l…liked Donald Trump much…

…but I’m willing to cut him a lot of slack after this.

Katherine Kersten notes:

[atheist author Sam] Harris even has a decorated tree in his living room. Dawkins explains why. Christmas, he says, has long since ceased to be a religious festival in America. “Understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance,” he adds, “I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”

When an outspoken atheist such as Dawkins says “Merry Christmas,” we may be reaching a consensus. American popular culture has appropriated Christmas, as it has Thanksgiving, and drained it of religious meaning.

Not in my house, Sam.

But read the rest of Kersten’s piece anyway.

The Zuckers meet the ISG.

New Jersey legislators legalize Civil Unions.

Personally, I don’t oppose civil unions; it’s a contract between two people that has conditions that need to be met, and (in theory) penalties for breaking.  The courts, I think, are right; there’s no secular, legal reason to bar people from having them in accordance with other laws.  (The “Now a guy can have a contract with a Badger and a Moose” doesn’t hold up; relationships between gays and lesbians are legal; humans, badgers, moose and other fauna  are not.  If you see a need to prevent them, by all means organize.  I’m not especially worried).

Of course, the reasoning of some on both sides irritates me:

“Love counts,” Democratic Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo, a chief sponsor of the bill, said as the debate opened. “The gender of whom one loves should not matter to the state.”

Yeah, true as far as it goes, but could we drop the “Love Counts” BS?  Marriage isn’t about love, and either are civil unions.  Oh, one had best love one’s partner, to be sure – but marriage (and surrogate ideas) are about much more than just “loving someone”.

So Mr. Caraballo’s bit about the “gender of whom one loves should not matter to the state” is true only in the sense that love is irrelevant.  Marriage  and  civil unions, to the state, are about obligation, duty, penalties and  conditions.

Nothing more.

Love’s got nothing to do with it.

But Republican Assemblyman Ronald S. Dancer said: “It’s my personal belief, faith and religious practice that marriage has been defined in the Bible. And this is one time that I cannot compromise my personal beliefs and faiths.”

Except that the Bible has little to say about contracts.

The social conservative argument is that “civil unions open the way for gay marriage!”.  Perhaps that’s true – and I oppose gay marriage – but that is our problem.

Gay marriage, like abortion, should be the job of the states to decide.  If you want to hold the line agains gay marriage (or, for that matter, civil unions), then get organized – because your opponents certainly are.  And in politics, victory generally goes to those who show up.

For my part?  Since civil unions are purely secular, and subject to secular laws, and there’s no secular reason to deny gays the right to contract with each other (assuming homosexuality is legal), then I can accept civil unions – and then draw my line in the sand, and top it with barbed wire.  Marriage is not a civil, secular observance.  It is a religious exercise.  And I challenge anyone to find any religion that justifies gay marriage on religious grounds (real religions, not McFaiths like the Unitarians).  And it may be that you can find such a faith; it’s a lock that I will neither marry nor worship there.

Gay rights advocates welcomed the legislation as a step forward but said they would continue to push for the right to marry.

Er, yeah.  Expect pushback.

The dextrosphere has been shaken to its’ puritan roots by yesterday’s installment of Chris Muir’s “Day By Day”, which was too revealing for some consumers (NSFW – if you work in a kindergarten, convent or  Minnesota Public Radio).

In the interest of public service, we’ve brought in experts on both sides of this controversy.  On the right,  Captain Ed:

As for yesterday’s entry, I think Chris went over the top. That won’t keep me from supporting Chris and his comic strip nor cause me to rethink my association with it.

Also from the right, Learned Foot:

KAR Thong or not, this is an encouraging trend. Yes – I say “trend” intentionally. I have taken to time to plot the occurrences of thong-clad women in Day by Day, and as you can see, the pattern is striking:

There you have it.

Developing…

Veggies will kill you too:

Fresh raw vegetables like lettuce, spinach, tomatoes and green onions were responsible for the illness or deaths of nearly 19,000 people nationwide over a five-year period.

Vegetables are nearly as dangerous as under-cooked meat when it comes to transmitting deadly food illnesses like E. coli, salmonella and hepatitis, according to a study of federal outbreak records by Scripps.

Beef, chicken, pork and their byproducts were responsible for nearly 22,600 deaths or illnesses, according to the study of 6,374 outbreaks reported from Jan. 1, 2000 through Dec. 31, 2004.

No other foodstuff came close to the threats posed by vegetables and meats, the study found.

In related news:  Bob from the American Lung Association and Jeanne Weigum have iron-clad proof that second-hand cabbage has killed more people than the Holocaust.

Cynthia McKinney, leaving the House, files a purely symbolic bill to impeach the President:

In what was likely her final legislative act in Congress, outgoing Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney introduced a bill Friday to impeach President Bush.

The legislation has no chance of passing and serves as a symbolic parting shot not only at Bush but also at Democratic leaders. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has made clear that she will not entertain proposals to sanction Bush and has warned the liberal wing of her party against making political hay of impeachment.

As long as we’re dwelling in the world of symbols, allow me to symbolically lob (if only rhetorically) a sulpherous, rotten egg at Cynthia McKinney’s gibbering face.

In my mind, it made such a symbolic spatter.

I rarely disagree with Dennis Prager (although I’ve broken with him about abstinence and the death penalty in the past).

Less often still do I agree with Keith Ellison.

So mark your calendars; Ed and I are with Ellison on his current flap about taking his oath of office on the Quran.

Ed recaps some of the discussion we had on the NARN last Saturday:

Prager, who usually gets it right, got this issue spectacularly wrong. He wrote that any Congressman not willing to swear an oath on the Bible should not serve in Congress, and that the American fabric would suffer its worst damage since 9/11 if Ellison used the Qur’an instead of the Bible. This is utter nonsense. In the first place, the entire issue is somewhat moot since members have one ceremony where they all take the oath of office as a group on the floor of the House. The rules of the House, furthermore, allows for the use of an “affirmation” for those choosing not to swear their oaths as a religious preference — which demonstrates that America does have a tradition of tolerance for the needs of other religions in its processes. Quakers in particular take advantage of that option, although Richard Nixon swore his oath when elected as President.

Besides, if using a religious text for an oath has any significance at all — and our experience with courts and politics strongly suggests there isn’t much — one would suppose that it would have to be a religious text with significance to the person swearing the oath. Atheists would not feel bound by the power of Divine retribution if they swore their oath on the Bible and then broke it later. Similarly, Christians would not feel much responsibility for protecting the honor of the Qur’an if they swore their oath on that text. Why wouldn’t we want Ellison to swear his oath on the one religious text he holds sacred, if we want him to feel some responsibility for acting in its defense by fulfilling his oath?

If I were to swear an oath on the Quran, would it be worth the air I spent saying the words? Yes, it would, because my word means something, but the Quran bit would be superfluous;  I don’t observe the Quran, less perhaps than Ellison does the Bible. The oath of office is being sworn to give an implied verbal warranty to the officeholder’s beliefs, not the voters’.

But while Prager is less correct than usual on this issue, he’s still more on the ball than whichever editoral-board drone wrote this bit of aromatica.  (I suspect Nick Coleman, the only person in the left-leaning world who still says “wingnut” with all the glee of a toddler who just made a big, juicy pants).

On reading David Drucker’s op-ed in the Strib (via the LATimes), it’s tempting to simply mutter “good riddance” as Drucker – whose column is so sodden with lefty caricature that it reads like parody – and his wife decide to move to Canada:

I’m sure a lot of other dyed-in-the-organic-wool liberals muttered something similar that dark morning in 2004, but unlike most of them, we meant it. Plan A: John Kerry wins, we build that dream ski house in Vermont. Plan B: Move to Vancouver.

So, Plan B it was. We’d had enough of Bush, the direction the United States was going, and this was the last straw. Never mind that we lived in Cambridge, Mass., arguably the most liberal city in the bluest of the blue states. We were packing our bulk granola into our diesel Beetle and heading out.

But then, after reading the cloyingly vacuous Drucker’s analysis of Canadian and US politics, you reconsider…

…and mutter “good riddance, yuppie a****le”.  I don’t care what your politics are – but we’re a better country to be at least be rid of one pair of worthless quitters.

That church bells disturb the daytime slumber of another somnolent suburb…:

Fairfax County officials have issued a ringing non-endorsement of the bells at St. John Neumann’s in Reston, ruling that they must toll within the limits of the county’s noise ordinance or not at all.

The Board of Supervisors asked the zoning staff this year to see whether the law could be amended to accommodate the church, whose bells ring at a volume slightly higher than the 55-decibel maximum permitted in residential areas… at an average of 75 decibels (roughly equivalent to a vacuum cleaner at close range), which is considerably above the 55-decibel limit in residential areas.

…that the ‘burb’s government is backing and filling to justify it…:

James P. Zook, director of Fairfax’s Department of Planning and Zoning, recently told the board in a memo that…”Localities cannot enact different standards for noise emanating from a place of worship,” Zook said. If Fairfax did that, he said, the new rules would have to apply to “all other types of bells, chimes or carillons.” Zook noted, however, that at least two other cities, Morgantown, W.Va., and Seattle, did make exceptions for church bells.

…or…:

St. John’s, a Catholic church in south Reston, installed a $50,000 electronic bell system in 2004 as part of a major expansion.

…that the scourge of electronic “bells” continues unabated?

I don’t write much about the difference between Islam and Christianity (or Islam and the West, for that matter); other people do it better.

But when I have, I’ve gotten the occasional comment claiming that, at least as far as this country is concerned, fundamentalist Christianity remains a bigger threat than fundie Islam.

The commenters (I’m not going to look them up now – they’re on the old site) never cite any concrete reasons, of course. And I wish they would.

Because I’m trying to find an example of any group of Christians doing something like this any time since the Middle Ages:

The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.

Anyone?

…this is the kind of lawsuit I love to hate: a California woman sues over food ingredients.

Not faulty ones.  Not unlabelled or unadvertised ones.  Not dangerous ones (shut up, Center for Science in the Public Interest).  No.  Just the wrong ones:

[Kraft guacamole] just didn’t taste avocadoey,” said Brenda Lifsey, who used Kraft Dips Guacamole in a three-layer dip last year. “I looked at the ingredients and found there was almost no avocado in it.”

She is seeking unspecified damages and a Superior Court order barring Kraft from calling its dip guacamole. Her suit seeks class-action status.

Brenda; then buy a different brand?  Make your own?  Substitute old mayonnaise?

On the other hand – watch this one carefully, American Beer Industry.

“The only way home is through Berlin”. 

The line was Tom Skeritt’s, from Saving Private Ryan.  It’s one I’ve repeated during countless intractable crises in my own personal life; it recognizes that the only way to be rid of the problem you face is to beat it, or at least outlast it.  The unspoken corollary, of course, is that if you don’t go to Berlin, you won’t go home.  And the key criterion in getting to Berlin is the will to do it or die trying.

 Victor Davis Hanson on loss of will, and what it means.  He describes our enemies not as terrorists, but as agents of a worldview incompatible with the one that spawned this great nation:

But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.

No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization–never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty–we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.

What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking–won at such a great personal cost–to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?

Hansen ponders – has the West lost the will to persevere?  The signs are ominous:

Just imagine in our present year, 2006: plan an opera in today’s Germany, and then shut it down. Again, this surrender was not done last month by the Nazis, the Communists, or kings, but by the producers themselves in simple fear of Islamic fanatics who objected to purported bad taste. Or write a novel deemed unflattering to the Prophet Mohammed. That is what did Salman Rushdie did, and for his daring, he faced years of solitude, ostracism, and death threats–and in the heart of Europe no less. Or compose a documentary film, as did the often obnoxious Theo Van Gogh, and you may well have your throat cut in “liberal” Holland. Or better yet, sketch a simple cartoon in postmodern Denmark of legendary easy tolerance, and then go into hiding to save yourself from the gruesome fate of a Van Gogh. Or quote an ancient treatise, as did Pope Benedict, and then learn that all of Christendom may come under assault, and even the magnificent stones of the Vatican may offer no refuge–although their costumed Swiss Guard would prove a better bulwark than the European police. Or write a book critical of Islam, and then go into hiding in fear of your life, as did French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker.

Read the whole, scary thing.

If you don’t live in Saint Paul, you might not know or care about Porkys’, a University Avenue institution for about fifty years.  The drive-up restaurant, with its greasy burgers and heavenly, American Heart Association-condemned onion rings, has been an anchor on the Uni cruising circuit since Eisenhower was in office.

While RT Rybak apparently can do nothing about crime, and is intent on taxing Minneapolis business into Eden Prairie or Sioux Falls, he does know his fast food, according to Doug Grow:

But there’s nothing normal about Porky’s, which has achieved icon status in St. Paul, or the debate the drive-through restaurant has stirred in northeast Minneapolis…To some, like Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, Porky’s conjures up romantic visions.

“As a kid, I rode my bike there,” he said, referring to a time when there were three Porky’s in the city.

All three closed decades ago, victims of the “Big Mac-ing” of America.

Rybak gets almost misty-eyed when he talks of the deeper meaning of Porky’s onion rings. They represent local ownership, a destination point, affordable family dining.

“If a piece of our history can’t be part of our future, the city has lost some of its soul,” the mayor is fond of saying.

And while I think Rybak’s romanticism is out of control – Minneapolis has lost vastly bigger swathes of its history than Porky’s – I wish all the best to the restaurant’s expansion.

And by “all the best”, I mean “good luck”.  They’ll need it.

Some clearly don’t share the mayor’s cosmic view of Porky’s. An organization — Neighbors Against Porky’s — believes it’s the wrong restaurant in the wrong place.”I like the onion rings, too,” said Doron Clark, a member of the group. But not in this place.

Some neighbors say the drive-through restaurant, which will have limited indoor seating, would dump too much traffic into the neighborhoods just off Central Avenue. Porky’s will bring more crime, graffiti and litter, detractors also say.

Finally, Porky’s foes have expressed concern that Porky’s will attract the classic car crowd that has attached itself to the Porky’s on University Avenue in St. Paul.

As part of the zoning committee’s approval, Truelson must agree not to encourage the classic car crew to show up on Central if he wants to build in Minneapolis.

Ah, yes. The dreaded “neighborhood activists” are sounding off.  They’re the ones that have basically shut down the hot rod cruise on University and Snelling on Saturday nights, the ones that extincted the Midway’s biggest, coolest June event, the Minnesota Street Rod Association cruise nights during their annual weekend convention.  Cars – the most amazing assortment of hot rods you’ve ever seen – would jam Snelling and University for miles, from Porky’s up Snelling to the Fairgrounds and down Uni to the Capitol…

…until the “neighborhood activists” got it shut down.  They couldn’t let other people be different from them for one lousy night a year.

These are, largely, the same people who are pressing for more mass transit, people who are “happy to pay for a better Minnesota”, people who vote for Metrocrat DFLers.

In other words, they want to live in a big, cosmopolitan city – but they can’t seem to stand people doing the legal, fun things people do in big, cosmopolitan cities.  These dolts want all the benefits of city life, and they want it to be as loud as an Iowa cornfield, 24/7/365, in the bargain.

I’m about ready to declare war on this hamsters.  They should…:

• either learn to compromise once in a while, and recognize that their blessed “diversity” includes “diversity of recreation” and “diversity of noise tolerance”
• or, if at the end of the day they really find the scrum and bustle of city life so intolerable, move to friggin Burnsville or Chanhassen or Hugo and leave the city to those of us who appreciate it.

Rybak, for once, is right.  But he might not know why.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the most dangerous group in America today.

They’re not dangerous merely because of their ongoing effort to criminalize any drinking, any time, or even because of their massive assault against civil liberty.

No, the big problem is that MADD has convinced a lot of otherwise intelligent people that what they’re doing is an objectively good thing. The Strib editorial board opines in favor of MADD’s effort to force the law-abiding driver to prove his/her worthiness every time they step into a car:

MADD says you pull out all the tools we have — and work to develop some more. It has joined forces with insurance- and auto-industry groups to create the Blue Ribbon Panel for the Development of Advanced Alcohol Detection Technology. It will encourage the development of technologies that include and surpass today’s sometimes-used ignition interlocks — which test a driver’s breath for alcohol and, if the driver fails, prevent the car from starting. Minnesota and many other states already have provisions to require such equipment in some cases. New Mexico has had some success with a law requiring their installation after the first DWI conviction.

MADD wants these intrusive, not-always-reliable interlocks in every car. They want you, whether you’ve had a beer or are a complete teetotaller, to prove your innocence every time you get behind the wheel.

And they want you to cheer and say “please, ma’am, may I have another”.

It’s a promising line of inquiry. In the meantime, however, most of those who drink must make the same old choice: Stay put or find sober transport.

Simple facts: drunk driving fatalities are off by over 40% in the past decade. Very few accidents and fatalities trace to drivers with blood alcohol levels below .10 – indeed, the big spike starts at .14, and lowering the legal limit to .08 or even lower will have almost no further effect on the issue.

In response to success, MADD proposes…more and more onerous regulation. More punishment of the law-abiding. More power for them.

And if you dare criticize them? As they said when civil libertarians opposed random checkpoint dragnets:

Opponents of sobriety checkpoints tend to be those who drink and drive frequently and are concerned about being caught.

“If you criticize us and our ideas, it’s because you’re a criminal”.

The Strib – which sniffs and phumphers about the “Civil liberties implications” of surveilling phone calls from terrorists to their contacts in America – stands up and cheers at the fascist antics of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which in the long run are vastly more dangerous.

Yes.  I said “vastly more dangerous”.  If you want to create a nation with no civil liberties, you don’t go out and ban them.  You kill them with a thousand cuts – and get the people used to the idea that “civil liberty” is an obtuse, picayune concept meant for others.

Which, of course, has been the Strib’s point of view all along.  The Second Amendment refers to the National Guard, Freedom of Speech is for people with printing presses, and that whole Innocent Until Proven Guilty thing only counts if you’ve been arrested.

The Star/Tribune; our own printed Abu Ghraib

Tim Blair, whilst observing the current Australian parliamentary elections, asks:

The Greens are also a chance to win in Richmond. Melbourne and Richmond are probably the two most densely-populated and urbanised seats in the entire state. How come Green voters never live where it’s green?

Well, that’d be like a poverty activist coming from a neighborhood in the lower 70% of median incomes.

The good news: the Twin Cities’ blogosphere’s depth chart for the “hilarious Hubbells” position is apparently longer than your arm; not only does MLP do Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry (a great read) but now Katie has apparently inveigled brother Billy (at least I hope it’s her brother, not that I can keep track of all of her relatives, including her other brother, who I learned is a college classmate of mine) to chip in with some writing at Yucky Salad with Bones, which leads us to…:

I had just spent 10 laborious minutes choosing between a big bag of Cheetos or a big bag of Doritos– and I needed something to read while I stuffed my face. Anyway, I couldn’t help notice that George Clooney was on two covers. Not that unusual, I know, but one was People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue and the other was Esquire’s “Genius” issue. Talk about best week ever. Next they’re going to tell me he’s Jesus, son of God, returned to Earth to save us all and that he would have saved us sooner, but he wanted to be on “Facts of Life” and make a Batman movie first.

Analogous to Jesus turning water into toe fungus, I suppose.

So when does Joe start helping out, here?

No – it’s fellow veteran Chuck Rangel, not so much attacking the troops as claiming they’re too dumb to know better:

If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.

Allahpundit notes:

[the left need] to find a way to exculpate our all-volunteer military for their role in it; blaming them, however obliquely, is politically unviable, which is why even Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore insist they support the troops. Solution: deny their autonomy. Pretend that they’re either too stupid or too lazy or too poor to do anything but enlist.

As to that whole “decent career” thing – AlPundit and I both thought of the same example…

The greatest South Park episode of all time: the one where they lampooned MTV’s Sweet Sixteen.

Oh, I thought lines like “Oh, it’s OK, Satan – you’re not as bad as those kids on Sweet Sixteen” were funny on principle.

Then I finally saw Sweet Sixteen. Kudos to Stone and Parker; at least I had the memories of the SPark episode to help assuage the crushing depression that watching Sweet Sixteen gave me – the creeping realization, watching those spoiled, vacuous little pigs – that “maybe the terrorists have a point after all”.

That is all.

A few weeks back, Minneapolitans elected racist dolt Chris Stewart to their School Board. The Strib, expending a new-found effort to report some of the the inconvenient facts about liberal politicians, notes that Stewart ran a blog that trafficked in racist japes.

There are people more qualified than I to excoriate this dolt. But I thought these two bits from the Strib story were interesting.

At one point, Stewart notes:

Stewart said he deeply regretted being at the center of a racial controversy, but he challenged his critics to look honestly at race relations in Minneapolis, using Keith Ellison as an example. Ellison, a black and a Muslim, was elected Nov. 7 to Congress from the Fifth District.

“Keith Ellison did everything we were told to do as kids,” Stewart said. “He got an advanced education, he got married, he had kids. Yet he’s reduced to his color and his religion.

“I see it as naked racism.”

Ellison was “reduced to his color and his religion” – and sent to Washington, to boot.

But let’s leave out that whole “he’s a member of Congress, now”, bit. Who “reduced” him to his color? And how? (Oh, the City Pages reduced the race to a matter of color, all right – count the number of times “white” turns up in this bit about the Apostate Heritic Ventura Independence Vote Suck Party)

Anyone?

The Strib noted elsewhere in the story – with no apparent irony intended – that Stewart also said:

The postings include… references to the “gelded quality” of black executives who speak precise white English.

Consorting with terror supporters is apparently less a problem to this hamster than speaking English.

Finally, this moral gelding moron whines:

“If you’ve written stuff and other people have written with you, does that discount you from political service?” Stewart said. “If the stuff is potent, does that discount you from participating in democracy?”

Of course not. But if your “potent” “stuff” is grossly offensive, it might make people think you can’t be trusted with elective office.

I suppose that pointing that out makes me a “racist”, too.

Lassie at Freedomdogs notes that the left is falready planning to try to disrupt the ’08 GOP Convention   here in Saint Paul:

Not placated after a major DFL win this election, area hippies are plotting street theater at the 2008 GOP Presidential Convention in St. Paul.

“[Executive Director of MN ACLU, Chuck] Samuelson said he expects the Minnesota ACLU eventually will get involved in lawsuits to guarantee convention access. He said he expects that authorities will be prepared to handle tens of thousands of arrests, possibly using a large venue to hold those arrested and process them.”

A “veteran” of ProtestWarrior and FreeRepublic, I remember reading reports of delegates harassed in New York. Hundreds of PWs and FRs joined to counter-protest agitators and escort delegates. Below, PWs got in front of unsuspecting protesters at their anti-war march:

Go to the Dogs to see the photos.

I’ve been in an extended conversation with a bunch of Democrats on a St. Paul politics discussion group. Over there, among the coterie of dedicated lefties, trying to distinguish between peaceful demonstrations (a perfectly fine thing) and violent provocation is completely fruitless; it would seem some of them (at least the more vocal ones) don’t think there is a difference.

As for me?  Bring on the peaceful protesters; it’ll be fun.  But keept he violent provocateurs in Seattle and San Francisco where they belong.

As to having a “large venue” for holding the scuzzbags that get arrested – rubbish.  Rent a bunch of barges on the Mississippi.  Put up tarps for shelter.  Violent provocation should have consequences.

And if the Saint Paul Police need a backup water cannon operator – you got my number.

More constructive, perhaps, is Protest Warrior’s idea.  Go read the Dogs!

The San Francisco School Board voted 4-2 yesterday to resolve to eliminate the Junior Reserve Office Training Corps (JROTC) program.

The resolution passed says the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers violates the school district’s equal rights policy for gays. The school district and the military currently share the $1.6 million annual cost of the program. About 1,600 San Francisco students participate in JROTC at seven high schools across the district.

Cadets and instructors who spoke at the meeting and rallied outside argued that the program teaches leadership, organizational skills, personal responsibility and other important values.

“This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe,” said Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor. “You’re going to take that away from them?”

Unmentioned in the story; the program is especially popular in heavily-minority inner city schools, among parents who can’t afford private schools but want something in their students’ day that instills some form of discipline, pride and self-respect (as opposed to self-esteem) among their students.

To his credit, mayor Gavin Newsom criticized the resolution:

Mayor Gavin Newsom called severing ties with the JROTC “a bad idea” that penalized students without having any practical effect on the Pentagon’s policy on gays in the military.

Indeed.

Now, here’s the dirty little secret; the left – awash as they claim to be in concern for the well-being of minority students – hate JROTC. There is a faction in the Saint Paul School Board and the Administration that is actively seeking to bar JROTC from St. Paul schools – not primarily because of “Don’t Ask…”, but because they just don’t like the military.

I’d love to get some Democrats on the local school board on record about this.

When plebeians try to call Algore on this massive mansion, his Gulfstream commutes, and his fleet of SUVs, his defenders quiver with delight. “He’s carbon-neutral!”, they titter. Algore has apparently “bought” other peoples’ carbon “rights”, and hence peace of mind and a propaganda point.

Or has he?

MLP from Casual Sundays with Mr. Curry needs somethin’ ‘splained:

Carbon credits. He bought them. Thats when you want to use more power and emit more carbon into the atmosphere than anyone with a conscience has a right to, so you buy someone elses alloted carbon amounts.

I dont know. Maybe from dead people who arent really using theirs anymore? Maybe from third world folks who would like to use them but dont really have an opportunity? I dont know, why are you bothering me with these details?

Im sure its on the up and up. After all, I heard that all the stars and presenters at the Academy awards were given carbon credits in their gift baskets this year. What a great gift This way Blythe Danner can drive her SUV guilt free and Ed Begley can make toast without pedalling for fifteen minutes. Oh wait, neither of them were presenters. Sorry, Ed Better get back on that bike.

So we take wholesale guilt-mongering, and insulate it with a level of accounting misdirection.

Does anyone see the potential for abuse here?