Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

The Notre Dame Controversy

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Over the last several weeks and months, one of the largest national controversies has been—by some accounts—the most perplexing. President Barack Obama (D), a noted supporter of abortion rights and the destruction of embryos for research, delivered the commencement address and received an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, a Catholic university.

By all accounts, the address Obama delivered yesterday was gracious, reasonable, and well-delivered. He called for supporters and opponents of abortion rights to find common ground, and to work to reduce the number of abortions in the United States. He called for a ‘sensible conscience clause’ which would allow religious doctors to refuse to provide treatments like abortion that are incompatible with their beliefs. Traditional Catholics have been up-in-arms though about Obama even being invited, since his beliefs run so afoul of Catholic doctrine, and many traditional Catholic students of the university sat-out the event.

So what’s the big deal?

First, Notre Dame is a Catholic university. It professes a Catholic identity. Many students who go there choose the school because it theoretically provides a more moral, less worldly environment as compared to secular schools. That is not to say that it shouldn’t expose its students to opposing viewpoints, but simply that it should present those worldy views in a proper moral context. As a Catholic institution, it must adhere properly to Catholic church policy. Like federal agencies must follow federal law, Catholic agencies must follow Catholic law. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) wrote in their 2004 document “Catholics in Political Life“:

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House Shopping Update

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townhouse1townhouse2So, I mentioned a little while ago that Melissa and I—in light of the ‘horrible’ economy presenting some of the best home-buying opportunities of a lifetime—are looking at possibly buying a house later in the year. Working with a Realtor, we’ve found a townhouse which is not yet built (scheduled delivery in October/November, just after our lease runs out) and happens to be in our price range. It has three bedrooms, 3 1/2 bath, 1-car garage, wouldn’t extend my commute . . . much, and is in a nice neighborhood.

It’s, of course, way too early to get our hopes up. We are working with the Realtor and builder to see if we can get something figured out that works with our current financial situation. It might work out, it might not. But, at this point, it looks fairly promising.

Forgive the poor cell-phone-camera pictures, but the pictures are an artist’s conception of the building (the one we’re looking at is the 2nd from the right) and the floor plan. The garage is in the back of the house, and the front door actually opens up on a grassy courtyard . . . or, at least it will once they build it. Exciting times!

It’s Time for Pelosi to Go

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Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA 8th), the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is among my least favorite politicians. She is a disingenuous opportunist at best, and a disgraceful liar at worst. She seems to have no interest whatsoever in working with members of the opposition party (though plenty of other leaders in both parties can be accused of the same). She has no qualms about lying through her teeth to advance her career or, as we have recently seen, protect her ‘image’ as a liberal populist. Ultimately, there are 257 Democrats in the House today . . . probably 200 of them would be better choices for the role of Speaker.

Let us briefly discuss some highlights of Pelosi’s actions and character over the last several years:

In April 2007, in direct violation of the Logan Act, Pelosi traveled to Syria without any executive branch review and arguably worked against the interests of the United States in order to cast herself as a ‘peacemaker’. The Logan Act (USC Title 18, Part I, Chapter 45, §953) prohibits any U.S. citizen, including members of Congress, from engaging in foreign policy activity without the approval of the president or his designates.

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Website Bugfixes and Such

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As is usually the case with major updates to the site, I’ve been spending my occasional spare moments since the launch looking for bugs and quashing them. I’m sure the site is not bug-free, but I think I’ve hammered out all the major issues. This time around was particularly difficult, since I didn’t reuse much of the code from the last site and it was sort-of like starting over (and I used a lot of new techniques that I’m not as familiar with troubleshooting).

One of the things I fixed was that the site had been failing the CSS 3.0 validation because of some Internet Explorer-specific code regarding image opacity, where IE (even the new IE 8!) has its own made-up opacity method instead of using the documented CSS standard. I couldn’t really fix this without breaking the site in IE 7 & 8, so I pulled the bad Microsoft code into a separate file that only gets loaded if you’re using IE. This makes the core code of the site compliant with the standards again.

The other thorn in my side has been an incompatibility with the current Firefox 3.5 Beta on Windows and Linux, and an identical issue effecting the released Firefox 3.0 but only in Linux. This caused the menu (when it is pinned at the top of the screen) to flicker annoyingly when scrolling the page up and down. This one wasn’t at all my fault; it’s the result of a Firefox bug (which I filed in their bug tracker). Initially I was going to just let it stay broken, since it only affects a small subset of my readers, but I spent a little time figuring out a workaround since I’m not confident the Mozilla folks will get this fixed promptly.

As always, there’s a list of officially supported browsers on my ‘About the Site‘ page. If you have any trouble in any of those browsers, please let me know!

Chrysler and the Rule of Law

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Todd J. Zywicki, an economics professor at my alma-mater George Mason University, writes in today’s Wall St. Journal about the Chrysler bankruptcy and the rule of law.

Perhaps I am beating a dead horse in the new Bush/Obama socialism, where the government owns banks, mortgage lenders, and car companies. Maybe America just isn’t about free markets, personal liberty, and rule of law anymore. But it seems to me that the Constitution, which says the government must make “uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 4), prohibits the federal government from treating Chrysler’s bankruptcy any different than any other bankruptcy.

Anybody hear me?

I weep for the republic.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.