I wish I could write that the Attorney General nominee of the President is a good consensus choice. The record shows that the only consensus in that choice is that of ultra-liberals and dithering cowards. For a man whose priority it will be to uphold the civil rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution, Judge Michael Musakey, the AG nominee, has already shown his true colors in the Dong vs. Slattery case where he as a sitting federal judge opined that there was nothing objectionable about the Communist Chinese practice of limiting family sizes by means of forced abortions carried out on poor women. Even most so-called ‘right to choose’ people find such coercion utterly wrong and contrary to the principles of liberty. No wonder such a bizarre individual is a top campaign adviser to that other ethically bankrupt New Yorker, Rudy Giuliani. Make no mistake about it, Mukasey is a lawyer’s lawyer, with polished credentials catering to his peers in a profession not marked for the sanctity of ethics: this is a man that other Perrier drinking career lawyer-politicians like Orrin Hatch, Joe Biden, and Teddy Kennedy can cozy upto in the thrall of ‘moderation’. While a Mukasey nomination will sail through the Perrier and Gucci infested Judiciary Committee, a Mukasey Justice Department will no longer be a place where Americans and foreigners persecuted on the basis of their religious beliefs will find a helping hand to fight for their rights. I intend to call my Senator, who sits on the Judiciary Committee and is one of the few non-Perrier type regular attorneys in the Senate, and ask him to oppose the Mukasey nomination. Sorry, Mr. President, but Judge Mukasey is the wrong man, for the wrong job, at the wrong time: he is the lawyer for Senator Schumer and Mayor Giuliani. America  needs an Attorney General who is going to be the lawyer for the American people.

---

Now like most other red-blooded heterosexual men, I enjoy looking at beautiful women in revealing outfits and hence would have had no problem with the two young women who were chastised by Southwest Airlines for inappropriate dress. The fact of the matter is, however, that I do not own the airlines. As a private business, Southwest gets to decide what dress code it feels is appropriate for its employees and customers. Fairly a simple matter of private property rights. To those who don’t like the apparent dress code ethics of Southwest airlines, well, fly another airlines! That’s the American way to handle the issue. Some overzealous and overpampered suburban self-centered imbeciles have called Southwest all kinds of uncharitable epithets over this episode. Funny how people forget.

 A better corporate citizen than Southwest Airlines is almost impossible to find in today’s world.

 The only major airlines with a woman President, Southwest’s customer oriented, low cost approach to aviation is a blessing to many passengers. In the wake of September 11, 2001 when all other airlines laid off thousands of employees, cancelled routes, and didn’t even bother to make alternative accommodations for ticket holding passengers, what did big bad Southwest do? Well, that airlines did not lay off a single employee; it sent out refund checks to all the passengers whose flights were canceled; and it kept flying largely empty planes to make sure that some semblance of normalcy remained in our skies. The loss in revenue was immense, but it was the right thing to do, so opined the management of Southwest.

 Don’t these whiny self centered wannabe cry babies have something else to do rather than make silly accusations against one of the most decent companies in America?

The fight goes on. Six years into the war that America didn’t start, America battles on. But only half the battle is against the enemy. The other half of the struggle is being fought at home: a weary public egged on by defeatist liberal Democrats (honorable Democrats like Lieberman of Connecticut and Nelson of Nebraska are exceptions) hungry for power, a rapacious judiciary and legal community that is expropriating the homes and kidnapping the children of deployed servicemen and servicewomen who cannot defend themselves in court, a society that knows more about the wardrobe of Britney Spears than the location al-Anbar province of Iraq. More and more I am convinced that we cannot win the war there, if we lose the struggle here. Once again I pose the question: does a society given to instant grits and instant divorces have the will and fortitude to outlast a ferociously committed enemy?

 

There is a Frenchwoman in New York that I love deeply. Always have, always will. For the sake of that woman with her majestic perch above the Atlantic waves, I pray that we win both the wars: the cultural one here at home, and the physical one against the evil ones. Without victory in both the wars, America will not be the America that generations of freedom loving people around the globe have known.

 

Victory is a must….for there is no other alternative to being the perpetual shining city on the hill for generations to come.

Public enemy number one Osama Bin Laden mocked us this week as being "weak". After hearing what Senator Joe Biden had to say on the Sunday jawbone circuit, I could see what would tempt OBL to make such a remark. For all the world to hear and see, the liberal Democrat from Delaware pre-emptorily declared that whatever General David Petreaus recommends to Congress on Monday was worthless. The general, our military point man in Iraq, was "dead wrong" about military matters, so opined the pin-striped, well coiffed patrician career politician who has never seen an hour of combat in his seventy year life. Yep, what kind of a party thinks that an effiminate career politician who has never fired a shot in battle is more of an authority on military matters than a four star career general?

You got it! It is a party like the Democrats with a  history of appeasement, surrender, and exhibitionist defeatism that makes our enemies question our purpose and our stamina.

Between David Petreaus and Joe Biden, I will pick General Petreaus' trustworthiness over politician Biden's anytime, thank you.

Claremont County, Ohio (about half an hour west of Cinncinnati) prosecutor Don White must be this week's top pro-child abuse prosecutor in America. This blog has long pointed out the active connivance and passive assistance provided to child abusers and molesters by judges and prosecutors who don't want to upset special interest law groups. Well, Don White is another one for sure. He doesn't think that roasting to death a 2 year old child in a a closed car is 'reckless' conduct

http://www.kirotv.com/news/14047414/detail.html

A footballer betting on dog fights goes to jail, a police officer leaving an unattended dog in his car goes to jail, but a wealthy Mercedes SUV driving vice principal goes scot free after roasting her infant to death. How low can we get? This is a person who had been given numeorus warnings about such negligent behavior but deliberately chose to ignore them. Now she has a five year old kid herself and looks after hundreds of other children in her school.

People like prosecutor Don White help make child abuse and child molestation more prevalent in this country. Instead of going after perpetrators, they go out of their way to DEFEND them. Whose side is the law on in Claremont County???? Families in Claremont County, OH should take heed. They have a law enforcement system that actively condones killing children. It may well be one of the most dangerous places for children in America because Don White has put up a sign "Welcome Child Abusers, We Won't Prosecute You".

Newly announced candidate Fred Dalton Thompson  has been taken to task for not being entirely solid on the protection of innocent life. Certainly there seem to be a quirk here and there about his work on that issue. But his record has been consistent. And most important, he has advocated a nuanced position that comes the closest to those of us who are 100 % pro-life but also extremely fond of the integrity of the Constitution. For the record, and this may anger ,and has angered, many of my friends in the pro-life community, I do not at this time support a Constitutional amendment banning abortions; nor do I support a federal law to that effect, and certainly not a pro-life equivalent of Roe v. Wade. The proper solution is to vacate Roe v. Wade and return the issue where such issues of criminal law and medical regulation properly belong: to the states of the Union. Yes, that would mean that states like California and Hawaii will have abortion on demand, paid by tax dollars, till the day of birth (maybe even beyond; I doubt that someone who can kill a child the day before delivery will have too much conscientious objection to doing it the day AFTER delivery). It would also mean that states like Texas and South Dakota will protect most of the children most of the time. A large majority of states, like my own Kansas, will fall somewhere in between, reflecting the overwhelming consensus of the American people on the hard, emotional, and divisive issue. Not a full life solution, but a solution that is consistent with our Constitutional principles and gives people of each state the ability, an ability currently usurped by the federal judiciary, to craft their laws on abortion reflecting the will and the values of their people. If that opportunity is given to the American people, no matter where they live, I believe that someday even Californians and Hawaians will come face to face with their conscience and realize that taking a knife and a vaccum tube to a helpless child is repugnant to every notion of decency that humanity has known. No living being, and certainly no child-animal or human-should be treated with such barbarity.

It is a matter of time before we have an electoral majority which is pro-life. Radical liberals are better off compromising on Roe v. Wade today , because if the reasoning behind Roe is defended too hard, a future pro-life majority on the Supreme Court may very well ban all abortions in America and use the same reasoning that it is a matter for the unelected federal judges to decide. No unelected body group of nine people should have so much power. Wise advocates of abortion on demand can and do see their dilemma. They know the irony of abortion demogragphics: by and large it is liberals who abort and conservatives who give birth, and guess what, the children of liberals tend to be liberals, and those of conservatives tend to be conservatives (no wonder that a liberal news reporter opined that indeed a Supreme Court decision made Bush president over Gore, but the decision was Roe v. Wade which has helped in increasing the electoral votes of Southern states while decreasing that of Northeastern ones). Women are a majority of the electoral population, and they are significantly more pro-life than men; the group that is most pro-abortion-the eighteen to thirty year old males-is also the second least likely to vote. The writing may be in pastel hues, but it is there on the wall. Relying on decreipt old octogenarian male federal judges to protect the so called 'right' to infanticide is ultimately a losing proposition for the radical liberals.

If not in our lifetimes then that of the next generation, abortion will go the way of its predecessor social evil, slavery. So not to worry my friends, we shall not only overturn, but we shall overcome! But with patience, hard work, and steady work within the bounds of the existing Constitution.

This is one of those rare posts where I will continue a discussion from the previous post and take a position that is arguably quite civil libertarian. The case of Kansas State University’s (KSU) Professor Tom Murray, convicted two years ago of the murder of his ex-wife, is quite bothersome. For starters, any Kansan worth her salt will tell you that Douglas County, home of the University of Kansas (KU), is quite a hostile environment for anybody affiliated with archrival K-State. And it is not only the simple sports rivalry in focus here: these are two antithetical cultures. Western Kansas based KSU is a down to earth, practical, no-nonsense land grant school while Douglas County seat Lawrence, the home city of KU, is steeped in the counterculture of the 1960s with pot smoking, municipally recognized gay ‘unions’, and anti-Americanism quite the norm. That a man like Tom Murray-a scholarly, well dressed, well groomed, quiet professor of solid credentials (as opposed to fu fu ‘scholars’ of multiculturalism and gender studies)- would get a fair trial in Lawrence, specially when the alleged victim was a minor icon of counter-culturalism (new age religion, alternative healing, cheating on a spouse etc) is questionable. These facts were brought up to the trial judge who dismissed them out of hand. Two years later, Judge Fairchild (an alumnus of KU) was short listed by ultra-liberal Governor Sebelius for the state Supreme Court. Is it possible that the judge wanted to curry favor with the liberal governor by making sure a ‘favorable’ verdict came out of Murray’s trial?

 

Nor did Judge Fairchild stop prosecutor Angela Wilson (another KU alum) from introducing second- and third hand hearsay evidence. Far and wide in Douglas County it is known that Angela Wilson is one of those agenda-driven radical lawyers who thinks that every man is an abuser and every woman a victim ….not exactly a poster child of seeking justice without fear or favor. Her agenda was pretty clear: a woman died under mysterious circumstances, it must be her current or former husband to blame. That line of reasoning is a throwback to the Jim Crow era when a white victim of crime necessitated a search for some, any for that matter, black man.

 

But the far more grave miscarriage of due process was a lack of evidence. No fingerprints, no DNA match, no murder weapon, no eyewitnesses, no threats, no physical violence in the past of the accused. The majority women jury, drawn from counterculture Lawrence, was not exactly made up of the ‘peers’ of Dr. Murray.

 

The key piece of ‘evidence’ used to convict Dr. Murray was the police testimony that the accused was still upset over the end of his marriage and did not show ‘adequate grief’ when told that his former wife had been killed. Excuse me? Since when do cops, who can barely measure speeding on highways, become experts on quantifying ‘grief’? Granted that in our effeminate ‘pour it all out’ society, masculine reticence is suspect, but still, ‘measuring’ grief? For that matter, how many people truly grieve the death of someone who has betrayed their most solemn trust? I sure won’t be shedding two tears for someone who betrayed my deepest trust; it isn’t natural and it isn’t sincere.

 

Thomas Murray very well maybe guilty of murdering his former wife. But the Douglas County prosecutor did not prove so, at least not in accordance with our deeply cherished Constitutional principles of due process and fair play. That very well may mean that the real killer is still out there enjoying the fruits of Judge Fairchild's bias. The question is, where is the ACLU? Well, not surprisingly, the ACLU is absent for a simple reason: it does not want to offend its radical liberal allies. After all, what is the Bill of Rights amongst friends, huh?

It is one of most sensational homicide trials to go to the Kansas Supreme Court for review this year and scheduled to be heard later this week, as announced by the Court's information office today.  Two parents whose lives are finished and a child left orphaned at a tender age. Such is the fallout of this sad saga. Unfortunately this is a story that, in its various forms, is chillingly common across this great land of equal justice under the law. And were the justice dispensed under that law  truly felt to protect all citizens equally, many, if not all, of these tragedies could have been avoided.

 

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/05/12/48hours/main694835.shtml 

A mild mannered, scholarly, ultra-liberal, feminist English professor was allegedly driven to kill his ex-wife. The only reasonable motive for such out of character brutal behavior is pure animal instinct: the primal instinct in every mammal to fight for its offspring come what may. Whether Dr. Murray is a murderer or not is now to be decided by the august justices of Kansas’ rather biased Supreme Court which has repeatedly denigrated the role of fathers in recent years. But what cannot be denied is that this man was looking suddenly at being torn away from his four year old daughter who was to be taken to California permanently so that his ex-wife could have an easier time dating her new boyfriend in San Diego. At a young impressionable age, this child was to have her real father replaced by someone she didn’t know and someone who well may have been a child molester, as many live in boyfriends are. Her father would not have the right or the ability to protect her or even be in her life. Any cogent observer of family courts will tell you that very few family court judges, even in a supposedly gender-equity-friendly state like Kansas, would have lifted a finger to protect Dr. Murray’s relationship with his child. All they would have cared about was the child support money being sent to the mother and the new boyfriend, a California man who incidentally was the person that the alleged victim was having an affair with prior to the end of her marriage.

 

Whether we like it or not, most men (or at least those who are not starry eyed and soooo madly in love to be abjectly oblivious to reality) do not have confidence in our family bench’s ability or desire to protect their relationship with their children in the event of a divorce. Given that divorce in America (an overwhelming majority filed for no-fault reasons and three out of four initiated by women) is as commonplace as a Big Mac at McDonald’s, this crisis of confidence sometimes has extremely tragic consequences. A cursory look at nature will tell us that the most humble of cornered creatures, in defense of its offspring, will fight irrationally as if there is nothing to lose.

 

Our courts and legislatures should make sure that the millions of divorced fathers in our democracy do not feel like such cornered animals who have nowhere to turn but to their rage in order to protect their relationship with their children. Often enough the very 'other man' who helped break up a child's home is given the child as a reward for such disgusting behavior. The tragic case of Dr. Murray’s family should be a wake up call to lawmakers, judges, and civil society leaders to reflect on a justice system that has lost the confidence of half of those who approach it.

 

The system of justice, whether it be criminal, civil, or family, should reflect our values of fairness, impartiality, and blindness to race, religion, and gender. Unfortunately, as it stands today, the family court in America is less American and far more Middle Eastern in its shoddy dispensation of gender-based ‘justice’.

The wires carried the headline on this Labor Day that a record number of kids, inching at 10 million, were either uninsured or underinsured insofar as health care was concerned. Typical of big government liberals, that is the wrong headline to the problem. The real issue isn't insurance but the fact that millions of kids in the richest country in the world do not have access to what is conceiveably the most modern healthcare system in the world. Insurance is, but a tool to provide for that access.

And why are so many kids not able to get the healthcare they deserve?

Some of it is insurance.  For twenty years congressional Democrats have routinely denied Americans the right to purchase affordable health insurance from other states. For even a longer period of time the same Democrats have blocked the ability of small businesses to pool their resources to buy insurance for their employees.

Some of it is the lack of healthcare professionals being produced by our schools. Whether we like it or not, relatively fewer and fewer high school graduates are capable of or even interested in training as physicians, nurses, lab professionals, and pharmacists. These professions require an intense aptitude in the sciences, devoted study time, and supportive parents....all attributes that not only do most teenagers lack, parents ignore,  and high school counselor don't care. To make things worse, interest groups like AMA and APharmA, for understandably pecuniary reasons, put every obstacle in the way of importing qualified foreign professionals to fill the gap between demand and supply.

Some of it is pure parental negligence and connivance of that treacherous institution called the family court. I know of plenty of households where there are sattelite dishes and flat screen televisions but not enough money to cover the doctor bills for the children. I know of so-called 'blended' families where child support money expressly earmarked for the children's health and welfare is spent on new boyfriends and clothes. Most Americans, even conscientious bureaucrats, are shocked to know that it is perfectly legal to spend child support money on clothes, boyfriends/girlfriends, cars, and everything else. Only eleven states have provisions to require accountability for child support and in every last one of them activist liberal Democrat judges (including here in my state of Kansas) have judicially killed those provisions designed to protect children

Yes, ten million children go without access to healthcare in America today. And the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of left liberals who have used Congress, the courts, and the professional associations to do everything possible to protect liberal special interests at the cost of children's welfare. Nothing to be surprised about. After all these are the same people who want only the rich kids to be able to go to private and parochial schools; these are the same people who allow thousands of children every year to be deliberately placed in homes where they would be vulnerable to abuse by predators; these are the same people who protect organizations that shield those who rape and impregnate minor girls.

Conservatives maybe often oblivious to the plight of poor children. Leftist liberals, on the other hand, are positively vicious about children: children don't have votes, special interests do. So let us not hear that hypocritical whining from the Left about children's healthcare. It is self serving drivel.

The city where I went to college saw the North American convention of one of the more recent immigrant groups this Labor Day weekend. The usual speeches, workshops, fairs, and networking were there. As were the Democrats in force..several members of Congress, local officials, and DNC and state party honchos. They were playing their typical game while Republicans, in this very Republican of states, largely stayed away except for perfunctory addresses by the secretary of state. Once again, Republicans gave a walk over to Democrats..as they have time and again, out of habit and history. The irony is that this immigrant community, like so many from Asia, is full of people custom made for Republicans..except that the Republicans are largely nonchalant and clueless. In the convention hall, full of children of all ages, nary a child was there who came from a broken home nor were there any parents who were not college graduates or small business entrepreneurs. Even the most liberal Democratic members of Congress from California who showed up, spoke of ‘family values’ and entirely avoided their signature rhetoric on gay ‘rights’, abortion on demand, and NEA run schools. These liberal Dems are smart, they know full well that promoting same-sex ‘marriage’ or tax-payer funded infanticide wasn’t gonna get them anywhere with this crowd where education, marriage, children, and hard work are words with substantive meaning.

 

Democrats know how to court immigrants. Republicans, by and large, keep missing the boat, literally and figuratively.

A half way cursory observation of the Democratic candidates and their special interest boosters presents quite a strange picture as to the Left’s stereotypes of women. Without fail they speak of women as if we are in the sixties and seventies: the clichéd  references to the women’s vote always comes with the usual rote emphasis on abortion, socialized medicine, and affirmative action. That issues like national security, tax policy, trade, and business regulation would be important to women is beyond the grasp of most liberals who are quietly stuck in a time warp. Well, times have changed.

 

Women make more than eighty percent of purchasing decisions in a family household, making the price of Chinese imports at Target and Walmart quite important to an average woman. Women are also the fastest growing segment of small business owners (by 2020 more than half of such entrepreneurs will be women) on whom the burden of excessive regulation, minimum wage, and socialized medicine falls disproportionately. Given that even amongst married women, three out of four work outside the home, the impact of high taxes on their ability to provide for their family is pretty high on their agenda.

 

What is not high on the agenda of most average working women is abortion, gay rights, and affirmative action. The core issue of the feminist Left, abortion, is rated no more than a fifth or sixth as a key factor for women, with gay rights and affirmative action even farther behind. And sadly for the out of touch feminists, more women are pro-life than pro-choice, the younger ones even more so than their older sisters and mothers. In fact, as if the irony of the Left’s caricature of “women’s rights” couldn’t be any starker, polls reveal that the strongest support for abortion on demand comes from..get this…men between 18 and 30 years of age (no surprise there for intelligent people). Put it another way, if all the people who couldn’t bear children (all men plus all the women 45 years and above) were taken off the sample, we will have a small but solid pro-life majority.

 

Liberals look at women as a special interest group to be pandered to with a mindset fixed in the 1970s. Were conservatives to reach out with real bread and butter concerns to American women, chances are that the liberal lock on the women’s vote will break in a few election cycles.

Thirty eight years ago today, they pledged to be the other half of each other, to stand faithfully  shoulder to shoulder in good times and bad till death do them part (honorable men and women actually  meant that once upon a time). Well, death is still quite at bay hopefully. And between them they have had good times and bad…and three children each of whom has been through graduate school and earns his own keep, thank you (well, not before bleeding the First National Bank of Mommy/Daddy Inc. dry on tuition dollars).

 

As one of those three kids, I should be grateful for the stroke of luck my siblings and I inherited: we are that small minority in America who didn’t know the bizarre world of stepmothers, half brothers, mother’s boyfriends, ex-step-cousins, custody battles..etc etc etc. I really don’t know how my parents did it though some of it has to be their concept that marriage was more than the mere capstone of youthful love; it was a subsequent duty to each other and their growing family. They would probably laugh off as incredibly bizarre the modern therapist nonsense that an adult should never sacrifice their ‘happiness’ for their child. Equally nonsense to them probably is the most hackneyed therapist line of all “Oh, I love him/her but am no longer in love with him/her” (what on Earth does that line mean anyway???). The idea of ‘match made in heaven’ or ‘soul mates’ will probably sound silly to them too, ‘marriage is hard work boy, not some fairy tale!’. They have loved quietly, they have sacrificed cheerfully, and they have lived the productive lives of unassuming, educated, honorable people who don’t make the news headlines thanks to their plain, decent, hardworking lives. And they continue to do so as they always have.

 

This is to Mom and Dad…Happy Anniversary and many more to come.

 

And if KsReaganite can be half as good a spouse and parent as his parents are, he is one darned successful fella!

It is widely understood that the person nominated to succeed Judge Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General will have to be someone acceptable to a sizeable number of Democrats who now control the Senate and are out for blood. The President's field of choosing is thus limited. Far be it for KsReaganite to suggest a name, but so he shall. For how can too many Democrats oppose a feminist Harvard law professor, Boston Democrat, 1970s civil rights activist, mother of a biracial child, first woman to head the Vatican's Social Science Council, and a lawyer named amongst the top fifty influential women in America? Of course the person I recommend is Professor Mary Ann Glendon whose championship of the underprivileged is writ large throughout her career as a legal eagle and whose scholarship is considered la creme de la creme amongst America's law faculties. Who better to be America's top lawyer heading the federal agency responsible, amongst other things, for protecting our civil rights and liberties? For all her liberalism, Professor Glendon's integrity and scholarship is unquestioned and her advocacy for the protection of the law encompasses all the rights enshrined in our constitution for all of us: life, liberty, and property. She will uphold the law and enforce it without fear, favor, or personal feeling.

 

Some Democrats may still vote against her for she is an observant Roman Catholic. After all, we have seen many times before, there is a heavy-set prejudice amongst certain liberal Democrats against having practising Catholics in high judicial or legal positions. Let us not forget that a majority of Democrats have voted overwhelmingly against every Catholic Supreme Court nominee in the last twenty five years. But I believe most Democrats will heed the wisdom of their Camelot hero and judge not a person by the manner in which she or he invokes the almighty. We can ask no more and America expects no less.

 He came from a family where hard work, real education and the values of the Ten Commandments were honored. His life exemplified die hard loyalty in a society infamous for disposable marriages and disposable friendships.  Without the crutch of affirmative action, this child of impoverished Mexican immigrants went from Rio Grande to the gated mansions of power that were heretofore considered the birthright of whiny pedigreed liberals from the New England. And all throughout he remained a steadfast conservative, true to his flag, true to his Commander in Chief, a scourge of the enemies of his country.

 

In other words, Alberto Gonzalez personified everything which the effeminate bicoastal liberal establishment detests. Yes, they finally got him. That is not the saddest part of the saga though. The proverbial deepest cut came not from known vultures like New York’s Chucky Schumer or Teresa Heinz Kerry’s husband, but from Republican cowards like Arlen Specter and Susan Collins. For a few morsels of New York Times’ kudos, to what depths of disloyalty will some men and women go!