Keith Burgess-Jackson

I leave you this fine evening with a column by Christopher Hitchens.

This is what partisan spin looks like.

Here is a scene from yesterday’s final stage of the Tour Down Under.

In 50 minutes, I’ll be watching President Bush’s eighth and final State of the Union address. I love the pomp and circumstance of this annual event. I love watching members of Congress react. I love seeing Supreme Court justices in their robes. I love seeing the president interact with senators and representatives as he enters and departs the chamber. You can be sure that if Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in attendance, the cameras will be all over them. Michelle Malkin will be live-blogging the event, in case you can’t get to a television and want to stay abreast of what’s being said.

Mark Spahn loves to send me things that give me nightmares.

Longtime reader Gerry sent a link to this blog post/essay by Kim du Toit. Kim has had me on his blogroll for several years, for which I am grateful.

Here is a proposal by a first-year law student to clean up baseball. Let’s hope that by the time he’s graduated, he learns the difference between “affect” and “effect.”

Addendum: Here is Steven Levitt’s blog post about the proposal. Thanks to Mark Spahn for the link.

Here.

To the Editor:

To have a meaningful debate over public policy you need to have real arguments, not fear-mongering.

In “Debt Relief Made Harder for Homeowners” (Business Day, Jan. 12), Steve Bartlett, president and chief executive of Financial Services Roundtable, an association in Washington representing the nation’s largest lenders and securities dealers, claimed that legislation that allows a bankruptcy judge to adjust the interest rate and valuation of primary residences would “drive up rates on new mortgages for everyone else and further disrupt the global securities market.”

There may be a legitimate reason why the country’s biggest banking institutions would oppose this legislation. but [sic] those reasons are not it. There is no data that supports the contention that bankruptcy changes being contemplated in Congress would do either.

The legislation that could help contain the current mortgage mess and help over 600,000 homeowners avoid foreclosure applies to existing loans only. Therefore, by definition, it could not affect future interest rates because it would not apply to future loans.

Let’s focus on stopping foreclosures, helping keep people in their homes and protecting our economy with a debate based on solid public policy and legitimate reasoning.

Jack Kemp
Washington, Jan. 16, 2008
The writer is the former secretary of housing and urban development.

I’m pretty sure I broke the 5K world record a few minutes ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t take my watch and nobody except a brown dog, three squirrels, and a man standing in his yard saw it.

Here.

Though I do not wish to digress too far here, it might be argued (and a Marxist surely would) that almost all the benefits which North Americans enjoy routinely, as part of their exorbitantly high standard of living relative to the rest of the world, depend upon the correlated and disproportionate suffering and deprivation caused others elsewhere in the world (e.g., in those countries which supply the raw materials that North American industry and consumerism devour at a staggering rate). From this perspective, the animal-rights debate seems considerably less urgent and a relatively “safe” area of controversy. One wonders why here (as elsewhere) there is so much concern for the plight of animals and evidently so little for that of humans.

(Michael Fox, “‘Animal Liberation’: A Critique,” Ethics 88 [January 1978]: 106-18, at 109 n. 4)

My Strine friend Dr John J. Ray reflects on his life, which has been long, happy, and productive. I have a feeling John will be around a lot longer than 10 years. We conservatives need him to help us keep progressives on their toes.

“It’s in your int’rest
To believe that God exists.”
—Monsieur Blaise Pascal