The Catholic Cricket

Senator Kent Conrad, speaking on the vote to confirm Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, offered the following rationale:

One committee member, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., a former tax commissioner, said in normal times, Geithner’s failure to pay his taxes would have led Conrad to oppose the nomination. 

“But these are not normal times,” Conrad said. He said the economy’s not “out of the woods” and touted Geithner’s extensive experience at a time when the country needs a treasury secretary imminently. 

What poppycock.  What makes now abnormal?  Housing slumps?  Economic changes?  Rising unemployment?  That’s all typical stuff for any country.  There are ups and downs in life.  That’s normal.

Think about what Conrad’s logic allows for.  In “normal” times, I wouldn’t  want a bank robber to run Citigroup, but since he has so much experience with money we have to hire this one.  In “normal” times, I wouldn’t want a homicidal maniac in a key leadership position at the DoD, but given the state of the world, we really need this homicidal maniac in place.

We are always in “normal” times.  There are always critical events occurring in the world, and we need to react to them.  That’s a part of living.  Using such a rationale in justifying the appointment of an unfit person to the position of Treasury Secretary is disingenuous at best.

What Conrad is saying is that ethics don’t really matter when times are tough.  Except that’s when they really matter.

Maybe Geithner will do a really good job as Treasury Secretary.  I hope so.  Maybe it was an honest mistake (doubtful, in my mind), or Geithner is truly repentant for his past actions.  But I don’t buy Conrad’s implied argument that it would take too long to find a suitable alternative (surely the Obama transition team had a list of possible nominees), or that Geithner is the only person who can fix things, and that therefore one must

This time I’m using iBlogger, which looks much better so far. I need to play with it more to see how well it works, but it’s not bad. It supports multiple blogs, which is nice.

If it worked, there should be a picture of Evelyn holding a drawing of the new baby in mommy’s tummy (“she’s crying”, according to E). I’d like to be able to move that picture within my post, but it doesn’t look possible right now.

And this post should also include my current location.

Looks good, although it’s a bit cumbersome switching between edit text mode and the preview/extras screen that adds images, location, and links.

And to test the links, let’s add one:
Loudest Cricket
Yeah, it probably would have been faster to type the HTML code.

Well, I’ll give it a chance since I spent $0.99 on it. It’s definitely a steal at that price, if everything works the way it’s supposed to.

Edit: Well, it mostly worked. It used the wrong location in the Google Maps link. There must be a way to update it, otherwise the Location feature is pretty much useless.

Steve Skojec over at Inside Catholic made an interesting point in an article a couple of days ago.  The estimates for the number of people expected (at the time) to attend the inauguration of (then) President-Elect Obama was 1.5 million people (I haven’t seen “official” estimates of the actual number yet).  This is really close to the number of unborn babies killed each year through abortion.

Go look at pictures of how crowded the Mall was.  That’s how many babies were killed last year.

For another perspective of what abortion has done since 1973, look at the total.  Say there have been around 50 million abortions since unrestricted access to abortion was discovered in the Constitution (it’s hard to know for sure, since reporting is sketchy at best).  That’s the population of the west coast of the US.  Eliminate all of the people in California, Oregon, and Washington.  Or it’s the entire population of Canada one and a half times.  Or it’s half of Mexico.  Or it’s more than the populations of the 50 most populous cities in the US combined.  And that’s just abortions performed in the US.

This country has said for the past 36 years that it’s ok that we’ve killed about 25% of our children each year.

Pray for an end to this horror.

In an effort to update this blog more often, I’m trying out various blog-authoring apps on the iPhone. This was written with BlogWriter Lite.

It looks like it’s ok, and the full version is supposed to add some other functionality. But I’ll be trying other apps as well.

It’d be nice if I could scroll the text I’ve written so far, and if there was a preview button. ahh well, what should I expect from a free app?