A few weeks ago, someone in Saint Cloud posted a fairly scabrously racist poster, defaming the Somali community.

My friend and radio colleague King Banaian, who is not one to cry “racism” prematurely,  says the poster was pretty bad.  And the “somali community” took, at least at first blush, the course every real American should take; by meeting bad speech with more, better speech.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, along with the one Somali speaker, they recruited some SCSU faculty.  And university faculty are (King’s company excepted) rarely people to go to for “real American” responses to anything:

Somalis are upset, and rightly so. When the campus announced that its Somali student organization wanted to hold a speak-out, that seemed a very reasonable thing to do. The best way to deal with hateful acts is by speaking about them. But the news report this morning about this event contains two statements that I found deviated from speaking against the cartoon. And, unfortunately not a surprise, it comes from two faculty. First,

Luke Tripp, a professor of community studies, said the same “conservative white” mind-set led to the election of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater.

So is it that voting for Rep. Bachmann (as a thin plurality did in the past two elections, which were famously awful for Republicans at large) makes you a racist?  Or that being a racist (as Mr. Tripp apparently believes most “conservative whites” are) make you vote for Michele Bachmann? 

Or both?

King:

This is an outrageous accusation. It says that anyone who voted for Rep. Bachmann has the same mind-set as the scribbler, is capable of being the scribbler, and is a reprobate. By what perverted analysis do you determine the moral principles of tens of thousands of area citizens that voted for this woman, many of them twice?

[Need I remind you – there’s your tax dollars at work!]

What inspires a man to take a speak out against hateful speech of his students as an opportunity to engage in the worst stereotyping of political opponents?

How do we count the ways?

Because academia, especially in lefty bullpens like “Community Studies”, promotes both extremism (and its bedfellow, bigotry) and unaccountability?

Because “Professor” Luke Tripp, who lives a comfy, cushy life as an (I’ll assume) tenured professor in a make-work “discipline” that is essentially a left-wing echo chamber, has developed both a deep sense of the bigotry that acc0mpanies marinading ones’ intellect in comfortable agreement for a whole career, and the tendency of too many such academics to say what they want, and hiding behind “academic freedom” to prevent himself from being held accountable?

Mr. Tripp; I invite you to come on the Northern Alliance Radio Network one of these weekends to defend your defamatory claim; I invite my St. Cloud and SCSU area readers to please forward this challenge to “Professor” Tripp (not that I think he has either the intellectual integrity or the balls to take me up on it).

…then the Democrats can be assured to start trolling the prisons.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday tossed out Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting, finding the state’s criminal-justice system is “infected” with racial discrimination.

In other words – because the system is discriminatory because it ostensibly jails too many minorities, the deprivation of voting rights to all convicts is wrong.

Who could possibly make such a ruling?  (emphasis added; listeners to Hugh Hewitt may recuse themselves from the question):

The surprising ruling, by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle, said the law violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act by disenfranchising minority voters.

The decision is the first in the country’s federal appeals courts to equate a prohibition against voting by incarcerated felons with practices outlawed under the federal Voting Rights Act, such as poll taxes or literacy tests.

So – being convicted by a jury of one’s peers (or pleading out of one’s own volition) is the same as poll taxes and literacy tests imposed on the law-abiding?

The two-judge majority apparently was persuaded by the plaintiffs’ argument that reams of social-science data filed in the case showed minorities in Washington are stopped, arrested and convicted in such disproportionate rates that the ban on voting by incarcerated felons is inherently discriminatory.

In retrospect, I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t impose electoral affirmative action, giving two votes to every convict.

Patterico, from a larger analysis that you should read in its entirety:

To me, the biggest concern flowing from this decision is the precedent that federal courts can now make sweeping declarations about the discriminatory nature of the criminal justice system based on dubious studies by sociology professors. (More about that in the extended entry below.) The implications are potentially staggering and go far beyond felons’ right to vote. If federal courts can declare the entire system of criminal justice in a state (or the country!) to be racially discriminatory, you could see an invalidation of Three Strikes laws or any other recidivism statute. You could see a sweeping invalidation of laws prohibiting felons the right to possess firearms. And that could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Commenter carlitos points out another potentially disturbing impact of the decision: its potential effect on rural districts with big prisons. Given that the decision explicitly extends to currently incarcerated inmates, you’re potentially looking not just at a huge bump in the number of Democratic voters as a whole, but also very concentrated bumps in districts that otherwise would likely be reliably Republican.

On the upside, who needs ACORN when you can get the Aryan Nations to do your registration for you?

I’ON a more serious note, I’m curious; the lefty squawked like stuck cats when they thought (erroneously) that the Heller decision might be misconstrued to give firearms rights to convicts – but today, dead silence.  Although I’m happy to attribute the bliss to ignorance, I’m wondering what people actually thin about this…

…and hoping that Alito, Thomas, Roberts and Scalia stay very, very healthy until this one gets to the SCOTUS.

I’m not one of those conservatives who reflexively bashes government employees’ intelligence, motivations and personalities.  Some of my best friends – people I know, with brains and honorable motives – work at all levels of government, in all kinds of jobs.  Not a one of them went into government because it was the only job they could qualify for (well, mostly; there’s no real private-sector market for fighter pilots).

Government, itself?  That’s another story.  I believe in closely scrutinizing any government agency, especially those that aren’t directly involved with defending our nation’s security.

Apropos not much – but we’ll come back to it.

The Strib is shocked, shocked, in the wake of the alleged Abdulmutallab bombing attempt, that privacy-rights activists ever opposed full-body scanning at airports:

Even more troubling is the extent to which privacy activists have been able to influence the political debate and restrict the use of whole-body imaging scanners in U.S. airports. To rally the opposition, the term “virtual strip search” has been used, conjuring images of Transportation Security Administration TSA screeners huddled around computers ogling the most shapely passengers.

Right.  Because TSA employees are ascetic monks, immune to temptation.

That ridiculous scenario was too much for our elected officials, and the House overwhelming passed a nonbinding measure in June to prevent the scanners from being used for primary screening. The brainpower behind the amendment, rookie Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, referred to screened images as “TSA porn” and came up with this wonderful but ill-informed sound bite: “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.”

The Strib editorial board chides the privacy activists for their close-mindedness, in terms that stop just a little short of “why do Rebublicans hate airline passengers?”.

Now, I don’t have a huge problem with full-body scanning in and of itself, as a form of technology.  It’s what it represents – and what the Strib, and by extension the rest of the left and media, have seemed to embrace over the past eight years – that is the problem.

The implication on the part of the Strib is that we, the public, should shut up and undergo whatever indignity our betters decide is best for us, because that’s our betters’ job.  It puts all of the many burdens – inconvenience, implied suspicion, humiliation – on the travelling public. Of course, these measures are all, universally, reactive – which means that terroriosts will find a way around them (if they haven’t already); the scanning, with its intrusion and indignity, will also be useless.  Not that it’ll go away.

But the Strib has consistently opposed the measures that’d put the burden on the would-be terrorists; they opposed wiretapping Americans for whom there exists a reasonable suspicion.  When a group of citizens reacted with suspicion to a group of Muslin clerics whose behavior seemed, at this remove, stranger than Abdulmutallab’s, the Strib pilloried them, and those who defended them, as racists.  The Strib couldn’t possibly abide by the concept of “profiling” – focusing security’s efforts on those most likely to cause problems, 20-40 year old middle-to-upper-middle-class Muslim men – even though that’s precisely what Israel’s El Al, one of the biggest terrorism targets in the world, has done to make themselves perhaps the safest airline in the world.

In other words, the Strib is fine with measures that demean and degrade you, Joe and Jane Citizen, provided that they are utterly politically correct, and without regard to the fact that they are in the long run completely useless.

Thanks, Strib.  Same to you.

This is actually a political post.  But you gotta be just a little patient.

Back in my senior year at college, I was sitting in the Philosophy “department” (my college had one philosophy prof; I was waiting for him in his office), reading one of the academic philosophy administration’s trade mags (sorta like Variety or Radio and Records, only advertising job trends for post-structuralists and help wanted ads for Nietscheans).  And I happened upon an article that explored a trend (or “trend”) of people applying to medical school with Bachelors’ in Philosophy (as well as, y’know, degrees in Chemistry and/or Biology, to boot).  The piece touched heavily on the worth of, and need for, doctors who could see beyond the numbers in the test results (as important as they are) to the larger values and ethics of the field.

And in twenty-odd years of dealing with doctors (mostly pediatricians), I’ve seen there’s some merit to this; while medicine is at its core a scientific field, most of them still have to not only deal with people, but with people who are frequently under immense stress, undergoing some of the most miserable traumas in their lives.  The best doctors do it very well; the worst are terrible.

The  Minnpost last week had a post on the subject:

Do you have the personality to be successful in medical school?

A recent study, co-authored by a University of Minnesota psychology professor, has found that certain personality traits may be a better predictor of success in medical school than MCAT scores — particularly during the latter years, when students are out interacting with real patients.

As medical students become “more involved with patients and applied work, personality becomes more and more relevant and predictive” of how well they do in their coursework, said Deniz Ones, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-authors of the study. I talked with her about the study on Thursday.

In other words, the real predictors of success in medicine are not the grades a student gets in high school, college and med school, or the half-decade of test scores leading up to medical school. 

It’s the personality.

The study, which was published in the November issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, looked at five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness), each with six different sub-traits.

The one trait that remained consistently important throughout the seven years of medical training was conscientiousness (competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, deliberation), said Ones.

“This is the dimension that is particularly found in education achievement because it’s related to effort and hard work,” she said. “It’s been shown to be related to college performance in other graduate settings as well.”

In medical school, however, conscientiousness became doubly important, said Ones, because attention and diligence is not only essential for good study habits, but also for diagnosing and treating patients.

But there’s a surprise; extroversion is the other apparently-dispositive trait for predicting success.

But another personality trait that showed up among successful medical students did surprise Ones and her colleagues: extroversion (warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking, positive emotions).

“At the beginning of medical school, this trait was actually negatively related to performance,” said Ones. After all, extroverted students are more likely to spend their time socializing rather than hitting the medical texts.

“But over time, if they managed to hang on, this liability became an asset,” said Ones. “This is the dimension that allows them to talk to patients, to have an interest in them and care about them.”

Of course, we’ve all run into doctors who lacked any human-interaction skills whatsoever.  I’m willing to bet that the resident who presided over the early labor before my daughter’s birth, a dour Hindi woman with the people skills of the west end of an eastbound lawn mower, got really good grades in high school, college and med school.

“Most of education is geared toward the acquisition of knowledge and skills. That’s what MCAT assesses,” she said. That’s OK, she says, but, as this study and other research shows, how smart someone is often fails to predict how successful they’ll be at a specific profession — particularly one like medicine, which requires such strong people skills.

Of course, it goes well beyond doctors.

I read this study, and I’m reminded of the concentrated snootiness that the left – the “party of the people” – focuses on politicans who, for whatever reason, did things with their early lives other than playing the paper chase.  Sarah Palin’s an obvious example – and too current, really.  A much better one – Reagan.  Reagan was an adequate high school student, went to a very obscure college (Eureka), got further adequate grades…

…and pretty much ended his academic career. 

During Reagan’s political career, some razzed him for not having had a more distinguished academic career – as if he’d have done a better job of reviving the economy, restoring America’s mojo and peacefully toppling the Soviet Union if he’d started his adult life as an insufferable Ivy Leaguer.

Indeed – as the survey of medical students shows – he’s have likely not done nearly as well.

Think about it; the people who get into either medical school or the Ivy League based purely on their high school grades (let’s leave out legacy admissions for now) did so because they were among that thin film of high schoolers who were motivated from Junior High onward to do one thing; get grades.  Not develop social skills; not diversify their personalities; not develop all the soft skills that go along with having to deal with people and navigate real life.

What do you get with a doctor or a politician whose highest pre-adult achievement was getting straight A’s, thereby getting into top-ranked schools?  Someone whose entire formative experience is focused on the academic skills – reading, regurgitating facts on command, kissing ass – and who may or may not have the faintest interest in or empathy for you, the patient/voter.

And someone who may have put grades, if not in the back seat, at least in the shotgun position? 

Well, the article above explains the results with doctors.

So do you think things are different for everyone else in the real world?  Say, with the leader of the free world?

Kids today have it tough.

Not so much on “life is difficult” front, of course; compared to life in the Depression, for kids who were going to grow up and go off to World War II and spend Christmas of 1944 in weather more or less like this sitting in foxholes in the Ardennes, kids today have it pretty OK.

But on the “adults are scary and stupid” front?  Kids today have it rough.

School counselors have been reporting a wave of…timidity?  Kids don’t socialize as much today as they used to; school counselors note the amazing, depressing numbers of children that head directly home after school, watch television/do homework, and rarely if ever get outside without direct adult supervision.  Part of the problem is the epidemic of single-parent homes, most of whom are headed by single mothers.  Parents’ styles are as individual as they are, of course – but one of the reason God, biology, remorseless fate or whatever you do or don’t believe in made families with mixed-gender parents is because different genders bring different traits to the table; mothers are stereotypically “nurterers”, and more risk-averse; fathers are, again stereotypically, the ones that imprint adventure and risk-taking on the kids (and no, feel free not to flood my comment section with stories of what an exception your mother was; I know, already). And so, with no male in the house to model behavior from, the kids become…nurtured.  And overnurtured, as the case may be.  It’s not the only explanation – but then, this post isn’t about explaining things.

Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids – a blog that is going on my blogroll today – writes about a letter to the editor she got:

Dear Free-Range Kids: My name is Shaylene Haswarey, and I want to share a story with you today.

This morning, my doorbell rang, and two police officers were present.  They asked me if I am the mother of my children, and I said yes.  They said someone called them because my three oldest kids (ages 9, 7, and 6) were walking around our GATED town-house complex, unattended. I said, “They found a cat, and I let them go out and feed it.”…

…I told the officer I am from Idaho, and kids play outside like this all the time.  He said my kids are too young to be out,  because we do not have a yard, and this is a complex.  He also told me there are predators around here.  He finally told me if I let my kids out again he will have to call social services because I am endangering my children! What is wrong with this picture???

Mitch’s answer – which is one reason why I don’t do a blog on parenting – is “they’re prepping your kids for the hyper-feminized school system, where uncontrolled risk-taking is actively squelched”. 

Back to Skenazy’s letter:

1.  Is it against the law to go out in the rain in your pajamas?
2.  My kids know how to watch for cars.  They were following the cat and feeding it.
3.  There are NO predators in my neighborhood. I looked on Megan’s Law, and there are only 6 in our whole city, and none are in my neighborhood.  I live in Aliso Viejo, CA.  Aliso Viejo is a small city in between Irvine and Mission Viejo.  These cities rank #1 by the FBI for the safest cities in America with a pop. of 100,000+.  Therefore, Aliso Viejo is safer than the city I grew up in in Idaho!

After the police officer asked for me and my husband’s name and birthdates, I freaked out!  I am NOT going to let my kids go outside without me again!  I don’t want social services knocking on my door.  What do you think I should do if anything, about this?  My husband’s family is from India.  They have a big house there.  I am thinking of going to their village this September and staying there for a few months, so my kids can be normal kids. — Shaylene

Lenore writes back (emphasis added by yours truly):

Dear Shaylene: Isn’t it incredible that you are living the “American Dream” — a house, four kids, nice town — and longing for the kind of childhood a kid can get in a much less affluent country? Meantime, I put this question to readers: What can this mom do to prove to the cop that she’s not off base? How can we she convince him (and other cops and other neighbors) that being outside is normal and healthy for kids? Should we all call the police department there? Start a petition? Any ideas? — Lenore

Well, you heard the lady ladies.  Let’s cough up some answers!

Last week, I wrote about the U of M Department of Education’s plan to screen Education majors – aka “future teachers” – for political purity.

I was going to write a detailed fisking last week, but as expected, FIRE – America’s foremost academic freedom group – beat me to it.

I’m excerpting pretty lightly – it’s a big article, but an excellent read:

The college promises that it will begin using “predictive criteria” to make sure that future teachers will be able to develop an acceptable level of “cultural competence”-apparently, those who do not pass the political litmus test and seem too set in their beliefs will never get admitted. This is far worse than what Columbia Teachers College does with its own “dispositions” requirement, and far in excess of what the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has ever mandated.

Fortunately, there is still time for the college to change course. A new set of “Phase II” task groups was established in October 2009 for the purpose of “moving forward on structural dimensions” of the plan. This year’s applicants are already being warned about the possible changes, but the new “[d]ispositions assessment” is not scheduled to occur until next summer.

It gets better:

Here’s the kicker: The college even realizes that its efforts to impose such a severe ideological litmus test may be unconstitutional. Here’s the plan for summer 2010:

Dispositions assessment for new candidates approved (includes consultation with UMN general council) [sic]

Indeed, the university’s general counsel ought to be weighing in really soon. If the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group gets what it wants, the result will be political and ideological screening of applicants, remedial re-education for those with the wrong views and values, and withholding of degrees from those who fail to comply.

FIRE is sending a letter to the U’s administration.

FIRE is deeply concerned about new policies at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities proposed by the College of Education and Human Development. According to documents published by the college (see http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cehd/teri), it intends to mandate certain beliefs and values-”dispositions”-for future teachers. The college also intends to redesign its admissions process so that it screens out people with the “wrong” beliefs and values-those who either do not have sufficient “cultural competence” or those who the college judges will not be able to be converted to the “correct” beliefs and values even after remedial re-education. These intentions violate the freedom of conscience of the university’s students. As a public university bound by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the university is both legally and morally obligated to uphold this fundamental right.

This is going to get interesting.

“When you’re taking flak, you know you’re over the target”
     — Mike Huckabee

“When they call you crazy, you’re scaring the p**s out of them”
    — Mitch Berg

“Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,”
   — Vladimir Bukovsky

Note to Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Pat Anderson, Katherine Kersten, Laura Brod, and every other conservative woman who is taking an avalanche of the kind of abuse (including an Avogadro’s number of variations on “She is teh crazee”) that’d leave the left writhing in fits of PC disgust  if it were directed at someone whose politics didn’t make them Untouchable; keep up the good work. 

That noise you’re hearing is the sound of the left scraping the ground below the bottom of the barrel.

Hm.  Things must be getting dicey for the Administration and the Democratic Party…

…because they and their proxies are finding enemies under rocks.  Almost literally, as it happens:

Militia groups with gripes against the government are regrouping across the country and could grow rapidly, according to an organization that tracks such trends.

Like we couldn’t see that one coming.

And – I’m almost afraid to ask – why?

The stress of a poor economy and a liberal administration led by a black president are among the causes for the recent rise…

What?

So we’re finding racists under rocks?

What group is making these claims?

…the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center …

Ah.  There ya go.  The SPLC needs bad whiteys with guns the way car dealerships need clunker programs.

As

Do you know Kim Carlson, the “footprint blogger” at the Star Tribune? No? You don’t think so? I believe you’re mistaken. You may not know Kim Carlson by name or by her Strib blog, but you certainly know Kim Carlson. As evidence I submit the first line of her latest post:

I was feeling a bit virtuous as I was bringing my recycling to the curb this morning.

Not many people can summarize their entire personality in a single phrase, but I think Kim did a terrific job of it here, don’t you? I mean you absolutely know this person after reading that sentence. Kim is the kind of person who believes she’s “saving the planet” by her own everyday activities. Recycling makes her feel virtuous. But it doesn’t end there, as you well know. No, when you’re Kim Carlson life is little more than a quest for the next guilt trip.

Then I decided to look up some recycling facts and was quickly deflated. According to RethinkRecycling.com, the average Twin Citian still produces 7 pounds of waste per day and one-third of what we throw away at home is recyclable through curbside programs. I suppose it is no surprise that nearly 30 percent of our trash is packaging – urgh!

Urgh! indeed! Why oh why didn’t we compost our packaging or use it as feed for our backyard chickens?! Why oh why didn’t we… oh heck, let’s stop guessing and see where she decides to run with it. It’s bound to be as entertainingly goofy as anything we might invent.

(more…)

This…:

…is deft satire, but this…

…is a racist attack and call to murder?

A year ago, Obama was being hailed as a “light worker”, the salvor of our nation’s soul; a man, but not just a man.

Today, of course, his poll numbers are gratifyingly human:

The nation is close to evenly split in its assessment of the president’s policies to date, and there is great intensity on both sides of the debate with dwindling numbers in the middle.Those are the chief findings of the latest NPR poll of 850 registered voters conducted nationwide Wednesday through Sunday by a bipartisan team. The pollsters found 53 percent approving of the president’s handling of his job, while 42 percent disapproved — the narrowest gap of the Obama presidency to date. Most of the approving group said they approved strongly, and an even greater majority of the disapproving group said they disapproved strongly.

Poll respondents liked a Democratic statement on solving health care problems better than a Republican statement (51 percent to 42 percent). However, when asked about the plan now moving through Congress, a plurality of 47 percent was opposed and 42 percent said they were in favor, based on what they had heard about the plan so far.

Presidential poll numbers are the most fungible transient asset in American politics, of course; Ronald Reagan’s numbers were abysmal in 1982, but jumped enough to give him re-election in 1984 and a Republican house of Congress in 1986.  So don’t start writing Obama’s political epitaph yet.

Because poll numbers aren’t forever.

I’m not so much saying this to the Republican and Conservative readers, though.  It’s not them I’m worried about.

No, it’s the readers on the left that concerned me.  Because while poll numbers change with the breeze, hatred just smolders on; Eric Kleefeld is finding racists under rocks.

He addresses the “racism” between the lines (it must be between the lines) from, in this case, Rush Limbaugh (with commentary inset):

So let’s take a look at some of those recent racially-charged attacks that have circulated against Obama, both right before and after the Gates incident.

• Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He’s done this kind of thing before — remember the “Barack, The Magic Negro” song? [which, while un-PC, was a takeoff on a line by a liberal commentator; certainly not a commentary on Limbaugh’s approach to race – Ed.] But in the wake of the Gates incident, he’s managed to become even more hard-edged about it. “Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman,” Limbaugh declared this past Friday. [which would have been pretty below-the-belt, had it not been for the fact that that’s exactly how Gates played it – as a racial issue- Ed.] Yesterday, he shared a dream he’s had about the dangers to capitalism: “I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama.” [Remember when dissent was the highest virtue?  Now, it’s apparently “racist”- Ed.] And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they’ll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos. [I suppose it would have been safer to say “Starbucks” or “Volvo” or “Patagonia”…- Ed.]

How much intellectual seed corn is the left willing to burn to prop up The One?  Poll numbers come and go,  but assaults on the integrity of half of ones’ fellow countrymen – defamatory, specious, intellectually vacuous attacks, of course – are gifts that just keep on giving.

The Obama Administration is borrowing a key tenet of his “Heathcare” strategy from an infamous Minnesota initiative from the 1990’s; “Soak the Addicts Who Don’t Have Clout”.

In 1998, the State of Minnesota and Blue Cross sued and won $6.1 Billion from “Big Tobacco” – which was, of course, passed on to “Big Tobacco’s” customers, aka “smokers”.

But that was safe, because smoking – and smokers – were indefensible.  So nobody defended them.

Of course, the to make money, the strategy depends on having a boundless supply of people with declasse addictions and problems – smokers, drinkers, and – as the LA Times informs us with breathless excitement – the overweight and obese.

When historians look back to identify the pivotal moments in the nation’s struggle against obesity, they might point to the current period as the moment when those who influenced opinion and made public policy decided it was time to take the gloves off.As evidence of this new “get-tough” strategy on obesity, they may well cite a study released today by the Urban Institute titled “Reducing Obesity: Policy Strategies From the Tobacco Wars.”In the debate over healthcare reform, the added cost of caring for patients with obesity-related diseases has become a common refrain: most recent is the cost-of-obesity study, also released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It finds that as obesity rates increased from 18.3% of Americans in 1998 to 25% in 2006, the cost of providing treatment for those patients’ weight-driven problems increased healthcare spending by $40 billion a year.If you happen to be the 1-in-3 Americans who is neither obese nor overweight (and, thus, considered at risk of becoming obese), you might well conclude that the habits of the remaining two-thirds of Americans are costing you, big time. U.S. life expectancies are expected to slide backward, after years of marching upward. (But that’s their statistical problem: Yours is how to make them stop costing you all that extra money because they are presumably making poor choices in their food consumption.)

[Taxes raised on “unhealthy” foods] would pay for a lot of healthcare reform, which some have estimated will cost as much as $1 trillion to implement over the next ten years.And here’s the payoff: Conservatively estimated, a 10% tax levied on foods that would be defined as “less healthy” by a national standard adopted recently in Great Britain could yield $240 billion in its first five years and $522 billion over 10 years of implementation — if it were to begin in October 2010. If lawmakers instituted a program of tax subsidies to encourage the purchase of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables, the added revenue would still be $356 billion over 10 years.

Let’s be honest: the more affluent Americans will not feel the effect of a soda tax, nor that of the inevitable tax on fast-food purchases from McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell…But let’s play along with the Ivory Tower bigwigs and self-appointed health gurus who are advocating the tax on “sugary” drinks as a means of off-setting the enormous costs of President Obama’s back-breaking health care initiative, as well as combating bad habits. Why stop at soda? How about a tax on every calorie-laden coffee drink served at Starbucks and its competitors? After all, a vanilla bean frappuccino with whipped cream is more than 500 calories, a beverage that health researcher Mike Adams calls “dessert in a cup.” Throw in a scone or brownie with one of those Starbucks “desserts” and a consumer is approaching, at mid-morning, the daily recommended calorie intake.

No knock against Starbucks, which I patronize, but it’s fairly inconceivable that either Congress or nutritionists would classify that chain’s offerings with the low-hanging taxable fruit of Pepsi and Coke. Taking this argument further: why aren’t the revenue seekers proposing slapping a “sin” tax on the following items that aren’t at all healthy (whether organic or not): butter, cream, eggs, bacon, corned beef, mayo, Godiva and Lindt chocolates, foie gras, triple-cream Brie, the entire dessert tray at a ritzy French restaurant, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, fried clams, squid, shrimp and oysters, entire menus at Chinese restaurants (both cheap and pricey) and fresh-squeezed orange juice? And maybe a tax credit ought to be awarded to those consumers who purchase olive oil instead of butter.

To add insult to injury; not only are “sin taxes” a way for the majority to punish the minority – they don’t work, either as revenue-generators or as societal behavior modification:

The consequences of the sin tax are often the very opposite of those intended by its designers. Rather than increasing revenue, the sin tax can reduce it. Rather than discouraging what are regarded as morally questionable behaviors, the sin tax can make them more appealing. Rather than reducing what are perceived to be internal costs of the sin, the sin tax can increase them and expand them to society as a whole.

The evidence that sin taxes are a failed policy approach is incontrovertible. According to a new report from the Mercatus Center, “taxes on sugar-sweetened soft drinks do not necessarily advance the overall public interest, may be regressive in nature, and hardly ever work as intended.” The bottom line, say researchers Richard Williams and Katelyn Christ, is that a convincing body of evidence tells us that boosting food and drink prices “is not sufficient to make ‘fat taxes’ a viable tool to lower obesity.” That’s because soft drinks are really a small portion of most people’s diets.

In short – sin taxes are a flop.  They drive down revenue, sap economic and personal freedom, and yet don’t affect behavior.  What they are is a handy way for those that are in charge in society to tell those that are not “there are gonna be some changes, here”.
So observe the number of ways the Obama Administration is telling 51% of the population to stick it to the other 49%.
And ask yourself “is this the society I want to live in?”

Do you remember when lefties insisted President Bush, at the head of a “theocon” conspiracy, wanted to take dictatorial control of the whole nation, assume the power of life and death, and impose its awful agenda by force?

As always with this sort of thing, I refer you to Berg’s Seventh Law.

And then this piece in the Hot Air Green Room by Jim Treacher:

It turns out that John Holdren, Obama’s new “science czar,” has expressed some unusually radical ideas about stemming population growth. Or to put it more simply, he’s a totalitarian eugenicist:

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

Please read the whole thing for the details, along with photographic proof that Holdren’s book, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, exists. Holdren really did say all that stuff, and he even lists the book in his cirriculum vitae. If he’s changed his mind about these things in the last 30 years, now might be a good time to say so.

If this is true – and it’s the kind of thing that passes as normal among a certain strain of scientists, like Robert Ehrlich (who advocated international triage to deal with the population and famine bomb that was going to kill billions by 1990) or some of the radical environmental crowd (who believe the worldwide human population should drop down into the tens of millions, living as hunter-gatherers) – then Holdren is going to need to do something radical.

Like take the media out for cheeseburgers and talk about John and Kate’s divorce.

We’re about 18 months away from the next round of elections to the US House of Representatives. 

I remembered that when I got this email from an anonymous source:

Let’s talk about MN 4th District Representative Betty McCollum.

“B-Cup Betty”, as she’s known to her smarter colleagues on Capitol Hill – which is, let’s face it, all of them – is a product of Saint Catherine’s,  a fifth-rate Catholic women’s college that seems to succeed only in teaching its graduates how to use that hot Catholic school girl uniform to get what they want.  Which was, in fact, the only way she could get a job, much less a guy.

McCollum, being too homely and brunette to get a job in entertainment or the media, not smart enough to get into law school and not masculine enough to land a women’s studies professorship, went into education. 

She stank at it, of course – the Saint Paul School District has a sub-50% graduation rate, which sank while she was teaching, and has only fallen further since she’s been in Congress.

Unable to finish the job she was given, McCollum manipulated the DFL’s gender-equity bylaws to get herself what is broadly regarded (by anonymous but reliable DFL sources) as an “affirmative action” nomination in a cakewalk district, the Fourth.  “This was basically the political electoral equivalent of walking into a bar full of guys and saying “any of you big strong fellas wanna help me push my car?” and showing a little leg” said an anonymous source.  And even at that, for two straight elections McCollum has shown neither the guts nor the brains to face any challengers in a debate, saying (in effect) “They might talk mean about me!  They hate women!”. 

“Of course she wins in the Fourth” said an anonymous DFL source.  “The DFL could endorse a pile of monkey poo and get 55% of the vote in the Fourth!  Good lord, those people are all lobotomized union droogs!  The real question isn’t “why did an inexperienced, not-so-bright, poorly-educated party hack win in the Fourth” so much as “is there another district where such a lightweight could win any office?  I swear, if she didn’t have her gender going for her, she’d come in third for Water and Soil District Commissioner”.

Anonymous sources say McCollum – who is anonymously known for being a strutting man-hating martinet – runs an office renowned for dubious ethics.  Although specific charges have neither been filed nor prosecuted, anonymous sources say it’s just a matter of time.  “McCollum shows all the signs of being an ethics disaster” said a source who asked not to be named, but is a higher-up in the DFL; “She’s female, she’s unqualified, ill-educated and dumb, she’s a castrating bitch – or so I’ve heard – she’s Catholic, she’s of Irish descent, she’s been a union member, and she’s a woman in politics; you just know she took every bit of swag that people left on the floor”. 

“She’s dumb, poorly-educated, has no political background and was a failure as a teacher, she’s never run a race against serious competition, and she’t not even close to hot”, the source continued, “and yet she’s a high-maintenance diva!”.

Well, I went and filed that piece in the “Stupid Hack Piece” drawer. 

Along with this.  And this.  And this.

Because there’s just no room for corrosive, stupid sexism in politics!  Why, just because every single thing in the scabrous email above was identical to similar defamations of, say, Sarah Palin or Linda Chavez or Margaret Thatcher or Laura Ingraham or Michele Bachmann or…

…um, where were we?

(more…)

What precisely is the ethical difference between the statement that got the loathsome Don Imus fired (calling the Rutgers women’s hoop squad “Nappy Headed Hos”)…

…and Letterman’s (that Bristol and/or Willow Palin are promiscuous little tramps)?

Other than the mainstream media and liberals in general not believing that conservatives deserve anything they get, I mean?

It’s hard to keep up with all the Change since Obama took office.

As we’ve noted in this space, it used to be that dissent from the government – which was seen, from 2001 to 2008, as the supreme manifestation of patriotism – is suddenly actually UnAmerican.

And now, it seems that rape – which was once, by non-partisan consensus, considered in many ways just as bad as murder – is now the height of comedy.

From Pink Elephant Pundit:

Playboy writer Guy Cimbalo published what might be one of the most offensive articles I’ve seen in a long time. I ranted about it on RFC Radio earlier, but I am still fired up enough to express my fury in words.

Top 10 Conservative Women We’d Love To Hate F**. What a sick, twisted, horrible premise. They list all the heavy hitting conservative women you’d expect – Michelle Malkin being at the head of the pack, and the notable absence of Ann Coulter. He then proceed to talk about why they’re attractive, why he hates them, and the “hate f*** rating”.

“Hate F***” is apparently what all the hip kids call “rape” these days.  I’d have figured it would be more like “Hate Powermongering”, but I guess I’m not hip to all the “change” going on these days.

The list?

A few highlights:

Michelle Malkin

This highly f***able Filipina is a massively popular blogger who is known to dress up like a cheerleader on occasion (see video). She’s also a regular on Fox News, where her tight body and get-off-my-lawn stare just scream, “Do me!”

Mary Katherine Ham

You get this one pregnant, she stays pregnant. Karma’s a b*tch, isn’t it?

Amanda Carpenter

She is also a columnist at TownHall, a website for illiterates who disprove evolution by their very existence.

Mind you, this isn’t a posting at some drooling lobotoblog like Cucking Splotch or Minnesota Tragedy of Spyrochaetal Paresis “Progressive” Project.  This is Playboy – the “legit” media (as long as you read for the articles). The rest of the list includes:

Megyn Kelly

Elisabeth HasselbeckDana Perino

Laura Ingraham

Pamela Geller

Michele Bachmann

Peggy Noonan

Back to Tabitha:

Aside from getting the facts wrong re: Carpenter [she’s not with Townhall], the entire thing is vile, unmasked hatred. It’s sick. It’s wrong. It’s something that, unfortunately, many conservative women are too used to.

Apparently being a conservative undermines our femininity? Much in the way that being a black conservative or gay conservative undermines their elevated status as a minority in the eyes of the Left, women on the Right are ignored, abused, and hated. As a conservative woman, I have only been in the line of fire a relatively short time, but have experienced this first hand. Nothing is off limits regarding personal attacks. The double standard is completely nauseating. If this list had been published containing women like Katie Couric, Soledad O’Brien, and other liberal women, it would be front page news. There would be attempts on the author’s life. Instead, Guy Cimbalo, the tool responsible for this, is proud of what he did. Amanda Carpenter, who was included in the list, pointed out that Cimbalo has said he’s proud of his article, and is adding fuel to the fire. He sent out a link, asking people to “join in the fun”.

Cimbalo also took a swipe at Michele Bachmann; “Chemical castration would be preferable”, he said, providing a point on which I’m sure he and Bachmann agree.
No surprise coming from Tabitha Hale, who is basically a junior-size Laura Ingraham.

But I thought; what do the leftybloggers think about this?

“Megan” from Jezebel:

Because it’s not as if Cimbalo does anything in his piece but slag on these women for having the audacity to be attractive, conservative, opinionated and loud about those opinions. In other words, if he didn’t agree with us mouthy liberal broads, he wouldn’t want to fuck us either, and apparently prefers his women quiet and agreeable. And that – no matter what your politics are – is just gross….So, liberal ladies, just make sure you keep your opinions to yourself, never get old, never get a high-powered career and goodness knows don’t disagree with Guy Cimbalo or, like George H.W. Bush, he might not want to fuck you. And you wouldn’t want that.

Emily Kaiser at City Pages:

You’ve got to love a man who tears apart women for having an opinion, some power, and something to say that differs from his own. At least your looks make you good enough for one hate-fuck out of the deal with this sleazy guy.

We’re not the usual voice to speak up for Bachmann, but this column should be a painful read for anyone who has the slightest respect for women, conservative or liberal.

I have to admit, I am so cynical about the local lefty alt-media, I expected worse.  I’m happy to admit I shorted Ms. Kaiser.

And even Jeff Fecke, who is normally one to abase and prostrate the entire male gender and take the odd squib thwack at conservatives (especially Rep. Bachmann);Jeff’s not amused either:

This is seven kinds of despicable, and it is a reminder that there are plenty of fauxgressives running around who somehow think one can be a good liberal and still hate women. One can’t. By all means, attack the politics of Malkin, Coulter, Ingraham and Bachmann. But do so by attacking their politics, not by asserting that their vaginas make them an inviting target for defiling.

Well, good; we’re largely agreed that rape is a bad thing, even for conservative women.

Of course, the left does treat conservative women differently than the politically correct ones; a good chunk of the media and left think that conservative women (like conservative blacks, hispanics and gays) deserve what they get; that a major, dare we say “mainstream” (at least within the realm of soft-core pr0n) publication would think of publishing it, much less pay for it, says something about the outlook of an influential minority (or so I hope) in the media.

The piece was pulled from Playboy’s site not long after the bipartisan wave of revulsion impacted.  Hopefully Mr. Cimballo will get his wish; he seems to have “hate-f***ed” his own career.

Occasionally, when discussing biking, one or another putatively “conservative” critic will sound off with one or another of the following:

• “Hah!  You are rilly a librul looser!  Because other biker riders are also teh librul!”.  Disposing of this one is fairly trivial; a real conservative doesn’t define people by the group their part of; that’s the road that leads you to endless affirmative action, quotas and “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”. Conservatives are’t supposed to support this sort of thing, preferring instead to tie individuals to their individual records; in my case, as a thoroughgoing pro-free-enterprise, free-market, strict-constructionist, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-traditional marriage, low-tax, high-growth, high-fence/wide gate, parental school choice libertarian conservative.
• “I haven’t seen you explicitly attack the funding that goes toward bike transportation”.  So if we’re defined by what we haven’t written, then I’ll take the liberty of pointing out that by the same logic, my critics all support building concentration camps for dwarves.  I mean, they didn’t say they don’t  support it, and nothing in their record shows their eliminationist hatred of little people, but they never really ruled it out, now, did they?
• “Most Minnesotans drive!”  So?  Most Minnesotans voted for Obama, too.  Numbers don’t make you right.

No, I bike because I enjoy it.I always have.  It’s great exercise and, unlike most exercise, the scenery is never the same twice.  For over 30 years, I’ve enjoyed the feeling you get from finding ones’ limit (which, at 46, is a lot easier than it used to be) and pushing it back.  I just plain feel better when I’m biking, which is nothing to sneeze at. How many of you car drivers look forward to your morning and afternoon commutes?

As I noted last year when interviewed in the Utne Reader, there are those that have politicized biking.  I respond to that politicization to wit: “Not me”.  Of course, there are impeccably conservative reasons to bike: it saves money; you pay less taxes (and what conservative doesn’t relish that thought?); you are happy not to pay for someone else’s vision of Minnesota.
That should take care of that, right?

Well, hopefully.  With some of the (let’s just say) less-creatively-dogmatic people on my side of the aisle, you have to get mighty specific, lest they take the word “bike” like a bull takes an inadvertently-exposed bit of red underwear.

With that established, though, there are some bikers that deserve rhetorical wedgies.

One of them – Matthew Modine, former famous actor – gives one all the ammo one needs in the biograf of a HuffPo post, “Cars Are Like Cigarettes; The New Pariah“:

Matthew Modine is a Causecast leader, a dedicated and passionate individual who is an enigmatic voice for change.

And it’s a good thing he’s got that, since he hasn’t had a decent movie since Full Metal Jacket.

Causecast leaders are a prestigious collection of athletes, artists, students, actors, musicians, politicians, teachers and more. These individuals have set themselves apart from their contemporaries with a spirited dedication to their ideals…

…which are then expressed on…a blog.

Modine:

I am often asked, “Why do you love bicycles?” For a few reasons, but mostly because I am in love with self-propulsion and self-motivation.

So far so good; most of us like “self-propulsion” for some reason or another.

I love finding solutions to problems and I want to leave the world in better condition than when I arrived. For too long we’ve behaved as if the resources of our world are infinite.

On the one hand – nothing is infinite.  But lots of people “want to leave the world a better place”; fortunately, many of them are more concerned with finding ways past our limitations than being held prisoner by them.

Sometimes I feel like I am flying when I ride my bike. It’s exciting to turn a corner and suddenly find myself in a sea of other bicyclists.

[CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MR. MODINE AND BIKERS ONLY:  Ugh.  No.  I mean, different strokes and all, but biking for me is always a solo thing.  Hell, as this article shows us, is other bikers].
Modine is now going to shift into 10th gear, settle his feet into the clips, and pedal like hell into the Smug Zone:

The statistical truth is that 90% of trips made in cars are less than five miles from our homes. A very comfortable journey made on a bicycle.

Mr. Modlne, I’ll give you your due: you’ve certainly put your money where your mouth is on quite a few issues.  You turned down Tom Cruise’s role in Top Gun because you didn’t like the politics; I disagree, but I can respect someone who lives his beliefs.  Unlike most of Hollywood, you’ve also been married to the same person for almost thirty years.  You have two grown children.  Good on ya.

Now – in all those years of raising kids in New York or LA, how many of those “90% of comfortable trips” to the UrgentCare, to the pediatrician,  or to the MiniMart for midnight diaper runs did you make by bike?  How often did you do a week’s worth – even a days’ worth – of shopping for a family of four on your ride?  Or even by subway, bus, taxi or any other “environmentally responsible” form of transportation?

And if you want to say “most of them”, that’s great. Now – if you weren’t a famous, well-paid actor, how might that have worked out?

Behind every transit-uber-alles advocate is someone who’s never had to haul two kids to the urgent-care after work.

Perhaps the best part of choosing a bike instead of a car is what you are saying by pedaling. You are saying to yourself, your friends, your family, and the cars that clog our roads and highways, that you care about the air we breathe and that you care about the environment. You’re saying you want to do something to reduce carbon emissions and that you want to improve your health. This personal and environmental awareness is the legacy that you want to share with your friends and family.

Well, no. I mean, believe what you will, but the only legacy I’m going to leave my kids is a father who hopefully doesn’t drop dead of a heart attack at 50.

Next: Proof that Modine really is from Planet Manhattan:

Our country has had a long love affair with the automobile. Since its invention, the automobile has provided us with the freedom and liberty we yearned for since we took those first baby steps. The automobile took us further and faster than we could have ever done by self-propulsion. But that speed and distance has brought the world to the edge of extinction. We must now look at the automobile with an understanding of what it really is…as a cigarette–a cancer stick–a nail in our collective coffin. The sexy lifestyle that the tobacco industry sold to us contains the same advertising lies and poison which the automobile industry sold and continues to sell to the world.

Let’s ignore for a moment the extent to which Modine’s transit-friendly world – New York – was built to a great extent with profits from slave-grown tobacco; does Modine realize how many millions of Americans were dragged out of poverty by the changes to society that the car brought?  How many good, family-supporting, transit-friendly-city-building jobs came from building, supporting and repairing cars?   How many places like Modine’s native Loma Linda, California were opened up to the rest of the world. enabling wide-eyed Mormon kids like Matthew Modine to think of futures that didn’t involve farming? Indeed, how they paid for Modine’s childhood itself (his father ran…a drive-in theater!).

But Modine’s right.  Like cigarettes, cars have their problems; they are also the butt (heh) of a wave of ill-informed PC lunacy, dished up in the service of people who want to re-engineer society in their image, and damn the unintended consequences; damn the jobs lost, cities swept into ruins, lives altered.  Damn the waitress thrown out of work by the smoking ban, along with the assembly-line worker, and the city in which they both live.

Modine’s right.  Gasoline is literally finite.  But the market will find an alternative long before government will.

Look at the ads for automobiles and you’ll begin to recognize the lies. You’ll see open roads with happy smiling drivers. Ask yourself, When was the last time I was NOT stuck in traffic? When was the last time I was not pissed off and stressed out after just a few hours spent driving behind the wheel of a car? The automobile ads always present cars in a setting that is free of traffic and the drivers appear powerful, happy and liberated behind the wheel. Yeah, like that ever happens in the modern world.

Dunno if Matthew Modine’s ever tried driving in the vast majority of this country between the Sierras and the Hudson.

Hey, he should try biking it!
Yeah.  Like that ever happens in Matthew Modine’s world.

…that a wise White man with the richness of his  experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latino who hasn’t lived that life.

I would hope that a wise White descendant of north-woods white trash with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a New York Times reporter who hasn’t lived that life.

Oh, hell – it’s like potato chips.  Once you start, you can’t stop.

Sotomayor’s comment (“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life”) promted me to wonder – is the nominee being taken out of context?

The NYTimes, America’s official gatekeeper of record, says no, not really:

In her speech, Judge Sotomayor questioned the famous notion — often invoked by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her retired Supreme Court colleague, Sandra Day O’Connor — that a wise old man and a wise old woman would reach the same conclusion when deciding cases.“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” said Judge Sotomayor, who is now considered to be near the top of President Obama’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Her remarks, at the annual Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, were not the only instance in which she has publicly described her view of judging in terms that could provoke sharp questioning in a confirmation hearing.

This month, for example, a video surfaced of Judge Sotomayor asserting in 2005 that a “court of appeals is where policy is made.” She then immediately adds: “And I know — I know this is on tape, and I should never say that because we don’t make law. I know. O.K. I know. I’m not promoting it. I’m not advocating it. I’m — you know.”

I would hope that a wise conservative guy with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who takes anything said at  Berkeley seriously, who hasn’t lived that life

Remember the old book “Black Like Me?”  It’s the story of a white journalist, John Howard Griffin, who pharmacologically dyed his skin black to pass as Afro-American; the book relates his experiences.

I knew it was only a matter of time until someone tried it with Christians.

Peter Roose, an undergrad at Brown University, went “undercover” to “infiltrate” Liberty University.

And he found out that fundie Christians are…

…well, basically human:

Roose had transferred to the Virginia campus from Brown University in Providence, a famously liberal member of the Ivy League. His Liberty classmates knew about the switch, but he kept something more important hidden: He planned to write a book about his experience at the school founded by fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell.

Each conversation about salvation or hand-wringing debate about premarital sex was unwitting fodder for Roose’s recently published book: “The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University.”

“As a responsible American citizen, I couldn’t just ignore the fact that there are a lot of Christian college students out there,” said Roose, 21, now a Brown senior. “If I wanted my education to be well-rounded, I had to branch out and include these people that I just really had no exposure to.”

How little exposure?

Roose’s parents, liberal Quakers who once worked for Ralph Nader, were nervous about their son being exposed to Falwell’s views.

See Berg’s Seventh Law; when libs babble about conservative provincialism, they’re projecting.

He was determined to not mock the school, thinking it would be too easy — and unfair. He aimed to immerse himself in the culture, examine what conservative Christians believe and see if he could find some common ground. He had less weighty questions too: How did they spend Friday nights? Did they use Facebook? Did they go on dates? Did they watch “Gossip Girl?”

It wasn’t an easy transition. Premarital sex is an obvious no-no at Liberty. So are smoking and drinking. Cursing is also banned, so he prepared by reading the Christian self-help book, “30 Days to Taming Your Tongue.”

The “Story” involved a lengthy interview with LU founder Jerry Falwell, I wonder what Roose’s parents think about the his conclusion?

Roose said his Liberty experience transformed him in surprising ways.

When he first returned to Brown, he’d be shocked by the sight of a gay couple holding hands — then be shocked at his own reaction. He remains stridently opposed to Falwell’s worldview, but he also came to understand Falwell’s appeal.

Once ambivalent about faith, Roose now prays to God regularly — for his own well-being and on behalf of others. He said he owns several translations of the Bible and has recently been rereading meditations from the letters of John on using love and compassion to solve cultural conflicts.

Perhaps someday they’ll try having a third-rate comic impersonate a caricatured blowhard conservative talking head…

…er,no.  That’d be too stupid.

I’m a fundamentally charitable person.

I’m personally inclined to give people the benefit of a doubt. Especially someone who’s new at a job; good Lord, I have had teething pains on jobs.  I am not one to cast the first stone, generally.

But as Canada’s National Post notes, our DNS Secretary, Janet “There’s A Conservative Terrorist Under My Bed” Napolitano, is – words fail – really, really stupid:

Can someone please tell us how U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano got her job? She appears to be about as knowledgeable about border issues as a late-night radio call-in yahoo.

In an interview broadcast Monday on the CBC, Ms. Napolitano attempted to justify her call for stricter border security on the premise that “suspected or known terrorists” have entered the U. S. across the Canadian border, including the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack.

Well, by all means, let’s clamp down on that border…

…presuming that she’s right:

All the 9/11 terrorists, of course, entered the United States directly from overseas. The notion that some arrived via Canada is a myth that briefly popped up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and was then quickly debunked.

Good Lord.  We have Grace Kelly running DHS.

Informed of her error, Ms. Napolitano blustered: “I can’t talk to that. I can talk about the future. And here’s the future. The future is we have borders.”

Just what does that mean, exactly?

It means “Don’t question me.  I am associated with hope and change!  You wanna end up on a watchlist, bub?”

Just a few weeks ago, Ms. Napolitano equated Canada’s border to Mexico’s, suggesting they deserved the same treatment.

That, of course, is PC – Par for the Course – on the left; suggesting that maybe we should fence off the Mexican border brings a knowing pursing of the lips and a devastating riposte; “so what about the Canadian border?  Or aren’t we worried about white illegal immigrants?”

Right.  Because we have gangs of Quebecois shooting Afro-Americans over drug turf in Los Angeles.

Mexico is engulfed in a drug war that left more than 5,000 dead last year, and which is spawning a spillover kidnapping epidemic in Arizona. So many Mexicans enter the United States illegally that a multi-billion-dollar barrier has been built from Texas to California to keep them out.

In Canada, on the other hand, the main problem is congestion resulting from cross-border trade. Not quite the same thing, is it?

It’s called a “Nuance”, I believe.

Paul at TvM reviews Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs by Robert Spencer:

A recurring theme is how Islamists target non-Muslims who resist the subversive Islamic supremacist campaign. Chapter Four “The International Jihad Against Free Speech” discusses controversies such as surrounded the 16-minute film “Fitna” by Dutch politician Geert Wilders and America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It by Mark Steyn (the darkest and most illuminating book that I have read in a while).

To understand how Islamic supremacists subvert US security by exploiting the bureaucratic and legalist mechanics of PC sensitivities, I urge leaping to the final two chapters. The penultimate, Chapter Ten “Compromised” recounts the most prominent US security compromises to accommodate Islamists, epitomized by the philosophical dispute between U.S. Army Reserve Major Stephen Coughlin, a top non-Islamic expert on Islamic law at the Pentagon, and Hesham Islam, special assistant for international affairs for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon R. England. Coughlin’s contract at the Pentagon was not renewed.

That’s the problem with small-“l” liberal democracy; its enemies turn its freedoms – and, as we’ve seen on American campuses, which would seem to be a vehicle for proving Parker’s thesis, its most closet-authoritarian tendencies – against it.

So what to do?  Well, for starters, continue throwing brickbats at the worst excesses of political correctness in this country. Find the place where it ceases to be a vehicle for positive change – I don’t really care if the “N-word”, “faggot” or “semprini” are ever acceptable in polite company again – and becomes a vehicle for petty authoritarianism and, as Spencer notes, worse.

The stock market does well for a president – Clinton – who, to be fair, was forced to do a decent, hands-off job on economic policy by a conservative congress, and to be even more fair was benefitting from the “Peace Dividend” Ronald Reagan gave him:  “The President is responsible for the strong market!”

The stock market starts correcting into a mild recession as overvalued tech stocks correct at the very end of his term in office:  “The President is not responsible for the market!”

The already-ailing market tumbles after 9/11:  “The President is responsible for the weak market!”

The stock market reacts to epic, welcome tax cuts by jumping to all-time record highs (taking employment and prosperity to equally-record levels):  “The President has nothing to do with the market!”

The real-estate bubble – which inflated largely due to socialistic policies that largely pre-date his administration, and which his administration fought (albeit in an inconsistent and dilatory fashion, albeit less so than the Congress) – deflates, eating up a quarter of the market:  “The President is responsible for the weak market!”

The stock market reacts to the election of a fabian socialist by shedding another 15% (from its high – 30% using election day as a baseline):  “The President has nothing to do with the market!”

The stock market reacts to the new administration’s inept, disastrous first six weeks by burning up another 8% of its pre-crash value (15% using election day as a baseline):  “The President really, Really, REALLY has nothing to do with the market!”

The market bounces back a few hundred points, amounting to less than 10% of its shrivelled value (around 5% of its Bush-era peak) in what most economists are calling a bear-market rally :  “Look at this wondrous market The President has, in His infinite wisdom, given to we who are not worthy!”

I gotta remind you; join Ed and I this Saturday on the Northern Alliance Radio Network (Volume II, “The Headliners”) as we interview Christina Hoff Summers.

We’ll be talking about her most recent work, which she’ll be in town speaking about (explaining the “lack” of women in math, science and engineering and, more importantly, assailing “feminist” explanations of the issue), as well as her earlier work including the classic The War On Boys. 

Join us on Saturday. I’m looking forward to this.

Also – on April 11, we’ll be doing a warmup interview for the Minnesota Tea Party.  Stay tuned!

I’ve been trying to write a post for the past few weeks about the Dems’ new fixation with cutiepie word games – but Bobby Jindal says it all, when asked if he wants the President to fail:

Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ‘Why no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” Jindal said at a political fundraiser attended by 1,200 people. “This is political correctness run amok.”

This, of course, from the party that said “dissent is good!”, and whinged about their precious patriotism being insulted if they were questioned.

Here’s one of the GOP’s problems; the Dems are playing the battle for the language as a full-contact sport, while Republicans think it’s a sideshow.

The bad guys are winning.