There have been suggestions, from President Bush and others, to amend the Posse Comitatus act in order to make it easier to use the military to respond to natural disasters. The act dates to Reconstruction and essentially makes it illegal (except under certain conditions*) to deploy the military for use in domestic law enforcement. The…

No evidence of shots fired at rescue copters

Robert P. George remembers philosopher John M. Dolan, who recently passed away. Dolan was a colleague of G.E.M. Anscombe (see his remembrance of Anscombe here) and shared with her a strong concern about beginning- and end-of-life issues. Together with the late Cambridge University philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe and the eminent physician and scientist Dr. Hymie Gordon…

I have no love for professional scold and virtue-crat (and high-stakes roller!) Bill Bennett, but this is ridiculous. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is demanding Bennett apologize for some comments he made on his radio show while discussing the book Freakonomics. You may know that the author, Steven Levitt made the controversial argument that legalizing…

Heh. (n.b.: bad language)

The immediate spin on the aftermath of Katrina was that New Orleans had descended into a Hobbesean world of criminality and anarchy. But it’s now starting to look like that ain’t necessarily so. To wit: this LA Times article. Snippet: Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in…

Today is the feast of St. Michael and all angels. There’s very little serious discussion of angels (and the demons, their wicked counterparts) these days ; popular images tend to involve either a saccharine Hallmark-card type spirituality or lurid horror-movie imagery. But as our pastor pointed out last night, the Bible mentions angels over 200…

Just wanted to try and come to some kind of conclusion regarding Christopher Insole’s The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism (see here, here and here for previous posts on this topic). In his concluding chapter Insole wants to clarify what the defender of political liberalism is and isn’t committed to.…

Zod in 2008! (via Unqualified Offerings) But wouldn’t this require amending the constitution? (I believe he’s an immigrant, after all.)

I don’t usually agree with John McCain, but props to him for calling for an investigation into new allegations of torture of prisoners in Iraq. Y’know, it’s funny (not ha-ha funny) that after all the tortured arguments (pardon the expression) about whether it would be justified in various contrived “ticking bomb” scenarios, the actual torture…