Month: November 2009

Now that the Democrats are fresh in the glow of their victory in the House of Representatives, I am seeing this new meme everywhere, a Philadelphia Inquirer writeup being typical. The headline is “Abortion threatens health bill,” but I think the subtext is to encourage a repeat of the same bait-and-switch tactics that took the…

In a previous post I was discussing the tension between social conservatism and fiscal conservatism in social conservatives. So I of course I needed to see how my congressman Don Manzullo voted on the Stupak-Pitts Amendment which prohibits federal funding of abortion and federal subsidies for insurance coverage of abortion. My Cong. Critter did good.…

I can’t believe it’s been twenty years since the Wall came tumbling down. The Berlin Wall that is. I was born in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, and I remember when the wall went up. I was seven, and it happened at about the same time as Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous shoe banging…

Eric at Classical Values has several posts up on how anti-abortion Republicans greased the way for passage of the health care bill in the House. You can read them at anti-abortion RINOs? Is there such a species? and The best way to keep something out of a government program? No program! and Federal crackdown leads…

To the anti-abortion lobby, Congressman Bart Stupak is a hero right now. But to those who oppose government health care, he’s anything but a hero, because his anti-abortion amendment is what saved the day for the Pelosi bill. While at least one anti-abortion conservative blogger warned that Stupak (a supporter of government health care) was…

With the House hurdle out of the way, government health care has inched closer to being a reality than ever before. Hopefully, it will be stopped in the Senate, if the Republicans there don’t make the same mistake they made in the House and help facilitate its passage by “sweetener” amendments. As I explained in…

Senator Joe Lieberman has a few questions about the Fort Hood attack. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s call for the investigation came as word surfaced that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan apparently attended the same Virginia mosque as two Sept. 11 hijackers in 2001, at a time when a radical imam preached there. Whether Hasan, an Army psychiatrist,…

As I’ve said before, abortion is not “my” issue. I don’t discuss it much, perhaps because I don’t like getting into the usual hopeless, useless arguments which persuade no one and mainly inflame passions. More than almost any issue, discussion of the abortion issue is limited mainly to pro-abortion and anti-abortion activists and single issue…

When Barack Obama was campaigning against Hillary Clinton, he repeatedly promised that his health insurance plan would not be compulsory, and stated that this was one of the important differences between him and Hillary Clinton. “Watch the whole video for Obama’s impassioned criticisms of plans which mandate that people purchase health insurance under threat of…

A crawler team wins $900,000. As I recall, braided carbon nanutube cables may be strong enough to make the idea work. A space elevator is a game-changer because it makes putting things in orbit an order of magnitude cheaper. That would mean we could think seriously about manned exploration of the Solar System or a…

Yes, this attack was a case of Muslim extremism: A former classmate has said Hasan was a “vociferous opponent of the war” and “viewed the war against terror” as a “war against Islam.” Dr. Val Finnell, who attended a master’s in public health program in 2007-2008 at Uniformed Services University with Hasan, said he told…

Anyone remember the good old days when the political world was divided into wingnuts and moonbats? Whether it was a more civil world, at least it was a cleaner one. Nowadays, to get their point across, political ideologues increasingly resort to sexualized insults — the raunchier the better! At the highest levels of government, Tea…

Eric and I have been having some fun with human logic over at Classical Values. I started it with Defeating Libertarian Logic and then Eric chimed in with No Man Can? So I have been getting all logical with my anti-abortion friends. Well I don’t like it either. I just don’t think it is a…

I loved M. Simon’s quotation from Emerson. So much so that despite Emerson’s warning against quotes — a quote infamously violated by William Safire — I wanted to quote the rest of the paragraph . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a…

You have met them. Those oh so logical Libertarians where every acceptable thought has to be a verified part of a system. They have to tie themselves in logical knots to come to the proper logical conclusion. Ralph has a few words about that. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by…

Yes indeed. A female police officer, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, put an end to jihadi Nidal Malik Hasan’s murderous rampage at Fort Hood. A female civilian police officer is being hailed as a hero in the aftermath of a gunman’s rampage at Fort Hood — an outbreak of violence that the officer is credited with ending…

Libertarian Republican has some excellent news for Constitutional Republicans. You know, small government, low spending. I’m just going to give short excerpts. Follow the links for details. Republicans sweep Westchester County, New York on Anti-Tax message Voters ousted Democratic supervisors in Yorktown and Lewisboro and elected GOP majorities in both towns, as they did in…

This is in honor of the fallen at Fort Hood and for the wounded who will need our ongoing help. Here is one way to help: Project Valour-IT helps provide voice-controlled/adaptive laptop computers and other technology to support Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand wounds and other severe injuries. Items supplied include: #…

From Veeshir (who has left so many helpful comments here that I treat an email from him like a homework assignment), my attention was directed to a perfect — perfectly dreadful that is — example of the contempt some of our highest elected officials have for the Constitution: James O’Connor, Burris’s communications director, later told…

So, the true 10-year cost of Obamacare is… $1.8 trillion. A trillion in new taxes, $800B in new deficit spending (oh, excuse me, I mean “imaginary Medicare cuts that will never happen”). And the next ten years are going to be even worse. It’s like 1938 all over again…