Andrew Newman at American Spectator is worried by people who don't make New Year's resolutions.

People who don't make New Year's resolutions worry me. Are they perfect? Are they simply waiting for the great up escalator to descend from the sky? Are they biding their time until Barack Hussein Obama delivers us from this red-blue valley of tears and into that promised and purple land of prosperity and plenty? Or are they simply lazy?

His questions fly very wide of the mark. He fails to grasp the key point that many people do not make New Year's resolutions because they make resolutions every day. Those of us who practice continual self improvement do not think we are perfect. Far from it, in fact. Rather, we are simply more serious about self correction than your typical News Year's resolution practitioner, who is using a training-wheels approach to self improvement.

If I determine there is something in my life worth doing better, it behooves me to start doing it better immediately, rather than waiting for some special day to declare my intentions to fix identified problems. In fact, those who would put off such corrections are typically just using the idea of New Year's Day as a time for resolutions as an excuse to continue their behavior, guilt free, until Jan. 1st rolls around again. The problem with this approach is that it erodes the will to improve altogether, resulting in your average resolution lasting about a month.

So, Mr. Newman, you need not worry about me. I suggest you worry about your fellow New Year's resolvers, as their resolutions may be evidence of a personality incapable of correcting bad behavior, even when they know they should.

Every now and then a story comes along that so defines a topic of discussion as to lift it beyond the reach of petty debate. With regard to the threat of Islamic Jihad, this is one of those stories.

Men claiming to be local Taliban bombed a girls school in Noor Ali village in Darra Adam Khel on Monday night and threatened further attacks if the students did not wear veils. The militants also left Urdu pamphlets at the school saying, “Be veiled, otherwise we will bomb you again.”

If ever a story could end the useless "debate" over the issue of jihad, this should be it. There is no amount of talk that will appease these people. There is no single issue driving their behavior, as James Baker would have us believe. Simply, it is their nature. There truly is but one solution, the Islamic Jihadists must be destroyed. Annihilated. Wiped out. It cannot be made any clearer.

It is incumbent upon free peoples to take the actions necessary to end this assault against human decency. Yes, that will involve suffering casualties. Yes, that will involve being the target of reprisal attacks. It is the right thing to do. It is time we get into the ring and fight. Really fight, not sort-of-maybe-pretend-to-fight like we have done thus far. Everywhere these people show themselves we must strike with righteous fury. They can be allowed no quarter and, most importantly, no mercy. All the Jihadist understands in this world is death. It is time we deliver it upon him.

Cross-posted at Conservative Compendium.

A Chicago group is claiming that area homelessness is higher than previously recorded, because "invisible" groups of homeless, living with friends and relatives, were not counted by City Hall.

Chicago’s nightly homeless population stands at 21,078 — nearly four times higher than the count compiled by City Hall — because of an "invisible" group that includes those "doubled up" with relatives and friends, homeless advocates said today.

The city’s last homeless census — on Jan. 27, 2005 — counted 6,715 people.

. . .The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless conducted its more exhaustive count in conjunction with the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Using Chicago Board of Education figures of the 8,461 students living "doubled up" in the homes of family and friends, they counted 21,078 homeless on any given night with just 22 percent of them served in shelters.

Students living with friends and family while attending school are not homeless. Nobody wants to have to rely on friends and family for shelter, but sometimes it has to be done. Living in such a state is a far cry from homelessness. Thankfully, the city has rejected this redefinition of homelessness.

I think this issue reflects a larger philosophical disagreement. Conservatives tend to believe that government should be used as a last ditch solution to problems. If someone is homeless, they should look to friends and family for help first, and only if none can be provided should they be assisted.

Liberals, on the other hand, discount altogether that there can even be a solution that does not involved government. Thus, someone who has a place to live thanks to the generosity of friends or relatives is illogically considered "homeless." Not to do so would be an acknowledgement that problems can be solved without government, an idea which could spell doom to liberal candidates if it ever caught on, and therefore must be resisted.

The group even went so far as to argue that living "doubled-up" must be counted because it is "unstable" and "insecure". To these people a person who has legitimate concerns about their future must immediately succor at the big government teat, as the very worry itself - regardless of whether or not the cause of concern ever comes to fruition - is itself a reflection of societies failure and the need for government intervention. This view is as dangerous as it is naive.

Cross-posted at Conservative Compendium.

In an audacious Newsweek column, former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor Michael Gerson offers the wrong prescription for the Republican Party. His article is rife with leftist-type appeals to emotion and faulty assumptions. That his brand of pseudo-analysis was taken seriously in the Bush White House goes a long way towards explaining Bush's failed experiment in big government Republicanism.

He opens the piece with an emotional appeal regarding the Katrina victims. He describes them as "disconnected from the mainstream economy," then quickly offers up the big government silver bullet, demanding "an active response from government to encourage economic empowerment and social mobility."

What Mr. Gerson fails to understand is that government activism is what has disconnected these people in the first place. The true lesson of Katrina should be recognition of the overwhelming failure that is the welfare state. Seventy years after FDR redefined government as a welfare provider, and thirty years after Johnson declared a "war on poverty", tens of thousands of New Orleanians lived so poorly they couldn't even leave town in face of a foreseeable disaster. For how many decades must a policy fail before it is abandoned? The underlying problem here is systematic government dependence, the solution to which is most certainly not more dependence - but that is exactly what Mr. Gerson is offering.

Next he attempts to wipe away Bush's failure to control spending by first distorting Reagan's legacy and then pointing to Reagan as an example for Bush. What he ignores is that Reagan knew his tax policies could not immediately solve the problem of big government, but that it would enable the economy to catch up with, and eventually overtake, federal spending. Lo and behold, this happened less than a decade after Reagan left office. That Reagan's policies could not immediately reach his goals is not now an excuse for giving up what he started and believed in though didn't see finished on his watch.

Underlying the rest of the article is a fundamental misunderstanding of why conservatism opposes big government. He refers to small government advocates as "radical", "antigovernment", "reflexive" and "unbalanced". Well, I have a name for Mr. Gerson. Ignorant.

We are not antigovernment, we merely realize what Mr. Gerson does not - "that government is best which governs least," to quote Thomas Paine. He falsely attributes our stance as "abstract antigovernment ideology," but the truth is that small government advocacy is entirely practical. Our goal is efficiency.  Smaller government works better than bigger government, and consequently serves its people better - which Mr. Gerson atleast implies is his primary concern. Unfortunately, if his ideas were to actually be listened to - which apparently they have been over the last few years - the results would have little in common with his stated goals. Such is always the result of big government activism.

Cross-posted at Conservative Compendium.

I'm a fan of Rudy Guiliani. He's not my first choice for the 2008 nomination, that's Newt Gingrich hands down, but he's near the top of the list. I know that he would be a strong leader in the war against global jihad, which is the single most important issue in my opinion. But there are still some issues where I'm concerned about Rudy and I'm waiting to here more details on his positions. One such issue is campaign finance.

Recently, on the Dennis Prager radio show, Rudy gave what I thought was a very weak answer when asked his position on McCain-Feingold. Here's the relevent section:

DP: My listeners know this, that this is actually rendered [McCain], unfortunately, unvotable for me. And if I have him on, I will tell him that, and that is campaign finance reform, which has ensured that essentially, only multi-millionaires run for office in the United States of America, especially to the Senate, because I cannot...if I, Dennis Prager, who doesn't have any money, wanted to run, no millionaire could give me a million dollars. They could only give me $4,000 dollars. So you have any views on campaign finance reform?

RG: I think there's no question that the present McCain-Feingold law has had tremendous loopholes in it, that people have taken advantage of. And it needs to be corrected. It needs to be cured.

At this point red flags are going up. Loopholes? That sounds a lot like the recent spat over 527's, which formed as a counter to the law's assault on free speech and wouldn't need to exist at all if people were free to spend their money how they please.

DP: So you would like to see it in place as well? You're also for...

RG: I would like to...but I think, in fairness to Senator McCain, that he has recognized some of the problems that maybe weren't foreseen in McCain-Feingold, and has promised to try to fix it. I don't know that that's happened.

DP: Well, let me then be specific. Why shouldn't people just be allowed to give any amount of money they want to any candidate, and just have it publicly known? Why should there be a law limiting that freedom?

RG: Well, I mean, there...I think there are very good arguments on either side of that. I've always lived under a campaign finance law that had limitations on it, so I'm sort of pretty comfortable with it. But the reality is that the Supreme Court has so far ruled on that, and I guess found McCain-Feingold...

DP: Unfortunately.

RG: ...found it Constitutional, although that was a pretty close vote.

DP: All right. We need to spend some time alone together.

RG: But I mean, I grew up in a system in New York where we had campaign finance, and we had matching funds, so I got pretty used to it. But it's the law, unfortunately, the campaign finance law has become so complex and so difficult.

Rudy's position is that, basically, he's always had to deal with campaign finance laws so the thought of not having those kind of restrictions on free expression is beyond him. This certainly does not encourage one to believe Rudy is a deeply principled thinker. However, his strong fiscal record, support for school choice and firm stance in the war make him a net positive candidate in this bloggers opinion. And hopefully he'll be influenced by the right policy people.

Cross-posted at Conservative Compendium.