One thing people always remark about the South is how often Southerners have a sense of hospitality. Rare is it to enter a Southern town and not be greeted with a smile, hello and a friendly, “How are ya!” With that said, R.J. Snell has a wonderful essay on manners today, an essay that is a well thought-out reflection on something so necessary to our public square. As he writes on Robbie George’s blog with the Witherspoon Institute, Public Discourse: (more…)

Ahhh. Obamacare. The gift that keeps on giving. Now we see states increasing the income caps on the people eligible to receive medicaid services, particularly, those involving reproductive health. With sob stories like this one, who could resist such a sanguine policy maneuver:

Ariel Wilberg, a 20-year-old student in Edgerton, Wis., says she enrolled in the program two years ago to cover the cost of her birth-control pills. With a part-time bookstore job that pays $10 an hour, she couldn’t afford to pay for the NuvaRing prescription birth control she now takes. She estimates it would cost her about $300 for the three-month supply she gets at a Planned Parenthood outlet.

“It’s very nice to know that I’m healthy in terms of I don’t have to worry about pregnancy,” she said.

The conclusion is clear: the day she gets pregnant, she’ll have a disease. That’s the warped world the culture of death has wrought.

For some things, you’ve just got to turn to bluegrass.  Who better than Bill Monroe in a solo performance?

All these died in faith. They did not receive what had been promised but saw it and greeted it from afar and acknowledged themselves to be strangers and aliens on earth, for those who speak thus show that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land from which they had come, they would have had opportunity to return.  But now they desire a better homeland, a heavenly one.  Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

This passage from Hebrews was the second reading at Mass today.  It points to our place in this world as what Gabriel Marcel called homo viator, man on the way.  We are pilgrims.

The essential thrust of the modern project has been to overthrow the medieval conception of man and find a way to make us at home in the world through a remaking of man, nature, God, and society.  There have been some great results, certainly, toward the ‘relief of man’s estate’ and not many of us would relinquish indoor plumbing or antibiotics.

There remains, however, a nagging distrust of projects to relieve our sufferings and provide an adequate end for human life within this world.   Prozac comes at a cost to the self; thoughts of the Human Genome Project can trigger acid reflux; and one feels the urge to let the dog loose on well-meaning sociology graduate students conducting community surveys.  The Left promises social justice and a redistribution of wealth; the Right promises equality before the law and the fruits of a free market.

In an Atlanta suburb, a thoroughgoing Republican corporate executive and a progressive Democratic chairman of a non-profit might share a backyard fence where they can debate the merits of global warming legislation, but they share something more:  the creeping despair and nameless anxiety of members of the most prosperous society in human history.

The answers on the right are certainly better, as they are more consistent with human liberty, but the reminder that we are strangers and aliens serves to keep us from becoming ideological.  Conservatism is not an ideology; at its best, it is anti-ideological for the simple reason that ideology is a path to being at home in the world.

“Liberty and homelessness!” should be the rallying cry for Christian conservatives.  The key, as novelist Walker Percy put it, is to find a way to be at home with our homelessness.  Remember the least of these, love those you find on the way, and fight like hell against the encroachments of the state on the one hand and the tendency to commodify what ought never be commodified on the other.

Michael Zak does what all too many on the left fail to do:  crack open some history books and take a real look at the history of the Ku Klux Klan.  Zak correctly notes that when the Klan was at its zenith during the 1920s, it was a terrorist wing of the Democratic party, and that since its inception, Republicans were at the forefront in trying to take it down.

It would have been far more truthful for the congresswoman to have admitted the fact that all those who wore sheets a long time ago lifted them to wear Democratic Party clothing.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan was established by the Democratic Party.  Yes, the Ku Klux Klan murdered thousands of Republicans — African-American and white – in the years following the Civil War.  Yes, the Republican Party and a Republican President, Ulysses Grant, destroyed the KKK with their Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

How did the Ku Klux Klan re-emerge in the 20th century?  For that, the Democratic Party is to blame.

It was a racist Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson, who premiered Birth of a Nation in the White House.  That racist movie was based on a racist book written by one of Wilson’s racist friends from college.  In 1915, the movie spawned the modern-day Klan, with its burning crosses and white sheets.

Inspired by the movie, some Georgia Democrats revived the Klan.  Soon, the Ku Klux Klan again became a powerful force within the Democratic Party.  The KKK so dominated the 1924 Democratic Convention that Republicans, speaking truth to power, called it the Klanbake.  In the 1930s, a Democrat President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, appointed a Klansman, Senator Hugo Black (D-AL), to the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the 1950s, the Klansmen against whom the civil rights movement struggled were Democrats.  The notorious police commissioner Bull Connor, who attacked African-Americans with dogs and clubs and fire hoses, was both a Klansman and the Democratic Party’s National Committeeman for Alabama.  Starting in the 1980s, the Democratic Party elevated a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), to third-in-line for the presidency.

I have one quibble with all this.  It focuses too much on the partisan aspect of the KKK and not enough on its ideological drive.  After all, modern day Democrats could just claim that the Klan represented the conservative wing of the Democratic party.  This would be an error.

While most members of the Klan held what would be termed conservative views on social issues, they were hardly purveyors of Burkean conservative values.  In fact the Klan typified the Progressive/Populist movement to a tee: “conservative” socially but decidedly left-wing economically and politically.  They supported government intrusion into the economy and were backers of the New Deal.  Jesse Walker explains some of the areas of overlap between the Progressive movement and the Klan:

1. Progressivism had roots in the Protestant pietist tradition, and its partisans were frequently interested in reforming individuals as well as institutions. It’s a quick jump from there to the moral authoritarianism described in Charles Alexander’s books. Jane Addams, the Social Gospel activist who played such a big role in passing protective labor regulations and compulsory schooling laws, was also a critic of the “debased form of dramatic art, and a vulgar type of music” that a young person might find in the five-cent theaters, writing that it was “astounding that a city allows thousands of its youth to fill their impressionable minds with these absurdities.” Prohibition, that Klan kause kelebre, reached its height as a cause during the Progressive Era, complete with muckraking exposés of the “whiskey ring” and culminating with the passage of the eighteenth amendment in 1919.

2. Racism also had a foothold among the progressives. It might be tempting to argue that bigots like Woodrow Wilson, who introduced Jim Crow rules to the federal government, were merely progressive in some areas and reactionary in others. But the American eugenics movement was tied closely to the progressives’ drive for “scientific” reform, and its heyday covered both the Progressive Era and the ’20s. Politicians offered eugenic arguments not just for laws that banned miscegenation and allowed authorities to sterilize the allegedly unfit, but for restrictions on immigration from southern and central Europe.

3. The progressives and the Klan shared an interest in mandating public education and eliminating urban political machines. The civic-activist historians tell us that the rank-and-file Klansman’s interest in such reforms was frequently a sincere response to corruption and inadequate schooling, though it’s clear that their urban proposals owed at least something to their fear of immigrants, and that their education proposals were transparantly anti-Catholic. If the Klan’s motives were not purely nativist, then neither were the progressives’ purely benign: Just as the Klansmen sometimes shared the progressives’ hopes, the latter sometimes shared the Klansmen’s fears.

4. In the late 1910s the Klan was a small regional organization. In the early ’20s it was large and national. There’s a number of reasons why it made this leap, but the biggest may be the effects of World War I. This too marked a connection with progressivism.

As the historian William Leuchtenburg and the economist Murray Rothbard have argued, Wilson’s wartime policies were an outgrowth, not a negation, of Progressive Era politics. During the conflict, government planners and “enlightened” corporate leaders replaced a relatively free market with a heavily regimented economy, while intellectuals hoped, in Leuchtenburg’s words, to adopt “the same sort of centralized directing now employed to kill their enemies abroad for the new purpose of reconstructing their own life at home.”

Jonah Goldberg discussed some of the nastier, racist elements of the Progressive movement in Liberal Fascism. Justin Logan also has taken a look at the links between the Klan and Progressives, and there is other literature that touches upon this phenomenon.

Long story short, the Klan were largely comprised of people we would term statists.  This is not to say, of course, that all Progressives were racists or klansman, but the idea that the KKK was some kind of right-wing group is not anywhere near accurate.

Yours truly will be one of the speakers.

A little James Brown in honor of Al “Mr. Stone” Gore.  C’mon baby, release my second chakra!  (Levez-vous!)

When we read the stories from France, England, and Scandinavia about the gradual Islamicization of public space, we have a sense of distance.  But this video from Acts 17 Apologetics demonstrates that many American cities are becoming fronts in this same struggle.

This group planned to distribute English/Arabic copies of the Gospel of John outside an Arab cultural festival in Dearborn, Michigan.  Several members of the group, which includes Muslim converts to Christianity, were arrested last year in a similar endeavor.

Four members of the group–including one with a video camera who was across the street and not distributing the gospels–were arrested and released after processing.

“We did make four arrests for disorderly conduct,” Dearborn Police Chief Ron Haddad said Saturday. “They did cause a stir.” Detroit Free Press

There is no evidence of disorderly conduct in the video, or of any ‘stir’ created by the men’s presence (though there probably would have been).  The police are on the scene in force within three minutes, not to protect the free speech rights of the men, but to remove them from the scene.

According to the Acts 17 spokesman, the evangelists would have had to be five blocks from the festival in order to be free from harassment by the authorities.

The real problem here, of course, is not the actions of the Christians, but the response of the Muslims.   We are willing to stifle the most basic free speech rights in order to protect the sensitivity of others and to maintain ‘public order.’  The problem is those who would disturb the peace, not with those handing out whatever materials.

Do I enjoy collecting tracts (or more ‘progressive’ materials in hipper towns) as I walk down the street?  No.  But the tradition of handing out pamphlets has a long history in this country; in fact, it played a large role in our founding.

HT Powerline, where John writes, “Many people seem to believe that concerns about creeping sharia are exaggerated or misplaced. This incident demonstrates, I think, the contrary.”

David Bentley Hart has been fasting on thin gruel of late, working his way through the books of  the “New Atheism” (Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, et al.).  He published his assessment last year in Atheist Delusions:  The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. Hitchens probably found waterboarding pleasant by comparison.

In the May issue of First Things, Hart revisits the subject of the New Atheists in an examination of 50 Voices of Disbelief. His demolition is brief and devastating, as one might expect.  Occasionally, there are flashes of the Hart’s Byzantine zest–”The insouciance with which, for instance, Daniel Dennett tends to approach such matters is so torpid as to verge on the reptilian”–but one senses his heart isn’t quite in it.

The principal source of my melancholy, however, is my firm conviction that today’s most obstreperous infidels lack the courage, moral intelligence, and thoughtfulness of their forefathers in faithlessness. What I find chiefly offensive about them is not that they are skeptics or atheists; rather, it is that they are not skeptics at all and have purchased their atheism cheaply, with the sort of boorish arrogance that might make a man believe himself a great strategist because his tanks overwhelmed a town of unarmed peasants, or a great lover because he can afford the price of admission to a brothel. So long as one can choose one’s conquests in advance, taking always the paths of least resistance, one can always imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Casanova (and even better: the one without a Waterloo, the other without the clap).

But how long can any soul delight in victories of that sort? And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?

Hart understands that the Church needs great adversaries, that there is such a thing as a noble, informed dissent.

Skepticism and atheism are, at least in their highest manifestations, noble, precious, and even necessary traditions, and even the most fervent of believers should acknowledge that both are often inspired by a profound moral alarm at evil and suffering, at the corruption of religious institutions, at psychological terrorism, at injustices either prompted or abetted by religious doctrines, at arid dogmatisms and inane fideisms, and at worldly power wielded in the name of otherworldly goods. In the best kinds of unbelief, there is something of the moral grandeur of the prophets—a deep and admirable abhorrence of those vicious idolatries that enslave minds and justify our worst cruelties.

An Old Dominion Company has come up with THE modern solution to aging relatives: a portable home pod you can put in your backyard, complete with the latest medical innovations for your elderly relative’s needs. The idea is simple. Nursing and hospice care have become prohibitively expensive. Homes today aren’t designed to really facilitate the needs of elderly. Voila! Rent a pod today to solve all your dilemmas: (more…)

That is the title of an article I just published in the Summer 2010 issue of Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics (vol. 26.2).  (The title, if you have not noticed yet, is from a line in the Bob Dylan song, “Dignity”). Here’s how the article begins (endnotes omitted):

In March 2008, the President’s Council on Bioethics published a volume entitled, Human Dignity and Bioethics.  It consists of essays penned by council members as well as other scholars and practitioners invited to contribute. As one would guess, the idea of human dignity and what it means for bioethics, both in theory and in practice, is the theme that dominates each of the works contributed to this impressive volume. But for those who have been following or participating in the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary world of secular bioethics during the past fifteen or twenty years, the insertion of the idea of “human dignity,” or even the word “dignity,” as the anthropological foundation of bioethics is highly unusual.  Much of the cutting edge literature in bioethics, with few exceptions, tends to employ the language of modern political theory and contemporary analytic political philosophy and jurisprudence. So, for example, one finds in these cutting-edge works discussions about the meaning and implementation of the principles of autonomy, justice, nonmaleficence, and beneficence, as well as calls for the application of these principles to what constitutes physician neutrality, informed consent, and patients’ rights.  This project often goes by the name principlism. There is, of course, much that this project has contributed to the study and practice of bioethics.  For each principle and its application has a long and noble pedigree about which many of us hold a variety of opinions. But what distinguishes principlism from the concept of “human dignity,” and what makes this central concern of the council’s volume so astounding, is that advocates of principlism typically intend for it to be a means by which a physician, ethics committee, nurse practitioner, general counsel, etc., need not delve into the metaphysical question for which “human dignity” is offered as a partial answer, namely, “Who and what are we, and can we know it?”

(more…)

That’s the title of the essay I just published in the Spring 2010 issue of The City, a publication of Houston Baptist University. Here’s how it begins:

One of the many bad habits of the modern mind is its proclivity to answer moral questions with social science answers. So, for example, it is not unusual to hear a political activist assess a policy’s success or failure at confronting the moral problem of out of wedlock teenage fornication by examining whether there are fewer bastards sired and borne by teenyboppers this year compared to last year (or the year before). If the numbers go up, the activist will likely argue that the schools should start distributing prophylactics as well as abortion gift certificates redeemable at your local Planned Parenthood. But just as you don’t erradicate illiteracy by burning all the books, you don’t solve a moral problem by redefining it as exclusively one of unpleasant consequences. After all, a promiscuous teenage girl, who while copulating with the entire high school football team remains prophlyicatically conscientious, does not cease to have a soul that is being formed by her judgments and experiences simply because her body has not exhibited the ordinary physical consequences of recreational sex.

As far as I know, Trojan, with its well-funded and creative research and development team, has yet to develop a metaphysically reliable condom that can protect the soul.

You can read the whole thing here.

(Originally posted on Return To Rome blog)

….Tiger Woods is really Superman!!!! I get it!!! Here’s the Creepy voiceover from the latest Nike Commerical:

And here’s Marlon Bando’s voiceover in the Superman Returns teaser trailer:

Happy Master’s Day!

Another day, another controversy in Virginia. Governor Bob McDonnell has restored April as the month to remember the Confederacy. The left is aghast. And clearly for only one reason: slavery—McDonnell didn’t mention it at all in his proclamation. Confederate history month had been celebrated for a long time up until the last two governors, both Democrats. Slavery aside, I’m not sure why this is such a big deal. If any state gets to claim pride from its Confederate heritage, it should be Virginia. We had the Capital. We produced the big name players. We hosted some of the most memorable battles. It’s hard to imagine simply wiping out a key part of the Commonwealth’s history simply because of slavery. Why can’t Confederate History month be the perfect example of the human condition? Noble aspirations and high principles do often mix with ignoble actions. Defending the South’s right to independence yes, was connected to slavery. But it was also connected to a lot more than that. Perhaps the motivation to suppress Confederate history comes from a misplaced feeling of guilt: losers should never be celebrated and remembered. Or deeper still, it might be about a post-modern sense that we can shape our past to reflect our future as we want it. No need to remember that which is painful or ugly. Regardless, I can’t see a compelling reason why Virginia shouldn’t celebrate its Confederate past.

“There are two aspects of manliness,” Mansfield says. “The first is confidence in what one does, self-assurance. Second, since he is confident in his ability to run his own life, the manly man is independent. This can either make him contemptuous of dependent people, or protective of those who depend on him, like his family. The protectiveness can become political: he gets involved with others and then decides to command or rule them.”

Manliness, says Mansfield, is “an ineradicable quality in males. Its social expression changes–Achilles, the Christian knight, the cowboy, the U.S. Marine–but there has to be a place for it in society. If there isn’t, then manly men will be frustrated and will find some illegal or dangerous outlet: extreme sports, gang wars, violence in movies. Manliness involves taking responsibility for others, as in protectiveness. If no responsible manliness is permitted, it can easily pass into irresponsible manliness–deadbeat fathers, for example.”

Mansfield is also, by the way, the author of a great brief introduction to political philosophy from ISI, The Student’s Guide to Political Theory.

Edit to fix the tense.  Thanks for the heads-up.

Well this manages to pretty neatly encapsulate everything that is wrong with our culture.

“I’m doing this to de-mystify abortion,” she says. “I’m doing this so other women know, ‘Hey, it’s not nearly as terrifying as I had myself worked up thinking it was.’ It’s just not that bad.”

These are the words of Angie Jackson, a blogger and mother of a 4-year-old son. Her IUD birth control failed; she is four weeks pregnant and writing about her abortion on YouTube, her personal blog, and on Twitter under the hashtag #livetweetingabortion.

Last Thursday, Jackson visited a Planned Parenthood where her doctor gave her the first dose of RU-486, the abortion pill. (Note: The abortion pill is not the same as the morning-after pill.) She had to take four more pills — swallowing two and letting two others dissolve in her mouth—on Friday and Saturday.

She hasn’t taken to her various media platforms to show the graphic parts of her abortion. Instead, Jackson is chronicling how her abortion feels physically and emotionally — as she puts it on YouTube, “It’s just not that bad.” It’s almost like guerilla sex ed.

An optimistic part of me thinks that the woman’s callous disregard for human life and the way that she is acting in the public square will actually hurt her cause.  Instead of de-mystifying abortion, she offers an extreme example of self-absorption and selfishness.

Well, that’s what I tell myself to keep from weeping.

By the way, I find the comments of the person blogging about this to be hysterical.

I think it’s brave of her to share something that will make her a bulls-eye for anti-choice activists.

Oh yes, what a brave woman.  She will have to endure the slings and arrows of hundreds of furious blog comments (like this one) that she most likely will never read.  It certainly takes a brave individual to swallow a few pills in order to “do away with a problem” rather than take responsibility for one’s actions.  She’s a real warrior that one.

Foot-in-mouth disease strikes again.

Matthews forgets Obama is black.

We are in a post-racial society blah blah blah.  Have they tried being a non-protected minority?  Protected minorities = African Americans, Hispanics (or is the term Latino, I can’t get it straight), Native American.  Non protected minorities = everything else.   What if you’re Asian and are generally penalized for being “smart”? What if you’re white South African but everyone assumes you’re American “white”?  < < insert post-racial society rant > >  Post-racial – yeah right.

Note 1: I do not mean this offensively towards anyone, white, black or purple.

Note 2: This is not just aimed at Matthews and his idiotic remarks about a president whose race doesn’t matter to me. Generally discussing race in America gets my dander up.

Today is the March for Life, an event I hope to attend at least some of later in the day.  It is also the 37th anniversary of one of the most atrocious Supreme Court decisions ever handed down by our Overlords in black, and Red State has a terrific editorial today that is a definite must read on the topic.

It is heartening that we have made some small strides through the years.  Opposition to abortion has increased, and we’re seeing some signs that the youth of today are embracing the culture of life.  But we still have far to go, as evidenced by the actions of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Council.

The Montgomery County Council is considering a regulation that would require pro-life pregnancy resource centers to tell new clients that the information they provide is not intended to be medical advice and to turn to other providers before “proceeding on a course of action regarding [her] pregnancy.” The regulation would impose a fine of up to $750 per day for not doing so.

The bill singles out pregnancy resource centers only because of their pro-life mission. If approved, the Montgomery County regulation would impose government-compelled speech on a non-profit organization that does not receive public funding simply because the organization declines to provide or refer for abortion. The regulation does not apply to “family planning” clinics, which the County government funds, or to abortion clinics.

Maryland, which as a colony was a haven for Catholics, is now the state with the fourth highest abortion rate in the country, and had been one of the few states where the rate is increasing.

There is a critical need for offering alternatives to abortion. While the abortion rate declined 9 percent nationally between 2000 and 2005, the abortion rate in Maryland rose 8 percent in the same period. Our state’s abortion rate is now 38 percent higher than the national rate, with more than one-in-four Maryland pregnancies ending in abortion. There were 37,590 abortions performed here in 2005 – about 103 per day.  To even consider targeting centers that help women choose life is unconscionable in light of these tragic statistics, which represent an even more tragic reality.

Though there is growing opposition to this movement, the Montgomery City Council has not a single Republican member.  My wife has written to our Council member, but I fear our pleas will fall on deaf ears.  If you are in or around the Montgomery County area, please write your local representatives to fight this ideologically motivated attack on pregnancy resource centers.  There is more information on how to get involved here.

“Education, after all, is typically described as a core, and possibly the core, state responsibility . . . Homeschooling is now such an entrenched practice, recriminalization is not a viable option in any event.” ~ Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center

Not a “viable option?” Well at least I can rest peacefully tonight knowing that jack-booted thugs won’t be knocking my daughter’s door down any time soon to arrest her for teaching “the state’s children.” (My daughter would want to know where the state was when she was going through those labor pains to deliver “their” children. By the way Professor, the youngest one has something stinky in her diaper – could you lend a hand here?) Professor West thinks that more government regulation of homeschooling is a good idea:

As the political philosopher and homeschool critic Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular review would give the state a way to ensure that the academic content is such as to protect the children’s interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active, autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood, and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways.

Well, gee whiz, that approach certainly has worked wonders in the public schools, hasn’t it? Diverse and more liberal – that’s what this is really all about. Professor West doesn’t like the fact that “the state” is losing the opportunity to indoctrinate OUR children.  Maybe she’s bucking for Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. More here.

This just in…..

Las Vegas cocktail waitress and lingerie model Jamie Jungers – among the women who allegedly had a fling with Tiger Woods – doesn’t feel like she owes an apology to the golfer’s wife, Elin.

“No, I don’t,” Jungers, 26, says on “The Secret Life of Tiger Woods,” a Dateline NBC special airing Friday. “I feel like that’s his– that’s his business. Everybody makes mistakes. This wasn’t something that I did yesterday or a month ago or a year ago. This was years ago. I was younger. And I’m not saying that what I did then was right. But– I’m certainly not gonna say that it was wrong. I believe everything happens for a reason. And– no, I– I don’t– I don’t believe that I owe her apology– an apology. I mean, I– I’m sorry for everything that’s going down. And what may happen to … their kids’ future, you know? But no, I don’t– I don’t believe I owe her an apology. No.”

Every two years, the unwashed LSU faithful crawl out of their brackish swamp and travel to Oxford, MS, bent on defiling our cosmopolitan soil like so many socially-perverse locusts. But we welcome you, that even one of your young might leave with the indelible mark of civility.

As to the game: beware of the man who has singlehandedly redeemed the name “Dexter.” Be sure and wave as he runs past you, because it’s all you can do.

Update: Dexter McCluster also passes.

Arkansas 2 is part of what I call the Jacksonian belt, the swath of counties from southwestern Pennsylvania along the Appalachian chain and extending to Oklahoma and Texas which were largely settled by the Scots-Irish immigrants that streamed into America in the dozen years before the Revolution and their descendants. Their great hero, and the son of Scots-Irish immigrants himself, was Andrew Jackson, the victor of Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans, who set about removing Indians from much of this territory and was the founder of the Democratic party. In 2008 voters in the Jacksonian belt voted heavily against Barack Obama in both the Democratic primaries and the general election, as you can see on these national maps and by clicking on individual states to see the county-by-county returns. This map showing the counties which cast a higher percentage of votes for John McCain in 2008 than for George W. Bush in 2004 is essentially a map of the Jacksonian belt.

If Vic Snyder is in trouble, it’s a good bet that many other Democrats from the Jacksonian belt are too.

Very interesting. My Scots-Irish ancestors are smiling from heaven. More here.

Read Charles Johnson’s essay, “Another Stone Wall: The Claremont Colleges commemorate a gay-rights milestone but forget the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

Reading and seeing almost everyone tiptoeing around the fact that the Ft. Hood shooter was acting out his Muslim beliefs made me think: what if the shooter was a devout Southern Baptist who had vocally opposed the war based on his understanding of the Bible and shouted “in the name of Jesus Christ” before opening fire? Would the MSM and our President be so reserved about attaching significant to those facts?

I highly doubt it.

That would be Rush Limbaugh of course, thwarting his lifelong dream to affiliate somehow not just with professional sports [once upon a time he lackeyed for MLB's Kansas City Royals], but with his true love, the NFL.

For those who came in late, Limbaugh was prepared to pony up some portion of his hard-earned fortune [$20+ million a year] to become a minority owner of the St. Louis Rams.

“Minority.” Therein lies the rub.

Limbaugh hasn’t been gentle on the Black Establishment, especially the corrupt demagogues Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, nor has he been gentle on their fealty to the Democratic Party.

Limbaugh’s a Republican, afterall.

Neither has Limbaugh been particularly kind to the pathologies that are sometimes excused as “African-American culture,” or charitably, the fallout from slavery and Jim Crow. Crime, gangs, broken families, education, employment, whatnot.

Race is America’s Third Rail—to touch on its implications and enduring problems in any meaningful way is social suicide, and that includes African Americans like Bill Cosby, who endured Jim Crow personally in his journey as one of Black America’s first transracial—post-racial—social pioneers.

Cosby, like Jackie Robinson, pierced the ceiling of racial prejudice by overwhelming merit. Cosby was charming, could absorb the flak without firing back, and he was funny. Robinson was charming, could absorb the flak without firing back, and could play the hell out of the game of baseball.

Limbaugh’s funny and charming, and very good at what he does too. See, this isn’t about race, it’s about partisanship. It’s about political power.

The Democratic Party cannot gain or stay in power without retaining 80-90% of the African American vote. That’s just a statistical fact.

Therefore, race-baiting—in this case branding the other “side” as racist—isn’t only convenient, it’s entirely necessary for the Democratic Party and their clients like Jackson and Sharpton and Waters and Lee and the NAACP and MSNBC in these, the early days of the 21st Century.

Just as it was in the 1960s, and has been ever since.

Y’see, after his baseball career was over, Jackie Robinson tried to become a journalist. In 1960, he interviewed both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. According to US government archives

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/jackie-robinson/nixon-draft.html

Robinson viewed Nixon’s civil rights record as more promising than Kennedy’s, especially after meeting with both candidates.

But the fix was in. The political power game, in favor of the Democratic Party. And so

Robinson was pressured into taking an unpaid leave of absence and ending his triweekly column with the liberal New York Post when he publicly endorsed Nixon.

It’s not about race and never was. It’s certainly not about Limbaugh.

Even Jackie Robinson himself had no chance against the machine, and he was no Rush Limbaugh. It’s not about race and never was. It’s about power, pure and naked.

I know I would be if I spun this wildly.

[Deal] Hudson argues that the public option will end up extending federal funding for abortion. He says that the courts will step in even if Congress doesn’t mandate abortion coverage in any such plan. Mind you, the courts have not stepped in to over-rule the Hyde Amendment lo these many years. The federal health insurance coverage that members of Congress enjoy does not include abortion coverage. Federal Medicaid funds do not support abortion. So, why would the federal option, which would be modeled after the insurance that members of Congress get, necessarily end up mandating abortion coverage? Hudson does not say. (more…)

Fried chicken, sweet tea, pecan pie, patriotism – Southern to the core. No body-piercing and no head-banging. And you can actually understand what they’re singing! (Sorry Joel, but I felt compelled to offer an alternative.) The Zac Brown Band

According to MSNBC, the gay community is divided on Obama, as he has given them nothing but promises so far.  Earlier this week there were rumblings about The Powers That Be ending the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy for gays in the military.  At this very moment (I think), people are marching on the Mall in DC in support of gay rights.

I’m curious to know other peoples’ opinions.  I have yet to make my own, for a number of different reasons.  Is the gay community doing the same thing feminism did, where “equal rights” really meant “the same as”?  In more urban/progressive places, are there really levels of discrimination that merit a march on the Mall (the ultimate form of protest)?  Someone once voiced the opinion that feminism was a way for ugly women to feel important about themselves and get laid.  Is all this gay activism a chance for, in a similar manner, legalized licentiousness? That same (gay) person opined that the only people who would benefit from gay marriage is divorce lawyers. Does the right to marriage (complete with white dress and cake topped with cheesy plastic figurines) constitute as a civil right?

Thoughts?