So, given that faith is involved with eternity, and organized religion concerns itself with eternal questions of right and wrong for, to the church’s point of view, everyone, I have to ask; when is the Catholic Church going to do something about this?

Nancy Pelosi reminds us that elections matter, in a DCCC fundraising e-mail:

This morning, I had the great honor of joining President Obama as he lifted the executive ban on federal funding for stem cell research.

If that’s not a shot across the bow from someone who describes herself as a “Devout Catholic”, what is?

That is all.

It’s Orwell 101; the authoritarian/totalitarian state has to have an enemy to justify piddling on the Rights of Man.

I know, I know; the left spent the last eight years caterwauling emptily about the same thing – the threat that the War on Terror was just a pretext to gut Americans’ civil liberties.  It’s not to say that the price of Liberty isn’t eternal vigilance; it’s not even to say that the left was crying wolf.

It might seem, though, that they’re projecting a bit.  The Obama Administration is apparently weighing using the US military to help the Mexican military fight the narcotraficantes weighing using the US military to help the Mexican military fight the narcotraficantes that have made northern Mexico as dangerous as Iraq so far this year:

The U.S. military is in a better position to provide Mexico’s military with training, resources and intelligence as its southern neighbor battles deadly drug cartels, Defense Secretary Robert Gates says…”I think we are beginning to be in a position to help the Mexicans more than we have in the past. Some of the old biases against cooperation with our—between our militaries and so on, I think, are being set aside,” Gates said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.””It clearly is a serious problem,” he said.

But yes, of course – it’s our civil liberties that are at fault:

A U.S. report has found that weapons in the drug killings are coming from north of the border. Mexican authorities are outgunned by the drug cartels because the criminals are receiving their high-powered arms from the United States, Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday…”They want to clearly stop the guns from the United States going south. We want to stop the drugs coming north,” Emanuel said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “That border is important to us and Mexico is a key ally of ours.”

We’ve called BS on this claim for quite some time; what self-respecting thug would use a measly semi-automatic, civilianized “Assault Weapon” when they can get, for a fraction of the price, fully-automatic weapons from Central American legacy terrorist groups, from the Mexican and other co-opted Latin American militaries, or from gun-merchants who can turn cartel drug money into first-world hardware for the asking.

No, the Administration needs a boogieman.

A domestic, right-wing boogieman.

So, gun owners; are you ready to boogie?

I strongly disapprove of police brutality.

So all I can add to the video Ed runs in this post is that the cops’ defense attorneys had better shoot for a jury of parents of teenagers.

I’ve said for quite some time; if Bobby Jindal becomes a contender (and his performance last Tuesday didn’t help, but he’s got a lot of time, in political terms, to fix things), “Apu the convenience store clerks” will become de rigeur.

As Brad Carlson shows us, from my blog to Joe Biden’s mouth.

Along with that, look for South-Asian Americans – diligent, hard-working, education-oriented – to get shunted into the same “not-really-authentic-minority” status that the left gives Asian Americans.

From the WaPo’s quotes of the week column:

Obama, I want a 65-inch plasma TV.” – sign held by a person along President Obama’s motorcade route in Arizona on Feb. 18″After God, Obama.” – sign held by a person along Obama’s motorcade route in Ottowa, Canada on Feb. 19

Silly wabbits.  Everyone knows the order of the universe is:

1. God
2. Jesus
3. Bono

Please see to this.

North Dakota House of Representatives bans abortion:

The bill, which now moves to the Senate, is a direct and legally interesting challenge to Roe V. Wade and is seen by many as a backdoor to outlawing abortion.

The House voted 51-41 yesterday declaring that a fertilized egg has all the rights of any person.

This could be to Roe what Heller was to the Second Amendment; the first step in a battle that leads to a cataclysmic battle royale in the Supreme Court.

Which means the good guys have a few years to reverse their electoral fortunes and take the US Senate back.  Before it’s too late.

The Black Sphere sums up why Palin drives lefties so bonkers:

Alaska’s Sarah Palin is the polar opposite of [so-called “feminist” icons], pun intended. Palin has accomplished more in her short life than 99.9% of the so-called Liberal women leaders that the Left adore. And she is a woman whose accomplishments are her own.Don’t get me wrong, Palin has a good, strong husband who is her staunchest supporter, and Todd Palin deserves credit for his contribution. And Sarah understands the role of her husband in her life and the lives of her children, and she respects his role. Palin knows that to have a strong man doesn’t diminish her as a woman. Quite the contrary. Mates are reflections of each other. Don’t believe me, just look at the Clintons for evidence.

Read the whole thing.

Is she the best candidate for President in 2012 or 2016?  Time will tell.

But watching the derangement she engenders on the left (and among some on the right) is just delicious.  It’s the green/brown festering tip on an iceberg of hubris that’s going to sink the Dems one of these days.

Blockbuster is selling a DVD about the life and times of..Barack Obama.

Con1 at Conservative Oasis comments:

This man just won one of the most historic elections of our Nation’s history, and we have a video on the impulse buying section of Blockbuster, with a complete educational history of “who the hell you just voted for, you damn fools…” And yes, what a perfect place for it to sit, right where people who do things on impulse, will do so again.

He’s just gotten into office, and not done really a damn thing of import, except get elected on a magic carpet ride of MSM ass kissing, softballs, and starry eyed sympathy from a voting block infused with hope driven children, and attention starved minorities.

And, all for .99 cents. A fair price, me thinks, for such a story of really, just about nothing to holler about, yet.

We’ve finally turned into the pop culture we feared we would be. We’ve American Idoled ourselves a new President, voting off the island the true survivors, the real qualified candidates, all because we “liked” the other guy more. The underdog.

The vid is 99 cents, by the way.  I’m tempted to grab one, just for comparison purposes in four years.

Oh, and if you can’t make it to a DVD player, and have $50 to spare?

You can carry your little red blue book with you!

Includes themes of democracy, politics, war, terrorism, race, community, jurisprudence, faith, personal responsibility, national identity, and above all, his hoped-for vision of a new America. POCKET OBAMA is a portable, everyday primer for readers who want to examine the substance of his thought and reflect on the next great chapter in the American story.

Be ready for the Great Change Forward!

I usually try to keep my criticisms of lefties, and leftism, substantive and fact-based.

Being human, I occasionally resort to sarcasm, humor and snark.  And you know it’s part of the reason you come here, so don’t try and get cute about it.

Sometimes, the best I can manage is a point-by-point fisking.

But in almost seven years of blogging, this is the first time I’ve had to sit back, scratch my eyes, re-read something, and decide that simply presenting the offending material in its full, dim, foul glory is all the criticism that material needs.

And so I present Grace Kelly – local 9/11 Truther and cog in the local DFL machine.  Her particularly wide-eyed, fabulist brand of jackboot-with-a-smile liberalism has turned up on this blog a few times in the past.

But she’s outdone herself this time.  She has summed up the collective id of the Democrat base in this country, in much the same way Rain Man summed up the cards in the casino, and presented it to the world in the form of a poem.

Lead Us President Barack Obama

At a time of darkness, the light appears
– that light is President Barack Obama.

At a time when knowledge, skill and science was disdained, a champion of knowledge, skill and science has stepped forward
– that champion is President Barack Obama.

At a time when it seemed that only corporations and the rich were represented, a representative of people appeared
– that representative is President Barack Obama.

At a time of torture, a leader of morality appears
– that leader is President Barack Obama.

At a time when the world no longer respects us as country, a reason for respect appears
– that reason is President Barack Obama.

At a time of too many wars and too much violence, we look for the wisdom of peace and diplomacy,
– that wisdom is President Barack Obama.

At a time of great economic crisis, a president who leads comes,

lead us President Barack Obama, speak for us,
lay out your plan of action,

And we the people will say
YES. WE. CAN!

I’ve been staring at this for ten minutes.

Have at it, all.  I’ve got everything…and yet nothing.

UPDATE: An emailer sends:

At a time with no flushable toilets

a man invented such a toilet

And that man was Thomas Crapper

UPDATE 2: Another emailer:

At at time when freshness eluded us
a man made freshness attainable.
And that man was Irving Douchebag.

Keep ’em coming!

UPDATE 3: The hits keep coming

At a time when bands’ names were lame, and balloons were merely toys
A man came a long and fixed both.
And that man was Count Von Zeppelin.

More!  More!

Andrew Breitbart at Big Hollywood on ithe cavalcade of hypocritical celebs who, mirabile dictu, are pledging to change the world for the better now that Bush is out of office.

Because, y’know, he kept them all in handcuffs and locked in the basement of a Halliburton office:

Moore’s nauseating video [watch the whole nauseating thing here] — which, like Steven Soderbergh’s “Oceans” franchise, grants a pristine look into the modern celebrity’s sense of self-importance — is not a sign of desire to serve the country under Obama. Watch, by March this pledge like New Year’s resolutions will fall by the wayside. It is a sign that the Democrat is in the White House now. It is a sign that they get to sleep again in the Lincoln Bedroom.Twenty years ago AIDS was the number one cause for the Hollywood left. Remember the trendy red ribbons at all the self-aggrandizing awards shows? Hollywood has moved on (dot org) to better blame-your-fellow-American causes. But President Bush didn’t. And aside from Bob Geldof and Bono , they ignore this president’s demonstrable goodness

Remember – it’s Obama’s election that makes it possible for these vacuous ninnies to do what they supposedly believe is right.

And yet…:

Amazing that Geldof and Bono could valiantly fight their battles and serve humanity without being paralyzed by the Leader of the Free World 2000-2008’s all-encompassing awfulness.

Remember this video: It is a instructive relic of the era of celebrity decadence and boutique anti-Republican activism under President Bush. It is a sickening display that they want fast and easy absolution for having comported themselves like ill-behaved children for eight difficult and war-torn years.

Good luck, President Obama. The rest of you can go to hell.

Absolutely.

(Except Marisa Tomei.  She can be saved.  I can just feel it).

Dumbest of the lot:

Anthony Kiedis (”To be of service to Barack Obama,”)

Kiedis, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (a band I hated twenty years ago) is pledging servitude.

God Bless America.

Obama won’t give up his Blackberry!

This is news?

Why should he? He’s the Chief Executive. He’s the boss.

I’m all for Obanana keeping his smart phone.

He’s not just the first African American President. He’s the first President that won’t look stupid thumbing his old racketeering pals a message.

“Dude. Like this is so cool. Did you guys see my new ride?”

He needs to be kept abreast when he’s sunning his washboard abs.

“I want to be able to have voices, other than the people who are immediately working for me, be able to reach out and send me a message about what’s happening in America.”

For example, soon-to-be disappointed voices like Peggy Joseph.

Security issues.

“I think we’re going to be able to hang on to one of these. My working assumption, and this is not new, is that anything I write on an email could end up being on CNN,” he said.

Oops. What the President-Elect meant to say was:

“Anything that CNN writes for me to say…”

National Security?

“So I make sure to think before I press ‘send’,” he said.

Let’s hope as President he thinks before he presses any buttons.

Obama’s Blackberry can take the place of his teleprompter when he’s on the fly.

“If I’m doing something stupid, somebody (in Jail-JR) in Chicago can send me an e-mail and say, ‘What are you doing?’

That might happen a lot.

For most of human history, humans have had to reproduce as fast as they could; children were the only 401K, and infant/child mortality was harder on that retirement plan than the recession is on your Roth IRA today.
Capitalism and the generalized prosperity that’s attended it in the past 150-odd years has changed that dynamic. In a sense relative to the rest of the world throughout history, capitalism and general prosperity has taken human  life from “nasty, brutish and short” to “relatively civilized, at least modestly comfortable, and where obesity is the biggest health problem among the poor“.

One of the blessings that’s attended these changes is the existence, throughout the world, of “cheap food”.  When I say “cheap”, I’m not talking about supermarket shelf price, by the way; 500 years ago, over 95% of the world’s population worked from dawn to dusk six or seven days a week trying to subsist.  Do you work two shifts seven days a week just to feed your family and live in a hovel?  Who does?  No – food is incomparably cheap these days, historically speaking, even if the price of eggs is getting kinda out of hand.

“Cheap food” has enabled the parts of the world still governed by dictators, petty overlords and warlords to sustain populations that would have been mathematically and logistically impossible 100 years ago.  Of course, the lack of actual personal prosperity, and the attendant uncertainty of life, has kept the birthrates in these places high (albeit lower than when I was a kid).  The presence of global media, communications and markets have also made life safer in the parts of the world run by despots, warlords, and amok bureaucrats; it’s a truism that no famine can take place in a nation with a free market and a free media (every famine in the past 100 years has taken place in places with neither); the globalization of communications and markets has made it possible for weathy nations (with their epic surpluses of food) to ameliorate the worst ravages of famines, the great population-leveler of days gone by.

So on the one hand, a tide that has been rising since the birth of the modern world has been lifting all boats.
On the other, this has led the world into two basic demographic paths:

1. “First World” countries, with safe, practically-boundless supplies of food and historically-unprecedented prosperity, find it unneccessary to reproduce as much – even, in the case of Western Europe, to fall below replacement level, leading in just a few generations (from the end of WWII to today)  to the specter of being demographically “upside down”, with average ages creeping up into the forties and retirees outnumbering working citizens, and thus having to choose between economic shrinkage (with its attendant ravages on taxes to support  “service”-heavy governments – but let’s not digress) or importing working-age labor from…
2. “Third World” countries, for whom the relative affordability of food (historically speaking) but the relative scarcity of economic freedom has led to populations that are booming, young (average age less than twenty in many countries) and, since they live in despotic, anarchic or socialist countries, underemployed and poor.

This might lead to a vicious cycle – as we’re starting to see in Western Europe, where ageing populations, which for almost two generations have been at zero or negative native population growth are having to import labor from other younger, poorer countries.  Who are changing the political face of these countries – sometimes against immense resistance from the natives, and all of the attendant strife.

(There are actually two vicious cycles:  overpopulation in the world’s current context happens when populations in un-free nations continue pre-prosperity growth rates; there’s a reason that Paul Ehrlich, overpopulation alarmist of the sixties and seventies, is largely a risible figure these days; widening prosperity (in a historical context) obsoleted his theory in many countries that he’d used as case studies.  Remember when people expected India to become a famine-ridden wasteland?).
The US’ average age is still relatively low – partly due to immigration, partly because our national birth rate is above replacement levels (and even moreso outside the “blue” states – which could reflect anything from lower standards of living or greater optimism in the red states, depending on your point of view, and it’s a digression we won’t follow in any case), but we have a “baby boom” moving through the pipeline that’ll drag things upward a bit in short order.  Still, the US is faring better than most, controversies over illegal immigration notwithstanding.

But here’s the question:  how does the “First” world react to the demographic fact that prosperity itself renders its populations older and less capable of continued economic growth?

1. The French model – work to pound immigrants into line behind a national set of standards set by the dominant culture (which, culturally, resists assimilation of immigrants)
2. The Dutch model – try (at least in theory) to carefully regulate and balance immigration to provide needed labor and skills without overly diluting the national culture (which is marginally less resistant to assimilation than France)
3. The American model – work to assimilate immigrants into a cultural system comprising a set of ideals rather than ethnic cultural norms
4. The Japanese model – actively reject all but the most desperately needed immigrants, and aggressively marginalize the few that do get in.
5. The Russian model – wallow in cultural depression and drink oneself into a stupor, and let your nation’s underworld fleece, terrorize, brutalize and co-opt the immigrants into a permanent, but distracted, underclass.
6. The Finnish model – watch your national median age skyrocket – but live in a place to which nobody actually wants to migrate.
7. The (ahem koff koff) model – subsidize fecundity.  Give tax breaks and/or other rewards to families that reproduce above the replacement rate, promoting measured growth and helping to keep the nation’s median age down to a reasonable level, to ensure future economic growth and national viability in everything from defense to beach scenery.

What’s a hypothetical, ageing society to do?

(more…)

There’s an add running on some online conservative podcasts lately; paraphrasing it, it says something like “join the resistance to Obama!”

Big, dumb mistake.

For starters, applying military metaphors to politics and government is (unless one is fighting a war) always, always a dumb mistake. Back away.

And beyond that? It’s the sort of talk that makes conservatives sound like too many lefties over the past eight years – the shrieking ninnies that spent the last years digracing themselves and their families with the depths of their obsession with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

And Jeffrey Lord is right; it’d be a very bad idea to sink to that level:

It will be well and vividly remembered, of course, that Bush mistakes on, say, weapons of mass destruction were morphed into “lies.” That a philosophical commitment to keeping America safe by taking the fight to enemies abroad was treated not as a serious difference of opinion or judgment but rather as evidence of a lust for deliberate murder in the mode of the infamous mass murderer of six million Jews. That this lust included a desire to murder the children of American citizens. And so on and on and appallingly and drearily so on.THE QUESTION NOW IS, should conservatives pick up the cudgel? Should Obama be Bushed in the style of Mr. Rich and his friends? For example, is President-elect Obama’s trillion dollar spending plan simply a wrong-headed (if spectacularly mammoth) example of even more government financial mistakes that will prove ruinous for generations? Or, in Rich-think, is it the mark of a venal liar (the new President Obama) scheming to rob average Americans blind in perpetuity to reward both his own political cronies and those of his party? Is the push to close Guantanamo a mistaken decision that could allow a collection of vicious killers to go free under the guise of legal protections never given before in American history? Or is it instead the action of a devious fool who has no intention of protecting American citizens because in reality he believes Americans should be murdered for their multiplicity of sins (against blacks, native Americans, all people of color etc., etc., etc.) during their history? Did Obama’s support for the election and re-election of the now-nationally infamous Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich mean that he was just doing the routine rally-around-my-party’s-nominee-for-governor dance common to all politicians? Or was he a sinister cynic and a willing participant if not a leader in the effort to elect as governor a man whose ethics were plenty visible to insiders before caught on tape trying to sell a seat in the U.S. Senate?

What would Mike Malloy do?

This is a serious question for conservatives. There are now (as there have been the last eight years) vital issues at play in the world. Issues of economics, constitutional law, national security, foreign policy, health, immigration and on and on. If conservatives start down the road of these Frank Rich-style Shallow Hal’s of the left — and doubtless there will be some unable, understandably, to resist the temptation — the conservative movement will not be back any time soon. Nor would it deserve to be. The fundamental successes of the Reagan era and, yes, of the George W. Bush presidency are devotion to ideas. In Reagan’s case it was a well thought out and deeply serious commitment to end the Cold War and put right (no pun intended) the American economy. Volumes have been written about the serious approaches inherent in launching the defense buildup that included the 600-ship Navy and Strategic Defense Initiative while rejecting the nuclear freeze or installing Pershing missiles over the vociferous objections of the American and European left. Or the intellectual work that went into supply-side economics and the understanding of tax cuts and monetary policy.

Read the whole thing.

And eschew the dark side.

Much, much more later.

There are a few geographical peculiarities in this country that I have to confess I’ve had enough of:

• Yes, Texans, we know; everything’s bigger.
• Alaskans:  Like Texas, in the same accent Francis McDormand used in Fargo.
• New Orleans: When you describe the New Orleans attitude, you’re describing a 24/7 houseparty.  Most of us outgrew that in our early 20’s.
• We don’t care how you do it in New York.

But one of the most tiresome is the reverence Chicago pays to its history of political corruption.

Christopher Orlet at AmSpec has had enough, too:

Here we go again. Another corrupt Chicago politician hogging all the headlines. It seems like every time you open a newspaper (or surf the Internet) some columnist is snootily recounting Chicago’s colorful past as a Shangri-la of corruption and political intrigue, from Mayor Levi Boone’s 1855 Beer Riots to the zany antics of Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Manhattanites may be ardent arts and culture snobs, but no one appreciates a good political scandal like a Bears fan.Just the other day Wall Street Journal readers were treated to the giddy recollections of Chicago native Scott Simon, who reminisced wistfully about the colorful history of Chicago politics. “Chicagoans and Illinoisans,” wrote Mr. Simon, “love political scandal the way that Milanese love opera.”

Speaking as a journalist who just happens to be a downstate Illinoisan, I’ll grant that political scandals are wonderful copy, perhaps even comedy gold. But as a disenfranchised citizen of a corrupt, one-party state ruled by Democratic party hacks (and I mean that in the best way possible) there is little to “love” in these continuous scandals.

Pride in rampant criminality that skews government? I don’t imagine they’d be as proud of it if were a Republican majority.

I had to touch on another incongruity from Victor Davis Hanson’s excellent piece last week on the ironies of 2008.

All that talk about how paranoid and “unconstitutional” Bush’s measures in the war on terror were?

You might not be hearing so much about that:

Bush’s Texas-twang explication that he kept us safe for seven years was laughed at, especially by a suave ex-Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama on the stump. And then what?Are we now in February to see no more Patriot Act? At least FISA overturned? Couldn’t we shut down the Gulag Guantanamo by January 25? (as easy as getting out entirely from Iraq by “March 2008” as promised once by Obama?)

Or now are all these once so clear-cut issues “problematic” and “raise concerns”? The irony? Compared to what Lincoln, Wilson, FDR or Truman did during wartime, George Bush was a constitutional purist—and the former all had conventional enemies in wartime, not stealthily terrorists who entered our shores to murder 3,000 Americans.

Of course, it’

The issue was never empirical, never historical, but simply political most of the time. Once Bush was wounded over Iraq, his opponents smelled blood and jabbed at anything they could. Most current Senate civil libertarians voted for both the ‘that was then, this is now’ Iraq war and the Patriot Act, and oversaw the CIA and FBI as much as Bush did.

A President Obama will not revoke all, or even most, of Bush’s supposedly unconstitutional measures. Why? Because he knows they did not end our civil liberties but most assuredly helped to keep us safe.

In short, the media will grow silent as the issue now suddenly disappears—as we probably keep wiretapping and holding enemy combatants and terrorists in detention…

Gonna make a note to look back on this in a year or two.

Victor Davis Hanson,from last week’s excellent piece on the ironies of 2008, on the California gay “community’s” protests against Proposition 8. Hanson notes that not only did Hispanics and Blacks voted every bit as disproportionately against gay marriage as, say, Mormons and Evangelicals, but that in his (predominantly Hispanic) neighborhood people rarely use terms as polite as “gay” to describe gays.

But then…:

Why then did not gay groups march through the streets of West Fresno, San Jose, or South Central LA, where such opponents are concentrated en masse and could be picketed, demonstrated against, and megaphoned for their sins?Was it because it is more dangerous calling Latinos in Fresno barrios homophobes than screaming the same at Mormons in the upscale temple parking lot? Or was that to do the former questioned the fable of uniformly aggrieved groups who share a variety of racial and sexual grievances, while to do the latter attested to the easy oppression we associate with white male Christians?

Well, it does make sense – in facile, gutless kind of way…

Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article about the ironic incongruities of the past year.

He’s got ten. I had to start with this one – on the media’s grotesque double-standard re Sarah Palin and, in this case, Caroline Kennedy:

[Palin] surely didn’t give snap answers on foreign policy matters. In no short order, a woman who had five kids, a 16-year political career, and a successful governorship was reduced to a white-trash hack, the mother of a promiscuous teen, as awful rumors, trafficked in by liberal professionals, swirled about her own most recent pregnancy.

The mainstream media’s narrative was thus that glibness matters, 16 years of Alaskan politics don’t quite cut it for national office, and a candidate’s personal life is fair game, as the moose-hunting ex-mayor of Wasilla and her life-story attest.

OK, it’s easy to make fun of things you don’t understand – and if Chris Matthews or Jon Stewart don’t get hunting, they certainly don’t have the mental kilowattage to know that the Northern accent (made most famous in America by Palin and Frances McDormand in Fargo and not many more) is a dialect, not a sign of stupidity.

These same egalitarians in the media, however, do not seem to have a problem with Caroline Kennedy, soon perhaps to be anointed Senator from New York.

But on the basis of what? Political experience—zero.

Past elections? Zilch.

Eloquence? Nope. Ms. Kennedy drones on with “you know” and “I mean” dozens of times per minute. In comparison, Sarah Palin sounds like Demosthenes or Cicero.

I almost choked on that when I saw the infamous “y’know y’know y’know y’know y’know” video last week. I’ve noted in the past – I give speaker points. Dad was a speech teacher; I was in radio.

Palin, dialect notwithstanding, is an electrifying speaker. Not “fancy” electrifying, but she connects with an audience like very few people anywhere in politics. And Kennedy’s father, John F., was one of the great orators and communicators in American political history, up there with Reagan (and praise gets no higher).

Full disclosure? Hardly. We know nothing about Caroline’s vast fortune—where it exactly came from and how it is used. We learned far more about poor Mr. Palin’s decrepit old prop airplane than Ms. Kennedy’s stock portfolio and past contributions.

Perhaps the difference is good citizenship? I doubt it. Palin ran for offices; Kennedy often passed on voting entirely.

Is it doctrinaire politics? Again, I doubt it. Palin has taken on Republicans in Alaska, entrenched males, and indeed, on matters of energy, her own running mate John McCain.

Kennedy? I don’t think there a liberal dogma or progressive politician she has ever questioned.

Don’t bother them with impedimenta like “consistency with their own alleged beliefs”.

We laugh about Palin’s Idaho work-your-way-through-college sports journalism degree, especially perhaps in comparison to Kennedy’s Ivy League pedigree. But the latter is too often affirmative action for silk-stocking East Coast grandees. Take away money and nomenclature, and I doubt Kennedy would have gotten into such schools on her own merits. I offer such an unsupported generalization on the basis of her elocution: I turned out about 100 classics majors and MA students during 21 years at CSU Fresno, and without exception every single one (mostly poor or minority students without parents who went to college) in interviews sounded far more knowledgeable and grammatical than does Ms. Kennedy.

The irony in all this? Too obvious to state…

There’s much more. Read the whole thing.

…it’d be impossible to detest Garrison Keillor any more than I do.

Oops.  I was wrong.

We’ll jump to Bogus Doug’s conclusion

about PiPress columnist Bob Shaw’s take on a story (a dog is cured by a canine stem cell treatment that is not legal for humans using human stem cells):

Anyway there are two very basic problems with this column. The first is that Shaw is opining in an area of science he apparently lacks very basic knowledge about (Science-journalism: All the whiz-bang and drama of science fiction, without the realization they’re frequently making stuff up). The second is that Shaw’s point isn’t even about what he thinks it is, but seems to rather be a call to lessen the regulatory burden on bringing medical treatments to market; with a kind of endorsement that the medical standards for dogs should be good enough for us.

What led to the conclusion?

Go to BoGo and read up. It’s worth the trip.

I’m sitting looking over my broad, tree-lined avenue with a glass of single-malt, and the sky is blue and the white families with their happy, present-sotted kids are wandering past on their errands, and the election is over, so let’s all relax and quit irritating each other, OK? Michele Bachmann, Erik Paulsen, Jim Oberstar, Betty McCollum, John Kline, Colin Peterson and that other guy are about to take office, so all you black people just get over it. Go stock up on watermelon and spare ribs and maybe real estate in Liberia. White people still rule this country. Deal with it. Boom Shakalaka Boom.White legislators plan to bring sanity to Washington, and why not begin with Congress? It has been sorely in need of reform for a long, long time.

Democrats intend to bring reform to Washington, and why not begin with the United States Congress? It has been sorely in need of reform for a century or so. Equal representation for all people is a good idea in theory, assuming they are half smart, but then you look at Keith Ellison, an incurious frat boy from the state of Humphrey and Mondale, and you think, whoa, something is wrong with this picture. We need some horizontal control.

Let’s start at the beginning and redraw the map. First of all, is there a reason for South Central Los Angeles to have a congressional representative? I have often wondered about this. Why give a House seat to a half million wannabee gangbangers, pimps, crack addicts, prostitutes and derelicts while Utah gets one lousy House for millions of honest, hard-working people? (Compton has roughly the population of Salt Lake.) It’s OK if South Central LA sends somebody with brains and an independent streak, but when they send a couple of Black Democrat hacks, then it makes no sense.

The idea behind the Congress was to create a representative body of wise counselors who rise above the petty tumult and think noble thoughts and do the right thing in a pinch. Can you think of a time when Los Angeles’ representatives have done this? No, you can’t. So let’s bite the bullet and make Compton a federal protectorate and appoint an overseer – ooh, what a perfect word! This would be a good assignment for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s done a heck of a job in south Chicago, so let’s give it all of Compton and, while we’re at it, Newark. A wonderful postcard place, but what have its congresspeople done other than grub for federal largesse for Newark? Change the name to “Housing Project # 447227” and put HUD in charge of it.

While we’re at it, let’s admit that Detroit, El Paso and Philadelphia have never been completely comfortable as part of the United States. They’ve tried to fit in, but it just isn’t working, so let’s allow them to pull out and find their own path. You could attach El Paso to Juarez and make a lovely little desert nation out of that, and let Detroit join Canada, and make Philadelphia an “independent” nation. Add Camden New Jersey to it. They really are part of the same thing. This leaves us with 40 or 50 House seats unoccupied (more if we simply assumed that all black people could be conveniently represented by a few token representatives, since they all vote the same anyway. It’s called consolidation, folks. It goes on all the time in corporate America and also in local school districts, so let’s make it work for America.

We White people will personally foot the bill for the new, incredibly convoluted district maps. This is a promise.

We now have 40 states and 20 extra Senate seats to parcel out. Give some to ex-CEOs. This would rescue them from their lonely lives on the lecture circuit and lend some pizazz to the place since they’d be free to spout off and say whatever they think. People would sit in the galleries to listen to Lee Iaccocca. He’d be down there sawing away with Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley and maybe some former bank and auto execs. Let them in the club and put that experience to use. And give congressional seats to the NRA and the GOP itself. This would definitely add brains to the assembly.

And that is how you create a permanent white majority. Al Sharpton showed us the way. Learn from the master. Those dinkeldorfs who ran the show for 40 years must never be allowed to return to power. Take those fuzzy-headed libruls to the cleaners. Subject them to alternative interrogation techniques until we get to the truth. Keith Ellison would make a decent host of a daytime quiz show. He came dangerously close to running for president. Ai yi yi yi yi. Let’s get to work.

(more…)

One of the things that makes a conservative a conservative is opposition to the relentless dumbing-down of our culture.

Authoritarians need a dumb, compliant population, focused purely on their own material wants and needs – people who value punctual trains over liberty – to succeed.

Our education system has been failing for at least a generation to try to produce anything but that.

Jay Reding notes that even the Chinese are getting this:

The Asia Times talks about the value of classical music in forming a strong and supple mind:

Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool.

I’m not one of those people who dings on “rap” music strictly for its own sake – but there’s a great point here.

Classical music ties a lot of highfalutin’ concepts – meter, melody, harmony, counterpoint – together simultaneously. Not only does playing it require a lot of concentration, years of practice and long-delayed gratification, but listening to it takes time and effort to really appreciate – which was why colleges used to teach “music appreciation”. For people who don’t grow up around classical music (and I didn’t, although I played cello from ages 10 to 22, and can still crank out a tune, so I like to think I’m a fairly literate listener) some of those concepts are not things that jump out and grab you by the hypothalamus. It takes time, practice…education to really get it.

As contrast, I present hip-hop. No, this is not the standard-issue social conservative attack on the form; indeed, I used to be a rap DJ. There is a skill to taking a rhythm apart; there is a certain art to the wordplay that a really, really good rapper brings to the table. But hip-hop is about rhythm, which is the most immediately obvious aspect of music; even babies can perceive and completely enjoy rhythm and simple melody.

And there was a time when the goal was to master things that babies couldn’t do.
Jay writes:

The problem is that the concepts of “discipline” and “delayed gratification” are practically foreign to Americans these days. We’ve become a nation that has begun to systematically rout out the qualities that make us strong. Instead of allowing children to explore, we coddle them. Instead of teaching the classics, we teach drivel. We teach “self esteem” instead of formal logic. A classical education trained young minds to think critically, appreciate culture, and inculcated them with the values necessary for life in a democratic society. Now, thanks to the relentless dumbing-down of society, that sort of education has been cast out as being “patriarchal,” “ethnocentric” and even just plain “racist.” It is any irony that the Chinese seem to have a finer appreciation for our culture than we do.

Yes, it is.

There’s a parallel, of course.

Like classical music, conservatism is not intuitive to most people. Toddlers have a hard time with Hayek and Mahler, but can fully wrap their minds around “make people happy” and banging on pots. To embrace conservatism – the conservatism of Hayek and Buckley and Goldwater moreso than most of your single-issue varieties – takes some of the same attributes.

Anyone can figure out the First Amendment.  The Tenth Amendment?  That’s complicated.

Sanden Totten at MPR’s “LoopHole” blog writes about the “phenomenon” of ‘Survival Panic’:

In the coming months, mental health experts expect a rise in theft, depression, drug use, anxiety and even violence as consumers confront a harsh new reality and must live within diminished means.”People start seeing their economic situation change, and it stimulates a sort of survival panic,” said Gaetano Vaccaro, deputy clinical director of Moonview Sanctuary, which treats patients for emotional and behavioral disorders. “When we are in a survival panic, we are prone to really extreme behaviors.”

The U.S. recession that took hold in December last year has threatened personal finances in many ways as home prices fall, investments sour, retirement funds shrink, access to credit diminishes and jobs evaporate.

A little background here.

My first job out of college paid a princely $3.35 an hour; by the time I got tubed at KSTP, I was making maybe $6 an hour. It was OK at the time – my bills were minuscule. My rent was $135 a month, no car payments, gas was cheap, no real serious other bills; if I sold an article or did a voice-over or production gig on the side, I was living pretty large for the month.

Then, of course, follow many lean years – exacerbated by what (if you’ve been following the last year or so of my endless “Twenty Years Ago Today” series) would probably have been diagnosed as clinical depression, if I’d been smart enough to see a doctor at the time. I worked in bars, and then more low-paying dead-end jobs in radio, and then some even worse temp jobs. The kids entered the picture around this time, which straitened things even more. I didn’t top $20K a year until 1994, after my youngest was about a year old, when I’d finally snuck into the world of IT, first as a technical writer and, from 1998 on, as a User Experience guy.

That wasn’t the end of it, of course; IT isn’t always much more secure or stable than radio. Companies fold; contracting jobs end without warning or, seemingly, reason. The 2001 recession left me out of work for five months, and doing subsistence contracting for five or six more in 2003.

I do fairly well these days, of course; it’ll be interesting to see if I can ride out a recession without another dislocation. Knock wood.

In short, I don’t know that I, personally, have “survival panic” over the economy, so much as an ongoing,lifelong “100 years’ war of survival”.  I guess I’ve gotten to age 46 without a whole lot of expectations about the material manifestations of “Success” in life.

Which, on the one hand, means my house isn’t getting into VH1 Cribs or Architectural Digest any time soon and, on the other, means I probably won’t be one of these any time soon…:

For those who need to abruptly curtail spending, that leaves a major void, said James Gottfurcht, clinical psychologist and president of “Psychology of Money Consultants,” which coaches clients on money issues.

“People that have been … identifying with and defining themselves by their material objects and expenditures are losing a definite piece of their identity and themselves,” he said. “They have to learn how to replace that.”

Now, don’t get me wrong; growing up as I did around all sorts of survivors of the Great Depression, I know that pathological frugality can be pretty debilitating, too.

Still – if this is the alternative…:

Beth Rosenberg, a New York freelance educator and self-professed bargain hunter, said she stopped shopping for herself after her husband lost his publishing job in June.

She is now buying her son toys from the popular movie Madagascar for $2 at McDonald’s, and is wearing clothes that have hung untouched in her closet for years.

She said it has been stressful to stick to an austere budget after she used to easily splurge on $100 boots. “I miss it,” she said of shopping.

…I don’t feel so bad.

Hopefully Bush’s late-administration Hooveresque socialist thrashings and Obama’s FDR-like delusions don’t stall the recovery so long that the pathology has to swerve from one pathology all the way to the other one.

Benicio Del Toro – an excellent actor, and, like too many actors, dumb as a bag of hammers about politics and history – is directing co-producing the yuuuuuuge biopic about Che Guevara:

When asked why the movie needed to be so long, co-producer and star Benecio Del Toro replied, “That is a question for Che. Why such a fulfilled life? We believe that this is the shortest film about Che Guevara’s revolutionary life that could be made.”

Mark Goldblatt in NRO, with emphasis added:

Well, no.

The shortest film about Che’s revolutionary life has already been made. In it, a couple of scruffy, paramilitary-looking, motorcycle-riding cartoon cockroaches decide to “take over” a kitchen, running amok until a giant muscle-bound can of Raid appears and “kills them dead.”

Guevara, in reality, belongs to that species of human vermin who attach themselves to a charismatic villain — in Che’s case, Fidel Castro; in Heinrich Himmler’s case, Adolf Hitler; in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s case, Osama bin Laden — and enact their murderous agendas until the countervailing forces of history end their pathetic existences. Granted, Che is more photogenic than either the thin-lipped Poindexter Himmler or the hairy-backed Super Mario Brother Sheikh. It’s hard to imagine either of them ever moving a gross of tee shirts the way Che does. But the fact that Che continues to sell is a testament to the historical ignorance of every consumer of his visage.

I remember standing at Lake and Lyndale, at the little counterdemonstration with a little over a dozen of my friends and readers of this blog last year.

A cute redhead with a pierced nose and a carpenters apron festooned with fascist flair walked through the crowd selling buttons. Among them were a bunch of Che Guevara buttons.

“One dollar”, she said, perkily.

“You do know that Guevara was a mass murderer, don’t you? He ordered the execution of children?”

She grinned, looking a little dazed, and walked away to more fertile sales ground.

The guy ordered the murder of eight-year-old boys. He slaughtered entire families of his opponents. He was not merely a thug; he was a cowardly, sadistic thug.

To not only roil in admiration for Guevara, but to support a systematic, institutional beatification of such a person, complete with rewritten/suppressed history and iconic imagery?

Wow. Good thing that’s just the province of young, dumb radicals. Good thing no modern movement would immerse itself purely in a figure’s surface appeal and ignore all that’s underneath…

Since it’s inevitable that someone in my comment section will bleat “What? You’re comparing Obama and Che?” – Er, no.

I’m comparing their audiences.

Minnesota gay marriage proponents think ’09 is the year:

OutFront Minnesota, the state’s largest group pressing gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality, says same-sex marriage will become its top priority next year. To lead that effort, the group will announce today that Amy Johnson will become its new executive director, replacing Ann DeGroot, who left a year ago.

“It feels my entire professional career and my volunteer activism led to this job,” Johnson said in an interview this week. “I think in working for marriage, we are working for full dignity and respect for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender families. And on the way to doing that, we are going to engage the hearts and minds of Minnesotans.”

Opponents of gay and lesbian marriage say they welcome OutFront’s campaign. “To John Marty and their proponents, I say bring it on,” said state Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove. “I’d love to have that discussion in the next election.” He said most Minnesotans oppose gay marriage.

What Limmer said.

The DFL’s power base in Minnesota is a coalition of

• teachers,
• union workers,
• guilt-stricken upper-middle-class white liberals,
• mainstream minority groups
• various lefty pressure groups
• entitlement-oriented special interests
• Gays.

Among that coalition, the only ones who support gay marriage are:

• Gays
• guilt-stricken white liberals

Look – there may come a time when society approves of gay marriage.  Leaving aside my own personal and theological objections (which I’ve written about at great length over the years – I support civil unions, and believe “marriage” is a religious institution; if any church can morally and theologically justify it, by all means let them go to it), I don’t think this is it.  When liberal hotbeds like Hawaii, Oregon and California won’t pass it, the idea is clearly not ready to come out of the oven.

In fact, while I hope the DFL leadership is dumb enough (or owes enough chits to gay groups) to spend off their political capital on gay marriage, I don’t know that Republicans are going to be that lucky this year.

But we can hope.