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.