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Where will we go if Thompson folds?

We? As in “True Supporters of Our Troops?” We’ll go the same place Fred Thompson goes, I expect. McCain.

Coming back to this board after a long time away, I see many who look on a term of Hillary Clinton as a better lesson for the nation than four or eight years of John McCain. Irrelevant. The mood of the country is still tilted left, so the Democratic superdelegates will probably get their female one-termer. However, we need a moderate like Senator McCain to keep it close so she doesn’t have big congressional coattails. And we need a McCain to be constantly pressuring her to be less of a defeatist. It will be a close run thing (reference, anyone?), but with enough pressure she may just decline to lose a war on her watch.

When at war, winning the war comes first. McCain knows that. So does Fred Thompson, who I greatly respect. And at a proper point, Thompson will plainly face the situation we find ourselves in, and act as a patriot.

It's easy to observe that these things are tolerated in the Old Testament, but it is impossible to say that God instituted them or approved of them as expressing His perfect intention for the human race.

I doubt you could cite a single instance in the Bible where a polygamous marriage was happy.

Thank you! The Biblical polygamists were flawed heros, at best. See for example I Kings 11:1-8 on how Solomon's 1,000 wives and concubines were part of his villainy.

I Samuel 8 : "the Lord . . . said 'Heed the demand of the people [to be ruled by kings] . . . For it is not you [Samuel] that they have rejected; it is Me that they have rejected as their king. . . . Heed their demand, but warn them solemnly, and tell them about the practices of any king who will rule over them.'"

Our founding fathers were heeding their Bibles by not making of us a kingdom, and our laws today should not honor the kingly way of life.

As for McDonalds who cares if they get a Big Mac while in town.

Thank you. Strong religious practices provide a frequent reminder of whether you are living by God's commandments. Which one to emphasize is actually not so important. Orthodox Jews have telephones in the house but but can't eat at McDonald's. The Amish visa versa. Complaining about such supposed inconsistencies makes as much sense as complaining that somebody else prays more on Sunday than Thursday. The way I have been taught, there is no deep reason I am forbidden to eat pork and not beef. (I know about split hooves and chews cud, but that isn't a moral distinction.) The reason is to be thinking of God's soverignty even in everyday matters.

Everyone changes. Including Anabaptist groups like the Hutterites and Amish. Maybe, if and when that school reopens, it will have a telephone. But that man had a cell phone with him, and was talking on it, and the police were outside, and we know the result.

Anabaptists fled to the US and Canada from Europe because of the most extreme persecution. We should be proud of being one of the only countries tolerant enough for them to live in, rather than trying to make everyone like us.

He's definitely one of the fifty men the Lord couldn't find in Sodom.

And, to correct myself, one of the ten that, in the end, Lord could not even find.

The chemical/biological angle is the final sentence in this Reuters report picked up by the Boston Globe. Is this chemical threat one they have made before, or do we have here yet another example of poor mainstream media news judgement?

I do know that the Jerusalem Post reporter on the OP story, Khaled Abu Toameh, is a reliable, non-political, brave and decent Palestinian with relatives who may not appreciate this kind of reporting. It's not going too far to ask people to pray for his safety. He's definitely one of the fifty men the Lord couldn't find in Sodom.

So, how was she being threatened when she was interviewed after she was released and still praised her "kidnappers"?

When I heard that she was released, and was in the headquarters of a Sunni party, my feeling was that she is almost certainly free but one can't be 100% sure yet. Apparently, at the time, she was also not quite sure, and so played it safe.

So by definition, anyone that reports anything negative about Israel is anti-Semetic, leftist and far-left? I just want to clarify this.

I just read through a great number of your thoughtful past posts and do not think you are anti-Semetic or leftist. And I am going to risk a long post in response.

It seems like you have met up with people who are indeed leftist-leaning. I judge this from your reliance on links citing figures from B'Tselem, an organization of Israeli human rights activists who are both defeatist and leftist. This doesn't mean you were a sucker. But is it possible that if you had met with a different crowd, they would have shown you different massacre sites. And they might have helped inspire you to find statistics showing, as I believe, that the human rights standards of the Jews are higher than those of their military adversaries. So who can you trust? Well, I would sincerely suggest that you read the book "O Jerusalem!" by Collins and Lapierre, a great 1972 bestseller on Israeli history which is scrupulously fair to both sides and will thus give you more of a both sides experience.

You write in another post that the Israeli military killed 2,000 Palestinian civilians in this century (not sure if you meant the 20th or 21st). I don't know that anyone knows the number, either way, but it must be some such number, representing a world of suffering while being quite low by the standards of any war generating even a fraction of the same publicity. What about the 19th century? Until at least 1870, Palestine's Jews were, in practical terms, pacifists, never fighting back, and as a result there were constant massacres of peaceful Jewish civilians -- both in the countryside, where Jews were a minority, and right in Jerusalem, even though Jews there were generally half or more of the population. (It is a myth, actually believed by many Jews, that the Jewish presence in Palestine was ever a small one.)

As explained in the Jerusalem books of Sir Martin Gilbert (a calm sort of conservative who is among the world's top historians) , Palestine's Jews have faced year-in year-out attempts to deny access to Jewish holy places (most are outside the 1949-66 borders) and massacres going back at least 200 years. Palestine's Jewish community has tried almost everything (dates below are rough and overlapping):

-- Appealed to Turkish colonial rulers for protection (prior to 1870's)

-- Tried paying Arabs to fend off the jihadi types (1870-1900)

-- Pushed to live side-by-side with Arabs / equal rights for all (1900-1920)

-- Tried to achieve peaceful partition / Jewish parts to Jews, Arab to Arab (1920-1947, then on and off with decades of negotiating, like the Oslo disaster, in which the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for compromise)

-- Interstate warfare (mostly in immediate response to major attacks; 1948 War of Independence, 1956, 1967, 1973)

-- Pushed to live in purely Jewish towns spinkled among the West Bank Arab towns from which Jews had been massacred-out before 1949

-- Raids against terrorists (individually, in buildings, in gathered groups, and sometimes their homes) based on usually correct but sometimes wrong intelligence information (1950 - current)

-- Fencing off hostile Arabs (current effort)

One thing that HASN'T been tried to is to kill as many Palestinians as possible, civilians and military, indiscriminately, hoping to end the conflict once and for all. There is something to be said for this approach, which has similarties to US/UK practice in WWII. To be said for it, is that you may get a near-permanent solution in a short time, and save more lives in the long run. So the Freepers who suggest it aren't monsters and may be right. However, more likely, they are wrong; it sure hasn't worked for the Palestinians! There are almost a billion Moslems cheering on the five million or so Palestinians, and Israel can hardly defeat the billion. So, thankfully, public opinion, consisting of Israel's patriotic Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, will not allow the kill-all-Arabs approach. This brand new story shows what one side does to stop this -- and the other side doesn't do except, sometimes, for show):

Israeli Police Raid Jewish Legion Office

And another alternative which Israel, with rarest exception, rejects:

How the British fought terror in Jenin

And to give a feel for the real Israel you maybe did not get to meet:

In Memory of Lt. Uri Binamo

Some day, I pray, the Palestinian leadership will see the value of living in peace with the Jews, genuinely seeking to end their centuries-long war on the basis of true compromise in the spirit of Arabs for Israel. Until then, I fear, your new friends will indeed be living in a war zone. And they won't like it, any more than the Israelis do.

Latest medical updates: Doctors are still insisting that Sharon will live, but surgery continues into what is the fourth hour to relieve pressure on his brain. No word about the Prime Minster's mental state. Earlier, of course, the overwhelming political consensus was that Sharon's political career is over. . . . Surgery is expected to end within the hour.

The final sentence above came out about 5 minutes ago; the rest is about 25 minutes old.

Radical Palestinian calls Sharon illness 'God's gift'

and

Palestinians fire celebration shots at news of Sharon in hospital

No admission of a false police report yet, but I don't why else he would have resigned. Let's not gloat too much.

If Condi wins the Republican primary, Condi will be the next president.

Any Republican primary. People who aren't ideologues, even Republican primary voters, are tired of the "vote for me" deal and will go for someone who is isn't running but appears to be a serious candidate. As far as I know, the last serious draft was Eisenhower, and, well, that worked, didn't it?

Hilary will be mum, stick her finger in thew air and will in the end vote for her.

Senator Clinton would stick her finger in the air, see the base she needs to win primaries is consumed by the meme of Brown being the next Thomas, and vote no. Once liberals feel themselves free to attack a black person, their attack becomes all the more frenzied.

Having said that, I do admit that I will be happily surprised if Bush picks Brown. Extremely surprised.

We got miered out of a conservative by krystal, coulter and the NRO...this next one had better work out...

The problem is that those guys were totally vindicated yesterday, as was Harry Reid, when this came out:

Executive Women of Dallas Speech

My vote, for what it's worth, is Janice Rogers Brown.

I haven't been around here much lately, which may explain why I find the near-uninamity here rather suprising.

I would love to see either Brown or Maura Corrigan up there, but they would not be confirmed if Bush was conservative enough to nominate one of them, which he isn't.

Of those who have a chance, my heart says Alice Batchelder is the most conservative of the bunch, but Mitchell McConnell is eleven years younger and a sure confirmation.

Race and sex if not going to make much difference when it comes to getting confirmed, if that's what anyone's thinking. And to get confirmed, a nominee must satisfy the small group of liberal Republicans.

I'm sure Dick Cheney rules his life by what Dick Morris thinks.

I've only read part of the Morris book, but the argument of the book is NOT that Condi needs a new prep job, but that we need to draft her out of her current position right into the presidency.

In the early republic, Presidential candidates did not campaign, but were put forward, pure and simple, by their party and friends. His thesis is that the internet puts those friends back in the driver seat if only they grab it.

Will Rice be drafted? Probably not. But will she, whether Sec. of State, or veep, seek an office she has already made clear she is not seeking? DEFINETELY not.

For most of US history, the vice-presidency was regarded as a much lower office than Secretary of State. In the early days they sometimes called the US Secretary of State the "premier." Going from Secretary of State to the vice-presidency won't do anything to enhance Rice's image as a leader; all it would do is reinforce the view that she is some kind of Bush crony. And it won't reverse her decision not to run.

As for whether Rice should be drafted, most will probably say no. My view is that, just as 2004 was ordained a GOP year, 2008 is, the way things are now going, a Democratic year. With victory in Iraq pretty much in hand by then, swing voters will not care so much about a strong foreign policy and will be ready to let the Democrats have their chance. Only Rice could win despite this because of various factors that should be pretty obvious. Aside from race, the appeal of a truly high-minded candidate who had not stooped to fund raising and begging people to vote for her would be overwhelming. So, what the heck, throw the dice. I don't know about you guys, but if faced with a primary choice between Rudy and a bunch of men bearing the senatorial curse (Hillary has no such curse, being best known as first lady), I could easily go for a Condi write-in.

Lie detector?

Well, the conventional FBI-type of polygraph examiner tends to say that the voice stress analyzer used by this police department is worthless. Me? I think all the lie detectors are voodoo science. At best, lie detectors are interrogation tools to intimidate witnesses into telling the truth. Darla Gingerella, and everybody else who can afford it, should just say no to lie detectors.

I am not quite sure what to make of RADAR, which interests me a lot more than the OP. The idea that women are the gentler sex is pretty old fashioned, I would have thought, and as an old fashioned man, I had always thought there was a lot to it. Most American liberals are, in my experience, much more committed to the idea that men and women are interchangeable than they are committed to Swedish-style feminism. So RADAR's ideas are perhaps not all that conservative.

Surely it is true that women are less likely than men to commit most categories of violent crime. How often does a woman stick up a liquor store? So why is it in different in these domestic disputes?

This is where I depart a big from the FR orthodoxy. The New York Times is a liberal newspaper but far more fair to us than other liberal institutions, like, oh, every Ivy League university, and almost all of the foreign press. Here's what Bill Safire says about the pick:

Safire, reached at his office at the Dana Foundation, a non-profit group he now oversees in Washington, D.C., praised the choice of Tierney. "He's a fine reporter with a definite libertarian streak and a good sense of humor," Safire told E&P. "I'm rooting for him." Safire also said that another conservative voice on the page is positive. "I was hopeful that [Sulzberger] would get one or two columnists to reflect a different view from the editorial page, and I think he has done that." David Brooks, who joined the page in 2003, is its other conservative voice.

Tierney returned his predecessor's compliment. "I'm a huge fan of Bill's, and I would love to write a column as good as his, but I'm not replacing him," he said. "He is irreplaceable. I'm just writing on the same page."

Here's Tierney's most famous article:

Recycling Is Garbage

It makes no sense to drive Tierney into the arms of the liberals by attacking him before he starts.

Even if the person who needs the organ does not have insurance to pay for the procedure?

I am confused. Your insurance, whether private or government (i.e. Medicare) pays for your getting a medically beneficial transplant. If you are indignant, then, one way or another, everyone pays. The LifeSharers members tend to be midlle class and higher libertarian types who are unlikely to lack insurance.

Many people don't want to donate their organs after their death. That's fine. There may be excellent reasons for that decision. However, if they ever need an organ, it is only fair that they be at the absolute bottom of the list. Liberals tend to hate that idea because they don't want people to bear the consequences for their actions.

Corection to link in my last post:

LifeSharers