Iran: Be Serious. Republicans: Be Quiet

Joe Klein argues that the Obama administration is finally making the Iranians scream and that Republicans look ridiculous claiming otherwise.

Another Newtonian Principle Disproved

Campaigning in South Carolina, angry Newt Gingrich, hoping to end up as the conservative alternative to his enemy Mitt Romney, unleashed a barrage of criticism of Romney's business practices that has made Romney look more...conservative.

Go Ahead. Click. He's Watching.

When President Bush's critics lambasted him for talking about God's Providence, I had trouble joining in, since almost every morning, I pray, right out of The Book Of Common Prayer, "In all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose." Which bring us to Tim Tebow, about whom theology professor Owen Strachan sounds, well, Anglican:

I believe that God is overseeing all of Tebow's passes, but he's also overseeing the typing and reading of this paragraph. He's overseeing the Denver Broncos, but he's also overseeing the Boston Celtics (much as it may seem otherwise at present), the Museum of Modern Art, and the playtime of your nephew. He's in control of all things. In this sense, which is called "secondary" causation (God's oversight of all things), the Lord is directing Tebow's life.

But is God directly intervening on the football field in the same way that, for example, he did to cause the virgin birth of Luke 2 (in what is called "primary causation")? That I don't know. It's not clear to my human eyes how this all shakes out. I do know that the Lord is working everything out according to his wise and mysterious counsel which, try as we might, we cannot fully understand.

We Are Stardust, We Are Golden, We Are Doomed

Gregg Easterbrook on the material word's be all and end all:

Researchers think they have a good idea of what happens inside the sun. Hydrogen, the lightest element and the sun’s primary constituent, fuses to become helium, releasing energy. Eventually, long after humanity has gone extinct or evolved into some other form, Sol’s hydrogen will be consumed. Then the helium will begin to fuse into medium-weight elements. An eon after that, the medium-weight elements will begin to fuse into metals. Ultimately Sol will explode, scattering heavy elements into the cosmos. It’s thought that all the heavy elements of the universe were forged within stars that later exploded, supernovas having been more common when the firmament was young. The Earth, your body—both are composed of elements made inside ancient stars that exploded.

Bruce Juiced

Bruce Springsteen became a superstar in the mid-1980 as the anti-Reagan, a working class patriot expressing a hermeneutic of skepticism about authority. Insiders say his upcoming album has the same energy:

"He gets into economic justice quite a bit," a source with knowledge of the upcoming album told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's very rock'n' roll. He feels it's the angriest album he's ever made. Bear in mind, though, that [Springsteen] wrote and recorded the majority of the album before the Occupy movements started, so he's not just setting headlines to music."

Get Me To The Grand Canyon

St. John's Church, photographed with the AutoStitch Panorama app for iPhone. Hat tip to School Committee member (and Nixon confederate from bygone days) Noah McMahon

NOAA Snark

Presidents usually avoid being critical of predecessors. But Barack Obama was yucking it up about Richard Nixon today as he announced his government reorganization plan:

There are five different entities dealing with housing. There are more than a dozen agencies dealing with food safety. My favorite example—which I mentioned in last year's State of the Union address—as it turns out, the Interior Department is in charge of salmon in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them in saltwater. (Laughter.) If you're wondering what the genesis of this was, apparently, it had something to do with President Nixon being unhappy with his Interior Secretary for criticizing him about the Vietnam War. And so he decided not to put NOAA in what would have been a more sensible place.

Obama may have heard the story from William Daley, a Clinton Commerce secretary who just quit after a year as White House chief of staff. If you look at the dates alone, the accusation seems to add up. After the Kent State shootings in May 1970, Interior secretary Wally Hickel wrote a letter to Nixon criticizing him over the Vietnam war and urging him to spend more time listening to young people. That Nixon seethed for months is well known. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was created as part of the Commerce department in October. Nixon fired Hickel in November.

But there's a lot more to the story than that. According to NOAA's official history, the new agency was parked at Commerce on the recommendation of Commerce secretary Maury Stans, a Nixon friend since their Eisenhower years, in anticipation of a dramatic plan to streamline the federal government not unlike the one Obama proposed today. Nixon's was the brainchild of Roy Ash, who died last month:

One of [Ash's] proposals was to replace the Department of Interior with a new Department of Natural Resources. One of the elements of the Department was to be a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which would combine some elements of the Department of Interior with the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA) of the Department of Commerce. Then Secretary of Commerce, Maurice Stans, noting that ESSA would comprise more than two-thirds of this new Agency (some 10,000 employees and an estimated FY 1970 budget of approximately $200 million) countered with a proposal to, at least initially, consolidate and house NOAA within Commerce and transfer it to the proposed Department of Natural Resources at a later date.

NOAA's historians attribute Commerce's win to the logic of Ash's proposed natural resources department (an especially good idea today), Stans' persuasiveness (which I experienced many years later when he was raising money for the Nixon library), and "perhaps" tensions between Nixon and Hickel. Given all that, it looks as if 44 took a cheap shot at 37. If Nixon had succeeded in getting his reorganization plan through a Democratic Congress, NOAA would have ended up right where efficiency wizard Ash wanted. When the Republicans get done with his proposals, we'll see if Obama's still laughing.

That Would Be 1982, BTW*

On Thursday a group of conservative religious leaders, including New York's Roman Catholic archbishop, Methodists, Lutherans, Southern Baptists, and the former Episcopal bishop who is now "archbishop" of the "Anglican Church in North America," published an open letter against gay marriage. They warn the like-minded that the government will try to make them knuckle under, not by forcing them to perform marriage ceremonies for gays and lesbians, which the signatories consider unlikely, but by punishing churches that deny benefits to gay couples, state-licensed adoption agencies that won't place children with the same-gender married, and state-accredited marital counselors who won't provide services to them.

Fred Clark, a Baptist Gen X blogger, doesn't just worry about how this kind of message from Christian institutions alienates gays and lesbians. He's afraid that eventually, it will alienate everybody. He writes:

Public statements like this exist only to take sides, draw lines and build walls. This letter serves no prophetic or pastoral purpose. But it is — unintentionally — useful and helpful for identifying the dead-enders determined to make exclusion and condemnation the hallmarks of their communities.

This pronouncement is an explicit “Unwelcome” sign hung on all of their churches.... [T]hat cramped inhospitality applies not just to the GLBT folks they’re demonizing here, but to “all Americans who dare to differ” with the letter’s signatories.

So in a sense what these signatories have just done is they have turned to nearly every American born since, say, Thriller came out*, pointed a long crooked finger and declared, “We don’t want your kind in our congregations.”

Live Or Die?

On Sept. 14, 2001 at Washington National Cathedral, an Episcopal installation, President Bush's national security adviser, Condi Rice, was inspired by an apt departure from The Hymnal 1982. As she writes in her memoir, No Higher Honor:

I am the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and my mother was a church organist. Music has been at the center of my life since I was born. I cannot to this day sing "O God Our Help in Ages Past," without flashing back to National Cathedral. I focused on the music and the extraordinary words of our great national songs. What had begun as a day of sadness ended, for me, with a sense of rising defiance. The last hymn was "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The original words of the Civil War hymn had been "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." Over the years congregations (hoping not to sound offensive, I guess) had changed the words to "As he died to make men holy, let us live to make men free." Much to my surprise, we sang the original version. As the military choir sang the climatic "Amen, Amen," I could feel my own spirit renewed. We'd mourned the dead. Now it was time to defend the country.

"Change The Sheets," Kathleen Edwards

From her new album, Voyageur. Review here.