My daughter attends a Catholic college, and the campus chapter of the Knights of Columbus raised enough money to put up a monument on campus to the infants that have been murdered aborted. You can read the article about it at http://www.tommiemedia.com/news/knights-place-monument-in-upper-quad/.

You would think that a Catholic campus would be a safe place to do this, but you’d be wrong. A female student wrote to the college paper to complain about it. In the process she hauled out the tired old liberal meme that “men don’t have the right to an opinion on abortion”.

This has gotto be the single most offensive statement in the entire liberal repertoire at least, I hope it is - it’s hard to imagine anything more insulting.

I’m in my early 50’s and a father of three, one of whom was “unplanned”. Our oldest child is now a senior in college, our youngest is now a senior in high school, and I’ve been there every step of the way. I’ve changed diapers and boiled bottles, wiped noses and dealt with all the childhood illnesses. I practically bankrupted myself paying for Catholic schools because it was my responsibility to give my kids the best education I could afford. In order to be in a good place to raise children, I quit a job with NASA, a dream that sustained me through an inner-city high school and four years of engineering school. Aa few years later, I took a pass on most of the internet boom while people less qualified than me made millions, because I didn’t want to uproot the kids.

I’m not looking for any medals for any of this; it’s no more than doing what I was supposed to do. But can you imagine how it feels to read that I don’t have a right to an opinion on child-bearing issues?

After 20 years of being a devoted parent, am I supposed to accept the idea that, by dint of having a uterus, some college girl has the right to lecture me on what an imposition nine months of pregnancy are? About the financial and personal burdens of having (not RAISING, mind you, just HAVING) a child? I passed up an opportunity to be a part of history, then passed up an opportunity to make a fortune, and instead spent two decades taking jobs I HATED in a steadily dwindling local market, just to avoid making my kids change schools; is there anyone in the world who has the right to tell me anything about what it means to subordinate your youth and your career to the good of your children? I’ve spent a fortune on non-pubic schooling, and I have nothing saved up towards retirement; who knows better than me the cost of raising children?

And if none of that earns me the right to an opinion on this topic, how about this: in the middle of one particularly awful night my wife miscarried a child in her fifth month, and I ended up midwifing the delivery myself, because we didn’t have time to get her to the hospital. Anyone who can look into the dead eyes of a five-month stillborn and call it “tissue” is uttrerly and completely soulless. Does looking into the dead eyes of my own stillborn child buy me the right to an opinion on the humanity of a fetus?

The next time you hear someone claim that men have no right to an opinion on abortion, I want you to remember me. Then I want you to look them in the eye and tell them that they’re full of crap.

This is my response to a letter printed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on Monday, as the “letter of the day”.  There’s a lot more I wanted to say, but I had to keep it under 250 words.

Gentlemen/Ladies:

The letter of 9/14 titled “Party of no ideas…” demonstrates either severe short-term memory loss or a complete lack of intellectual honesty.

There’s no other way to explain a belief that Joe Wilson’s outburst even approached the standard of behavior set by the left since 2000 towards President Bush and the Republicans, particularly not by someone who was in the Twin Cities during the 2008 RNC convention; it wasn’t Republicans planning the use of “urine bombs”.  She’s also forgotten the entire Democratic caucus booing Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address, President Obama’s staff chanting “Na Na Nana, Goodbye” as Bush left the White House, and an endless stream of demeaning portrayals of Bush in the Democrat-friendly entertainment media.

Throughout this, not one mainstream Democrat politician, including the current president, came forward to ask that the office be accorded some respect, if not the man.

I don’t approve of what Wilson did; I don’t think Republicans should engage in a “race for the bottom”, particularly not against people who are already living there.  But these shrieks of outrage against the Democrats’ new-found sense of decorum and reverence for the presidency ring a bit hollow.  Don’t complain about the bar being low when it was set there by your own behavior, day by day over an 8-year period.

It’s rather amusing that the party that spent 6 years calling the last president a liar for being wrong is suddenly sensitive to the current president being called a liar for telling lies.

I hope to eventually update this with a link, but in case you missed it, Chris Mathews is now claiming that “‘Socialism’ is code for the ‘N’ word”. I’ve always wondered how it is that people like Mathews know what the “code” is when *I* don’t (maybe he’s intercepting my copy of the super-secret cypher book?), but this puts me in mind of a story I heard back in the 80’s.

If you’re old enough to recall the 80’s, it was the time when feminism was still the cause du jour. When a good, progressive (male) Democrat’s is informed that his family doctor has retired, he schedules his anual physical with a young female doctor. Since he’s just turned 50, it turns out that she will be giving him his first-ever prostate exam.

As he’s bending over the examing table, his doctor says to him, “You seem tense.” He replies “Yes, I am”. She immediately gets defensive; “Is it because I’m a woman?”. He replies “No, I’m pretty sure I’d be tense with *anyone* doing this to me.”

Freud said that “sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar”, but a finger up the butt is a always a finger up the butt.

And that’s a truth we can count on, regardless of whether the person doing it happens to be a woman, or as happens to be the case this time, a smoot-talking, marxist “community organizer” from Chicago who happens to be half-black.

OK, I usually follow the guideline that “if you bring the Nazis into the discussion you’ve run out of useful things to say”, but I’m going to be even *more* juvenile and use the defense that “SHE started it!”

Accoding to the folks at Real Cler Politics, Nancy Pelosi claims protesters are “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.” link here.

Here’s the thing I find so ironic about this - guess who was one of the first political parties to bring about universal health care in Europe? Anyone? Beuler? Beuler? Beuler?

The answer is, the Nataionale Sociliste Deutcsche Arbeiter Partie (NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers Party), which later shortened its name to Nationale Socialiste, and later to Nazi. That’s right folks, universal health care was an essential part of the Nazi party platform.

Oh, and by the way, once they’d taken over the health care system, they decided that it was simply too expensive to maintain what was known as the time as the “feeble minded”; they quietly turned the mental institutions into abatoirs, in a move that was a tragic forewarning of the horrors to come.

Pretty much what you’d expect from a system that banned dissent and used government takeovers and a cult of personality to join industry, government, and trade unions into a strong central government (or fascie).

Sound familiar?

I heard a news report today Attorney General Erick Holter said that the tragic shooting in the Holocost Museum proves the need for hate crimes legislation.

Either these people are monumentally stupid, or I’m missing something here.  We’re talking about a lifelong bigot deciding to commit suicide-by-cop in the most conspicuous place possible.  Do people think that someone in that state of mind is going to stop and say, “Golly, I’d better not do that, it would be a hate crime!”

Of course, this kind of thinking can only be expected when discussing something that’s called “the Mathew Shepard law”; the morons who murdered Shepard were spared the death sentance only at the request of the because the victims family; apparently the death penalty isn’t quite enough of a deterrent, so they literally want a “fate worse than death”.

1) There is no such thing as deserved wealth. Anyone who is rich either stole it or inherited it. Government therefore has a responsibility to ensure that this wealth is taken away in the interest of fairness. This is why we need “progressive” income taxes. This rule does not apply to senators from Massachusetts, since there’s apparently no link between income and wealth in that state.

2) There is no such thing as deserved poverty. Poor people are poor because there is some sort of clandestine system in place that ensures that the wealthy stay wealthy, and not due to any life-decisions they might have made. This cabal runs all politics outside the Democratic party (and the Unions). Only by turning over all decision-making authority to the Democratic party can we achieve anything like “justice”.

3) Profit is fundamentally immoral, because it’s based on the principal of the job creator paying the worker less than the value of his/her work and pocketing the difference. Anyone who makes a profit can only be assumed to be working in his/her own best interest. This immorality taints all things in the private sector.

4) Religion is fundamentally undemocratic, because it attempts to impose rules on individuals, based solely on “superstition”. All religions have an implicit goal of imposing of their primitive rules on other people (Islam being the only exception). The only acceptable religions are the new age superstitions, which allow people to make up the rules as they go.

5) All moral authority therefore resides in the government, through the agency of unelected bureaucrats who, fortunately, know more than you and therefore can be trusted to make all decisions in your best interest. These government bureaucrats are the only ones who can be counted on to not be working in their own best interest. This rule does not apply if there is a Republican in the white house. The highest form of moral authority is the UN, which has NO elected officials and is therefore is clearly above operating in its own best interest.

6) There can be no freedom without health and safety. Anything that might cause the most minute health or safety hazard must therefore be regulated and controlled by people we can be assured aren’t operating in their own best interests (i.e., government bureaucrats). Even those things that don’t actually cause physical harm must be controlled, as they might, in the future, be found to cause health or safety problems, or could cause mental or emotional distress. The logical conclusion is that the only way we can be free is by turning over all decision making authority to the government.

7) If the planet isn’t healthy, none of us are free. Therefore anything that might effect the planet or the climate (like exhaling) must be regulated by the government is any of us are to be free.

All white people must bear and accept the responsibility for all of the bad things that have happened to people of color, everywhere. This is much like the concept of original sin – there is no time limit on this and there is no redemption. Guilt has a long memory, and nothing has really changed since 1960. However, it’s in poor taste to blame the Democratic party for generations of support of slavery, establishment and enthusiastic enforcement of Jim Crow laws, the use of the Klan as its military arm, its opposition to civil rights legislation, and its continuing cynical practice of race-baiting; those things were all in the past and must be forgotten.

9) No individual has the right to the work of another human being. However, everyone has the right to health care, and the poor have a right to housing, food stamps, child care, and an education. That’s because those things are provided by the government and not by people.

For those who’ve seen Casablanca, this scene needs no introduction. For those who haven’t go get the DVD and watch it. Repeatedly.

Casablanca is the story of a jaded American expatriate in the late 1930’s, a former idealist who’s watched the world descend into fascism and has given up on it. His feelings aren’t muche different from what I’ve been feeling lately, as I watch our beloved country sinking into socialism in order to buy some temporary financial safety.

The first 20 minutes or so of the move very effectively set up the sense of utter hopelessness of the refugees from Nazi occupied Europe who’ve found themselves trapped in Moroco, a colony of “neutral” France, unable to continue thier trek to America and freedom. Rick, a man who once ran guns for the Ethiopians and fought for the Spanish loyalists, owns a cafe (nighclub) that’s very popular among the disposessed, but he’s as hopeless and cynical as anyone in Casablanca.

Into this mix comes Victor Laslo, a tireless anti-Nazi crusader who’s been in and out of German concentration camps across Europe as an “enemy of the reich”. Wherever he’s gone he’s served as the a lightning rod for the local resistance, and the Nazi’s want him dead. His only hope is to acquire a set of transit papers that Rick has in his posession. Just prior to this scene, he’s trying to talk Rick into giving them the papers. Then this happens.

We see here a room full of people who’ve become so wrapped up in the act of fleeing the opressors that they’ve forgotten how to be free men and free women. These people who, seconds before, were willing to meekly turn thier heads as the conquerors sing of the glory of thier new world order, are suddenly brought to thier feet by one man who refuses to knuckle under. And suddenly the Marcilles become not just the French national anthem, but the anthem of all free men and free women everywhere, everytime.

One man. One man with the courage of his confictions and the dignity of all free men and women.

One man.

Maybe we all need to send a copy of this url to EVERY ONE of our republican “leaders” in the senate.

You would have thought that electing our first Marxist president would have made the Socialist president of Venezuala happy.  Guess again.  In the last 24 hours, I’ve read two AP articles about Hugo Chavez issuing statements about Obama that, had they been uttered in Venezuala about Chavez, would have landed the speaker in jail (for those who’ve been living in an ice cave for the last few years, it’s illegal to make “insulting statements” about the president).

Now, it’s not that unusual for Chavez to insult the American president.  Personally, I was a bit worried that the Immaculate Inauguration would force Chavez to find a new hobby, like supporting terrorists in neighboring countries (no, wait… oh, yeah).  As it turns out, I needn’t have worried; Chavez has already managed to fit the Obamassiah into his paranoid delusions. He’s now decided that Obama is out to remove him, and that if he doesn’t, the Pentagon will have him killed. I’m guessing that he sussed this out while wearing a tin foil hat and sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. Or, he might have been tipped off by his close personal friend, Bigfoot.

All of this reminded me of one of my favorite of the “ealy, funny” Woody Allen movies, the immortal Banannas.  Ironically, Banannas is SUPPOSED to be about south American revolutionaries of the 60’s.  I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Enjoy.

My wife emailed me this: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html?emc=eta1

Here’s the  summary:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams. Was this what adulthood promised?”

I doubt that there’s a human being on the planet who hasn’t seen this movie, with the possible exception of a few tribal groups deep in the Amazon.  The author of this review puts a completely selfish and cyincal spin on the story.  He goes on at length about how horrifying the movie was to him at 15, much fun the town looks like after it’s degenerated into Pottersville, and the empty look in the eyes of Ernie the cabbie as he drives George around the changed town.  He also points out that at a couple of times in George’s life, he lashes out at those closest to him.

This was once of the most self-centered, small-minded articles I’ve ever read.  I’m horrified.  The point of the movie is that when we sacrifice our own desires to a greater good, the rewards are worth the  price, even if they’re something we take for granted.  George subordinated his wanderlust for the sake of his family and his town, and he did it of his own free will.  Yeah, he chaffed at it, and it turned into rage at a couple of the lowest points in his life (primarily so that the character would be more interesting), but then he sucked it up and “did the right thing”.

As for how much “fun” Potterville looked like, and the blank look on Ernie’s face, they’re one and the same;  all the vice and glamour was nothing but a facade for the empty misery of life in a town without values.

That was once of the most selfish, self-centered, small-minded articles I’ve ever read.  I’m horrified.

The point of the movie is that when we sacrifice our own desires to a greater good, the rewards are worth the  price, even if they’re something we take for granted.  George subordinated his wanderlust for the sake of his family and his town, and he did it of his own free will.  Yeah, he chaffed at it, and it turned into rage at a couple of the lowest points in his life, primarily so that the character would be more interesting; we need to know that he’s chaffing and that the dreams of the young man have never been forgotten.  But then he always sucked it up to Do The Right  Thing.

As for how much “fun” Potterville looked like, and the blank look on Ernie’s face, they’re one and the same;  all the vice and glamour was nothing but a facade for the empty misery of life in a town without values.

The character of George represent every family man in the world; I saw my father in him the first time I saw this movie, and I’m usually pretty dense about these sorts of things.  I’m truly stunned that a writer who has a son of his own hasn’t figured this out. 

This author is an example of a generation that never seems to stop harping on how we ”change the world”, and he works for a newspaper that’s relentless in it’s desire to see the government used to FORCE people to do what it sees as the right thing, and yet he can’t seem to understand the moral in a trite little movie about personal sacrifice, or the nobility of an “ordinary life”.

So, lets get this straight: we can’t use coal, we can’t drill for oil, and God knows we can’t build nukes.  That leaves solar, wind, and biofuels (that use nearly as much energy to produce as they release).  None of the “alternative” fuels (the ones that are going to be mandatory, which in my lexicon is the OPPOSITE of “alternative”) are reliable or cost-effective.

So, what does that leave?  Meet the energy source of the future:

It’s not all bad news; they’re cute and I think four of them should be able to out-accelerate a Prius.

My politics

I recently joined a social networking group centered around an activity that tends to attract a lot of liberals. Someone started a discussion thread on politics, and more than one lefty jumped in with the usual talking points. I haven’t so far seen anything from a conservative. Here’s the entry I’m thinking about submitting.

Read More →

This ad is being run in MN in the Senate race between Al Franken (D-Bigmouth) and incumbent Norm Coleman:

Let me get this straigh - prices are higher at the pump because we didn’t tax the oil companies enough? Or are you saying that taxing them more will bring gas prices down?

What kind of business is this “Dan” character in???

So far, government attempts at making alternative enery happen have been uniformly disasterous. They either give direct subsidies or create mandated government markets (such as Governor Rhino of Minnesota passing a law that dictates the amount of green energy that the state utilities will provide). Neither of these approaches result in actual “alternatives” but rather higher costs for everyone. What’s worse, they take money from the entire population to enrich those who are in that particular industry; we share the risks and costs but not the rewards.

The simple fact is that if these technologies have any technical merit and can become cost competitive, they’ll be huge commercial successes, and they won’t need the subsidies or guaranteed market shares.

Of course, the liberal response to this is that we need to “prime the pump”. Again, I think this is a stupid argument; no one needed to prime the pump to make the automobile a success, or the personal computer, or the internet (aside from a small DARPA grant that, yes, Al Gore had a part in awarding). But, ok, maybe some times we need to help incubate an embryonic industry.

So how about this for an approach: eliminate the capital gains tax for investments in companies that are doing the basic R and D on alternative fuels. If the companies fail, they fail on thier own, the government’s not out a penny, and the only people who get hurt are the ones who voluntarily took the risk. If they fly, the government’s STILL not out a penny, the people who took the risk reap a larger reward, and the entire economy benefits

My wife just sent me this link. Apparently, the Chinese promised the international Olympic committee that the would allow journalists free access to the internet, but have renegged (yes, I used that word!) on thier promise.

I don’t have the time to go into much depth, there, but I wanted to make two points:

1) Why should visiting journalists have more access to informatoin than the citizens of China? If you’re going to aid an abbet a dictatorship by helping it showcase a Potemkin villiage, you should also get a taste of what it’s like to live under said dictatorship.

2) Why did anyone think that the Chinese would have kep thier word on this, or anything else, inside thier own borders?

3) Anyone care to take bets on any major news outlet, anywhere in the world, boycotting the games to protest this? Journalistic integrity is all fine and dandy in a country with a First Amendment, but no one’s going to miss out on covering the finals of the mens full-contact tidley-winks competition over something as trivial as THAT!