The one viewpoint that is verboten on the post-American regime's state-run media

The Christian viewpoint on human sexuality.

The gay athlete post

The particulars of Jason Collins's coming out - the fact that he's pretty much at the tail end (pun intended or not? you decide) of his NBA career, what it does for his endorsement-deal prospects - are being sufficiently covered elsewhere.  What primarily interests me here is its importance as symbol of how close the forces of wickedness are to complete cultural victory.

Entering into a discussion about anything related to homosexuality's role in our society demonstrates how hard it is to avoid the utterly banal.  There is nothing constructive about saying, in reaction to this, or any of the near-daily developments on that front, "We need to get back to God's design for the family structure" on the one hand, or "Who cares about his sex life?  What does it have to do with the game of basketball?" on the other.  Such statements, from wherever they emanate along the sociocultural spectrum, have all the conversational value of, "My, the weather's nice today."

This is not to say that the points that have been made, just because they've been made so frequently, aren't of primary importance.  The fact that the push for homosexual acceptance is qualitatively different from the race-based civil-rights struggle of fifty years ago must not be obscured.  The same goes for the whole question of how fellow athletes - or soldiers - are to react in the shower.  These are very definitely ongoing proper topics for talk shows, blogs and podcasts.

Something I see as particularly significant in this situation is the quickness with which the MEC ("I couldn't be prouder") and his wife ("We've got your back") chose to stake firm positions on Collins's announcement.  The glee they feel about this latest success in their Great Leveling Project is on full display.  The priority they place on that leveling project is obvious when one considers that, at a moment of deteriorating stability in several Middle Eastern countries (Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Libya), a moment of decision regarding Iran that is no longer "fast approaching," but upon us, an unprecedented degree of threat from North Korea, an ongoing European economic crisis, unsustainable public debt and continued economic malaise in the United States, and, of course, a hair-raisingly large jihadist infiltration of our society, they think there's even time to mention it in public statements.

Mind you, I'm not staking out a "with-all-the-problems-facing-us-what-are-we-doing-concerning-ourselves-with-sexualtiy" position.  Far from it; I think the warping of assumptions as old as the species is a phenomenon of crisis proportions as far as I'm concerned.

Nor am I in the "just-play-ball-and-keep-your-love-life-to-yourself" camp.  The fact that a sport like basketball is supposed to showcase men who are masculine - competitive, willing to make hard contact between elbows and faces and knock others to the floor, willing to assume particular roles in manly forms of team effort -  in their entirety (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual aspects) necessarily comes up against the question of the value of watching men engage in this contest under unprecedented premises.

In a sense, it's fitting that basketball should be the context for this latest front in this particular cultural battle.  Basketball is all about blocking shots, crafting a defense that leaves the player holding the ball with no options other than a turnover.  That's what those posing the Great Cultural Dare are attempting to do to us.  Are you conservatives going to make your case on statistical grounds? scriptural grounds? common-sense grounds?  biological grounds?  We've got you covered, say the Levelers; we have you hemmed in.  We control the narrative to such a degree that the low-reflection public will yawn at the triteness of any arguments you put forth.

And I have no doubt that a large swath of American society is indeed yawning at Collins's announcement.  That's chilling.  Jadedness is the last step before abnegation of humanity.

The regime shows its true face - today's edition

Victoria Toensing is representing one of the State Department's Benghazi whistleblowers, and claims that person has received threats about ending that person's career from someone inside State.

It is very late in the day.

The rotten harvest of identity politics

An NRO editorial on the 5000-word investigative New York Times article (you read that right) about how the Pigford case, which started out as an attempt to determine if any black American farmers had been wrongly denied USDA loans, morphed into a grab-bag of largesse for all claimants from all the favored supposedly beleagured demographic groups.  A whole apparatus of activists, lawyers and bureaucrats sprang up to find four-year-olds and city dwellers and anybody else who could be remotely construed as qualifying for some gummint gravy.

Of course, the Most Equal Comrade really flung the grain bin doors open to an unprecedented degree.  Will this be the scandal that finally delivers the hurt to his sham stature as a great leader, in the way we'd hoped for with Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the string of bankrupt "green" "companies," and attampts to make the sequester look like a Pub idea?  The fact that the NYT felt compelled to look unblinkingly at it is encouraging, but that alone won't be sufficient.  It will take sustained examination by those with a far greater commitment to restoring America.

Sunday morning roundup

Somewhat busy lately with paid-writing deadlines, other professional obligations, and an ear issue that has left my hearing quite diminished.  After my last session with the nurse practitioner, she said that that was enough blasting for one day, and for me to do the drops for another week and come back next Thursday.

Anyway, I thought the way to begin the week of observing the passing scene was with a roundup.  I may do entire posts on some of these developments later, but they're all noteworthy.

It seems the US isn't the only nation under jihadist siege lately.  228 Nigerians died last week in a battle between al Qaeda-linked Boko Haram and government forces.


The White House Correspondents Dinner joins the Grammys, Oscars and Super Bowl as just another chunk of toxin flowing through the sewer of post-American culture.  Plenty of opportunities for the Most Equal Comrade to engage in self-congratulation, along with sinister little acknowledgements that we're on to him ("I'm not the Muslim socialist I once was"), and for the emcee and other dignitaries to rip into us for loving freedom and America.

Speaking of post-America's premier Freedom-Hater, it turns out he decided to address Planned Parenthood after all, and get very combative about it.

Think North Korea has scaled back the hostility level?  Think again.

Per Russian wiretapping, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother discussed jihad in a 2011 phone conversation.

Trey Gowdy, one of the House's good guys, says that more Benghazi hearings are on the way and will be "explosive."

And this guy is supposed to be ultimately responsible in our country for seeing that the law is upheld

Eric Holder says that amnesty for illegal aliens is a civil-rights issue.

If the MEC were a normal US president, he'd consider his credibility to be on the line

It's pretty apparent that the Assad regime has used sarin gas in the Syrian civil war.  Even Chuck Hagel says so.  The MEC had declared chemical weapons to be a "red line."  It now appears that that term was pretty much meaningless, and the message sent to our rivals, adversaries and enemies is yet again that of an ever-weakening America.  That's okay with the MEC.  He may preside over America, but he doesn't love it or understand its greatness.  He holds it in disdain and thinks it needs to be knocked down a peg or two.
As with his domestic policy, it is we the masses who will experience the consequences of his mad worldview.

George Jones RIP

The greatest voice in the history of country music.

He came from hardscrabble beginnings in Beaumont, Texas.  Served a little time in the US Marines.  Cut his first records for the Starday label in the mid-1950s.

There was country music before him, of course, going back to "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" by Fiddlin' John Carson in 1924, and there has been country music, of a sort, albeit with a veneer of overwrought glitz and cynical marketing designed to self-congratulate and reinforce a demographic's attitude, since Possum's heyday.

But no one, save maybe Hank Williams or Webb Pierce, has brought to musical life the actual swath of American humanity that understood every note the likes of these artists ever sang.  It's a type of American whose engagement with life is raw, whose missteps and fits-and-starts growth of character are on full display, but who endure with humor, simple faith, and the loyalty of friends who can take the ornery with the sublime.

The sewers that are government schools - today's edition

Ace of Spades has been burning up Twitter remarking on the Red Hook, New York junior high where an "anti-bullying" workshop entailed making 14-year-old girls ask each other for lesbian kisses.

How long has the term "bullying" had this status as some kind of official educational lingo?  Obviously, bullying has always been around.  Thuggish types shaking down the pencil-necked geeks for lunch money and the like.

The home, when most homes were occupied by groups of people meeting the age-old normal-people definition of family, was, until the last few years, the arena in which young humans in precarious stages of development were made to understand the residual impulse to impose a pecking order, and given the tools to deal with it with dignity and autonomy.

Now that at least half of our society's households are constituted in some deviation from that norm, the statists have seen a juicy opportunity to step in it-takes-a-village-style and indoctrinate these impressionable folks in their formative stages into the identity-politics worldview.

This may seem like strictly a culture-and-human-sexuality issue, but it actually has national security implications.  Certain demographic groups have victim status conferred on them, and their own bullying gets a pass.  This leads to situations like the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Army coming up with warnings about non-existent threats from "right-wing" elements while the obvious threat cannot be named, as we've seen when Eric Holder testifies on Capitol Hill.

The state supplanting the home as the locus of human development.  That's the bottom line here, and the result is a new and unrecognizable species of being without much chance of survival.

What difference does it make? It makes a hell of a lot, Madame H-word Creature

The Interim Report for Members of the House Republican Conference on the Events Surrounding the September 11.2012 Terrorist Attacks in Benghazi, Libya is out, and it's a pretty damning indictment of the regime's reluctance to seriously fight jihad.

The Most Equal Comrade: the most pro-fetal-death president the country once known as the USA has ever had

He will attend a gala Planned Parenthood fundraiser Thursday, even as the Kermit Gosnell trial continues.

UPDATE:  He has backed out.

Do they not know the answer, or do they know it and just want to obfuscate because it hastens the decine of the civilization they loathe?

Pamela Gellar on the "Why-did-the-Tsarnaev-brothers-do-it" question popping up at so many outlets of the FHer regime's propaganda arm.

The answer, of course, is simple.  Not easy to squarely face, but simple.

The rifts on our side are being exposed again, and we will have to deal with it

Forces lining up to either support or oppose Gang of Eight immigration reform can, at least for the moment, be summarized as Cato Institute vs. Heritage Foundation.

Another player in this, Grover Norquist, is troubling.  He has done such great work on tax issues, hosting his weekly meetings for legislators and policy wonks in Washington and writing and speaking about the basic principle of people keeping their own money.  But those shady ties to Muslim activists disturb a lot of folks, me included.

And, back to the pitting of the think tanks against each other, the fault line makes things fairly clear for me.  Again, Cato, being a libertarian outfit, has done some fine work on economic freedom, but it is ultimately libertarian, and Heritage is explicitly conservative.

The core of this whole matter is whether the law is the law.  That's why LITD pretty consistently uses the term "illegal alien" to describe those who burrowed into this country by means not set out in our immigration code.

Plus, I'm none to keen on these little "gangs" that folks on Capitol Hill like to form.  Let's just stick with regular law-making procedure for getting things done.  That, plus they're usually bipartisan, and that ought to be a red flag.

I want better quality service for my tax dollars than this

Why did the FBI not keep more of an eye on Tamerlan Tsarnaev after Russia warned it about him?  And why is it mum about the whole thing now?

This is beginning to take on shades of the Benghazi debacle.

Why California is a failed state

It's broke, its citizens and businesses are leaving in droves for other states, it's overrun with illegal aliens and its educational system is a joke, and its legislature considers it a priority to come up with new ways to make foods stores and consumers use particular types of shopping bags.

When we can't speak plainly even when the attack is happening to us

Great Andrew McCarthy piece at NRO on how the West's decision-makers still refuse, at this late date, the enemy.  We refuse to discuss the enemy's ideology, as if this were some kind of time to stew about appropriate conversation for polite company.  Instead, we impose our assumptions on he enemy's actions:

“How shocking it is,” we’ve repeatedly heard, “that the brothers Tsarnaev want to mass-murder Americans. After all, they’re Chechen Muslims, and the Chechens’ beef is with the Russians, not us.”

Good grief. It is the Uighurs all over again. You’ll recall the Uighurs — they were a group of Turkic-speaking jihadists from the Xinjiang region of China, detained at Guantanamo Bay because they trained in Afghanistan with an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization (the East Turkistan Islamic Movement). At least some of them fought against American forces. Nevertheless, we released them. Stroking its bloated chin, our government rationalized that they could not be enemy combatants because they weren’t our enemies — their beef was really with China, right? After all, Islam is a Religion of Peace and we’re very nice people, so why should we assume they might have a problem with us?

If we don't understand what we are up against, we wil not defeat it.

Even one of FHer-care's architects anticipates a "train wreck" as it's imposed on us

Senator Max Baucus FHer - Montana says it's unlikely that it can be implemented in any way that's not chaotic and counter to its ostensible intent.  He's right in his prediction, but his premise could still use some work:  There was no coherence to the way it was cobbled together, And we all know why that is.  Its crafters really wanted full single-payer health care, but knew they still had to deal with the fig leaf of the continued existence of private insurance companies in order to get even a modicum of public acceptance.

Sorry, David Sirota, but your sick little wish isn't panning out

The effete, smart-ass, freedom-hating pundit who, in a Salon column on Wednesday put forth the vulgar and infantile desire to see the Boston marathon bombing perp turn out to be a white American has run straight up against Occam's razor.

Turns out that at least one of the Chechen brothers who are the only suspects was a devout Muslim.  (Who knows what he is now, besides dead as a doornail.  The other one is the subject of an ongoing manhunt and he has the entire Boston area in the grip of fear.)

So Sirota's vile and puerile public fantasy is yet another example of leftist yearning for reality to be something other than reality, so that demographic groups can be pitted against each other, the better to take away the freedom of all of them.

The inherent contradictions that inevitably surface in a society where relativism prevails

Great Victor Davis Hanson column on how we have become a society of promiscuous prudes.  Yes, that's an oxymoron, but that's where we are.  Read his laundry list of examples.  It makes it hard to determine whose outrage is fabricated and whose is genuine.

FHer-care: the main point is planned decline

Regal Entertainment, the nation's largest movie-theater chain, is cutting employee hours, and specifying the reason as  Freedom-Hater-care.

When principled freedom lovers refuse to dilute their principles . . .

. . . that which is good and true and right prevails.  Exhibit A: The stand taken by Cruz, Lee and Paul on the Toomey-Manchin gun bill.

We won a big one today, my friends.

What this world is starved for

The kind of manly resolve Col. Allen West is showing in defending his wife.

A world without a moral leader

The Boston Marathon terror attack was gruesome and alarming, but, as it consumes the entirety of the next couple of 24-hour news cycles, remember to keep it in perspective.  For instance, Iraq also got a dose of it yesterday - a wave of bombings across the country that killed 55 and injured 300.  And this comes a week after prime minister al-Maliki's Washington Post column assuring the US that it has a partner in the search for mideast stability.  The jihadists yesterday were saying, "Here's what we think of your stinking partnership."

The enemies of righteousness and human advancement aren't stupid.  You could make the case that they're mad, but they're not stupid.

On the immediate heels of Secretary Global Test's let's-get-back-to-patty-cake swing through the Pacific rim, the Chinese Ministry of Defense released its annual white paper, in which it places the main blame for Pacific-rim tensions on the increased Western / US presence there.

We navel-gaze and obsess over "diversity" while our highly focused foes proceed with their agendas.  One thing I'm going to be interested in following as the Boston story continues to unfold is the international angle.  I don't think the fact that that race attracts runners from such a broad array of nations is coincidental.  It seems more likely to me that a message along the lines of "The party's just about over, all you global-harmony types" was being conveyed.  Let's hope the investigation has sufficient scope to, as they say, connect any dots.  Word of blood travels fast among piranhas.

Why I knew Senator Global Test would be a horrible Secretary of State -- today's edition

On the last leg of his Pacific rim swing - a visit to China - he talks about "reaching out" to North Korea, and maybe even looking for steps that could be taken before it "denuclearizes" - as if North Korea has any intention of denuclearizing.

Awful.

Why I knew Senator Global Test would be a horrible Secretary of State - today's edition

He offers China a cutback in the missile defense system the US has deployed in the Pacific rim if China will be more helpful in getting North Korea to change its maniac ways.

In Philadelphia, of all places

One of the most gruesome cases of ongoing systematic death in American history occurred in the very city where two of humankind's most thunderously freedom-exalting documents were signed into law.

A brief roundup of various aspects of the Kermit Gosnell situation.:

Andrew McCarthy at NRO draws the direct line between "choice" rhetoric and snipped spinal cords.

Gateway Pundit on all those empty "reserved media" seats at Gosnell's trial.


Kirsten Powers on MSM indifference.

Pundit & Pundette on the graphic details of what went on in Gosnell's clinic.


We have got to stop exterminating fetal Americans.

Why I knew Senator Global-Test would be a horrible Secretary of State

North Korea is saying that nuclear war is unavoidable, and Global Test responds with that further-isolation / door-open-to-resumed-talks dog vomit.

Quickly disqualifying himself as prez-candidate material

There's great irony in the fact that Ohio's strongly Pub legislature has to continually drag Governor Kasich back to the right on various issues.

The flatline state of American culture

Dr. Carson feeling the need to step down as the Johns Hopkins medical school commencement speaker speaks volumes about how America's cultural tyrants have turned our nation into a sewer.

It may not be such a good deal

Charles C. W. Cooke at NRO explains why the seemingly acceptable compromise Manchin - Toomey gun bill worked out this week is fraught with opportunities for the FHers to move in for the final kill - pun intended:

Alas, there is peril ahead. Why? Because today’s “exemption” is tomorrow’s “loophole.” No sooner will the glorious presidential ink have dried on that abject page, than those provisions that were sold a few days earlier as commonsense exemptions — the product of “bipartisan compromise” and other media-tested platitudes — will become structural problems, ripe for “standardizing.” Sure, Congress wouldn’t be so gauche as to include A or B or C in their bill today. But have no doubt: Within a few weeks of the bill’s passage, the eerie progressive silence that has marked this tortured process will be broken, and when it is, legions of prominent gun controllers will take to their feet in order to argue that it makes “no sense” for there to be “exemptions” to the almost universal background-check system.

They will cynically inquire as to whether keeping these loopholes open for the “industry” is more important than the lives of children, and they will profess that the existing system simply “can’t work” without them. Studies will be commissioned to demonstrate that tying off these “loose ends” is all that stands between the United States and broad sunlit uplands. And, while demonstrating not only that they don’t know the slightest thing about guns but that they don’t care that they don’t, ThinkProgress and Talking Points Memo and Salon will smirk and make oh-so-smug jokes about “black helicopters” and militias. After all, we already regulate commercial sales, Internet sales, and gun shows, right? This is just a baby step — nothing to worry about, wingnuts.

This one appears to be a refreshingly statesmanlike approach to finding common ground and crafting something that is truly beneficial for the American people.  But it could well turn out to be yet another stark lesson in a time-tested truth:  There is no compromising with Freedom-Haters.

The Ashley Judd / McConnell campaign strategy meeting / secret tape / Mother Jones / David Corn post

Let's see.  Some McConnell staffers hold an utterly un-newsworthy meeting to discuss the opposition research they'd done on Judd's depression struggles and her stridently feminist views of Chrisitanity.  The kind of opposition-research meeting political staffers routinely have when opponents to their office-holder emerge.  Somebody illegally bugs the meeting and gets the tape to David Corn.  And now McConnell and staff are supposed to have committed some outrage?

I don't think so.

The Most Equal Comrade is serious about certain things, but a fiscally sound America is not one of them

His new budget is a joke.   The main point is to take more of Americans' money at gunpoint and blow it on silly programs that still leave us in debt.

The regime's propaganda arm is working overtime to keep you from knowing about the Big Stall

FHer-care is unraveling, but you'd never know it from the non-coverage offered by the various regime propaganda outlets.

They smell weakness - today's edition

Iran announces, at the conclusion of yet another round of patty-cake with the "international community," that it will build yet two more uranium-enrichment facilities.

We've been down this road before.  Think of the years wasted on those worthless Six-Way Talks with North Korea, and the resultant denouement we may witness as soon as tomorrow.

Our enemies exhibit contempt; we exhibit feeble hope.  And the clock keeps ticking.

The value of the willingness to be hated

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish points out a rather thought-provoking lesson we can learn from Margaret Thatcher's life:  If you are correct about something and believe it is important to see that the understanding that it is correct get an ever-wider consideration, you must be willing to be hated.

In other words, even the most principled and thoughtful of today's conservative leaders suffer from a touch of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome:

 

The missing element is conviction. When conservatives remember Thatcher and Reagan, they hear the echoes of clear and principled messages. Neither of them were perfect as politicians, but their rhetoric was perfect because they knew what they believed, said it clearly and colorfully and enjoyed themselves doing it.

Modern conservative parties eschew that kind of plain talk. They flee from principle selecting candidates who speak as indirectly as possible and mean as little of what they say as they can get away with. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But no cause is advanced in the course of these evolutions from communication to obfuscation. 

Conservatism never wins. It loses. It comes to be associated with slick empty men and women who smile a lot and lie a lot. And that in the long run is far more devastating than the occasional senate candidate who says something horrible or idiotic. Candidates like Mitt Romney are more damaging than a hundred Todd Akins because they fix the image of a soulless party that cares about nothing and no one.

It is better to have the public think that the Republican Party stands for horrible and divisive things than to think that it stands for nothing. There are people who will vote for horrible things... but who will vote for nothing except in opposition to the something that the other party is selling?

Conservatives bemoan that Obama, who blatantly said that he would raise energy prices, redistribute wealth, diminish national power and ram through a radical agenda, could be elected twice. And the wrong lesson that GOP leaders have taken away from that is that the country turned to the left and that they have to turn with it. The real lesson is that voters will choose a radical agenda over no agenda at all.

It's the basic principle of nature abhorring a vacuum.  One thing you can't accuse the Freedom-Haters of is deception.  They're about as upfront regarding what they're about as you could ask for.  And because they didn't care that that made them the object of revulsion to a great many of us, they kept gaining power - to the point where they really didn't have to care, because we didn't matter.

That's how late in the day it is.

The sewer available via your TV remote

MSNBC is fast becoming the anti-normal-people-definition-of-family network.  The other day, I posted about Melissa Hays-Perry and her frustration that American society continues to subscribe to the notion that a kid belongs to his or her parents rather than "the community."

The network has another humdinger of a host, Krystal Ball, who brought her five-year-old daughter onto her show to ask her if she might consider marrying a girl when she grew up.

Where does MSNBC find these monsters?  Ball, who is a fierce pro-fetal-death advocate, apparently decided to let one of her viable tissue masses come to term so she could spend its childhood programming it into a compliant little post-human subject of the FHer regime.  Gotta replenish those upright cattle with the moveable thumbs at least long enough to complete the fundamental transformation, you know.

FHer-care's big stall not good politically for its proponents

FHer-care's unanticipated - or at least undisclosed - cost overruns are causing the FHers some difficulties as they plan their 2014 campaigns.

Tick tick tick

North Korea is completely closing the Kaesong industrial complex, even sending home its own workers.

And, China is mobilizing troops and jets near its border with North Korea.

Margaret Thatcher, RIP

What makes her passing particularly sad is that there are ever fewer people in politics with not only her magnitude of character and wisdom, but also with the comprehensive understanding of conservatism in its fullness that she - and, of course, Dutch - had.

Even the best of the ascending generation of statespeople among us seem to have worldviews that are to some degree skewed by their pet concerns rather than grounded in the conviction that right and wrong are absolutes.

Hats off to someone who was instrumental in giving Western civilization a few more years of breathing room before the Big Rot set in.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

Cass Sunstein actually calls his new piece at The New Republic "Why Paternalism Is Your Friend."

Yes, it's full of qualifiers, such as a distinction between what he calls "ends paternalism" and "means paternalism," and an airing of the free-market objection to any kind of paternalism, but the end result is the same one we always here from the statists:  There are some people who just can't hit their own backsides with a yardstick, and need government to lead them by the nose into a life of healthy and wise choices.

Sorry, pal, but what you fail to do is assuage anybody's concern about a slippery slope.  These "nudges," as you call them - fuel standards, label warnings and such - will never be a stopping point for the likes of you and kind.  Your model presupposes bodies of "experts" - either in the direct employ of the government or serving in an "advisory capacity" - getting paid taxpayer dollars to sit around and determine what's safe and healthy and prudent for the unwashed masses to include in their lives.

That's not the role of the federal government, and we can't afford it.

I hope this one gets a lot of smackdowns this week.

How dare you have a viewpoint other than the state-sanctioned one!

Mark Steyn on how Maureen Dowd and Max Mutchnick see a certain "tone" in the Supreme Court's use of the term "homosexual" rather than "gay":

Mr. Mutchnick’s comparison of the word “homosexual” with “Negro” gives the game away: Just as everything any conservative says about anything is racist, so now it will also be homophobic. It will not be enough to be clinically neutral (“homosexual”) on the subject — or tolerant, bored, mildly amused, utterly indifferent. 

And who is really trying to shove an agenda down everybody else's throats?

What’s that? I’m “scaremongering”? Well, it’s now routine in Canada, where Catholic schools in Ontario are obligated by law to set up Gay-Straight Alliance groups, where a Knights of Columbus hall in British Columbia was forced to pay compensation for declining a lesbian wedding reception, and where the Reverend Stephen Boisson wrote to his local paper objecting to various aspects of “the homosexual agenda” and was given a lifetime speech ban by the Alberta “Human Rights” Tribunal ordering him never to utter anything “disparaging” about homosexuals ever again, even in private.

As they say, read the whole thing.

 

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

MSNBC host and Tulane poli-sci professor Melissa Hays-Perry says that kids belong to communities.  Says outright that it's regrettable that America hasn't had a more "collective" (her term) attitude toward raising young ones.

The GOP's main problem for years has been Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

Charlotte Hays has a column at Townhall this morning on Stuart Stevens's post-Romney-campaign gig as a Daily Beast columnist.  She says that between his latest column there and the RNC's recent Growth and Opportunity Report, it's obvious that the official position of the Pubs continues to be an open invitation to the Freedom-Haters to claw out their entrails:

What is so poignant (and infuriating) is that, after being bloodied and run circles around by the ruthless and determined Obama campaign, Stevens persists in believing that, golly, if we calm down and aren’t rude to one another, we can solve these danged problems. Stuart is dismayed that what should have been a Socratic dialogue has degenerated into “desperate anger” with manifestations of an “almost willful contempt.”

It is that “almost” that tugs at my heart. Stuart must have missed some of the ruder protests in front of the Supreme Court as that venerable body began to address the issue of gays and marriage. But I am being too kind. Let's face it--it takes willful blindness to ignore the fullness of the contempt the left showers on those who dare to disagree with them. There’s no “almost” about it, Stuart.

She nails the influence of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome on the recent RNC report:

much of the report shows willful blindness of the fierceness of the opponent. Constituencies that currently hate Republicans’ guts are called “demographic partners.” Well, of course, they aren’t demographic partners yet but the second they realize that we're taking all the old guys out to shoot them, they will want to join. A new “Growth and Opportunity Inclusion Council within the RNC” will surely fix the GOP's problems.

Manifesting a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, the Growth and Opportunity report buys implicitly the Democratic critique of the GOP. Like the Romney campaign, it never confronts an all-important issue: how do you confront smears? It is essential to reach out and make the GOP case for people who have never voted Republican, but it is also just as important to realize that the Democrats aren't going to go to their quiet places and let this happen.

As does Stuart Stevens in his guns and gays column, the GOP report fails to recognize the fierceness of the army arrayed against it. How can the GOP attract more women and African Americans, when we know that women and African Americans who become Republicans will face a barrage of vicious assaults from a well-oiled Democratic smear machine?

The Growth and Opportunity Project report exists in a vacuum, as if there is nobody on the other side tossing grenades. I’d love to see a more genteel style of politics in this country. I share Stuart Steven's apparent longing for a more civilized political arena. I’d love to not see language distorted and lies told. But when the answer to these things is to just close your eyes, you lose.

It's not the Tea Party, it's not Christians, it's not talk radio that's besetting the Pubs with their deep, possibly existential problems.  It's their unwillingness to see what is really going on: a war for America's soul.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The economy added the fewest number of jobs in March of any month in the last nine.  Lots of people keep dropping out of the workforce, too.

The majority of the uninsured never did and still don't go for FHer-care

That's a fact, and it will be a key component in the Big Stall coming in the law's implementation.

This guy is such bad news

The Most Equal Comrade is frustrated that he's "constrained by the system the Founders put in place."

This is the same kind of revealing whine he exhibited recently with his "I'm not a dictator" remark.

If he can find a way not to be constrained and to be a dictator, he'll act on it pronto.

The MEC regime's propaganda arm doesn't even try to pretend it does journalism anymore

The term "illegal Immigrant" has been removed from the AP Stylebook.

Turkish response to the apology for defending itself that Netanyahu was forced to make: cackle and gloat

Not just Erdogan and the government, but the Turkish press is having a field day with it.

Some people are still calling the MEC's Israel visit a real reset in relations and a pivot away from the chilly atmosphere of the first term, but I think this phone call at the airport was the key event of the whole thing.  Someday we'll find out just what kind of leverage the MEC employed.  We can be pretty sure why.  We're not really in a reset era.  He just saw an irresistible opportunity to humiliate our ostensible ally.

Not only should you yank your kids out of government K - 12 schools, you should be very careful about what college or university they attend as well

It's fitting that this development - the hiring of Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin as adjunct faculty at Columbia University - comes at an interesting time for me.  Tonight is the point in the semester in my rock & roll history class at our local IU campus at which I talk about the New Left and the student radical movement.  The fact that one event I'll be telling the students about - the 1968 takeover of Columbia's administrative offices - occurred at that very university is rich in irony, obviously.  But, with the election of the MEC, a product of Chicago's cesspool of radical socialist organizations, as president, the opportunity to make some connections to the present has been increasing for me over the last few years.  Now I have a chance to really open some eyes.

As I've said before, my main reason for taking on my own adjunct-lecturer gig is that the state of Indiana would pay someone to do it and chances are that anyone else they hired would present material such as tonight's far differently and more destructively than I do.

This is getting real grim

The Kaesong Industrial Park has been seen as one of the last rays of hope for some kind of North - South connection on the Korean peninsula.  Several hundred Southerners worked there.  Now the Kim regime is closing access to it.

If you still need evidence that the UN is a sewer of decadence and tyranny . . . .

 . . . consider the arms-trade treaty it signed off on today.