harmonicminer

Because of the enormous numbers of new voters this year, and because of the high degree of partisanship in the current election cycle, the Federal Election Commission has made a very controversial decision, namely that staggered election days are the only option, in order to be sure that all registered voters are given the opportunity to vote, without possible duress from the other side.

Continue reading “Election Day has been rescheduled for Democrat voters”

The Hedgehog Blog: Proposition 8 and California’s Schoolchildren: A Primer on Falsehoods

Perhaps the most hotly-debated question about Proposition 8 is the measure’s impact on schoolchildren. If Proposition 8 fails, will young children be taught that same-sex marriage is equal to traditional marriage? Opponents of Prop 8 have adamantly — and falsely — claimed this will not happen.

The fact is, Prop 8′s leading opponents have been very public for a long time about their goal of teaching schoolchildren about gender orientation at very young ages. What is worse, they have openly promoted strategies for overcoming or circumventing parental objections to such teaching. It is foolish to believe they will not use the same approach to teaching children about same-sex marriage.

Read it all.

Here is an article on American foreign policy couched as a book review.

In From Colony to Superpower, George Herring, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Kentucky, provides a comprehensive, competent and rather conventional narrative history of US foreign policy from the origins of the “empire of liberty” in the 18th century to its “unipolar moment” following the fall of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001…………….

Despite some major failures, Herring argues, American foreign policy has been “spectacularly successful.” Behaving, for the most part, like a traditional great power, the US has balanced its zeal to carry out a providential mission to spread Christianity and democracy with the pragmatic pursuit of its national interests. Unilateralist, but almost never isolationist, America conquered a continent, dominated its hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean, prevailed in two world wars, won the Cold War and “extended its economic influence, military might, popular culture and ‘soft power’ through much of the world.”

Add this to the list of books (and articles) heralding the much hoped for and frequently sought end of American hegemony on the world stage, in which authors try to make the case that the USA is “losing its grip” and is no longer going to be the “hyperpower” that has dominated the world since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Continue reading “The End is Not Near: Or is it?”

If you want to learn how to blog with Scribefire (the tool I use most often), here is some help:

Continue reading “Blogging with Scribefire”

Why I Fear an Obama Presidency – washingtonpost.com

Mr. Obama supports ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that would have disastrous consequences for the American family. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, the U.N. tribunal authorized to interpret and enforce the Children’s Convention, sets forth an exhaustive index of children’s rights, many at odds with the rights of parents. It has held, for instance, that Britain violated children’s rights in Wales by allowing parents to withdraw their children from public school programs without first considering the children’s wishes.

In other words, the United Nations has determined that the government will decide what is best for our children. This is the ultimate dream of elitists: They get to decide for all of us what is best for our own children.

Home schooling is already essentially illegal in Germany.

Not exactly a scintillating read, but a  sober summary of the candidates’ positions and differences on taxation. The first few graphs: (much more, with supporting charts and text, at the link)

Either Republican Senator John McCain or Dem­ocratic Senator Barack Obama will have to make very important decisions on tax policy when he takes office in January 2009. First, the U.S. econ­omy will be recovering from the financial crisis and is already predicted to grow less than its usual rate of 3.3 percent over the last 50 years.[1] Second, Pres­ident George W. Bush’s tax cuts will expire in 2011, and the President must decide how to extend or make permanent some of the tax cut provisions.

Senator McCain will make the Bush tax cuts per­manent, with the exception of the estate tax. McCain credited the Bush tax cuts with helping the economy recover after the 2001 recession.

Senator Obama, on the other hand, will extend the Bush tax cuts only for those taxpayers who earn less than $250,000 a year—he has deemed the rest of the people “rich.” Senator Obama will also enact new tax increases on these rich individuals as well as a series of targeted tax credits for lower-income indi­viduals. Senator Obama believes that the current tax system is not progressive enough and that higher taxes on the rich should be used to give money to low-income individuals or those who do not work at all, such as retired people, reduce the deficit, and reduce the size of Social Security’s shortfall.

In other words, Obama isn’t planning merely to return to the higher taxes under Clinton for “the rich”, he plans to tax them even MORE than Clinton’s Democrat congress voted in 1993, when Clinton “discovered” that he couldn’t keep his campaign pledge to lower taxes for the middle class after all. One can’t help but wonder if Obama will discover that “the rich” are those making more than $50K-$70K per year, when his staff really crunches the numbers.

Those windmills are going to be expensive.

In describing the abuse of power by Leftist politicians invading Joe the Plumber’s privacy, Michelle Malkin hits it just right:

If that doesn’t send a chill up your spine, you don’t have a spine.

Where’s the ACLU in protecting Joe from activist public officials abusing their access to his private life?

Probably getting ready for the big party in Chicago.

Hundreds of people mysteriously disappear in Russia every day – Pravda.Ru

Several hundreds of people vanish in Russia every day. The number of those who disappeared without a trace during the recent several years has doubled and reached 120,000 people. Out-of-town visitors, entrepreneurs and lonely proprietors make the largest risk group at this point.

Obama’s 2005 Daily Kos Post : Tone It Down, and Usher in a New Progressive Era | NewsBusters.org

Barack Obama sent a letter to the Daily Kos which was posted back in 2005 to talk strategy and “change” to the Kossacks. Obama was very serious about toning down the rhetoric only until it was safe enough to “enforce a more clearly progressive agenda.”

Read it all.

Newsmax.com – Ex-CIA Expert: Obama Took Millions in Illegal Foreign Donations

A Newsmax investigation of Obama/Biden campaign contributors, undertaken in conjunction with a private investigative firm headed by a former CIA operations officer, has identified 118 donors who appear to lack U.S. citizenship.

Some of these “red flag” donors work for foreign governments; others have made public statements declaring that they are citizens of Cameroun, Nigeria, Pakistan, Canada, and other countries.

A Newsmax sampling of about 3,400 donors also found hundreds more who showed “yellow flags” such as not having used a Social Security number or a known U.S. address. Most U.S.-born citizens are issued Social Security numbers at birth or by the time they enter kindergarten.

Under federal law, only U.S. citizens or permanent residents may donate to federal political campaigns. It is illegal for the campaigns to accept money knowingly from foreign donors.

And when the major media begin to talk about this, they’ll be shocked, simply shocked. Who would have thought it?

You’ve seen the ads, trying to make us feel scared for the fate of a young woman who has to ask her parents if she can have an abortion. We’re supposed to believe she’ll be abused, maybe both physically and emotionally, and will instead seek an illegal abortion or (gasp) have the child.

Here is a short summary, by a radical foe to Prop 4, under the title HELP needed to defeat anti-choice Prop 4 in CA — no, No, and NO again! [UPDATED]

Proposition 4 is another bad anti-choice proposal: either parental notification or an automatic child abuse investigation if the young woman doesn’t want to notify her parents and can’t find a judge to approve. And if she is able to find a judge, the judge then has to declare her mature enough, and the judges have to make annual reports, county-by-county, on how many abortions are approved for young women each year.

Omitted at the “no on 4″ site above (a typical one) is any serious discussion of how the current law aids child molesters, by making it easy for them to intimidate their victims into quietly aborting the evidence.  Yes, it is possible that some parents will not respond well when told their daughter is pregnant.  But it is certain that current law is used to enable child molesters and statutory rapists (predatory males taking advantage of young girls), and allow them to continue undetected.

To the Left, abortion is a hyper-privileged “right” that trumps every other consideration.  ANY abortion performed on a minor is prima facie evidence of the crime of statutory rape.  Yet the current law provides no mechanism for reporting the possible crime.  And it isn’t just a possible but rare crime…  Very large numbers of minor girls who become pregnant are made so by men who are NOT minors.  No one is suggesting the frequent prosecution of minor boys for having sex with minor girls, although this still fits the definition of statutory rape.  But even when the “father” is a minor, isn’t this a serious enough issue to require some parental participation in decisions surrounding the situation?

When the “father” is NOT a minor, it’s a crime, pure and simple.  The parents need to be involved in any decision about an abortion, and any other actions that may result.

Of course, to the Left, sex is NEVER a crime, short of violent rape and pedophilia…

Current law does not let a minor child get an aspirin at school, get a tattoo, etc., without parental approval, signed, sealed and delivered.  The only reason abortion is an exception is because it is that hyper-privileged “right” (some would say “rite”) that the Left thinks is necessary to keep the sexual revolution in full swing.

I don’t expect this discussion to matter to anyone on the Left.  But if you’re on the fence at all, consider what a BAD idea it is to make law affecting everyone on the chance that someone will react badly, when the alternative is the perpetuation of ongoing abuse and the diminishment of the family, as well as the failure to protect young girls from predatory males.

And consider the aborted baby, who choose none of this, but was unjustly killed to allow someone to hide from their deeds.

UPDATE:  Current law contains a preposterous contradiction.

If a public official or health care worker, teacher or counselor, school staff member or adminstrator detects any hint of abuse of a minor, that person is required by law to report it to proper authorities (with significant penalities for non-compliance).  That “hint” could be a suspicious looking bruise, a comment that suggests sexual abuse by a “step-father” or “uncle” or “family friend”, etc.  Yet when the proof of sexual abuse of a minor is presented in the person of a pregnant teenager, the question is often not even asked, and the parents are not required to be consulted before an abortion is done, if the victimized girl is unwilling to tell them herself.  It can happen again and again with the same teenager, and no one is required to follow up on who is making her pregnant.

For every case of a teenage girl who really doesn’t dare tell her parents for fear of abuse (certainly rare, and for which Prop 4 offers other remedies), there are hundreds or thousands who SHOULD be telling their parents, so that their parents can protect them adequately, advise them appropriately, pursue legal action if indicated, etc.

The opponents of Prop 4 don’t care that parents may be unable to properly protect or advise their daughters, under current law.  They care only that the most extreme pro-abortion laws in the world remain unchanged, so that the “right” to an abortion, on demand, for any reason, at any time in the pregnancy, remains sacrosanct.  For them, abortion isn’t just a “right”, it is virtually a “rite”.

It remains to be seen if the voters will be fooled by the deceptive ads of Prop 4 opponents, implying that any noticeable number of young girls will be endangered by telling their parents, and will have no other recourse.

Closing graphs below, but all worth reading. The BIDINOTTO BLOG

It is extraordinarily telling that the only true “maverick” in this political campaign is a self-made, hard-working, straight-talking homemaker who fought her own party to become governor of Alaska. It is equally extraordinary and revealing that the key philosophical argument against Barack Obama’s plan to “spread the wealth around” had to be raised and voiced not by some professor in a college classroom, but by a blue-collar American plumber in an Ohio suburb.

It is the intellectuals who have betrayed the American sense of life and rejected America’s founding principles of individual rights, free markets, and constitutionally limited government. Today’s “progressive” juggernaut is being propelled not by ordinary Americans, but by pampered elites and economic parasites: tenured leftist academics, rich Hollywood celebrities, entrenched regulatory bureaucrats, and tens of millions of recipients of the unearned fruits of “redistributionism,” from corporate welfare to college grants to food stamps.

Are there still enough Joes and Sarahs left in the country to stop the bipartisan lurch to the left that we have witnessed this year?

Will they show up in unprecedented numbers on election day, defying the smug predictions of the “experts”?

We’ll know in less than a week.

What if Steve Forbes Had Won the Election? – TCS Daily

What if Steve Forbes Had Won the Election?

Sigh.  I never did like that “compassionate conservative” language.

It would appear that the McCain campaign has stooped so low that it now extorts endorsements from illegal aliens in a kind of October surprise.

In a shocking reversal with major implications for the U.S. presidential election, political kingmaker, the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain amid furor. Both political camps are buzzing about the implications, as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.

Ongoing investigation points to Cindy McCain as being the cause for this historic shift in allegiances.

Uncovered photos suggest that in a last ditch effort to help her husband’s failing campaign, Cindy McCain seduced and then blackmailed the Alien for his endorsement.

…………….  Swing state voters, who will decide this election, have the highest rate of alien abductions and UFO sightings and are known to vote in accordance with supernatural forces.

Read the entire sordid tale…. with pictures!