You read one you read them all

I'm in Borders before and I see this new book by liberal feminist Susan Estrich, Soulless - Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate, a clever play on Ann's own book and this is pretty much the political discourse these days, some rightie or leftie pens a book and then someone else pens a rebuttal to that book. I used to read these books more but then quickly tired of them as I am mostly conservative/libertarian in bent but not overly ideological. The Left has been pretty much dominant in every sphere of modern life the last few decades so how can Estrich blame the Right if they are reacting to the influence of the Left? If the other ball dropped and it was the Right with all the clout the leftie books would pretty much come across as hateful too. Much of my own blogging has been a reaction to the political ideology of feminism and frankly I don't much care how I come across. There are no sacred cows in my book and I think when the Left or the Right has too much influence then some criticism of that movement is called for. I am a reactionary at heart and I remember radio host Jay Diamond applying this to callers when he said "if somebody comes across as too pro-abortion then I become pro-life" (and vice versa) and so while I wouldn't apply this to abortion as my views are pretty much set I do have that yin/yang principle in my makeup that Jay refers to, if a bunch of men banded together and formed a movement to defend getting a woman drunk and then taking advantage of her or what's the big deal with slapping that bitch around a little? she probably deserved it anyway then I'd be a passionate feminist. It's a shame though that today's major political thinkers and writers are so set in their ways, I think the people suffer as a result.

National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru, whom I agree with most of the time, analyzes the recent election as a "conservative crackup" and even says that conservatives need to drop their opposition to big government. My views are really becoming more outside the mainstream everyday now, the great conservative movers and shakers have spoken, Reagan's notion of limited government may have a nostalgic sense but hey, who really wants to abolish the Department of Education or the National Endowment for the Arts? What were we thinking? How come we never hear of a great liberal crackup? That's because they don't argue their differences in public, they are more united than us and so have become more dominant and accomplish more. We could take a lesson. People who masturbate your mind

The Sean Bell case

Let's also say the Rev. Al Sharpton is also not part of the solution. Last Saturday night cops opened fire on a car outside the drug, gun and prostitution-infested strip club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens killing a young black man of 23, Sean Bell who was to be married that very day to 22 year old Nicole Paultre. All in all 50 shots were fired and two other male passengers in the car were injured. Bell's fiancee says they "murdered him" which seems to be the standard line in the African-American community these days whenever cops shoot and kill a young black adult. Bell was unarmed but an undercover detective says he was trying to run him over with his Nissan Altima. It all began when cops observed a man leaving the skeezy dive with a gun and another guy saying "let me get my gun." Now I never knew this before but apparently the NYPD has a departmental "rule" that a police officer cannot open fire at a moving vehicle even if he feels that vehicle is being used as a deadly weapon against him, there have to be passengers with guns inside first. What else can the NYPD not do when their lives are directly threatened?

Now is it within the realm of possibility that there was one psycho cop that night or even a cadre of them? Sure, most everything is within the realm of possibility but not everything is probable, a club of psycho shields is possible but it is definitely there on the outer fringes, more likely the undercover officer's line of events is closer to the truth but here you have the usual suspects, racial arsonist Al Sharpton indicting the cops once again even before any kind of preliminary investigation is underway and NYC Councilman Charles Barron practically calling for a race war and that RINO Mayor of Gotham there, Mike Bloomberg, cozying up to both of them. Now a pertinent question might be what was a young groom to be spending the last night of his single life at such a crime-infested bar in the first place and why was he allegedly trying to run over a cop? He and his two male cohorts all had some type of criminal records involving guns and robbery and such and yet the liberal media always show that picture of him with his fiancee and their young child. Are most cops really this evil?

NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is a disappointment but he was chosen because he can be counted on to be politically correct all the way in such tragic circumstances but that's what you get when you have a RINO as mayor. I don't think the problem is so much about racist cops as it is about young men in the black community who choose time and again to not obey the law and when this is the way you decide to live you put yourself and others at risk but you'll never hear Sharpton and Barron say this. They say what's up with the cops these days and I say what's up with the crime?People who masturbate your mind

My Golden Age of movies

How come Osama never blows himself up? lead by example. Who ever thought the security and peace of the entire world would one day be threatened by a growing movement of radical assholeism..... awesome.

My personal DVD collection is now mostly made up of movies from the late '60s and '70s. Bullitt, Planet of the Apes, Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection, Marathon Man, Serpico. Horror movies were on a par with Rosemary's Baby, Suspiria and Rod Serling's Night Gallery in those days, even cult classics like Superfly, Blacula and I Spit On Your Grave, while not Oscar material, were interesting in their own right. One of the few more modern movies I really liked was The Perfect Murder starring Michael Douglas and Gwyneth Paltrow but well-crafted movies like this one are now few and far between, the '60-'70 time period was truly the Second Golden Age of Movies. I recently watched The Skeleton Key starring Kate Hudson two times now, the second time while sober, and I still can't make heads or tails over the last quarter of the movie, this didn't happen in the old days.

LIFE has a certain set of unwritten rules like when Mom and Dad give you 50 bucks for your birthday you don't use it to go out and buy porn, you allocate funds if you have to. I think these little rules are important, they remind you of the larger moral order out there but we seem to have lost this sense. I mean, what's knocking over somebody for a Playstation 3 all about? Don't we have a culture anymore, where's our philosophy these days, all anyone seems to want to talk about is Kramer and Clay Aiken's hand. People who masturbate your mind

"Book 'em Danno"

Liberal mainstream media make a hard turn to the right and elude their conservative media-stalkers.

Dateline NBC - To Catch a Predator series starring new right-wing law and order poster boy, Chris Hansen. In the olde days the liberal msm would have had a problem with the commonly used police tactic of entrapment and liberals in general focused more on the criminal and his rights, if a legal technicality sprung him early on society to prey again so be it. To go after Michael Dukakis' weekend furlough program was deemed impolitic and uncivil and the famous Willie Horton ads were evidence of conservatives' inherent racism, now the new real-life crime shows like 48 Hours Mystery and Dateline highlight the evident failings of our criminal justice system and the insufficiency of our current laws to protect crime victims, Chris Hansen could probably pen the next law and order platform at the next big Republican convention in '08. On the last episode of Internet Predators they nailed a cancer-research specialist, a head of some medical affairs division at a large pharmaceutical company and they showed everything from his interrogation at the hands of a web detective to his painful phone call to his wife, "honey, you have to bail me out, it was a sting operation, I didn't do anything but I did do something stupid." Your life marriage and career have been destroyed in front of a national TV audience, tough shit buddy, that's the way the cookie crumbles pal. OK, so a prosecutor caught in the Internet sting killed himself, it's all in a day's work and society is better off without him. When it comes to issues of crime and punishment methinks many members of the liberal msm secretly vote Republican and have the Dirty Harry box set in their DVD collections.

Of course the Ole Gray Lady, the New York Times herself, is still way out there in the wild blue yonder, beyond being liberal, in some radical stratosphere of their own deranged thinking, defending people like notorious late-term Kansas abortionist George Tiller. Bill O'Reilly recently wrote about this Doctor of Death and the Times' defense of him. I can no longer stomach reading their editorials, they thought Bush's recent very pro-illegal immigration speech was pandering to his extreme right-wing base for cryin' out loud, and so I rely on what others who have stronger stomachs than mine have to say about Times' editorials. I prefer not to read them and so ruin my day, you have to go to work with a clear head and save masturbation of the mind for another day.

The Life Legal Defense Fund is now taking the Ohio chapter of Planned Parenthood to court because they allege they helped a 21 year old male statutory rapist elude the police when he impregnated a girl much younger than him and of course PP did the requisite abortion without telling anyone. LLDF claims there are many such cases that could be made against PP and that protecting statutory rapists by aborting their unborn offspring is standard operating procedure for them and LLDF further says that if this massive scandal of the abortion industry ever came to light it would wipe out PP overnight. Chris Hansen, anyone wanna run with this? The New York Times is out to lunch. 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

Nicky Spano, nice to know you

It was close again here in Westchester County New York. Last time Republican State Senator Nick Spano won by only 18 votes over his black Democratic challenger Andrea Stewart-Cousins and this year it appears he's lost to her by a wider margin. Instead of accepting defeat graciously the way Republican George Allen did in VA he wants the same endless recounting that they did the last time around and right after the election results he took off for a 6 day Florida vacation. Spano was pro-life early in his career but then Polly Rothstein of the Westchester Coalition for Legal Abortion got ahold of him and he switched to pro-abortion. This is retarded, whatever you are it's best to stick with your original position because then you can't change back even if you wanted to. Let's say Spano sniffs the air like all politicians do and senses a pro-life swoosh in the other direction, he can't change back because then he'd lose all credibility with both sides and would look like a total asshole. Politicians call themselves "pro-choice" usually not out of sincerely held principles but because they see the public opinion polls going in this direction. If most surveys showed 90% of the population going for pro-life then they'd be pro-life. They are whores, nothing more. They'd sell their own mothers out for votes. People who masturbate your mind

So let Danny Glover go there

I know political correctness wants us all to be sensitive and do the right thing but does it have to be blind too? I was watching the "My9News" last night in NY and they had a special investigative report about NY cabbies who won't pick up black fares or drive them to ghetto areas. I'm sure that if you're black it IS frustrating when cabs pass you by but the liberal media oversimplifies these issues as good vs. bad, black vs. white. There have been cabdrivers shot and killed by black passengers or driving in poor urban crime-infested areas and while most who live in the ghetto are decent people we can't become offended when we try to highlight the crime blight. I used to drive for a flower shop in the Bronx and went into some of these areas, you'd pass a drug addict lying in a hallway and the elevator would reek of urine, in Co-Op city apartment complexes they have signs posted that read "if you see gang activity please call..." so I said not the job for me and people I knew, even some white people, acted like I was the one with the problem. It just ain't a simple issue is all I'm saying.

Looking back on doctors I think some of them may be pervs themselves. When I was growing up I went to a doc for an earache but he decides instead to play with my balls and tells me to cough. Another time I went for a routine checkup and some other male doc is taking a piece of lint that wasn't bothering anyone out of my peehole. Now instead of going to the doctor I just read a book or visit a museum.

I like to think of myself as basically a clean and hygienic guy but then you use the stall at work and see a skid stain in your Hanes and so you feel like a dirtbag for the rest of the day and want to go home.

So what's up with The Shining, that classic movie by Stephen King? In one scene a man in an animal costume is giving a blowjob to a clown sitting on a bed and yet all anyone talks about is "HEEEERE'S JOHNNY!" Explain.

It's better to be pissed off than pissed on.

Is it just me or does music in general just suck especially the music on 'PLJ here in New York? It all sounds like a bunch of angry grunge.

I hope I'm not boring Anonymous.People who masturbate your mind

Why is everyone so anal?

Bill Maher on the Larry King show the other night says there are many important Republican functionaries who are gay themselves and by golly he's gonna out 'em all and then says that Ken Mehlmann, former head of the RNC, is one of 'em. Maher is the most political comedian out there and his whole shtick is based on his personal moral grievances, at root he has a big problem with anyone who has moral views different from his own, it's KarmaBites applied to politics which is why he's floundering. He's one of those people who never tire of quoting that ole H.L. Mencken line about Puritans but it may well be a puritan is anyway who thinks differently from him. I've always found this man annoying and very unlikeable. Now I am fairly tolerant of gays myself but if you asked me if it's a great form of sex I'd have to go with a no. Is that ok Bill? Everywhere you look Lemonface keeps showing up to give us his .02 but like go away already!People who masturbate your mind

NONE OF THE ABOVE

Not voting can also be an act of principle. It is a herd opinion that if you exercise your right not to vote you are somehow an irresponsible American and that therefore you have no right to complain. You may not like the candidates (Spitzer vs. Who?) or you may feel like me, that we have enough laws already if not too many and that sending people to Washington to do just this just doesn't agree with you. You may not like the mudslinging. Maybe I am morally jaded but the Jeanine Pirro and Alan Hevesi "scandals" have hardly registered on my outrage meter. We now know way too much about Jeanine and Al's marital state. In NY Comptroller Alan Hevesi's case he has admitted to having a state worker drive his wife around at which revelation the New York Post trumpeted the next day that HE BROKE THE LAW. Indeed he did and I guess I'm supposed to be more concerned but I would much rather trust him with my check than that Callaghan guy. I think the overly virtuous cannot abide the imperfect. God Himself gave us only 10 moral Commandments to live by, not 158. What was Martha Stewart supposed to do, hold on to bad stock?

I had said at a forum or two that the American people reelected George Bush so he could wrap up the war he started, a smart move on the populace's part to want to have some consistency in our foreign policy rather than change course in midstream. I had also predicted at the same forums that should the war still be raging come midterm election time Bush will bring his party down but no one really listened. We'll know tomorrow morning whether W is an albatross or not.

I'm not getting the gay marriage issue, it's like liberals are the only ones who can discuss the issue without being called bigots. If you have any moral views on SEX whatsoever you stoke their liberal paranoia, they conjure up visions of some right-wing Orwellian sex police whereas the reality is if no one told you what they did in private the chances are very good you wouldn't ask. That canard that many heteros do what the homos do is irrelevant. I myself would not be into a woman who is into the anal, if I had a magic wand I would repeal all the absurd sodomy laws in the various states but beyond this I have the right to have a view on this or any other matter. I think THIS is what liberals really object to in their hearts, your right to feel the way you feel which is the real push behind pc, they want to police your mind.

HAPPY ELECTION DAY People who masturbate your mind

Political 'hos

Hillary was talking again about the importance of religion in society, went to some black church the other day and rapped about the need for parents and rules and discipline (except of course minors who get abortions without their Mom and Dad's knowledge). In my neck of the woods we have Westchester State Senator Nick Spano in NY who used to be pro-life until he sold his soul to Planned Parenthood. In his ads he highlights that he is a steadfast supporter of abortion rights which got me thinking, whatever happened to the Krauthammer Model on abortion? Charles Krauthammer is a mostly conservative commentator who once wrote what I thought was a very seminal piece that, even though politically abortion should remain legal it should have a negative social stigma attached to it and pro-lifers should be given as much latitude as possible to talk women out of it. As I am pro-life I can't fully endorse his views here but what is very worthwhile in my opinion is the stigma part. I could even see a politician saying something along these lines, "I am reluctantly politically pro-choice but in my heart I feel abortion is wrong and so you won't catch me speaking before groups that are very active in enabling women to get abortions...yada yada yada", but we don't get this. It's like Hillary made a pact with the pro-aborts, you can talk your best conservative smack, rap violent video games and sex on tv all you want, just tow the pro-choice line is all we ask. And I would ask Nicky Spano do you ever have anything negative to say about abortion? There is a rebellion in our hearts over what we know to be true and it's this unacknowledged moral tension that has us bewildered and adrift, we don't know why we are so unhappy.

NY State Comptroller Alan Hevesi has an ad running touting the fact that he has been the author of 108 laws. So why is this something to be proud of? I think this is the main way people go about solving their problems today, go to their legislators, but I still make the case that a functioning society needs comparatively few laws. Yeah, as an early civilization evolves (think colonial America) you need your laws against murder and bank robbery, and then plagiarism comes up and libel and slander and yeah, you need some rules governing food establishments mainly along the lines of proper food temps for meats and general cleanliness but beyond this - WHAT? - and so this is the main reason why I'm not voting this year,

WE HAVE ENOUGH LAWS ALREADY! People who masturbate your mind

John Kerry

Mass. Sen. John Kerry should stick with his day job. If his crack about our troops was a "botched joke" he won't be subbing for Leno or Letterman anytime soon. Imagine Jay or Dave explaining or apologizing after each joke, it'd ruin the monologue. Kerry is still pissed over those Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads and he has every right to be, that brainchild of Karl Rove was political pornography at its finest. Kerry's political philosophy, which is liberalism, was reason enough for conservatives to vote against him . Kerry also got in a dig at White House spokesman Tony Snow calling him a "stuffed suit standing behind a podium", don't know what purpose going after this mild-mannered man served. He has a job to do just like Mike McCurry had being Clinton's spokesman, it's like going after defense attorneys, what's the point? Then Kerry took a jab at Rush Limbaugh saying he mimics and makes fun of people with disabilities, this is going to be the liberal line from now on whenever someone has the courage to question and criticize someone like a Michael J. Fox who pushes the pro-abortion agenda. It's all a news story for 2 or 3 days so Chris Matthews can have something to jabber about and Sean can fill up his 3 hours on the radio dial. It's quite possible that Kerry simply misspoke but we don't live in an age where you have the luxury of misspeaking.

John Kerry wants the presidency and he wants it badly. I myself wouldn't vote for someone who successfully obtained an annulment from Archbishop Cushing which nullified his marriage of 17 years to his first wife, a conjugal union which produced two children. He also masturbates your mind when it comes to Pro-Choice. He has it that life begins at conception but that we are essentially dealing with a human non-person. Shoot that pro-choice jizm somewhere else sir, we already have Hillary saying she's a moderate on abortion when she just starred in a California TV spot to defeat a proposition there that mandates a pregnant teen have a waiting period and tell her parents before getting an abortion. If this be moderation then the liberal position must be to kill babies after they're born.

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

I'm a pro-choice pro-lifer

Hillary Clinton recently went to Long Island to receive the enthusiastic endorsement of the political arm of Long Island Planned Parenthood even though she and Bill have repeatedly gone on record as saying abortion is a BAD THING. There are now about 1.3 million of those bad things happening in this country every year and Planned Parenthood performs the majority of those bad things so how bad does a thing have to be before you decide to stop speaking to a group that is primarily responsible for those bad things, or maybe for her it's just kinda bad or not bad at all when you need the votes. I thought Bill kinda wanted to make the bad thing a RARE THING so where's all the "informed consent" legislation she should be working on? If this be "moderation" on abortion I'd hate to see what a liberal would do.

People who masturbate your mind

The Amish tragedy

Re the horrific tragedy at that Amish school yesterday where a crazed milkman shot those young schoolgirls and killed three of them, a woman said to me today and I have to agree that in such situations of peril where you have a roomful of people and only one gunman it is far better for everyone to rush him at the same time even though one or two of them may get hurt and lose their lives in the process but that's just it, we've become a nation of victims and we've seemed to accept it. The Amish are historically a pacifist people and this could have something to do with it but in the time it took for this 32 year old psycho to tie up those girls something could have been done. They say he had a 20 year old grudge which would mean he got angry at the tender age of 12. Good grief, people are growing up way too fast these days to have issues at 12 and carry them through life.

People who masturbate your mind

Life Chain Sunday

Today is 'Life Chain Sunday" when thousands of pro-lifers across the country bear peaceful witness against abortion by forming human chains and carrying posters. Pro-Choice is not at all a consistent political philosophy, most of the choicers seem to be pro-choice only about abortion. This is not a novel observation, George Will once wrote a column about how the pro-aborts are never for your right to smoke a cigarette or own an SUV or carry a gun for your self-preservation or, to update this, to eat french fries that have been dipped in trans fatty acids. In fact most of the time they are Big Government all the way and so I propose that we use the term "pro-abortion" instead. If they were really pro-choice on all these other issues I'd go with it but they haven't earned the moniker in my book. What about the choice of a woman to carry a gun to protect herself, a woman who may be in real danger and has been properly trained in its use? You'll never hear a Democrat talk like this, instead they want to protect the woman from the risque joke in the workplace.

The prevalent legal view that the fetus has the moral status of Hamburger Helper is the imposition of somebody's else's view of things, it is not by any stretch of the imagination a non-view as Mario Cuomo would have us believe and so I would also propose that you have to demonstrate the fetus's non-humanity before you can kill it which of course the pro-aborts cannot do. Also, how does it make sense that the fetus may be fully human at the 5th month or the 6th or the 7th but not two or three days before these whimsical and purely arbitrary cutoff dates? This is masturbation of the mind big-time and that is my thought for this Pro-Life Sunday. On the Right

Thought crime

Is thinking now a federal crime? Former Westchester County, NY District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, now running for State Attorney General against Andrew Cuomo, is under federal investigation for talking to former NYC Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik about planting a bug in her husband Al Pirro's room on a cruise ship to see if he was having an affair. Got that? We all have a skeleton or two tucked away neatly in our closets but Kerik has a whole haunted mansion and fun ride deal, real Grim Reaper/Cryptkeeper stuff and you need a 25 volume encylopedia just to read about all the scandals he's been involved in. Anyway, Kelli Conlon of the pro-abortion group NARAL of New York City says that Jeanine once betrayed her on the issue of abortion (read "partial-birth abortion"). Get a grip Kelli and grow up, this is not an episode of Fashion House (or is it?).

Time was the major source of stress in the world was the Cold War and mushroom clouds but at least you could talk and dialogue with the commies, after all we both had the Bomb and it was in our best mutual interests to talk but what do you do with these radical Islamist men who think that if they blow themselves up there will be 72 virgins waiting to feed them honeycakes? Whoever thought that the peace and security of the whole world would one day be threatened by radical assholeism? Mind-blowing.

The New York Post had a story yesterday about gals who, before dating men, have background checks done on them. There are now Internet companies that specialize in this. Now I suppose if you engage in massive dating this all makes sense but why anyone in their right mind would be into this dating crap is beyond me. I prefer the classic model, two people fall in love and then go out, not go out and then see if you like each other. Then you have your people at work who are adamant about don't dip your pen in the company ink, if you break up the woman may then claim sexual harassment against you. True but we are now using the rare psycho cases to influence our decision-making. I don't like groupthink, I don't like herd mentalities. Most of the women I've gone out with have been from work and I still have my job and bank account intact. Fear and worse case scenarios are now the order of the day but I strongly believe in taking chances but then again I think I have a healthier outlook on life because I don't watch a hundred crime shows a week. Don't hate, participate. Do we have to give up living? If so then let me move to Europe where they laugh at us.On the Right

The government is NOSY

If conservatives truly mean what they say then they should work for the repeal of the Bank Secrecy Act which states that any money transaction over $10,000 has to be reported to the appropriate governmental authorities, this from the same crowd that brought you Pro-Choice. What business is it of the government if Mom wants to loan her dire straits son more than 10G? I know this is all about money laundering but it fails my two yardsticks on whether a new law is good or not - is it of the utmost importance to pass said law and does it violate our fundamental and Constitutional privacies? I agree with the conventional political wisdom that holds that women want more laws on the books and men want less and that's why women vote heavily Democratic (aka the nanny state) and men vote Republican. Since I see very little difference between the two parties in power right now I don't vote in off-year elections anymore, the whole reason for the career of a Senator or Congressman is to constantly be passing new laws but the more laws you pass the less privacy you have. Why don't they get real jobs and leave the rest of us alone?

Hats off to independent thinker Bill O'Reilly for a great column today in the New York Post. He talks about those "hyper-partisans" (ideologues) in both parties. He says there are more of them on the Left but I say it's about even. The War in Iraq could go on for another 20 years and there would be Sean Hannity cheering on the Republican president. I am at heart a conservative but not an ideologue and I believe you can be a good liberal and not an ideologue as well. Let's do it!

Dennis Miller had a good point on Sean's radio show yesterday. Speaking about the CBS Evening News saying no to Bill Maher's diatribe against religion on their new freeSpeech segment Dennis said "once you open up the Pandora's box of free speech you have to adhere to it." I agree but maybe someone was trying to tell Bill that his spiel about faith is so yesterday, it's BORING already yada yada yada. If Bill really wants to go with it then Katie Couric should let him but I ain't watching and oh, btw, have a Hustler in the green room for Bill before he goes on (lol).On the Right

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

Fitty cents will get you a cup of coffee

"Do you have fitty cents? I wanna get a cup of coffee." The other day in Queens, NY rapper "Fifty Cent" was driving a new Lamborghini when cops pulled him over and arrested him for not having either a driver's license or insurance and registration. Many in the crowd of black onlookers sided with Fitty over the cops and said things like "stay strong Fitty." Maybe they wanted to give Bill Cosby something to talk about in his next speech but this anti-cop mentality is a bane in the black community. Let's see, what did Fitty do wrong? You have a car that costs as much as a house and you don't even have the proper paperwork, I dunno know what the problem is. Every now and then the rappers have to do something to maintain their thug image, like DMX the other day putting down Jay-Z for wearing sandals, said it's a sissy thing for a man to do (I kinda hate sandals on men myself, the men always have ugly feet sometimes with yellow gnarled toenails). Continued DMX, "he's only doing it 'cos he's in love and follows everything Beyonce tells him to" (honestly I'd have to admit I'd follow most of her directives myself). Sounds like a rap feud brewing which happens when the gangsta front has been too peaceful of late (how come you never hear of Gwen Stefani taking a shot at Mariah Carey or Celine Dion involved in a drive-by?) Seems like most rappers don't want to go the Diddy route of social respectability, hell Jadakiss is still hustling. Other than that there's really not a whole lot Cos can talk about.

What's with the Donald of late? He seems to have become a caricature of himself ("Martha's show was an abysmal failure while my 'Apprentice' has been a tremendous success.") MAD TV doesn't even have to have a scriptwriter for this, the Donald provides all the best lines himself.

I'm not voting in the midterms. Republicans and Democrats are more or less the same beast and both support leviathan government that intrudes upon our personal lives. When was the last time you heard a prominent Republican call for not more laws but less? I'm conservative/libertarian at heart and there's really no one out there for me.

I've learned alot from the Mel Gibson saga. Not only in the future am I not going to apologize for things done in the past but I'm also going to refuse others' apologies to me as well. Oh what a wonderful world it will be.On the Right

Some spiritual musings

"The way of the world is so far along the road to perdition. There is little hope but God's Justice. Mankind has fallen to its lowest depths and it shall be only by a Supernatural Intervention that can save him otherwise he will lay waste his soul to the slavery of Satan" (Message of Feb. 4, 1989 from "Our Lady's Message of Mercy to the World", copyright 1997 - Friends of the Mother of the Divine Mercy - 46 Ash Grove, Glencairin, Dooradoyle Co., Limerick Ireland, Nihil Obstat: Dublin 22 March 2000, Rev. Brendan Leahy DD., Deputy Censor Dublin Diocese - Printed with ecclesiastical permission, ISBN 1-899177-08-6) Our Lady of Fatima: "Look, my child, don't be surprised if, at a certain moment, a certain diabolical disorientation affects the best of minds, a disequilibrium, so that they no longer judge according to the voice of My Son and of Peter." The Secret of La Salette: "In the Last Days Rome itself will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist."

I am convinced that the general nastiness in the air today is due to the prevalent modern disbelief in Hell. St. Augustine taught that man can be good and repent and avoid sin out of imperfect contrition, that is, an overriding fear of Hell, perfect contrition being when you do good out of goodness sake. Both are acceptable in the eyes of God but the latter is obviously better. Take away the punishment though and many people let themselves go, making fun of the retarded, taking their spouses to the cleaners in nasty divorce battles, getting your rocks off and heading for your friendly neighborhood abortion clinic to clean up the mess, starving your incapacitated relative to death who has become a burden on you and your finances. You can see the "wave of diabolical disorientation" that Sister Lucy of Fatima fame said would sweep over the world during the Latter Times, for instance in this cultural rut we're in, the attitude that we can forgive but not forget and it's all acceptable to Jesus. There is an exquisite pain in the sinner who repents, it disturbs and cleanses at the same time, and yet his pleasure at saying he was wrong becomes unacceptable to others and so he is left demoralized and only the angels in Heaven celebrate. This happens in marriages, in friendships, in relations between men and women. Through a subtle shift in emphasis (it's ok to forgive but still remember) the Devil convinces people that this is really the Gospel of Jesus when in fact it is a diabolic counterfeit and people fall for it. You can also see the deceit in the American Catholic Church's annulment industry where the standard used today is one of "emotional immaturity" and presto chango, you have your annulment and can marry in the Church again and validly receive the sacraments.

The famed Third Secret of Fatima is not the impenetrable mystery of the ages that many would have you believe. On Oct. 13, 1963 the German newspaper "Neues Europa" published a diplomatic version that was read by Kennedy, Kruschev and British PM MacMillan that led to the signing of a historic nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, head of the Holy Office (now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), when asked about its veracity said "publish 10,000 copies, publish 20,000 copies, publish 30,000 copies." Compare the last part of the Secret of La Salette ("Rome will lose the Faith ...) with the elements and language of Neues Europa and you have your Third Secret that has been buried in the Vatican archives ever since.On the Right