Link Byfield on what progressive parties want

He writes:

But before going further, let’s define “progressivism.”
Quite simply, it’s the assumption that government should get bigger.
This is not how the progressive parties themselves think of it it. They’d say they just want government to become more compassionate, more green, more fair, more feminist, more helpful. But it’s how a very astute retired McMaster political scientist, Janet Azjenstat, defined it in her useful 2003 book “The Once and Future Canadian Democracy.”
Progressivists take it for granted, she explained, that whatever governments are already doing, it is not enough. They must move forward and take and spend more of our money – to register our guns, restrict our speech, protect our self-esteem, choose our television programs, schedule our surgeries, raise our children, plan industrial strategies, eradicate sexism, save the planet, nurture our culture, and address the root causes of crime. And it is never enough. There are always more problems to solve, and it is always government’s responsibility to do it.
Progressivists argue about which specific problems matter most, but they solidly agree on the underlying point – that the primary duty of the state is to solve a never-ending series of problems.

Great video on the U.S. Election

I love this guy. Too bad Barack Obama wasn't sitting under this guy's pastor.

Laughing out loud about Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder

I felt bummed out all day yesterday about the American election, but for some reason, I am light-hearted, even laughing this morning. And what has me laughing out loud is the way Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder have become icons. In the National Post there's a little headline saying Joe is thinking of a country music career in Nashville. Just struck me as funny. Only in America. Then, in the cornucopia of great posts today over at HillBuzz, there's Tito the Builder telling the media off for its pro-Obama bias.

HillBuzz also has video of Joe the Plumber showing up at a Palin rally.

This is happy warrior stuff. It's fun. It's gaining traction. It will be what people remember about this campaign long after it's over.

Also HillBuzz has started playing a card of her own whenever someone plays the race card. Again more laughs. Head on over and enjoy her site, and send a little money so she can go to Ohio this weekend and work with Hillary Democrats to secure a McCain/Palin victory.

And HillBuzz notes that no one is paying much attention to Obama's 30 minute "big brother" like infomercial. Heh heh heh.

Anti-Christian bigotry gets a pass

Ezra Levant is all fired up about new evidence of anti-Christian bigotry on the part of the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

He writes:

Comrade Andreachuk's rationale is a smokescreen, of course. It's made up -- just like the rest of the crap that HRCs publish as "rulings". It's not jurisprudence; it's not coherent; it pretends to adhere to precedent, but it clearly doesn't. It's legal mumbo-jumbo to cover up the bald political fact here: Comrade Andreachuk thinks it's fine to call for the murder of Christians. And this same anti-Christian bigot sentenced Rev. Boissoin to a lifetime of silence about his faith.

Don't get me wrong: I don't think that the filth in Music World should be illegal. I don't think it quite rises to the criminal code standard of hate speech; I don't think it quite meets the test of incitement to murder. But I wonder if, instead of saying "Kill the Christian", it said "Kill the Jews" or "Kill the Blacks" or "Kill the gays". You could imagine Comrade Andreachuk going nuclear. Well, no need to imagine -- just look at what she did to Rev. Boissoin for merely preaching peacefully.

Let's state the obvious. The human rights industry is full of ani-Christian bigots like Comrade Andreachuk. I am unaware of a single non-Christian ever being convicted of a hate speech offense -- certainly none have been at the federal CHRC. But the HRCs pick on Christians like a bully pulling the wings off of flies, roughing up Toronto's Fr. Alphonse de Valk; the Christian Heritage Party; Calgary's Bishop Fred Henry; and, no doubt, a dozen other martyrs who quietly paid off their tormentors with some sort of plea bargain.

There is another bigotry that is increasingly getting a pass, and is extremely worrisome to me. That's misogyny.

We saw it in the treatment of Hillary Clinton during the primaries and we're seeing it in the treatment of Sarah Palin. For example, an effigy of Palin is hanging by a noose in West Hollywood and despite complaints, authorities are treating it like a artistic Halloween display. But of course, instances of Barack Obama effigies are quickly denounced and removed.

Everyone should abhor effigies of black men hanging because of the horribly legacy of lynchings in the American south.

But horrible, horrible things are being done against women all over the world and the Left is silent. And misogyny has become integral to rap lyrics that treat women as bitches and hoes and sexual objects to be denigrated, used and despised.

I think Palin gets a double whammy because she is a Christian and a woman.

All conservatives must read this post by Joseph Ben-Ami

The whole post is at his site. Here's an excerpt:

High spending and high taxes, failing schools, a shortage of doctors and nurses, human rights commissions run amok, family breakdown, the assault on community standards…the list goes on and on. These problems are not isolated from one another. They are symptoms of a government colossus that has become so bloated and so all-powerful that it literally cannot help but interfere in the smallest of decisions that we make on behalf of ourselves and our families, often with disastrous consequences.

Liberal statism is the common foe of both fiscal and social conservatives, as well as traditionalist and libertarian conservatives. Our common goal, therefore, should be to reduce the size of government and restrain its power. Our reasons for wanting to accomplish this may differ, but all are equally valid.

Fiscal conservatives may believe that big government slows economic growth and jeopardizes prosperity; social conservatives may believe that big government undermines family and church; traditionalists might add, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed, that the line separating good and evil runs through the heart of every man, and that power concentrated in any individual or group of individuals is, therefore, an invitation to despotism; libertarians may believe that absent a compelling reason otherwise, the sole arbiter of personal behaviour ought to be the individual.

Regardless of what intellectual path we conservatives travel, the point of intersection for all branches of the conservative movement is a shared commitment to small government. Everything flows from there.

David Horowitz tries to wake Hitchens out of his trance

I have loved reading Christopher Hitchens on the war the West is engaged in. I have loved his moral clarity. But then, I used to love visiting Andrew Sullivan's blog everyday, back when he made some sense. But both of them are supporting Obama and suffering from variations of a derangement disorder. It seems Sullivan contracted Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) over Bush's opposition to gay marriage and since then, Sullivan's mental acuity and rationality has declined markedly. His BDS has morphed into a full-blown case of Palin Derangement Syndrome (PDS).

Well Christopher Hitchens seemed to have an immunity to BDS, but he has contracted an acute case of PDS so severe that he has chucked all his common sense on the war with radical fascist jihadists and endorsed Obama.

David Horowitz has written a wake up plea to Hitchens that is a must read (it was hard to pick an excerpt because it is all so good).

Instead, Hitchens suggests that with Palin “the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister… She is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools….” Well, not exactly. As Hitchens himself explains, she has not advocated imposing Creationism on the schools. She merely wants to “smuggle” the doctrine through the door in “the innocent disguise of ‘teaching the argument.’” Oh. She wants students to be made aware of the discussion over evolution, whereas Hitchens wants the fact that some members of the scientific community believe in Intelligent Design to be suppressed – and this in the name of “knowledge and learning”!

Hitchens is normally able to make the sharpest distinctions, but this ability is strikingly absent from these electoral ruminations. Perhaps his instincts have been blunted by the new company he is keeping among the bigoted hysterics of the political left, to whom distinctions appear as mere distractions from the righteous Path of Truth. “The Republican Party s has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic, and a proud boastful ignoramus,” writes Hitchens, adding that on November 4, those who care for the Constitution and reason will “repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.” The wickedness and stupidity are more aptly reflected in baseless, mean-spirited remarks like this.

Anti-God is not great either, Christopher. While you refuse to cut Governor Palin slack in an election season, look at the gaping latitude you provide to her opponents. Obama’s election (should it come to pass) will not put him a heartbeat away from the presidency but anoint him commander-in-chief. This makes your burden of responsibility that much greater, particularly since as a man of the left you understand exactly who Obama is.

Some years ago, you wrote a memorable book about Bill Clinton called No One Left To Lie To. When you wrote it, you shared many of Clinton’s political agendas but parted ways with him over his moral corruption. Your defection turned on the issue of presidential character. You were repelled by Clinton’s easy ways with the truth. But Obama’s lies make Clinton’s pale by comparison.

Consider that Obama’s closest counselor and spiritual guide over a twenty year period is a racist kook, a Jew-hating, terrorist-loving acolyte of Farrakhan. When confronted with this fact, Obama responded he had no idea who Jeremiah Wright really was. What Clinton lie comes close to that in brazen coolness? Or this one: My name is Barack Hussein Obama; I grew up the son of a Muslim father and went to a Muslim school in an Islamic state, but I wasn’t raised as a Muslim – I’ve always been a Christian. I do not believe being raised as a Muslim should matter. But I believe the lie should.

Keepin' it real, Obama style, according to The Anchoress

She writes:

People are hoping to get the LA Times to release the tape it is holding - is refusing to release in order to protect Obama (can you even believe I’m writing that sentence in America?) - but you know, we don’t really need it to learn who Obama is. His actions speak volumes. For all his dodginess, all his unreleased medical reports, all of his his unreleased transcripts, all his votes of “present” and smooth evasions, Obama has effectively shown us who he is; all that is needed is for the twinkle-dust to be rubbed out from the eyes, to see it.

He’s the guy who lets his auntie live in a slum and tells her to keep silent until after the election, while he’s lecturing Joe the Plumber about “sharing the wealth” and talking at his rallies about the “selfishness” of those who disagree with his policies.

He’s the guy who does not talk to the press anymore, takes no questions, and expects only softballs and agreement.

He’s the guy who spends over half a billion dollars to win an election because he could not keep his word about public funding. He wants to ’share the wealth’ and he wants to talk about ‘fairness’ - but he doesn’t have any moral qualms about outspending his opponent by $518 million, thanks to a dishonorable flip-flop which - it must be said - his GOP opponent did not copy.

He’s a guy who spends half a billion dollars on electioneering while talking about how to help the poor and the downtrodden. Note - he does not share his wealth. Someday he’ll drive past those downtrodden and give them a thumbs up for keeping it real, as they stand in their lines full of “shared” discomfort.

Bill Clinton you gotta love him

Bill Clinton suddenly showed up to undermine, I mean, campaign with Barack Obama in the final days of the campaign. ABC News Jack Tapper reports:

Clinton's explanations of why Obama is qualified were interesting, to say
the least.

"You know what he did?" Clinton said, heralding Obama's reaction
to the financial crisis. "First he took a little heat for not saying much. I
knew what he was doing. He talked to his advisers – he talked to my economic
advisers, he called Hillary. He called me. He called Warren Buffet. He called
all those people, you know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he
said anything he wanted to understand."

Got that?

"If we have not learned anything we have learned that we need a president that wants to understand and who can understand," Clinton said.

Thank heaven the Clintons were there to help Obama understand!"The second thing - and this meant more to me than anything else, and I haven't cleared this with him and he may even be mad at me for saying this so close to the election - but I know what else he said to his economic advisers - he said, 'Tell me what the right thing to do is. What's the right thing for America? Don't tell me what's popular, you tell me what's right, I'll figure it out and sell it.' Clinton's explanations of why Obama is
qualified were interesting, to say the least.

"You know what he did?" Clinton said, heralding Obama's reaction to the financial crisis. "First he took a little heat for not saying much. I knew what he was doing. He talked to his advisers – he talked to my economic advisers, he called Hillary. He called me. He called Warren Buffet. He called all those people, you know why? Because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything he wanted to
understand."

Got that?

"If we have not learned anything we have learned that we need a president that wants to understand and who can understand," Clinton said.

Thank heaven the Clintons were there to help Obama understand!"The second thing - and this meant more to me than anything else, and I haven't cleared this with him and he may even be mad at me for saying this so close to the election - but I know what else he said to his economic advisers - he said, 'Tell me what the right thing to do is. What's the right thing for America? Don't tell me what's popular, you tell me what's right, I'll figure it out and sell it.'

(Hat tip National Review`s Corner)

Lots of good stuff at the Corner this morning

National Review Online`s the Corner is a recommended stop for thoughtful insights about the U.S. election.

John Hood explains why Obama still does not get what it means to be a collectivist redistributionist aka socialist. And it seems that those who believe governments should be the source of social justice and compassion (about two thirds of Canada`s population voted for parties that hold this view) also need this simplified lesson. As Hood`s post, excerpted below shows, we need to develop civil society and intervening institutions so that strong families inculcate virtues, as do churches and other religious institutions, so that people will support charities and other efforts to improve the common good--through their formed consciences and free choice. That is a truly generous society. Hood writes:

Speaking in front of a huge audience at downtown Raleigh rally yesterday,
Barack Obama threw off a humorous line about John McCain's accusation that the
Obama tax plan is redistributionist:

McCain has “called me a socialist for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class,” Obama said. “I don’t know what’s next. By the end of the week he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten.”

Ha ha.

Only, in this passage Obama revealed precisely why he is vulnerable to such charges: he can't seem to tell the difference between a gift and a theft. There is nothing remotely socialistic or communistic about sharing. If you have a toy that someone else wants, you have three choices in a free society. You can offer to trade it for
something you value that is owned by the other. You can give the toy freely, as
a sign of friendship or compassion. Or you can choose to do neither.

Collectivism in all its forms is about taking away your choice. Whether you wish to or not, the government compels you to surrender the toy, which it then redistributes to someone that government officials deem to be a more worthy owner. It won't even be someone you could ever know, in most cases.

Dispatch from Obama country

Ed Whelan captures some of what I am thinking about Obama:

In the abstract, given the long and terrible history of slavery and
institutionalized racism in much of the country, it will be a wonderful and
glorious thing when the citizens of the United States elect our first black
president. For that reason, if I believed that the cases for two competing
presidential candidates—one black, the other white—were reasonably close, I
would eagerly vote for the black candidate. But one point on which ardent
supporters of Barack Obama and I agree is that the cases for Obama and John
McCain are not remotely close. Many of those who think otherwise, I
suspect, just haven’t been paying enough attention.

If Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, his election will be seen as a striking symbol of yet further progress towards respecting the American ideal that “all Men are created equal.” Insofar as our fellow citizens who have endured, and continue to
endure, discrimination and other indignities because of the color of their skin
would take special joy in that symbolic achievement, I would extend them my
genuine congratulations and find some consolation in their joy.

Only consolation, though, for, alas, we do not live in the abstract, and symbols are no substitute for substance.In the abstract, given the long and terrible history of slavery and institutionalized racism in much of the country, it will be a wonderful and glorious thing when the citizens of the United States elect our first black president. For that reason, if I believed that the cases for two competing presidential candidates—one black, the other white—were reasonably close, I would eagerly vote for the black
candidate. But one point on which ardent supporters of Barack Obama and I
agree is that the cases for Obama and John McCain are not remotely close.
Many of those who think otherwise, I suspect, just haven’t been paying enough
attention.

If Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, his election will be seen as a striking symbol of yet further progress towards respecting the American ideal that “all Men are created equal.” Insofar as our fellow citizens who have endured, and continue to endure, discrimination and other indignities because of the color of their skin would take special joy in that symbolic achievement, I would extend them my genuine congratulations and find some consolation in their joy.

Only consolation, though, for, alas, we do not live in the abstract, and symbols are no substitute for substance.

Binky on the Obama

He writes:

~ WHATEVER OBAMA BELIEVES, it’s not classical Christianity. As we’ve noted before, no Christian would permit music, accolades and statements to be made about them that infringe on the turf of divinity. The One? Halo-pictures? If that was me being divinized, I’d rightly fear the flames of eternal punishment for presumption. But so far as I’ve heard, Obama hasn’t called it off, whatever he’s heard of thusfar. Indeed, he seems to have deliberately wrapped himself in religion: healing the planet, change, hope, transformation! That’s why his opponents are given heresy-trials in the media, before their media-executions. It’s ironically fitting for the non-absolutist left to long for an absolute candidate; no secularity, just Obama & anti-Obama. Soon, like the Taliban, there will be trials for any blasphemy and desecration and doubting of The Obama. It’s evil to claim God’s proper praise for oneself.

On the other side, to vote for someone who winks at such popular divination of a political candidate is also a questionable matter. Read Mark Levin’s brilliant The Obama Temptation: and that’s what it is– a fundamental testing of our beliefs and character, and 50% + of the American electorate is flunking the test of “No Other Gods Before Me”. Aside from the usual political post-mortems of elections, this one is a wake-up call to the American Churches. ~

I'm in love with Hill Buzz

I am now a regular visitor to Hill Buzz, a PUMA (party unity my ass) site run by a Hillary Clinton Democrat who, along with others, is working hard for a McCain Palin victory.

There is great stuff at this site.

Go on over and check it out.

Human rights update

Well, a lot has been going on. I don't know where to begin, so I suggest you check out Ezra Levant's and Mark Steyn's sites as well as Free Canuckistan for many updates.

I want to call your attention to how Canada's reputation for civil rights abuses is seen south of the border, and our socialist-style suppression of negative rights is used as an object lesson for what's to come if Obama and his thugs gain power.

Dr. Sanity has a most interesting post with great links that you must read.

She writes:

UPDATE: Jeff Jacoby wonders if Obama intends to stifle his critics when (if) he becomes President. We have seen numerous signs in both the Democratic primary and in the general election that is exactly what he will do (see above for one of his favorite techniques--kill the messenger).

Thus we will have a perfect crossover experiment set up when the messiah reigns. For 8 years the left have been wailing that Bush has stifled their free speech; or that he was imminently going to stifle their free speech and trample on their rights; shred the Constitution; that he was going to impose a theocracy etc. etc. etc. (lace of space restrains me from listing all the accusations hurled at the BusHitler). No evidence to support such accusations has ever materialized, and the sheer number of [unrestrained, unjailed] voices raised in this outcry would seem to detract from their essential point.

I have maintained all along that these accusations are primarily a psychological projection on the part of the left; i.e., that it is they who in their deepest hearts wish to silence all opposition to their agenda--but since they don't want to face that unpleasant little reality about themselves, they outsource it to the other side. I therefore predict that under an Obama adminstration, these leftist hitler-wannabees will feel completely psychologically free to impose their dictates on all of us. They will stifle free speech (and call it "human rights" as they do in the so-called "human rights panels" of our socialist neighbors to the north); they will subvert the U.S. Constitution (and call it "social justice"); they will silence all opposition (and call it "fairness") and so on. We have already seen how a supposedly "post-racial" candidate who is going to "bring us all together" has wonderfully succeeded in advancing his entire campaign on accusations of racism and bigotry; it should not be much of a surprise to discover that the same psychological dynamic will infuse his Administration.

In fact, I predict the greatest suppression of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the history of our country.

The problem with much of the left is that they really do see anyone who disagrees with them as evil, insane or stupid. That cannot conceive of any sane, well-intentioned person not sharing their worldview. That's why their arguments never rise above the ad hominem attack, because they think what they believe is self-evident and only unreasonable, evil people don't see it. Thus there is no need to understand the other person's argument, then use facts and logic to make a better case. That's so old school.

By the way, I'm reading Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals while I also read some Jack Cashill and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which is a must read book.

I can see the allure of Alinksy and why he would be persuasive to the moral relativism crowd. I don't know where the "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" originated, but I would not be surprised to come across that statement in the book. There's also a lot of good practical rather Machiavellian notions about human nature and human responses that maybe we conservatives ought to co-opt when we're stuck in the conservative gulag.

Not that the end justifies the means you know.

Reaction to Obama's anti-Constitution stance

Rush Limbaugh (emphasis mine):

The Constitution is too big an obstacle is what he's saying. This whole discussion of negative versus positive rights can be boiled down to something very simple. What Obama wants to do and his buddies, they want the Constitution to be used to forever require judges to rule as a matter of law for economic and social justice. That's the bottom line. They don't think there are enough rights in the Constitution. They think the Constitution limits the federal government too much. They want the Constitution to have more rights but they can't do that, it's too big a problem to change that so they want the judges to do it for them, just the way they found rights to allow Roe vs. Wade. They want new rights found in the Constitution by judges and they're calling this positive. They're calling all of this positive rights. They're looking at it as expanding constitutional rights for social justice and economic justice, and social and economic justice simply equals redistribution. They want judges to find these rights, since it's too problematic to go argue before the courts all the time because it takes time, the judges are going to get caught up in the Constitution itself.

So he's saying to change the Constitution, we're going to have to get judges appointed that will simply invent law and therefore call it constitutional. That's his idea. And along with that, when he says "One of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change." Let me translate that for you. Yeah, the courts aren't the place to do this redistributive work. The Constitution's usefulness in this regard was limited by the founders. There are all kinds of separation of powers claptrap; this bogs down our mission. The secret of transforming America to my Obama utopia is community organizations and all the hell they can raise, like ACORN. That's the fulcrum of the power we can leverage to remake society, community organizations just raising hell. I mean, the notion that Obama believes the key to his radical agenda is organizations -- the reason he says that, by the way, is 'cause they last. You set up an ACORN, you find a way to get the federal government to fund it and it's there forever.

It's all over his early writings. It's all over his early interviews, and this one, too, from 2001 that we're playing. And it's easy to gloss over these kinds of statements 'cause community organize -- we still make fun of it. We make fun of the fact he was a community organizer, but he's dead serious about it, and that's his foundational building block to change the Constitution from outside, not within. He was doing that. He got hold of ACORN, he aimed it straight at the heart of the American republic. It was the key to voter fraud and the torpedoing of the American economy. Without ACORN, they would have had a much tougher time bringing off this calamity that the subprime mortgage crisis is, because ACORN was out there agitating, which is what community organizations do, everybody, banks, government, politicians, you name it, and they were getting federal money to do it to boot. So if you take ACORN out of this subprime mess, you have less of a subprime mess. I am convinced that ACORN is and has been far more significant and dangerous than we even realize.

Victor Davis Hanson (emphasis mine):

I don't know why Obama's supporters object to the airing of these quotes. His past views, his tax plan, and other spontaneous offerings ("Spread the wealth around") are a fair enough representation of a European socialist view of how to take money from higher wage earners and redistribute it to the less well off, apparently on the twin premises that one's income is really property of the state, and, that the mechanism by which a market compensates people is arbitrary and unfair and in need of 'redistributive change.' This view is shared by former associates like Wright and Ayers, Obama's parents, and almost everyone in his circle in Chicago.

There should be no apologies for such views, since until 2005 (when he was ascended to the Senate and broke off contact with Ayers) they were a proud part of the Obama hope and change agenda.

I was reminded of such a well-worn ideology two years ago recovering from an emergency ruptured appendix operation in a Libyan state-run, universal health-care clinic in Tripoli, where an exasperated doctor lamented to me that the fellow who was mopping the floor beside the bed by fiat made exactly what he did. Perhaps we can bring such an 'redistributive' ideology to Hollywood and the university where a Tim Robbins or Cornell West would make after taxes (or perhaps even before?) exactly what those who cleaned up the set or office did.

Barack Obama on the U.S. Constitution

This is a bombshell. But will anyone outside the blogosphere, though, pay attention? I hope and pray they will before it is too late.






Bill Whittle writes:

This redistribution of wealth, he states, “essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.” It is an administrative task. Not suitable for the courts. More suitable for the chief executive.

Now that’s just garden-variety socialism, which apparently is not a big deal to may voters. So I would appeal to any American who claims to love the Constitution and to revere the Founding Fathers… I will not only appeal to you, I will beg you, as one American citizen to another, to consider this next statement with as much care as you can possibly bring to bear: “And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [it] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

The United States of America — five percent of the world’s population — leads the world economically, militarily, scientifically, and culturally — and by a spectacular margin. Any one of these achievements, taken alone, would be cause for enormous pride. To dominate as we do in all four arenas has no historical precedent. That we have achieved so much in so many areas is due — due entirely — to the structure of our society as outlined in the Constitution of the United States.

The entire purpose of the Constitution was to limit government. That limitation of powers is what has unlocked in America the vast human potential available in any population.

Barack Obama sees that limiting of government not as a lynchpin but rather as a fatal flaw: “…One of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.”

Government data bases used to undermine Joe the Plumber

This is scary business, and augers badly for what America would be like under an Obama administration.

Where are the cries of outrage on the part of those who complained about Bush's NSA snooping on emails and phone calls? Are they only concerned about the rights of potential terrorists and not about the rights of ordinary Americans who ask a question of a political candidate?


Michelle Malkin has more:

You’ll remember that a national media uproar ensued after it was discovered that State Department contractors had snooped through Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain’s passports. (Later, it turned out that the CEO of a company whose employee was involved in Passport-gate was a consultant to the Barack Obama campaign.)

Will the privacy champs come to Joe the Plumber’s defense?

Where are the cries of outrage on the part of those who complained about Bush's NSA snooping on emails and phone calls? Are they only concerned about the rights of potential terrorists and not about the rights of ordinary Americans who ask a question of a political candidate?

"State and local officials are investigating if state and law-enforcement computer systems were illegally accessed when they were tapped for personal information about "Joe the Plumber."

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher became part of the national political lexicon Oct. 15 when Republican presidential candidate John McCain mentioned him frequently during his final debate with Democrat Barack Obama.

The 34-year-old from the Toledo suburb of Holland is held out by McCain as an example of an American who would be harmed by Obama's tax proposals.

Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher's driver's license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate.

Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.

Team Sarah Town Hall livestreaming now

Go to www.teamsarah.org and listen live.

See ya!

Thomas Sowell on Obama

He writes:

If Barack Obama had run as what he has always been, rather than as what he has never been, then we could simply cast our votes based on whether or not we agree with what he has always stood for.

Some people take solace from the fact that Senator Obama has verbally shifted position on some issues, like drilling for oil or gun control, since this is supposed to show that he is “pragmatic” rather than ideological.

But political zig-zags show no such moderation as some seem to assume. Lenin zig-zagged and so did Hitler. Zig-zags may show no more than that someone is playing the public for fools.

Some people who see the fraud in what Obama is saying are amazed that others do not. But Obama knows what con men have long known, that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe. He does that very well.

Stanley Kurtz deserves a Pulitzer prize

...for the work he is doing on Obama's connections to unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, the radical ACORN now being investigated for rampant voter registration fraud, and the present economic crisis. Here's an excerpt of a must-read interview with Hugh Hewitt (emphasis mine):

I think Obama’s ties to radicals have everything to do with this economic crisis. I wrote a piece the other day called O’s Dangerous Pals with the New York Post, all about how ACORN, which Obama was very close to, this radical group of community organizers, used to go around to banks, trying to get them to make high-risk loans to customers with bad credit histories. This is absolutely at the core of why we’re looking at the current financial meltdown. And at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Obama was doling out money to ACORN among other groups. So I don’t think these are separate issues.

HH: Have you seen any pronounced curiosity as to the Ayers-Obama connections among your colleagues in the mainstream media, Stanley Kurtz? Is anyone digging into this issue?

SK: (laughing) I don’t think I’m at liberty to say the detail on this, but there is one organization that might surprise people where I know some reporters are looking into this, but no other. And I, you know, I’ve been asked to go on Fox News a fair number of times, and I’m going to be going on again tomorrow, but I haven’t been asked to go anywhere else except CNN did invite me a few weeks ago to speak, and they taped an interview and they asked me a lot of questions, all very suspicious about whether the Ayers connection was important. I answered them all in great detail, and they ended up not showing any of that on the air.

HH: And in terms of the other news organization that might surprise, do you have any expectation that they will publish this before the election when it might matter?

SK: I think that the reporters I’ve interacted with there want to do it. Whether they’ll be allowed to do it, I really want to wait and see what’s going on. But the mainstream media, it just seems like every four years, it gets worse and worse. I remember back with the rats business, I think it was, in 2000, and then of course the Dan Rather thing in 2004, and now, no one even bothers to argue about this bias thing. It’s just assumed by everyone, I think.

Please read the whole interview, because the patient, scholarly Kurtz, who has done the research to piece together an astounding and alarming puzzle, has much more disturbing evidence in this interview.

Mark Steyn on the Obama reign

Great column by Mark Steyn on what an Obama reign will be like, aka. why the prospect sends chills down my spine and not in a good way.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving "fetuses" of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – i.e., the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex – voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely "present"?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting "present," you can stand down.

Nobody denies that, in promoting himself from "community organizer" to the world's president-designate in nothing flat, he has shown an amazing and impressively ruthless single-mindedness. But the path of personal glory has been, in terms of policy and philosophy, the path of least resistance.

Peggy Noonan thinks a President Obama will be like the dog who chases the car and finally catches it: Now what? I think Obama will be content to be King Barack the Benign, Spreader of Wealth and Healer of Planets. His rise is, in many ways, testament to the persistence of the monarchical urge even in a two-century old republic. So the "Now what?" questions will be answered by others, beginning with the liberal supermajority in Congress. And as he has done all his life he will take the path of least resistance. An Obama administration will pitch America toward EU domestic policy and U.N. foreign policy.

Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a "point of no return," the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

Margaret Wente gets it wrong on Palin

She writes:

"She's a former beauty pageant contestant and a real honey, too," one bedazzled pundit wrote. Another couldn't help noting that she was "exceptionally pretty." A (male) Newsweek writer described her as "a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc." It didn't matter that she'd only been governor for a few months. She was a moose-hunting fertility goddess! It was these men who talked her up and up, and got her on the list, even though she didn't have the résumé. By the time Mr. McCain picked her for vice-president, he'd spent less than three hours in her company. But hey! Rush Limbaugh had called her "a babe."

Conservative pundit William Kristol, the most vigorous Palin-promoter of them all, referred to her on Fox TV as "my heartthrob."

Phew. Can you imagine any man being vetted in such a way? Can you imagine any serious person gushing over any male candidate in those terms? I thought not.

Er, Margaret, have you not seen any of the "thrill up my leg" Obama is the One, the-savior-of-the world coverage? There's a reason why we on the conservative side call him the Obamessiah.

And, you know, femme fatale has nothing to do with the image of Sarah Palin. She's beautiful but not in a femme fatale way, because her inner beauty more than matches the outside packaging. A femme fatale is beautiful on the outside and hell within--that's where the fatale comes from. She lures you to captivity and death. That inner beauty, like that of Mother Theresa, is what makes Palin so powerful, so confident and yes, so lovely.

H/t ProWoman/ProLife

Newsweek reporter watched a lot of porn

What a sad admission. Newsweek's Michael Hastings watched porn every night in his hotel while covering various candidates during the U.S. Presidential election, and fantasized about taking Rudy Giuliani out and writes about it in the new self-absorbed confessional that's become postmodern journalism. These are our betters in the media. This guy needs a lot of prayer. What's even sadder is that he seems to think, and maybe he's right, that his colleagues are all porn devotees, too.

J. Budziszewsksi has it right in the Revenge of the Conscience, that when we no longer have the proper outlets for repentance, confession and reconciliation, our conscience will force us to behave in strange ways, with inappropriate confession being one of them. The last stage in this revenge is seeing evil as good and good as evil.

Join Team Sarah

Are you tired of the focus on Sarah Palin's wardrobe and shoes? On the constant attacks not only on Palin, but on her family? Have you had it with media and campaign misogyny? Are you an educated, well-read conservative woman who is happy that Sarah Palin, a woman who actually lives her principles and loves and celebrates life, even vulnerable human life, is on the Republican ticket in the U.S.?

Then join Team Sarah! Tomorrow they plan a one million woman conference call. I plan to listen in.

More scary Obama footage the MSM will never show you

Gateway Pundit has this:

Founding Bloggers discovered this video of Barack Obama praising fellow New Party socialist Danny Davis at a political rally in Chicago in 2004.
Obama and Davis go way back to their days as New Party candidates:

Founding Bloggers has more on the New Party's socialist values.

Barack Obama started his political career in 1996 in the living room of a domestic terrorist.
Obama began his career as a member of the quasi-Marxist New Party.

Obama is the most liberal member of the US Senate let alone the most radical candidate to ever run for President of the United States.
This man is no moderate.

By the way-- The New Party, ACORN and Project Vote shared the same address in Chicago.

I think markets are tanking all around the world in anticipation of the United States going the way of failed socialist utopias everywhere. But its not just the economy. What if Obama makes good his promise to divert military funding to, as he says, pay everyone a living wage. Then America would be a soft target for China, or heck, even Mexico, to come in and take over.


I'm with Charles Krauthammer who writes:

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?

And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.

The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.

Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.

Gerson's thoughtful and interesting look at Obama

Bush's former top speechwriter has this to say:

This might seem like cynicism, but Obama does not appear to view himself as a lapsed radical. He sees himself as the reconciler of opposites, the seer of merit on both sides, the transcender of stale debates. He is the racial healer who understands racial anger. The peace candidate who prefers a more aggressive war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The outsider who surrounds himself with reassuring establishment figures.

During the presidential debates, Obama reinforced this image as an analyst, not an ideologue -- the University of Chicago professor, not the leftist community organizer. His entire manner douses inflammatory charges of extremism.

So conservatives are left with what might be called the Niebuhrian hope. One of Obama's favorite philosophers is Reinhold Niebuhr (though I imagine Niebuhr's favorite philosopher might have been the same as George W. Bush's). Niebuhr's thought is complex, but he is properly known as the theologian of conflicted humility -- for his belief that human nature is flawed and fallible even, or especially, in the pursuit of good causes. Man, Niebuhr said, is an "ironic creature" because "he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature."

All things being equal, conservatives prefer liberals to be ironic and self-questioning rather than messianic and filled with gleaming-eyed intensity. In Obama's case, this humility might translate into an administration focused on achievable goals, run by seasoned, reasonable professionals (such as Tom Daschle and Dennis Ross), reaching out to Republicans in the new Cabinet and avoiding culture war battles when possible.

But there is a reason we don't generally praise Niebuhrian soldiers, Niebuhrian policemen -- or Niebuhrian presidents. Sometimes events call for courage and clarity, not a sense of irony. And courage may be required to confront a genuinely radical and passionate Democratic Congress.

Read it all. Most interesting.

Beyond a partisan media and blogosphere

It would be very easy to have the blogosphere and the media devolve into partisan spin zones full of propaganda coming from both sides and let the facts be damned.

Dr. Sanity has a most important post this morning on how important it is to realize there is a fundamental philosophical battle going on. She writes:

WE MUST NOT LET THE DEMOCRATS AND THE LEFT GET AWAY WITH THE PREMISE THAT OBJECTIVE REALITY DOES NOT EXIST. WE MUST NOT LET THEM ARGUE THAT ALL TRUTH IS RELATIVE, BUT THEN CLAIM THAT THEY ALONE POSSESS IT EXCLUSIVELY.

The issues that underscore journalistic incuriousity and the distortion of truth are philosophical and thus the battleground must also be on a philosophical level. And it's important to remember that philosophical battles cannot be won unless we go back to fundmental philosophical premises. And that brings me around to the role of our academic institutions--supposedly the repository of our knowledge--in understanding reality and searching for truth.

As it turns out, these institutions are also in thrall to postmodern relativism / nihilism.

And the Right must not succumb to postmodern, nihilistic attempts to merely spin its own truth perception.

Please read her whole blog and the excellent links.

I think one of the reasons why the Left is so quick to engage in ad hominem attacks. There is among them such a group think, and such a self-righteousness as gatekeepers of the truth that truth is relative that they assume anyone who disagrees is false and evil. They won't even admit the logical fallacy of their absolutist claim that the truth is relative.

So why bother to painstakingly and logically address the facts and the arguments of the other side. Just kill the messenger.

What kind of woman becomes a "human rights" apparatchick?

I am so very tired of having a certain brand of feminist purport to speak for me as a woman. And I am so very, very tired of misplaced attacks against well-meaning men who happen to misspeak or who happen to disobey their ludicrous speech codes. It annoys me when feminists accuse conservative men of oppression because their views are by default patriarchal. Ugh.

And I am FURIOUS that not one of these feminists has spoken up about the very real and dangerous misogyny that is right out in plain view. Where is the critique against the treatment of women in countries like Saudi Arabia or Sudan? Where is the outrage against honor killings right here in North America? Where is the protest against the misogyny that Hillary Clinton faced during the Democratic primaries, and the unhinged hatred that Sarah Palin faces now from the left? (Or is that okay?) Crickets chirping.

So when Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant push back against some feminists who dominate the so-called "human rights" industry that is really an exercise in radical thought control, I can't help but say "it serves you right." And I'll add that you are failing me as a woman because of your silence and complicity. There is real misogyny, real oppression out there and you either ignore it and by default become that hatred's useful idiots or you share the hatred of Western Civilization that, patriarchal or not, has given women more true freedom than any other culture in history.

Ezra Levant has a scathing piece on Jennifer Lynch, the Conservative appointee who heads up the Canadian Human Rights Commission. This is what he found:

I have been doing research into Lynch's background -- research that, it's clear to me, wasn't done by the Conservatives before her appointment. Take this little gem that I found.

It's a story about Lynch back when she was a feminist activist within the old Progressive Conservative Party.

It seems that when Kim Campbell was briefly prime minister, she was introduced by Wayne Taylor of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce as Canada's "first lady". That, of course, is the term of art used for the wife of the U.S. president, though it might have been just a generic phrase that popped into Taylor's head, like "first citizen". It sounds more like a verbal stumble than a pre-meditated insult, the kind of thing that grown-up politicians quietly wince at, but quickly move on from.

Then lawyer Larry Carr apparently told a joke about Campbell's mother being a "free spirited feminist" who ran away with her boyfriend when Kim was 12. That's an embarrassing anecdote, of course, though it's true.

So what's the point of all that? That, at a chamber of commerce event, a couple of the old boys club made ham-fisted remarks? Fair enough. The "first lady" comment might be stretched to be sexist; the story about her mom was just inappropriate. A grown-up -- say, a prime minister -- would laugh it off.

But not Jennifer Lynch. This was her moment! She was a feminist, and she was going to pounce!

But Lynch didn't pounce on Taylor or Carr. She didn't criticize those two men, however petty their offences may have been, and however petty it would have made Lynch (and Campbell, by extension) look for doing so.

No, Lynch smeared the entire province of Alberta. Here are her quotes, from the Toronto Star.

"This movement away from sexism doesn't suddenly lift like a fog off of the country," she said. "What happens is, it lifts in certain areas faster than some others, and one area it hasn't lifted from is Alberta -- and I've heard that often."

"I just wonder why would somebody think that something like that was acceptable, and it has to be because things are not as quick to catch on in Alberta."

So Lynch condemns stereotyping by engaging in stereotyping.

So instead of criticizing two men -- for verbal misdemeanours -- she lashes out at an entire province.

Then Ezra goes on to correct the record about Alberta's role in women's rights.

Okay, Jennifer. Where's your criticism of the very real misogyny from the Left against Hillary Clinton during the primaries? Where is your criticism of the even worse hatred against Sarah Palin? Have you no problem with the Sarah Palin is a C*** t-shirts Obama campaigners are wearing? That's real hatred against women, whereas these stupid "verbal misdemeanours" could have easily been corrected politely and privately by taking the man aside and explaining to him why the remarks were not appreciated.

Or does the present "human rights" regime think it is fine to express bigotry against women if they go against the feminist model and support the culture of life in word and dead? Is it okay to hate women who are Christian, since your CHRC seems to think it is okay to persecute Christians?

Mark Steyn pushes back against Pearl Eliadis, a "human rights" apparatchick , who seems unhappy with the fact that three complaints against him and Maclean's magazine were dismissed, as if the process was not punishment enough.

He writes:

But the tireless "human rights" apparatchik Pearl Eliadis isn't going to let any tedious technicality like three dismissals get in the way of her pushback against the Steyn-Levant threat to the deranged Dominion's "human rights" racket. She returns to the fray in a long snoozeroo of a piece in Maisonneuve magazine called "The Controversy Entrepreneurs" - a not-quite-good-enough concept she's been valiantly attempting to plant in the zeitgeist for some months now. "The Controversy Entrepreneur" is meant to be me, frantically milking my notoriety, although dear old Pearl seems to be the one who can't let go of the udders.

This woman apparently would like to see the state silence people like Steyn, but where is her critique of real dangers to women worldwide, such as female genital mutilation or getting sold into slavery? Such as punishments like stoning for adultery because you got raped? Where is her critique of forced marriage? Where is her criticism of attacks on women who get attacked for choosing life, for choosing motherhood?

This is why we need a new movement to represent women's rights. Barbara Kay said recentlyshe does not like any word that ends in an "ism." Okay. Let's jettison feminism and find a common sense approach that is pro-woman and pro-man, pro-human dignity and pro our being the best we can be, without the state calling the shots on whether I become a professional woman or stay at home with my children or decide to have it all like Sarah Palin.

Pearl and Jennifer do not represent me. I am ashamed of them.

The resignation of Justice Harry LaForme

I do write about other things besides the election and "human rights" commissions. I spent all day Tuesday trying to get a handle on why the chair of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC) resigned suddenly on Monday.

Here's my story, published online at the Catholic Register's site.

Why I love Sarah Palin: reason #649

Listen to her conversation with Dr. James Dobson.

Denyse O'Leary on Liberal Fascism--part one

Don't forget to check out Denyse O'Leary's look at Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism

The link above will take you to the first post that has links to the others in the series.

From Part one:

In general, anyone who thinks that government should be small and limited (as Goldwater did) is, by definition, not a fascist. All fascists believe in Big (and powerful) Government, though different fascist identity groups would aim their government juggernaut at very different Enemies.

Unfortunately, the confusion around the word "fascist" means that when actual fascist political movements become a power in the land, people find it hard to discuss what they sense is wrong.

From Part two, where she asks if fascism can exist on the left among "progressives":

Yes, certainly. Remember, fascism is a mood in politics, not a specific set of policies. And the further left the progressives are, the more likely they are today to exhibit the fascist mood.

Notice the unhinged anger, the sense of grievance, the eagerness for conspiracy theories on the far left today. That is not because they are left-wing but because they are fascist. Right-wing fascists behave similarly - but in North America today, right-wing fascists are simply not as numerous or powerful.

The breath of the beast at dinner with colleagues

A fascinating story over at Breath of the Beast:

I felt the breath of the beast for the first time over dinner with a group of colleagues recently.

Before I tell this story, I should explain as background that I was on the last PATH train into the World Trade Center out of New Jersey on Sept. 11, 2001.

We were headed into Tower One either as or just after the first plane hit. As I left the train, I smelled jet fuel. I exited the building by walking out under the gaping hole the first plane made. I was walking up Church Street when the second plane hit. I turned around just in time to see the side of Tower Two blow out.

One would think I would have felt the breath of the beast that day. I didn't. I knew Islamists had been trying to nail us for a long time and that this time they succeeded.

To me the world had not changed. It simply finally caught up with us.

Read what happened at the dinner.

Need a good laugh? Iowahawk does Biden heh heh heh

Read it all.

SEATTLE -- Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden promised a group of supporters Sunday that running mate Barack Obama "will absolutely 100% trigger a nuclear Armageddon kinda thing" within the first 20 minutes of his presidency, but added that "Barack Obama is looking forward to this apocalyptic opportunity to test his mettle, because he totally aced his LSATs."

Most fascinating look at Obama's narcissicism

An expert on narcissism analyzes Obama. This is a long article but well worth reading.

Obama displays the following behaviors, which are among the hallmarks of pathological narcissism:
a.. Subtly misrepresents facts and expediently and opportunistically shifts positions, views, opinions, and "ideals" (e.g., about campaign finance, re-districting). These flip-flops do not cause him overt distress and are ego-syntonic (he feels justified in acting this way). Alternatively, reuses to commit to a standpoint and, in the process, evidences a lack of empathy.

Ignores data that conflict with his fantasy world, or with his inflated and grandiose self-image. This has to do with magical thinking. Obama already sees himself as president because he is firmly convinced that his dreams, thoughts, and wishes affect reality. Additionally, he denies the gap between his fantasies and his modest or limited real-life achievements (for instance, in 12 years of academic career, he hasn't published a single scholarly paper or book).

Feels that he is above the law, incl. and especially his own laws.

Talks about himself in the 3rd person singluar or uses the regal "we" and craves to be the exclsuive center of attention, even adulation

Have a messianic-cosmic vision of himself and his life and his "mission".

Sets ever more complex rules in a convoluted world of grandiose fantasies with its own language (jargon)

Displays false modesty and unctuous "folksiness" but unable to sustain these behaviors (the persona, or mask) for long. It slips and the true Obama is revealed: haughty, aloof, distant, and disdainful of simple folk and their lives.

Sublimates aggression and holds grudges.

Behaves as an eternal adolescent (e.g., his choice of language, youthful image he projects, demands indulgence and feels entitled to special treatment, even though his objective accomplishments do not justify it).

The comprehensive argument against Obama

Is right here, with video, audio and extensive links that reveal why his myriad associations with Marxist, America-hating "intellectuals," radical groups like ACORN, his pro-abortion extremism and other reasons why this inexperienced, naive, narcissist with a Messiah complex should never be president of the United States.

Christian voters---why you can't support Obama

H/t Gateway Pundit:

This video slams the most radical pro-abortion and infanticide candidate in the last 35 years.

This is the real Barack Obama:

This video is designed especially for undecided Christian voters. It is suitable for all ages and there are no graphic images. The goal here is to give American citizens a solid grasp of where Senators McCain and Obama really stand on the life issue, using their own words.

I was horrified and alarmed back then, too

Mark Steyn is running some of his old National Post columns to celebrate that paper's 10th anniversary. It is a sorry, bland caricature of its former self, alas.

But interestingly, in that column he talks about Canada's growing official intolerance masked as niceness and mentions the latest abuses of human rights commissions. I have been alarmed and appalled by these commissions for this long, too. He writes:

Canada’s much-vaunted niceness is smug and suffocating, but it’s our national characteristic. It’s what all those National Lampoon non-jokes boil down to: “How do you get 40 Canadians into a phone booth?” “You say, ‘Pardon me, but would you please all go into the phone booth?’” Etc. The truth is it requires a vast panoply of restrictive legislation to shoehorn us in: Canada’s “niceness” has always been somewhat coercive. It’s not just anti-totalitarian demonstrators being denied the right to protest, but also fellows like that Mayor of Fredericton, forced by New Brunswick’s Human Rights Commission to proclaim officially the city’s Gay Pride Week.

Canada’s famous “tolerance” has become progressively intolerant. It’s no longer enough to be tolerant, to be blithely indifferent, warily accepting, detachedly libertarian about gays – as the Mayor and his electors were. For tolerance is, by definition, somewhat grudging. Instead, gays must be accorded official mandatory fulsome approval, no matter that enforcing Gay Pride means inflicting Straight Humiliation on a hapless mayor and displaying a cool contempt for his electorate. As the Queen put it a couple of Canada Days back, “Let us celebrate the unique Canadian ability to turn diversity to the common good.” But the uniquely Canadian thing about “diversity” is the ruthless uniformity with which it’s applied.

I’ll bet those B.C. students protesting against Suharto would approve of the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission’s ruling that Hizzoner was guilty of discrimination. But the trouble with letting the state restrict free expression in the interests of nice cuddly causes like gay liberation is that you make it a lot easier for them to restrict free expression in the interests of non-nice causes like Suharto. In Canada, we’ve let the state go too far in policing dissent. Our official niceness has led, inexorably, to official intolerance – or to put it in culinary terms: If you cook up something that bland, it’s bound to get covered in pepper.

John Bolton and Obama's a Kumbya kinda guy

John Bolton wouldn't call Obama an appeaser. Instead he describes him as naive and a kumbya kind of guy who doesn't understand that foreign leaders might be less reasonable than he is.

Great stuff:

John Bolton has a few thoughts about Joe Biden’s dire warning that electing Barack Obama will result in an immediate international crisis.

Silent, peaceful anti-abortion protestor back in jail

Sheila Dabu, a great new reporter at the Catholic Register has more:

For Gibbons, time in prison has turned into a pro-life ministry. After being arrested at least a dozen times and spending 75 months in prison over the past 14 years for her silent protests outside abortion clinics in downtown Toronto, the 60-year-old grandmother of five and mother of three said she was looking forward to seeing some familiar faces at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, northeast of Toronto.

Gibbons and other pro-life protesters are prohibited from carrying on their protests within 60 feet of the Scott Clinic on Gerrard Street East. A 1994 injunction by the Ontario Supreme Court bars pro-life activists from picketing, sidewalk counselling and interfering with access to abortion services or the economic interests of the clinics. Gibbons, however, has chosen to disobey the order and stands near the entrance of the clinic with her sign, walking back and forth and talking to a few passersby. This has led to her frequent imprisonment.

For Gibbons, the abortion issue is personal. As a pregnant 22-year-old young mother with one daughter already, and who was separated from her husband, Gibbons said she felt like she had to choose between staying in college or keeping the baby. So after 13 weeks of pregnancy, Gibbons went into a downtown hospital for an abortion.

“Even though I was reckless in my thinking at that time, there was conscience that came into it. There was a certain sense of shame that you shouldn’t be, you know,” she said.

Gibbons’ protest has taken on a familiar routine. First, there’s the arrest like the one on Oct. 8. Two police officers and two local sheriffs surrounded Gibbons outside the Scott Clinic. Just before she was handcuffed and driven to a nearby police station, they took away her placard with a baby’s face on it that reads: “Why mom? When I have so much to give.” The sheriff then read aloud part of the injunction which Gibbons is accused of disobeying. After the injunction was read and the sheriff handed her the document, Gibbons ripped it in half and continued her silent protest.

There was also an overnight stay at the police station, sleeping on a cement bench in a cell, without socks or shoes, before the court hearing the next day.

Read it all. And ask yourself why this woman's freedom of speech is being infringed on like this.

Denyse O'Leary on Liberal Fascism

Denyse O'Leary does a multi-part review of Jonah Goldberg's bestselling Liberal Fascism.

She writes:

Recently, I read a book by an American political analyst Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, which helped me understand a political landscape that I have watched with growing concern: increasingly authoritarian government and increasingly supine citizens.

Culturally, it reached the point recently where the term denialist began to characterize anyone who departs from a consensus - as if departing from a consensus were not part of the engine of progress in the Western world.

Goldberg calls the new mood "liberal fascism." To interpret the political landscape correctly, we need to understand fascism clearly.

At present, most people think fascism is simply "the way the Nazis behaved." While there is no question that the Nazis were fascists, it is quite easy to be at the opposite end of the traditional political spectrum and also be a hard core fascist. And so far as I can see, there are currently more fascists in North America at the leftward end of the political spectrum than the rightward end. That's what Liberal Fascism is about.

So what is fascism?

Fascism is not a program in politics, it is a mood. It can be a mood of the right or the left.

It is the mood of an angry identity group. The group could be vegans, transgendered people, the losers in a war, members of an impoverished ethnic group ...

In their view, they have been wronged - by members of another group. The government must make things right by giving them money, status, and power and punishing members of the evil group that has wronged them.

Typically, fascists thrive on crises. When they don't have actual crises, they proclaim or even manufacture them in order to get what they want.

This post has links to all the various other posts on this.

I haven't read them all, but I will link to them regularly as I go through them.

I think Jonah's book should be on people's Christmas shopping lists. You can buy it through Denyse's site.

Ezra Levant's great "HRC" theatre

Ezra Levant makes following human rights commissions and tribunals juicy and entertaining. Why? Because he has great dramatic flair. He knows how to tell a story, to lard on the telling details, to insert conflict into every scene, to make a gripping and entertaining farce out of serious, grueling, bureaucratic gobbledy-gook that would otherwise be eye-glazing, trance-inducing and stupor-creating even as it robbed us of all our fundamental civil rights.

By doing so, Ezra then tempts the otherwise boring bureaucrats to play their kangeroo court roles with "you can't make this stuff up" dexterity.

For example, the latest scene involves the censoring of Ezra's own letter of defense to the human rights commissioners who will determine whether his republishing of Stephen Boissoin's letter warrants his going before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

Ezra writes (emphasis mine):

In her letter to me today, Dagenais says she's finally going to pass my defence along to the commissioners who will rule on whether I've commited a hate crime by republishing an Op-Ed by an Alberta pastor named Rev. Stephen Boissoin. You'll recall, Rev. Boissoin has been fined, given a lifetime ban on expressing his faith, and ordered to publicly renounce his faith, for daring to express a politically incorrect religious view.

If the commissioners find me guilty, they'll prosecute me before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In the thirty years they've been prosecuting section 13 "hate speech" cases, they've never lost. Political prosecutors in Iran and China would be impressed.

But here's where Dagenais becomes a symbol of everything that's wrong with the CHRC and its censorship fetish: she blacked out portions of my defence before passing it on to the commissioners. Seriously -- she censored what I wrote in my own defence, before she passed it along to the people who will sit in judgment of me. She's only allowing me to say things in my defence that she approves in advance. Look at the version of my letter she's passing on: several of my arguments are blacked out.

Of course Ezra has links to both the blacked out version (???!!!!!???) and his original over at his site.

Amazing! How they have become like caricatures in a play!

The scary thing is this is real life. Why not head over and drop some change into Ezra's tip jar for the service he is providing us.

Gotta say, the CHRC and the BC Human Rights Tribunal showed some smarts by dismissing the cases against Mark Steyn, because he has the same kind of flair Ezra does in pointing out the humorous absurdies in this tragicomedy.

But Denyse O'Leary may be on to something when she writes that the HRCs were merely using Islamic groups to go after conservatives like Steyn and Ezra, that they are really as anti-Islam as they are anti-Christian because the progressive ideologues who gravitate towards these bodies are opposed to religious expression. O'Leary argues that's why the socks and their Canadian Islamic Congress puppet masters lost.

She writes:

But I heard a rumour recently that some of the Islamists think that they've been had by the leftists. They were, after all, encouraged to use the "human rights" commissions to go on the offensive against anyone who, in their opinion, had insulted Islam. And look what happened ... they didn't win.

Note to Islamists: Yes, that's right, folks. You've been done had. The leftists hate Mark and Ezra because they are fifty times smarter and more articulate than any Canadian leftist. They used you to go after them, because they daren't do it themselves. They were probably hoping you'd lose, as long as you inflicted lots of damage on Mark and Ezra.

The irony is that leftists despise you way more than most Canadians could ever imagine doing. I, for example, do not think you are at all wrong to believe in God and want to serve him. But I recommend that you pay a little more attention to the carefully worked out structures of religious tolerance here in Canada. Remember, tolerance means putting up with things you don't agree with, because the general welfare is better served that way.

Ezra may not get a pass on the Rob Wells complaint because it stifles Christian expression and that seems to be a new value on the part of these bodies. As postmodern progressives, their idea of tolerance does not mean putting up with things you don't agree with, tolerance means state-mandated approval and acceptance of what you disagree with and permanent bans on ever dissenting against your forced approval.

But this new tolerance stifles Christian expression in an area where sincere, religious Muslims agree with Christians. In fact, sock puppet Khurrum Awan gave a most compelling argument against same-sex marriage before a legislative committee in 2005 on behalf of the CIC. I even thought he was pretty smart back then.

What Syed Soharwardy realized is that these HRCs could easily be used against him. That's what we've been trying to tell the CIC, too. Your freedom of speech, your religious freedom, depends on the old-fashioned, fundamental civil rights that have evolved from the Western tradition and that the HRCs in their rabid, progressive way, have been undermining and replacing with a secularist, anti-religious model. Ezra and Mark were fighting for you as much as they were fighting against your complaints.

Frankly, I don't want Sharia and I don't want the HRC secularist version of non-religious fatwas either. I want Rob Wells to be free to spout his anti-Christian nonsense, but not free to shut down Pastor Boissoin's criticism of his beliefs. But the way things are stacked, Rob Wells opinion has become the state-sponsored one.

We get a world crisis with Obama says Biden

Rush Limbaugh weighs in on Joe Biden's guarantee that a world crisis would test Obama within six months of his presidency. Me? I'd like to pass on the world crisis, thank you very much, and elect McCain. I see that my MSM papers picked up this story, but it is tiny, packed at the bottom of inside pages. But at least they covered it. I thought of the cloud no bigger than a man's fist on the horizon. Let it rain, rain, rain on Nov. 4. (Please read the whole post at Rush's site. It is sobering. Link it.)

Rush said:

BIDEN: Mark my words, within the next -- first six months of this administration, if we win, they're going to -- we're going to face a major international challenge, 'cause they're going to want to test him, just like they did John Kennedy, they're going to want to test him, and they're going to find out this guy's got steel in his spine.

RUSH: Really? Okay, well, we're all comforted by this. Got steel in his spine? Keep in mind what Biden has said. Biden said that it's patriotic to pay higher taxes, and now he said the country will face an international crisis only if Obama is elected. Note what he didn't say, that we'll face international crisis if McCain is elected. So we can assume Joe Biden says no international crisis if McCain is elected. Well, that's what he said. No international crisis if we elect McCain. Obama gets elected, bammo, I guarantee you, buddy, the first six months, we're going to have a international crisis. So under McCain we'll get lower taxes, not higher, and apparently according to Biden we'll have a far more peaceful world. McCain's already been tested, no one's going to mess with him according to Biden. Higher taxes, attacks on our country, attacks on an ally. Biden says the world is going to test Obiden, Obama. Hell, these guys are screwy, confusing me now, Obiden, Obama.

So what's it going to be, folks? Is China going to try to take Taiwan, North Korea, both of them? Is Russia going to take over a bordering country or two? Will Iran make its move against Israel? Or will it be all of the above? I don't know, but Biden is guaranteeing this. And, you know, that's a fair price, I guess a fair price for electing an inexperienced little guy like Obama to run our elections, wants ACORN to run the elections. Can't wait to surrender in Iraq, by the way, can't wait to proclaim defeat in Iraq. Colin Powell said (paraphrasing), "I don't like Palin, but I do love Biden. Biden is ready to be president on day one." Well, my question is this: Does Powell agree that the price for electing Obama is a world crisis? Biden is stating this as a fact beyond dispute. He says this is a guarantee that we are to "mark my words." Do you realize the import of this? Then Biden said this: "Obama's going to need help and the kind of help he's gonna need is he's gonna need you, not financially. We're going to need you to use your influence, your influence within the community to stand with him because it's not going to be apparent initially, it's not going to be apparent that we're right in dealing with the international crisis."

Now, this is creepy, creepy stuff, and everybody is out there going, "Wow, this is so honest. I can't believe they are telling us how bad it's going to be." This is one thing the libs love. They want everybody to be told how rotten things are going to be, how rotten things are, how much worse they're going to get. That's honesty, that's reality. There is no future for America. Our best days are behind us. Obama said so in Berlin. And now Biden's guaranteeing an international incident, maybe more. Then he's telling us that Obama's first reaction may not look like it's right, but you gotta hang in with us. You have to support us. It's up to you, folks, you want to take this risk?

Joe the Senator gives us a really good reason not to vote for Obama

Jennifer Rubin writes:

On the very same day he told us that Colin Powell should have ended all questions about Barack Obama’s national security bona fides, Joe Biden comes along to tell us precisely why we should be scared of Obama as commander-in-chief:

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Well, golly, if Obama is so untested that we will have a series of international crises — at the very time we are in a financial meltdown — which will make the Cuban Missille Crisis look like a walk in the park, shouldn’t we vote for the other guy who will keep all the miscreants in their place?

Gee, makes me wonder whether one would be engineered by Obama's totalitarian soul mates so he can use the crisis as an excuse to suspend all civil rights in the United States of America.

Are we not seeing the Cloward-Priven strategy right now in the subprime crisis?

And now there's Audio!!!

UPDATE: Here's the audio I YouTubefied:

On the very same day that Colin Powell's endorsement supposedly calmed the nerves of those worried about Obama's foreign policy inexperience, running mate Joe Biden makes the counter-argument --- God love 'im:

William Ayers regrets he didn't do more

Obama's mentor and friend William Ayers said in 2001, the year he posed for a photograph treading on an American flag, he does not regret the Weather Underground bombings . He said he wished he had done more. Same with his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. And this was after Barack Obama had worked with this guy "living in his neighborhood" for over a decade.

More? Do they wish the planned bombing of a dance for military personnel at Fort Dix had been successful?

Kathy Shaidle and the folks at The Nose on Your Face have made a video that puts it into perspective.

With an Obama presidency, the radicals' "long march through the institutions" will end in triumph.

Has the culture war really been for naught, America?

Will you really hand those hippie traitors this ultimate victory?

I read about the foiled Weatherman plot against the Fort Dix Dance here and here.

I got so pissed off I wrote the script for a campaign ad I'd make for McCain if he asked me, which he never would.

I shared it with the incredible guys at The Nose on Your Face -- and they ran with it.

Here, then, is our video. Call it "The Fort Dix Dance" or "What Might Have Been..." or whatever you like:

Smears against Obama?

I woke up this morning to CBC radio's Michael Colton and his one-sided piece on the Obama campaign. The focus of his story was General Colin Powell's endorsement; the only mention of the McCain campaign was in the context of smears against Obama. A line about Palin's "palling around with terrorists" campaign, then a shrill clip from Obama warning against smears.

Well, ya know, I used to be angry about this huge phalanx of uncritical mainstream media support for Obama, but this morning I realized it is so over-the-top that most curious people will want to investigate for themselves. Methinks he doth protest too much against smears, when no one ever hears anything critical about the man.

Of course, high up in the Google search engine is Obama's "fight the smears" website. I hope that people will go beyond the talking points and find that there are truthful things about Obama the MSM is just not covering. But I think the fact that the media is so blatantly one-sided is going to backfire and backfire bigtime.

Palling around with terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayers is only the tip of the iceberg of problematic Obama alliances that includes the radical organization ACORN, now being investigated for rampant voter fraud in about a dozen states (and ACORN's relationship to the present subprime mortgate crisis); his relationship with the socialist New Party; his 20 year, close relationship with America-hating Marx-inspired Black Liberationist Jeremiah Wright; to associations with thugs like Tony Rezko, and to associations with Jew-hating activists.

Dr. Sanity had a comprehensive video up today on the Ayers/Dorhn, ACORN and Wright connections.

Please watch and pass around:

Download video!

Gateway Pundit has more on the new revelations that Obama and Ayers worked out of offices on the same floor of a smallish Chicago office building for three years. Jack Cashill makes a compelling case that Ayers may even have substantially book-doctored Obama's famous memoir Dreams of My Father.


There are also big questions about foreign donations to Obama's campaign. Could it be Arab money? Libya's president said so.

ANd that's to say nothing of Obama's support for infanticide in cases of babies born alive as the result of botched abortions.

And we think we won the Cold War?

This interview makes me wonder . . .

Especially when you look at the influence unrepentant terrorist William Ayers on Barack Obama, influence that the news media will not look at.

(H/t Small Dead Animals)

Father Neuhaus on the culture war

The First Things editor nails it:

We are two nations: one concentrated on rights and laws, the other on rights and wrongs; one radically individualistic and dedicated to the actualized self, the other communal and invoking the common good; one viewing law as the instrument of the will to power and license, the other affirming an objective moral order reflected in a Constitution to which we are obliged; one given to private satisfaction, the other to familial responsibility; one typically secular, the other typically religious; one elitist, the other populist. These strokes are admittedly broad, but the reality is all too evident in the increasingly ugly rancor that dominates and debases our public life. And, of course, for many Americans the conflicts in the culture wars run through their own hearts.

No other question cuts so close to the heart of the culture wars as the question of abortion. The abortion debate is about more than abortion. It is about the nature of human life and community. It is about whether rights are the product of human assertion or the gift of “Nature and Nature’s God.” It is about euthanasia, eugenic engineering, and the protection of the radically handicapped. But the abortion debate is most inescapably about abortion. In that debate, the Supreme Court has again and again, beginning with the Roe and Doe decisions of 1973, gambled its authority, and with it our constitutional order, by coming down on one side.

The result is the Court’s clear declaration of belligerency on one side of the culture wars, endorsing the radically individualistic concept of the self-constituted self. In the Casey decision, for instance, it waxed metaphysical in its assertion that the unlimited abortion license is necessary in order “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.” (Such philosophical speculation, bear in mind, is made by lawyers presumably interpreting the Constitution.) Not only does authentic personhood require freedom from the state, but also freedom from other potentially encumbering communities. From spouses, for example. The Court struck down the requirement that fathers be notified before mothers get an abortion. That, it is said, would be an “undue burden.”

What I would add though is that there is even something worse underlying the Obama-messiah and that is a totalitarian whiff of collectivism that mashes the individual into the state and conflates the interests of the state with the "people."

This is a far cry from communal ideas that uphold, for the sake of the common good, all the intervening institutions (families, churches, unions, charities, businesses, professional associations and so on) that form a bulwark against untrammeled state power and the fascism that ensues.

As bioethicist Margaret Somerville said last night at an event I will be writing up, society needs to allow each one of us to think in terms of both a "me" and a "we."

That's not the same thing as the me and the we being synonymous as in the collective where we all find ourselves embodied in the strong man, the personality of the dictator.

November 8th, I plan on being there

Ezra Levant is going to be in Ottawa for a panel discussion as part of the Canadian Media Lawyers' Association annual meeting. If they're allowing journalists to cover this thing, I will be there.

Ezra writes (go to his site for his links to work):

I've also been invited by the prestigious Canadian Media Lawyers Association to speak on a panel at their conference in Ottawa, on November 8. It's a pretty august conference, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada giving opening remarks -- according to this agenda, it looks like she'll be talking about libel law. As I mentioned here, this summer the SCC significantly enhanced the defence of fair comment in defamation law, strengthening Canadians' freedom of speech. It will be interesting to hear Justice McLachlin expand on that decision.

For anyone interested in media law -- from defamation to human rights censorship -- this conference has national-class experts ranging from Richard Dearden, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's lawyer in his defamation suit against the Liberal Party, to Michael Geist, Canada's Internet law guru, to name just two speakers.

I've been invited on a panel, too, entitled "Impact of Human Rights Commission on Freedom of Speech" -- a very real threat to Canadian media, and one against which the defences in defamation law (truth, fair comment, etc.) do not apply. I'm on the panel with some pretty heavy hitters: Julian Porter, Q.C., Maclean's lead lawyer in their B.C. Human Rights Tribunal show trial, and Mark Freiman, chief counsel to the Air India Public Inquiry.

It's an honour to be invited to serious discussions like this one and the one in Halifax. It is a sign that there is growing concern about the threat to our civil rights posed by the preposterously named "human rights commissions" and that concern is non-partisan, and that concern has spread from politics into law and civil society. It's a sign of how wide and deep opposition to HRCs has become and how far the national discussion has moved in the past year.

I, too, be listening attentively to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin's talk the preceding day on libel law and Michael Geist's talk on the Internet Saturday morning. While Ezra and others think the recent Supreme Court decision in Kari Simpson's libel case against Rafe Mair is good for those who would use fair comment defenses, I have long leery of that interpretation. Why? My original concerns are here. I wrote:

I fear though that anyone who wants to protect their children from information that opposes their traditional religious beliefs and moral strictures concerning chastity is de facto a bigot and intolerant in the light of this decision.

What increases my disquiet is this: Ian Binnie participated in a wonderfully entertaining debate with Antonin Scalia at the Charter@25 conference a couple of years ago. Binnie was the "living tree" guy, while Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice, was the "original intent" guy.

The "living tree" model sees the constitution, the Charter, and human rights as "evolving," "progressing," ever coming to new meanings that the judges need to interpret. It's a version of the "empty container" view that sees terms like marriage just empty abstractions into which society pours whatever meaning it chooses at the moment.

Scalia argued that the framers of laws had an original intent that must be taken into account, that the courts should not improvise and read in new meanings. That legislatures should change the laws, not judges.

Interesting, the word tolerance has, for the empty container/living tree crowd, morphed into meaning "agreement," and "acceptance." Thus when I read between the lines of this Rafe Mair decision, if you do not wholeheartedly accept and approve of the gay lifestyle and same-sex marriage, you are a bigot who at least tacitly approves of violence against gays and lesbians, or at least a "reasonable person" might arrive at that conclusion. Well, that's because anti-Christian prejudice is so widespread, so fashionable. At least some of the justices agreed this was defamatory against Simpson.

Kathy Shaidle sums up similar concerns up nicely in the comments section of Ezra's post. She writes (emphasis mine):

PS: Ezra and I have a friendly disagreement regarding that Supreme Court decision.

I look at it more as a decision AGAINST a troublesome conservative Christian activist, not a decision FOR more freedom of speech. If the roles had been reversed, and the conservative Christian had called the liberal radio host a 'nazi' dozens of times, I honestly believe the decision would have been different.

The system works?

When I was up in the Hot Room, the media den at Centre Block, printing off my copy of Tryanny of Nice the other day, a colleague noticed the catchy title and asked what it was about. When I said human rights commissions, he kind of recoiled, smiling, as if to say, like, oh that, I'm not interested at all, so what, it has nothing to do with me.

Another of my colleagues, Brian Lilley, dissects the recent dismissal of the Mark Steyn, Maclean's Magazine case and why it is NOT proof the system is working. He writes:

I’ve heard from plenty of my colleagues in the media that they believe the system worked; Steyn and Macleans have been found innocent of all claims, they suffered no harm. Wrong. The process is the punishment in this ordeal. In a society where free speech and a free press is protected, no one should fear a government agency investigating your thoughts and words to see if they are approved.

When Calgary based magazine publisher Ezra Levant was called before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for publishing the Mohammed cartoons alongside an article on the worldwide controversy, a bureaucrat asked him why he published the cartoons and what was the motivation. Levant rightly told the woman on the other side of the table, that as a free man with a constitutional right to free speech, he owed no explanation.

Now I’ve written about this before and it may all seem so remote, especially for readers in the United States. But consider that just like the human rights commissions in Florida, Illinois or Washington, our human rights commissions started out dealing with questions of fairness and discrimination in housing, employment and dealings with government bodies. Eventually, they changed.

Florida, Washington, Illinois or any of the other states operating similar human rights tribunals could easily follow Canada’s path. Well-meaning politicians, bureaucrats and an activist judiciary willing to set limits on America’s First Amendment right to free speech could soon be declaring that some topics are off limits from critique.

Though apparently some of my press gallery colleagues don't understand why the thought police in Canada are a problem, the Canadian Association of Journalists does get it:

 "This decision does nothing to solve the real problem, which is that such
tribunals shouldn't be taking on these cases in the first place," said CAJ
president Mary Agnes Welch.
   "Tomorrow, someone else unhappy with what they've read somewhere can
lodge another complaint with these human rights bodies and start another
time-consuming, expensive, bureaucratic process that, in the end, serves to
chill freedom of expression."
   "Since the state picks up the tab for investigating such complaints, and
for any hearings held to discuss them, there is no cost to the complainant,"
she said. "Those accused, however, must pay to defend themselves. As a result,
the fear of being embroiled in a human rights complaint may influence some
writers and publications to censor themselves," said Welch.
   Government-appointed human rights bodies are also not bound by strict
rules of evidence found in a court of law, unlike cases involving the
legitimate curbs on free speech found in the Criminal Code, such as libel and
hate speech.
   In the B.C. case, the tribunal was ruling on an article by Mark Steyn
published in Maclean's in October, 2006 that discussed Islam, demographics and
falling birth rates in the West.
   "The idea that it's okay for these bureaucrats to sit in judgement of
what should and should not be printed in a Canadian magazine is deeply
offensive," said Welch. "We renew our calls for politicians to act to amend
human rights legislation to end these witch hunts."

H/t Mark Steyn, who is back from his hiatus.

And Binky is keeping up the fight over at Free Canuckistan, the new name for www.freemarksteyn.com

The unhinged angry Obama supporters

Though the mythical individual at the McCain or Palin rally who cried "Kill him" has been proven now to be a fabrication, a real example of actual physical assault of a McCain supporter, a woman, by an Obama-supporting man is a big yawn for the media.

Here's what the police report says:

“Defendant grabbed the sign [informant] was holding, broke the wood stick that was attached to it, and then struck informant in informant’s face thereby causing informant to sustain redness, swelling, and bruising to informant’s face and further causing informant to sustain substantial pain.”

Oleg Atbashian has more:

This is how the victim describes it:

I said, “What are you doing? You can’t do that!” And he was red in the face screaming, “You people are ridiculous!” And I said, “Yeah, whatever, but you can’t do that.”

So I reached for the sign that he ripped up, and he grabbed another sign, broke it, and ripped it to shreds. And when I said, “You can’t do that,” he took the stick from the sign and started beating me on the head with it. He broke the skin on my head, he scratched my wrist, and almost broke my glasses, and then he left.

I followed him down the stairs to the subway until I could get the police and I said, “You’re not going to get away with it.” And as soon as he saw the police he immediately went calm. He still had the stick in his hand, and you could see the injury on my face, and he admitted it. He was arrested. He actually said, “I don’t know why I did this. It’s just those signs, and this election, it has me so upset.”

Hmmm.....will the variation of Bush Derangement Syndrome that has now become Palin Derangement Syndrome and other variations be a mitigating factor in sentencing?

Demands to see your papers

More than a whiff of totalitarianism (with the new Pravda leading the charge) in Joe's treatment, no?

So, if you happen to be standing in front of Obama when he publicly reveals his socialism, what does the media do? Demands to see your papers. That's just delicious, is what that is.

What if journalists were vetted the way they vetted Joe the Plumber?

Funny, I've had these thoughts, too. What if journalists were on the receiving end of the treatment they give to public figures, and now, increasingly, private figures like Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol and her boyfriend? What if they received the full brunt of what goes around, comes around? Karma, in other words.

How would journalists feel if they were the subject of their vicious feeding frenzies? I think we would quickly, quickly see the resumption of more old-school journalistic ethics: like respecting the privacy even of public figures, of making a distinction between on the record and off the record, and overlooking times when people are obviously misspeaking. Of treating everyone, even those with whom we disagree, with basic respect by virtue of their being a fellow human being. I just wish we could return to the old-school ethics without the karma. Though I would not take part in an exerciswe like this, just like on principle I would not file human rights complaints, I do confess that the lower part of my nature, by Romans 7 "old man" as it were has had these thoughts.

Colleagues, I am awfully disappointed in you. What a shrill, irresponsible mob you can become. Please put yourself in the shoes of the people you tear apart with such glee and imagine what it would be like to be in their place.

Ace of Spade writes:

A lot of people want to know why we shouldn't begin "vetting" the media -- and by "vetting," I do in fact mean vetting. I mean starting a fund to put fucking detectives on them and begin outing them, one by one:

In the closet.

Hits his wife.

Fucking her editor.

Stoned out of his mind on coke half the time.

Etc.

And to reduce costs, I'm sure some budding citizen journalists-detectives would be wiling to take a night a week following these bastards around, taking pictures.

The media's position that Joe the Plumber who merely asked a question must be "vetted" out of existence certainly supports the full-blown "vetting" of them.

After all, far more turns on the questions they ask and... refuse to ask, more importantly.

Will we do this?

I've had angry phases where I was within inches of proposing just this. Even starting a corporation with limited liability protections to do so.

It may be time.

But not now. There are only two weeks left. The media isn't changing. They are in the tank for Obama; this is the full-court press. If we "got" one or two of these bastards by election day, what effect? None.

However, I have been loathe to even post such a notion in the past. It's too ugly, too vicious.

Not anymore.

It is their own "rule" -- those who ask questions that harm one's preferred candidate must be hounded and harassed and humiliated until they are silenced.

If this is the rule they impose on everyday citizens, it's time for everyday citizens to impose it on them.

Yes, this is where we're headed. And while I used to greet the prospect with disgust, now I'm comfortable with it.

It is their own "rule."

They will have to live by it, same as all of us.

Joe the Plumber was the last straw.

He was the last "freebie."

Rush Limbaugh explains Obama's tax policies

To Obama, the purpose of taxes is to punish achievement. Now, I have to believe, based on if the polls are correct and so forth and who knows, I have to believe most of the country has no idea how Obama looks at taxpayers. All of us who pay taxes, Obama looks at us as mini-piggy banks for strangers. If we make a certain amount of money we're either going to put money in the piggy bank down the street or some guy will drop a nickel in ours. That's Obama's economic plan, to equalize incomes, pure and simple. So instead of taking care of our own families and our own businesses, the Obama plan has us making deposits in other people's bank accounts, with him as the banker. You're upset about what's happening on Wall Street, you're upset with all these banks and so forth, imagine Obama is a banker and he's going to force you to make deposits just like the Clinton administration forced banks to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back. Obama is going to force you to put money into his bank, and then he's going to give it away to people who he thinks need it more than you do.

This is not America. It puts me in a good mood again because Obama's gone too far. His butt-kissing media friends have gone too far. This elitist BS might just blow up in their collective smug faces. I think Joe the Plumber and Joe Six-Pack are going to shove their elitism and socialism right down their throats. That's what I think. You know who reminds me of Joe the Plumber? Todd Palin. Todd Palin and Joe the Plumber could pull this country out of its funk by themselves.

I'm all for helping the poor. But I can do a better job of deciding what charity to support than any government bureaucrat can.

The CRTC wants to control the Internet--don't let them

They're asking for submissions and holding hearings on how government can regulate the Internet.

Let's make sure they don't put the kybosh on the last free speech zone there is and use Google the way China does to suppress dissent. Let's make sure that the Mainstream Media does not make sure that only their portals to the Internet are available and those that have a conservative or traditional or Christian or otherwise religious viewpoint are no longer available or only at a higher cost to state-registered "approved" sites.

I got this email in my box today:

The CRTC want's to look into regulating the Internet. Back in 1999
Chairperson of the CRTC, Françoise Bertrand, had said, "Our message is clear. We
are not regulating any portion of the Internet"
This assurance was repeated in 2003. Yet now they appear to be having second thoughts (surprise!). While ostensibly claiming that the growth in broadcast
materials (movies, TV and radio programs) accessed online or via cellphones is
the reason for their concern, I suspect the leftists at the CRTC and their
confreres are really taking aim at free access to information and opinion
sharing on the Internet. They cannot be trusted. The CRTC is likely using
the tried and true Fabian technique of starting with an issue that looks
relatively innocuous or reasonable in order to incrementally (sometimes swiftly)
establish one's real agenda. It was used to turn Canada into a socialist
country. It was used to normalize homosexuality. It was used to
marginalize Christianity in Canada.

For years the mainstream media in Canada has been virtually controlled by the left, and even the bit that is not (Talk Radio, a few magazines and columnists) is greatly hampered in what they can opine or report through intimidation -- by threats of litigation or being hauled up before a Human Rights Commission.

I have been expecting this move for some time. The statists of the left want to
control people's views by censoring ideas they do not want them exposed to while
indoctrinating them (through schools, the law, and the media) in ideas they want
them to embrace. The Internet has become the major foil in this plan. They are bound to eventually try and block the hole. Google's awful deal with Communist China was an ominous portent.

[The email includes the following links, containing background information:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/weblogs/michael_lithgow/1853
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/media/story/2008/09/09/new-media.htmlhttp://technology.canoe.ca/2008/10/15/7093856-cp.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-CRTC-and-the-Internet-Forbidden-Domain&id=488662

Denyse O'Leary also sounds the alarm:

The CRTC, our broadcast regulator, is proposing to regulate new media, which previously had an exemption. You
have until December 5, 2008 to offer comments.

Could this all be true? He sure makes me want to find out

Jack Cashill:

Writing has something in common with golf: to succeed at either requires a God-given talent and a great deal of hard work.

And yet America is asked to believe that Barack Obama, having written only some self-described “bad poetry” and one unsigned case note, turned around and wrote what Time Magazine has called “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

It would have been just as likely that, having played a few rounds of golf in the high 90s, Obama turned around and qualified for the PGA Tour.

The question has to be asked then: why is it that no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama’s role in the writing of Dreams From My Father?

One obvious reason is that Obama is saying what the folks who man the New York-Hollywood axis want to hear. To advance its causes, this class has been aiding and abetting intellectual fraud for a century.

Read it all. Much of what passes as truth is mere truthiness, according to Cashill, and he makes some good points.

I especially agree on the writing part. It is a craft that takes years of practice.

Why I love Sarah Palin

Michelle Malkin writes:

There is something very special about this woman, and I pity the detractors on the left and the right who don’t appreciate it.

Get a tissue before you click:

***

I'm Deb the journalist and I am appalled by the National Post and the rest of the MSM

And I am APPALLED by what the mainstream news media is doing to Joe the Plumber.

I am on the verge of canceling my subscription to the National Post for its front page story wherein everything from the guy's plumbing license to his tax payments has been "vetted" and debunked, probably to the point where the guy is going to or has lost his job. What a sad, caricature of its former self under Conrad Black this newspaper has become.

SHAME ON YOU, NATIONAL POST!!!!

This is scary stuff, folks. The whole investigative power of the mainstream media will act like citizen tribunals in some communist dictatorship to denounce you, shred you and destroy you as if you were a public figure. But they will ignore the lies merely spout The One's talking points. I do not recall any big take-out in the National Post exploring Senator Obama's ACORN/terrorist/Marxist William Ayers/Rev. G-damn America Jeremiah Wright axis. No, some hapless citizen who is on his lawn, who happens to ask The One a hypothetical question that illicits an answer revealing Obama's socialist, "spread the wealth" mentality (in a time when America's wealth is tanking and there is not a hell of a lot to spread around) the questioner rather than the answer is taken apart.

How DARE someone ask THE ONE a question!!!!

These emails posted at The Corner captures how millions of Americans feel in watching the evisceration of Joe the Plumber:

I don't know why I'm e-mailing you, except that I just need to vent to someone on The Corner. Pass this around to the others if you like — I bet I'm not the only one.

I really don't like McCain. I'll probably vote for him just as a vote for divided government. I'm far too libertarian in my leanings to be comfortable with McCain (or Obama, for that matter).

That said, the way the pro-Obama media and bloggers, and Obama himself, have responded to Joe has got me nearly shaking with rage. They are attempting to destroy a man — a private citizen — who had the audacity to ask The One a question. Mind you, Joe was on his front lawn playing football with his son when Obama strolled up to give him his hopenchange spiel. Obama approached Joe, not the other way around. And Joe asked Obama an honest question. And Obama gave him an honest — and very, very revealing — answer. Again, mind you, the embarassment was on Obama's end, not Joe's. It wasn't a gotcha question.

And yet, for that Joe is being pilloried, every aspect of his private and professional life being sorted through and exposed. To prove ... what? What does that have to do with Obama's answer? What does Joe's situation have to do with Obama's philosophical answer — that he wants to "spread the wealth"? Obama's answer goes down the memory hole while the nation concentrates its fire on obliterating Joe the Plumber.

It's sickening, it's maddening and it's downright chilling.

Sorry for the length. But I am just SEETHING.

and

I could care less about Joe's background, whether he's legit, or whether he is a McCain operative. What I do care about is that I could be attacked like a public figure simply for asking a question, like Joe. I am chilled. No longer undecided either.

Mark the Trucker's wife weighs in

She writes to Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner:

Hello Kathryn,

I always like to read what you write, particularly when you stand for life. Good take on Joe. I am married to Mark the Trucker. He owns a small transportation business (approx 15 employees). He started with one truck in 1978. I'm pretty proud of him. He was also my high school sweetheart and still a hunk.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that small businesses are usually S-Corps or LLCs, and that means what they cannot deduct as business expenses is taxed as personal income. That puts most small business in a higher tax bracket than the one they would qualify for if only their real earnings were taxed. Also, this predicament disqualifies their children from receiving financial aid for college—we are "wealthy" by FAFSA standards.

In the transport industry an owner has to keep sinking-fund, so to speak. Engines blow up, accidents happen, and the price of replacing an 18 wheel tractor or a specialty trailer is very expensive. My husband is taxed a higher rate on income that is really not income. He puts a large percentage of it back into his business, as I know most entrepreneurs do. We live on a modest percentage of what appears "wealth" to Senator Obama.

My husband's employees understand that. They see how we live and they respect their boss because he pays a fair wage and does provide health care and contribute to their 401ks. He's not a Fat Cat or Robber Baron.

They recognize every time they pass through the toll booth and the EZ Pass registers that their boss is being taxed. They see more taxes when they fuel his rigs. They know that Interstate permits are more taxes. He pays Unemployment and Workman's Comp, as well as half of their Social Security taxes. They recognize this.

And Kathryn they all vote Republican.

Joe the Plumber's take on last night's debate

As Mark Steyn reported last night, readers have been sending him versions of the Bob the Builder song re: the now famous Joe the Plumber.

Joe the Plumber
Can we tax him?
Yes we can!

My grandson loves Bob the Builder. As soon as the theme song starts playing he jumps up and dances. He's not even two yet. Well, I love Joe the Plumber. And Wes the Farmer.

Here's Joe the Plumber commenting on last night's debate. (h/t Gateway Pundit)

Joe Wurzelbacher, "Joe the Plumber", of Toledo, Ohio weighs in on the final presidential debate last night. The man of the night concluded that Obama scares him because his plans are just one more step towards socialism:

Download video!

Aussie sheep farmer comments on Obama

From the comments section at Sine qua non. Too bad Wes the Farmer doesn't live in the United States. He writes:

I can not believe this is happening. I live on an isolated sheep farm in Australia and I can't figure out why Americans are ready to commit national suicide, which will, as result, take what remains of Western Civilization with them.

Are you people really going to "elect" a neo-Marxist, hate-America first degenerate in a sharp suit to the highest office on the planet merely because he's hoodwinked the whole lot of you with used car salesman techniques and a smooth voice? Mates, your enemies overseas like to laugh at Yankee naivete but this takes the cake.

...during the worst fiscal crisis since Carter's malaise? ...with a Congress controlled by leftist ideologues?...with China holding so many dollars that if they bolt, it's all over? ...with Iran ready to nuke Israel whenever they get it together? ...with a militarily resurgent Russia? ...with European allies that will stab you in the back? Jesus Christ, people, wake up! The cure for the failures of the Bush administration and a recession isn't post-modern defeatism and socialism but can-do Yankee innovation!

Obama is your (and our) worst nightmare. He'll turn America economically into Argentina destroying your military advantage and diplomatic clout and thus hand the world on a platter to whomever is the most brutal and regressively hegemonic, ie China, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, the Taliban, while encouraging emergent dictatorships elsewhere, say, Bolivia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Thailand and Argentina.

Don't the American people realize that they have too many enemies waiting for the opportunity to take the US down to risk installing one in the White House?

Stanley Kurtz connects the dots

Obama's associations are relevant to the economy. Very relevant. Stanley Kurtz connects the dots:

ACORN is a powerful example of an Obama "association" that has immense policy implications. ACORN is a genuinely radical group. It believes in economic redistribution, the same question raised by the "Joe the Plumber" controversy. And ACORN’s campaign to undermine credit standards in this country was an extremely important contributing cause of our economic meltdown. So Obama’s ACORN ties are part and parcel of the core issues at play in this campaign.

Bill Ayers? As McCain noted, Ayers and Obama together gave hundreds of thousands of foundation dollars to ACORN. That needs to be unpacked, but McCain’s point begins to get at the real issue. This is not about what happened when Obama was eight years old. Ayers and Obama both believe in a redistributionist economic policies. Together Ayers and Obama backed radical community organizers like ACORN, a key player in the mortgage crisis. ACORN’s assault on credit-standards was driven by its redistributionist philosophy. So Obama’s radical associations reveal the truth of his economic policies. It’s all of a piece. But this critical point has not been made.

People still speak as though the "associations" issue and the economic issue are two different things. They’re not. ACORN wants to spread Joe’s wealth around. So does Bill Ayers. That’s why Obama worked with both ACORN and Ayers. Someone needs to explain all this to Joe.

Rachel Lucas goes nuclear on Obama's Fox comments

An excerpt:

You want to talk about an entire industry - an entire apparatus - designed to perpetuate a cultural schism, to give one guy an edge over another guy based on soundbites and bias? You want to talk about that? And you think it’s WORKING AGAINST YOU, SENATOR BARACK OBAMA???

Sorry for all the yelling. I just simply cannot believe my own eyes on this one. I truly cannot FATHOM that this man, who is supposedly intelligent and “aware”, would actually say with a straight face that there’s an entire industry - in the form of the media - that is anything other than his own personal cheerleading corps.

And what in the hell is he talking about, that Fox News portrays him 24/7 as a “latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal.” Is there another Fox News that I don’t know about? Because I’ve never once heard a single thing about Volvos or latte or what he reads or how effete he is. What I have heard is about ACORN. And about Ayers and Wright, you know, unimportant stuff like that. Stuff that’s keeping me from getting to really know Obama. And by the way, CNN has been hammering the ACORN thing more than anyone lately.

And also by the way, the example given in the Times piece that led Obama to say all of that bullcorn was a quote from Joe Scarborough. Of MSNBC.

Well, whatever. Don’t worry, Obama. Once you’re president you can “disappear” Fox News. Then the next openly socialist Democrat presidential candidate won’t have to suffer from such bias and will have a full 100% of the media in his or her pocket. Not just 98%. A full 100%.

Joe the Plumber

Just in case you didn't get all the stuff in the debate about Joe the Plumber, here's the video (thanks to Gateway Pundit):

Governor Palenty said in support of McCain that it was the "Joe the Plumber" debate.
Palenty is right. The debate may have been a tossup but "Joe Plumber" won:

The most memorable lines tonight were about Joe Plumber and Obama's "spread the wealth" policies.

Ezra's baaaaack

Two of Parliament's key freedom of speech activists have been re-elected. Conservative Rick Dykstra of St. Catharines was re-elected handily, and Liberal Keith Martin of Esquimalt Juan de Fuca squeaked back in, by a margin of less than 100 votes. Dykstra is the MP who proposed a resolution before Parliament's Justice Committee to have a full-bore review of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, its operations and its censorship provisions in particular. Martin is the MP who really got the ball rolling early in the year, with his private member's motion to repeal that provision altogether. Of course, many other MPs made very encouraging public statements about reforming the commissions, such as Jason Kenney who chaired the "war room" in which I worked this past month.

When I was working on the campaign, needless to say, I met a great number of MPs, cabinet ministers, senior staff and reporters. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of senior people in the Canadian political establishment who, on their own, brought up the subject of HRCs with me. It was very encouraging -- over the next few days I'll tell a few anecdotes about that, while respecting the privacy of those conversations where applicable.

Of course, the past month hasn't just been about the election campaign. The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal chose a characteristically cowardly moment to issue their "ruling" in their trial of Mark Steyn and Maclean's -- the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, preceding the election. I don't blame them -- as the Vancouver Sun's Ian Mulgrew opined during the trial this June, the BCHRT murdered its own reputation, not Steyn's. I'll give you my thoughts on their execrable ruling later.

Over the past six weeks, I haven't received any new human rights complaints -- at least, none that I know of. As I discovered in August, human rights commissions no longer even tell me when I've been hit with a complaint. Welcome to justice, kangaroo-style.

Good posts on Obama

The Anchoress has assembled some great links:

Christians and the Obama Conundrum; Four Must Reads: Paragraph Farmer has a must-read analysis on the subject and explores how emotion is overrunning intellect, for some. It’s very well done. Then, Bob Owens also wonders can Christians support Obama, while George Weigel mulls the pro-life part of the equation. Finally, Princeton University’s Robert George spells out just how dedicated to the proposition that vulnerable life does is expendable life is our Mr. Obama.

I'm reading why a good Christian cannot support Obama now. Many more good links at her site.
I love you Anchoress!

A blog to watch

Breath of the Beast is a blog to watch. There is a most interesting analysis there in the media complicity that is mirroring Obama's Messianic image (or to use another metaphor, regurgitating his talking points). It's a must read post that develops its premise beautifully.

I'm excerpting from the conclusion here, but the whole post is a thing of beauty.

Next time you see film of an Obama rally or see video of chubby middle class children being coached in the singing of hymns to the wondrousness of The One. Like this:

Keep in mind that Soros and piles of illegal foreign money has funded him, he has lived off government grants and distributed millions to radicalized haters of our values and government. He has insulted “common” people- albeit not to their faces. His friends and associates have always intended on getting power for him so they can abuse it. Even now they are registering legions of dead people, incarcerated felons and illegal immigrants to put him in power. Every time the hat drops, the media dutifully pick it up.

They refuse to follow up on the money trails, ignore his associations, soft-peddle his connection with those who are committing the voter fraud, and draw the attention away from all of these things by virtually unfolding every crumpled piece of Kleenex in Sarah Palins trash barrels in search of manufactured scandal. And still, the crowd cheers wildly. Clearly, they will keep on doing it until the "mirror" is shattered.

At least it won't get worse

So Stephen Harper returns with a strengthened minority government. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? From the freedom of speech point of view, Mark Steyn has this to say:

Mr Harper's failure to sweep the land probably means that this inherently cautious politician will be unlikely to champion any serious reform of the country's ghastly "human rights" commissions that consumed so much of my time and money this last year. He was awfully non-commital when I spoke to him about it back in the summer, and I'd imagine he'll be even more so now.

I agree with Mark on this. We cannot expect any changes, at least on the surface. Whatever changes, if any, will be so subtle and so incremental that they will escape detection by any but the most diligent observers.

Frankly, if he had won a majority thanks to Quebec we would have the same approach.

I think Harper will be especially chastened by the Quebec results, the fact that $45 million in cuts in arts funding (cuts that social conservatives in the rest of the country applauded) kept him from the majority he hoped for. Changes to human rights commissions will never fly in Quebec, nor will anything remotely socially conservative. I have some concerns the election results will mean more pandering to Quebec at the expense of the conservative base who have no where else to go.

Several weeks ago, I attended a dinner and sat across from a high-up in the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Of course, I gave this individual an earful. And I think this person heard me. I think the conversation would have gone much differently had I been sitting across from one of the ideologues that bloggers have identified as key players in abuse of civil rights that has gone on so far.

The changes we might expect will be subtle: changes in personnel, perhaps, away from extreme ideologues to people who think striking a balance is important. In other words, we may see a slow as molasses change from those who think, like Dean Stacey said under oath, that" freedom of speech is an American concept" and "I don't give it any value" to those who agree that freedom of speech and freedom of religion are Charter values but who want to balance them with ensuring that no minority group is victimized by hatred or discrimination.

The big difference we are likely to see is what we've already been seeing: an attempt to define the hallmarks of hatred according to the Supreme Court's Taylor decision, signally a move away from the vagueness of the "likely to expose" thought- crimes provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act, section 13(1) that is so dangerously open to interpretation, and so free of any recourse to truth as a defense.

No, it is not good enough. It is also a great disappointment that the Justice Minister (who got relected) continues to have his department intervene on behalf of that horrible subsection. But believe me, having this Tory minority government is far better than having a bunch of ideologues with the ability to define hatred any way they choose, and targeting Christians and conservative dissent with impunity.

If you think the Tories are bad, think of what it was like under the Liberals when anyone who simply disagreed with their radical, anti-family agenda was called "Anti-Charter" and "anti-Canadian." Shoot, Prime Ministers Paul Martin and Jean Chretien both used this kind of hate-speech against those with traditional values during election campaigns. It was under the Liberals that the whole apparatus became the anti-Christian, anti-Western home for radical social engineers that it had become.

For those who are disenchanted with the Tories and even furious at them for betraying conservative principles, take a look at the reality of the election. Most people voted for left-wing parties. The majority of Canadians, in other words, don't give a hoot about freedom of speech unless it is the right for Avi Lewis or some jerk who likes the f-word and transgressive sexuality to get a paid junket to world capitals to display their anti-Western claptrap. They only see freedom of expression as the right to choose a porn channel with Canadian content, or the right to produce art at public expense that no one would buy and or that undermines traditional principles. In other words, freedom of speech applies only to subversives who hate everything Canada was founded on, who want to reserve the right to continue to undermine with bathroom humor or art designed to shock.

But those who defend the rights of the unborn, those who defend traditional marriage and the biological family are directly endangered by all the other parties. At least under the Tories things will not get worse. They may not even improve. But having things get worse and feeling like Canada was pumping itself to hell on a handcart was what it felt like with the Liberals in power.

No, I remember what it felt like in Ottawa when prime ministers advocated hatred against Christian believers and called them anti-Canadian, when Christians were painted as scary, when prime ministers used all the hallmarks of hatred against them.

So even though I have a headache this morning, I am thankful.

Other good news is the fact that Liberal MP Keith Martin got re-elected. There was some concern that he might not survive in a closely contested race. But Keith will be back, but only for this term, as he planned to retire after one more election. He was the champion of freedom of speech with his private member's motion to axe section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Let's hope he finds a way to bring back our cause to Parliament.

Anyone else share this fantasy?

I was daydreaming that tomorrow night, Gov. Sarah Palin would accompany Senator John McCain to his last and final debate with Senator Barack Obama.

Then, McCain would, right at the wings, send Palin in to debate Obama. Can you see it?

Of course Obama would refuse to debate her on live TV. Imagine the consternation. Would the networks cut away, go to black, cue a commercial?

Maybe there would be a cutaway shot of a proud McCain with that mischievous grin on his face, rubbing his hands with glee.

Sarah Palin phones Rush

The transcript is here:

RUSH: Well, now, as I listen to your campaign appearances and Senator McCain's, it seems that you are the more forceful in speaking out against Obama and his campaign ideas. Are they giving you pretty much free rein to attack this campaign as you wish? GOVERNOR PALIN: Well, you know, there just aren't enough hours in the day I think to get out there and (cell garbled). Rush, I've got nothing to lose in this, and I think America has everything to gain by understanding the differences, the contrasts here between Obama and McCain. So, you know, I'm going out there and I'm just simply speaking. So be it that I'm a simple talker, but I'm just going out there and letting people know the differences and how absolutely paramount it is that voters are paying attention and that voters are understanding candidates' records, their associations, their plans for the future; instead of being kind of wrapped up into all this rhetoric of Obama's and buying into it and not holding him accountable for the things that he's done, the things that he's said, his associates, and where he wants to take America.

RUSH: That's exactly it. The media is not holding him accountable; the media is covering up for him. That's why there is so much enthusiasm for you, because you are the one in this campaign who is holding him to account and trying to explain who he is and who his alliances are with and have been. There are two stories today -- one in the Los Angeles Times, one in the New York Times -- both saying how wonderful you are as a speaker. The New York Times posited that you are the most forceful and dynamic speaker of all four candidates on the presidential circuit. Then they said that your forcefulness and your opinionatedness and your charisma and your overwhelming ability to say what you mean, is driving away moderates. Now, this is an attempt to get you to shut up. GOVERNOR PALIN: (laughing) RUSH: This is an attempt by the media to make you stop being who you are. What it means is, they're really worried about the effectiveness that you have. GOVERNOR PALIN: Well, yeah, I guess that message is they do want me to sit down and shut up. But that's not going to happen. I care too much about this great country. Now, yes, speaking of some of those associations -- and you're right; mainstream media is not holding Barack Obama accountable -- let's talk quickly about ACORN and the unconscionable situation that we're facing right now with voter fraud. And given the ties between Obama and ACORN and the money that his campaign has sent them and the job that he had with them in the past, Obama has a responsibility to rein in ACORN and prove that he's willing to fight voter fraud. We called him on it. RUSH: He's not going to do that. He's been paying for them.

There's more.

Obama helped campaign for this guy

About 50 parishioners were locked into the Assemblies of God church before it was set ablaze. They were mostly women and children. Those who tried to flee were hacked to death by machete-wielding members of a mob numbering 2,000.

The 2008 New Year Day atrocity in the Kenyan village Eldoret, about 185 miles northwest of Nairobi, had all the markings of the Rwanda genocide of a decade earlier.

By mid-February 2008, more than 1,500 Kenyans were killed. Many were slain by machete-armed attackers. More than 500,000 were displaced by the religious strife. Villages lay in ruin. Many of the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.

The violence was led by supporters of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the Dec. 27, 2007, presidential election by more than 230,000 votes. Odinga supporters began the genocide hours after the final election results were announced Dec. 30. Mr. Odinga was a member of Parliament representing an area in western Kenya, heavily populated by the Luo tribe, and the birthplace of Barack Obama's father.

The Washington Times article goes on:

Initially, Mr. Odinga was not the favored opposition candidate to stand in the 2007 election against President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking his second term. However, he received a tremendous boost when Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Kenya in August 2006 to campaign on his behalf. Mr. Obama denies that supporting Mr. Odinga was the intention of his trip, but his actions and local media reports tell otherwise.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama were nearly inseparable throughout Mr. Obama's six-day stay. The two traveled together throughout Kenya and Mr. Obama spoke on behalf of Mr. Odinga at numerous rallies. In contrast, Mr. Obama had only criticism for Kibaki. He lashed out against the Kenyan government shortly after meeting with the president on Aug. 25. "The [Kenyan] people have to suffer over corruption perpetrated by government officials," Mr. Obama announced.

"Kenyans are now yearning for change," he declared. The intent of Mr. Obama's remarks and actions was transparent to Kenyans - he was firmly behind Mr. Odinga.

Maybe this adds some resonance to Sarah Palin's "palling around with terrorists" remark.

The B.C. Bureau of Facts will have trouble reconciling these truths

Rob Breakenridge has a great column today on the B.C. Bureau of Facts, formerly known as the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, and its not guilty verdict on the complaints against Maclean's Magazine and Mark Steyn.

He writes:

This was a case about religion; specifically, a critique and criticism of religion. Yes, religion is one of the defined groups to which protection from discrimination is granted, but somewhere along the line an important distinction became blurred, or erased outright.

There is a world of difference between "Catholics need not apply" and "Catholicism is nutty." As a recent report from the pro-secular Center for Inquiry succinctly put it: "Believers deserve protection. Beliefs do not."

If we can no longer make that distinction, then any critique of any religion is off limits -- it becomes a de facto blasphemy law.

I'm not sure which is more alarming -- that the Tribunal was empowered to hear this case in the first place, or that it failed to note this distinction.

You betcha!

He goes on:

The point here is the "truth" about any religion is not going to be discerned from two experts -- let alone three members of a human rights tribunal. But in "acquitting" Maclean's, the tribunal seems to be enshrining certain "truths" about Islam.

Shall other religions now be permitted to bring forth their own favourably inclined witnesses so as to enshrine their own "truths?" Shall religious views and religious figures now be spoken about in only the most reverent terms?

Mandating respect for religious views is a step on a path toward imposing religious views. Respect is to be earned through a process of free expression and free inquiry.

Rob stresses "secular values" but I'd like to point out that the whole idea of the secular comes from the West, from Christianity. It's founded in Jesus' saying "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's"; it's found in Augustine's seminal work "The City of God" in which he explores the difference between the earthly city and the heavenly city.

The secular, the term bequeathed by Christianity to refer to the world, is the best antidote to all forms of utopianism, religious or non, because it understands that in this world, in time, we will not achieve the perfection of the world to come, because we have to live with sinful humanity and are thus limited in what we can do to make heaven on earth. It's not an excuse to give up on the common good, but it is a crucial check on man-made messianic tendencies to impose perfection, usually by killing those who don't get with the program.

Also, the secular, as Iain Benson of the Centre for Cultural Renewal has drummed into my head over nearly 20 years, does not mean non-religious as many wrongly use the word. The secular is the world that includes all of us, whether we are religious believers or not.

To conflate the secular with non-religious is dangerous, and so is the use of the word secular to exclude religious arguments in a pluralistic society.

If religious and transcendent arguments are excluded from debate, then we will end up worshipping Caesar, aka the state. The difference between a theocracy is that the state has a religious basis; the "secular" (in its wrong use) has a non-religious basis. Both versions use the state apparatus to enforce their monistic views.

God forbid that we should have either and thanks to Western Civilization and its Judeo-Christian roots we don't, though we are rapidly eroding our foundations.

I resent having Michael Moore interfering in my election

As an American I am ashamed of the traitorous, unkempt Michael Moore. (And I am being my usual charitable self by omitting a whole bunch of other adjectives I could have used).

Moore with Taffarel (courtesy Pete Vere)

As a new Canadian, I deeply resent his interfering in our election. I know NDP MP Tony Martin and he's a nice, earnest guy, one of those social justice Catholics whose faith prompts him to care about the poor, but has no problem supporting abortion and gay 'marriage'.

I disagree with Tony on lots of things, but I have always respected his integrity.

But eeewww! to take Michael Moore along with you while campaigning? Tony! It ain't Halloween yet! How could you use such bad judgment?

Tyranny of Nice co-author Pete Vere has more, including video over at Pajamas Media.


Ugh. Better get my shoes on and go vote.

Blogburst for freedom

I see over at Blazing Cat Fur, there's a blogburst for freedom today as Canadians go to the polls.

She posted this quote:

I am a Canadian, a free Canadian, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledege to uphold for myself and for all mankind.

-Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, from the House of Commons, Debates (on the Canadian Bill of Rights), July 1, 1960.

Then she added:

Our last best hope to end the tyranny of Canada's thought crime law, Section 13(1), remains with a Conservative Majority. A vote for any other party is a vote for censorship and the continued perversion of the rule of law by the unelected demagogues of our rogue Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Kathy Shaidle adds:

Note to the beligerent Muslims and other professional victim groups who are using the Human Rights Commissions to "oppose what they believe is wrong":

The operative word in that composition is "free". You are NOT FREE if you are using agents of the state, and other people's extorted tax dollars, to fight your foolish battles.

I invite other Canadian bloggers to repeat Diefenbaker's words on their sites in an attempt to re-popularize them.

Can you imagine a Canada in which school kids recited this each day like the Pledge? Naw, me neither. But it's fun to think about.

I agree that our best hope is a Conservative majority, as long as that majority represents a strong coalition of Burkean conservatives, libertarians and social conservatives. The oxymoronish old Progressive Conservative types--forget it.

Over the weekend, I was sorry to read that Liberal MP Keith Martin faces a tough battle to retain his seat in British Columbia. He has been the freespeechers' hero of the hour.

There are also a number of pro-life Liberals who, especially if they are running against pro-abortion Conservatives, that should get re-elected. These Liberals have defied their party time after time on crucial issues.

As disappointed as I am with the way the Conservative government has distanced itself from social conservative principles, I remember how much worse it was under the Liberals.

Spare us, Good Lord.

Bailin' over Palin

Today the National Post's Jonathan Kay bails on John McCain because he can't see Palin as Commander-in-Chief. In "Another Conservative for Obama" Kay writes:

After a few weeks, I began to focus on the idea of her as a (potential) U. S. Commander-in-Chief. On the crucial question of whether I would actually want this woman to be running the most powerful nation on earth, I really couldn't, in my heart, answer yes.

I suspect that many conservatives who profess to believe that Palin would make a great leader have secretly come around to the same view as me -- but their tribal political reflex won't let them admit as much.

Let's unpack this. First we're voting for McCain as Commander-in-Chief but not Palin.

But, in the event that it came down to a choice between Palin and Obama I would still choose Palin.

Why? Because who would be Obama's training wheels and co-president? Senator Joe Biden, who has no trouble in making up "facts" out of thin air, (and made about 14 errors of fact on foreign policy during his debate with Palin) who claims to be a Catholic but does not believe what his faith teaches, who more often than not has been on the wrong side of issues, but where he has been on the right side, his new boss disagreed with him.

I would suspect that if, God forbid, McCain died in office, Sarah Palin would choose an excellent vice president, someone who had character and principles in addition to knowledge of the world. I also suspect that, as a true leader, she would bring in the right people to fill out her team, people who complemented her strengths and filled in where she was weak.

See, Jonathan, it's a question of character, not the ability to spout intelligent-sounding bafflegab. Palin is more qualified from an executive standpoint than Obama. At least she respects the Constitution of the United States. And she knows how to use a gun. Obama's probably afraid of them.

And as for leverage on the world stage, gee, it seems that good old George W. Bush has done a good job in bringing all the heads of state together in finding solutions to the global financial crisis.
And frankly, I am not crazy about the idea that countries like Cuba and Venezuela and Iran and organizations like Hezbollah want an Obama victory. You've got it wrong Jonathan. Instead of the United States having more leverage, they expect to have more leverage with America if Obama, who is basically a weak ditherer and panderer, sits in the Oval Office.

The ONLY bright side of an Obama victory is this: it would send the Democrat brand onto a negative spiral the way Jimmy Carter's did. But look at what Carter's presidency cost us. Jonathan's probably too young to remember the malaise, the gas lines, the stagflation, the dismal foreign policy mistakes, the horror of the Iran hostage crisis.

An Obama victory could very well spell the end of Democrat majorities in the House and Senate a few years down the road.

I agree with Jonathan that Obama would probably tack to the centre in hopes of getting re-elected in four years. But think of the kind of people he will be bringing in as advisors. That there will be Obama and Pelosi and Reid with no check on their power. Think of the Supreme Court appointments that Republicans won't be able to stop.

No, an Obama presidency will be possibly as transforming of America as Trudeau's reign was of Canada. And that is not a good thing.

Palin has shown herself to be a quick study. She stands on solid principles and lives by them.
Can't say the same for Obama or Biden.

Bill Whittle explains why health care is not a right

He writes:

What’s the difference between the right to free speech — which is enshrined in the Constitution — versus the “right” to health care, which is not?

Well, back in the day, we would simply say that a right has legal authority — it’s in the Constitution and therefore it’s a not just a right, it’s a birthright. So why shouldn’t we amend the Constitution to include the rights to health care, food, housing, education — all the rest? What’s the difference between the rights we have and the “rights” Obama wants to give us?

Simply this: Constitutional rights protect us from things: intimidation, illegal search and seizure, self-incrimination, and so on. The revolutionary idea of our Founding Fathers was that people had a God-given right to live as they saw fit. Our constitutional rights protect us from the power of government.

But these new so-called “rights” are about the government — who the Founders saw as the enemy — giving us things: food, health care, education... And when we have a right to be given stuff that previously we had to work for, then there is no reason — none — to go and work for them. The goody bag has no bottom, except bankruptcy and ruin.

Obama and freedom of speech according to Michael Barone

Barone writes of the coming "thugocracy":

Once upon a time, liberals prided themselves, with considerable reason, as the staunchest defenders of free speech. Union organizers in the 1930s and 1940s made the case that they should have access to employees to speak freely to them, and union leaders like George Meany and Walter Reuther were ardent defenders of the First Amendment.

Today's liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that once prided themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Mr. Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech they don't like and seem utterly oblivious to claims this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

Jack Cashill and his case for the authorship of Obama's Dreams of My Father

Cashill can write. He clearly knows a lot about writing. He makes a most interesting case for William Ayers' involvement in the crafting of Obama's memoir Dreams of My Father.

It is interesting to me that many scholars involved in the historical criticism method of Biblical scholarship scientifically examine the linguistic choices in say the letters of Paul with some concluding that he never wrote some of the later letters such as I and II Timothy, Hebrews and some others. It would be interesting to see what some of these experts would have to say on Cashill's thesis.

Cashill's essays are a joy to read for their crisp command of the writing craft, even if you don't agree with his evidence. As someone who has struggled for years to improve my craft, I know that you do not go from being a pedestrian writer to a great writer overnight. But that is apparently what Barack Obama did with Dreams.

Did Obama peak too soon?

Despite the growing hysteria in the Obama-nation and their mainstream media lackeys about the hatred, anger and George Wallace-like racism on the part of the McCain-Palin campaign, Obama's numbers are slipping and McCain's are going up. Gateway Pundit has more:

This is horrible news for Obama and the Obamedia...
As McCain continues to define Barack Obama's radical background Americans get turned off.

Apparently, Americans weren't too impressed with Obama's relationship with a terrorist that was brought up last week by the McCain Campaign.

Download video!

Obama's response that he thought the guy was rehabilitated didn't help him much either.

Screaming racism against a majority American population that yearns to be able to accept Obama at face value, that would love to have a black president just so that the racism card will be removed from the deck forever is bound to backfire. Most Americans are people of good will, but you will see their attitudes harden if they are falsely accused of racism and the straitjacket of political correctness gets bound too tight.

No, I think emerging evidence of Obama's involvement in far-left, socialist and radical causes and his "guilt by participation" to echo Stanley Kurtz, that is hurting him, not his race.

The Acorn stuff is hurting Obama. The Ayers collaboration is hurting Obama.

And painting McCain as a racist, just like painting Bill and Hillary Clinton as racists, is going to prevent Obama from closing the deal.

Obama better step in and call off his dogs, just as McCain did in telling his supporters that it was wrong for them to call Obama a terrorist or an "Arab."

And you know, a stupid woman with a bad permanent and a lousy dye-job in a McCain audience is hardly an indication of hatred and rage on the part of the war-hero's campaign.

No, if you want to look at hatred, take a look at Madonna, screaming that she's going to kick Sarah Palin's ass if she ever comes into her neighborhood, while leading her wildly-approving audience in an anti-Palin chant. Scary enough? Why is even the National Post repeating the drivel about the scary Republican campaign but not including a word about Madonna's incitement.

People in the Obama campaign are wearing Sarah Palin is a c*** t-shirts. How's that for hatred?
Why no coverage? Is it because sexism is okay?


Michelle Malkin has a gallery of unhinged sexist hatred against Palin. Go through the whole thing. You'll see artwork of a monkey taking a dump on McCain's head. You'll see a number of mug shots of people who have actually been charged with violence against people in the McCain campaign:

Let’s talk about “insane rage” and “violent escalation.”

This is insane rage — Madonna bashing Sarah Palin and shrieking “I will kick her ass:”

Download video!

This is insane rage — Sandra Bernhard bashing Sarah Palin and cursing her head off with hate warping her crazed face:

Download video!

This is violent escalation — Palin-hating artwork designating her an “M.I.L.P.” (Mother I’d Like to Punch).

Ian Mulgrew on the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal

Thanks to Blazing Cat Fur for the link to Mulgrew's excellent editorial on the recent B.C. Human Rights Tribunal decision on the Maclean's Magazine complaint. It is excellent. I hope we see more pundits weighing in with similarly strong editorials:

Maclean's and Steyn didn't deign to even offer a defence at the summer's tomfoolery.

Who can blame them?

Still their temerity earned them the panel's enmity.

The triumvirate was unable to resist taking a swipe at the defendants for supposedly "fuelling" the raging international controversy:

"At times, Maclean's conduct of its case appeared to be directed to the media coverage of the hearing rather than supporting the positions it had taken in its original response to the complaint . . . . Maclean's, for example, published an editorial critical of the complainants and the human rights process . . ."

There would have been no controversy if the tribunal had not provided this attention-seeking advocacy group with a soapbox.

Maclean's was right to tell the tribunal to get lost and take its case to the public.

This process was illegitimate and these tinpot judges knew it.

Michael Knox Beran on Obama Shaman

I may have already linked to this, but it is worth several readings (emphasis mine):

Obama, in gaming this culture, has figured out a new way to bottle old wine. He knows that experience has taught Americans to suspect the masculine healer-redeemer who bears collectivist gifts; no one wants to revive the caudillos of the thirties. Studiously avoiding the tough-hombre style of earlier charismatic figures, he phrases his vision in the tranquilizing accents of Oprah-land. His charisma is grounded in empathy rather than authority, confessional candor rather than muscular strength, metrosexual mildness rather than masculine testosterone. His power of sympathetic insight is said to be uncanny: “Everybody who’s dealt with him,” columnist David Brooks says, “has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them.” His two books are written in the empathetic-confessional mode that his most prominent benefactress, Oprah, favors; he is her political healer in roughly the same way that Dr. Phil was once her pop-psychology one. The collectivist dream, Obama instinctively understands, is less scary, more sympathetic, when served up by mama (or by mama in drag).

With the triumph of Obama’s post-masculine charisma, the patriarchal collectivism of the New Deal has finally given way to a new vision of liberal community, the empathetic mommy-state that Balzac prophesied in La Comédie humaine. The leader of the future, Balzac foresaw, would be a man who, like his diabolically charismatic Jacques Collin, possesses a capacity for maternal love. When his protégé Lucien dies, Collin exclaims: “This blow has been more than death to me, but you can’t understand what I’m saying. . . . If you’re fathers, you’re only that and no more. . . . I’m a mother, too!” Collin ends his career as a functionary of the state—and a policeman. The Grand Inquisitor of the future, Balzac intimates, will undertake his inquisitions in the name of matriarchal pity.

Whose guilty of rage?

Michelle Malkin sets the record straight as the Obama campaign and their mainstream media toady's try to blame the McCain campaign and especially Sarah Palin for the few crazies that shout or say nasty things at their rallies.

The kind of hatred those of us on the right have been seeing for eight years against George W. Bush is no comparison. Michelle has a whole lot more present-day examples that make the odd negative remark about Obama seem like civil discourse in comparison.

Which is not to say I in any way condone hateful attacks on any candidate. I don't.

BC HRT decision undercuts Islamophobia

According to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, its okay for Mark Steyn to use stereotypes and wrong facts to engender fear of Muslims, because fear is not the same thing as hatred or contempt.

In other words, they have, through their verdict, as Sean Berry writes, with many commas, to imitate the report, they have, as I said, consigned the word Islamophobia to the dustbin of history. Maybe there is room in said circular file for the word homophobia as well.

What does the suffix -phobia mean but fear? If I have a phobia about snakes or tight spaces or crowds, I am terrified for usually non-rational reasons, according to common psychiatric definitions. Dr. Sanity, my favorite online psychiatrist, has written at length about phobias in the context of fear of Islam.

She writes:

No; a rational, healthy fear of Islam and its aggressive desire to subjugate the entire human race under the yoke of its god by any and all means (including using freedom and democracy to facilitate its totalitarian policital agenda) is perfectly appropriate and continually justified by the fanatical behavior of millions of Muslims everywhere on the planet.

This is not Islamophobia; this is common sense.

Hannah Arendt once said, " Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival." So, let's review the rational role of emotions like fear; which, as Dalrymple suggests is "not wholly irrational" at all.

These days, "fear" is often used as if it were a dirty word; when in fact, fear is a perfectly normal emotion that we are (thankfully) hardwired to experience. One notable aspect of fear, as opposed to terror, is that the fear mobilizes the person experiencing it (physiologically to fight or run away from that which is threatening), while terror immobilizes.

In other posts, I have explained how destructive it is to rely solely on one's emotions as a strategy for living one's life. But is equally irrational to completely ignore feelings and pretend that you don't feel what you do.

In other words, fear may be an extremely rational response to a dangerous situation that threatens the survival of the individual.

I personally do not believe Islam as a whole is fear-inspiring. Nor do the vast majority of Muslims around the world frighten me. (I don't think Dr. Sanity does either, from a regular reading of her blog). But even if there are even 10 per cent of Muslims (or three per cent) who hold an extremist, violent view of jihad (or sympathize with it) that's millions of people. Of course those extremists are most dangerous to fellow Muslims.

Dr. Sanity talks a lot about how fear creates the fight or flight response. Hatred or contempt is something other than fear. So the word Islamophobia is toast, according to our betters at the BC HRT otherwise known as the B C Bureau of Facts. Unless, as is common in a postmodern universe, words mean what we want them to mean (take marriage for instance).

The proper word for hatred or contempt of Islam should be Islamodium. As a Christian, I do not believe any of us should practice hatred of any person or group. I also don't believe we should fear any person or group except God. But from a standpoint of love, through the lens of objective reality given us by Truth, we can see things as they are and plead for correction and reconciliation.

I hope the B.C. B of F will adjust their lexicon now that Islamophobia is, by their definition, not a hate crime.

But that won't happen, because it is part of the strategy of social engineers and utopians everywhere, religious and non-religious, to marginalize those who dissent as mentally ill, irrational, or sick.

Why I love Sarah Palin

Because she says things like this:

“In this same spirit, as defenders of the culture of life, John McCain and I believe in the goodness and potential of every innocent life. I believe the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who are least able to defend and speak for themselves. And who is more vulnerable, or more innocent, than a child?

When I learned that my son Trig would have special needs, I had to prepare my heart for the challenges to come. At first I was scared, and Todd and I had to ask for strength and understanding. But I can tell you a few things I’ve learned already.

Yes, every innocent life matters. Everyone belongs in the circle of protection. Every child has something to contribute to the world, if we give them that chance. There are the world’s standards of perfection … and then there are God’s, and these are the final measure. Every child is beautiful before God, and dear to Him for their own sake.

As for our beautiful baby boy, for Todd and me, he is only more precious because he is vulnerable. In some ways, I think we stand to learn more from him than he does from us. When we hold Trig and care for him, we don’t feel scared anymore. We feel blessed.

National Post story on the BCHRT and Maclean's

I wonder upon what basis the BC Human Right Tribunal assesses that Maclean's Magazine and the Mark Steyn article is not based upon fact, since the magazine nor Steyn never offered any defence of its facts. I see that it's the acceptance of the "expert witnesses" produced by the complainants:

We have accepted the expert evidence of Drs. Rippin and Ayoub that the Article contains historical, religious and factual inaccuracies. However, their expertise did not extend to linking the inaccuracies in the Article to the probability that it would expose Muslims in B.C. to the level of “unusually strong feelings and deeply felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification”

(...)

We do, however, accept Dr. Hirji’s evidence that the Article used common Muslim stereotypes. For example, when commenting on the cover page of the Maclean’s issue, she indicated that the black burkha is often used as a common image to depict Muslims as foreign and that it was common to show women and children as markers of the oppression of Islam. However, she did not link that stereotype with the impact its use might have on an objective reader of the Article.

(...)

The problem associated with relying on subjective views about the Article was highlighted when contrasting the evidence of Dr. Hirji and Dr. Habib with respect to their interpretation of the image of the young girl on the Maclean’s cover page. At first, Dr. Hirji did not consider the young girl’s image as threatening. She only interpreted the image as threatening after reading the text of the Article. In contrast, Dr. Habib described the young girl as appearing distressed and apprehensive about what was to happen next. The image is therefore capable of a number of interpretations.

Frankly, if I were Steyn or Maclean's I would not be pleased with this. It reeks of the drive-by verdict the Ontario Human Rights Commission's Barbara Hall issued when it stated it did not have the jurisdiction. Again, this assertion was made without the benefit of a trial (with real rules of evidence).

I recall that Maclean's editor Ken Whyte said the magazine stood by its facts. And I'm sure Mark Steyn, unlike Joe Biden, does not make up facts out of thin air, but bases his opinion upon real, objective data that exists out there in objective reality (Steyn strikes me as a more old-fashioned type who happens to believe there is real truth to be discovered, not made up as we go along). He does not live in a subjective postmodern universe where facts are whatever any victim group says they are, and those of the "power structure" are automatically discounted.

Joseph Brean has an interesting piece in today's National Post. That subjective interpretation of truth comes up in the whine of the Canadian Islamic Congress's Faisal Joseph.

Mr. Joseph said the outcome could have been different if the tribunal had not "unilaterally changed the [legal] test" for establishing hatred and contempt, preferring a purely objective test over an earlier, more subjective one that focused on how the alleged hate message was understood by recipients.

"On the whole, however, the case was a leap forward in the struggle against media-propagated Islamophobia," Mr. Joseph said. "The fact that human rights commissions in Ontario and B. C. have recognized the role of Canada's national news magazine in promoting societal intolerance towards Muslim Canadians and in publishing false and exaggerated material highlights the urgent need for editors and newscasters to critically examine how they represent Muslims in their news and editorial coverage."

It's interesting that the decision separated between hatred and fear. Brean writes:

It ruled that the article, an excerpt from Mr. Steyn's book America Alone, contained historical, religious and factual inaccuracies, relied on common Muslim stereotypes and tried to "rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims."

"But fear is not synonymous with hatred and contempt," the tribunal wrote. "With all its inaccuracies and hyperbole, [the article] has resulted in political debate which, in our view, [B. C.'s hate speech human rights law] was never intended to suppress. In fact, as the evidence in this case amply demonstrates, the debate has not been suppressed and the concerns about the impact of hate speech silencing a minority have not been borne out," the tribunal wrote.

What, pray-tell, are the historical, religious and factual inaccuracies? Is the BCHRT now like a bureau of facts and historical and religious accuracies like some kind of bureau of standards and measurements? Is this the role we want government to play, as big tax-payer funded fact-checkers to which every media outlet must bow? When the ideology motivating most of these so-called fact-checkers no longer believes in facts, but that everything is relative?
(oh, except that the colonial mentality of Western Civilization is uniquely bad).

Puhleeze. The BCHRT accepted as factual the evidence of the Buffy the Vampire slayer expert and the non-Muslim apologist, who claimed jihad does not mean violent struggle against non-Muslims, but some kind of internal spiritual struggle. Well, jihad has both meanings and to extremists and terrorists the meaning is not the latter.

Mark told Rob Breakenridge that he had hoped for a guilty verdict so he could fight this battle in a real court, with real rules of evidence.

Listen to the radio interview. It's excellent.

This is drenched in irony . . .

Could it be that the same prosecutor who put Conrad Black in jail may end up going after Barack Obama?

BC HRT dismisses case against Maclean's and Mark Steyn

The BC Human Rights Tribunal has dismissed the case against Maclean's Magazine for running the excerpt of Mark Steyn's bestselling book American Alone.

Mark writes:

Their Marsupial Majesties at the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal have dismissed El-Mo's complaint against Maclean's and voted unanimously to acquit the hatemongers:

The panel has concluded that the complaints are not justified because the complainants have not established that the Article is likely to expose them to hatred or contempt on the basis of their religion. Therefore, pursuant to s. 37(1) the complaints are dismissed.

For the full monster PDF ruling, click here. I'll be discussing the verdict later today after 6.30pm Mountain Time with Rob Breakenridge on 770 CHQR Calgary. Further reports from The National Post, plus comment from Andrew Coyne, and from Kathy Shaidle & Pete Vere - and there's never been a better day to pick up a copy of The Tyranny Of Nice.

Go to Mark's site and the links will work.

I haven't read the whole decision yet, only a few pages. But what struck me is how slippery and pompously legal-sounding it all is with all the "high-minded" talk about balancing rights.

It is strange how the right to be equal before the law has morphed in the looking-glass, Kafkaesque "human rights" world into equality rights that trump other all other rights. And it no longer means equal before the law and impartiality and innocent until proven guilty and all that good stuff but quotas and rights for special interest groups and the right to discriminate against Christian belief and practice and in the case of Steyn, fact-based opinion writing. That should give every columnist in the country a bad case of the libel chill flu.

Of course, if Mark Steyn were not Mark Steyn but some low profile Christian polemicist and Maclean's Magazine were not Canada's highest profile news magazine but some tiny circulation special interest publication or blog, I bet the verdict would have been different. The BCHRT, like the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) is picking its battles. It wants to survive.

It was also interesting that the BCHRT did recognize that freedom of expression is a Charter value, but stressed that the right to be free of discrimination is also not only in the Charter but in the Code. Like that gives it more weight or something. This is the balancing act and the Code gives more weight to the freedom from discimination thing, but, hey, we'll be magnanimous.

Gag me. Are we going to start hearing the Code spoken of with the same reverence in Canada as the Charter?

The Code is anti-Charter, unless the equality provision has, through legal sleight of hand, become the trump card for every other right through judicial interpretation. I don't think that's what the framers intended. And it certainly is not in our civil rights inheritance that preceded the Charter.

Well, Andrew Coyne, who liveblogged his fingers off during the kangaroo court proceedings says:

Aw nuts, we won

Well, maybe the Sockpuppets and their puppet-master will appeal the case to a higher court.

If they do, then Maclean's should not be gentlemanly about it as they were at the Tribunal, where they indicated they were not going to seek costs.

The horror of the BCHRT, despite how reasonable-sounding and balanced and mealy-mouthed its decision, is that any time someone decides they want to punish someone whose thought offends them, they can victimize that someone with an expensive, ridiculous, rule-free, goal-posts always moving around travesty of a trial.

The Sock Puppets won because they have chilled free expression in Canada because most media outlets would not or could not go through what Maclean's went through in that week from a surreal, ridiculous hell last June.

By the way, I am reading my e-copy of Tyranny of Nice now. Can't wait to get back to it.
Kathy Shaidle has details on where to get your copies. You can also get a signed copy from Mark's site.

I'm going to order several bound copies to give as Christmas presents and stocking stuffers.

The HRCs and the HRTs hope that by dismissing complaints against Mark and Ezra that we'll just go away. But we will be watching every single decision they make from now on, thousands of us.

Kathy comments on the decision:

But what's with the "but"?

Well, now we'll get to hear, "It's cuz we iz Muslims, init?" for the next 10 years. Jews have always won their HRC cases against neo-Nazis, and Christians always lose to gays; the optics are bad all around.

Mohammed Al-Sharpton will say, "This verdict is just as Islamophobic as Steyn's articles. They even released it on a Friday because that's our holy day!"

And the cycle will continue in appeal.

Stay tuned.

Morgentaler gets his Order of Canada today

It was an outrage when the Governor General announced on Canada Day that abortionist Henry Morgentaler would get the Order of Canada. It would have been a terrible appointment on any day, but on Canada's national holiday, the announcement felt like a slap in the face to hundreds of thousands of Canadians, even many pro-choice Canadians.

Thousands of letters, emails and petitions followed. But did the Governor General listen?

No. Either she is utterly tone deaf, or she is deliberately rubbing salt in the wound and telling the two thirds of the Canadian population who are not happy with the status quo of a Canada with no legal protection for the unborn at any stage of pregnancy that they are held in derision and utter contempt by their government.

Today, on the day preceding Thanksgiving Weekend, she gives this award to a man whose activism has contributed to the deaths of more than 2 million unborn children. A man who brags about personally aborting about 100,000 babies.

This woman must go. Her term must be rescinded.

Archbishop Collins has issued a statement last night that has been posted at the Catholic Register website.

He said:

This is a sad moment in Canadian history.The Order of Canada was created to
recognize the outstanding achievements of citizens who have desired and helped
to create a better country. Is a country made better when those who are most
vulnerable are not allowed to continue their brief experience of the precious
gift of life itself?He is being received into the Order of Canada despite the
opposition of hundreds of thousands of Canadians. This action divides our
country. It does not unite.This ceremony is taking place as we are entering into
the celebration of Thanksgiving, when loved ones will gather with their families
across this nation. Around dining room tables this weekend, let us reflect
deeply, and remember that while no one of us was ever a mere part of another’s
body, each one of us was, at one time, the precious unborn baby in our mother’s
womb. Let each of us thank God that our personal journey was not terminated.
This is no abstract issue. Nothing affects you or me more profoundly.
After all, you and I are here to give thanks on this Thanksgiving Day.

Yes, Your Grace, this is a sad, sad day for our country. (I am an American-Canadian dual citizen who was born in the USA but live here and love both countries.)

Obama--Messiah? Obama--Liar?

Obama the Messiah ..... that's what Louis Farrakhan is saying in this video (via Gateway Pundit):

Anti-Semitic
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan says of
Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama: "The Messiah is absolutely
speaking."Warning: This video is just freaky:Via World Net Daily

And if that's not enough. Obama is saying that he believed William Ayers was rehabilitated when he consorted with him. Well, a video of a Connie Chung interview with Ayers and his terrorist wife has emerged from 1998, where they say they wish they had been more militant. These are the folks who helped launched Obama's political career? This man is going to be Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America?

Again, Gateway Pundit has the video:

Now there is video of terrorists and Obama associates Bill Ayers and wife
Bernadine Dohrn admitting that they wish they would have done more.The O'Reilly
Factor reported:This was from a 1998 interview with Connie Chung.

And if that's not enough, Obama's campaign is lying about his association with ACORN.

Again...Gateway Pundit is all over this:

This is just amazing.
The Obama Campaign made 3 statements on Obama's ties to ACORN at the Fight the Smears website.
2 of them are found to be outright lies from this article.
The Cleveland Leader reported:

While Barack Obama's connection with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has not gone entirely unreported, it has not been fully explained. Most media background pieces simply note Obama's involvement in a 1995 lawsuit on behalf of ACORN. Obama's own website, as well as most major media, fail to reveal the full depth and extent of his relationship with the organization.

Attempts to hide evidence of Obama's involvement with ACORN have included wiping the web clean of potentially damaging articles that had appeared, and were previously publicly accessible. Unfortunately, those behind the attempted cover-up failed to realize that in today's day and age, nothing disappears forever.

Most interesting take on Obama--fascinating actually

David Samuels writes in the New Republic:What's even more remarkable about Dreams from My Father is the fact that it was written by a man who has since decided to run for president by disowning the most striking parts of his own voice and transforming himself into a blank screen for the fantasy-projection of the electorate. It is hard to overemphasize how utterly remarkable it is that Dreams exists at all--not the usual nest of position papers and tape-recorder talk, but a real book by a real writer who has both the inclination and the literary tools to give an indelible account of himself, and who also happens to be running for president. In which connection, it seems right to mention that the Barack Obama who appears in Dreams, and, one presumes, in his own continuing interior life, is not a comforting multiracial or post-racial figure like Tiger Woods or Derek Jeter who prefers to be looked at through a kaleidoscope. Though there are many structural parallels between Dreams and Invisible Man, Obama believes in the old-fashioned, unabashedly romantic, and, in the end, quite weird idea of racial authenticity that Ellison rejected. He embraces his racial identity despite his mixed parentage through a kind of Kierkegaardian leap into blackness, through which he hopes to become a whole, untroubled person.

-snip-

Filled with striking, well-disciplined sentences and observations, Dreams is also shot through with the vanity of a young man trying on borrowed clothing in front of a mirror as he attempts to figure out exactly what kind of black man he will be, a process that tells us that the narrator comes from a privileged place in society.

Gagdad Bob at One Cosmos tells how we will damn ourselves

H/t FreeMarkSteyn.

Gagdad Bob writes (emphasis mine, and please read the whole essay because it is most interesting):

It may well turn out to be as his spiritual mentor, Reverend Wright says: God damn America!

And why not? If we abandon any pretense of spiritual ideals, it is not God who will damn America. Rather, we'll do it ourselves. I'm pretty sure we'll discover what it felt like to be a Christian living in Rome, as the barbarian hordes were about to put an end to that world.

I am especially concerned about the catastrophe of Obama potentially nominating three Supreme Court justices before a filibuster-proof senate. This will have the effect of radically remaking America for good. There will be no turning back. For generations to come, we will live under a judicial tyranny in which a few elites get to decide what they want the Constitution to mean.

snip

Now, what of Obama? He obviously knows nothing. That goes without saying. And he has accomplished nothing. Even his most vocal supporters will concede that. Therefore, his support appears very much to reside in the dimension of being. He is the One. He will Heal the Nation. He will Change things. He gives us Hope. He's just.... special.

So right away we see that Obama represents the projection and embodiment of deeply religious impulses, only deeply irrational (as opposed to transrational). To put it another way, anyone with a shred of spiritual discernment is not only immune to Obama's attraction, but is repelled by such a man. He is full of phony authority on every level, but it's not just an "absence," but the positive presence of a negation.

Binky has a must-read post over at FreeMarkSteyn

Binky at FreeMarkSteyn, the best daily conglomeration of important reading in the blogosphere, has an important essay today on the dangers that Barack Obama poses to the free world. He writes:

ANTI-AMERICANISM has an almost-president, with a lick-spittle media and a cloud of tax-funded flakes and extremists of all sorts buzzing around him. He has covered (as best he can) his crazy-bad thoughts, past recrod, and cronies; that won’t be needed in January 2008 if he is elected. He is a hard-socialist with Communist ‘community organizer’ training, his ACORN-mafia ties; and he has a black-power racist cadre behind him, including his long-time pastor.

Just a few thoughts: he’s hiding a lot; and that is being hidden from the public by sympathetic people and institutions. When will those favours owed be paid out? Next: anti-Westernists on the Left make common cause with soft-Jihadists, Israel-haters, and a wider circle of America-haters. How will those direct connections influence this almost-president and his policies?

Hope.. in what? Change.. to what? We may well be on the cusp of a soft-fascist fourth-wave (WIlson- FDR-LBJ being the first 3), led by America, against freedom of speech and thought, for ever-more corrupt insider politics; and ever more extremist utopianism at any cost.

He’s a smoothly manipulative and poorly-fathered person who desires to be loved, and to have power to right all wrongs. That’s nitro & glycerin.

For The Obama, the political is personal, and opposition or disagreement is personal (or racist); this his attempts to silence or have his minions out-shout all critics, or even those seeking to reveal what he wishes concealed– like the NRO’s indefatigable Stanley Kurtz. The Glorious Leader is not be amused. And imagine elections by ACORN; oil policy by Pelosi; financial oversight by Barney Frank; communities organized by Ayers.

The financial crisis is huge: but Obamunism is Godzilla-huge.

Oh, and U.S.-bloggers? Only Daily Kos and HuffPo will get free run under Obama. The O-Bomb represents the single greatest threat to the freedom of the blogosphere since it began.

Victor Davis Hansen asks: what is real wisdom?

At The Corner, he writes (emphasis mine):

We had a debate between the two Vice Presidential candidates. Biden was superficially the more impressive with his recall of facts, anecdotes (most of them not mysteriously with Biden at the heroic center), and broad assertions.

In contrast, Palin was direct and perhaps repetitive in her focus on lower taxes, less government, and individual responsibility (especially for personal debt) — and I suppose what Brooks would call populist in her vocabulary, tone, and Fargo-mode of expression. But when they were through, Palin proved the more truthful and pragmatic, inasmuch as the glib Biden turned out to have misled in almost everything he professed, from our own Constitution to Hezbollah's presence in Lebanon. Even the folksy reference to his hometown diner was inaccurate. And that raises the age-old Euripidean question, "What is wisdom?" or maybe those general Hesiodic warnings about the dangers of moral regress that sometimes can accompany intellectual progress.

Wisdom can be, but surely is not confined to, or even assured by, degree certification, rhetorical brilliance, or the ability to talk off the cuff about Niehbuhr — or the wit to write Brooks and advise him about his own ethical conduct, which Obama did and which now impresses Brooks:

"For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say."

This is sad — since everything from the faux-seal with its vero possumus pretensions, the Greek temple backdrops, the efforts to speak at the Brandenburg Gate, the mantra "we are the change we've been waiting for," the messianic idea that the seas and planet will likewise heel to His wisdom, and the inane 'hope and change' banalities do not suggest real wisdom at all, but a dazzling veneer that overlays a great deal of megalomania.

Pro-life leaders sour on Harper

The Catholic Register has my latest story on the Canadian election. Note they are not saying don't vote Conservative.

OTTAWA - Though Conservative Leader Stephen Harper faced hidden agenda charges during the election campaign, pro-life voters have grown increasingly disappointed that he has none.

So disappointed Catholic Insight magazine editor Fr. Alphonse de Valk called for Harper’s defeat in his Calgary Southwest riding.

De Valk issued the call after Harper told the news media he would not allow his government to reopen the abortion debate and a spokesman added Harper would whip his cabinet to vote against any pro-life private members’ bills.

“I’m not saying don’t vote Conservative,” de Valk said in an interview Oct. 7, noting he was only calling for pro-life voters to send a message in the prime minister’s own riding. “The Liberals of course are hopeless,” he said, pointing out their pro-abortion agenda is even worse than the Conservatives.

McGill University religious studies professor Douglas Farrow, who co-edited Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada’s New Social Experiment, said he too would vote against Harper if he lived in his riding if there were another choice, even though he said a Tory majority might be best for the country right now.

“If you can’t even see that protecting the unborn is your responsibility, then whatever wisdom you may have in dealing with the military or the economy or some other set of interests that the country rightly needs to have, you are not going to provide the kind of leadership the country needs,” Farrow said.

Why Obama's connection to William Ayers matters

Obama and his campaign are trying to dismiss his long association with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers and calling him an educational reformer.

Rush Limbaugh talks about what kind of "educational reformer" William Ayers has been talking about, things most Americans should find deeply disturbing:

RUSH: I'll tell you, these guys are nervous. Bill Ayers was one of the formative influences in Obama's life. Now, the editorial guys at Investor's Business Daily have a great, great piece today entitled: "Obama's Real Problem with Bill Ayers." We all know who he is, Weather Underground, bombed the Pentagon, was the host of Obama's coming out political fundraiser party in 1995, gave Obama $150 million to head up education, the Annenberg Challenge, worked and introduced him to ACORN. Bill Ayers is very, very close to Michelle Obama. In fact, it may well be, folks, that Michelle Obama is as instrumental in Obama knowing Ayers as Obama himself is. "At an education forum in Venezuela--" Let's go back here. Remember what Axelrod said, "Bill Ayers today is a professor of education in Chicago, he's an aide to the mayor on school reform." That's what Obama's campaign advisor says.

"At an education forum in Venezuela, Bill Ayers showed the real issue is not his terrorist past. It's the socialist revolutionary agenda that he and Barack Obama want to impose on the nation's schools. Still more evidence of how the media are in the tank for Obama was evident in Tom Brokaw's description of Ayers on Sunday's 'Meet The Press.' 'School reformer' is how Brokaw identified the co-founder of the Weather Underground, the radical organization that, among other activities, bombed government buildings, banks, police departments and military bases in the early 1970s," and private homes as well. "Bill Ayers is a school reformer in the same sense that Joe Stalin was an agricultural reformer. An idea of what Ayers has in mind for America's schools was provided in his own words not 40 years ago when Obama was eight years old, but less than two years ago in November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez. With Chavez at his side--" two years ago, Bill Ayers who is just a professor of education in Chicago, "--voiced his support for 'the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. ... I look forward to seeing how ... all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.'"

So....do Americans want the United States schools to help make our country more like Venezuela?

Peter Kirsanow writes at The Corner:

Obama consorted with a terrorist who brags about planting bombs and whose organization planted hundreds of bombs. Some were meant to kill cops. Some were meant to kill soldiers. Some were meant to kill civilians.

Let's put this quite simply: This is an abomination. This alone disqualifies Obama from being president. Even if he can heal the planet. Even if the Dow tanks to 5000. Even if he puts a unicorn in every garage. A majority of Americans will not vote for a candidate who they know has had a working relationship with a terrorist — foreign or domestic. But they must know it.

Americans haven't suddenly become so tolerant of terrorism — and those who are tolerant of terrorists — that we'll vote for a smooth, glib, empty suit because we hope that somehow he'll work some form of alchemy on a scary economy.

But it's not just Ayers. Remember his long-time pastor Jeremiah Wright? What about Obama's membership in the socialist New Party?

One hell of an election says the Anchoress

She writes:

This is going to be one hell of an election. If you criticize Obama you’re a racist. If you look into his associations, you’re “being dangerous.” If Obama loses, we’re told by Democrat James Carville that Obama supporters “will riot” (the most racist thing I’ve yet heard in this election, btw) and of course, if you look into voter fraud and ACORN and its mad history of voter intimidation, fraud and suppression, well…that’s probably racist, too. Meanwhile he’s got Camp Obama going on, training folks for agitation on election day, and he’s telling his supporters to “get in their faces.”

Go to her site to follow the links.

If you want to know more about Acorn and widespread allegations of voter fraud, Gateway Pundit is on it. So is Michelle Malkin.

What if those planes represent America ?

Well, this reporter's notebook comparing the Obama and the McCain campaigns organization, treatment of journalists and the state of the chartered plane has me thinking metaphorically.

The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama's, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.

The other day in Albuquerque, N.M., the reporters were given almost no time to file their reports after McCain spoke. It was an important, aggressive speech, lambasting Obama's past associations. When we asked for more time to write up his remarks and prepare our reports, the campaign readily agreed to it. They understood.

Similar requests are often denied or ignored by the Obama campaign aides, apparently terrified that the candidate may have to wait 20 minutes to allow reporters to chronicle what he's just said. It's made all the more maddening when we are rushed to our buses only to sit and wait for 30 minutes or more because nobody seems to know when Obama is actually on the move.

Maybe none of this means much. Maybe a front-running campaign like Obama's that is focused solely on victory doesn't have the time to do the mundane things like print up schedules or attend to the needs of reporters.

But in politics, everything that goes around comes around.

Hmmmm. What does that mean? Is the honeymoon Obama has been taking for granted with the news media starting to fray?

But think about that stinky, cramped, uncomfortable plane. America....you want to fly Obama? Or fly McCain? Who is going to take better care of your country?

Hmmmm....interesting review of what looks like an interesting book

At Inside Catholic, Todd Aglialoro writes this in a review of Stephen Baskerville's new book Taken into Custody: the war against fatherhood, marriage and the family:

As unique as it is disturbing, Taken into Custody strikes notes from all over the conservative/libertarian spectrum to compose a sort of hybrid thesis: that big government and anti-father feminism have teamed up to promote divorce, tear apart families, pauperize and criminalize fathers, and swell the power of the state.

The marriage contract today is a legal anomaly, the author muses, in that our government directs nearly all its efforts and resources toward dissolving rather than -- as with other contracts -- enforcing it. In what he calls the "totalitarian regime of involuntary divorce," unfaithful parties are not punished, and faithful ones not rewarded. In a perverse twist, it is the faithful party -- the one seeking to hold the marriage together -- on whom the guilt and suspicion are cast.

With the advent of no-fault divorce (before which divorces required cause, and fault could be assigned proportionately), "the fault that was ostensibly thrown out the front door of divorce proceedings re-entered through the back." Working from the "therapeutic" (read: morally relativistic) premise that both parties must be equally to blame -- which is to say, not at all to blame -- for a marriage's failure, divorce courts begin with an "automatic outcome" and then set out to find or manufacture evidence to support it.

How is that evidence obtained? Via "extensive and intrusive governmental instruments whose sole purpose is intervention in families." Having quit the marriage-enforcement business, government has turned the full weight of its resources and coercive powers to the divorce-enforcement business.

Take a look at this developing story . . .

From LifesiteNews.com:

CORNWALL, ON, October 7, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Some of Canada's most outspokenly pro-life bishops are urging the Bishops of Canada to attend the March for Life en masse with representatives from each diocese. The 2009 March for Life, to be held on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on May 14, will mark 40 years since the omnibus bill of Pierre Trudeau which opened the floodgates to abortion in Canada.

I hope it's not true, but I think Obama's cruising for victory

I watched the soporific town hall debate last night. If it hadn't been for my laptop and the live-blogging at various sites keeping me awake, I would have switched it off and gone to sleep.

And, if I did not know what I know about Obama and could just take him on face-value, he seemed on top of things, middle-of-the-road and certainly not scary. Frankly, just based on last night's debate, I couldn't see a whole lot of daylight between him and McCain. Yeah, there was the health care is a responsibility vs. Obama's it's a right, but then McCain came out with this buy everyone a house thing. I dunno. I can just see that a lot of people who tuned in without knowing much background will agree with the mainstream media that there is nothing scary about Obama and that he seems to have the best grasp of the economy and McCain is just trying to mount a smear campaign to revive his falling poll numbers.

Obama has an uncanny ability to shapeshift and, like the consummate narcissicist, produce an image on the blank screen of his personality that represents whatever meets the needs of the audience who is projecting their idea of a political savior on that screen. It's only these subtle little things--like health care as a right--that betray his centrist, command-economy, government is the answer mindset.

But his associations and alliances matter. They give us some frightening insight into the wizard behind the screen and the radical left-wing politics that have guided him all his life.

Stanley Kurtz, who has done the legwork the mainstream media has failed to do, has this (emphasis mine):

I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance “counseling” operations like the one touted in that Sun-Times article. This much we’ve known. Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.

In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as “oppositional outlaws.” Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.” “This identity as a uniquely militant organization,” says Swarts, “is reinforced by contentious action.” ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers “tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.”

These are fascist tactics. But, obviously, they work. They are the tactics that Obama has studied under and embraced, though now he's adopted the meek and mild and bland mainstream politician persona and the mainstream media is going to let him get away with it.

A bright spot in a dark news day

In my trip around the blogosphere this morning, reading up on reaction to last night's debate, seeing the headlines in my morning newspapers on the global economic crisis, I popped by the Catholic Register site to read this story about Cardinal Marc Ouellet's presentation to the Synod of Bishops going on in Rome right now.

Cardinal Ouellet's words came alive, they make my heart sing with joy.

VATICAN CITY - As children of God and brothers and sisters of Jesus, Christians must learn how to listen to what God is saying to them today in the Scriptures, said Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec.

The cardinal, recording secretary of the Oct. 5-26 world Synod of Bishops on “The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church,” outlined the main themes for the synod’s debate during an Oct. 6 speech in Latin.

Ouellet, primate of Canada, proposed that the 253 synod members consider Mary as the role model for how Christians should respond to the word of God in the Scriptures and, especially, to the Word of God who took on flesh and became human in Jesus Christ. The Gospels recount not just the fact that the angel Gabriel revealed God’s plan to Mary, but also show her reaction, “her fear, her perplexity and her asking for an explanation” before embracing God’s plan for her life, he said.

The key, Ouellet said, is that Mary enters into a dialogue with God and gives herself to God in response to God revealing Himself to her.

“In the measure that the church, in her members, perceives herself as a beloved spouse, the object of a chosen love, it becomes natural to turn lovingly to the holy Scriptures” in order to hear the voice of the God who reaches out to humanity and asks for a response of faith, he said.

Think for a moment. We are children of God and brothers and sisters of Christ. Mary is our example. Remember as a result of this dialog with God in the Annunciation, Mary responds:
Let it be unto me according to thy Word.

Here is a link to the full text of Cardinal Ouellet's address.

The picture shows Cardinal Ouellet in his office in Quebec City. I took it last March.

The Anchoress on the future of civil liberties under Obama

She writes:

Well, really, it is simple. With the first-amendment unfriendly Obama in the White House, the Internet-unfriendly Pelosi running the House and as many as 3 SCOTUS judges to be named probably within Obama’s first year in office, the press will face a huge reduction in competition from the alternative media. With a filibuster-proof house the so-called “fairness doctrine” will quickly be put back in place, which will effectively end representation of opposing viewpoints. With Mrs. Pelosi’s previously murmured intentions to regulate internet freedoms and access, even unto her own elected colleagues, the ‘net will cease to be a force in politics or freedom of expression. And the newly revitalized ‘activist’ Supreme Court will uphold all of it.

In other words, with an Obama victory and a Democrat sweep, the press will - within a year or so - once again be “the only game in town.” And with no reason to do so, they will not even pay the barest lip-service to opposition opinion. Hell, they barely do, now. They will become the monolithic monopoly which acts as the trumpet for the Glorious Government of the People’s Republic of America - or, if you like, Pravda West.

I expect we’ll also see a newly minted “crisis” coming down the pike every other week - to keep the nation off-balance and distracted. Fun times.

Once again, as one raised by classical liberals, one who considers herself, still, to be a “classical” liberal, I am at a loss to understand how those who call themselves “liberal” in 2008 can find this unfree, suppressive press acceptable. I am at a loss to explain how the very people who have been hyperventilating about “lost civil rights” - and projecting all manner of suppression onto a Bush administration that never shut down a film, or a parody, or a radio station or a book or play or any media that criticized it so roundly and with so much vigorous hate - are so willfully blind to the maneuvers being run by their favorite candidate. But love is blind. So, apparently is the appetite for victory. Winning “at all costs” - even unto the ends of the scorched earth - will end up costing a great deal, but some don’t seem to care about that.

A President Obama seems to promise a heavy boot coming down hard on dissent and to seriously threaten civil liberties, beyond the first and second. He’s already showing his inclinations in that area. Those of us who dissent will no longer be told “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” We’ll be feeling full-blast the “chill wind” Tim Robbins so prosaically imagined all those years ago. I can’t wait to see what happens to our rights to assemble and to worship. Hey, where 2 or 3 are gathered, and not in his name, there might be a conspiracy - can’t have that.

Silence led to loss of Catholic education rights says lawyer

OTTAWA (CCN) — The silence of Quebec’s Catholic bishops is responsible for the loss of publicly funded Catholic schools in that province a constitutional lawyer told Catholic school trustees Sept. 26.

“We will lose (Catholic school rights) in Ontario if we’re silent,” Alberta Lawyer Kevin Feehan warned the 300 delegates attending the Canadian Catholic School Trustees’ Association here Sept. 26 - 27.

“The majority in a province can determine minority rights,” he said, pointing also to the loss of confessional schools in Newfoundland in 1998.

The loss of Catholic education ended in Quebec, he said, with a 1982 agreement the bishops made, acceding to the legislation allowing for the creation of linguistically based school boards. Each subsequent erosion of Catholic education rights was met by silence, he said.

The 1997 constitutional amendment in 1997 officially wiped out religious education rights in the province.

“If the Quebec bishops had said ‘No,’ we would have had Catholic education in Quebec,” said Feehan. “We traded a linguistic right for a denominational right.”

Rod Dreher echoes my thoughts . . .

He writes:

All along I have believed, and have said in this space, that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright matters. As far as we can tell, no single person had a greater influence on Barack Obama's thinking than did the radical, race-baiting Wright. To a far lesser but still significant degree, the unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers matters; as someone brought up the other day, if John McCain's political career had been launched in the home of an abortion clinic bomber who was not sorry he did it, there's no question but that the media would have made a huge deal about it.

Exactly. You see, there is a pattern. It's not only Ayers. It's Wright. It's various other terrorists like this former member of the PLO when it was a designated terror organization. You add Saul Alinsky into the mix and you have a man formed by radical, America-hating, grievance-mongering politics.

Does Obama think Hugo Chavez is a great model?

Because the Venezuelan dictator got high praise from "educational reformer" Bill Ayers.

I hope someone asks the Obamanator about this tonight. Check out Sol Stern's must-read essay in City Journal. (h/t Dr. Sanity.)

Stern writes:

For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”

As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.

The unbelievable dismissal of Ayers' relevance

I listened to CNN last night, mouth agape for the most part, with the breezy dismissals of the role unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers played in Barack Obama's political rise.

Gee, what if Timothy McVeigh had gotten off the Oklahoma City bombings on a technicality and, without ever saying he was sorry for what he did or getting any punishment for his murderous crimes and treason, became a professor at some university and what he taught was basically a system of doctrine that justified the alleged grievances that in his mind justified the bombing.

Okay? You think what Ayers did was not as big a bang as McVeigh's? It's only because the plans to blow up a dance where soldiers brought their dates that he did not succeed with a higher death count.

Now, imagine that John McCain or Sarah Palin not only had their political career launched in McVeigh's livingroom, but that McVeigh's political theories were the motivating factor in the "community organizing" (along radical political lines) that formed the bulk of your adult life experience allegedly qualifying you for Washington.

I find it amazing that the likes of Anderson Cooper and others just brush this off as a smear campaign. There was, however, a good mini-doc on CNN that played around 10 p.m. on the Ayers connection. Finally. The reporter even interview Stanley Kurtz. It's a start.

Well, Dr. Sanity has a great essay this morning with lots of links on the anti-Western, anti-American educational views that have become the new indoctrination of our youth, replacing a sound education.

She writes:

Do you think it is just a coincidence that the Obama's connection with unrepentant terrorist and avowed leftist William Ayers had to do with an educational project in Chicago's schools? What do you imagine that project's real goals were, when the author of the grant that underwrote it was William Ayers, bomber, terrorist, and now university professor? Ayers was the one who wrote the grant in 1993, and hired Obama to administer it. This was Obama's only serious executive experience in his entire life, and it was a total disaster. But, we continue to observe the unrestrained incorporation of postmodern, leftist, PC, multicultural, and environmentalist ideas into the curriculum even as early as kindergarden.

Regarding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge-Ayers-Obama connection, Sol Stern writes in a City Journal article, "The Bomber as School Reformer":

Ayers wrote the grant proposal[to the CAC] that secured seed money for the schools and ran the implementation arm of the project; Obama became chairman of the board that distributed the grants. Not only did the Times exonerate the Democratic presidential candidate of having anything like a “close” relationship with Ayers—their paths merely “crossed” while working on the Challenge, the paper said—but it also bestowed the honorific of “school reformer” on the ex-bomber. “Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform,” the article maintained. On Meet the Press Sunday morning, Tom Brokaw—who will be moderating tomorrow’s debate between the presidential candidates—picked up this now conventional wisdom and described Ayers as “a school reformer.”

Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer.

Rush on Sarah's debate performance and my thoughts on Obama's training wheels

RUSH: Who's the biggest loser in last night's debate, ladies and gentlemen? Who would you say, Brian, was the biggest loser in the debate last night? Well, not "the Drive-Bys," one Drive-By member. That would be Katie Couric. Katie Couric did her best with her gotcha questions and her ghoulish follow-ups and her even more vicious editing of the interview with Sarah Palin. The biggest winner last night was everybody who thought that Sarah Palin was whatever Sarah Palin is because of the Katie Couric interview. There are people who watched last night, I will guarantee you, could see how the news creates an image or destroys an image with absolutely no truth to it, no reality to it. Remember: The same folks that are tearing Sarah Palin down are the same ones building Barack Obama up, covering up for all the... (interruption) What are you laughing at in there? I realize I'm a funny guy, and I haven't said anything funny here unless Katie Couric's name makes you laugh.

snip

RUSH: And you don't understand it. The role of the vice president is spelled out in the Constitution. He is president of the Senate. He has an office there. If he wants to, he can go preside over the Senate every day. He can't vote unless there's a tie. Now, what Biden was basically saying is, "I'm going to be doing nothing. I'm not going to do diddly-squat. I'll be advising Barack a lot 'cause Barack doesn't know what he's doing. So I'll be advising Barack a lot," but he thinks the only time the vice president can go up to Capitol Hill is to break a vote, break a tie vote or sit there for the State of the Union speech because he's basing it on separation of powers. That's what he meant by the vice president's part of the executive branch and you gotta stay away from Capitol Hill.

I'm surprised so few have picked up on Biden's saying he would be right by Obama's side all the time advising him as VP. I thought: training wheels, Biden is going to be Obama's training wheels. Can't you see his wobbly neophyte bicycle with its rainbow decals and streamers with the training wheels and Biden keeping him from falling down? It speaks to the lack of confidence and the inner knowledge Obama has that he is not ready to be Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America. And it speaks to Biden's blowhardiness that he would want to brag about how he'll be the real president behind the president. ugh.

What a ghastly thought.

Sarah Palin--a holy fool?

To tell you the truth, I would rather have Forrest Gump for president of the United States than either Obama or Biden. Why? Because I would rather have someone with a good heart, with principles, with a love for America running the country than someone who appears intelligent but can lie, create "facts" out of mid-air or shapeshift positions depending on the audience.

One of the reasons why Sarah Palin strikes a chord is that on some levels she fits the archetype of the holy fool---an innocent, a David fighting Goliath who does not seem to stand a chance against the bigger, heavier armed, more experienced opponents, but someone who despite all the odds comes out on top.

It's also this holy foolishness about her that confounds and infuriates her critics. Sarah Palin is relying on a power bigger and higher than herself. She is just a self-confessed hockey mom, but she is powerful in ways that go way beyond her sex and her 44 years and her 2-years experience in Alaska as governor. I hate to say it, but it is this power that people hate. It's a good power, and despite her winks and good looks, it is not a seductive one like Obama's.

Victor Davis Hanson has an interesting take on Sarah:

Much of Palin's appeal and much of why she apparently grates on others is her accent, colloquialisms, grammar, seeming simplicity, and mannerisms—which are a lot like the wily, sing-songy voiced hero of Fargo, Marge Gunderson. In her methodical, seemingly plodding way, the pregnant Marge systematically figures out the complex criminal labyrinth, and then in courageous fashion wades into the thicket unaware perhaps of the danger from the supposedly more clever involved, but confident that what has worked for her in the past and gotten her this far will see her through just fine as usual.

Fair or not, Palin is the emblem of underestimated Middle Americans wading in over their heads, not changing with the times, and in the end finishing the job and outsmarting the rest.

It's not only Sarah Palin who is a holy fool. It's those Middle Americans, clinging to their guns and their religion and their vision of America as a Shining City on a Hill, who are holy fools, also (to use a Palin verbal tic).

As John Wimber used to say, I'm a fool for Christ. Whose fool are you?

May the foolishness of Sarah Palin continue to confound the wise. And may God grant John McCain a little of that foolishness, too.

Palin says Obama disqualified to be Commander in Chief

Yup.

You go, Sarah.

“Some of his comments that he has made about the war that I think may — in my world– disqualifies someone from consideration as the next commander in chief.” Palin said, “Some of his comments about Afghanistan and what we are doing there supposedly– just air raiding villages and killing civilians. That’s reckless. So I wanted to talk about things like that. So I guess I have to apologize about being a little annoyed, but that is also an indication of being outside that Washington elite and being outside the media elite also and just wanting to talk and just wanting to talk to Americans without the filter and let them know what we stand for.”

Finally the New York Times explores the Obama/ Ayers connection

Interesting piece, but one that does not go far enough, in my opinion. Also, I think Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright IS relevant.

Steve Chapman, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, defended Mr. Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his longtime pastor, whose black liberation theology and “God damn America” sermon became notorious last spring. But he denounced Mr. Obama for associating with Mr. Ayers, whom he said the University of Illinois should never have hired.

“I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations on terrorist bombings,” Mr. Chapman said in an interview, speaking not of the law but of political and moral implications.

“If you’re in public life, you ought to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this guy,’ ” Mr. Chapman said. “If John McCain had a long association with a guy who’d bombed abortion clinics, I don’t think people would say, ‘That’s ancient history.’ ”

Mr. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University Law School who was also a Weather Underground founder, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Stanley Kurtz is the expert on the Obama/Ayers connection.

More evidence that political correctness has helped tank the U.S. economy

Barney Frank has been front and centre as someone allegedly solving the credit crisis in the United States about not only his role in preventing reforms of Freddie Mae and Fannie Mae, but of a direct conflict of interest through his lover, who was assistant director of product initiatives at Fannie Mae. Hmmmm, I wonder what products---sub prime mortgages maybe?

H/t Dr. Sanity


Fox News has this:

Frank met Moses in 1987, the same year he became the first openly gay member of Congress.

"I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus," Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. "On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover."

The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses "helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs."

Critics say such programs led to the mortgage meltdown that prompted last month’s government takeover of Fannie Mae and its financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad mortgages throughout the private financial sector.

Although Frank now blames Republicans for the failure of Fannie and Freddie, he spent years blocking GOP lawmakers from imposing tougher regulations on the mortgage giants. In 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, the Boston Globe reported that Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively.

Still voting for Obama? Then perhaps you like this sort of thing

Via Fausta's blog:

4:30 Back up again! Via BSC Beth:

Download video!

Another tale of woe from a victim of HRCs

Blazing Cat Fur received an infuriating account of what sounds like a vexatious and abusive use of the human rights complaint process (not that the process in itself and the laws allowing them are not abusive even at the best of times). Here's an excerpt of what the victim wrote her:

I have been holding off on sending this out to the blogosphere since my battle with the HRC is still ongoing (albeit I think we are close to being "acquitted"). I was named in a HRC complaint filed by a former employee this year. The basis of this claim was "wrongful dismissal by means of discrimination on the basis of aparent sexual orientation". The employee in question only worked for my business for under 2 weeks and was an absolutely HORRIBLE employee. His last day of work I had a meeting with the employee in question telling him I would have to let him go if he didn't clean up his act and bad behaviors. He left that day and did not show up for work the next morning. Pretty simple right? So I terminated him and he ended up coming in at the end of that day demanding his final pay check. Once again pretty simple right? In his mind he quit because I hadn't even told him I had terminated him at that point.

Fast forward 3+ months later. I get a thick envelope in the mail from the HRC with a complaint from the employee in question claiming the discrimination. Now to the juicy parts. He claims that a co-worker had made a remark to him regarding a dinner date he had brought up. Allegedly the co-worker jokingly asked "oh yeah what's his name?". The employee now claimed to be terribly offended by the remark (which was never reported to me at the time as per our non discrimination policy). The employee then went on to claim that he had received an e-mail from me berating him and telling him to "get out of the closet" which is a total fabrication ( I barely knew the employee in question).

Help me get my wings back!

Have you ever tried President's Choice Timid Jerk frozen chicken wings? Well, the folks that own Loblaw's and the Great Canadian Superstore's and distribute to various Independent grocers have decided to de-list the product.

They were the Best. Chicken. Wings. Ever. Even better than anything I've tasted in bars or restaurants. They had a Jamaican style jerk sauce of lime juice, hot peppers and garlic that baked up crisp and spicy. No gluten either. They used to have Real Jerk wings that were so hot that even those of us with accustomed palates found them, well, spicy (and those were the ones I used to buy until they discontinued them.) But the Timid Wings had enough kick to make my family happy, but not so much that those not used to hot food could not eat them.

Everyone I introduced these wings to loved them, whether it was at my church socials, pot lucks, or parties at home. I used to share a box once a week and they were one of the reasons why I would go out of my way to Loblaw's instead of the Loeb around the corner.

If you ever tasted these wings and are sorry to see President's Choice de-list them, please send them a note or give them a telephone call. I got the following response from a customer service representative this morning. If you love Timid Jerk wings, why not drop Melanie a line through the website listed below via the form they have for asking about products.

Dear Mrs. Gyapong,

Thank you for taking the time to email us concerning our PC Timid Jerk Chicken Wings.

Unfortunately, this product has been discontinued; however we have forwarded your comments to our Merchandising Department for their review.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and hope you will contact us in the future with any other questions or comments.

Regards,

Mélanie

Sr. Customer Relations Representative

President's Choice

1-888-495-5111

www.presidentschoice.ca

If you missed seeing the chilling Obama kidz

singing about how Obama's going to change the world, the tape has been removed from YouTube.

But there's a remix that includes portions of the sickening indoctrination and compares it to similar use of children in North Korea.

H/t Dr. Sanity:

From reason tv:

Download video!

Sheila Wray Gregoire on the credit crisis

A good, common sense explanation of what's really going on in the credit crisis:

Let’s fast forward twenty years. My husband and I are living in a bungalow as a concession to my bad knee. He’s still not bald, so he’s the envy of all. And we still have two daughters.

Let’s imagine that one is married, stable, and living in a modest house while saving much of her income to launch a business. The other daughter dropped out of university to travel around the world and find herself. Mission accomplished, she returns home with dreams of starting her own organic goldfish farm. And she wants a large house suitable to her new role of a legitimate businesswoman.

Hopefully in twenty years my husband and I will still have the courage to slam our wallets shut. But let’s say we lose our minds and lend this daughter our life savings. A decade later, when she inevitably loses the house, guess who’s going to be bailing us out? The daughter who was trying to live responsibly all along.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened in the United States last week. It all started in the early 1990s, when Congress, under Bill Clinton, declared more loans should be given to those who don’t have a stellar financial footing, and offered banks incentives for being generous. All these new mortgages created a housing bubble, tempting speculators. Lenders launched subprime mortgages, which sounded ideal for the first little while, but soon became killers when the interest rate increased. These subprime loans went from comprising 2% of all loans in 2002 to 30% in 2006. And then the bottom fell out.

Read the whole thing.

If Sarah Palin had a convicted abortion clinic bomber in her closet . . .

The news media would be all over it. If this unrepentant abortion clinic bomber, after serving his time in prison, went on to become an academic who developed theories of education that indoctrinated young people into hating the establishment that allowed abortion clinics and gave them strategies for ends-justify-the-means tactics for destroying that establishment, do you think the media would for a moment be quiet?

Yet as I read on a blog recently, there are more hits for Bristol Palin (in five weeks of her mother's being on the national stage) on various mainstream news outlets than there are for William Ayers,(in months and months of Obama coverage). Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist who bombed the Pentagon (yeah, yeah, when Obama was eight) and who was the inspiration behind the educational theories that Obama "community organized" in Chicago, educational theories inspired by Marxism, hatred of America and class and race hatred.

Dr. Sanity writes today about the classical symptoms of hysteria ...la belle indifference....vis a vis the mainstream news media:

Personally, the most discouraging aspect of this entire presidential campaign is the unbelievable, completely overboard media bias in favor of Barack Obama. The media have lied, ignored, and completely obfuscated Obama's record and inexperience, even as they have attacked and become completely hysterical about Sarah Palin's. You cannot even argue key issues in this campaign because the media refuse to print the concerns that many reputable individuals have brought forth about Obama (see Stanley Kurtz's attempts to get the media interested in Obama's connections to William Ayers and his investigation into the CAC for a glaring example).

This seemingly willful blindness on the part of the media is eerily similar to "la belle indifference", a characteristic symptom of clinical hysteria and conversion disorder. We have seen it before in our biased MSM--and it has only gotten worse over the last few years.

And Rush Limbaugh tells why Obama is eminently unqualified to be president of the United States.

-

When you examine Obama's career, you basically see two things, and only two things. You see a man (a man-child) who has spent his life both as a college and law student and as an adult, working hand-in-hand with domestic terrorists. Now, I know you know this, and I know you want to sweep it under the rug because I know you just don't want to believe it, even though you know it. But do you not think that this is truly extraordinary? William Ayers and others from the Weather Underground are responsible for being a part of a terrorist wave in this country that murdered police officers. To downplay this or dismiss it as "guilt by association" is to be shortsighted and make a mistake. I don't believe most Democrats or independents find this kind of thing acceptable behavior. What kind of man sits in the pews of a church where his preacher spews hate about his own country -- hate for Jews, hate for whites, hate for blacks who don't agree with him -- and then says he had no idea his preacher was saying any of these things? Again, I ask you to look deep inside yourselves, ask yourselves if you see such a man representing your country as president of the United States.

A must read essay on Sarah Palin by Mary Grabar

At Pajamas Media Grabar writes about why feminists who now dominate much of modern academia hate Palin (emphases mine):

In order to climb the tenure ladder, one must join in the emotional championing of the “oppressed” and reject linear (logical) thought even as carried out through the grammatical structure of writing for spectacle, performance art, and female pop icons like Madonna and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But this kind of “scholarship” provides evidence of an extension of what the academic establishment had been trying to do since the 1960s — overthrow the West at the roots, at its intellectual base. The anti-logical theories of postmodernism, where truth itself is questioned, parallel feminist thinking. Reason, as part of the “Western patriarchal hegemony,” is indicted over and over in jargon-laden obscurantist academic prose.

-snip-

Women — and men who think like women — rule the liberal media and grant such emotion-based politics legitimacy. But the other side of the “caring” coin is the personality-based “critical” side — a nasty, catty one, indeed.

The confusion of the two spheres, the application of “caring” that is appropriately reserved for the domestic sphere where all fetuses are allowed to be birthed and nurtured, is illustrated by Palin, who does not make such confusions. She does not infuse public policy with those notions suited for the home by promoting increased welfare, negotiation with terrorists, and efforts to “understand” the root causes of terrorism, as Obama said we should do in his post-9/11 speech.

And she enjoys an approval rating among men of 62 percent, nine points higher than among women. Those in middle America who have not been taken up by the postmodern theories dominating our universities, especially at Ivy League schools like Barack Obama’s Harvard and Michelle Obama’s Princeton, like what they see.

Palin presents the American ideal: the frontier woman who lovingly takes care of her family, with a shotgun if necessary. The feminist and her male followers who attempt to change American culture through histrionic grievances, demands, meetings, and mass protests see in Palin a glaring example of how their ideas were not only wrong, but unnecessary and, indeed, harmful to women’s advancement.

Please read this entire essay.

Could it be that Sarah Palin represents the common sense of the American people?

Oh yeah, there is some interesting fisking going on about Biden's performance last night. Of course he appeared to benefit from his years of experience in Washington and his store of memory. Or did he? Jonah Goldberg at The Corner on National Review Online notes that Biden's grasp of the facts is really his ability to pull them from thin air and appear to be in command of the facts.

He writes (emphasis mine):

What struck me the most about the debate – and it probably helped having quintessential Obamaphiles in the room – was how Biden’s “gravitas” is derived almost entirely from the fact that he can lie with absolute passion and conviction. He just plain made stuff up tonight. I read a long list tonight in my debate with Beinart here at Wash U, we can visit the details tomorrow.

Just a few: Flatly asserting that Obama never said he’d meet with Achmenijad; that absolute nonsense about spending more in a month in Iraq than we’ve spent in Afghanistan (“let me say it again,” he said as if he was hammering home a real fact); the bit about McCain voting with Obama on raising taxes; his vote in favor of the war etc.

It’s amazing how the impulse to see Biden as the more qualified and serious guy stems almost entirely from his ability to be a convincing b.s. artist. I’m not saying Palin was always honest or unrehearsed, but when she offers up a catchphrase or a talking point, you can tell. When Biden spews up a warm fog of deceitful gassbaggery the response seems to be “what a great grasp of the issues he has!”

His ability, nay his eagerness, to fake not only the “facts” but his sincerity is so shameless many pundits seem either mesmerized by it or scared to call him on it.

I hope McCain listens to this media strategy

Mark Steyn has some ideas for Sarah Palin's media strategy. I think they are good ones. He also has some big concerns about the Obama ticket. So do I. Here's Mark on the Hugh Hewitt show tonight just before the debate:

MS: Well, I think whichever way it goes, it’s going to be close. And it shouldn’t be close, because I think there’s no doubt in my mind that Obama is, and Biden, are the most liberal ticket since 1972, the difference being that the media are going along with this charade that he’s some benign, post-partisan figure who will heal the nation. And I don’t think that’s the case. I’m personally, after what I’ve gone through on free speech issues in Canada, I personally dislike the classic Chicago machine thuggishness that Obama uses to silence people who disagree with him. And I don’t contemplate an Obama presidency with equanimity simply on freedom of expression grounds alone. So I think this race, I think we have to accept the fact that we are, the media have essentially signed on as the war room of the Obama campaign, and that is why McCain is such a fool to mortgage his prospects to what he thinks of as his old media pals like Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill. They’re not his pals. They may be nice to him at dinner parties, and they’ll be even nicer to him after he goes down as a Bob Dole decent old loser in November. If that’s what he wants, they’re the people to stick with.

HH: If he wants to win, what do you advise him to do?

MS: If he wants to win, he should be doing and end run. Sarah Palin was great around that old media. Sarah Palin was great on your show. The only problem was she should have been on your show three weeks ago. And the only reason she wasn’t is because McCain is a media snob. He doesn’t like talk radio, he doesn’t like Rush, he doesn’t like Laura Ingraham. Fine, that’s fair enough. But as I said, Sarah Palin could have been on every rinky-dink local news show all around the country where she’s been going, and she would have done great. This was a disastrous strategy, and I’m fully behind a let Sarah be Sarah prospect for tonight. I don’t care what she does, as long as get to see the real Sarah Palin. That Sarah Palin I love, and I’m fed up with McCain for sticking her at the back of the cave with Osama bin Laden in Waziristan, or wherever the hell she’s been these last couple of weeks.

I love the Anchoress

The other day in praying for the elections, the Holy Spirit prompted me to pray for God's will, not for my favorite candidates to win.

Today I find the Anchoress has posted a most eloquent plea for the same thing. She writes:

The Revelation of Christ as Messiah was nothing obvious. The Jews wanted a warrior. They got a Lamb.

So, I cannot hazard a guess as to this election, and whether our ultimate victory involves a loss or a win at the polls. Given the clear intent to fraud we’re seeing in some places, and the questionable finances and associations surrounding one campaign - all of which is unquestioned by the press and uninteresting to election regulators - I’m thinking we’re in the middle of a mystery, that this whole, odd, unpredictable and too-long election season has been run along one of those threads connecting things seen and unseen, and we are so disoriented today that we do not really know which outcome is the outcome pleasing to God, and meant - by Him - to draw us into Himself.

The Holy Spirit, of course, uses whatever He chooses, to bring things about. Who knows if we are meant to be shaken, soundly, in order to be roused from our complacency and the status quo?

The sense I have is that the status quo won’t do any longer. That we are stagnant, too deeply comfortable in too much of the muck and mud of materialism, and we’ve lost sight of what and who we are meant to cling to.

So, let us not worry. Let us not wring our hands. For the Christian, anyway, I believe we are in a moment where the rubber meets the road. How do you respond to that? With trust that no matter what things seem like, that “all things work for good and to the Glory of God” or with wringing hands, depression and doubt?

If you are doubting…if you are thinking that only electoral victory - as defined by the world - will be a validation of either the existence of God, or His Intent, then you need to hunker down into scripture and get out of your own head. Do you believe that Christ is the Son of God, or do you not? If you do, do you really think that this election is all there is, and that a loss here is somehow static, and works to nothing in God’s purpose?

Read the whole post. It's great.

Can I have fries and special sauce with that?

Jonah Goldberg writes at The Corner:

I had no idea that I was painting the rosy scenario. But look at the Senate bill. It is to crap sandwiches what the giant Twinkie referenced in Ghostbusters is to, uh, enormous metaphorical cake products. It brings to mind one of those eight-foot subs you get for Super Bowl parties, only this one stretches off far into the horizon and then bends with the curvature of the earth like the Great Wall of China. The Senate managed to dress the sandwich so that it is in fact much more craptacular than the House version. Whatever defense one can muster for the wooden arrow tax breaks (take that fiberglass arrow-making scum!), it's just bizarre from the standard of earth logic. At least with the House version of the bill, one got the sense that the political class did not in fact like eating crap sandwiches. The Senate version makes it clear that many of our elected leaders are in fact not so much coprophagic but caecotrophic (caecotrophic organisms re-ingest their own waste for nutritional purposes). When the House — for good or ill — served the crap sandwich to the Senate, the Senators not only ate it with relish (mmmm crap), they slathered on condiments and piled high the side dishes which seem even more repugnant than the main course. And, when asked to defend it, the good senators reply "that's how we eat crap in the world's greatest deliberative body."

The party of death . . .

That's what the Democratic party is transforming itself into, according to a Vatican official, former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke. I met Burke briefly in Quebec during the Eucharistic procession through the streets of the City during the International Eucharistic Congress. He's on the left. Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast is in the middle. I can't remember the name of the bishop on the right.

Reuters has the following story (with some nice pix, too):

Burke, who was named prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature in June, told the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire that the U.S. Democratic Party risked “transforming itself definitively into a party of death for its decisions on bioethical issues.” He then attacked two of the party’s most high profile Catholics — vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — for misrepresenting Church teaching on abortion.

He said Biden and Pelosi, “while presenting themselves as good Catholics, have presented Church doctrine on abortion in a false and tendentious way.”

The Anchoress on the need for a Hail Mary pass

The GOP, for the GOP Punditry and the GOP ticket all keep acting like the political and media rules today are the same rules by which the games were played 50 years ago, and that if they just sit on the curb saying, “hey, guys, play fair! Hey guys, here’s the rulebook, play fair!” the left and the press will suddenly pull back and say, “hey, wow, you’re right! We haven’t been holding to the precepts of honest governance or ethical journalism! Thanks for pointing that out, and by Jove, we’re going to do better! We’re going to stop lying about Sarah Palin and those rape kits! We’re going to go ahead and ask those questions about Bill Ayers and we’re going to report on those Obama’s questionable tolerance of free speech! We’re going to demand for accountability from the Democrats and even be fair once in a while!

It’s not going to happen. It’s time for the GOP and people on the right to realize that - for now - the rules have changed. There is a whole ‘nother rulebook being used, and sitting around flapping the old rule book and whining “c’mon, guys, c’mmmmmmon,” is not going to get the game back on track.

John McCain needs to realize it today. So does Palin. We need to recognise it and begin to compete under these new rules, or just concede the game. John McCain needs to stop trying to act like a referee and start acting like the quarterback.

By the way, we’re outnumbered. Team Mainstream has all the heavyweights, the guards, the tackles and the microphones, too - so they call the plays the way they see them, regardless of what is actually happening. The spectators are eating pretzels and wondering if they’ll win the office pool, but they’re busy listening to the color commentary rather than watching the game with their own eyes.

How do we win? Maybe we can’t. Maybe things are too far gone. But I’m thinking McCain needs to make a very aggressive play, here - right now - to do or die.

Somebody ought to file a hate complaint . . .

against the awful racist garbage that has been posted on the Internet on this site.

Under Section 13 (1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, where truth is no defense, nor is motive, this stuff is illegal as, well, any apparatchik wants to make it. That's the problem with the law, it is so elastic that it can be used at will against anyone the government deems unpolitically corrrect or if a special interest group wants to use government levers to censor you.

As Kathy Shaidle pointed out earlier today:

So: writing this stuff is a crime when it appears at some dumbass little neo-Nazi chat room nobody ever heard of until the Government of Canada and a major news service reported on it... (Hey, where have I heard that before?)

But: when this same stuff appears on a taxpayer supported Government of Canada website, innocent readers are somehow magically "immune" from its (imaginary) "hateful" effects?

Alas, I'm just a stupid, ordinary person, and not a liberal Trudeaupian Establishment lawyer -- please explain the subtle alchemy involved.