What are they afraid of?????

The MN GOP announced on Monday that they were mailing an interactive CD out to selected voters regarding the pending Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). This interactive CD is a voter ID tool. There is a short video presentation that you can watch and afterward (via authorized web access) you can answer a few voter id questions on the issue. After that announcement, the DFL outrage machine flew into action, pouring out letters to the editor, stories and breathless press releases about "domestic spying" and "invasions of privacy". An MPR employee even managed to get his hands on an unreleased Beta copy of the CD and, in violation of the "Terms of Use" agreement that he agreed to, he began to decompile data on the disk!

One of the most comical aspects of this whole kerfluffle is this (from the Star Tribune story linked above):

"While acknowledging that they had not seen the CD, DFL Party officials accused Republicans of their own version of "domestic spying" and called the effort "an intolerable abuse of trust."

What is driving all of this? Has the DFL decided that data privacy is an important issue? No, what is driving this is fear...fear of the voter. 78% of the voters in Sen. Dean Johnson's district (Sen Johnson is the DFL Senate Majority Leader) want the opportunity to vote on DOMA. Nineteen states have already passed DOMA - by overwhelming majorities! The vast majority of Minnesotans WANT to have the opportunity to VOTE on DOMA. So what are they afraid of?? They are afraid that the majority of Minnesotans see through their callous, partisan ruse. They are attempting to turn the debate from the fact that they are refusing to allow the people of Minnesota a vote on an important issue into a debate on whether or not a privacy policy statement may or may not be included on a CD that was NOT EVEN MAILED TO CITIZENS UNTIL TODAY!!

Just a SMALL government inefficiency

I subscribed to Rep. Ron Paul's email newsletter.
And I got an auto-reply from the Congressional computer to confirm that it was me that was asking for the subscription. So I did.
I then received THREE different confirming responses that my subscription response had been accepted.
Of course.

The solution to too big? Make it BIGGER!

Well, we've got Katrina six months behind us. And a review of what happens when citizens depend on government in the first place. And what happens when government "comes to the rescue". Well, the evidence proves Ronald Reagan's pronouncement that the most terrifying nine words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
And both the left and right's solution to this huge man-made disaster? Make the problem bigger!! Is government too big? The solution is to increase it's size and scope?
And the bobblehaed American citizen and voter will agree!!!
And here's the real rub: the Gulf of Mexico hurricane season is just three months away!
And New Orleans hasn't moved further inland yet.
I talked to a friend of mine who's father had fellow employees go to New Orleans to help rebuild houses. The report coming back? The home owners sat in their lawn chairs and watched as these men worked on their homes! Sat on their butts!!! And then expected these workers to give them the lunches the workers had brought with them.
These volunteer working men left and came back to Minnesota.
And always remember, ALWAYS that when you see people screaming that the government isn't doing enough that means that YOU just aren't doing enough. That you just aren't having enough of your money taken from you. That YOU just aren't being compassionate enough. That YOU aren't working hard enough! That YOUR family needs to do without, do with less. That YOUR family needs to be compromised.
On average, each American worker will have to come up with an extra $1,700 to pay for their "fair share" of Katrina relief. So, you either work overtime or kiss goodby $1700 worth of some things that your family would have gotten from YOUR efforts!
Get busy America. You just ain't doing enough, you lazy, insensitive,uncompassionate greedy bigots! Just ask those poor victims in New Orleans.

Charlie Brown, a football, and $60,000,000,000,000

In my last post, I referred to Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt and the decades long saga of those two and a football.
Last night I was talking to a good friend of mine and we were lamenting the huge and looming disasters that are coming our way in maybe 25-40 years. This no global warming crap. This is hard cold economic facts and reality. PERIOD! This will mean war between the generations. It will pit my/our generation against our children and grandchildren. And we've done it to ourselves. All those politicians over the past 90+ years (I start counting with Teddy Roosevelt and the tinkering populists who were and are progressives, aka socialists, with the real disaster starting with the illegal,unenforceable and non-ratified 16th Amendment (here and here).
The left always just wants to tinker along the edges, just make a small correction, all in the name of fairness. And disaster always follows. Even when the right thinks that they can correct and tinker, they never seem to want to completely reset the trip odometer to zero. Afraid that people will think them mean.
Well kids, after 70-90 years of disaster after government disaster, mostly from the left but the right has certainly added its fair share also, the American voter still thinks that the government can finally get it right this time. This very next program will be the one that works. This politician, my new representative, my old representative is the greater thinker who has all the wisdom and acuity needed to finally set all our lives straight.
And Lucy van Government Pelt will change and Charlie American Citizen Brown will finally be able to kick that football!
And as a final kicker, read Ron Paul's excellent analysis on the recent history and the future of the dollar, gold and oil.

The bellwether to the north

The Canadian Health Care system is much vaunted by the left here in America. They keep telling us how well it works. That we should have something just like it. And yet there is incredible irony with socialized medicine and one William Jefferson Clinton. The Cato Institute compares what treatment he got just over a year ago and what he would have received if his and now Senator Rodham's plan had gone through. The irony is rich and full! And the stories of the disaster of socialized versus free market are plenty (well, here in America not free market but freer than a lot of places).
And now, we can look to our frozen fellow North Americans and see what a disaster legal same sex marriage is and is becoming. Always the Law of Unintended Consequences (LOUC) is never,ever factored in. Or the lawmakers just don't care. And when the LOUC becomes apparent? Just pass another corrective law that will take care of the first.
I'm still waiting for it work. But the evidence of 90 years of history doesn't give me any hope.

Reflection on the ports issue

I have to admit that I had a knee jerk reaction when I heard that a UAE company was buying the British company that was overseeing port operations (NOT security!). I read James Lileks and his concerns. And I agree with Glenn Reynolds that the real issue isn't port security that's run by at least six American agencies. The real issue is that GWB and the admin have no clue as to how the perception and politics on this project would run with the American public. GWB and others in the White House bungled this one badly. Harriet Miers writ large.
That being said, the UAE is run by moderate Arabs, Muslims. They and other moderates in the region are just as concerned about the radicals as we are. The radicals as just as likely to kill their brother Muslims as they are Europeans or Americans. That's why they're called radicals.
Plus, we've received a lot of below the radar help from the UAE and others.
As much as it pains me to phrase it this way, why would we disrupt that incredibly valuable help in the heart of the radicals base just because these people are Arabs? The security at the ports is abysmal to begin with. And the ownership by a UAE company may help as the UAE is not hampered by union idiocy and the need to be "sensitive" to workers concerns. In this case a government run by moderate Muslims may very well be a huge plus.
And the ongoing help we'll receive from other moderate Arab countries will pay huge benefits that we will probably never see.
So, I'm still going to bash Bush on his horrible mishandling of the politics on the port issue, but as cooler heads prevail...
And isn't it interesting that the lefties scream on this issue because the holding company is Arab, yet doing statistical profiling (NOT racial profiling) at airports is just wrong?
A foot on the dock, the other on the boat.

Oh my oh my oh my...oh my oh my oh my

I was reading one of my favorite columnists, historians,analysts Victor Davis Hanson (VDH).He's just returned from Iraq and visiting the boots on the ground and the commanders. Go and either read or listen to the mp3 file on his interview on Hugh Hewitt's show last Friday.
Today he has a piece in the WSJ about how we are at war with ourselves and no one seems to be happy. The left snipes at any and all things (no blood for oil but the price of oil is too high, etc. etc...). And the right says we should have had more troops but we're spending too much in Iraq.
Go read both pieces from VDH. Well worth the few minutes.

A million, a million there...

Well, here we are at the beginning of the legislative free for all with your and my money, I see that there is a projected $88,000,000 surplus. And the tag line from Prairie Pravda in their editorial " Black ink is back for state, but use the extra sparingly". In other words "SPEND IT! YAHOO!" Don't return it. Don't cut taxes. Spend the overtaxed amount. The writer says that the governor has accomplished this from the budget disaster of 2002-2003 by having more local fees and taxes increase. Well duh, do ya' mean that the local governments need to cover their own expenses? That it's a bad thing that Duluth dollars pay for Duluth programs and government rather than Bloomington dollars going to the port city via St. Paul? And the writer never, ever addresses the real problem that he himself is part of with his tag line. Remember the huge "surpluses" (meaning overtaxation) of the late 90's? And all the warnings from people like Jason Lewis that the legislature needed to return that money and cut taxes, not spend the surplus with extra programs. The reason: sure as the sun rises and sets, that surplus was counted as revenue that would always be there. And when it wasn't, the legislature had all those extra programs that were never, ever going to be cut. The "extra" as the Strib puts it, was used. And when the economy retracted, well, hello billion dollar deficits. The editorial goes on to opine that Minnesota's economic job creation engine is lagging but never,ever states why. Golly, could it be that private citizens have been taxed to the point of no return? That a huge state government is NOT what encourages small business like me to hire and expand? I'm reminded of a number of people I know who purposely have kept their companies small to avoid the stepped regulations of the Feds and state. I used to live across the street from a great guy who had a small manufacturing company. And he was very clear that he would never have more than 14 employees as when he reached 15 there was huge slug of regulations that became applicable. Another friend of mine who had a telecommunications company (had as he sold it) was agonizing over whether or nor to go over 25 employees as he was open to another large group of regulations. The decision was not based on business principles, but government. I know of another company (a high tech company) that has nothing but independent contractors and the only employees are the two owners. They do not want all the headaches of rules, regulations, OSHA, EEOC, potential lawsuits, etc.
And so it goes...

Father knows best!

The gents at Powerline direct our attention to this article (via the Washington Times) in Foreign Policy magazine.

"Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It’s more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best."

Count this household in that number!

There is much good information in the article that you really should read, but I would like to point you to a couple of paragraphs in particular that spell good news if you are of a conservative bent (as we here at Savage Republican are).

"Falling fertility is also responsible for many financial and economic problems that dominate today’s headlines. The long-term financing of social security schemes, private pension plans, and healthcare systems has little to do with people living longer. Gains in life expectancy at older ages have actually been quite modest, and the rate of improvement in the United States has diminished for each of the last three decades. Instead, the falling ratio of workers to retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born. (ed - or were aborted????) As governments raise taxes on a dwindling working-age population to cover the growing burdens of supporting the elderly, young couples may conclude they are even less able to afford children than their parents were, thereby setting off a new cycle of population aging and decline."

Which is exactly why Social Security reform is essential. Without reforms that will allow younger workers the opportunity to take care of themselves, we will never be able to take care of the elderly.

" By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of their parents.
Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation."

Our family, sadly, is part of that 7.8% of the population that only had one child...and it was not by choice. I'm certain that the use of DES in our parents generation had something to do with that.

"This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry. It may also help to explain the increasing popular resistance among rank-and-file Europeans to such crown jewels of secular liberalism as the European Union. It turns out that Europeans who are most likely to identify themselves as “world citizens” are also those least likely to have children."

And there is the rub dear readers. This explains the rancor, the bile, the vitriol and the anger that you hear out of the left. They know that as divided as this country is, they will soon be outnumbered by those of us in "Jesusland". I will leave the final word, to author Phillip Longman.

"Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father."

From tiny acorns...morality vs justice vs fairness

Where I go to church there is a real nice sounding movement called "Social Justice". A few years ago we closed down our counseling center and made it into "The Center for Spiritual Formation". Very catchy title. Really bad formation. This center has had seminars on "White Privilege", "Writing your Congressman " ( on how to force more programs out of Congress and on to us), how to lobby for "affordable housing" which is a code word for subsidized housing. All this and so much more under the rubric of Social Justice.
Now, this is supposedly a Christian Church. And yet, I'd be willing to bet that not a one of the "Spiritual Formation" leaders has a clue, even the vaguest notion as to the genesis of the "Social Justice" movement. And that they haven't the smallest notion that the social justice movement was born from ungodly men to topple God off His throne and replace Him with the worship of His creation in its highest form-us! Viola'-secular humanism and its vehicle, socialism.
The following is excerpted from Thomas Brewton's fine site "The View From 1776" (I urge you read the entire timeline here to learn about the growth of socialism and social justice in all its subtle entirety).
1750 - 1780s - French philosophers of the Revolution (Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet, Turgot, Voltaire, et al) begin propagandizing for social justice via revolt against the monarchy and the Catholic Church.

1825 - Henri de Saint-Simon systematizes revolutionary doctrines into socialism; publishes The New Christianity, which calls for a catechism of socialistic morality, called social justice, to replace the religion of Christianity. Government is to be by councils of intellectuals and managers empowered to regulate all economic activity. Education will be under intellectual control to insure that only socialism is taught.

1822 - 1842 - Auguste Comte in 1822 publishes System of Positive Philosophy, which is carried to Germany by his young pupils studying with German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, thus cross-pollinating German statist and French socialist philosophies. Comte's socialist positivism becomes widely studied in German universities. Comte's Positivism denies existence of God and reality of religion and morals; only reality is things detectable by senses like sight, smell, and hearing; creates The Religion of Humanity, which says that the object of worship is humanity itself; "discovers" the Immutable Law of History that supposedly pushes human society inevitably toward perfection under a government of socialized regulatory control directed by intellectuals.

1870s - German universities, medical science, chemistry, physics, historical and classical scholarship become the finest in the world. American scholars who aim for advancement in American universities attend German universities, where they absorb the prevailing Hegelian statist and French socialist philosophy. Harvard and Yale convert from schools to train ministers of the Gospel to secular universities, focusing in the social sciences on promulgating the new "scientific" socialism. Johns-Hopkins University is established, modeled on the German universities. Only about 2 percent of Americans go to college, but those who do emerge as the first American liberal-socialists. The first group of American women go to college, emerge openly socialists, working predominantly in the social services such as Jane Addams's Hull House settlement house in Chicago and similar organizations in other cities. Their goal is to convert America from private property ownership to socialized regulation of the economy. Caring for the less fortunate is transformed from a moral issue, handled by churches and local social organizations, into a national political issue of socialistic "fairness.

Notice the modern morphing from the old moral issues of poverty into fairness now being a moral issue.And what has never been explained to me is how, from a Christian Church where we supposedly worship a God who calls force and coercion evil, Who specifically wrote a commandment against stealing (meaning taking what doesn't belong to you) and another against coveting (meaning wanting something that doesn't belong to you), how these people in this church call for "Social Justice" that inflicts injustice, by force, against people who are innocent bystanders. The Social Justice anarchists mob (there, I finally said it. I feel much better now) force programs on the citizens of the United States.,force them to work to pay for these programs that are neither effective, efficient nor lawful according to the commandments of my God at least, and supposedly the god they say they worship. But Social Justice is not justice. It is force. It is evil (there, I feel even better now). And the genesis of Social Justice was in the realms of secular humanism, to dethrone the God of Jacob, the God of the Founding Fathers.
Yup. I'm always amazed at how incredibly subtle satan is. He makes what is incredibly evil sound and look so good! And The Lord warns us, and warns us very pointedly about calling evil good and good evil in Isaiah 5:20, with the greatest admonition in the Bible: "Woe to you".
satan is excellent at what he does. The saving grace is that God is perfect at what He does.

TO ARMS! PROTECT THE FIEFDOM!!

In the bowels of a story there sometime lies bits of incredible truth.
Anna Nicole Smith's case has made it to the Supreme Court. And I'm always interested in stories where the feds have an interest in a state case. And deep in this story is a another reason that we supposedly have a federal and not a national constitution.
"The Bush administration is siding with Smith as a technical matter, arguing that the justices should protect federal court jurisdiction in such disputes." Never mind if there was ever supposed to be federal jurisdiction here at all. Just protect it once the feds have it.
Yup, as one of my friends at CCRN said "It's good to be the king!"

About those non-existant WMD's

A couple of articles have come out recently that give lie to the oft repeated myth that "Saddam had no WMDs" and that "Saddam had no connection to al Qaeda". The first is this from the American Thinker magazine. The second is this from Investors Business Daily about the Saddam tapes.

War foes have long asserted that Saddam halted his WMD programs in the wake of his defeat in the first Gulf War in 1991. Saddam's abandonment of WMD programs was confirmed by subsequent U.N. inspections.
Again, not true. In a tape dating to April 1995, Saddam and several aides discuss the fact that U.N. inspectors had found traces of Iraq's biological weapons program. On the tape, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, is heard gloating about fooling the inspectors.
"We did not reveal all that we have," he says. "Not the type of weapons, not the volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told them about, not the volume of use. None of this was correct."

Say it isn't so...Saddam didn't reveal all of the WMD's that he had to UN inspectors???? Impossible...or so the left would have you believe.

Take this, combined with the articles here and here and you can see that maybe, just maybe Saddam not only had WMD's but he might have indeed had ties to Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks!

So now feeding them is abuse?

I'm stunned! For months we have heard about "detainee abuse" out of the Gitmo detention center. This week the NY Times breathlessly reported the newest abuse...force feeding detainees that are trying to starve themselves to death!

So let me see if I understand this.....we feed them gormet hilal food, they refuse to eat it or they purge themselves (bulimic) and when we try to make sure that they get enough food to stay alive we are the ones in the wrong?????

There is nothing that our troops can do to make the prisioners OR the NY Times happy so why do they even try? Do whatever it takes, within the letter of the law and nothing more. The prisioners at Gitmo want to kill Americans - something that our government can and should not let them do. Why should the same Americans that they want to kill make it easier for them to do so??????

Now they decide to do something about this?

Every time an evangelical church gets involved in "politics" the ACLU starts screaming about separation of church and state. Yet that does not stop Democrats from campaigning from the pulpit. This week, the Washington Times reports that the IRS finds this kind of activity "disturbing". Oh NOW they say that....

"We want to stop improper activity during -- not after -- the election cycle," said IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson. "Now is the time to act, before it is too late" to prevent churches and charities from becoming deeply embroiled in politics and the fundraising process.

The article goes on to talk about the over 100 complaints that were filed with the agency. Here is a hot tip for the IRS...don't wait for complaints to be filed. When there is a news story about any candidate campaigning from the pulpit, consider that to be the complaint! We should not have to file a formal complaint for the IRS to do it's job.

Here's the deal...if the left does not want the "religious right" to campaign in their places of worship, they should not be inviting candidates to be campaigning from their pulpits. The law works both ways and we need to make sure that the law is enforced both ways!

This is what universal health care gets you

This is one reason why we should resist universal health care. What is wrong with humanity when we will refuse to administer care to an ailing child. The death with dignity people will say that the child is terminal and her suffering should not be "prolonged". But what about the patients in Canada who had to sue to get private health care or are routinely denied lifesaving services because of expense or made to wait to get care (as they are in the UK).

Even Canadians are recognizing that their once touted system has sometimes fatal flaws. Here in the US, as we creep closer and closer to a universal system, we are running into the same problem. Seniors are denied doctor prescribed therapy because they are only allotted a certain dollar amount a year for that therapy and they have already surpassed their amount! More and more hospitals are cutting services because the costs of providing those services are not picked up by HMO's and Medicare.

We do have a health care crisis brewing in America and it is called universal health care. We do need to fix our current system, no doubt, but replacing it with a Canadian or UK style single payer system is not the fix that we need.

Headlines?

If you went by the headlines, you would think Iraq was a lost cause. The press breathlessly tells us how the "Violent Cycle of Revenge Stuns Iraqis" and "More Clashes Shake Iraq; Political Talks Are in Ruins "(NY Times), or "Reprisals kill scores in Baghdad" (WaTimes) or "A Nation Teeters on Brink of Civil War" (LA Times). They aren't so quick to tell you about this or this or this.

I understand the old news adage "If it bleeds, it leads", but really. Just once I would like to see some of the Good News out of Iraq lead. There is progress being made over in Iraq. The media needs to start writing about it.

If you want to know what is really going on in Iraq, you need to be a better consumer of the news. Do not rely on our friends in the MSM. Instead, rely on the word of people who are living through the good and the bad in Iraq. I recommend sites like Iraq the Model or any of the other Iraqi blogs listed on their blogroll.