The Senescent Man

Judge Alito confirmed to the Supreme Court. Senator Chafee picks the wrong side again. 'Nuff said.

As reported in the Providence Journal this morning, the relentless casino promoters are still pushing their scam with bogus poll results supposedly showing support for this license to steal. The good news is that they have to spin the results like crazy to make it look good. In reality, most people seems to know that the power brokers at the General Assembly are up to no good and only the gullible seem to support them. In the poll there was no mention of Harrahs backing in the plan and no acknowledgement of the undercutting of the other two betting parlors currently ripping off the naive patrons. They push the 'tax-relief' issue, but only the hopelessly dumb could possibly believe that they won't shuffle the money and spend even more so that the net relief is zero. C'mon this is Rhode Island.

Via Michelle Malkin, an instance of "post Schiavo" syndrome, on this, the 33rd anniversary of the Roe versus Wade. The "signs missed" will blow you away.

Here is a wake-up call for those who think gambling is just harmless entertainment. Tom Grey has been battling against this scourge for years and knows what he's talking about. RI is far down this road as evidenced by the shenannigans going on in the General Assembly right now. There actually are legislators blatantly trying to rewrite our State Constitution to give the gambling promoters and themselves even more money and power than they have now - and pretending that this is all sweetness and light. If this should happen, the speck integrity we have left will blow away in the wind.

The Opinion Journal of the WSJ reminds us that today is the 25th anniversary of saner economic policy coming to Washington, DC.
"It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government." - Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1981

Mark Comtois at Anchor Rising took the trouble of reporting on the interesting interview between Dan Yorke and Senator Lincoln Chafee a few days ago. I happened to be running some errands and caught a good piece of it myself.

What's interesting is Chafee's no-holds-barred opposition to the war in Iraq. During the discussion he made numerous references to the Vietnam war. Chafee simply is opposed to any war, even, evidently, a war that was triggered by an attack directly on American soil. Yorke actually probes a little into this to his credit.

But what I found to be really astonishing was when Yorke asked Chafee what he felt was a challenging non-political experience (i.e., apart from his numerous mayoral campaigns, and his few Senate races) he said horse-shoeing was a real challenge for him with all the stress and strain of having to be traveling around and living in various states in New England, making choices for himself, and generally being on his own, or words to that effect.

I don't know about you, but that answer really explains a lot to me.

The attack ad against Judge Samuel Alito that has been running on tv lately strikes me as funny. As he sits in a chair being made up for an appearance before cameras, a smart-looking consultant approvingly goes down a list of his supposed evasions to pretty trivial flaws in his background. At the end a semi-scary voice-over gets me chortling when it says, "Samuel Alito - he's no Moderate!" And then, "The information in this ad has been supplied by MoveOn.org." Now, I lose it. Saturday Night Live couldn't do a better parody ad. These guys are so proud of themselves for delivering this grave warning. Lions and Tigers and Bears, OH MY!

Word is that Ken Lay and the other top dogs at Enron are determined to plead the "idiot" or "Sgt. Schultz" defense by claiming that they didn't know what was going on at the energy company as the books were being manipulated. Seems to me that this is prima facie evidence for making them return to the stockholders everything they ever "earned" at Enron. While it's somewhat uncertain who did exactly what in this scheme, it's abundantly clear that if they all together were too stupid to run the company properly, they were too stupid to earn a dime from it. Only after that, the courts should determine guilt and punish appropriately.

In the latest Weekly Standard, Bostonian writer Patrick J. Walsh makes some keen observations about Ralph Waldo Emerson in his piece on Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Hawthorne...rejected the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson that was blustering about him in Concord. In Mosses from an Old Manse, he wrote of Emerson's flock of followers: "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were simply bores of very intense water." As for Emerson, Hawthorne added, "I sought nothing from him as a philosopher."

"[W]hen Emerson said he could no longer celebrate the Lord's Supper unless the bread and wine were removed, an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place." Randall Stewart likewise regretted Emerson's influence on the American spirit, recognizing his doctrine as radically "anti-Christian." Christians believe that Christ healed the division between the world of spirit and the world of matter and became the bread of life. Emerson's staged refusal was a rejection of the material world of things as unredeemed.

And this one:

Emerson, and not Hawthorne, is the father of our introverted modern America, where truth is relative and self-manufactured. This religion of self infects every level of society, ranging from the Self Help sections in bookstores to the slogans of advertisement, from movies to public television, from college curriculums to gum-chewing stars. It penetrates the chambers of the Supreme Court, where Sandra Day O'Connor ruled in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that there is "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe." All are the offspring of Emerson's gnostic gospel "that the soul makes its own world" and "nothing is sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Yale's Harold Bloom, a professed Gnostic, celebrates this "freedom from nature, time, history, community and other selves" in The American Religion.