March 08, 2005

By the Way… Just What Exactly is In the Ten Commandments?

Larry Kudlow points out that the 10 commandments are very much in keeping with our legal system and with Americian goals:

The Ten Commandments should stay right where they are in all cases. Various monuments, structures, and statues of the Ten Commandments can be found all over the U.S., including some highly visible spots in Washington, D.C.

...The Ten Commandments provide the very foundation of our nations legal code. They also make up the basis of the moral values that thankfully guide us in our everyday lives.

I have a suspicion, however, that too many folks forget whats on that list of commandments, or maybe never learned them in the first place. And even if we do know the Ten Commandments by heart, it never hurts to read them through and contemplate them from time to time. So heres all ten:

I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Remember that thou keep holy the Sabbath day.

Honor thy mother and father.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not covet they neighbors wife.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors goods.

I have a few direct questions for you: Is it such a bad thing to think about not killing, not stealing, not lying, and not committing adultery? Is it so bad to talk about honoring ones parents? Or to think about a power greater than oneself about God or some higher deity? Or to set aside just one day a week as a spiritual day, separate from the material strivings of the other six days?

Attempting to live by these moral and religious values is a worthy endeavor.

Criminals Like to Vote Democratic. The Response of the Left? Let More Criminals Vote!

From NRO Editor Jonah Goldberg:

...this is a delicate issue, so I will try to be sensitive criminals tend to vote for Democrats. Moreover, some places where convicted criminals are barred from the rolls are key for Democratic chances to take back the White House. Florida tops that list. Hence, Hillary and the Democrats’ desire to make felon rights a federal issue. If you think this is too cynical, ask yourself why Democrats in 2000 were far more concerned with counting the votes of alleged felons than confirmed soldiers.

So naturally the intelligentsia on the Left is busy making up all kinds of highfalutin’, scholarly-sounding claims about why felons should be allowed to vote and how not letting them vote is all about oppressing minorities:

That Democrats do better in the ex-offender community undoubtedly has less to do with their simpatico outlook with thieves, robbers and rapists and more to do with the lamentable fact that the prison population is disproportionately made up of poor, underprivileged, nonwhite men. Not surprisingly, liberals are more than eager to turn the prison ballot into the race card. A Stanford Law Review article calls it “the new literacy test.” The New York Times’ Brent Staples asserts that “legal scholars attribute [felon disenfranchisement] to this country’s difficulties with race.” The president of the American Bar Assn. claims that the “origins of America’s felony disenfranchisement laws are linked to post-Civil War efforts to disenfranchise former slaves, a sad racial legacy that manifests itself today in the fact that people of color make up more than 60% of our nation’s prison population.”

However, it’s just another phony claim from the Left:

An inconvenient problem is that this isn’t true. Even two of the chief advocates of felon re-enfranchisement Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project acknowledge in a joint publication that “disenfranchisement [of felons] in the U.S. is a heritage from ancient Greek and Roman traditions carried into Europe.” The basic idea is simple: Lawbreakers shouldn’t be lawmakers.

I’d just like to add that if felons become a voting bloc, it will become necessary for politicians to try to appeal to them, which will inevitably interfere with good legislation in this country.

Okay, so let’s recap. The Left has an absurd proposition, that convicted criminals should be permitted to help elect Presidents (and specifically Hillary.) Everybody knows this is a dumb idea. So in order to try to promote it, the Left tries this: they try to make us feel bad. They say, you rotten people like to oppress minorities, and not letting criminals vote is just another way of oppressing minorities. The interesting thing about this strategy is that people are so easily pushed around by it. It’s possible to make people feel bad just by saying rude things like this. Then sometimes a lot of people will get out of the way and stop opposing even the most preposterous things.

Conclusion: if someone tries to make you feel bad, check their facts.

As applied to this specific instance: the facts alleged by the Left are not accurate. Not letting criminals vote is a practice of the ancient Greeks and Romans which was subsequently carried out in Europe and inherited by the U.S., and is unrelated to the oppression of minorities. There is no reason for anybody to feel bad and the absurd argument of the Left, in favor of letting convicted criminals help to elect Presidents, should be rejected.

Cancer Drug Shows Promise

From the New York Times:

The biotechnology company Celgene said yesterday that its cancer drug Revlimid had performed better than expected in two clinical trials, proving so effective that the studies were being stopped early so that all patients could be offered the drug.

...In the two trials, involving 705 patients with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, the combination of Revlimid and a steroid delayed the worsening of the disease compared with a placebo and the steroid. The difference was so great that the committee overseeing patient safety decided to stop the trials. The company said the data from the trials would be released at medical conferences this spring.

Celgene’s president and chief operating officer, Sol J. Barer, said the early conclusion to the trials would allow the company to seek approval to treat multiple myeloma a few months sooner than it had planned. “It’s one of the seminal events in the life of a company,” Dr. Barer said.

I’m not sure I would have taken this report seriously if I’d seen it in a substantially lesser publication. It’s interesting how reliable the NY Times is, and what a great resource it is, when politics are not involved.