But who else was in the running the Dalai Lama?

Well it wasn't gonna be Bibi we know that. As long as your name isn't George W. Bush you have a shot. I understand the rationale for Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, taking measures or trying to take measures to reduce the world's nuclear stockpile (only the most nostalgic paleocons yearn for those good ole Nagasaki days) and his outreach to Muslims in the famous Cairo speech obviously played more than a part but his mere nine months in office weaken the argument considerably I might add. Oslo Norway, known to be very liberal, don't they smoke pot over there?

So are congrats in the offing or in order from us right-wingers? not if you're Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity. Maybe O's decision to take away our radar in the Czech Republic and our interceptors in Poland had something to do with it, imagine Reagan doing this!!! but really who else was gonna win this one if you want to be totally objective about it? DR. OZ?

But Z wanted a Big News Event and he sure as hell got one!!

A philosophical question

Does conservatism or do conservatives in general come to preordained conclusions? Should conservatives come to preordained conclusions, the Insta-Opinion? Lately it's how to treat Roman Polanski (cut off his gonads and sautee them) but it could be anything. Is this good or can we at least differ around the edges?

Let me tell you what was happening on the Glenn Beck Program today

Beth got me turned on to him and so I sampled a little more today and he seemed like a different Beck but I'll get to that in a sec. So they made fun of him on SNL, that show is so lame and so well past its prime that unless Tina Fey was involved it doesn't even merit a blip. OK so today Beck was talking about the federal government may force your kids to get the new Swine Flu vaccine and he was talking about all those mothers who say HELL NO!! So Beck and his sidekick were hashing this out, this massive distrust of the government thing. Beck said it's not healthy and he divided the mistrusters into two main groups: those who think the government is incompetent and those who think the government is up to something nefarious.

FOLKS, Beck ain't immune to criticism either, he's human and by taking on a kind of fringe element here that even he disagrees with he looks moderate and reasonable by comparison. Point of this blog is not to say Beck is extreme himself but that's the common assumption and perception that's out there thanks in large part to the media although he does use actual quotes of people in making his case, Obama's past statements in interviews about the Constitution doesn't address income redistribution for instance, that's a pretty Marxist thing to say and no SNLer can bury it with parody. So on today's radio show if you just tuned in for the first time and had no clue as to who Glenn Beck is Beck sounded like someone taking on all those folks who distrust the federal government (POT - KETTLE - BLACK) but in answer to Beck's own question why are all these Moms saying no to vaccinating their children two words -- TUSKEGEE AND MKULTRA. We all know what Tuskegee was all about but for those of you who are new to MKULTRA this was an ultrasecret project of the CIA in the '50s and '60s that involved among other things dosing different sectors of the US population with LSD without their knowledge and studying the results (I'm still waiting for some conservative feedback over this, perhaps in a future Jonah Goldberg column?). So am I on the same side as these Moms who think the government is up to something James Bondish with the new Swine Flu vaccine? not in a million years but understand root causes here and am surprised Beck didn't bring them up. Yes righties, actual conspiracies do exist on occasion, the Moon does enter its blue phase every now and then.

Is Beck losing his cojones? If you find them will you please return them?

Hate speech on the Left - the murder of a pro-life activist

Go to http://bluewavecanada.blogspot.com/2009/09/reality-of-violent-opponents.html for the tragic story of pro-life activist Jim Pouillon's murder. Jim Pouillon was sitting across a school in Michigan holding his pro-life poster when a car pulled up and did a drive-by. The self-avowed pro-life hater also allegedly killed another man and was searching for a third when apprehended.

Do pro-choicers need to police their own speech? Does Keith Olbermann need to dial down the vitriol? Should we hold the NOW gang personally responsible for Jim Pouillon's murder?

Ya wanna know something? on a theoretical, abstract and even practical plane it's all good and despite the most heated verbiage on BOTH sides actual incidents of violence is something that's really few and far between. Ya wanna know something else? some people just don't LIKE free speech, lately it's the liberal crowd. Now ever since the tea parties and townhalls liberals in general like Bill Moyers and Frank Rich and the liberal msm in particular, well put it this way their absolute hatred for conservatism is coming to a rolling boil now, all the invective they can muster up is coming YOUR way but if I can sum up their overall theme about US we're totally for the rights of the individual against the welfare of the larger society or community, we're anarchists who are totally against the government or the State, potential McVeighs, we're against charity or caring for others, we're conspiracy-mongers (although what's wrong with the notion that the occasional conspiracy theory may actually be true?), in short we hate the State (well kinda true) but the biggest thing I'm seeing of late is that liberals HATE free speech, it's always free speech is good and fine and swell and American BUT (go over what they said about O'Reilly in the wake of George Tiller's murder) but on this front what would happen if we didn't always call for tempering or policing our own speech? what if we just let her rip? what if we just let free speech be, say what we will? I submit that in general

NOTHING

would happen, and the few extreme cases that are alleged to have been caused by the hateful speech of others however dubious the connection does not justify in the least chipping away, abridging or otherwise curtailing or suppressing the free speech of others. OR to put it another way so Ted Bundy liked porn.

A fan of neoconservatism (NOT)

Irving Kristol, godfather of neoconservatism 1920-2009

It's not just that the philosophy of neoconservatism has led us into many a foreign adventure. This is either good or bad depending on your viewpoint, for Pat Buchanan it's bad but I really have no problem if the guiding moral principle involved is to liberate an oppressed people but here read this from a 2003 column in The Weekly Standard by Irving Kristol (bold-type mine)

and as Glenn Beck would say READ CAREFULLY (ooooooh):

"Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on 'the road to serfdom.' Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable.

People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not.

Note the not so subtle digs at paleoconservatism or the purer form of conservatism. Z makes the case that you cannot have a large state that is also not intrusive, that's a neocon fantasy, and from my vantage point you only need something new or neo if there is something wrong with the old product. OR to put it another way who's more popular right now, Rush Limbaugh or David Frum?

How to put the racism issue to bed once and for all

Elect a black conservative president next time, say Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell. If we still hate the nigger then ok.

What really stands out about Patrick Swayze (1952-2009)

From Wikipedia:

"Personal life

Swayze was married to Lisa Niemi from June 12, 1975 until his death."

Ghost has got to be one of the most romantic movies of all time, a must have in any serious DVD collection. I really was hoping as we all were that he was going to kick this thing but I don't think they know how to treat cancer yet. You don't know which is worse, the cancer or the chemo but this has really turned into the Year of the Famous Dead Person -- Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson (they're STILL talking about it), pitchman Billy Mayes, Walter Cronkite and of course Ted Kennedy (and others I'm leaving out but those are the most prominent, you'd have to google the rest). I sure hope next year is less dark.

To hear liberals tell it

the conservative grassroots is filled with Hate. First the Tea Parties and then the town halls but the way I see it is Democracy in Action,

it's all good

and have liberals forgotten their own maxim that dissent is the highest form of patriotism? So some folks showed a little passion, it's nice to know some Americans still have some spunk left in 'em and I'm trying to diagnose the lib problem here. Is it we're not supposed to critique the nation's First African-American President? Well welcome to the ballgame bro! I think it's healthy that folks are up in arms about the lack of fiscal restraint by Government which among other things is what's animating the conservative grassroots these days. It's OUR money after all. Whether you agree or disagree with the tea partiers and townhallers there's nothing even vaguely unconstitutional about it all but libs are treating it as a hate crime.

I'm lovin' it!

The MSM under the microscope

As my brother is fond of saying take an average group of people and they'll likely tend to be non-ideological, you can have someone who is pro-life but for gay marriage at the same time, you can have a conservative who bashes Big Business (that'd be me) but the whole point is there are so many opinions out there and that's good. It's pretty much an established fact that the vast majority of the msm are liberal in their political orientation, ok sure you have your occasional Brit Humes, ok you have Brit Hume but on balance they always take the non-conservative position on practically any given issue. They won't call themselves liberal of course, we're objective you know (a Marvin Kalb piece of gospel they fall back on when challenged) but they certainly do harbor certain opinions and this seeps out every now and then in their coverage of the Whatever and the seepage is known as bias. I like to think of it as cat spray, marking their territory or a little septic action in the backyard but ok, so now here's the question before the Board today (or judging by my sitemeter of late is that the Bored?) -- do these budding journalists, aspiring reporters enter college, journalism school, the institutions of Higher Learning without much in the way of a strong political package to begin with either way and then something happens within the school itself that churns out a bunch of cookie-cutter liberals OR are they liberals to begin with who are merely honing their journalistic skills to better practice their non-bias bias? Again on ANY GIVEN ISSUE, Ted Kennedy - be respectful, talk radio - Bad, health-care reform - obvious, Van Jones - Glenn Beck racist......I MEAN WTF IS GOING ON HERE???

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!!!

Think tanks, beavers and other things conservatives won't talk about

My friend and I are what you would call non-ideological conservatives. In my view the main problem with politics today is that the vast majority of libs and cons read from the same playbooks. Do libs have to be for abortion at every turn for instance? Anyway we got on the subject of think tanks.

Think Tanks

Many companies today use them. My friend seems to have a thing for supermarkets, always seemed to have been working in one at any given time so he was telling me he has it on good authority that the supermarket business in particular is heavy on the think tank stuff, hiring expensive consultants to implement their recommendations. Think tanks, yes they literally do meet in a house and chart the course of your workday from giving everybody only one day off a week to making most workers part-time but giving them almost full-time hours. Being pro-Big Business the average conservative is not going to talk about these things which is why you have me. On the other hand a rather small but not insignificant portion of the population seems to be happily unemployed and that's where the rest of my conservatism kicks into high gear. If I have to work so do you. At least work gives a discipline and structure to your life as opposed to all these people I just saw waiting for the library to open. What's wrong with this picture?

The Environment

Geez it would be nice if conservatives had at least some love for the environment. I remember when I was a kid my Dad took us behind Warehouse Lane in Elmsford, NY Back then it was mainly UPS there and in this stream you could see the beavers working, gnawing at twigs and building their dams, using their tails to pat the mud down and so I was telling a friend about this and we went there the other day. Have to relegate it to a fond memory though as the place has been more built up since those days with other businesses now but the thought occured: now we're not what Rush would call lefty-commie-enviro-whackos but considering that the beaver population had been so heavily decimated in the past due to early trapping when you do encounter actual beavers today in a populated area doing their thing one would think it has a special value. One would think SOMEONE would have left the place alone since a more reasonable environmental philosophy would recognize that the beaver should have a higher status than the snail-darter and so be worth protecting. In short I want the Palisades Mall AND the beaver and don't see why such things have to be overly political, either/or political pigeonholing. Gotta build! Gotta build! Well having gone there the other day it did bother me, ya gotta leave some things alone not only on an environmental level, there are romantic and poetic considerations as well. Maybe it's my midlife crisis but you should be able to relive some of your childhood memories.

So think tanks make your job rough and you don't even have the solace of looking at the beavers anymore. My schematics say something is wrong here.

Our over-the-top media (as usual) - why I'm not into political necro

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy 1932-2009

I'm sorry but whenever I hear Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" I think of him ("If you told me you were drowning I would not lend a hand") but more on that in a minute. It's funny to hear the msm refer to Kennedy as the liberal lion of the Senate but that's because he described himself as a liberal so it was ok, the msm had no choice. It's kind of like coming out of the closet, the media won't do it for you (the responsible media anyway), you have to get the ball rolling yourself. If not they would have happily referred to him as a moderate because in the universe of the msm, must have something to do with the warping of space/time, parallel universes and wormholes but there are no liberals. OK on to the murky waters of Chappaquiddick.

MY THEORY and it's a darn good one is this and it was first proposed to me by a woman -- Ted was not in the car that night. He gave the keys to Mary Jo when he shouldn't have, everybody must've had some that night and so she was the one who drove off the bridge all alone. This helps enormously to help clear up some discrepancies like why he didn't notify the police immediately afterwards and why he was spotted early the next morning outside his hotel room all clean and with fresh clothes on and seemingly not a care in the world and that's because he didn't know at the time. Not exemplary behavior to be sure but not the monster he was often made out to be by right-wingers to this day.

OK a true John John story. JJ went to a nice restaurant with a woman and the head waiter told this other couple he was relocating them to make room for the Kennedy scion and so the guy was naturally miffed. JJ must have sensed this because after he came in he invited the other couple over to join them for dinner. Years later JJ bumped into the man again and remembered him and asked "so how was your dinner?" That to me speaks volumes, that's all I need to know about the man.

Liberal and conservative views on the CIA

Pretty much conservatives are very pro-CIA. I've a more varied view of the spooks but before I get to that I do think it's a terrible terrible mistake for Obama's AG Eric Holder to decide to prosecute any CIA officials for authorizing or using certain interrogation techniques of terror suspects that liberals have felt went too far. You might make the case from a technical moral standpoint that the methods were somehow wrong but what I for the life of me don't get is this apparent soft spot among the leftie community for those who wish to do us great harm and for Obama to approve of this prosecutorial approach merely cements his repuation as a liberal. From stimulus to health-care to this, it ain't hard to figure. It's not a centrist or moderate pattern at all, it obviously masturbates his base but to point this out you risk the ire of folks like Bill Moyers who, how do I put this? you're engaging in hateful mythology even though you're merely connecting the dots and highlighting the truth. Anyway to balance out my view of the G-men found this under the Wikipedia link for LSD:

"Beginning in the 1950s the Central Intelligence Agency began a research program code named MKULTRA. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subject's knowledge. The project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission Report."

Yeah so Bill O'Reilly is not a big fan of those Matt Damon/Jason Bourne movies because it casts a bad light on the CIA, liberals can't bash the CIA enough and so perhaps BB can shed some light. Perhaps the late Bob Novak had the best take on politics in general: "Always love your country but never trust your government."

The Freedom of Choice Act

Interesting that Obama has spent so much time on health-care "reform" when he had made a promise at some Planned Parenthood confab a few years back that signing the FOCA into law would be the first act he'd do, Priority Numero Uno. Everyone (libs included) should start seeing him for the bullshit artist he is. Gotta laugh though, when Obama was elected many in the liberal msm sounded the death knell for conservatism as a movement, funny how a few fringe people can derail such a massive project as health-care reform. He tackled too much too soon, wanted to ram everything through and couple impatience with arrogance and it ain't a good combination. Conservatism was never really dead, just waiting for the right moment to reenergize itself and as for FOCA I'd be really surprised at this point if anybody brings it up. With 40 million+ abortions to date since 1973 where is the legislative urgency? Obama has been a boon to the conservative movement so be glad he was elected. We as a country got to Make History and we get our country back too, not a bad deal by any stretch!

Obama is in deep denial

Even many Democrats have turned against the public option and so the best analogy I can use is that Obama is like some man who has so much to offer and yet he's being rejected and so the initial stage is denial, it ain't happening, people don't understand, maybe I need to 'splain better. I said this over at Pamela Hart's blog but Obama putting out a government website to "correct" all the "misinformation" about health-care reform would be like to expect a bunch of JFK conspiracy theorists to consult the Warren Commission Report. Hey dude you need to get over yourself, you ARE being rejected and that cute little tv spot of a bunch of cars cutting off the ambulance (i.e. those special interests blocking much-needed health-care reform) well it was clever but it ain't gonna change anyone's minds. Obama has to know in the back of his head that this is soon gonna be the first major failure of his presidency, no amount of shucking it up at those townhallers is gonna help and he's like some guy coming out of the local porn emporium with his little care package and the pastor sees him, the town widow, the postman, Brian with his yo-yo and the wind opens up his trenchcoat and what comes flopping out but it says SOCIALIST all over it. No man public option wasn't a make or break deal, I got these here for a friend and ah fuck it man, I'm more liberal than my own Congress. I got my Harvard cred, I thought you were with me on this. Nothing personal about your Grandma but that AARP crowd, they're what's known in the game as a bunch of useful idiots. I had the msm on my side all along and even they couldn't help me now how depressing is that?

Interesting questions

Is there free will in Heaven? http://catholicdiscussion.yuku.com/topic/1585/t/Is-there-a-potential-for-sin-in-Heaven.html

Why is there no repentance after death? http://catholicdiscussion.yuku.com/topic/1513/t/Why-no-repentance-after-death.html

As well as my own: If God is Eternal then that means He existed for all Eternity going backwards in Time, how is this possible?

Beth and I discussed the importance of appreciating the gift of life God gave you (and presumably this also means if your life sucks) so basically if you wind up in Hell you can say you had no say in the matter of YOU coming into existence so you're only there 'cause God created you in the first place (for this you'd need a good lawyer).

AND the really really BIG QUESTION of the day: Why is Charles Manson follower Squeaky Fromme getting out of jail but Bernard Madoff has something like 8 life sentences or something?

The msm really really really really wants health-care reform

I wish they'd just go back to reporting the news instead of giving opinions. Hey Charlie Gibson pal, if it bothers you that much write an Op-Ed and oh, those Fact Checks they can shove up their ass. Funny how the "facts" always seem to go against the critics. I don't want some government bureaucrat sticking his finger up my rear, I have my own doctor to do that thank you. Better yet since Obama's so worried about little old me maybe he can put on the latex himself. Hillary seems a little testy of late. I don't think she's happy as Secretary of State, I think she really wanted his job, the bitch wanted the whole enchilada. Maybe they can have a Cash for Clunkers program where you can turn in your fat wife.

Rick Pitino, another crumb

OK so a few years back famed University of Louisiana basketball coach Rick Pitino had an affair with this Karen Sypher woman and gave her money to have an abortion. So unless my closed-captioning deceived me and I seemed to read the same thing in the paper the next morning they had sex in some restaurant. I've said it before but a main problem with the whole pro-choice movement is the basic fact, there's no getting around it that widespread abortion fosters and encourages social irresponsibility and yet the pro-choice movement never seems to care or talk about the moral context in which many of these "procedures" take place. The other thing is with Bill Clinton sexual scandal made him stronger, boosted him up in the polls but with everyone else it's wrong and maybe a career death sentence. Call this the Bubba Triple Standard, some asshole woman reporter by the name of Nina Burleigh once wanted to give him a blowjob for his role in keeping abortion legal, hell put a dead fetus in the room and maybe this chick can start squirting. Hey Rick keep the snake in its cage next time! if your wife won't give you a Slurpee go to 7-Eleven.

Life is like the bad job that never changes

A blog inspired by Beth's theme of late and as I said there sometimes I have to rejigger theology in my own head from time to time due to events. The late playwright Arthur Miller who as I recall was not known for being a religious person had this to say in his autobiography TimeBends: "Fuck you Death!" Probably for many of us we've come to accept death as natural and normal if not really a great thing, it's not and I think Miller tapped into something here basic to Christian thought without even knowing it and that is there is something fundamentally flawed with the Universe, in the original Christian understanding death did not enter the world until Man sinned and I covered alot of this ground already in my blog about why emotionally I can never be pro-choice (http://not-the-left.blogspot.com/2009/01/spiritual-view-on-pro-life-im-entitled.html) .

It's not an either/or situation, you can hold that God exists and yet Life is absurd and without meaning at the same time (although this is largely subjective since the happy and the unhappy cannot seem to relate to each other). The atheist "solution" besides ignoring Intelligent Design is too easy and doesn't address this central existential problem head on. Now whenever I've drifted towards this view people call you depressing, negative, pessimistic...relax, I'm merely stating a hard philosophical truth and do counsel people to get as much out of Life as you possibly can, you can and should enjoy Life to the max anyway but the answers religious folk give in such situations are too pat. So why do those of a spiritual bent continue to fool themselves insisting that God has plans for all of us which are too inscrutable for us to even figure out, always on some unknowing mystical plane? What about the 8 dead in the Taconic tragedy? I'd have thought a divine plan would not be so easy to foil.

The thought occured during my walk in Piermont this morning that maybe we're not meant to be here that long anyway and yet we cling to this life with all its absurdity and tragedy and yet maybe the good angels are whispering to us to just let it go. As soon as we're born we start to die, life's a bitch and then you die so why do we try to reconfigure a reality that isn't? Man sinned, we muffed it and can't seem to get back on track. Why are we here? Why were we born? I have no answer to that just know that it's not our true destination so if it's merely a sojourn does the duration really matter? IMO the real problem is secularism which teaches us to become too attached to this one life and meaning then becomes derived through materialistic means: career, house, money, sex etc. Final Thought - Your life here on Earth is very short, even the average lifespan of say 75 years is short when you stop to think about it so how the tragic affects us emotionally and spiritually is finite too and when the time comes when everyone looks back on this dot called Life, well as I said it really didn't make a whole lot of sense and we're in Heaven now so seen against the backdrop of Eternity its relevance is only temporary.

If it's Bubba it has to be bad

Now you'd think the safe return of those two American journalists being held prisoner by North Korea would be a happy event even if it did take Bill Clinton himself to go over there but listening to Hannity during my drive the other day and, must be manic-depressive politics or something but he seemed to be saying Clinton shouldn't have done that and what did we give them in return? Oh I don't know, maybe Bill got Kim Jong-Il a couple of strippers or a little ulterior motive action, maybe he just wants a little Asian favor in return (once you go Asian you never go Caucasian), how the hell do I know? Wonder if the families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee feel the same way as Hannity but somehow I doubt it.

Well since I brought up strippers funny story. Many years ago my friend and I were supposed to go to my brother's birthday party or party of some sort or some type of social occasion involving brother, brain cells dying on a daily basis so the details are fuzzy at best but long story short we didn't go. We wound up at our old haunt Barnes & Noble as we didn't feel the party was socially obligatory and when I talked to my mother later she scolded me, said we were supposed to go and that we were probably at some strip joint instead having a good time. No Mom we really are that boring.