Let Casey speak!

William A. Galston, a domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Catholics were the quintessential swing voters. Mr. Galston said they were roughly a quarter of the electorate but lived in disproportionate numbers in the swing states of the Midwest. Polls show them closely divided between the two candidates. Mr. Galston said Mr. Obama could improve his standing with Catholics by, like Mr. Clinton in 1992, conferring with a group of Catholic leaders and then giving a substantive speech at Notre Dame or another Catholic institution.

Mr. Obama should also speak out in favor of legislation now before Congress to provide financing for alternatives to abortion like free prenatal care and adoption assistance, Mr. Galston suggested. Mr. Obama should also invite Mr. Casey to speak at the convention, he said.

“I spend a lot of time with Catholic intellectuals, and no matter how liberal they are and inclined to support Democrats, they speak with vehemence about the exclusion of Casey’s father from the 1992 convention,” Mr. Galston said. “They don’t accept any of the explanations. I think it would be a dramatic act of historical rectification that would resonate with Catholics.”

Tim Reidy at America links to something good here.

As usual, a thoughtful reflection in First Things:

And that’s another thing. I’m as liable to fits of pique, bursts of high dudgeon, and spasms of righteous indignation as any conservative kind of guy, but I must admit that some of Baehr’s language about “moral people in America” and his tendency to throw labels around make me a tad uneasy. Does anyone—besides the sociopath of my opening graf—really think of himself as immoral, as opposed to someone who follows a broader-here/narrower-there code of conduct? There’s a difference between objecting to adolescent dreck that offends merely for the sake of being offensive and a moralism that fulminates constantly against those millions upon millions of degenerate “others” who we just know revel in such things. Remember: This depiction has a mirror image, one in which traditional Christians, conservatives, and “moral majoritarians” are portrayed as a bunch of self-righteous “others” from whom one should flee before the Inquisition sets up shop again and all undesirables are thrown into underground cells wearing nothing but chains and those pointy dunce hats.

This is a great story:

Should Lomong make the U.S. Olympic team and qualify for Beijing, look for him to exercise one of his inalienable rights.

“I’ll say it’s not a good thing for China to sponsor the government of Sudan and kill innocent people,” he said of the genocide in Darfur that has left more than 300,000 dead and 3 million homeless. The hard-line military leaders who stoked war in the oil-rich south when Lomong was a boy remain in power, only now their tactics are being applied to control the potentially oil-rich west. In Darfur, the slaughter has been carried out by the Janjaweed horseback militia, a band of Arab nomads recruited and financed by the Khartoum government, which receives cash, arms and political protection from China.

The atrocities have led to the creation of Team Darfur, an international coalition of more than 300 current and former athletes pledging to address the crisis. More than three dozen of them are from the U.S., and though the organization’s official Web site does not list Lomong among the group, his advocacy for the cause could be significant should he get to Beijing.

At the same time, he tries to be understanding of athletes who have taken a more cautious posture, such as LeBron James, who was one of two Cleveland Cavaliers last year who refused to sign a petition protesting China’s support of Khartoum.

“He probably didn’t know what’s going on in Sudan and his teammates did,” Lomong said of the NBA superstar, who in recent months has adjusted his stance and suggested he’d be comfortable making some type of political gesture in Beijing. “If I was born here in the U.S. and didn’t travel too much, maybe I wouldn’t know what’s going on overseas. But me, if I was here during the Vietnam War, I would have signed a petition saying we need to get out of it and not harm innocent people.”

Read this article:

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

This is a lovely reflection:

We are forever lectured to respect “diversity” and remain open-minded in the face of difference, but it’s likewise reassuring to know we occasionally resonate with kinship. My brother and I come from the same place but have followed variant, sometimes parallel trajectories. To a surprising degree, my assumptions are his: “And what I assume you shall assume.” We share a rare temperamental compatibility, at least most of the time.

Often I feel the same about Theodore Dalrymple, at least as I know him in print, and this is particularly true of his essay in the August edition of the New English Review, “Of Death and Transfiguration.” He starts with observations on the Internet and the ease with which it permits relationships, both rewarding and irksome, and quietly turns to a meditation on mortality, the human body and the sacred. Each sentence reads like a digression, yet the whole coheres, and the reader is reminded that he is in the company of an adult who has learned something from his experience:

“We have to live as if some things were sacred, for if we do not we become savages, or rather beings without limits. We cannot (or at least ought not) to condone necrophilia, for example, merely because no one is harmed by it, because the body on which it is practised is inanimate and has neither interests nor wishes, and is therefore not the kind of being that can give or withhold consent.

“The precise boundaries of the sacred are always disputable, but we cannot do without an awareness of the sacred, even when we know that sacredness is not a natural quality, that it is not just ‘there’ in the way that natural qualities such as weight and density are, that it does not inhere as a natural quality of anything, that it is imposed upon the world by us in a way that other qualities are not. And that is part of the reason why a purely scientific attitude to life is both undesirable and impossible.”

What more could you want really?  And the movie has Gandhi in it (well, Ben Kingsley, but we all know his real name.)  It’s getting good review at Rotten Tomatoes, or, at leas, better reviews than anything else out there.

Can you tell I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace? Anyways, check it out:

Even then I recognized Oberst’s melodramatics for what they were, but couldn’t deny that they affected me. When he feebly insisted, on “Kathy With a K’s Song,” “Love is real/ It is not just in long distance commercials,” he vocalized my own desperation to believe it was true. The summer I turned 18, I sublet a sleeping loft in midtown Manhattan and his phrase “the coffin you call your apartment,” from “Something Vague,” permeated the space. The teenage Oberst, who attended a private high school just like I did, perfectly articulated the sorrow and angst that seem trivial to the adult world but feel epic to adolescents blessed with intact, financially comfortable families.

From the NYTimes:

The town council took the significant step in June of moving from merely encouraging citizens to install solar panels to making them an obligation. The ordinance, the first of its kind in Germany, will require solar panels not only on new buildings, which fewer people oppose, but also on existing homes that undergo renovations or get new heating systems or roof repairs.

To give the regulation teeth, a fine of 1,000 euros, about $1,500, awaits those who do not comply.

Critics howled that the rule, which is to go into effect on Oct. 1, constituted an attack on the rights of property owners. The regional government in Giessen stepped in and warned that it would overturn the rule.

City officials in Marburg said, in turn, that they would take their case either to administrative court or all the way to the Hessian state capital, where they would try to get the state building code changed to protect their ordinance from officials in Giessen.

In the middle of this political chess match sit homeowners like Götz Schönherr.

Keep me in your prayers…