Okay, that sounds really beautiful. But what does this have to do with me? What kind of connection do I even have with Mary after all? So her body is "up there"... in heaven. I'm here on earth. I hope I make it to Heaven some day, but that some day can seem pretty distant from my daily life. What difference does it make anyway whether I believe in this or not? Why is the Assumption of Mary a "holy day of obligation" (and that phrase doesn't exactly warm me up inside either).
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.
"We are reaching for the stars, and it is not easy. Accidents happen. Good people die. And we move on. We move on to reach the goal they died for, because to do less would be to dishonor them and their sacrifice, concluded Tumlinson. "Tonight, in dark skies above Mojave, there are three new stars. Let us wipe our tears, pick up our wrenches and tools and get back to work, and now and then as we move ahead in this quest, look up to them and smile - as they are smiling at us."
Reports from the field show that remarkable progress is being made. Violence in Baghdad and Anbar Province is down dramatically, grassroots political movements have begun in the Sunni Arab community, and American and Iraqi forces are clearing al Qaeda fighters and Shiite militias out of long-established bases around the country.
But in the flush of battlefield success, public perception of American military progress continued its calamitous decline. According to Pew Research, the percentage of Americans who opine that America's military operations are "going well" slid from 38% in May '07 to 34% in June; those who believe our military operations are "not going well" increased from 57% of respondents to 61%.
The same Pew poll found that only 30% of the public could identify General David Patraeus and only 27% could identify Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. 59% of respondents were unaware that Shi'ites constitute the majority religious group in Iraq. Precise knowledge of the war's progress is obviously scarce. Yet 95% of respondents have defined opinions on the success of our arms.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
The contrast between the use of optimism and pessimism in politics was on full display in the last century. The pessimists included Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. The optimists included Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Reagan and Bill Clinton. The optimists won, hands down, even though TR once warned, in his 1907 annual message to Congress, that if optimism is "carried to an excess, it becomes foolishness."
From the beginning, Sarkozy pledged to help heal the ill feelings that have existed between our two countries — especially over Iraq. He outraged French Socialists and journalists by coming to America during his campaign to meet with our president. He has praised America’s dynamism, freedoms and prosperity, and he promises to work for reforms that will make France more like the U.S.
Sarkozy’s victory over anti-American political forces was not just decisive; it was far more of a mandate than our own current congress claims. In his first post-election speech, he went out of his way to say, “I want to call out to our American friends to tell them that they can count on our friendship.”
On another level, Hawking spent the most time during his preflight interview with NBC News talking about how the space effort needed to engage "the entrepreneurial engine that has reduced the cost of everything from airline tickets to personal computers." Only then, he said, could the cost of space travel fall to the point that we could start thinking about expanding our living space beyond Earth, as an insurance policy in case the unthinkable happened on our home planet.
Yes the music was good, the lights and exhibits stimulating, and the crowd mellow and enthusiastic. But there was something more than sensual comfort operating.
There was an emergent property to all of this. I guess it at least had something to do with space exploration. But in many ways it was also about the future - the future of the future - and what it will be like to live there. In ever-increasing ways, our world is now poised on the cusp of what is and what will be. How that future is shaped is rushing at us at ever-increasing speed - and we all have our foot on the gas pedal.
These and other indicators of progress are encouraging, but they are not determinative. I understand the damage false optimism does to public patience and support. I learned long ago to be skeptical of official reports that are long on wishful thinking and short on substance. As we make progress in some areas, the enemy strikes where we do not have as great a presence. But security in the capital is indispensable to a greater level of security throughout the country so that political and economic progress can occur. And in Baghdad we are making progress. We have a long way to go, but for the first time in four years, we have a strategy that deals with how things really are in Iraq and not how we wish them to be.
"I have listened carefully, especially to those whose loved ones are suffering from serious diseases and disabilities and who disagree with my position," Casey said. "I deeply respect their views and hope they can come to understand mine."
Casey's position counters that of his Republican colleague, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, who has been one of the Senate's most vocal supporters of embryonic stem cell research.
The calendar pages turn, Lent unfolds — and once again, God comes to the rescue of our humanity. That is what we remember, ponder, and celebrate each year in the great Easter Triduum: the astonishing good news that the Creator of the universe entered his creation, in the person of his son, in order to redirect the story back to its proper end, which is eternal life within the light and love of the Blessed Trinity. That’s a rescue story for the ages.
The irrationality of the early twenty-first century is not only the irrationality of murder-in-the-name-of-God, however; it is also the irrationality of the radical skeptic, who insists that human beings can never know the truth of anything with surety. Corrosive skepticism is eating away at the cultural vitals of Europe, the continent that gave the world the very idea of reason; corrosive skepticism is not unknown in America, which is Europe transplanted. At this moment in history, confronted on the one side by irrational faith and on the other by a profound loss of faith in reason, the Church, Benedict XVI insists, must “make more room for rationality.”
The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort.
But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.
As hideous as it was, the truth is, long before Terri's case made headlines, the removal of basic care – food and water – was becoming commonplace. It continues to happen every day across our country oftentimes in cases, like Terri's, where the patient does not suffer from any life-threatening condition.
Much of the problem that exists stems from a blind acceptance of misinformation that has moved us from a firm belief in the sanctity of life to a "quality of life" mindset, which says that some lives are not worth living.
Should a peace candidate win the American presidency in 2008, prompting the U.S. to pull out of Iraq before the democracy there is stabilized, in the short term we will save lives and money. But as the larger war continues after we withdraw, jihadists will still flock to the Sunni Triangle. Hamas and Hezbollah will still rocket Israel. Syria will still kill Lebanese reformers. Iran will still try to cheat its way to a nuclear bomb. Ayman al- Zawahiri will still broadcast his al Qaeda threats from safety in nuclear Pakistan. The oil-rich, illegitimate Gulf sheikdoms will still make secret concessions and bribe increasingly confident terrorists to leave them alone. And jihadists will still try to sneak into the United States to kill us.
Amazingly, however, just at the moment things are at last beginning to look up in Iraq, a narrow majority in Congress has decided that it's time to force our military to retreat. Rather than supporting Gen. Petraeus, they are threatening to strip him of the troops he says he needs and sabotage his strategy.
But if we have an orphaned war that is dubbed lost, it nevertheless can still be won. None of our mistakes has been fatal; none is of a magnitude unprecedented in past wars; all have been cataloged; and few are now being repeated. We now understand the politics of our Iraqi odyssey, with all its triangulations, and the ruthlessness of our enemies.
Not arguments, rhetoric, pleading, or money right now can save the democracy in Iraq. The U.S. military alone, in the very little remaining time of this spring and summer, can give Iraqis the necessary window of security and confidence to govern and protect themselves, and thereby to allow the donors, peacekeepers, compromises, and conferences to follow.
May Lent be for every Christian a renewed experience of God's love given to us in Christ, a love that each day we, in turn, must "regive" to our neighbor, especially to the one who suffers most and is in need. Only in this way will we be able to participate fully in the joy of Easter.
"I think it is going to mean that people develop a persona earlier and wear out their welcome earlier than they would," he told The Politico in an interview. "I think there's going to come some point this year where people are going to basically be saying: 'I'm largely disinterested in the contest.' "
I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.
Are you thinking maybe it's time to turn over the page to the Anna Nicole Smith "A life in pictures" double spread? Well, that's my point. Most of us aren't reading the science, or even a precis of the science. We're just reading a constant din from the press that "the science is settled," and therefore we no longer need to think about it: The thinking has been done for us. Last week's U.N. IPCC "report," for example, is not the report, but a political summary thereof.
Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years (see Figure SPM-1). The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture. {2.3, 6.4, 7.3}
Gone from the latest summary is the infamous “hockey stick” of the 2001 report. This was a graphic purporting to show that the planet is warmer today than at any time in the last thousand years, a demonstration which required erasing the inconvenient medieval warm period and the little ice age. The new IPCC report has also reduced its estimate of the human influence on warming by one-third (though this change was not flagged for the media, so few if any news accounts took notice of it). That reduction is one reason the IPCC narrowed the range of predicted future warming, and lowered the new midpoint — i.e., the most likely prediction of temperature increase — by a half degree, from 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2001 to 3 degrees in this report. The new assessment also cuts in half the range of predicted sea-level rise over the next century.
"It is too early to know what influences the ACS anomaly may have on Hubble Space
Telescope Servicing Mission-4 planning" said Preston Burch, associate
director/program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope. "It is important that
the review board conduct a thorough investigation that will allow us to
determine if there are any changes needed in the new instruments that will be
installed on the upcoming servicing mission so that we can be sure of maximizing
the telescope's scientific output. We are continuing to make excellent progress
in our preparations for the servicing mission, which is presently targeted to
fly in September 2008."
…we live in a very special moment. Using the talents given by God, people of
science have been able to develop unprecedented means of obtaining knowledge.
Extraordinary means of transportation and communication have been developed.
Computers have reached capacities and speeds previously unimaginable. Serious
plans can now be made for space stations, space colonies, and for manned
missions to planets as far away as Mars. Scientists and technologists are
developing the possibilities of making the whole planetary system a home for the
human family. But all of these developments will lead to truly significant
results only if they are employed within the frame-work of a new humanism, where
spiritual, moral, philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific values are developed
in harmony, and where there is a profound respect for the freedom and rights of
the human person.
National Review Online's (NRO) Corner blog features accounts from over the weekend, and hopefully there will later be a summary at NRO's home page. I believe that following November's disappointing election setbacks, this conference was well timed to revitalize the conservative movement. As I told NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez when I was leaving the luncheon room today, "It worked! We're energized!"
“Hubble has truly transcended just being an astronomer’s tool for science,"Perhaps his most challenging task will be the complex repair of a failed instrument already onboard Hubble.
Grunsfeld said in a recent interview here at the Space Telescope Science
Institute, command central for the orbiting observatory. “It is an icon for
science and as I travel around the country or around the world, people know
Hubble—people have an idea of what Hubble does, people recognize that it’s
important."
For Grunsfeld, the most significant and trickiest task will be to revive the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), which conked out after a power failure in August 2003.
Installed on Hubble in February 1997, the STIS separates incoming light into its constituent colors, giving astronomers a chemical map of a distant object. Since deployed, STIS has been critical in the confirmation of black holes at the centers of galaxies, made the only discovery of an atmosphere around an exoplanet and helped confirm the age of the universe.
Preparing for the mission along with John Grunsfeld and his crewmates is a large team, including my colleagues and I, working to develop and carry out the mission from the ground.
Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Roe v. Wade has got to go!
