It’s Tuesday, April 24th, 2012….but before we begin, we take a moment to mark the passing of a rare human being, courtesy of John Dilulio writing in the WSJ: a man who undeniably practiced what he preached.

Chuck Colson and Second Chances

How a Watergate villain dedicated his life to helping prisoners—and changed my mind about crime.

On July 9, 1974, Charles W. “Chuck” Colson spent his first night in a federal prison. He had worked hard to get there.

Raised in Massachusetts, Colson attended Brown University and George Washington University Law School. In the 1950s, he got married, was a captain in the U.S. Marines, and worked for his home state’s senior U.S. senator, Leverett Saltonstall. In the 1960s, he got divorced, remarried, built a lucrative inside-the-Beltway law firm, and became a player in national GOP politics.

In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon made Colson, then just 37 years old, his top White House legal counsel. Colson later confessed that he was “ruthless in getting things done” for Nixon, which eventually led to his conviction for obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in. Among other infamous acts, he leaked information from confidential FBI files on antiwar activist Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and he fulminated about firebombing the liberal Brookings Institution.

Nixon’s once-powerful “hatchet man” was the first Watergate figure to become an incarcerated felon. But just before Colson landed behind bars, he got old-time religion. While in prison, he promised fellow inmates that he would never forget them. He made good on that promise by dedicating his life to helping prisoners and their families, improving prison conditions and working to reform penal codes. In 1975, he wrote his bestselling book, “Born Again.” In 1976, he founded Prison Fellowship, an international evangelical Christian ministry based in Virginia.

Well into the 1980s, Colson’s just-before-jailhouse conversion was widely panned as a pre-emptive performance for the parole board. Many commentators mocked him and his fledgling ministry. In the 1990s, his ecumenical work with groups like Evangelicals and Catholics Together deeply upset many orthodox Protestants. And, in the 2000s, his activist opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage deeply upset many progressive Protestants, among others.

As an urban Democrat, a Jesuit-inspired Catholic and an academic, I disagreed with Colson about many things. Differences on policy and cultural issues aside, he insisted that hard science supported “intelligent design” even when leading evangelical Christian scientists, like Francis Collins, former head of the international human genome project, counseled otherwise. He embraced studies touting faith-based programs but sometimes squinted past their shortcomings.

Still, for nearly four full post-Watergate decades, Colson, who died this past Saturday at age 80, steadfastly practiced what he preached about prisons, prisoners and penal reform. Where criminal justice was concerned, he was God’s good man, not Nixon’s bad man. He gave his ministry most of his adult life and almost all of his money, including royalties on about two dozen books, speakers’ fees, and the $1 million Templeton Prize for spiritual endeavors that he won in 1993. While maintaining his Break Point radio show, he worked endless hours raising the tens of millions of dollars a year that supported the ministry’s operations.

In the 2000s alone, Colson’s Prison Fellowship mobilized more than 10,000 volunteers to work in 1,329 prisons from coast to coast and also mustered nearly 15,000 volunteers each year to purchase Christmas gifts for more than 350,000 children of prisoners. Recognizing that about 700,000 prisoners are released each year, the Colson ministry created eight InnerChange Freedom Initiative prisoner re-entry programs across five states, and found jobs for about 60% of all IFI parolees.

But Colson’s most consequential criminal-justice legacy is still in the making. He nearly single-handedly put America on a bipartisan path to zero prison growth. With another born-again ex-prisoner, former California state legislator Pat Nolan, he led the charge against states’ mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders and for the federal government’s Second Chance Act, which gives grants to nonprofit organizations that help ex-prisoners find jobs, get drug treatment, and reconnect with loved ones.

Promoting the concept of “restorative justice,” Colson godfathered into being several conservative coalitions that are now making real headway in reducing prison populations and changing penal codes in many states. For example, as documented by the Texas-based Right on Crime organization, in recent years the Lone Star State has cut crime rates while reducing its adult prison population by thousands, and the number of juveniles behind bars by more than 50%, by repealing draconian sentencing laws and increasing support for community-based corrections.

As I recount in my book “Godly Republic,” in the late 1990s Colson was among those who softened and spiritualized my views on crime. Visiting prisons with him, watching him relate pastorally to prisoners, was an inspiring experience that never got old. Through his ministry, his second chance became a second chance for hundreds of thousands of others. When it came to treating incarcerated citizens, recent parolees, and all persons touched by crime, both perpetrators and victims, with Christ-like care and compassion, he was “ruthless.”

Ephesians 2: 8,9 states:

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God–not by works, so that no one can boast.”

But Chuck Colson also knew the Scriptures describe faith without works as dead, so he chose to live Christ’s teaching in Matthew 25: 34-36….

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’“

….to the letter.  We know Chuck’s enjoying his inheritance as we write.

Now here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy again of the Journal, The Obamao spends $8.35 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars on his re-election bid:

Medicare’s Obama Donation

An $8.35 billion ‘demonstration’ to get past November.

Re-electing President Obama is really important to President Obama, which isn’t news. What is news are the out-of-liberal-character acts that his Administration is committing to serve this political goal.

Recall how last year the White House rudely overruled the EPA on its ozone rule, postponing it past November. Then there were those temporary tax cuts that go poof on December 31. Most remarkable is Mr. Obama’s decision to flout his own health-care law to temporarily protect private insurance inside Medicare.

ObamaCare slashes about $145 billion from Medicare Advantage, the program that allows one of four seniors to escape the traditional entitlement and choose commercial plans. This was a central plank of the Affordable Care Act, touted by everyone from former White House budget maven Peter Orszag to Democrats on Capitol Hill.

They hated such market flexibility because they viewed it as a threat to government control—so much so that the other day Mr. Obama denounced as “social Darwanism” Paul Ryan’s larger Medicare reform that is a cousin of the Medicare Advantage model.

Medicare’s budget counters estimate that ObamaCare’s cuts in the Advantage program will result in enrollment falling by half. The cuts were scheduled to begin this year. But someone from the Obama campaign in Chicago must have conducted a poll in Tampa Bay or Scottsdale.

So in November 2010 Mr. Obama’s Medicare team announced a nationwide Medicare Advantage “demonstration project” that would test if paying insurers bonus subsidies would improve quality over the next two years. Lo and behold, according to a new investigation by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, the $8.35 billion pilot program is just enough to reverse 71% of the Advantage cuts that would have hit seniors in the runup to November. And behold again, the demonstration project turns into a pumpkin in 2013.

The GAO auditors show a dry wit in expressing skepticism about Medicare’s “stated research goal” for the test. The demonstration project’s design “precludes a credible evaluation of its effectiveness,” GAO says, since all Medicare Advantage insurers get the pay-for-performance bonuses. In other words, there’s no control group to test which approaches work better. It’s a demonstration project without the ability to demonstrate. Professional courtesy prevents the GAO from saying outright that the bonus program is purely political, but the report suggests as much.

All of this does provide a fascinating insight into the mind of the health bureaucrat, however. The entire point of Medicare Advantage is not to subject it to regulatory fine-tuning. Seniors who sign up for Medicare Advantage basically take a voucher and have the run of about 3,300 different plans by 175 different insurance companies in total, with a diversity of benefits, premiums and cost sharing. (Options vary region to region.)

The incentive to improve quality isn’t some arcane government program. The incentive is competition—the need for insurers to acquire and retain seniors as customers. Yet Mr. Obama’s Health and Human Services Department is allowed to spend unlimited taxpayer dollars as long it claims the money is going to “demonstration projects” to fine-tune Medicare Advantage.

The real game here is purely political—to give a program that is popular with seniors a temporary reprieve past Election Day. Then if Mr. Obama is re-elected, he will go ahead and gut Medicare Advantage, just as the White House will give the EPA leave to impose the ozone rule, and taxes will soar.

Given the pre-election timing of this short-term Medicare Advantage pardon, the Federal Election Commission should bill HHS for giving Mr. Obama’s campaign what amounts to an $8.35 billion re-election contribution.

At the risk of sounding indelicate, in other words, not only is The Dear Misleader a practiced, perpetual prevaricator….he’s a thief as well.

And in International News of Note, the Journal details an aspect of India’s recent missile test you won’t find in the MSM, primarily because it doesn’t fit the Progressive worldview:

India’s Missile Warning

The threat depends mainly on the regime, not the weapon itself.

India successfully test-fired a long-range ballistic missile on Thursday capable of carrying a nuclear warhead as far as Shanghai. The event deserves more scrutiny than it’s received, though not for the reasons offered by the theologians of parchment arms control.

The test marks a significant advance in global missile proliferation, which surely vindicates those in the U.S. who have pushed antimissile defenses. India’s Agni 5—Agni is the Hindu god of fire—is capable of carrying MIRVed, or multiple, independently targetable, warheads. The missile also puts India closer to being able to develop antisatellite weapons, and the Agni 5 appears to be launchable from mobile platforms. All of this makes the missile a fearsome deterrent against foreign attack.

It’s clear that India will eventually be able to turn the Agni 5 into an intercontinental missile capable of reaching Europe and the U.S. This is a harbinger of missile proliferation to come, and it shows that the dominance that the U.S. and Russia have long enjoyed in missile technology and the high ground of space will soon be challenged.

The launch also underscores the folly of arms-control treaties in controlling proliferation. India has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty even as it has become a formidable nuclear power. The world’s missile technology control regime has forced India to develop its own launch and guidance technology, though we also suspect it’s received help on the sly from Russia and others.

The point is that a continental power like India is going to pursue weaponry that it believes to be in its own security interests, regardless of the wishful treaties of Western diplomats. That’s especially true given China’s claims to Indian territory and Beijing’s bullying of its neighbors.

Yet it’s also worth noting that few people laid awake Thursday night worrying about this new Indian missile. A State Department spokesman called on “all nuclear-capable states to exercise restraint regarding nuclear capabilities” but added that “India has a solid nonproliferation record.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry noted that “India and China are not rivals but cooperative partners,” though China is one presumptive target of the Indian missile. Pakistan, India’s traditional rival whose government was advised in advance of the launch, had no immediate official response at all.

This restrained reaction is strikingly different from the global alarm over North Korea’s recent failed ballistic-missile launch, to say nothing of the anxiety provoked by Iranian missile tests and nuclear program. The difference is that no one in the West believes that India poses an aggressive military threat. India is a robust democracy whose nuclear weapons are intended as a deterrent, and not even hawks in the People’s Liberation Army can credibly argue that Delhi would contemplate a nuclear first strike.

The crucial nonproliferation point is that the threat is less from the weapons than from the kind of regime that holds them. The arms control evangelists, including many in the Obama Administration, believe that the spread of weaponry is its own threat, whether the finger on the button belongs to David Cameron, Kim Jong Eun or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (You know….sorta like the Brady bunch!)

But the real threat is that weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them will be acquired by tyrants who lack any domestic restraints and might well use them to dominate or destroy their neighbors. The world will be a safer place if fewer nations have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. But the danger grows exponentially when those weapons are in the hands of a Hitler, Brezhnev or Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

The Indian launch might also cause some soul-searching in Beijing. Chinese officials sometimes sound as if their bullying regional policy will eventually have all of the Asia-Pacific region under their sway. But in practice the result has been the opposite, driving Japan, the Philippines, even Vietnam and Burma closer to the U.S. as a countervailing regional power. India’s missile launch is another sign that its neighbors feel the need to deter any Chinese aggression.

As for the U.S., India’s test underscores the need for robust investment in missile and satellite defenses with deployments before genuine threats arrive. It also shows the need to redouble the efforts to quarantine and deny WMD to rogue states, in contrast to treaties that provide an illusion of nonproliferation.

Treaties; they’re like gun laws: the folks that abide by their terms didn’t need ’em in the first place.

Next up, it’s the Environmental Moment, and yet another example of the MSM’s version of unbiased reporting:

Rains don’t water down Earth Day enthusiasm

Unfortunately, pictures of the actual event belie the WaPo‘s editorial enthusiasm:

“The day is observed by about a billion people around the world, according to organizers.”

Now juxtapose this blatantly biased bit of reporting with the coverage accorded the March for Life back in January:

Post local editor Vernon Loeb: “In retrospect I wish we had given readers a better sense of the overall magnitude of the march. . .it was far larger than 17,000.”

Yeah….only about ten times that….but who’s counting?  Certainly no one at the WaPo!  MSM bias….WHAT bias?!?

In a related item, courtesy of Free Market America and Speed Mach:

America IS the greatest country the world has ever seen; so why DOES The Obamao….

….want to change it?!?

On the Lighter Side….

And in another story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter….

New Jersey state police are investigating allegations that members of the department used police vehicles to escort more than two dozen exotic cars as they sped down the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City in March, NBC New York has learned. The complaints, leveled by private citizens and relatives of former state police officers, allege that a group of luxury cars, including Porsches and Ferraris with taped-up license plates, raced down the parkway, with two police escorts — which had flashing emergency lights on — leading and trailing the convoy.

Next up in News of the Bizarre, our Chicago bureau reports….

Man Dies After Peeing On ‘L’ Tracks In Evanston

An Indiana man died overnight, after coming into contact with the electrified third rail as he urinated on the Purple Line ‘L’ tracks in Evanston. The man was at the South Boulevard Purple Line stop around 11 p.m. Sunday with two other people when he came into contact with the third rail, according to CTA spokeswoman Lambrini Lukidis.

The man, Zachary McKee, 27, of Ossian, Ind., was pronounced dead at Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston at 11:52 p.m., according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office. It turned out that the man had climbed down to the tracks to urinate when he fell onto the third rail, according to a news release from the Evanston Police Department.

Authorities have not said whether the man urinated on the third rail.

Peeing on the Purple Line ‘L’ tracks; one can only assume the unfortunate Mr. McKee (no relation) was both drunk as a lemur….and unaware the ‘L’ stood for ‘LIVE’.

Finally, in the Wide, Wild World of Sports, where would we be without “reports”:

Report: Paternos reject stadium offer

Say it ain’t so, Joe!  Sorry kid, but it is.

Joe Paterno’s family turned down an offer by Penn State to rename Beaver Stadium after the late coach as part of a package deal that would have prohibited the family from suing the university, The Patriot-News reported Sunday. A source close to the Paterno family told the newspaper that renaming the field “was never important to Joe.” (Yeah; unfortunately, neither was the health and safety of “Jerry’s Kids”.)

According to The Patriot-News, renaming the stadium was one of three items in the package that would have come in exchange for a full release. The school also offered an apology for firing Paterno over the phone and said they would fully honor the late coach’s contract.

Penn State did honor the terms of Paterno’s contract last week by making an estimated $5.5 million termination payment to his estate, but an attorney representing his family stressed that the payout was not a settlement. “The university had requested that the family agree to a full release in return for the payments under the contract,” attorney Wick Sollers told the newspaper in a statement. “That request was declined and no release was signed. It would be incorrect, therefore, to characterize the payments as a settlement.”

The terms of the contract also included a $3 million retirement bonus and the use of a Beaver Stadium suite by Paterno’s family for 25 years, a privilege valued at roughly $1.5 million. Paterno’s wife, Sue, will also receive a monthly payment of $1,000 for the rest of her life and has been granted access to specialized hydrotherapy equipment in the Lasch football building.

Paterno, who died in January, was fired in November amid sexual abuse allegations against former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky. With just three games remaining in the 2011 season, after which he had planned to retire, the university’s board of trustees dismissed him for a “failure of leadership” — specifically, failing to follow up on allegations the defensive coordinator had been sexually abusing boys.

We’re perplexed; PSU officials had no choice but to fire Paterno.  Had JoPa lived, he likely would have been the subject of numerous civil suits, possibly even the subject of charges for criminal negligence.  Why Penn State is bending over backwards to provide his family anything beyond the termination payment we assume is due his estate is beyond us.

We can only hope the victim’s of Jerry Sandusky’s predations and JoPa’s indifference will realize more of any settlement than the Paternos.

Magoo