One cheer for Richard Dawkins, the world’s foremost proselytizer for atheism. I’ve criticized him and his new-atheist colleagues Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens in The Wall Street Journal and in Commentary for invoking “science” as backing for their disbelief in the existence of G’d. In fact, it is not science that Dawkins and company use to “disprove” the existence of the divinity, but a certain kind of reasoning - and they do not disprove His existence so much as to show that it is improbable - as it is, but no less improbable than the existence of anything at all. Nevertheless, Dawkins invokes the word “Science” as a talisman that acts, he hopes. as the Christian cross does to Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel. Merely uttering it will make religious feeling magically wither and die.

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For those in the media world - and for the few who love them - reading Romensko, formerly mediagossip.com, at the Poynter.org Web site, is a daily ritual. Jim Romensko gathers together all the media stories from around the Internet, links to news, opinion, and gossip, and sets the agenda for the commentariat.

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If Olympia Snowe, Richard Lugar and their colleagues have their way, the Senate and presidency will soon be in a position to begin again the process of appointing activist judges to the Federal judiciary.  Judges will once again gaily be legislating from the bench, based on their own ideas of how to run the country.   I have a modest idea for some preventive medicine.
What if we were to pass, as Amendments 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 and 37, the Bill of Rights all over again - without a single word out of place?  We would studiously resist the temptation to make nips and tucks in the wording.  We would not have a preamble or state our intention in making the 28th amendment the first amendment - again.  It would simply stand.  The Bill of Rights would be passed exactly as it was written.  Only this time - I hope - it would mean what it says.
Re-ratifying the Bill of Rights would make it harder for future Justices to say that the rights given to us by our constitution, such as freedom of speech or the freedom to exercise religion, must be now be understood in a different, more “nuanced” way.  There will be no need for tomorrow’s judges to puzzle over original intent, or argue about how the framers would have understood today’s problems.  To  ingenious legal reasoners like David Souter or Stephen Breyer, we can say, to adopt Pogo’s formulation, “Mr. Justice, meet the Framers - they’re us!”

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Genocide for various communities in Iraq is now the official policy of The New York Times editorial board, as Jules Crittenden brilliantly shows ( http://www.julescrittenden.com/2007/07/08/genocide-prefered ) and as the editor of Editor & Publisher endorses. The reasoning behind this policy is too boring to recapitulate here - but my question is this. Why does the anti-Bush, pro-Ba’ath, anti-American alliance invest so much in protesting genocide in Darfur (as I - pro-Bush, antifascist and pro-American - do also protest) when they don’t mind it at all - in fact, they recommend it - in Iraq?

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Many people have begged me to weigh in on the question of the immigration problem, and the immigration bill. I have not because I represent the silent majority - I don’t know what to do about it, and I don’t like any of the solutions I’ve seen. So I’ve remained silent.

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As we watch the Hamas/PA debacle unfold in Gaza, many are reverting to the notion that the Hamas takeover is a bitter consequence of a misguided policy of promoting democracy in the Middle East - because Hamas initially took power by means of an election.

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Bien-pensants like Boston College’s Alan Wolfe are rushing to the defense of Tony Judt, who has been uninvited to several panels dealing with Israel.

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In today’s Wall Street Journal, a liberal has usefully repeated the cliche that President Bush’s big mistake “following 9/11 was his failure to ask Americans to sacrifice anything in fighting terrorism. Our troops and their families bear nearly the entire burden of this fight. Despite constantly reminding us of the looming threat of terrorism, Mr. Bush has failed to ask us to do anything to fight it, and we have complacently obliged.”

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The real victims of the Valerie Plame non-issue, it turns out, were those who believed in the honorablity of two men: Richard Armitage and Colin Powell.

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One would have to have a heart of stone not to relish the hilarious and completely unnecessary predicament in which Joe Lieberman’s primary loss has landed his enemies in the Democratic Party.

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The Democratic party’s leadership is notoriously thin-skinned regarding criticism of their political position on the counter-terror war. Any disagreement with them they read as “impugning their patriotism.”

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