day parade.

Among the more memorable moments of the parade was when a large contingent of active duty troops marched by. Everyone rose and spontaneously broke into sustained applause. Those who had served gave a standing ovation to those currently serving. Then, just as spontaneously, individual troops from the active duty group broke ranks and walked up to veterans and shook our hands as we thanked each other for serving. One young lady approached me, and clasped my hand with both of her hands. Was that a tear in her eye? It was hard to tell, but she seemed moved as she looked me in the eye and said, "Thank you, sir." I thanked her for keeping us safe. There is something about that moment, when generations meet and appreciate each other, that stays in my mind.

The Patriot Guard was there, throttles wide open. A Pearl Harbor survivor who had been awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart, was given a ride in the parade. I saluted him, and I must confess I felt a chill when he returned my salute.

The guest speaker at the ceremony, an Army Brigadier General, spoke of a simple concept: Silence. The silence a family experiences when their loved one deploys. The silence a service member may long for during drills, or when his daily routine is accompanied by the sound of mortars, gunfire, screams of the wounded, the rumble of tanks, or the roar of jets. Perhaps the hardest silence of all, said the General, is when our nation's flag is presented to a grieving loved one at a grave side.

The General then asked everyone to rise and observe a moment of silence to honor those who serve, those who have served, and those who gave the last measure of their lives in service. From Yorktown to Gettysburg, he said, from Pearl Harbor to Korea, from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, America's warriors stand shoulder to shoulder, defending our country and our freedom. The General had to pause periodically to gain command over his emotions as he looked out over a sea of glittering hats, and wheelchair-bound men and women. The emotions ran strong from all around, it seemed.

A wreath was laid at the memorial to honor the fallen, and we rendered a proper salute when Taps was played. I don't know why my eyes water so much when I hear that song. It must be my contact lenses.

Then there was an ominous, low pitched sound above. Looking up and to the south, we could see a two-ship formation of F-22s moving in. Then, when they were overhead, they throttled up and the ground shook with the awful roar, ...of freedom itself. As the jets faded away, a procession of bagpipes played Amazing Grace, and nary a dry eye could be found.

At the ceremony's conclusion, I took a few minutes to personally thank folks who served in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The General was right. Times change, but we still stand shoulder to shoulder, and I am personally humbled and honored to stand with these remarkable people, and grateful beyond words to live in a country that is so worth defending.