March snippets

Here is one more contribution to the health care debate south of the border: Universal health care tends to cut the abortion rate. How so? Britain's former Catholic archbishop, Basil Cardinal Hume explains:

"If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed," Hume explained, "she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?" . . . For various reasons, then, expanding health-care coverage reduces the rate of abortion. All the other industrialized democracies figured that out years ago.

The question remains, of course, as to the best way to extend such coverage.

Greece is in deep financial trouble, as indicated in these reports: Fears of a Greek bank run, Strike-hit Greece awaits EU budget verdict, and Timeline: Greece's economic crisis. If there's an up side to all this, it's that it has likely killed off whatever residual sympathies Greek-Cypriots might once have had for enosis.

British Conservative leader David Cameron is taking lessons from Canada by way of Phillip Blond: Painting Britain's Tories Red.

Mr. Blond is on a single-handed mission to resurrect the Red Tory, a familiar figure in Canadian politics but one that has virtually vanished from Britain. He tells me he was inspired by Canadian nationalist thinker George Grant, whose 1965 book Lament for a Nation bears a strong resemblance to Mr. Blond's current thinking about “broken Britain.”

The Tories, who are baffled to find themselves only barely ahead of Gordon Brown's Labour Party in the polls, have seized upon Red Toryism as an ideological lifebuoy. Mr. Blond emerged from small-university obscurity last year, briefly ran something called the Progressive Conservatism Project, then launched a Red Tory think tank called ResPublica, raising $5-million from wealthy Tory donors in two weeks.

Who would have guessed? Nearly seven years after our own federal Progressive Conservative Party bit the dust after limping along for the previous decade, it's being revived across the pond. Perhaps they'll have better luck with it than we did.

Despite Cameron's efforts to infuse the Tories with new life, the man who is currently campaigning to unseat Prime Minister Gordon Brown appears to have miscalculated, according to Stephen Murgatroyd. Not only is he drawing on Canadian political experience, but also on American:

David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, modelled a lot of his campaign strategy on Barack Obama’s successful bid for the US Presidency. Outlining the need for change, being general about what change meant and decrying the failures of the party in power were, he thought, enough to unseat an unpopular Labour government. What he failed to notice, until recently, was that the disappointment with Obama’s performance and the emptiness of the mantra “yes we can” is palpable. Over a year after starting health reform, Obama is still stuck in the mud. Climate change and energy security has not even started the torturous [sic] journey through the Senate. The US economy is still not mending. People demand more than a mantra. They want specifics. Cameron has to start talking action plans and detail.

Using the Wayback Machine Internet Archive I have located what my Genevan Psalter website looked like a decade ago, when it was no more than a single page with links to a few midi files. This is how it looked on 9 October 1999. And this is it a year later on 27 October 2000. Needless to say, the site grew considerably over the next few years.

By the way, I have a short piece, Metrical psalmody: singing God's word, which was recently posted at The Worldview Church, which bills itself as "Resources for Pastors from the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview."