The little film’s success has spawned a sequel:

Enjoy!

In Utah’s caucuses, the political parties’ more extreme bases rule the nominating process – more, it seems, than in just about any other state. Before anyone gets too excited about Bennett’s ouster being an expression of national conservative outrage, let’s note that Representative Jim Matheson now faces a primary. Matheson is the lone Democrat in Utah’s delegation. His sin? Voting against Obamacare. In Utah’s caucus system, being insufficiently liberal can get you in as much trouble as not being conservative enough. I found this comment interesting:

Much in the same fashion as what Utah Conservatives accomplished against Senator Bennett, an ideological sense of pureness has overcome Utah Liberals, who want to remove their one chance of representation in Washington, because he isn’t big government enough…. if the Republican Caucus wants to emerge a stronger and healthier coalition come November, I would suggest a gameplan for maintaining a sense of Ronald Reagan’s big tent and his 80 percent friend, not a 20 percent foe approach. If we lose the Ronald Reagan Republican formation, than our movement will shrivel and die, especially if we don’t reinstate the Eleventh Commandment of Republican politics.

Writers in the blogosphere (including yours truly) often criticize our national political class. Well, Bennett is one of the good guys: decent, thoughtful, conservative, classy, and well-spoken. The hard-core anti-Bennett forces in Utah who, amid their gloating, are calling the Senator a RINO have a very heavy burden to carry in winning that argument. Others, like Dan Riehl, wonder whether the tea partiers are controlling the situation quite as much as they think they are.

The tea party movement is a great and important phenomenon, but excesses are excesses, no matter who commits them, and the Bennett episode was one. Excuse me if I don’t join in the celebration.

Obama let on that this frenzy to achieve passage of a hugely irresponsible and politically unpopular bill was in large part ego-driven when he started hounding House Democrats to save his presidency. (He, however, has no interest in saving their congressional careers as he demands that they walk the plank to vote against their constituents’ wishes.)

This was the candidate who created a cult of personality, who told us he represented the “New Politics,” who was going to eschew politics-as-usual, and who would be post-partisan, post-racial, and post-ideological. Now he’s a handful of votes away from a humiliating defeat. No wonder it’s desperation time. His possible failure would not be a mere political failure; it would be the obliteration of his own mythology.

Should he squeak it out, Obama’s “victory” would come with a heavy price. Gone is the image of a policy sophisticate (try watching that Bret Baier interview a few times without wincing). Gone is the “moderate” moniker. And gone is the notion that he’d usher in a new era of less contentious and less corrupt politics. (It’s a new era, perhaps, but hardly a better one.) There is no mistaking now the depth of the campaign deception. The public has figured out what he is all about. And increasingly, they dislike what they see.

I think the Senate bill is going to pass the House this weekend and that any bill to enact “fixes” will be quickly mired down.  So the Senate bill will become the law of the land.

Five or ten years from now we will not recognize the health care system we have, and we won’t like what we see there either. For the rest of our lives, unless this thing is repealed (and don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen) the debate will be like Social Security has been: How much money do we put into this program? That will take place alongside lie after lie about the program’s sustainability.

In fact, what we may have here is a government entitlement that is both unrepealable and unsustainable. The “unrepealable” part is what the Left wants. I’m not sure they care about the “unsustainable” part, because I think their solution to that is for the United States to become like Sweden.   I don’t think that’s what the country voted for in 2008.

And yes, insurance companies are a big problem. But buying health insurance will also be a lot different in the future. By federal law, we will all have to buy health insurance, which is not such a big problem to me, but we will have to buy a one-size-fits all policy that meets government standards. Say good-bye to your choices in the matter. And if you think the cost of your health insurance is going down, you will probably be surprised.

This is a big deal, folks. And it’s being passed despite opposition from a pretty large majority of the American people.

Then things are going to get very interesting.

You can see Justice Samuel Alito shaking his head and mouthing the words, “Not true,” in response to the president.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, we have this from Georgetown law professor Professor Randy Barnett:

In the history of the State of the Union has any President ever called out the Supreme Court by name, and egged on the Congress to jeer a Supreme Court decision, while the Justices were seated politely before him surrounded by hundreds [of] Congressmen? To call upon the Congress to countermand (somehow) by statute a constitutional decision, indeed a decision applying the First Amendment? What can this possibly accomplish besides alienating Justice Kennedy who wrote the opinion being attacked. Contrary to what we heard during the last administration, the Court may certainly be the object of presidential criticism without posing any threat to its independence. But this was a truly shocking lack of decorum and disrespect towards the Supreme Court for which an apology is in order. A new tone indeed.

Instapundit has a collection of additional comments on this latest episode.

One of the criticisms we hear about President Obama is that he is arrogant. This episode certainly seems to support that claim. And that attitude of arrogance may pervade his administration. In the video, you can see Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, at the Court members’ right. He is sitting right next to them. At least, he was, until he leapt to his feet and, with a grin, began applauding the president’s statement. If nothing else, this whole episode is appallingly impolite.

And to think the president is a lawyer.

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker

California federal courtroom for the first time.

Less than four weeks ago, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals determined that it was time to begin a pilot project exploring the benefits of broadcasting federal civil trials.   It is somewhat remarkable that the long-protected privacy of California federal courtrooms would become negotiable just weeks before the start of the Proposition 8 discrimination trial.   The Ninth Circuit’s “pilot project” immediately opened the door for Federal Judge Vaughn Walker to take extraordinary legal steps, on New Year’s Eve no less,  to extend the project to include the discrimination suit against Protect Marriage.  With every day, the prosecution of Protect Marriage seems to be led, not just by formidable constitutional attorneys David Boies and Ted Olson, but by Judge Walker as well.  An outraged National Review Online columnist, Ed Whelan, notes that by waiting until New Year’s Eve to make procedural moves to broadcast the Proposition 8 discrimination trial, Judge Walker essentially precluded the public from having any opportunity to oppose it.  In a letter written directly to the Judge, Whelan publicly challenges the motives behind the move:

“The longstanding policy of the Judicial Conference of the United States opposes all broadcasting of civil and criminal cases in federal district courts.  The concerns that animate that policy—including the threat of intimidation of witnesses and litigants—are especially present in the Perry case, as the December 28, 2009, letter from counsel for Defendant-Intervenors makes clear.

I will not address here the curious announcement on December 17, 2009, of the Ninth Circuit’s pilot program.  Suffice it to say that the selection of cases for a pilot program ought to involve, at a minimum, addressing the following questions:

1.  Does any party object to televised proceedings?

2.  Is there any reason to believe that televised proceedings might increase the risk that trial participants would face intimidation, harassment, or abuse?

3.  Is there any reason to believe that that televised proceedings might create a risk that trial participants, including the judge, would engage in grandstanding behavior?

Only in cases in which the answer to all three questions is NO would it make sense to consider further the possibility of participation in the pilot program.  By contrast, in Perry, the answer to all three questions is YES.

I am aware that a coalition of media companies has asked you to have Perry televised because “televising this modern-day Scopes trial would present viewers with a national civics lesson on a hotly contested issue that crosses social, political, educational, and religious boundaries.”  But the role of the courts is not to “present viewers with a national civics lesson.”  It’s to decide cases fairly.  In some cases, that goal might be jeopardized by televising the proceedings.  But in other cases it will be.  The very fact that these media companies are intent on portraying the case as a “modern-day Scopes trial” reinforces the ample evidence that this trial should not be televised.  If you persist in failing to recognize that elementary fact, the national civics lesson that you will be providing is yet another reminder that too many of our federal judges willfully abuse their authority in order to advance their own political agendas.

If you proceed to rubber-stamp the proposed revision to Rule 77-3 in order to enable televised coverage of Perry, I respectfully submit that your reckless and prejudicial course of conduct on this matter will have clearly demonstrated that your “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” within the meaning of the judicial-disqualification law, 28 U.S.C. § 455(a), and that you will then be obligated to disqualify yourself from further participation in Perry.  Indeed, I invite you to examine dispassionately whether you are already required to disqualify yourself.”

Ed Whelan writes, what everyone is thinking.

Read more here as the National Review Online examines the strategy behind the federal court challenge of Prop 8.

Anyone with a television set in 1994 remembers the televised circus that was the O.J. Simpson trial.  Judge Ito’s courtroom became a circus and the trial a judicial farce.   Indeed, the public is fascinated with law and order. It is also true that some events in our society really do not bear the intrusion of video cameras.  Truth was distorted in the O.J. Simpson case, and certainly the majority of Americans feel the outcome was dreadfully impacted.

Even if the famous Bush vs. Gore Supreme Court case in 2000, where the outcome of a presidential election and the interests of every American was at stake, only audio broadcasts were allowed of the proceedings.

The Supreme Court, with Justice Steven Breyer dissenting, has for the present, protected the proceedings from becoming an even bigger media frenzy.

“We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch watch-listers sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.”

–Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times column today, “As the Nation’s Pulse Races, Obama Can’t Seem to Find His.”  Ed Morrissey wonders whether Obama “has lost Maureen Dowd.”  Read the whole thing. (HT:  Instapundit.)

After a reference to the story of the emporer’s new clothes, Steele states his thesis:

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Steele’s piece is so tightly written that it is really impossible to excerpt fairly.  But here is one of his central and typically well-developed points:  Barack Obama is essentially a content-free president: 

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called “individuating”—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots”—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

One has to raise such points with great care in order to avoid being painted as a racist – or, in more modern parlance, as a believer in  racialism, which is less odious but just as debilitating to public discourse.  Steele, who himself is African-American, is well-positioned to comment on all this, and probably because of his own racial background (and the resultant need to avoid the tired charge of being a traitor to his own race) is one of the most careful living writers on the subject. 

In other words, his ideas cannot be dismissed.  Give them a read.

On Christmas Eve we share the words from my very favorite Christmas carol,

 What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honor to this day,
That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile, like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers,
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath
This holly, and this ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who’s our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?

We wish a blessed Christmas to all.

Before Google Maps or navigation systems, there were shepherds and there were stars.

In the Old World, shepherds knew the sky and the terrain like a well-worn map.   They were quite different from farmers of the time, who had the means to at least own land or to buy livestock.  Shepherds survived on meager wages earned by watching the flocks of others.  Even so, they were well-travelled and moved from pasture to pasture, hillside to hillside.  If there ever was a change in the sky, or a happening on the horizon, shepherds often would have been the first to see it, and likely the first to tell of it.

There has always been great poetry in the way Heavenly Father sent word of the Savior’s birth, dispatching a beautiful chorus of angels to proclaim it to lowly shepherds.  There was also a message in this method.  By breaking the news on the hillsides above Bethlehem where only shepherds dwelt, those shepherds would be the ones to have the privilege of announcing to many that the greatest shepherd of all had been born into the world.

Turning the pages of  the well-read passages in Luke,  it is also meaningful to note that the story of Christ’s birth is as much about what happened to shepherds that night, as what happened in the manger:

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And lo the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid.  And the angel said unto them “Fear not: for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you;  Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.  And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.  And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.  But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.  And the shepherds returned glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

How marvelous to contemplate what it might have been like to see or hear of this greatest event in history.  Almost nothing we know of or have read since compares.  The scriptures give hints as to what the Second Coming of Christ might be like, and it is remarkable to try to imagine that.  Yet nothing in the history of the world compares with the simplicity and humility of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus Christ.

Today, two thousand years later, students gather to study the histories of the world in Jerusalem.  As part of their studies, students are sometimes taken to what is now known as “Shepherd’s Hill,” believed to be the site where angels appeared at the birth of Christ.  On one occasion, students there were ushered to the hillside overlooking Bethlehem.  They were surprised to find that it wasn’t at all what they expected.   Instead of a lovely, grassy, welcoming hillside like one might expect in a painting or impression of that night, it was a dry, desert-like hill, rough and terraced, covered with rocks and even thorny bushes.

Still, all of the students sat down, pulled out their journals and were encouraged to write as they looked over the historic horizon and pondered the events that happened there.   In addition to the quiet of this sacred site, they had been assured that they would be able to see shepherds on Shepherds Hill.  Indeed, after just a few minutes poor little shepherd boys appeared and came towards them,  their palms turned upward in hopes of receiving something from the tourists.  Even in modern times, the shepherd boys were dressed in rags.

One student wrote:

“A shepherd boy came towards me.   He was carrying a little lamb draped around his neck.  He, like the other boys, hoped we would give them money or treats.  He asked if I would like to hold the little sheep.  As I took the warm baby lamb in my arms, I began to feel the spirit of the shepherds in a way I had never done before.   Unlike Wise Men who came to see the Christ child bearing gifts, these humble, solitary shepherds had nothing to give except their devotion and their faith in the wondrous words they had heard.

“Just as shepherds stand watch while waiting for the darkness to pass,  the Savior was born to stand watch through long, dark, nights with us, despite the terrors and sometimes the hardships that this life can bring.

“He knows us, his sheep.  He is our shepherd.”

Those who truly reverence the life of Jesus Christ also understand that we are all shepherds.  In our homes, our churches, our communities we are all part of  sacred flocks who need direction, protection, and love.

It is the beauty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that we are here to serve one another.

And so, we watch over those in need, those who anguish.  We provide a shoulder or a hand, or a round of applause when someone in the flock has a great victory.  We share the Sacrament with one another in our services.  We struggle to rise to new callings because even while we are learning, our service is important to someone.  Sometimes all we can do to show our love for the Savior and each other is to add our voices to a hymn and sing praises to God.

Still, every time we set down a casserole at someone’s doorstep, or put a child in our lap, aid a wayward teenager, teach a class, present a merit badge, or bestow an award on a young woman who might not have received it without us …

Surely, angels are singing somewhere.

There is only one headline, one directive that we have received in the last two thousand years that surpasses all others, and which if followed, would help us to rule the world:  “Glory to God in the highest, Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.”

If, as mortals, we could follow those messages and keep our sites set singly upon the glory of God, work for peace on earth, and extend goodwill to all men, all would be well.  At this Christmastime, may we find ways to re-dedicate ourselves to these simplest and most important of missions.

We are so blessed to know of, and to have a shepherd that we can trust.

Let us follow him.

“While shepherds careful vigil kept o’er lambs in fields of green.

The sky took on a brilliant glow and lit the grassy scene.

In dread they looked upon the star that rose anew that night.

Then angels came to calm their fears and tell of the heavenly light.

In word and song they shared the news of the babe who was their king.

They sang of peace and love and joy, and the good will he would bring.

The keepers of the flocks arose and followed the heavenly beam,

But not to gleaming palace walls as it would surely seem.

It led them to an earthen stall where cattle and goats were kept.

And in the manger soft and warm, the little Jesus slept.

Tears filled up their tired eyes and ran down wind burned cheeks.

They had found the promised one, for whom the world still seeks.

Though they were watchers of the flocks, tenders of lamb and ewe,

He was the keeper of God’s flock, HE was the shepherd true.”

— Sally Meyer

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Merry Christmas.