USNS Comfort...

To most people's eyes, this is one ugly ship.

But I'll bet it looks absolutely beautiful to the Haitians when it arrives this coming Thursday.  It's on the way right now.

It's the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship with 250 beds and 550 medical personnel.

America is quietly providing real assistance, as it always does.  We already have a substantial presence on the ground there, far larger than all other countries and the U.N. taken together.  This is not to denigrate their efforts, but rather to make a point: the world depends on America's ability to project resources quickly, whether those resources are military, medical, financial, or logistical.  Private American citizens give more to foreign causes, per capita, than the citizens of any other country.  For the past 20 years, America's ability in these areas is more effective than the rest of the world combined, and that shows no signs of changing.  The rest of the world depends on us to provide (and pay for) these things.

As an American, I'm proud of these facts.  I wish we got a little more credit for them from our foriegn critics...

Charity...

Biden's tax returns were posted to Obama's web site today, and on them you can discover that he and his wife donated 0.3% of their income to charity last year. The Obamas, by comparison, donated 5.7% of their considerably higher income to charity last year.

Now I don't think either of those numbers is “bad” in any sense of that word. By comparison, Debbie and I (in percentage terms) were somewhere between the two of them. I believe that giving to charity (and which charity one chooses to give to) are entirely personal matters, and the quantity of a candidate's charitable gifts has no weight at all in my decision about supporting them.

But this reminds me of a book I read some time ago, called Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. The “surprising truth” in the book is this: measured in dollars or percentage, charitable giving by liberals is dwarfed by charitable giving by conservatives (and libertarians). This is consistent with my own (far less rigorous) observations and experiences in charity work.

McCain contributed 26% of his income last year to charities. Palin's tax returns have not yet been made public, so we don't know what their contributions were.

When I read that book, I came away with the thought that this aggregate difference in charitable giving carries a profound message of some sort. The closest I ever came to being able to articulate it was the notion that liberals in general expect government to do things for them; conservatives and libertarians are much more interested in having the government get out of the way so they can do things themselves. There's yet a deeper message there, I think...