That the Hillarites are woefully and increasing clueless with the America beyond the Starbucks laced strip malls is fairly obvious again with the cavalier ignorance (or is it arrogance?) that Congressional Democrats showed NASCAR fans this past weekend. In a memo to staff members who were to visit the North Carolina NASCAR races for some research, the Democratic leadership asked their aides to be vaccinated and immunized prior to going to these events. You would think they were being sent to some sub-Saharan African country with communicable diseases! But then, liberal Democrats do think that way about the values, mores, pastimes, and hobbies of those who work hard, go to church, and hold their culture dear. Let us face it, limousine liberal Democrats have nothing but contempt for the large swathes of people in America who shop at Walmart, worship on Sundays, and go to NASCAR events.

 

Little surprise then, as many latter day Schwarzenegger-Giuliani Republicans forget, that it is these culturally aware NASCAR fans who formed the core of the Reagan Democrat coalition in the 1980s. Without an appeal to their bedrock values-faith, family, God, guns, and NASCAR-Republicans may win puny Connecticut and Vermont again, but will surely lose the Carolinas and Cajun country.

 

Bottomline is this: Republicans will have a tough time winning elections without the RINOs of New Jersey and Connecticut but Republicans will find it impossible to win without the NASCAR going Reagan Democrats of the South and the industrial Midwest. Prudence should dictate our choices.

Frankly, I was expecting former Vice President and perennial presidential candidate Albert Gore, Jr. (Algore to us old Clinton era College Republicans) to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics- rather than Peace- for his ‘invention’ of the internet. Well, I guess it is hard to dupe even the Scandinavians about a claim like that.

 

But these Swedes and Norwegians are a largely dupable lot. Take the Nobel Peace Prize for example where Algore is not the only recipient to raise astonishment. The former Vice President and the later murderer Yasir Arafat, we are to surmise, belong on the same plane as Mother Teresa who won the prize over ten years ago.  Well, too much socialism and rampant secularism will blind you to a sense of absolute ethics, as is evidently the case with our Nordic friends. Their two subjective Nobel Prizes-those on Peace and Literature-routinely go, with rare exceptions like Mother Teresa, to the most rabid leftists, alarmists, anarchists, and anti-Western publicists.

 

Peace Prize for helping humanity? Mind you this is the same Algore who questions cutting down trees that provide medicines for cancer patients. If a conservative said something like that, he would be called ‘heartless’. When Algore says it, he is a ‘peacemaker’. No wonder, Hillary wants to make the United States more like the socialist, morally bankrupt paradises of Scandinavia.

 

By the way, will Algore be kayaking to Stockholm and staying there in an igloo to save the ‘ecosystem’ he harangues us all about saving? I seriously doubt it. He is, after all, a typical liberal Democrat hypocrite who sent his kids to good private schools but spent a career preventing poor people from having the same choice. There is ‘pro choice’ for you readers.

In a world full of America’s enemies, commonsense would tell us that we should not gratuitously offend our closest friends….and certainly not over a historical interpretation of an event almost a hundred years old. But then we are talking about radical liberal Democrats who run Congress these days. With a dose of abject sentimental stupidity matching the asinine foreign policy of the Carter years, the majority Democrats in the House Foreign Affairs committee, led by its ultra radical chairman Tom Lantos of California, voted yesterday to condemn the so-called Armenian genocide of 1918 and hold Turkey responsible for it. This is the same Turkey that has been our bulwark in Central Asia, an ally whose importance is ranked next only to Israel and England. This is the same Turkey from where our troops in Iraq are supplied a dozen times daily with ammunition, medicine, and intelligence. This is the same Turkey whose young men have bled with us in Korea, Kuwait, and Kosovo. This is the same Turkey whose armed forces, the second largest in NATO, are the mightiest sword of secularism and moderation in the Muslim world.

 

But then these are the same pathetic liberal Democrats who helped remove our ally, the Shah of Iran, in 1979, and welcomed Ayatollah Khomeni as a beacon of democracy in Iran.  The rest, as they say, is history. Except now history repeats itself at a juncture when tens of thousands of American lives are in harm’s way.

 

The only honorable course of action for the Senate is to resoundingly defeat the ignominy that is House Resolution 106 on the Armenian question. This is not the time, if there is ever any, to offend our closest military allies just to placate Los Angeles' ethnic political bosses.

As if it wasn’t enough for class warfare Democrats to go protectionist on us, now we have the GOP’s mighty turboprop twins Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo dancing to the same silly tune. Ah the glory days, they bemuse, when a lad of nineteen fresh out of high school would go to work in the local plant, makes tons of money, marry his school sweetheart who would stay home and raise kids, and retire comfortably with a home, a boat, and a truck. Depending on which turbo twin you ask, it is the Chinese (Hunter) or the Mexicans (Tancredo) who stole that American dream.

 

Pandering to our worst fears and appealing to their own non-existent cranial economic faculties, Messers Hunter and Tancredo demonstrate the other ugly armpit of the Republican Party (Rudy Giuliani, of whom I wrote in the previous entry, is the first armpit).

 

The facts are quite contrary to what the turbo twins portray. More Americans than ever before make their living directly as a result of foreign trade and investment and anyone who doubts it can quickly take a tour of cities and towns across the South where entire communities have entered the middle class thanks to Toyota and Nissan. Thanks to cheap Chinese and other Asian imports, luxury household goods once affordable only to the Bel Aire crowd are now purchased by regular Americans who shop every weekend at Target and Walmart.

 

Yes, there is pain in the rapidly dysfunctional industrial belt of the north. But the culprit is not Toyota or free trade. Rather, the responsibility for such frustration lies squarely on the doorsteps of those who have championed failing schools where football and cheerleading was emphasized over math and science. Such indulgent mediocrity could get us by with a comfortable middle class lifestyle back then when the Indians, the Japanese, and the Chinese weren’t going to schools or building factories. Those days are past.  They work harder, they complain less, they do with little, and their schools, as poor as they are, churn out nerds who can communicate, compute, and rig computers and industrial machines faster than their stateside counterparts can gossip over the latest pictures of Brittney Spears. Xenophobic imbeciles like Hunter and Tancredo would build a wall to protect entrenched mediocrity while sacrificing the livelihoods and purchasing power of millions of American families who depend on vibrant trade and investment to live the American dream.  

 

Fixing the economic malaise in the rust belt is a cultural issue more than an economic one. Failing schools, indulgent teenagers, and vanishing nuclear families create a dysfunctional society that cannot be artificially protected from competitors whose economic might is complemented by their social vibrancy.  The good fight has to be fought not at the customs posts on the borders but in the school boards, courthouses, and legislatures of America’s industrial heartland.

The question, a very fond one of the Washington pundits and the nationwide chattering class, becomes this: can post-1980 Republicans nominate a Presidential candidate who does not endorse the right to life of all innocent Americans? The answer, to put simply, is yes. There is, however, a caveat to that ‘yes’.  A self-declared ‘pro choice’ candidate can indeed win the nomination provided he is able to assure the party faithful that his views will not trump the principles of the Constitution. It is a path Rudy Giuliani has attempted several times to negotiate but has come up short so far. All Hizzonner has to do is to be crisp and clear (understandably that is a trait not exactly found in abundance either  amongst New Yorkers or amongst lawyers) with the conservative base of the party and say: Listen, I am  ‘pro choice’, but that is my personal opinion. This is a very controversial, very emotional, and very divisive matter that should be decided by the electec representatives in each state. I will appoint judges who will take and keep the three branches of the federal government entirely out of this business.

 

Unfortunately, Rudy has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity when it comes to reassuring conservatives about his bonafides. I suspect that is because the former NYC mayor, like so many other self proclaimed ‘moderate’ Republicans, are largely ignorant of the roots and history of the Republican party. In their desire to be condescending to what they dismiss as ‘single issue’ voters, these liberal Republicans forget that the GOP was founded in the 1850s  on the basis of a single issue: slavery. Not unlike today, the polite establishment then also considered it proper to be ‘pro choice’ on slavery arguing, to paraphrase a Republican ‘moderate’ of those times, that “if you particularly dislike slavery, don’t own slaves”.. The rest is, as we say, history. The kernel of the much derided ‘single issue’ was the same: in a civilized society like ours, can some people (Southern Whites or Northeastern young adult males), aided by an imperial and unelected judiciary, deny fundamental personhood to some other people (blacks or unborn children)?

 

Republicans have usually answered ‘no’ to that question since 1854. The mayor of Gotham is banking on the answer being a ‘maybe’ in 2008.

For the last week KsReaganite was away on work and then had the pleasure of spending a long Columbus day weekend with his siblings on the East Coast (yep..I have siblings, no half siblings no step siblings...none of that modern day consequence of the Great American Divorce Culture).
Salute to President Bush for having the courage and perpicacity to veto the SCHIP expansion. I am a fan of the SCHIP program and have referred families in need to take advantage of the same. What the slimy liberal Democrats wanted to do in the name of 'expansion of SCHIP' was to get the taxpayers to cover the medical bills for children whose parents make 70,000 dollars a year. That is an unconscionable waste of taxpayer money on the upper middle class. If parents who make 70,000 a year cannot afford heathcare for their children, there is a serious case of child neglect and some no-holds-barred-shopping sprees ar Nieman Marcus and Nordstrom going on....and such neglect ought to be prosecuted. What it should not become is a Trojan Horse for the long rebuffed Democrats to create socialized medicine through the backdoor. Democrats have long been sleazy enough to use children to advance their radical agenda; one wishes there were more Republicans who had manly guts enough to stand up to the Hillary Hordes in Congress. Unfortunately, one of the bigger casualties of the Iraq Liberation War has been the testicular fortitude of Republicans.
Let's hope and pray that there is enough such fortitude left in enough Republicans in Congress to sustain the veto over the loud commercials of the labor mob, the Soros anti-America crowd, and the Moveon.org radicals. Or else, we have but only several years to go before the rest of our healthcare choices are determined by the Washington DC bureaucrats put in charge by Hillary Clinton and her sycophants.

Finally the Bush Administration and even the clueless Democrat controlled Congress is taking notice of one of the least noticed military juntas in the world: the almost fifteen year old military regime in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Secretive, brutal, and thriving on trading rubies and timbers with multinational companies, the regime has largely escaped attention until the peaceful protests of the monks and nuns last week. The sanctions imposed on the Myanmar junta are overdue. Myanmar's larger neighbors, India and China, have quietly assisted the junta in its exposure to the outside world and traded with its bloody hands. Money talks. Hence, most of Myanmar's refugees, driven out of their ancestral homes because of ethnic chauvinism or plain greed of land and timber, have found refuge in neighboring Bangladesh, a poor country on its own. Unlike the centers of attention that India, China, or even Pakistan (with her ertswhile Afhgan refugees), Bangladesh has struggled to get any international attention about the refugee problem created by Myanmar's bloodthirsty generals. That is sad considering that Bangladesh has been a faithful ally of the democratic world going back to the first Iraq war while both India and China have been, well, quite shallow in their preferences (both were major trading partners of Saddam Hussein).

It is time to bring the last secretive military regime in Asia to accountability. Myanmar has to come to light and her generals held to account. To paraphrase Cato the Elder, Yangon (Myanmar's capital, the former Rangoon) has to be squeezed till the pips squeak.

One the greater political myths of the last twenty years, often selfishly promoted by the mainstream media and bought readily by naïve conservatives, is that the Republican Party is the “conservative” party. Surely the top flight news of the past twenty months have convinced many to rethink that kind of naivete: any number of GOP members of Congress engaged in deviant sexual conduct, another dozen or so enmeshed in fiscal improprieties, and almost all of them spending taxpayer money like drunken sailors at a Manila brothel. And then of course there is the apparent national leader of the party, Rudy Giuliani, a man who never married a woman he didn’t cheat on, who never saw a gun he didn’t want to confiscate, who never saw a public dime he didn’t want to spend, and who never saw an abortion that he didn’t want the taxpayer to fund. Heck, most Democrats in half the states are far more conservative than the former mayor of Gotham.

The GOP has never been the conservative party. At most, it has been the party where conservatives had a voice, and that too only since the Reagan presidency when the iron clad grip of Northeastern liberals on the party apparatus was loosened (though by no means broken). The difference between the GOP and the Democrats has been only that the Republican big tent allowed conservatives and liberals both to co-exist while the Democrats never had any place for even the moderate liberals of their own party. Let us not forget how, as late as 1996, governors Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Don Schaffer of Maryland were treated by their own  national Democratic party: two popular liberal governors of major states forcibly removed from the Democratic National Convention because their views on a couple of issues were moderate. That kind of third world thuggery would have never happened in the Republican Party and, had it happened, the media would be all over it instead of ignoring the shameful episode.

With the Republicans in disarray and latent liberalism amongst the Northeastern GOP rearing its head in these troubled waters, conservatives have to ask if they should engage the Democrats just as they did the Republicans starting the 1980s. While by and far the national Democratic Party has been hostile to conservative values, there are small signs of more tolerance at the state level in some places. With good organization, a committed turnout at precinct meetings, and patience, conservatives well may be able to find a seat at the table in the other major party. It is perhaps only proper and practical to do so in a two-party system. Here, the NRA is a good model in that the gun rights organization, though traditionally allied to the Republicans, has had a strong presence amongst the Democrats in many Southern and Western states. Similarly, though on a much smaller scale, the prolife community has had significant success being accepted as a stakeholder in the Democratic politics of South Dakota, Louisiana, and Mississippi (in fact the Democratic state platform in Mississippi affirms the inalienable civil rights of all Americans, including the unborn).

Bottomline, it is not prudent for conservatives to refuse to engage the other major party in the country. Specially not in these days of GOP turmoil.

 

It is not a nuisance but a huge debilitating factor to our culture: two out of five first marriages end in divorce. More than sixty percent of these divorces involve children of the couple headed to Splitsville. In raw numbers that means that one of every four first time marriages in America will have divorce-related custody battles at some point. Sadly, the end result of this is the innocent child losing a parent (no, twice a month ‘visitors’ are not exactly parenting) and often ending up as victim of abuse by predator males who now have a target child unprotected by its father. Whether we like it or not, the number one source for child abuse is stepfather or some other unrelated male sexual partner of the child’s mother.

Willy nilly divorce is bad but no child should pay for the consequences. It is doubly disgusting to note that the consequences a child suffers because of horrendous divorce and custody laws is actually the principal source of livelihood and career enhancement for ‘family’ lawyers, ‘family’ court judges, and ‘family’ therapists. Isn’t it amazing that in our version of English (where are you ‘English only’ Tom Tancredo), ‘family’ actually means ‘anti-family’?

The solution mostly lies with individuals making choices of marriage partners after due diligence rather than a simple ‘oooh I am soooo in love’. But from a legal standpoint, divorce laws should reflect equity and the best interest of children. At the onset of proceedings the baseline ought to be a rebuttable presumption of joint physical custody by both parents should either one so desire. The presumption should be rebuttable in cases where domestic violence, drug/alcohol abuse, and prison eligible felonies are in the picture. Furthermore, there should be some sort of accountability for child support being spend on, well, the child it was intended for. In the case of relocation, the interest of the child to have an equitable, enduring, and meaningful relationship with both parents should be paramount, and the interest of the relocating parent or the relocating parent’s newest sex partner should be far down the line of priorities.

On a different note, I will point out that there are apparently some judges around on the family bench who truly have the child’s interests at heart and cannot be cowered by money, sleazy tax payer funded  lawyers, and corrupt bureaucrats as the following story shows. Now here is a lady in judicial robes who has more testicular fortitude than all the male judges combined in most of the state family benches.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/09/27/cuban.custody.ap/index.html?eref=yahoo

The newest URL link from my blog (on the lower right panel) is to the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a Washington D.C. think tank headed by my friend and former CNN and US News journalist Steven Emerson. Long before fighting terror was a popular phrase, Steve and his IPT were keeping a watch on shady outfits with K-Street addresses and creating copious databases on these groups, their pronouncements, their financing, and their terror-related links. It is well said, that had the powers that be listened closely to where IPT was pointing and taken Steve’s warning seriously, we may have been able to avoid what happened that September six years ago. Thus it is not a surprise that former FBI counter-terror chief Richard Clarke called Mr. Emerson the “Paul Revere of this new War on Terror”, noting that the IPT had amassed far more detailed and in-depth information than the feds on the US presence of  terror-friendly groups like the PIJ, IAP, HLF, and others. It may be mentioned here that HLF, under federal indictment now, is being prosecuted in a Texas trial as we speak.

 

Today, the fight continues. Emerson is a regular analyst on Fox News and MSNBC, dissecting for the public the latent and not-so-latent threats that terror poses to our way of life. His IPT colleagues are also often on the air, in print, and in front of Congressional panels, helping policymakers understand the nuances of those who wish us harm.

 

So click the link, take a tour, and be happy that the IPT leads the information war on terrorism. Oh yes, if you have rich friends or sugar daddies, get them to contribute to IPT: it is an organization run entirely on private donations which can be tax deductible!

Unlike many other conservatives, I am quite alright with the singularly ill-attired Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinijad speaking at Columbia University. Petty tyrants and fear should not make us weak enough to doubt our own principles of free speech and robust debate. What does bother me, however, is the bizarre placing of priorities by the liberal apparatchiks of Columbia. The same free speech that Columbia President Lee Bollinger claims for Ahmedinijad, he denies to the ROTC which has been banned from that august campus for almost twenty years. Why do doctrinaire liberals hate the military so much that they will not allow it to speak to potential recruits on campus?

 

Be as it may, let us speak of the future. Since President Ahmedinijad claimed to want to speak directly to the American people through the forum at Columbia, is he man enough to reciprocate to our President in kind? Say, how about inviting President Bush to address the Iranian people directly through a live, uninterrupted, unjammed broadcast?

Sometimes ago I shared the antics of  of Don White, the county attorney of Claremont County, Ohio, who is a huge blessing to those who kill and molest children. Well, my friends, Don White has a kindred neighboring soul in Brad Foulk, the prosecutor in Erie County, Pennsylvania. On Friday, Mr. Foulk decided not to charge with homicide a star athlete who calmly gave birth to her child, put the newborn in a trash bag to suffocate, and took a lesisurely shower while the baby had its life sniffed out. Of course, the usual chorus of child abuse defenders are out in force defending the murderer Terri Rhodes for being the victim of anything from mental instability to Catholic education. But the facts are stark: Ms. Rhodes is a scholarship athlete from an upper middle class family who has no record of drugs or past abuse (as if that excused murder). Her defenders are probably arguing that the 'poor' woman should have gone to my former neighbor 'doctor' George Tiller I suppose and gotten an abortion the day before...after all it is legal to kill a child a few hours before delivery so Ms Rhodes probably assumed ' hey, no harm killing it a few hours after delivery either'. I mean what difference does a few hours make, right?
Shame on you Brad Foulk. A child is brutally murdered and asks you to seek justice on its behalf..and you are too chicken to upset your campaign donors like liberal Republican Arlen Specter and the bar association. As I have maintained, children don't have votes and campaign contributions; radical liberal Democrats and sleazy liberal Republicans do. Brad Foulk is ambitious; he is the liberal Republican who wants to use the tiny bodies of murdered children to get to a New York Times endorsement for a GOP nomination for higher office.

The caucus of professional race baiting whiners in Congress, led by Maxine Waters, William Jefferson, and Jesse Jackson Jr. , have decided to weigh in on the Jena Six controversy. Paying obeisance to their millionaire poverty broker mentors, the adulterous ‘reverends’ Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. These little whiny members of our august national legislature plan to subpoena the district attorney of an obscure Louisiana parish (county) to comment on the racial aspects of prosecution and justice in that county. Good golly, is that what the subpoena and oversight power of Congress is for?

 

Now I am the first one to admit that justice as dispensed by the various courts in America is often not blind. State criminal courts in many parts of the country continue to harsher in the prosecution of blacks and Hispanics than of whites and Asians. Federal prosecution launched at the Justice Department level is often done under undue pressure from Washington liberal interest groups and tends to overwhelmingly target white collar suspects who are overwhelmingly caucasian.  So called family courts of the states, of course, use the American version of MiddleEastern sharia law in egregiously, blatantly, and openly favoring women over men and children.

 

If these members of Congress really want to expose and correct the structural biases in the courts, why not take a look at the entire edifice, rather than picking and choosing? Well, probably because a wider inquiry will make their powerful friends in the bar associations, NOW, and New York Times quite uncomfortable.

 

All this hubbub about the security firm in Iraq brings up a rather sad point: waste of taxpayer money by the bundles by self-absorbed bureaucrats in cahoots with their ex-colleagues who are contractors for the federal government. Why on earth would American Embassies need a private security firm to guard them and their employees when not only the State Department has its own fairly large security and intelligence force,  but the United States Marines are traditionally seconded to US diplomatic security duties around the world? Even more bizarre, there are rent-a-cops ‘protecting’ the American armed forces at their bases overseas. Now pardon me if I am wrong, but if the Marines and soldiers cannot defend themselves, why do we have an Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines anyway??

Truth be told, I suspect, our servicemen are quite capable of defending themselves and the State Department’s internal security arm is quite adept at securing our consulates abroad. But some top civil servant at the Pentagon and State, in cahoots with a bunch of over made-up staffers on key Congressional committees, probably have some friends and constituents to provide employment to and thus this plethora of private security firms operating in Iraq and elsewhere. Not to mention, in exchange for such lucrative and useless contracts, these civil servants and staffers will get a cushy consultancy job upon exit from the padded government payroll. The concept here is the same as the Justice Department, all ten thousand lawyers there, hiring outside lawyers on ‘contract’ for ‘specialized’ help. Or that Congress has legions of  staffers known as drafters and revisers for bills though you would think that drafting and revising laws is the task of, er, Congressmen and Congresswomen.

What a bloody waste of public money!

That indomitable spirit of the English speaking peoples is still alive, at least amongst some. Last week, in the sand dunes of southern Iraq, in the middle of a war, our English and Australian allies calmly played a cricket match with all the usual trappings: regulation time and regulation dress, tea break, disputed umpire calls and what not.  Only the English (and their former Commonwealth natives) will do something like that, showing the world that not all the vestiges of civilization are entirely gone, even amidst the horrors of a war that is making cowardly liberals on both sides of the Atlantic turn yellow to their very bone marrows. It is this serenity of purpose, as exemplified with a day long cricket match outside of Basra, that made generations of Scots, Frenchmen, and Germans gape in wonderment at their English-speaking adversary’s serene conservatism in face of a maddening world.

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/ci/content/story/311368.html

Sir Winston Churchill’s three pillars of civilization-cricket, tea, and the Queen’s English- live on to fight another day.

On a side note about allies, it was quite disgusting to watch Bill Maher and two radical liberal Democrat Congresswomen from Illinois show their ignorance and bigotry on television last night as they made fun of our smaller allies. Specifically mentioned were Moldova, Kazakhastan, and Mongolia, countries that have provided a much higher proportion of their soldiers to support us than just about any other ally in the Coalition of the Willing. This is in stark contrast to large ‘allies’ like France, Germany, and Canada whose contribution to the liberation of Iraq has been, well, zero. Cowards rarely understand courage; political cowards almost never do