jb writes:	Wednesday, November, 21, 2007 9:40 AM
Throwing rocks at Huckabee
"Huckabee is the b-----d child of Lou Dobbs and Pat Robertson." I guess that means Huckabee must be gaining some traction, to generate such a fearful, rock-throwing response from Jonah Goldberg today. Specifically, Goldberg calls Huckabee a "statist", using, as the most extreme example, a proposed national ban on smoking. Hmmm. Is there any more egregious example of statist intrusion by the federal government on the citizenry than the IRS? And how many candidates want to get rid of the IRS? Let's see: there's Huckabee. And what about a national smoking ban? Well you know, even Rush Limbaugh says that if smoking is so dangerous, why don't we just ban it? And he's not kidding: He's talking about how stupid it is to try to tax it out of existence (all the while becoming dependent on the tax revenue) rather than to ban it. And if banning smoking is such anathema to conservatives, how many are for legalizing all the other dangerous drugs? Ron Paul, the libertarian, I suppose. PS: I had to bleep out the quoted "b" word at the top, because Townhall wouldn't let me post it. How come Jonah Goldberg was allowed to?

I'm a strong school choice advocate, and I didn't know about this Utah showdown Ken Blackwell just wrote about today.

But there's a red flag here that signals trouble for conservative principles.

Specifically, the Utah plan is very strong on means testing. In an era where "ending welfare as we know it" has become a welcome reality, with palpaple positive results, the Utah plan would extend socialistic welfare benefits overwhelmingly for the poor, thus, providing people an incentive to remain poor.

The way I see it, the whole school funding issue needs to be framed in a more honest way. The truth is that the current system forces churches to subsidize the government school systems, in clear violation of the Establishment Clause. Not allowing parents to use state funds designated for the education of their children to send them to a church school violates their free exercise of religion; forcing them literally to ransom their children back from the government. If they can't afford to do that: Too bad!

One other note: Blackwell wrote: "How can we forget the infamous words of the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, who said, "When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children."

It is curious that this should be regarded as "infamous", for Shanker was merely being honest. The day union officials stop single-mindedly representing their membership, they should be fired, because that's the day they stop doing their jobs.

The problem is that the Unions are not honest about who they are and what they do. That is, they always claim to represent the best interests of the students. In my own town, which is known for excellent public schools, it is interesting to see what happens whenever there is a school board vacancy: The local teachers' union, the "Spackenkill Teachers Association" (which most voters do not even realize is a labor union) sends out fliers to every household, telling the voters whom to vote for, and they get elected, the electorate never realizing that the school board and the union are and should be adversaries.

Ideally, the teaching profession should not be unionized. If all parents had the same amount of money (via a voucher representing the average cost of public eduation for each child) to spend on the public or private school they choose, schools and teachers would have to compete, and the best teachers would be the best paid teachers.

The Utah voucher plan, while well intentioned, would ultimately lead us away from the free market in schools and back toward the welfare state. The right way to start a voucher plan is without means testing, in my view.

 

Rudy and the ‘social issues’

Lots of Republicans and even conservatives are talking about Rudy Giuliani’s being the likely GOP nominee for President in 2008.

But nobody seems to talk about the big irony about Rudy:

He's running mainly on his 9/11 record, but the way I see it, his biggest problem is that he does not get the single most important fact about 9/11: Most of the innocent people brutally murdered on that day in the US had not even been born yet.

And the same is true of 9/12 and 9/13 and every day forward to the present, and every day back through 1970.

Maybe one of the reasons for the widespread lack of clarity on abortion and on Rudy’s position on it is the fact that abortion is neatly pigeon-holed as one of those pesky ‘social issues’, a term which makes it sound like what color shorts to wear at poolside for the cocktail hour.

When will we realize the monsters that Roe v. Wade has created? For example, everybody thinks Scott Peterson deserves the place he occupies on death row. Why? Isn’t he just one of those "pro-choice" guys who chose to terminate a pregnancy? Why, it was just a blob of tissue anyway. And if Laci didn't agree, so what? Wasn't she just a bigger blob of tissue standing in the way? According to Fox News, in the US, about 100 pregnant women per month are murdered by the father of the child they carry.

And is it really a stretch to think that the death cult of anti-American jihad is fueled by our own death cult, epitomized by legal abortion? Well, maybe that's going a little too far, starting to sound like the rantings of some fanatical right-wing religious nut job like Jerry Falwell or Abraham Lincoln.

Joel Brind, Ph.D.

Professor of Biology and Endocrinology

Baruch College, City University of New York

New York, NY

Starring: Iran as Germany,
                    Syria as Austria,
                        Lebanon as Czechoslovakia,
                            Israel as Poland,
                                China as Japan,
                                    Japan as China,
                                        Afghanistan as Italy,
                                            and Iraq as France.

Great Britain and Russia will play themselves, but auditions are still open for the leading role of the United States. (However, a spokesperson for the majority party in the U.S. has acknowledged that his party is in the process of arranging an audition for the U.S. to play the role of Denmark.)

Coming soon to a theatre near you!

 One would think that after 140+ years after the Emancipation Proclamation, America would get over the destructive habit of racism, especially as it is based on the fiction that there is more than one human race. Unless, of course, there are powerful, organized forces at play which perpetuate the habit.

Hmmmm...seems to me that the Democrats are always quick to "play the race card" and call anyone in opposition a racist when it serves their purposes. So here's a hypothesis (or "an" hypothesis if you prefer): The Democratic Party is continuously involved in an act of mass projection; that they are the real racists who perpetuate this national nightmare.

Now, before you go ballistic on the atomic blogger, remember that this is just a hypothesis, and it needs to be tested before any credence can be given to it.

Let's see: What are the THE most important domestic policy positions that are held by Democratic Party as a whole; you know, issues for which they will go to the mat; issues on which they have fought so hard that they have managed to prevail even against 12 years of their being in the Congressional minority and six years out of the White House?

Feel free to disagree, but I doubt anyone would seriously challenge these three issues as THE most central to Dem. political action on the domestic front: Preventing Social security privatization, preventing any sort of voucher system for non-public school choice, maintaining abortion on demand (usually phrased as preserving Roe v. Wade, and manifested as the refusal to confirm--or even to allow a confirmation vote upon--any candidates for the Supreme Court who they suspect might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade).

Let's take these positions in order, and see how they stack up. The latest vital statistics in the US show that white people live, on average, about 5 years longer than black people (about 76 v. 71 and 81 v. 76 for men and women, respectively). Since the Social Security retirement system is based on an insurance model, your benefits end when you die. That means that the average man who retires at age 65 will receive 6 years of benefits if he is black, and 11 years if he is white. You get the drift: One of the conservative think tanks did the precise math a few months back and proved the point: The Social Security retirement system effects a net flow of dollars out of the pockets of black workers and into the pockets of white retirees. If the system were changed to a pension system model, where each worker would own his or her own pension, and it would transfer to his or her heirs, then blacks and whites would benefit equally, in proportion to what they put into the system. But as its stands--as the Democrats insist it stands--the Social Security system actually serves to keep black people poor, relative to white people.

School vouchers are the only way that poor, inner city black kids' parents can afford to get them out of the often rotten public schools in their neighborhoods. No school choice outside the public school system means many will be relegated to poor educations and the lower socio-economic status that results; i.e., it keeps them being second-class citizens. (And what about the separation of church and state argument? It's easily proven to be pure bs and I'll deal with it in another posting.)

And abortion? The statistics in that arena are most telling: Black babies are aborted at more than three times the rate of white babies; a major reason why blacks now constitute a smaller minority than Hispanics. Since Roe v. Wade, something like 12 million African-American children have been killed before birth, by "choice".

So what's the bottom line? The main thrust of the Democratic Party's domestic agenda energy has, and continues to be expended upon keeping black people poor, poorly educated, and few in number. Consciously or unconciously, that sounds like a racist agenda to me.

Are you listening, Uncle Tom Obama?