There is, of course, nothing wrong with the theory of evolution as a means of explaining how life developed on this Earth – but there is a problem when people take that theory and attempt to apply it in a universal sense and turn it into a political ideology masking as a scientific theory:

Father Marc Leclerc, professor of Natural Philosophy at the Gregorian Pontifical University of Rome, explained in a recent article for L’Osservatore Romano that there is no problem with the theory of evolution. The problem, he said, lies in the ideology that is created as part of the theory.

In his article, the Jesuit priest said that in the past, and much more so in the present, “many, whether they are fans and foes of Darwin, have confused his scientific theory of evolution—which should be discussed at a scientific level by competent persons—with the reduction of it to an ideological system, a vision of the world that forcibly falls upon on all men.”

Father Leclerc underscored that “as then Cardinal Ratzinger rightly wrote, the controversy has not come from the theory of evolution as such, but from the turning some of its elements into a universal philosophy, in order to explain all of reality’.”

Darwin, he noted, “applied his theory of natural selection to how our species emerged, but not to the functioning of current human societies, underscoring instead as a beneficial aspect for the species the acquisition of moral and religious faculties that lead man to protect the weakest, contrary to the absurd pretentions of social Darwinism.”

“Evolution and creation pose no opposition to each other, but rather they show themselves to be complementary,” the priest added.

He went on to say, “Reflection on the place of man in evolution and in creation” is of particular importance. Man, as a living being, can find his own place in the evolution of species which, when read post factum, had prepared for his coming for a long time. But man cannot reduce himself to a pure product of the evolution of species without contradictions: in other words, man is not reducible to mere animality.”

But the Darwinists insist we are mere animals – accidental results of accidental evolution which has no meaning and no point. Such assertions fly in the face of easily observable facts – such as the fact that there is no way to predict what I’ll think next, and if you can’t predict what I think next, then a purely evolutionary view of the development of life is utter nonsense. But Darwinism – as differentiated from Darwin’s theory – isn’t about science or truth; it is about an anti-religious worldview which some people insist we adhere to.

What is the reason for opposing Intelligent Design as a theory of how life developed? Not anything in Darwin’s theories. In fact, ID does an excellent job of filling in the rather large holes which have developed in Darwin’s theory since he first proposed it more than a century and a half ago. The reason for being opposed to ID is because if you have a Designer, then you’re open to the whole gamut of thought regarding God, and the Darwinists don’t want the kiddies to hear about God, because – in their absurd view – belief in God is at the root of all or most of our societal problems.

It is fine and dandy for someone to believe that the net effect of religious belief is negative – but it is quite another when such a person desires to impose that view on everyone else. By hijacking Darwin’s theory and pretending that it explains all and also disposes of any need for a Creator, the anti-religious Darwinists are seeking to impose their worldview on us.

We must fight this – in the name of liberty and, very importantly, in the name of science. It is anti-science to hold that a theory cannot be questioned – Darwin has a theory and it is actually our duty to question it, and accept no dogmas which have built up around it unless such things are verifiable in a laboratory setting. For all the carping that ID can’t be proved, the fact remains that Darwin’s theory can’t be proved, either and thus mere rational discourse requires that we allow the free play of ideas in the matter of the origin and development of life.

Meaning, in this instance, our Democrats and their Obama-Pelosi-Ried Hot-Dang-We-Gonna-Spend-Us-Some-Money Porkenstien “Stimulus” Bill – no one can possibly read it prior to the upcoming vote – from The Sundries Shack:

It is now 7 PM and the Democrats in Congress have yet to give their Republican counterparts a copy of the final Stimulus Bill for them to read. Steny Hoyer says that the House is going to move toward a vote starting at 9 AM tomorrow.

Today’s version of the bill clocks in at 1,434 pages and that’s not the final version. What Congress will likely vote on tomorrow (because President Obama has practically demanded that he sign it on Monday) is likely going to be larger.

There is no chance in the world that any member of Congress is going to be able to read the bill by morning unless they are a trained speed reader. Even then, they’re not going to know the full ramifications of what the bill contains. I’ll do some back of the envelope calculations to prove it.

Let’s start with two generous assumptions: that the bill remains at 1,434 pages, and it gets in the hands of your member of Congress at 8 PM. Let’s also assume that there are about 350 words on each page

In order for anyone to read the entire bill in 13 hours, they’d have to start the very minute they got it and read over 1.8 pages a minute every minute, without a break. They’ll be clocking in at a reading speed of 640.5 words per minute at that rate. If anyone needs a potty break, they’d better take the bill with them. Forget eating.

As noted later in that linked entry, even if by some miracle some Congresscritter did manage to read the whole thing, that doesn’t mean said critter would be able to understand all the ramifications of the bill, as a lot of the bill is couched in “amendment to sub-section 3C” legalese. At the end of the day, Obama and his Democrats are passing a bill of which they are ignorant of its provisions as well as how it will fit in with all other programs carried on by the United States government – its just a bunch of sh** shoved through the legislative process as fast as possible, with low level Congressional aides and Obama Administration officials to be left to apply it to the American people after passage.

Liberals, do you fully realize just how monumentally stupid this is? And this is the action of the man you swear up and down is a vast improvement over President Bush. Let me tell you – for the sake of argument, lets say that Bush was just as bad as you say he was. Obama is worse. By far.

Entirely unsurprising:

President Obama today repeated the claim we asked about yesterday at the press briefing that Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar, Inc., “said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off.”

Caterpillar announced 22,000 layoffs last month.

But after the president left the event, Owens said the exact opposite.

Asked if the stimulus package would be able to stop the 22,000 layoffs or not, Owens said, “I think realistically no. The truth is we’re going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again”

“It is going to take some time before that stimulus bill” means re-hiring, he said.

The wonder remains whether or not Obama actually believes his Porkenstein will do good, or whether he’s just scamming us…he’s either a fool, or a con artist. Neither of which makes for a good President.

Liberals: Just please file this sort of post for later reference. When your Obamessiah completely flunks the test and Democrats are crushed in 2010 and 2012, you just remember that we told you before it was passed that the stimulus bill not only would not work, but would actually make things worse.

Yaaawn…some day this won’t be routine:

In a press conference Thursday, the House Republican leadership spoke candidly about being kept out of the House-Senate conference on the Obama-Pelosi-Reid so-called “economic stimulus” bill. They confirmed they had not yet seen the text of the bill as of 4 p.m.

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said he was unsure how many Democrats would vote with Republicans again on this bill but that he thought Republicans “may get a few” Democrats to side with them. The fact that the Demos have now broken their promise to have the public able to see the bill for 48 hours may drive more Dems into the Republican camp.

“[I] don’t know, ‘cause they haven’t seen the bill either,” Boehner said.

“The American people have a right to know what’s in this bill,” Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind) told HUMAN EVENTS after the press conference. “Every member of Congress — Republicans and Democrats — voted to post this bill on the internet for 48 hours, 48 hours ago. We’ll see if the Democrats keep their word.”

Actually — as of 5:15 pm, the Democrats had broken their word.

One wonders why Democrats even bother making promises – everyone just has to know by now that anything a Democrat says is merely for temporary expediency and the actual event will be some sort of corrupt, screw-the-people boondoggle designed to enhance the power and wealth of senior Democrats. But they keep at it, and they keep breaking their promises.

UPDATE: Now that the Democrats have graciously placed the bill on the House website, lets see how they are going to keep things above-board for us:

SEC. 1221. ESTABLISHMENT OF THE ACCOUNTABILITY AND TRANSPARENCY BOARD.

There is established a board to be known as the `Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board’ (hereafter in this subtitle referred to as the `Board’) to coordinate and conduct oversight of Federal spending under this Act to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

SEC. 1222. COMPOSITION OF BOARD.

(a) Membership- The Board shall be composed of seven members as follows:

(1) The Chief Performance Officer of the President, who shall chair the Board.

(2) Six members designated by the President from the inspectors general and deputy secretaries of the Departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and other Federal departments and agencies to which funds are made available in this Act.

(b) Terms- Each member of the Board shall serve for a term to be determined by the President.

The President will have his guy running a board staffed by more of the President’s guys to keep an eye on what the President’s guys are doing. Yeah, I’m confident – feel absolutely certain that these watchdogs will keep close tabs on how the people’s money is spent.

And we get this all for a measly $14,000,000.00….

There are some things which can’t be tolerated – and the growing absurdity known as the Obama Administration is one of them:

President Obama’s choice for Commerce Secretary, Senator Judd Gregg, withdrew his nomination on Thursday. He said there were “irresolvable conflicts” between him and the administration.

“It has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census, there are irresolvable conflicts for me,” Mr. Gregg said in a statement. “Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.”

The withdrawal comes one week after Mr. Gregg was named to become the third Republican member of the Obama Cabinet. It is the second time that the commerce secretary position has been vacant within the last month.

The conflicts, I imagine, revolve around the fact that the so-called “stimulus” bill is a con job, while the census going under direct White House control means that liberals are going to try and gerrymander the United States, likely by trying to manage the count so that liberal areas of the country lose fewer House seats than expected. Disaster is coming, and no one with any sense really wants to be part of the train wreck, except Gates at Defense who is doing a patriot’s job of protecting the military as best he can against the liberals.

Keep fighting, House GOP, keep fighting:

Are Republicans winning the public relations battle over spending in the $800-billion-plus economic stimulus package? Democrats and Republicans are nearly even in this week’s edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveys found that the Democrats’ lead is down to just one percentage point. Forty percent (40%) of voters said they would vote for their district’s Democratic candidate while 39% said they would choose the Republican (see crosstabs).

This marks the lowest level of support for the Democrats in tracking history and is the closest the two parties have been on the generic ballot.

The thing about the “generic ballot” is that it always tends to over-state Democrat support. Generally, if the GOP is sitting three or four points back in the “generic ballot”, then GOPers are doing well…to be one point back means that if the election were held today, the GOP would utterly crush the Democrats.

Trouble is, the election isn’t until a year from November…

On the other hand, after more than a year of Obamunism, we might have the GOP up by ten in the generic ballot…

What this shows is that when we fight on conservative principle, we win – people want to vote for something, and right now the GOP is once again becoming the watchdog of the people in Washington, DC. The only thing which could harm us now (other than the impossible: ie, Obamunism working) is a failure on our part to keep fighting. Tooth and nail, toe to toe – lets have at them with gusto and give them not a moment’s rest. They are corrupt, they are dishonest, and they are destroying our nation – the harder we fight them, the better things will be.

I know, you liberals out there are going, “huh?” with that look of confusion you normally have on your faces made even more pronounced. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

You see, Obama can’t tax to get the money for his Porkenstein “Stimulus” Bill. Neither can Obama borrow the money – with the world heading into deep recession, there just won’t be the global funds to, willy-nilly, buy $800+ billion in US bonds in addition to normal bond sales to finance our debt/deficit. So, what is an Obama to do? Print it, of course. But printing money is inflationary, and inflation is essentially a hugely regressive tax on the poor, especially poor people on fixed incomes. Obama is going to bail out CEOs and unions on the backs of the poor.

But, surely, he’ll throw some taxes on The Rich in order to make them pay their fair share, right? Well, no. You see, Obama has placed caps on CEO pay and this means that there will be less The Rich income to tax…and more and more compensation paid to The Rich in non-monetary (and thus un-taxed) instruments. CBO estimates (PDF) that Obama’s plan will reduce tax revenues from The Rich by more than a billion dollars per year – and if you think The Rich are going to lie down on this, you’re nuts. The Rich will just have the corporation buy the Manhattan penthouse and then allow The Rich to live in them as part of their compensation package.

The thing is, liberals, is that you can’t do liberalism – as it is based upon false premises, anything you try to do with it will come out wrong. You’re starting out here with a desire to stimulate the economy and help the poor – what you’re going to do is provide swag for corrupt entities and harm the poor, while The Rich get richer. I know the adage is “if at first you don’t succeed try, try again”…but we’re on experiment Number 1,056,095,009 in Liberalism, and each of the first 1,056,095,008 failed miserably. After a while, we have to go with the adage, “don’t be a freakin’ moron”.

If you liberals really go for this, all you’re doing is building the bonfire which will result in Civil War II:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said the government should look into creating a “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s Department of Justice.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said that such a commission, which would answer to both Congress and the executive branch, could probe Bush administration policies on torture, interrogation and surveillance and “get to the bottom of what happened” during the eight years the Bush administration grappled with the legal war on terror.

Leahy called his proposal a “middle ground” between those critics of the Bush administration seeking to prosecute officials, and others wishing to concentrate on the future as opposed to investigating the past. “We need to be able to read the page before we turn it,” said Leahy.

Which assertions by Leahy – one of the more nasty, leftwing partisans in the Senate – are utter nonsense. This would be a political witch-hunt controlled by the kook left and designed to make conservatism illegal. The worst sort of screwball, leftist, anti-American lies would be presented as rational arguments and Bush Administration officials – possibly including President Bush, himself – would be presented as evil men who need to “confess” in order to gain absolution. Nothing doing, lefties.

You do this, and there will be a fight.

Dear friends and even you liberals:

We here at the Noonan household are experiencing the end of life for a beloved family member, and thus I am not in good position to regularly update the blog. I will try to update later today with new entries, but at the time of writing this entry, its quite late and I’ve had an exhausting day making arrangements – so the brain is mush (more so than usual) and I’m afraid anything I wrote at this moment would be rather incoherent (once again, more so than usual).

Meanwhile, the earlier entries all seem rather popular, so please have at them – and, of course, you now have this open thread to discuss just how bad the Obama economic disaster will be…plus just how miserable will be Obama’s foreign policy as it relates to Iran and the larger War on Terrorism.

I ask for your patience and, of course, your prayers for our family as we enter in to this trying time.

UPDATE: Thank you all for your kind words and prayers. As of this moment (10:06 PM, PST, Wednesday), she still clings to life, and we’re just waiting for the moment when she’ll go home to the Lord.

The first in an unfortunately continuing series of what happens when liberalism occurs:

An Arizona man who has waged a 10-year campaign to stop a flood of illegal immigrants from crossing his property is being sued by 16 Mexican nationals who accuse him of conspiring to violate their civil rights when he stopped them at gunpoint on his ranch on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Roger Barnett, 64, began rounding up illegal immigrants in 1998 and turning them over to the U.S. Border Patrol, he said, after they destroyed his property, killed his calves and broke into his home.

His Cross Rail Ranch near Douglas, Ariz., is known by federal and county law enforcement authorities as “the avenue of choice” for immigrants seeking to enter the United States illegally.

Trial continues Monday in the federal lawsuit, which seeks $32 million in actual and punitive damages for civil rights violations, the infliction of emotional distress and other crimes. Also named are Mr. Barnett’s wife, Barbara, his brother, Donald, and Larry Dever, sheriff in Cochise County, Ariz., where the Barnetts live. The civil trial is expected to continue until Friday.

Here we have the confluence of liberal ideology on immigration, property rights, civil rights and judicial activism. To think that an American citizen can be hauled into court by illegal immigrants shows just how out of touch liberalism is with reality – and only because liberalism exists is there anything other than laughter at any foreigner, illegally come into the nation, bringing such a suit. They have no standing – they have no business being here; they should be arrested for harassing the rancher, not accorded respect in our courts.

Thank you, liberalism.