OK so Florence Nightingale she's not

I found this item on the website of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network.  Since the TS Life & Hope Network is obviously an anti-euthanasia organization I just had to read about this incident but after reading it at least two times I came to the conclusion there was no pro-euthanasia motivation that I could detect on the part of the nurse involved or her place of work although I do think she and her facility were tragically mistaken.  I blame the lawyers.  At my workplace for instance one of the co-managers came over one day and we had a kind of impromptu meeting and the gist of it was if a customer is in need of some type of urgent medical attention just call 911 and leave it at that.  Attend the person in need but that's it, don't try to help them yourself so I politely said what if someone is choking on a chicken bone can't you perform the Heimlich?  I mean by the time the paramedics arrive and he said well ok but you have to be properly trained and certified in these life-saving procedures.  Well the reason he gave that you're not supposed to help the person in need besides calling 911 is your workplace can be sued later, YOU could even be sued if something goes wrong.  Better to sit back and do nothing and wait for the ambulance to arrive and just hope they're not navigating heavy traffic.  Again I blame the lawyers.  Interesting scenario though, a lawyer is choking on a chicken bone......

Liberal diversity of thought on abortion?

Not as I see it. Saty believes overall that conservatives all share the same political opinions basically whereas liberals do not and she believes, actually believes this applies to abortion as well. Well obviously it doesn't because while liberals may wax poetic about our nation's diversity and pluralism their overall conclusion is exactly the same re the practice notwithstanding the occasional oddball like Nat Hentoff. That conclusion is that abortion should remain entirely legal, they wholeheartedly support Roe in other words. Now if you had some libs saying abortion legal only during the first few weeks, others saying maybe 4 or 5 months and still others advocating parental notification laws and others not, IF you had one hearty group of libs saying yeah we're pro-choice but the legal framework behind Roe really sucks and needs to be overturned or at least revisited and another group saying no 'tis fine, these and other finer shades and nuances would indicate liberal diversity of thought on the issue but you lose on this one Saty, oh boy do you lose!

Now if I were a liberal Democratic strategist I would counsel the Left distance themselves from abortion. Push the green issues, labor issues, the rights of dissidents in foreign lands and whatever else floats your boat but to chug away at something that is by its very nature ugly makes no eminent practical political sense to me. It's a creepy brand imo (make that creepy-cubed when you throw in Terri Schiavo). There doesn't seem to be that great a diversity of thought on gun control either or immigration for that matter. I'd go so far as to say that overall liberal and conservative thought tends to be fairly homogeneous over time and that is to be expected since liberals have roughly the same ideals as other liberals and conservatives share generally the same ideals as other conservatives and there's gambling in Vegas. So for Saty to tout liberals as somehow being the Great Thinkers of the Age on what planet?

Have at it. I'm pumped and primed and when it comes to splitting hairs and parsing language I already know your next move. I wasn't going to do an abortion blog so soon but her misguided encomia to modern-day liberalism cannot go unaddressed. BTW when it comes to liberal diversity of thought on abortion I want copious documentation and quotes:)

afterthought: You know here's a weird thought, there actually is more conservative diversity of thought on abortion than liberal diversity of thought on the issue. Conservatives also from what I've been reading in the blogosphere and in organized punditry these days also have differing views on gay marriage, Jonah Goldberg is rather all over the map......hmmmmmm......

Is it more important to win the debate or have a discussion?

Unless you're an amoeba most folks have what's known as a political philosophy but sometimes our so-called inconsistencies are simply the recognition that our philosophy may have a logical absurdity or two if stretched, the Quirk (e.g. brother and sister should not get married). One can be strongly libertarian in spirit but hate abortion and Saty and soap bring up the usual tried-and-true pro-choice angles, really the skip in the record as if we've never heard them before. If we don't agree with Shaw for instance she tends to think we haven't considered her points. Oh no darling we hear you loud and clear we just disagree with you. That's possible ain't it? There's no need to pulverize your opponent, this scorched earth policy (S-Block). I like to think of this place as a coffee klatch, a passionate but friendly cafe. There's no need to break the saucer or piss in the sink.

Debated with Saty at her blog a few months back and for me Michael Schiavo at best was and is a questionable character so we got into a whole medical discussion and before long you reach The Impasse, a ravine or chasm with a shaky footbridge. For me I've reached the end of my walk, may as well turn around and head back to the car. IMO nobody won that one and I'm philosophical about it. It makes for a good Google search and I'm glad I did it. Not her but if people want to hold his water for him I got no problem so long as you don't begrudge me my take. You can even bring your 9/11 Truther movement over here and I won't get personal which reminds me I have to check out Alex Jones' views on the Mosque.

There develops over time if you're a true conservative a certain what I call Conservative Convergence. By this I mean it's ok to question aspects of your own movement from time to time, I've done it many times myself but after awhile you find yourself agreeing more and more with your fellow conservatives and kind of put the old feuds in a shoebox. It's better for society to be pro-life, the GZ mosque, unions are bad, traditional mores should be defended etc. etc. My own definition of being a true conservative is this: libertarianism or maximum liberty but with respect for social mores which many times we get the first part but not that leavening factor. You can be for maximum liberty and still see the wisdom in that it's better off for society to be pro-life for instance and I'm not even talking about the finer points of that debate which have been hammered home time and again (Soapie's Foundry) but the general principle. There's no need for a porn shop to be located within close proximity to a church and angel dust needs to stay banned for reasons of public safety. Many times marijuana is mixed with phencyclidine unbeknownst to the pothead and if you think your local drug dealer has a moral code you're an idiot.

How would you like your coffee?

Consistency, the hobgoblin of small minds

Ah sweet consistency! Dave Miller searches for it, the soapster is probably more consistent than most, most hold it up as a virtue but there's just a little something I've discovered quite on my own. In fact it's rather disturbing, unsettling even and it's something we'd rather not face. It's

the Quirk,

oooooohhhhhh!!!!!! and many times it leads to Icky Things. Basically I've come to the realization over time that quite a few of our positions if logically applied to their stretching points have quirks, in fact they're built-in and it doesn't really matter where these positions fall on the political spectrum. If you're a bona-fide libertarian then you readily accept the premise that there's something wrong with our civil rights laws at least the parts that forbid private companies from discriminating against African-Americans (Rand Paul kind of acknowledged the quirk and then ran away from it). If you're a federalist then you have to accept miscegenation laws should they unhappily make a return. If you're for the gay marriage then you have to welcome the brother and sister team, even polygamy. While we're on the subject of Sex if you're a Catholic and don't accept artificial birth control as morally licit then you have to accept the notion that you should only have sex when you want a kid. Natural Family Planning (NFP) is a loophole and I once received a newsletter in the mail from some ultra-traditionalist Catholic sect that had a problem with even Pope John Paul 2 pushing NFP as basically it's just what I said: you should only have sex when you want a kid which is not the Z-man position of course but we are discussing quirks here. Terri Schiavo was a vegetable and not even human, a common enough position at the time except that you'd also have to accept the scenario then of somebody walking into her hospice room and then stabbing her to death and not having to face prosecution. Chris Rock talks about niggers, I should be able to as well. Now it's not the Z-man position that Chris Rock should talk about niggers but once you accept the Premise......I could go on. Pro-choice would mean you'd have to accept a world without abortion if let's say pro-lifers won in the marketplace of ideas and then every doctor on the planet for reasons of conscience refused to perform the procedure. I left Pro-life out you say? I leave that to Miss Saty. Quirks are political particles shooting around the political universe but we refuse to even acknowledge their existence and people (like me) who bring them up are accused of slippery-sloping. It's why a Protestant minister I once worked with said to me he doesn't believe in logic, he seemed to know. This list is very incomplete, quirks are EVERYWHERE but just to get things started let's go with gay marriage and a brother and sister wanting to marry each other, hell let's throw in some happy polygamists too for good measure. What some people call slippery-sloping is simply the acknowledgement that quirks exist and we'd better start addressing them. The slippery slope, you're skiiing towards the Quirk anyway. Doesn't matter either if the theoretical scenario under discussion is absurd (for the time being) or otherwise not realistic, quirks exist at the very end of many positions on the political spectrum these days. It truly is a funkadelic world.

How come lib critics of the President aren't racists too?

(I have borrowed some of the following information from Moderate Republicans' blog of 6/17, Obama, Oil Spills and Rhetoric. Mod Repub, ever a useful resource)

First it was Kirsten Powers who seemed the first to fall out of love with him, then the Ragin' Cajun' went ballistic. I heard also that Olbermann had something not nice to say. So what was the impetus for all this? The Crisis in the Gulf of course, yes it took something of this magnitude for them to finally turn this spaceship around and head back towards Earth but here's a list of some other liberals who've had critical things to say:

E.J. Dionne (Wash. Post) - a fair lib imo not given to hyperventilating
Gail Collins (Ole Gray Lady) - I recall her name from somewhere and it wasn't for her conservative musings
David Broder (Wash. Post) - I think he's some type of lib but I'm not really sure. Seen him on gabfests with Gwen Ifill on PBS and he always looked kind of boring to me like he'd get out his lawn chair with a few other oldsters and sit outside of Macy's on a hot sweltering day in July. Looks like he uses the stall in the Men's Room alot.
Tina Brown - THE Tina Brown
Robert Reich (HuffPo) - we all remember him.
Roger Simon (Politico),

& on it goes. Now many of them are saying the same things you or I might say. You know I gotta break this down and get to the Westchester County Gun Show but I'm just sayin' if you're a Tea Party motherfucker you're a racist by definition but if you hang with the above set your criticism is somehow more cerebral and fair. In short why has criticism of Obama become niggerized but only on the conservative end?

Progressive conservatism

Z said I should do a blog about this and not having much else to blog about these days besides Oil and maybe Lindsay Lohan it's a good idea. It's a term I used the other day in the Rand Paul discussion and it really means things like if we've made some social progress, in this case regarding race, then by all means just accept it. Don't go back and reargue the whole 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater is not the guiding force of the movement anymore. Progressive conservatism is meant to directly take on what I consider the drawbacks of libertarianism or rather extreme libertarianism. Some drawbacks of extreme libertarianism in my view:

(1) Free association means if you're a private establishment you have the right to discriminate against blacks (or anyone of your choosing). It's retro and backwards and definitely out-of-the-mainstream. It's an interesting intellectual point but ultimately folds in on itself. Libertarians are not big on civil rights, the rest of us got with the program a long time ago and have moved on. They're in a timewarp.
(2) The War on Drugs is somehow invalid in libertarian thought. No it's not and it's kind of murky if libertarians actually support drug use as a harmless recreational activity or simply it's legalization. The War on Drugs seems to conjure up alot of passion on their part but explain WHY it's invalid. The root of the anger at government over this is also interesting, is it as simple as you want to drop some acid? Not sure why the National Review has become a leader in this vanguard, maybe Wm. F. Buckley Jr. toked towards the end. Rich Lowry is usually more sensible than this.
(3) Pro-Life. Libertarians hate social conservatives and their concerns. This is why Barry Goldwater became testy in his old age towards the Right. They got no problem with starving the cognitively disabled to death as long as they're able to order Chinese and a pizza while they're visiting their aging uncle who is now on the ultimate diet and a burden on the family treasury. On the unborn they really really hate you and get all fidgety. They've no use for Pro-Life as there's no $$$$$$ involved, the only thing they seem to care about. They tend to be secular (tend?).

Those are just three items plucked at random. Even though they're not racists themselves their intellectual framework would allow racist practices to flourish. They have no problem with narcotizing the masses even if you have some LSD and PCP mind-bending mofos walking around. If you somehow make it past the birth process they'll deny you food and water in your old age or disabled state or allow others to do so (BUTT OUT!!!). Most of us here are libertarian to a point but our libertarianism is moderated and allows for other social and moral concerns. It's a blend as any successful recipe has to be, theirs is one ingredient. LIBERTY AT ALL COSTS has never really caught on though and despite the wide variety of political beliefs in this country theirs is as minority status as you can get though they somehow feel their influence is so important it should be more dominant within the party.

Progressive conservatism - Accepting racial progress, drugs are bad for society and it's better to have a pro-life culture to name but a few. Progressive conservatism, if the enemy does something good give him credit but as of this date the only good thing I can come up with (seriously) is when Obama gave the go-ahead to have those Navy snipers shoot the Somali pirates and that's going backaways. We can throw in progressive conservatism is by no means hawkish but not pacifist in nature either. We don't need anymore cowboy diplomacy but we don't need a president apologizing to our enemies either. Progessive conservatism is forward-looking and hopeful and it's a theme I'll have more to say on in the future.

Nothing else matters

I feel this way about Pro-Life. The idea for this blog has been gnawing at me for some time now and I expressed it once before and it is this: let's say conservatives got everything they ever dreamed of and then some but that abortion and euthanasia were still the law of the land and was to be forevermore for me at least this would be a spiritually empty victory. In fact I feel so strongly about this that it is reason enough for me to stop blogging since what good is talking about all the other stuff if we don't have a pro-life culture first? For me it's as if having a pro-life society would free us up to consider more fully and less distractedly these other important parts of the conservative agenda but without this what good is all the rest? For the record I will continue to blog probably until the day the Good Lord calls me home but am just emphasizing how passionate some of us are about the issue.

Nothing else really matters if you have an event that in pro-life terms is such a tragedy, a kind of moral catastrophe and this may or may not help to explain the mystery of the "retired" bloggers or at least some of them, not everything at your heart's core gets expressed in print, and speaking for myself I've often considered not blogging or retiring from blogging since the pro-life issues are so much on the back-burner these days. I mean how can we even talk about Obama the Socialist let alone concentrate fully on this issue and others like it when as I said there's been so many recent horrors on the pro-life front?

I really think there needs to be something so newsworthy in pro-life terms, some event so positive and of such moral magnitude that it will rock us back to our collective senses, make us rethink our attitudes towards the unborn, the disabled and the elderly, the poor, the downtrodden, the voiceless, the totally vulnerable among us. To continue on this pro-abortion/pro-euthanasia arc is so depressing that what good is all the rest of what we ever dreamed or fantasized about if we still continue down this destructive course?

Today's blog is simply a lament, to explain a thorn that's been in my side for awhile now before I continue to blog about the Other Important Issues of the Day. It's just something for your consideration.

Does being pro-choice mean you have to be pro-Roe?

Is this constant percolating tension between the social conservatives (SC's) and the fiscal conservatives (FC's) within the party a false one? Can one be pro-choice and anti-Roe vs. Wade? Soapie has said in the past abortion should be a states' rights issue though he is personally very much pro-choice but he seems one of the very few fiscal or libertarian conservatives to actually say this. Put it this way I could (though there are alot of other factors involved here) support someone for political office who is pro-choice but anti-Roe and I would say the majority of pro-lifers these days are not purists on the issue. The Human Life Amendment is pie-in-the-sky stuff except for folks like Judie Brown of the American Life League. If Giuliani had adopted this federalist approach even a few years ago he well might have been the GOP standard-bearer instead of McCain by default. I've never understood it, this internecine political rift between the SC's and the FC's when there is so much potential common ground here. Roe was wrong on so many levels that would be a separate blog unto itself, I'd probably have to break it down into 3 threads at least.

FC's do the same thing with Terri Schiavo, it's always the Congress shouldn't have gotten involved but I've talked to a couple of pro-choice people who saw it from other angles. When that case was living news a chef friend of mine whom I worked with at the time first said he wouldn't want to live like that (DUH, who would?) but then framed it as the husband was suspicious (no mention of Congress' involvement) point being can't the FC's look at pro-life issues from any other perspectives? My chef friend though I disagree with his politics (he's a liberal) generally thinks of things the right way, goes through the correct thought processes and I don't see alot of objectivity out there. Again he and I both had a common ground here about why not just let Terri's family take care of her and so you can't tell me there can never be any thoughts that coincide on the life issues between SC's and FC's or even between conservatives and liberals in general.

George Will once concluded that the abortion issue is stale, maybe that's because he prefers it that way. You take any issue under the sun and I can find new hues, other nuances, perspectives, shades of meaning. Maybe the problem is our limited imaginations.

Introspection on abortion

Usually when I'm debating with a pro-choicer at some forum or blog, when things get to the boiling point and I'm driving my point home, when things get a tad too personal the opposition will throw the pejorative "self-righteous" in my face which they like to say characterizes the social right. OK I'm speaking only for myself here, can't speak for Sarah Palin, for the Rev. James Dobson, Randall Terry, Jeb Bush, just little old me. In my day to day I consider myself so far from the holy, for the bulk of my life I've never even remotely felt myself approaching sainthood and yet at the same time I've reached the conclusion that many pro-abortion folks are utterly heartless but it's not self-righteousness that spawns this evaluation as I've none of it to begin with. I think many pro-choicers are dark people and while I consider myself to be your rank-and-file sinner, I fully expect a lengthy stay in Purgatory at the least I don't want to take that final step over to the dark side (I hear BB cogitating a response) and the reader will note I was careful to use the word "many" here, didn't say "majority", "most" or "all" but candor compels me to admit for instance that many characters in the Terri Schiavo saga were downright creepy, I know a few liberals who feel the same way and again this is only a conclusion drawn from a sinner who is so far from the mark but draws the line at killing. As dear old Anonymous once noted "morality consists in drawing the line somewhere", you don't have to twist my arm if Beyonce and Britney, Eva Mendes and Jessica Alba are playing nude volleyball on the beach but I don't like to see dead fetuses in garbage pails. I guess the latter makes you a right-wing extremist, a fringe guy or gal these days at least according to polemical rules as defined by liberals who seem to feel that flexibility in one or more areas should guarantee your pro-choicedom. The other pejorative they'll frequently throw in my face is "Mr. Religious Fanatic" which for me is, as Mike Tyson would put it ludikwis since I've never gone out on a theological limb in any discussion or forum or blog with my latest calculations of who's in Hades these days, quite the opposite. Just an autobiographical note here SO GET IT STRAIGHT!!!

As a person...

...who feels that the majority of us do not wind up in Hell as a religious extremist I'm somewhat of a disappointment. I've always maintained it's a theological mystery and have a problem when priests or ministers go out on a limb here in their sermons. I'm not dogmatic either, it's none of the pastor's business imo how many times Lino circle-jerked on a Friday night. I find it hard not to be spiritual though and if anything anti-religious extremism is a problem. When Michael Schiavo forbade the hospice chaplain from giving Terri a drink of wine as part of the Last Rites that's pretty creepy in my book but anywho let's get to the nub or the hub shall we and define this case known in the lefty blogosphere as Religious Extremism, as it stands now it's a little vague and I invite as much bloviating and ranting as possible. If you don't believe in mermaids then why do you obsess about them?

So when can we say we have enough laws?

The function of the Congress or any legislative body for that matter is primarily to pass laws. If they don't pump out the legislation this is, you guessed it,

a bad thing,

and so it will haunt a candidate in the next race. Legislation is all about addressing issues and showing concern for people's problems but the second question before the Board today is how many laws do we as a society actually need? Why the obsession and constant need to legislate? as well the more laws you pass the less freedoms you have, it's basic arithmetic. So when can we send our parliament of ho's home?

Fred Thompson - a consistent political philosopher

He may not be a pro-life purist like Judie Brown of the American Life League, always going for the touchdown, aka that Constitional Amendment, but he's not a life-choicer like Mitt Romney either. He's a federalist or a believer in states' rights. Laura Ingraham brought up the fact that he was against government intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, well he can say he was consistent in his own head anyway. I myself was more into the whole angle of Terri could swallow on her own and so the laws in all 50 states say you have to feed a person by mouth. Her feeding tube was always a side issue anyway, they could have given her saline hydration by IV and as for his misguided comments about a federal law banning abortion meaning women and possibly their Moms and Dads going to jail, this had a silver lining. It allowed pro-lifers and in particular us bloggers to clarify the issue, hey, maybe Fred knew this all along. Anyway he has my vote if he's the nominee.

Broward County ME Joshua Perper's Sylvia Browne moment

Though she died of a drug cocktail of no less than nine (!) different prescription drugs including chloral hydrate and methadone the coroner assures us that foul play was not involved in the tragic Anna Nicole Smith case, not only that it wasn't even suicide which end a reasonable person might draw. Seminole tribal Police Chief Charlie Tiger seconds the motion and says no cause for concern here (would twenty prescription drugs in a person's system be the barest minimum for concern?). In the wake of the controversial Schiavo case it is now the politically correct thing to do to go out of our way not to demonize people even if this means we should ask far more questions than we do or even that justice has to take a back seat to sensitivities. To this day we don't really know with any metaphysical certitude what caused Terri to collapse on that fateful morning of Feb. 25, 1990 and likewise we cannot state with any metaphysical certitude, as Broward County ME Joshua Perper has done, that Anna Nicole's death at such a young age was purely an accident. Is our legal and justice system no longer intellectually curious anymore? Is enabling a person's drug dependency no longer a crime? Is it just easier these days to let the dead rest with their secrets? WHY must I rely on sources like the National Enquirer for really vital new information in the case?

What of Howard K. Stern?

Why comics all swing from the left

I finally figured out why so many comedians swing to the Left, maybe it's just because the Right is so much easier to make fun of. The Left may be wrong about most things but they may be right about the War, even a little bit. The Right might be right about many things but wrong about the War, even a tad. It would be too easy to make a Macabre House on the Left, what with Terri Schiavo and New York Times Magazine reporters who never met an abortion they didn't like, throw in a feminist coven or two for good measure, but the Left is pretty much upfront about their Death Worship these days, what makes the Macabre House on the Right much more scary is that they purport to be

The Party of Morality and All That is Decent,

people you can trust. I expect more. As the Joelster says "I'm movin' out!"People who masturbate your mind

Americanism and God

Which is more important, love of God or love of country? For me the answer is self-evident, if love of God leads me to conclude the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wrong actions, for example, then that's the way I go. As important a national value as patriotism is it only becomes offensive if it takes on the aura of a state religion, a substitute for God, jingoism that blinds us to our own nation's faults, the political worship of Americanism, that only we are the moral beacon of the world and must guide, if not force, the rest of the world out of the dark cave of barbarism. Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, it is said by conservatives who have an eye on Hollywood these days, spews anti-American rhetoric almost on a daily basis and it's probably true but it needs to be pointed out that when social conservatives do this, as when they criticize our cultural moral retardation on such issues as human feticide and forced starvations, they can still hold on to their mantle of love of country. Should a liberal do this, as when he focuses attention more on economic disparities let's say he is said to hate his mother land and may even be called a Communist. Sean Hannity couldn't believe we were starving a young disabled woman to death in a hospice in Florida in March of 2005 and yet he is still an unquestioned icon of patriotism, let a liberal like Al Franken talk about how we don't help the poor in this country and he's a left-wing turd. Just my thought for the day.People who masturbate your mind

The 3 Co-Equal branches of the government

"Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." Dennis Miller used to say this after each of his rants but you never hear the opinionated fools known as talking heads ever say this and it comes to mind since there is now a small but growing chorus led by George Will and Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain that the Democrats swept into Congress because the Republicans gave up on their vision of small and limited government (read - Congress' intervention in the Terri Schiavo case). I never knew McCain was the libertarian type what with his campaign-finance reform and all and Will should know that we have or are supposed to have 3 co-equal branches of the government, that the judiciary does not have the final word on matters of life and death, and that many people, even some liberals, can forgive a desperate family for going to the Congress to intervene on behalf of their incapacitated daughter. Conservative Linda Chavez and yours truly seem to be the only ones on the right track here, of course the War was uppermost on voters' minds but as she pointed out the other day in her column 1 in 4 people who voted in this last election were union members even though unions make up only 12% of the workforce and 3/4 of these voters went for the Democrat. Will seems to be reinventing conservatism to mean you can't help cognitively disabled people to escape a painful and agonizing death from starvation and dehydration at the hands of spouses with ambiguous motives. Will is no small intellect but he is hardly the pro-life conservative he was in the past (he recently came out for embryonic stem-cell research for example) and everytime he does this I'm going to check him on it.

I myself opposed the War from the start but have grown more tolerant of it, I never thought Bush deliberately lied about those WMDs to get us into war and so I figured even though it may not be the right war Bush acted in good faith and losing is not an option, once you're in it you have to win it, it's just that I don't see the Sean Hannitys really grasping the message voters sent and if you want to win the White House in '08 you have to get rid of your ostrich politics. The American people are not inherently anti-war but they do want wars fought competently, they re-elected Bush over Kerry mainly to finish the job. That conservatives like Hannity are willing to forfeit the '08 elections because the War is all-consuming is, to put it mildly, somewhat amazing to me. I'm no longer the hardcore Republican I used to be (if I ever was one) and now I'm just floating around in Independence land, tired of the ideological trenches and the lack of moral consensus in this country and most of all TIRED OF ALL THOSE TALKING HEADS. People who masturbate your mind

Legislative OCD

Bob Novak, in a recent column, said of the most recent session of Congress that there was "no burst of legislative activity" (this is generally taken to be a BAD THING). I myself think the country runs best when the government shuts down. WHY do we have to always be legislating anyway? It's been over 200 years since our great country was founded and we don't know how it should be run yet? There is even a law in my neck of the woods (local laws are often the most intrusive) that if a motorist accidentally kills someone's cat he has to track down the owners of said dead feline and notify the survivors. Yes folks, the mentally ill are in charge to protect us all from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and if you feed the geese in Mamoroneck in Westchester County NY you could be facing a 15 day jail sentence (whatever happened to simply fining people?) I myself have always worn my seatbelt whether it was NY State law or not but why do we always have to be protecting people from themselves? The power of the few = the tyranny of the many.

Pro-Choice may be a libertarian position but Pro-Choice by and large is not at all a libertarian political philosophy. A third-party libertarian once ran against Christie Todd Whitman for NJ Governor and made the case that prostitution there should be legal ("my body my choice"). The pro-abortion Whitman said no way in hell can a loser pay for sex in the Garden State (although sticking scissors in the back of a full-term unborn baby's skull is another matter). Pro-Choice is against the right of a woman who may be in real danger to protect herself by carrying a gun, Pro-Choice wants to stigmatize and maybe even eventually criminalize the tobacco industry, the pro-choice Republican Mayor of NYC wants to ban those trans-fatty acids that Mickie D's uses for those freedom fries, many choicers are not wild about those gas-guzzling SUVs, Pro-Choice is against any sexualization of the workplace.....I would simply refer to them for what they are, PRO-ABORTION. They are big government types all the way, from FDR's New Deal to LBJ's Great Society and War on Poverty. They are only pro-choice on abortion and the "right" to physician-assisted suicide. Yes, they want to tell everyone else how to live and I really think their narrow focus on "abortion rights" comes down to population control, too many people ruin the planet and pollute and drive SUVs and smoke and pig out on fast food and so what better way to protect us from ourselves than by killing us in the womb or starving us to death in a hospice when we get a little older.People who masturbate your mind

Get back in the closet already!

In my view former NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey has not stepped up to the plate and taken full moral responsibility for his actions but then again who does these days? Forget for a moment that he's a self-proclaimed "gay American" (well bully for you) and focus instead on the pain and suffering he caused his wife and children with their show marriage (although she didn't know it was a show at the time) and there is a huge moral lapse that at press time he has refused to acknowledge. He's on the Oprah today no doubt regaling the audience with his anal adventures at truck stops while Governor but you cannot use the storyline that society's homophobia pushed him into the domestic hearth scene, not in this day and age. The msm is having a field day with him. No, you cannot be even mildly anti-gay anymore, the media make you out to be like that deranged Marine colonel in American Beauty.

Funny, but the only one who has, in my opinion, stepped up to the plate recently is Peter Cook, Christie Brinkley's soon to be ex (that is, if you don't count Mel as being sincere) and yet it didn't mean squat to this former supermodel with soon to be 3 divorces under her belt. He gave as an unvarnished apology as he could for his affair with that 19 year old toy-store clerk what's her name and NY Post gossip maven Cindy Adams writes that many thought Christie would ride this one out since she'd look like a three-time loser by divorcing him. Now maybe he is a cad and she made the right decision after all but it is rather alarming how little the Christian doctrine of forgiveness weaves itself into the warp and woof of our daily lives.

I am not all that jazzed up over Meredith Viera joining the "Today" show. During her stay at "The View" she proved herself a real potty mouth and time will tell how she does at her new gig. My eternal view of her was formed, however, when I was channel-surfing a few months back and she had on Michael Schiavo hawking his new book Terri - the Truth, and, to use Marlon Brando's classic phrase in Last Tango in Paris "what a steaming pile of horseshit." She promised each member of the studio audience a free copy of the literary work, no doubt mostly ghostwritten with Michael spewing his intellectual diarrhea into a tape recorder. She was so in awe of what the guy did, starving his wife to death and all over the course of 14 long days, that I'm surprised she didn't go for his cojones. On the Right