Code Pinkos disrupt the Senate.

I loved the first lady; “I will not be…
“…”

“…”

“…silenced!”

Like she forgot her lines and had to read a cue card.

Last week, the Minnesota GOP acted against the six House “Republicans” who voted with the Tics to override Governor Pawlenty’s veto of the “Transportation” Bill.  The House GOP Caucus stripped the six of their committee leadership positions and other party-assigned perks; movements to unseat them proceeded from the bottom up as well, with Kathy Tingelstad losing her endorsement last week, other endorsements very much in jeopardy, and with Keith Downey running a very credible campaign against Rino Ron Erhardt in Edina (which, although I don’t endorse candidates because, well, I’m just a guy with a blog, I heartily urge every Republican in District 41A to get out and support Downey at this Saturday’s convention).  

The DFLSorosMedia reacted predictably; they lauded the RINO Six as “courageous“, they insulted the intelligence of those who disagreed, they pondered “Why Are Republicans So Close-Minded?”

For acting – y’know – like a political party.

That is, actually, just background for this next bit. Ponder the DFLSorosMedia’s love of “diversity of thought” as you read this account of a moderate DFLer and long-time DFL delegate’s dissent from party orthodoxy – on abortion and the war. 

And only on abortion and the war.

And wait to see when you’ll see the DFLSorosMedia demanding “open-mindedness” from the Tics.

And wait.

And wait.

From Barney Greenwald’s classic soliloquy after the court martial in The Caine Mutiny:

See, while I was studying law ‘n old Keefer here was writing his play for the Theatre Guild, and Willie here was on the playing fields of Prinshton, all that time these birds we call regulars–these stuffy, stupid Prussians, in the Navy and the Army -were manning guns. Course they weren’t doing it to save my mom from Hitler, they’re doing it for dough, like everybody else does what they do. Question is, in the last analysis–last analysis–what do you do for dough? Old Yellowstain, for dough, was standing guard on this fat dumb and happy country of ours. Meantime me, I was advancing little free non-Prussian life for dough. Of course, we figured in those days, only fools go into armed service. Bad pay, no millionaire future, and You can’t call your mind or body your own. Not for sensitive intellectuals. So when all hell broke loose and the Germans started running out of soap and figured, well it’s time to come over and melt down old Mrs. Greenwald–who’s gonna stop them? Not her boy Barney. Can’t stop a Nazi with a lawbook. So I dropped the lawbooks and ran to learn how to fly. Stout fellow. Meantime, and it took a year and a half before I was any good, who was keeping Mama out of the soap dish? Captain Queeg.

I thought about that when I read this.  Medea “Code Pink” Benjamin before, defending Berkeley’s assault on the Marines:

“If it weren’t for people like the people in Berkeley, standing up for what they believe, we’d be living under Hitler.”

Medea Benjamin yesterday:

“While we were at the protest in Berkeley from 12 to 4 PM a white volvo drove by and a man spat upon code pink. They chased him down the street and got into a verbal altercation. The police were NO WHERE in sight. That’s not the best part, ready for this? Medea Benjamin yelled and I quote “Marines!” she actually yelled for our help because this man had stepped out of his car.

Perhaps a mistake?  Something lost in translation from human to Code-Pink-ese?

I even asked her if she was yelling Police and she told me “I said Marines” then put her arm around my friend Allen (the Marine vet) Ironic?

Paging Alanis Morissette.  And Jose Ferrer.
(Via Malkin)

An emailer wrote me yesterday, wondering (at that point) if the driver in the tragic bus crash in Cottonwood, MN, who’d given a Hispanic name at her arrest – was an illegal alien.

I’m always loathe to assume that; most Latin-Americans are perfectly legal.  And I don’t want to succumb to bashing illegal immigrants for every ill that faces this country, since the precedents for that sort of thing in the past 100 years are pretty bad.

But of course, it’d seem the emailer was right.   Lassie at True North relates the Fox9 story:

Fox Nine News confirmed late this afternoon what many have suspected, but some local media still aren’t noting:

Authorities have confirmed that the driver of the van that struck the school bus that killed 4 students on Tuesday is an illegal alien.

Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement are checking to see where she came from and how long she’s been in Minnesota. FOX 9 has also learned that the name she gave to police, Alainiss Morales, is an alias.

A memorial fund is set up:

Memorial Fund for Families of Bus Crash Victims
United Southwest Bank
P.O. Box 288
Cottonwood, MN 56229

As Michelle Malkin noted, open borders and sanctuary cities have bloody consequences. Contact your legislators.

Of course, perfectly-legal Americans also commit stupid crimes with cars; thousands of Americans die every year, most of them killed by other legal Americans (or themselves) via any variety of stupid traffic tricks.

But it was an illegal alien who had the accident in Cottonwood.  And there are four families who might not be dealing with their childrens’ deaths if one of those illegals had been kept out of the US today.

Peg Kaplan read Nickeled and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, too.  And she liked it about as much as I did:

While I would never argue that people who earn hourly wages at Wal-Mart, fill orders at Wendy’s or clean rooms at Hampton Inn don’t have serious struggles, Ms. Ehrenreich’s book was a joke.  Part of her undercover stint took place in my hometown, Minneapolis.  Thus, it was easy to see that the author didn’t really want to be successful.  She never tried to improve her positions, get superior housing, bargain for better anything at all.  She was surly and rude to most with whom she met – be it co-workers, superiors or clerks where she was trying to find decent but inexpensive housing. 

Beyond that?  My problem with Ehrenreich’s book was that while she may have had some minimum wage jobs, she actually lived like an upper-middle-class person who’d put on a “poor” costume and was acting, as Peg noted, like a cartoon of a disadvantaged person.  Her conclusions were already set; there was never any doubt about the outcome of her experiment, and if there HAD been, her cartoonish, central-casting “poor person” behavior pretty well scuppered it. 

Which, in addition to being a pretty risible approach to a serious issue, was kind of insulting.  Early in my marriage, my wife-at-the-time and I got by on very little money, scrimped and pinched pennies and, eventually, found the opportunity to get ahead; the notion that a pampered foof like Ehrenreich thought her cartoonish experiences emblematic was nauseating.

I bring this up because Peg points us to this piece in the Christian Science Monitor, about a recent college grad who tried Ehrenreich’s experiment, in reverse:

Shortly after graduating from Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., [Adam Shepard] intentionally left his parents’ home to test the vivacity of the American Dream. His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year.

To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education.

During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.

Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in his family. But by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000.

The effort, he says, was inspired after reading “Nickel and Dimed,” in which author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on a series of low-paying jobs. Unlike Ms. Ehrenreich, who chronicled the difficulty of advancing beyond the ranks of the working poor, Shepard found he was able to successfully climb out of his self-imposed poverty.

He tells his story in “Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream.” The book, he says, is a testament to what ordinary Americans can achieve.

Read the whole thing?  Sure, why not? 

(Via Peg at What If?)

Chad the Elder, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward and JB Doubtless – rock-ribbed conservatives, Catholics and Republicans all – team up to write a scathing, but unsurprising, review of Sicko, Micheal Moore’s paeon to socialized heath care.

The three, in a rare team posting, take on Moore’s take on Cuba’s system with timing that is, given the events of the day, eerie.  Moore lauds Cuba in Sicko.  The Fraters lads?  Well…:

Fidel Castro’s island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” He and his charges make their way — their pre-arranged way, if it need be said — to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to “give them the same care they’d give Cuban citizens.” Then he adds, dramatically: “And they did.”

If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, “imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus”). What Moore doesn’t mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of “health tourism” — a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that’s unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal. The Cuban American National Foundation (admittedly a group with no love for the Castro regime) calls this “medical apartheid.” And in a 2004 article in Canada’s National Post, writer Isabel Vincent quoted a dissident Cuban neurosurgeon, Doctor Hilda Molina, as saying, “Cubans should be treated the same as foreigners. Cubans have less rights in their own country than foreigners who visit here.”

They also shred France…:

Moore’s most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks’ vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who’s reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he’s finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can’t have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can’t.

…and Canada…:

In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called “Dead Meat,” by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore’s movie would have you believe don’t exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he’d contacted: “As of today,” she says, “it’s a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation.”

It’s a scathing indictment.  Too bad it was written by a bunch of rock-ribbed conservatives.  You expect them to rip on Moore and on socialized medicine.

UPDATE:  Doh.  The piece was actually written by uber-liberal MTV “News” anchor and former Rolling Stone writer Kurt Loder.

Not sure how I mixed that up.

…and piss off a terrorist!

(As a special Val’s day present, I direct you to one of my favorite Valentine’s Day stories)

Two Iranian sisters face death by stoning after a Sharia conviction for adultery.

The two were found guilty of adultery — a capital crime in Islamic Iran — after the husband of one sister presented video evidence showing them in the company of other men while he was away.

“Branch 23 of the supreme court has confirmed the stoning sentence,” said their lawyer, Jabbar Solati.

The penal court of Tehran province had already sentenced the sisters identified only as Zohreh, 27, and Azar (no age given) to stoning, the daily said.

Solati explained that the two sisters had initially been tried for “illegal relations” and received 99 lashes. However in a second trial they were convicted of “adultery.”

No word yet if Minneapolis Community Technical College will carry the stoning live on a jumbotron.

Berkeley not only tries to shut down a Marine recruiting station, it gives Code Pink preferential treatment to carry out their harassment!

[the Berkeley City Council] voted 8-1 to tell the U.S. Marines that its Shattuck Avenue recruiting station “is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders.”

OK, so we’re used to Berkeley (and San Francisco, and Minneapolis for that matter) “sending” stupid “messages”. 

But this bit here… 

In a separate item, the council voted 8-1 to give Code Pink a designated parking space in front of the recruiting station once a week for six months and a free sound permit for protesting once a week from noon to 4 p.m.

In other words, in parking-strapped Berkeley, the City Council is lending city property to a protest group!

Can every protest group expect that sort of consideration?

Doy…:

“I believe in the Code Pink cause. The Marines don’t belong here, they shouldn’t have come here, and they should leave,” Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said after votes were cast….The recommendation to give Code Pink a parking space for protesting and a free sound permit was brought by council members Linda Maio and Max Anderson.

Some peoples’ freedom of speech is more important than yours, obviously.  At least, it is in Berkeley.

Code Pink on Wednesday started circulating petitions to put a measure on the November ballot in Berkeley that would make it more difficult to open military recruiting offices near homes, parks, schools, churches libraries or health clinics. The group needs 5,000 signatures to make the ballot.

In other words, zoning them like pr0n shops.

But here’s the part I like; it’s not entirely one-sided!

Because not only does the story note (as I did, years ago) that the Pinkers are stupid and ignorant – they’re lousy neighbors!:

Even though the council items passed, not everyone is happy with the work of Code Pink. Some employees and owners of businesses near the Marines office have had enough of the group and its protests.

“My husband’s business is right upstairs, and this (protesting) is bordering on harassment,” Dori Schmidt told the council. “I hope this stops.”

An employee of a nearby business who asked not to be identified said Wednesday the elderly Code Pink protesters are aggressive, take up parking spaces, block the sidewalk with their yoga moves, smoke in the doorways, and are noisy.

“Most of the people around here think they’re a joke,” the woman said.

A joke?  Really?  Seems a little…

…well, accurate.  It seems their Pinkers aren’t any smarter than ours are:

Fran Rachel, 90, a Code Pink protester who spoke at the council meeting, said the group’s request for a parking space and noise permit was especially important because the Marines are recruiting soldiers who may die in an unjust war.

“This is very serious,” Rachel said. “This isn’t a game; it’s mass murder. There’s a sickness of silence of people not speaking out against the war. We have to do this.”

“Our opponents are mentally ill”.

Oh, I’m looking forward to seeing those dimwitted old crones at the RNC.

Really, really, I am.

UPDATE WITH BOOYAH:  The American Legion says “Berkeley Delenda Est“.  Legion leader Marty Conatser does to the Berkeley Flower Children and the Pinkos what the Marines did to Peleliu (via Michelle):

“Osama bin Laden couldn’t have said it better,” American Legion National Commander Marty Conatser said of the Berkeley City Council Resolution, which tells the Marines that they are not welcome there. “Disgraceful, disloyal, ungrateful. These words are too kind in describing the actions of the public officials in Berkeley, who voted for this disgrace. Nonetheless, our Marines continue to bravely serve and in so doing, allow Americans to spout such foolishness. The American Legion not only strongly condemns this action by the City Council but also believes that a sincere apology is in order to all Marines, past and present.”…“I have been a recruiter in the National Guard and I know that it’s tough duty, with long hours,” Conatser said. “What these recruiters do is essential to our national security. Without recruiters we have no military. And I don’t think we can count on the flower children from Berkeley to protect this nation when it comes under attack. They have to remember that Marines are not the enemy; the terrorists are.”

“Remember”?  They have to learn it in the first place.

Remember; if some tinhorn city government can vote to make the Marines (or any other body of government) “unwanted and unwelcome intruders”, they can do it to anyone. 

“Implausible” means “people talking with their dogs”.

“Irony” might be “leftybloggers that would lose debates with real dogs”.

Ipso “Spotty” from Culling Snook:

If Mitch had an irony-warning meter in his head, it would have been pegged while he wrote that. But Mitch is, of course, dead to irony.

Well, to be fair (to me), “Irony” isn’t the term you’re looking for.

That’d be “non-sequitur“.

“He” (it’s a writing in a dog’s voice, but he’s not fooling anyone; dogs have better reading comprehension) was writing about yesterday’s bit about abortion; how abortion rates are falling because people (says columnist Steve Chapman) are assigning moral gravity to humans-under-construction today that they didn’t 20 years ago.

My point – well, read it yourself.

Mr. Stool:

So pro-choice supporters have to realize that there is a “moral dimension” to abortion? And then a “compromise” would be possible? Does Mitch sound like he wants to compromise, boys and girls?

Well, Bad Dog, all you had to do was ask. I think I was pretty clear about it.

Me? Personally? Hell no. If it were up to me, there’d be no compromise at all! Not on abortion, or many many many other issues.

But I’m not an absolute dictator. I am one of a couple hundred million voters.

Our society reaches compromises, though, on pretty much every issue (mostly; there’s not much call to legalize cannibalism). I liken it to tugs of war, with people pulling the rope of each issue one way or the other; some pulling hard, others not so much, still others cajoling people to pull with them or at least stop pulling for the other side.

If you want a different metaphor, you go ahead and pick it! But since society does the compromising, my goal is to pull like a mofo to try to make society’s compromise better (from my point of view).  I expect others to pull against me.  Being a conservative, I’m a match for any 20 of them, but knock yourselves out.

Well, he does wrote about “an acceptable a less vile compromise,” Spotty.

Grasshopper, does that sound like Mitch would accept half a loaf if offered to him?

No, I guess not.

With good reason – society and its attitudes aren’t a “loaf” that someone offers me, for which I should be grateful, with which I should just shut up and go along. It’s a huge organism with five million parts (in Minnesota alone), each with a mind of its own. And I’m doing my best to reach as many as possible, on the things that matter to me.

And if “Spotty” thinks society and its attitudes and the way our culture conducts its business are some kind of “loaf” handed to him by some unseen benefactor, [Joke about how DFLers are just a bunch of mindless hive creatures, like Borg slathered in patchouli and chanting mindless doggerel, deleted for civility’s sake]

Mitch sees compromise as just a step in the incremental banning of abortion until it is entirely illegal.

Bad dog! Stupid dog! Who’s gonna clean up this pile of steaming intellectual crap on the floor? Bad dog!

I see compromise as “where society as a whole is” on whatever issue you want to talk about.

And yes – my goal is to try like hell to make society as a whole realize that life begins at conception.

Because it’s not my role to compromise. My role is to affect the compromise. To respect the results of that compromise, of course – it’s called “living within the rule of law” – but to keep trying to swing that compromise via any legal, civil means.
To be fair to Spotty, though, he’s handicapped. DFLers in this state aren’t used to compromising. They’re used to having absolute control. Now that there’s someone pulling against them on some of these issues, it’s disconcerting to some of them.

Tough.

Tell you what Mitch, come back after you’re willing to concede that there is a privacy and civil liberties dimension to abortion. Then maybe we can talk.

But you go first.

OK. I’ll go first.

No! I will concede no such thing! The parents’ civil liberties and privacy do not trump the “fetus”‘s right to life, liberty and happiness any more than they do mine! The fetus is a human from the moment it’s conceived. Killing it is murder. People – individual men and women – need to take that into account before they make flippy floppy. It’s as simple as that.

And for someone else – let’s call her “Gretel Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis” – it’s equally clear-cut. Abortion is not just a right, it’s a civil sacrament, which I have an obligation to supply via my tax dollars.

Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis and I meet. We yell. We scream. And in the end, since we do need to decide and since neither of us has the power or right to coerce each other, we compromise somewhere in the middle. I retain my opinion; Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis retains hers. We continue trying to pull the issue toward our point of view. If I get bored and drop out, Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis will make abortion a civil sacrement! And if I convince someone else – say, Ann Plotnik, pro-lifer – to join the debate – we’ll outnumber Ms. Buncombe-Stipe-Purvis and the compromise will be recast, maybe a little more to the right.

You see how it works, Spot?

Oh, jeez – you pooped on the floor again, didn’t you?

Glenn Reynolds noticed something at the State of the Union; people – the President, in this case – are seriously talking pork:

His actions aren’t as bold as I’d like, but still — back in 2005 when PorkBusters started, nobody in Washington cared and members of Congress were bragging about pork. Now the State of the Union leads of with an attack on earmarks, to thundering applause.

Thundering applause – from the pork ranchers themselves?  Isn’t that sorta like Major Renault’s “I’m shocked – shocked“ line in Casablanca?

Yeah, a lot of it’s a sham. But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and this kind of hypocrisy indicates that the anti-earmark momentum is growing.

One of these years…

Politics in our society is a matter of compromise among different forces pulling in each direction, reaching an agreement that everyone can live with (or at least tries to, until the next election cycle).

I view politics as a tug of war. A series of tugs-of-war, really – one for each issue that’s out there, at any level, from National Security to Welfare to Cheese Price Supports. At the center of each debate is a mud pit; a ribbon in the exact center of each rope shows how well each team is doing.

My role in that tug of war is to affect that compromise by pulling to the right like there’s no tomorrow. So I pull like mad, and the ribbon over the mud thus inches a little closer to the right. Others, of course, pull against me, trying to edge the ribbon to the left. I know there’ll be a compromise; I know that the harder I pull to the right, the more people will (if I’m doing my job) be convinced to pull with me, and the farther to the right that ribbon – the “final” results of the compromise – will be.

Abortion is one of those tugs of war. When I was a kid, in 1973, the ribbon got a huge pull to the left with Roe Vs. Wade. In the past 35 years, many – from conservative evangelicals to liberal Catholics – have grabbed onto the rope from the right and pulled with all their might. And for some of us, the hope for a compromise – knowing that a complete ban was not going to happen in our lifetimes – was the hope that just one more tug would pull the ribbon just far enough so that people – maybe a majority – would see that while abortion was legal, that aborting a fetus was an act imbued with much more moral gravity than excising a wart or clipping a toenail.

In other words, the first step to an acceptable a less vile compromise would be for abortion’s supporters to realize that there is a moral dimension to abortion. It’s a realization that abortion’s most sacramentalist zealots resist, because it’d be the first step in gutting the notion that a fetus is nothing but a mass of tissue until you get a diaper on it.

Steve Chapman notes in Sunday’s Strib that there are signs the ribbon, measured by popular culture, may have moved that far (I’ve added some emphases):

Laws often alter attitudes, inducing people to accept things — such as racial integration — they once rejected. But sometimes, attitudes move in the opposite direction, as people see the consequences of the change. That’s the case with abortion.The news that the abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level in 30 years elicits various explanations, from increased use of contraceptives to lack of access to abortion clinics. But maybe the chief reason is that the great majority of Americans, even many who see themselves as prochoice, are deeply uncomfortable with it.In 1992, a Gallup/Newsweek poll found 34 percent of Americans thought abortion “should be legal under any circumstances,” with 13 percent saying it should always be illegal. Last year, only 26 percent said it should always be allowed, with 18 percent saying it should never be permitted.

Sentiments are even more negative among the group that might place the highest value on being able to escape an unwanted pregnancy: young people. In 2003, Gallup found, one of every three kids from age 13 to 17 said abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. More revealing yet is that 72 percent said abortion is “morally wrong.”

By now, prolife groups know that outlawing most abortions is not a plausible aspiration. So they have adopted a two-pronged strategy. The first is to regulate it more closely — with parental-notification laws, informed consent requirements and a ban on partial-birth abortion. The second is to educate Americans with an eye toward changing “hearts and minds.” In both, they have had considerable success.

Even those who insist Americans are solidly in favor of legal abortion implicitly acknowledge the widespread distaste. That’s why the Democratic Party’s 2004 platform omitted any mention of the issue, and why politicians who support abortion rights cloak them in euphemisms like “the right to choose.”

But some abortion-rights supporters admit reservations. It was a landmark moment in 1995 when the prochoice author Naomi Wolf, writing in the New Republic magazine, declared that “the death of a fetus is a real death.” She went on: “By refusing to look at abortion within a moral framework, we lose the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity.”

This growing aversion to abortion may be traced to better information. When the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, most people had little understanding of fetal development. But the proliferation of ultrasound images from the womb, combined with the dissemination of facts by prolife groups, has lifted the veil.

In the comedy movie “Juno,” a pregnant 16-year-old heads for an abortion clinic, only to change her mind after a teenage protester tells her, “Your baby probably has a beating heart, you know. It can feel pain. And it has fingernails.”

“Juno” has been faulted as a “fairy tale” that sugarcoats the realities of teen pregnancy.

The prevailing view used to be: Abortion may be evil, but it’s necessary. Increasingly, the sentiment is: Abortion may be necessary, but it’s evil.

Simple Fact:  None of the great famines of the last 100 years – Ukraine in the ’30s, Bengal in the ’40s, China at various times but focuses in the ’50s, India and Bangladesh in the ’60’s, Sub-saharan Africa in the ’70s, Ethiopia in the ’80s – was caused by a lack of food. 

None.  Zero.  Every last one of the above was caused by government action.

A further simple fact:  no place with a free market and a free press has ever suffered a famine.  Every one of the famines above were caused by governments that had dictatorial powers, either structurally (most of them) or due to exigent circumstances (British-controlled Bengal in the early forties, in which the government assumed wartime powers over distribution and the press). 

In every case above, but for government intervention (usually hostile, as in the case of the USSR, China and Ethiopia, but sometimes “well-meaning”, as with the spectacular, grisly failure of India’s foray into big-state socialism), the means – food! – existed to solve the famine.

Of course, it’s misleading to compare the Ukranian Famine of the ’30s – which was induced by Stalin’s Cheka/NKVD to force the collectivization of Ukrainian farmland – with India, whose hamfisted attempts at creating an industrial powerhouse by second-world means was such an incredible human catastrophe.  Isn’t it?

Well, not if you’re starving.

All of that is just backgrond for this story; Hugo Chavez is sending the army to confiscate food from Venezuela’s food merchants, to “alleviate shortages”:

Venezuela’s top food company has accused troops of illegally seizing more than 500 tonnes of food from its trucks as part of President Hugo Chavez’s campaign to stem shortages.

The leftist Chavez this week created a state food distributor and loosened some price controls, seeking to end months of shortages for staples like milk and eggs that have caused long lines and upset his supporters in the OPEC nation.

Price controls?  State distribution?

Yeah, goodness knows that’s worked so well every time it’s been tried.

Simple economic fact:  You can not make something worth other than what people are willing to pay for it. 

Artificially lower the price?  Expect shortages; people will gladly pay $1 for $2 worth of product!  Expect the black market to try to make up for the shortages; expect massive amounts of the artificially-cheap product to find their way to the black market.

Artificially raise the price?  Expect the black market to fill the demand for cheaper.

Did someone say “black market?”

The highly publicised campaign has also included government crackdowns on accused smuggling, with the military seizing 1,600 tonnes of food and sending 1,200 troops to the border with Colombia.

Using the military to crack down on the black market caused by government-induced shortages?

Why, it’s like a “war on drugs”, only with food!

Jose Anzola, a director of food company Alimentos Polar, told reporters that troops stopped 27 of its trucks over the last three days and described the seizures as “illegal, arbitrary and irresponsible.”

Troops said they halted the transport of 350 tonnes of food to states along the Colombian border on suspicion of smuggling, he said. Another 165 tonnes were impounded in an eastern state on accusations of hoarding, he added.

In other words, he’s sending the military to undo peoples’ responses to the shortages his own government is causing.

Business leaders say shortages of these products are caused by strict price controls, which have lagged inflation that is Latin America’s highest.

Chavez is focusing on practical issues like food supply and crime after losing a December referendum that would have let him run for re-election indefinitely and expand his self-styled revolution.

He announced an increase of more than 30% in the retail price of milk in an effort to ease shortages that have created headaches for consumers of all social classes.

He also threatened to expropriate companies selling food above regulated prices.

“Anyone who is distributing food … and is speculating, we must intervene and we must expropriate (the business) and put it in the hands of the state and the communities,” Chavez said during the inauguration of a new state-run market in Caracas.

Let’s see how well that works.

Any bets?

BONUS QUESTION:  What do you suppose happens when Hillary, Obie or Silkypony does the same exact thing to healthcare in the US?

Never let it be said that I’m not a big-tent kind of person.  Indeed, the GOP – as an amalgam of fiscal, social, legal and cultural conservatives, any individual of whom might fit one through four of those four adjectives – needs to some extent to be flexible on its bedrock principles, especially since they are so relatively complex.

Indeed, that’s one of the things that separates conservatism from liberalism; you can teach any child to be a liberal (indeed, that’s what many of our schools do); it’s a short leap from “share and share alike” to “what is yours belongs to everyone; from “don’t run with scissors” to “the Second Amendment is a collective right”; from “mind your own bees-wax” to “keep your laws off my body”.   It’s not for nothing that Churchill said a man has no heart if he’s not a liberal at 20 and no brain if he’s not a conservative by 40; liberalism and adolescence are both prone to callow, facile sloganeering.  Conservatism is, if you were raised liberal (and to some extent in western culture we all are), somewhat counterintuitive.

So to be a conservative (at least a multi-issue conservative) requires a certain amount of thought – and any group of three individuals who thinks about any set of issues is going to come up with at least four solutions. So running a “conservative” party necessarily needs accomodating a wide range of points of view (to say nothing of the more-rigid, more sloganistic views of the single-issue crowd who, I should observe, often don’t understand conservatism outside the bounds of their main issue – although they can be, and have been, taught).

And that is as it should be.  It makes election time a contentious scrum (as we see in the GOP Presidential race right now), but there’s really no other way. 

That being said, “big tent” or no, there are some “Republicans” we’re better off without. 

The Star-Tribune seems to have a boundless stockpile of these people.  They show up on cue in columns by Lori Sturdevant and Doug Grow; people who mewl about feeling “cut off from the current state of the party”, who pine for the days when the GOP, especially in Minnesota, was pro-choice and anti-gun and took a soft line on crime and foreign policy.  In other words, when the GOP (nationally and especially in Minnesota) was basically Tics in better suits.

Two of these popped up in the Strib yesterday, in an op-ed by Liz McCloskey and Peter Leibold entitled “To value life — in all regards — is to be politically adrift”.  The duo – described as “…a doctoral candidate at the Catholic University of America” and a “former general counsel of the Catholic Health Association”, respectively, describe a journey that’s not all that terribly different than my own (if you substitute “Protestant” for “Catholic”), in some ways:

When we were born in the early 1960s, it was possible to be both a Democrat and a Catholic without any agonizing pangs of conscience. John F. Kennedy was president; John Courtney Murray was a public theologian; Pope John XXIII was opening a window to the world at the Second Vatican Council. But as we came of age politically, we felt orphaned by the Democratic Party, whose prolife positions on war, poverty and the environment did not extend to the lives of the most weak and vulnerable, those not yet born.

In other words, they are liberals, except for that whole “infanticide” thing.  Now, I’ve confessed in the past – abortion, like gay marriage, isn’t my hottest-button issue.  I’m pro-life, but it’s somewhere down my list of “gotta haves”.  As it was for Ronald Reagan, as it happens.

While the moderate wing of the Republican Party provided us a foster home when we worked on the Senate staff of John Danforth, R-Mo., with the likes of former Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and others, the Grand Old Party’s move to the right, including its hardening, dominant positions on the Iraq war, access to guns and the death penalty, among other issues, have made it an inhospitable place for us to dwell permanently. 

Let’s stop right there.

I’m not one to speak for the GOP as a whole – far from it.  But if Ms. McCloskey and Mr. Leibold can’t tell the difference between the life of a fetus – a human-under-construction, utterly innocent of any wrongdoing, exactly as the Catholic Church teaches – on the one hand, and convicted murderers, especially child-murderers, murderers who rape and then kill, mass-murderers and spree-killers on the other, perhaps it’s not their politics that are adrift.  If they compare abortion on the one hand with the right of the law-abiding citizen to defend themselves from criminals on the other, perhaps it’s not the GOP’s politics that have deserted reason and rationality.

During many elections we find ourselves facing the same dilemma: Which of our values must take a back seat when we go to the voting booth? Do we let our moral concern for peaceful resolutions of conflict, the environment, addressing poverty and aggressive enforcement of civil rights guide our choices? Or do we stand firm on another important issue of conscience and signal our hope for an end to abortion? Often, both choices leave a bad taste in our mouths.

Welcome to real life, kids!

But the fact that you – a “pro-life” voter – get a “bad taste” in your mouth because I have the right to protect my and my family’s lives through the grace of the Second Amendment as an individual right, then perhaps your notion of “life” is what’s adrift.

Tuesday’s March for Life in Washington brought home this problem. The assumption of abortion opponents is that anyone serious about his or her desire to see an end to abortion will vote for the “prolife” candidate. Yet there is rarely a candidate, and certainly not a political party, that embodies the consistent ethic of life that would make casting a truly prolife vote a simple or straightforward choice.

May I suggest that y’all – and the organizations you represent – are the ones with the inconsistent “ethic of life”.  To fail to differentiate between innocent life and life that is itself anti-life – murderers, and those whose actions are lethal enough to be covered by laws governing legal self-defense – is inconsistent to the point of meaningless.  And I say this as a conservative who opposes the death penalty. 

If the Democratic Party could adopt a much less disdainful, more welcoming, perhaps even “prochoice” stance toward those under its tent who have conscientious objections to abortion, we would be much less squeamish about supporting its candidates, and we know that we are not alone in that conviction.

As the 2008 campaign unfolds, we will look for a candidate who will not use rhetoric or a tone seemingly designed to alienate those of us who simply cannot cheer for speeches celebrating the availability of abortion….

…A party and a candidate that truly respect this viewpoint are ones that can adopt these two political orphans.

I can’t speak for the notion of “respect” – but if my party were to follow your viewpoint, that the life of a murderer or of someone who wishes to kill my family and I are of no less value than an an innocent human-under-construction – then I’d choose “orphan”. 

It’s a view of “life” that doesn’t even rise to the level of “illogical”. 

In the previous post, I decried the intellectual provincialism of the (usually) female voters who claim their vote will be based on gender first and foremost.

I have never, ever, met a guy who claimed he’d vote “men first”.  I suppose such a guy exists out there; an angry fathers’ rights advocate, a militant gay, someone – but if I met such a guy, it’d be a first.

In the meantime, I’ve known quite a few women (and a few men) who claimed – as I noted in my previous post – that a pair of Y chromosomes was basically all they needed to earn their vote (although presumably they’d make exceptions for Michele Bachmann and Mary Kiffmeyer).

And I knew, in the pit of my gut, that I’d find more on the subject by reading the Twin Cities’ media’s most reliable Tic flak, Lori Sturdevant.

And it goes without saying that the key to the story will be a “Republican who is disaffected by the current state of the party”:

The story was that one longtime Republican backer of womenwinning (which at the time was called the Minnesota Women’s Campaign Fund) phoned another to announce that she was organizing a Republicans for Choice rally at next September’s GOP national convention in St. Paul. It was the sort of thing the two of them used to love to do 25 or 30 years ago — back when there was something called the GOP Feminist Caucus and when Minnesota’s Republican leadership had not yet alienated or exiled almost all of its backers of legal abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.

“Can I count on your support?” Sally Pillsbury asked Marilyn Bryant.

“I’m sorry,” replied Bryant, “but I’m supporting Hillary.”

So is womenwinning. The still officially multipartisan state organization sends money only to candidates who are female, prochoice and viable, and this year found itself able to endorse a candidate for president for the first time.

Bryant, a womenwinning founder, explained her choice last week: “I’ve seen women move into the professions — business, law, medicine — with great success. But in politics, it’s been a terribly slow process. I’d love to have the opportunity to vote for a woman for president, especially a woman who’s as articulate, smart and qualified as Hillary Clinton is.”

That longing among female voters — some of them former Republicans like Bryant — is getting much credit for Clinton’s resurgent victory Tuesday.

To keep women’s votes coming the way they did in New Hampshire, Clinton has to make sure they see her the way Bryant does: articulate, smart, qualified, and a woman to boot — and not the way her opponents cast her in Iowa: too calculating, cautious, controlling and connected to a certain previous administration.

Clinton emerged from New Hampshire as both the establishment and the feminist candidate. That’s a complex and somewhat contradictory dual identity that no previous major presidential contender has borne. She’s traversing uncharted territory.

A lot of politically ambitious women are watching her for a lesson in how to do it…Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, state Senate Assistant Majority Leader Tarryl Clark and Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner — would have to decide how early and how often to play the gender card if they run for statewide office in 2010 or beyond.

In the wake of Clinton’s New Hampshire experience, all three played it boldly Wednesday.

For almost forty long years, the Ameircan Civil Liberties Union has been AWOL on one of the most divisive civil liberties issues of our era – unreasonable government control and banning of firearms in the hands of the law-abiding.

They also sat out the debate on McCain-Feingold, whose main effect was to ration conservative grassroots speech.  As to the rights of the unborn to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – well, that just gives ’em a headache.

Indeed, whenever civil liberties that might be labelled “conservative” are on the block, the ACLU makes like Brave Sir Robin, and bravely turns its tail and flees.

But let a “conservative” get caught in a farcical episode in an airport restroom, and the right to drop trou and get the freak on is essential stuff, dagnabbit

In an effort to help Sen. Larry Craig, the American Civil Liberties Union is arguing that people who have sex in public bathrooms have an expectation of privacy

I’m all for privacy – as in, “more than you”, whomever you are (and that means you too, Chuck Samuelson). As someone whose free speech Hillary Clinton has in her cross-hairs, I’m obviously a First-Amendment advocate (and the rest of the Bill of Rights as well). And I’m a pretty forthright critic of the public school system.

But I still would like to see these kids tossed out on their ears

Thirteen Eden Prairie High students who were pictured drinking online face penalties. Some students are planning a walkout after first period this morning, and they’re promoting the protest where the controversy began: on Facebook.com.

The walkout – as opposed to a job strike – has always struck me as the most gutless and snotty form of protest, in general. I don’t know who’s teaching these kids about rhetoric, civil disobedience and protest, but if it’s a teacher, the district should get its money back.

Whether it’s this story – about a Polish couple that is divorce after meeting in a “client-to-provider” capacity in a brothel:

A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment’s employees.

Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

 …or that Ed was able to seamlessly correlate it with Rupert Holmes’ “Pina Colada Song” (AKA “the day Satan conquered the Seventies”).

I’ll get back to y’all on that.

Amy Alkon:

I don’t know about you, but it seems I’m a little behind this week, not only in my writing, but in blowing up busloads of innocent people.

Read the rest of the piece.  How dumb is Amy’s target?

She has a PhD.

That is all.

The title of this post in the Daily Mail – “When we elevated fatuous bits of female fluff to celebrity status” – hits directly on something I wondered about when I caught about thirty seconds of the Teela Tequila (?) or Kim Kardashian show or some such trifle the other day.

The drip-drip effect of all these empty-heads being paraded before us as beacons of success is that, among women of all ages, even those of us in our 40s who should know better, it is now no longer seen as ironic to be interested in whether or not Kylie has had a face lift, or Lindsay Lohan has or has not checked out of rehab, or totalled her car while drink driving. Or Sienna Miller has said yes or no to Rhys Ifans, or Jennifer Lopez has piled on the pregnancy pounds.
Thanks to last year’s bombardment of the banal, to know and care about these people is now seen as normal.

They’re the flip side of the “Simpson Trial” coin, really; it’s a short leap from the trivialization of murder to the significantization (I know, it’s not a word. Or is it?) of walking wastes of public attention span like Nicole Ritchie.

But Liz Jones notes that there’s hope:

And finally and most commendably the American news anchor Mika Brzezinski, for shredding her script in anger at being ordered to lead a bulletin with yet another Paris Hilton story – a liberating act tantamount to burning her bra, surely?

David Brauer – former Twin Cities Reader (or was it the City Pages?  Who can tell anymore?) writer, KSTP-AM morning guy and MPR’s current Sole Voice on the Media, writes in the Daily Mold’s wrapup of the year’s top stories about something I was actually pondering myself over the weekend.

No, not this bit…:

Atrios lovingly labels the mortgage meltdown as a pile of poo, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that while inner-city neighborhoods have been shat upon, those are troubled places used to such muck; the real gonad-shrinking panic is emanating from the petro-enabled Outer Burbosphere, whose overvalued aura of Manifest Destiny may exhibit a steeper downward arc than our own fading American empire.

Many’s the lefty who fantasizes about the burbs’ crumbling and the US joining Sweden among the ranks of “former powers”.  Apparently equally many are the leftybloggers who think Duncan “Atrios” Black’s fourth-grade dribblings are quotable. 

But I digress: here’s the part I started pondering late last week, myself, when i was writing about the Northstar Commuter Rail line a few weeks ago.  A few comments popped up in my comment section that mirrored some things I’d heard from some left-leaning friends of mine:

With the approval of the North Star I actually hopped on MLS last night and looked for homes in Elk River and Big Lake. Down Side, of course, it is crazy Bachmann land. But nice homes and a better price than burbia with a commute that would be very doable on the Rail…if enough people like me consider the move, her days are numbered anyway *smile*

In other words (not to stuff words into commenter, neighbor and pal Flash’s mouth, but it reflects something I’ve heard from other people, so I’m going to use the comment emblematically), once rail transit makes it politically correct for (white, middle-class) lefties to move to the ‘burbs, they’ll flee the mess that three generations of their own party’s policies have created.

Along these lines, Brauer adds:

Wouldn’t it be something if the flipped parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul were some day repopulated by the Hummer-scarred expats of Commuterland?

Indeed, I pondered over the weekend – should Linden Hills, Highland Park and Saint Anthony Park’s upper-middle-class Prius-driving yuppie demo decamp for the ‘burbs to escape the collapsed education system, crime and social ills that their own liberal/DFL machine, system and philosophy have made into untouchable institutions, it’ll leave behind a huge stock of housing at bargain rates – housing that is well-built (compare a 1910’s Edwardian, solid as Churchill’s bunker, with the shoddily-built, cheesily-appointed McMansions that glut the left’s future stronghold), well-situated (sited and built before the left’s tinkering with the market via Urban Renewal, when the free market still ruled demographics) and very, very liveable (as the Twin Cities were before three generations of DFL hegemony messed the place up). 

And conservatives – being people who appreciate value over “statements” and “messages” – will go where the value is. 

By about this time, the shoddily-mass-manufactured McMansions will of course be decaying into rotting husks, and the suburban high schools will be crime-sodden atrocities, and the DFL will be plaintively begging the prosperous inner cities to bail them out. 

As David Brauer notes, things change.  As history tells us, the more they do, the more they stay the same.

…what’s funnier; that someone apparently hacked a computer in orthodox-puritanical Iran, to display pornograhic images on an LCD billboard…

…or listening to the Iranian guys filming the display (pretty much NSFW) hoot and holler like a bunch of junior high kids who just found a Playboy in the alley.

Katherine Kersten – the best general columnist in the Twin Cities – on the U of M’s continuing effort to expunge Christmas, Christ and Christianity from the U’s public consciousness:

December office parties of any kind are now suspect at our state’s flagship institution of higher education.

The problem, explain [U of M Human Resources orc Dee Ann] Bonebright and [Office of System Academic Administration bureaucrat Julie] Sweitzer in their memo, is that “celebrations held in December tend to make people think of Christmas, whatever the theme.” And who knows where that could lead?

Due to what they call “seasonal creep,” warn Bonebright and Sweitzer, “an event that is meant to be a seasonal celebration [with no allusion to Christmas] suddenly looks very Christmasy when decorated with green and red.”

And here I thought seasonal creep referred to that guy who can’t keep his hands to himself or his nose out of the punch bowl.

Anyway, don’t suppose that including acknowledgements of Hannukah and Kwanzaa can keep an event from looking too Christmasy. That sort of inclusiveness, say Bonebright and Sweitzer, can be seen as “insensitive” and “won’t change the underlying message.”

Like what? Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men?

The U’s burearcrats seem to think that people’s productivity will plummet if they are exposed to – try to keep this straight – people with different worldviews.  People with different traditions, who celebrate different things.  That Moslems, Hindi, or Atheists will be so paralyzed with ire at the notion of people celebrating a Christian (and, these days, secular as well) tradition that they’ll turn into sullen lumps.

Which makes one wonder how a Moslem, Hindu or Atheist manages to do anything at all, in our out of work, in a nation that’s at least nominally 85+% Christian.

Kersten:

But Christmas or holiday parties, or whatever you call them, have a very different purpose. They remind us that life is about more than spreadsheets — that there’s a world beyond the office where real human beings laugh, talk about their families, and share the interests that give their lives meaning, fun and joy.

If we forget this, we risk sucking everything warm and human out of this wonderful season of the year.

The only “warmth” that seems to matter to the U – and much of the rest of official Minnesota – is that tingly feeling you get when nothing, ever, offends anyone, no matter how hard one reaches for it.

Over at David’s Medienkritik – a bilingual blog about the European, mainly German, media – David (or Ray?) writes:

Imagine you are an American correspondent in Germany. You are encouraged by your editors to report only the most extreme, outrageous, strange and dark sides of German society. Your publication chooses to ignore the 97% of issues that bring Germans and Americans together and instead focus on the 3% that most divide the two nations – such as attitudes towards prostitution, social welfare, guns, etc. This seedy sensationalism sells – and that is exactly what your editors are after. For that reason, they also strongly encourage you to write whatever you can on Neo-Nazi violence – not because the issue is genuinely troubling – (and it is) – but because it brings good ratings and reaffirms your readership’s dark stereotypes of the Vaterland.

Beyond that – your editors oblige you to bring stories only on a narrow band of pet issues that they have predetermined are of “interest” to the readership. (In fact, you may have been specially selected for your job because you have a an ideological propensity to dislike Germany and favor stories that make Germany look bad.) When you arrive in Berlin, you discover that Germany isn’t quite the awful place you expected and – because you are a free spirit – the urge is great to report on the many complex aspects of German society. Predictably, however, your editors discourage any independent ideas that might shed a different (you might say balanced) light on things.

The pet issues and big politics are all they want. In particular, the editors want to demonstrate that Germany is a nation infatuated with pornography, cursed by extreme alcoholism and blighted by racist attitudes towards non-Germans…The editors supplement your work by sprinkling-in stories cut-and-pasted from news wires on Germans behaving badly worldwide. You eventually realize that intellectual honesty takes a distant backseat to the pet-issue template devised by your editors…Not surprisingly, the most “self-critical” Germans – those with a particular talent for shamelessly bashing their own nation and people – are held up as heroic dissenters and showered with awards by your publication and others like it.

[Hm.  Sort of like how the only Republicans that the Strib paints in a decent light are the ones that vote like DFLers?  This is sounding familiar]

Finally – because quite a few other publications share the same general ideology of your own and follow the same pattern of reporting – it is not beyond the pale for your editors to proclaim that you represent the “mainstream” of American media and that you are largely fair and unbiased in reporting on Germany.

It’s a trick question, natch:

Turn the mirror around…

Now let us turn this script around. The above is a reflection of how certain influential segments of German media have operated for years now. The latest Amerika-Korrespondent for Stern magazine – Jan Christoph Wiechmann – offers an excellent example. One of his more recent articles is entitled: “Weapons Trade in the USA: An AR-15 with your Coffee?” The opening paragraph reads:

“In Europe one usually receives a cookie with their coffee. In the USA it is an assault rifle: In the Texan solitude, waitresses with highly teased hair offer the things for sale in weapon shops camouflaged as cafes. Normal daily life in Bush-Country.“

The article paints a picture of daily life in the USA that is neither typical nor normal

Read the whole thing.

(Auf Deutsch, wenn Du willst…)

And then I read things like this…:

Lynne Spears’ book about parenting has been delayed indefinitely, her publisher said Wednesday…She declined to comment on whether the delay was connected to the revelation that Spears’ 16-year-old daughter, Jamie Lynn, is pregnant.

…and I think “maybe not”.