Savage Republican

During the course of the Alito hearing, the word “racism” was brought up many times – usually in reference to the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (an organization that Judge Alito belonged to). Most of the accusations against CAP were based on a satirical article that appeared in its monthly magazine.

I bring this up because of certain things that were said during events that were supposedly “honoring” the memory of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. After hearing these comments (on top of the brouhaha during the Alito hearings) it is obvious that a refresher is in order.

Racism (according to Merriam-Webster) is define as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”. With that in mind I will ask you which of the comments below is racist…

“I do not believe that anyone should be given preferential treatment based on their race or heritage”

Is that a racist comment? How about this one?

“I believe that everyone has the God given ability to succeed if they try.”

Is that a racist statement? Now, compare those to statements that were made on Monday:

“It’s time for us to come together. It’s time for us to rebuild New Orleans — the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans. This city will be a majority African American city. It’s the way God wants it to be. ” (Ray Nagin in remarks on Monday – emphasis added)

AND

“When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run – it has been run like a plantation…You know what I’m talking about.” (that from the presumptive leader in the Democratic race for President in 2008).

Now these are the people that support a system that tacitly implies that it’s recepients are incable of providing for themselves and thus they must rely on Big Government to “take care of them”. These are people that support systems that tacitly imply that “there’s no way you can get that job on your own merit – we will make sure that you get ‘special’ consideration” or “you can’t get into that college without our help”. Match those implications with the definatioin of racism above and you tell me, who are the real racists?? The ones that encourage people to succeed on their own, or those that tell them “you can’t do it without our help”?

If the Democrats were truly concerned about the plight of minorities in America, they would not be so quick to politicize race in America.

A couple of my fellow MOBsters have written about this, from yesterdays Star Tribune. Both Dementee at KAR and Mitch at Shot in the Dark are talking about how alcohol is “next”. Well the Logical Husband and I are of a sufficient age where we remember advertising for “hard” liquor on television (mostly sporting events). We remember the debate, in the late ’60s and early ’70s over whether it was “appropriate” for young people to be seeing that kind of advertising. We also remember tobacco advertising on television and the ensuing debate over whether that was “appropriate” for young people to see, so the call from the Strib editorial staff for a ban on advertising of beer and wine comes as no surprise at all. These health nazis have been around for a long, long time and they have been slowly, but surely chipping away at our rights, “for the sake of the children”. For years we have slowly been abdicating our rights to choose what to eat or drink. We should not be surprised to see this. We have been allowed it to happen. When are we going to stand up and say no?

In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Catholic. Then they came for me — and by that time there was nobody left to speak up.
-Martin Niemoller

You say that I am “over-reacting” that bans on smoking and alcohol advertising are hardly the same as what Niemoller wrote about. Which of your rights are you willing to be on this?

A friend sent me this. I thought I would share because it pretty much sums me up in a nutshell.

I AM A REPUBLICAN BECAUSE I BELIEVE …The proper function of government is to do for the people those things that have to be done but cannot be done, or cannot be done as well, by individuals, and that the most effecive government is government closest to the people.
I BELIEVE …Good government is based upon the individual and that each person’s ability, dignity, freedom, and responsibility msut be honored and recognized.
I BELIEVE …That free enterprise and the encouragement of individual initiative and incentive have given this nation an economic system second to none.
I BELIEVE …Sound money management should be our goal.
I BELIEVE …In equal rights, equal justice and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, creed, age, sex or national origin.
I BELIEVE …We must retain those principles of the past worth retaining, yet always be receptive to new ideas with an outlok broad enough to accomodate thoughtful change and varying points of view.
I BELIEVE …That Americans value and should preserve their feeing of national strength and pride, and at the same time share with people everywhere a desire for peace and freedom and the extension of human rights throughout the world.
FINALLY, I BELIEVE …The Republican Party is the best vehicle for translating these ideals into positive and sussessful principles of government.

The Star Tribune printed an article yesterday that has me both puzzled and worried. In it the Trib seems to be concerned about the prospect that “non-sex offenders” are going to be locked up long past their sentences. The problem (according to the Strib) is the Minnesota Sex Offender program, a program that was instituted as a result of (among other things) the Dru Sjodin murder. Dru Sjodin, for those who don’t know, was a college student who was kidnapped and murdered by a level 3 sex offender who had recently been released from prison!

Here is the poor soul that the Strib’s writers are so concerned about.

(Dwane) Peterson, 25, of Mankato, Minn., has never been convicted of a sex offense or even charged with one.

HOWEVER…..

A petition filed by Blue Earth County Attorney Ross Arneson on Dec. 13 cites Peterson’s own accounts of sexual activity with “unknown young male victims” as well as with two other boys, one of whom denies sexual contact with Peterson, the other now dead. ..The petition also details Peterson’s troubled life, including sex abuse as a child, foster homes, reform schools, suicide attempts, fire-setting, bed-wetting mental disorders and what Betters called “a long past of dumb crime” such as theft and misdemeanor assaults. Peterson also wrote sexually explicit letters to and otherwise tried to contact several boys he became obsessed with, including one in Connecticut whom he saw on TV.

So a man who is “obsessed” with young boys, who writes sexually explicit letters to these young boys is ok to be on the streets? Is that what the Strib is trying to say here? I certainly hope not.

Sexual predators need to be kept away from children. We have seen, time and time again, where sexual predators will do whatever they can to get at their prey like this one did just this last week! The state is obligated to protect our children from people that show a propensity for stalking them in this manner. Everything else (light/commuter rail for example) is fluff and we don’t need the fluff!

Everyone and their brother has been doing their obligatory tributes to Reverand Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. However, this one (from todays Pioneer Press written by William Chafe) hit it home for me. So many people, when talking about Dr. King totally forget the driving force behind his actions and reactions. Not so Mr. Chafe (emphasis added):

That legacy begins with the power of King’s faith, which became searingly personal when, soon after agreeing to become the spokesman for the Montgomery bus boycott, he began receiving nightly phone calls from people threatening to kill his family. Unable to sleep and tormented by visions of his little girl suffering, King broke down one night in his kitchen. As David Garrow writes in his biography of King, at that moment King heard an inner voice saying: “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth… [It was] the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.” From that moment forward, the voice in the kitchen was King’s personal anchor.

That’s right, all of you secular humanists, the Reverend Dr. King was a man of God and it was his great faith and reliance on Christ’s strength that got him through the hardest of trials! As a Christian, the Rev. Dr. King knew that there were 2 things that he had to stand on in this fight…love and justice!

The second point to recognize is the tension King insisted upon between his embrace of the New Testament’s gospel of unconditional love and the Old Testament’s prophetic insistence on righteous justice. Latter-day King celebrants focus on his support for reconciliation without acknowledging his prophetic anger. “It is not enough for us to talk about love,” he told his followers. “There is another side called justice … Standing beside love is always justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion — we’ve got to use the tools of coercion.”

This “tension” is something that Christians must deal with daily. We all know that we are to forgive those who trespass against us (love), but we forget the “do not tresspass” part (justice). We forget that the first half of the Bible story is a story of righteousness and (when necessary) anger! I heard an interview with Jonathon Starkey (the self professed vampire that is running for Governor of Minnesota) this morning. He was saying that he could not understand how God could punish the innocents of Soddom and Gomorrah. HELLO……justice. The only innocents in those 2 cities were Lot and his family! Abraham interceeded with God (in Genesis 18:23) asking “will you destroy the righteous with the wicked?” to which God answered “find me one righteous man and I will spare the city!” (Gen 18:24-33). The same thing happened in Noah’s time where Noah (while building the Ark) pleaded with his neighbors to repent! The whole time God was planning the earths destruction, he was also trying to save it. However, mans choice was to turn away from God and his offers of salvation.

Every generation, God sends us a Noah or an Abraham or a Dr. King who is supposed to show us how to walk that fine line between love and justice. I am truely honored and humbled to have been able to see the fine example that Dr. King provided to mankind. I struggle daily to try to be one to help realize his dream – when our children are indeed judged by the content of their hearts and not the color of their skin! Hopefully, my contributions will help us (in the words of the Mr. Chafe) “… remember the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., let us recognize the full depth of his faith and vision — not just the antiseptic version that has now become part of our official culture.”

MDE pointed us to this over at the Real Clear Politics blog. Based on the criteria that the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have set for President Bush’s judicial nominees (such as Judge Sam Alito) the RCP staff wondered just how many of said Judiciary Committee members would qualify for the Supreme Court.

The answer, just off the top of my head and without resorting to extensive research or digging through trash, is not very many:
Not Ted Kennedy: for obvious reasons.
Not Joe Biden: he has a plagiarism problem.
Not Dianne Feinstein: she’s had a Guatemalan houskeeper issue, was fined $190,000 in 1992 for failing to properly report $3.5 million in campaign expenditures, and her husband runs a company that scored a $600 million Iraq war contract in 2003. Imagine what the Dems would do with this last one.
Not Charles Schumer: two of the people under his employ at the DSCC are currently being investigated for illegally obtaining Michael Steele’s credit report last year. In 1983, Schumer narrowly escaped indictment for misusing state funds in his 1980 Congressional race. The U.S. Attorney in the case, Raymond J. Dearie, actually recommended that Schumer be indicted, but the Reagan Justice Department turned down the request citing “lack of jurisdiction.”
Not Dick Durbin: he would never get around his pro-life past. Durbin is on the record in the 1980’s saying that he “believed that Roe v. Wade was incorrectly decided” and that “the right to an abortion is not guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.”
That leaves Pat Leahy, Herb Kohl, and Russ Feingold as the only Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who – at least at first glance – might possibly be able to survive one of their own confirmation hearings. Three out of eight. That’s it.
It makes what the Democrats are trying to do to Samuel Alito all that much more distasteful and highlights how partisan and out of control the whole process has become.
UPDATE: We’re down to two. I missed Pat Leahy’s 1987 resignation as Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee for leaking classified information to a reporter.

So, going by the criteria that was set by the Democrats in the Judiciary committee, only 2 – Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl – both of Wisconsin. Pretty pathetic, don’t you think?

It is time for parents to wake up to what their children are being taught! Our children are our most precious resource and yet we have schools who are teaching children how to download pornography (HT:Tracy at Anti-Strib) and asking our 1st and 2nd graders about their sexual fantasies among other things. You think I am exaggerating? Take a look at this list of credit courses from some of our more “prestigious” universities:

– Princeton University’s The Cultural Production of Early Modern Women examines “prostitutes,” “cross-dressing,” and “same-sex eroticism” in 16th – and 17th – century England, France, Italy and Spain
– At The Johns Hopkins University, students in the Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ancient Egypt class view slideshows of women in ancient Egypt “vomiting on each other,” “having intercourse,” and “fixing their hair.”
– Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania offers the class Lesbian Novels Since World War II.
– Alfred University’s Nip, Tuck, Perm, Pierce, and Tattoo: Adventures with Embodied Culture, mostly made up of women, encourages students to think about the meaning behind “teeth whitening, tanning, shaving, and hair dyeing.” Special projects include visiting a tattoo-and-piercing studio and watching Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding film, Pumping Iron.
– Harvard University’s Marxist Concepts of Racism examines “the role of capitalist development and expansion in creating racial inequality” Although Karl Marx didn’t say much on race, leftist professors in this course extrapolate information on “racial oppression” and “racial antagonism.”
– Occidental College has 2 —one a course in Stupidity, which compares the American presidency to Beavis and Butthead and the other The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States which explores ways “which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie [and] to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism.” .
– University of California, Los Angeles offers The Psychology of the Lesbian Experience reviews “various aspects of lesbian experience” including the “impact of heterosexism/stigma, gender role socialization, minority status of women and lesbians, identity development within a multicultural society, changes in psychological theories about lesbians in sociohistorical context.”
– Duke University’s American Dreams/American Realities course supposedly unearths “such myths as ‘rags to riches,’ ‘beacon to the world,’ and the ‘frontier,’ in defining the American character”.
– Amherst College in Massachusetts offers the class Taking Marx Seriously: “Should Marx be given another chance?” Students in this course are asked to question if Marxism still has any “credibility” remaining, while also inquiring if societies can gain new insights by “returning to [Marx’s] texts.” Coming to Marx’s rescue, this course also states that Lenin, Stalin, and Pol Pot misapplied the concepts of Marxism.
– Brown University’s Black Lavender: A Study of Black Gay & Lesbian Plays “address[es] the identities and issues of Black gay men and lesbians, and offer[s] various points of view from within and without the Black gay and lesbian artistic communities.”
– Students enrolled in the University of Michigan’s Topics in Literary Studies: Ancient Greek/Modern Gay Sexuality have the pleasure of reading a “wide selection of ancient Greek (and a few Roman) texts that deal with same-sex love, desire, gender dissidence, and sexual behavior.”

(Course descriptions courtesy of YAF).

What can a parent do? Discuss your child’s course work with your child and with your childs teachers. For universities, with hold donations if you are an alumni. Attend school board meetings and run for the board if you feel the board is not listening to the concerned parents! Find teachers who are willing to stand up to the NEA/MEA and encourage them. Help the teachers take back their unions. In other words, get involved. Write letters to your local paper. You have the power to take back your community if you are willing to get up and work for it.

Now is the time – GET INVOLVED!

So says (among others) the Annandale Advocate in this op-ed from January 10. The article recounts the AG’s failed attempt to get former GOP chair Ron Eibensteiner on campaign finance violations.

So let’s review the facts: Attorney General Hatch takes a thank you letter from a friend – claiming it’s evidence of a crime – then leaks it to a metropolitan newspaper. The former Republican Party chairman who signed a poorly worded form letter is forced to spend thousands of dollars to clear his name because the top Democrat in the state wants to use it as leverage in order to become your new governor. And finally, once it’s discovered that the corporate contributions were made legally to both the National Democratic and Republican Committees, the assault by the Attorney General’s Office against the Republicans continues, while no similar investigation is made into the Democratic donation.

It is nice to see that the Advocate is saying something that a lot of Republican activists have been saying for months! But wait…there’s more.

Clearly, this is different than normal political partisanship. What you have here is a constitutional officer abusing his office by wasting taxpayer dollars to promote his gubernatorial run. Hatch orchestrated all of this, intending to use it in his run for governor. If the prosecution had been successful, he would have used it in his race against Gov. Pawlenty. However, the Eibensteiner case is one where a jury, not politicians, heard the facts and made a decision. The jury did not believe Hatch’s version of the events.

But the fun doesn’t end here. Hatch is now going after current Republican Party Chair Ron Carey for alleged wrongdoings. Carey, who is also vice-chairman of the Minnesota Autism Center board of directors, has an autistic son who receives treatment through the center. The organization receives funding from public sources. Hatch now has the idea that the center may have misspent state money, and is conducting an investigation. Attorney General Hatch is again abusing the power of the attorney general’s office and its investigative authority for personal political purposes! This has Witch Hunt, Round 2, written all over it.

With this course of conduct in mind, why would anyone – regardless of political affiliation – want Mike Hatch as their chief executive officer of the state of Minnesota?

The thing is, Mike Hatch has a history of doing this. We should not be surprised that he is doing this. What we (the people of Minnesota) need to do is figure out if we want a person with a history of Nixonian persecution of his perceived enemies in the Governor’s mansion?

A friend pointed me to this information over at the National Rebublican Senatorial Committee website. It indicates that 40 out of 45 sitting Democratic Senators have taken money from Jack Abramoff or his clients. Now the NRSC is stating that they retrieved the information from the Campaign Finance Analysis Project Website, (access is for members only), Political Money Line and the IRS website.

I found some of the numbers listed to be troubling, and that is putting it mildly. Here are a few notable examples and how much (according to the NRSC website):

Byron Dorgan(D-ND) Received At Least $79,300
Dick Durbin (D-IL) Received At Least $14,000
Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Received At Least $29,550
Joe Lieberman (D-CT) Received At Least $29,830 and
John Kerry (D-MA) Received At Least $98,550

Notably absent from this list is our soon to be former Senior Senator, Mark Dayton.

Now I am not naive enough to think that there are no Republican senators on this list, however a visit to the DSCC website did not reveal any similarly detailed information. It simply listed 5 Republican Senators….Senators that we already knew about.

What we know now, via public records, is that a lot of people on both sides of the aisle took money from either Jack Abramoff or his clients. By now, we have all seen the list (in pink and blue) that shows a supposed “vast” number of Republicans who took Abramoff money. As I said here the smart party is going to propose some real campaign finance and lobbying reform. The party that is not serious about it is going to go to on Wolf Blitzer’s program and say “we never took money from Abramoff, only his clients” as if there is a difference! Whatever!!!!!!

In discussing this issue a wise woman asked “My question is, “Which of them sold their votes for favors, and who merely accepted the donations without performing favors and selling out?” Two different animals in my book.” and she is absolutely correct. That is where the difference lies…..who took the money and sold out and who didn’t!

Here is my challenge to any Democrats that are reading this blog. Find me a source that says that 90% of the sitting Republican Senators took money from Abramoff or his clients. You can send it to me at the address LadyLogician at hope4america (dot) net.

But know this readers , contrary to the protestations of the DNC Chairman, taking money from Jack Abramoff clients who are giving money to you at Abramoff’s direction, is the same as taking money from the man directly! So Ms. Pelosi……bring on the investigation! But make sure your house is in order or you could end up being taken down by your own myopia!

I had a conversation today with Captain Ed from Captains Quarters Blog . We talked about a number of things including a very worthwhile project regarding a WWII veteran and trying to correct a 62 year injustice that he has suffered. More on that in a few weeks. We also briefly talked about the Abramoff scandal. And I related the sum and substance of my blog entry and repeated to him that the only reason that influence is bought is that there is influence to buy. Enforce the 10th Amendment, keep those cretins in Congress true to their oath of office (and by the way kids, a Congressman is either a Representative OR a Senator…Congress includes BOTH houses- Senate and the House of Representatives), keep the chief resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave true to his oath of office and all that influence buying goes away.
So, when I see the Blogosphere calling for reform of the lobbyists (see Captain Ed’s top entry), I say don’t go halfway. Don’t amputate half of a gangrene arm. Don’t expect that what you’ve proposed will really work. To use Thoreau, don’t cut at the leaves, chop at the roots!