From the Gouverneur Times:

The computerized voting machines used by many voters in the 23rd district had a computer virus - tainting the results, not just from those machines known to have been infected, but casting doubt on the accuracy of counts retrieved from any of the machines.

Cathleen Rogers, the Democratic Elections Commissioner in Hamilton County stated that they discovered a problem with their voting machines the week prior to the election and that the “virus” was fixed by a Technical Support representatives from Dominion, the manufacturer. . . . None of the machines (from the same manufacturer) used in the other counties within the 23rd district were looked at nor were they recertified after the “reprogramming” that occurred in Hamilton County.

As is pointed out in the article, this virus debacle calls into question all of the NY-23 election results. It is simply unbelievable that a virus was found in Hamilton County voting machines one week before the special election and none of the other machines in the district were examined. Who really won in NY-23, and did the virus tamper with the vote count?

Last and most pertinent question: Where did the virus come from? Were there any, erm, community organizers near the voting machines prior to the election?

Cross-posted to my personal blog: Nate, Uncensored.

Just a few absurd news stories I thought I would share with my fellow college undergrads this beautiful, yet chilly Friday morning…

First up is news that the New York Times, clearly desperate for readers, is offering any college professor who makes the Times required reading in his or her syllabus a free subscription. In case the implications aren’t abundantly clear — I know it’s early — let me spell it out for you. The Times is going to let professors have a subscription to their newspaper for free if they make you pay for it. I would call for a student boycott of the New York Times, but clearly none of us are reading it anyway or they wouldn’t have hatched this scheme.

Next up is news out of Pittsburgh that is sure to boil your morning oatmeal. Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is proposing a “Fair Share Tax” that would levy a 1% tax on college tuition (h/t Instapundit). In his not-so-humble opinion, students just aren’t paying their fair share for city services. Mary Hines, president of the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education and president of Carlow University, disagrees. She points out that students already pay income and property taxes in Pittsburgh. But of course that’s not enough for Ravenstahl. When are there really enough taxes for any liberal?

If this “Fair Share Tax” passes muster in Pittsburgh, look for it to come to a college town near you. I’m sure the corruptocrats in the Athens County Democratic Party will be chomping at the bit to levy a similar tax once they hear the news. Just remember, my fellow matriculants: You do have options. Republicans are for lower taxes and, unless they’re RINOs, aren’t likely to tax your tuition. These folks who want to levy taxes on your tuition are counting on you to keep voting for hopeandchange (TM) at the ballot box.

Last but certainly not least, in this edition of What Were They Smoking and Where Can I Find Some?, we explore what kind of hard drugs University of California regents must have been on when they thought they would quietly get away with increasing tuition by 32%. Are they familiar with the long tradition of student protest at California colleges and universities? But UC students aren’t going quietly into that good night; they’re raging, raging against the dying of their bank accounts. And good for them. But guys, don’t just blame the regents. Your far left state government and its budget mismanagement, that’s the real culprit.

All of this begs the question: Leftist assault on higher education, or just putting the liberal in the liberal arts?

Cross-posted to my personal blog: Nate, Uncensored.

If Democrats don’t want gays and lesbians to stay home in 2010 and 2012 (they don’t), they will pass at least a partial repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) sometime next year. President Obama explicitly promised to repeal DOMA during the 2008 campaign, and the Democratic leadership in Congress has also expressed support for repeal. Republicans can and must get out in front of this issue and pressure Democrats into a bipartisan agreement that would still protect the essential spirit of DOMA.

We can do that by supporting a libertarian, populist revision of DOMA — by introducing a Let the People Decide Act of 2010.

Here’s how it would work. The full faith and credit clause that prevents same-sex marriages from being forcibly exported to other states would be left completely intact. The clause that excludes same-sex marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships from federal rights and benefits would be repealed if and only if voters within a state approve some version of same-sex unions through ballot issues.

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Sarah Palin is making news everywhere over the past few days, promoting her new book Going Rogue: An American Life through a series of interviews and a national book tour. Many are looking to her most recent interviews to examine whether or not she is in fact qualified to run for president in 2012. She has made a number of eloquent, red meat policy statements in these interviews and there is a lot to examine. I’ll leave that to others.

While finding out where Palin stands on policy is important, I think there are other ways one can discern whether or not she is qualified to lead our nation. Over a year ago, Palin gave her speech at the Republican National Convention as the GOP vice presidential candidate. I think now is the appropriate time to look back on that speech and see just how prescient Palin’s claims about the future of America under an Obama administration have turned out to be.

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It’s a beautiful Thursday morning here in Southeastern Ohio. Actually, I think every Thursday morning is beautiful because it’s the last day of classes for me for the week. To celebrate this auspicious occasion, I thought we should play a game called Name That Democratic President. I’ll provide you with two clues, then you can take a guess and peek underneath the fold to see if you’re right. Don’t visit the links before you guess though; that’s cheating. Here goes!

Clue #1: In the run-up to her inevitable endorsement of NY-23’s lying leftist Bill Owens, Dede Scozzafava was told by text message that this Democratic president was trying to get in touch with her. Dede declined to return his calls.

Clue #2: Following the passage of PelosiCare by just five votes in the House of Representatives, this Democratic president went to the Senate and told Democratic senators that attacks by so-called “teabaggers” (a derogatory term for conservative Tea Party activists) meant that the Democratic majority was actually winning. He urged Senate Democrats to make history and pass PelosiCare right away.

Find out just who this Democratic president is beneath the fold…

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Don’t let them tell you that Barack Obama wasn’t watching the election returns last Tuesday. From a sickeningly sappy interview with Dede Scozzafava in the Washington Post, we glean this little gem:

Scozzafava’s black Nokia phone vibrated nonstop. She rarely picked it up, except for family or close friends. She called the publisher of the Watertown Daily Times to convey her private support for Owens. She received a text informing her that former president Bill Clinton was trying to reach her, but she wasn’t returning any messages.

The emphasis is mine. Leaving aside the unbelievable notion that Scozzafava wouldn’t have returned a message from a former president, take that in for a minute. Bill Clinton was trying to reach her.

The former president of the United States, former leader of the free world, Democratic superstar, almost First Gentleman Bill Clinton was reaching out to Scozzafava for an Owens endorsement.

Could it be that the Obamacrats knew they were going to lose in Virginia, feared they were going to lose in New Jersey, and were desperate for some face-saving victory? Fearing that if they lost all three elections the media might turn on them, Democrats dispatched a former president for an assemblywoman’s endorsement so the media would cling to the meme that Republicans were killing the party by pushing out “moderates” when we couldn’t win with conservatives.

We can never prove that President Obama was concerned about last Tuesday’s election. What Scozzafava has revealed is that at least one Democratic president was concerned. Don’t let them tell you that last Tuesday didn’t matter, and don’t let them tell you that their desperate grab for NY-23 means a conservative defeat. Hoffman and his supporters made Bill Clinton beg for an endorsement from a woman who wouldn’t even return his calls. If that kind of humiliation of a former Democratic president is their “victory,” let them have it.

Cross-posted to my personal blog: Nate, Uncensored.

Today is the 234th birthday of the Marine Corps, and it has me thinking about a friend of mine who comes from a Marine Corps family. I met him shortly after I came to the Ohio University campus in 2007 and we became pretty good friends throughout that school year. I got the chance to meet his dad, who served in the Marine Corps, during a Memorial Day Weekend camping trip with his family in 2008.

He was a big guy with a somewhat intimidating presence, the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley (or a bright alley, for that matter) if you had somehow ended up on his bad side. He also struck me as a no-nonsense kind of guy. No excuses. You succeed or you fail, and if you fail you pick yourself up again — but you don’t make excuses. You own your life, your triumphs and your mistakes, and you either work to better it or you don’t.

But it was also pretty clear that he was a good guy, a man with a deep sense of loyalty. That sense of loyalty was obvious by the way he interacted with his family and by the way they interacted with him. Here was a real father in an age when real fatherhood is rare, when men are so often inclined to cede their responsibilities to the mothers of their children, to the public educational system, and to other government programs. Not this guy. With him, you got the impression that he would be just as willing to die for his family as he was willing to die for his country as a Marine.

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Leftists have created their own abortion nightmare. They can whine all they want to about the eeeeevil pro-life movement and those aaaaawful conservatives, but the truth is that the Stupak amendment was only made possible by the liberal obsession with government-run health care. Consider this, Planned Parenthood and NARAL: Under any of the various Republican health care proposals, decisions about abortion coverage would have been left to the free market law of supply and demand.

Translation: You hate Republicans so much, but GOP health care proposals are the only ones that offer 100% protection of abortion choice.

This is not to suggest that the GOP has any great love affair with the pro-choice movement; as we all know, quite the opposite is true. What it does suggest is that pro-choicers have either been incredibly naive or outrageously hypocritical. Under government-run health care, with a government-run option and government subsidies for private insurance, there was always going to be greater governmental control over health care decisions. Either pro-choicers didn’t think this through in terms of abortion rights, or they thought the rules wouldn’t apply to them. Maybe they thought, for some reason, they would be exempt from government control over their health care choices.

Sorry gals, but in this brave new world that we call ObamaCare/PelosiCare, no one is exempt from government control over their health care choices. This week Bart Stupak is making decisions about your perceived right to an abortion. Next a panel of experts will be making a decision about whether breast cancer patients really need breast-conserving surgery. Mastectomy, after all, could be deemed more cost-effective. You see, when you want government-run health care, that kind of implies that you want the government to, well, run health care.

Now, if the Stupak amendment has made you think twice about having politicians accountable to public opinion managing your care versus a market driven by consumer demand, you do have options. You can join House Minority Leader John Boehner in calling on Congress to “scrap the whole bill and start over.” But I won’t hold my breath. We all know that this is about a radical leftist ideological agenda of which your movement is an integral part. It’s not really about women’s health, and I don’t doubt for a minute that you’ll prove us right again.

Cross-posted to my personal blog: Nate, Uncensored.

As at least a nominal Catholic, I was perplexed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) decision to endorse PelosiCare after the Stupak amendment prohibited federal funding for abortion. While abortion is the number one issue confronting those who are trying to build a culture of life, it isn’t the only one. There are at least five reasons why Catholics should still oppose PelosiCare, reasons that the American bishops should have been paying more attention to if they were going to insert themselves into health care policy decisions.

1. Deficit spending is anti-life, anti-family, and immoral in general. By supporting PelosiCare, Catholics would be passing the cost of health care reform primarily to their children and grandchildren. PelosiCare will create the fiscal and economic conditions that will encourage the next generation of Catholics to continue using contraception and discourage them from having large families — simply because large families will cost too much.

2. PelosiCare will fund abortifacient contraception — including the birth control pill and the morning after pill. Although the Stupak amendment prohibited federal funding for surgical abortion, chemical abortion will still be provided using federal dollars under both the public option and subsidized private insurance. It has been scientifically proven that the birth control pill can destroy a life after conception, and the express goal of the morning after pill is to do just that.

3. Procedures using embryonic stem cells would also be funded under PelosiCare. There is nothing in the House bill that would prohibit either public health insurance or subsidized private insurance from using federal dollars to fund procedures that use embryonic stem cells. While many Catholics remain opposed to embryonic stem cell research, under PelosiCare their tax dollars might be used to subsidize the destruction of embryos and the use of their stem cells in medical procedures.

4. Under PelosiCare, care rationing (AKA “death panels”) will become reality. Do you want the government deciding whether your parent or grandparent should live or die, or what kind of treatment is “too much”? Under PelosiCare, that will be inevitable. As Americans begin to realize the full cost of a reform plan that expands access but doesn’t cut costs, politicians will be looking for ways to reduce the pricetag. Rationing will become reality. It already is reality in other countries with government-run health care.

5. There is no guarantee that the final health care bill won’t provide federal funding for abortion. The bishops should have known better. Why would they trust a rabidly pro-choice House Speaker, a pro-choice Senate Majority Leader, and a pro-choice president — all beholden to Planned Parenthood and NARAL — to prevent federal funding for abortion? They’re already backtracking, and President Obama has gone on the record saying that language about abortion will need to be changed. The final bill on President Obama’s desk may well feature federal funding for abortion, if not under the public option then under subsidized private insurance.

In their zeal to provide health care for all Americans, Catholic bishops have overlooked these serious issues. They have also overlooked the good that Catholic ingenuity has accomplished within the boundaries of private health care, and have instead bought wholesale into government-run health care. The bishops are simply wrong, and it is well within the rights of lay Catholics to decide that this is the case and to continue opposing PelosiCare.

Cross-posted to my personal blog: Nate, Uncensored.

Many are interpreting the message of the new ABC show V as a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration, intended to reach out to libertarian and conservative Tea Party activists. That’s probably the most obvious interpretation, as the Visitors bring “universal health care” (direct quote) to earth and encourage their human supporters to “spread hope,” all the while hiding a much more sinister agenda.

It would be a mistake to leave V’s criticism solely at the political level, though. While on the political level the plot certainly appears to be a shot across the bow of the Obama administration, on a cultural level this storyline is also a critique of our gullible culture.

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