The Razor

The older I get the more I recognize patterns in daily life, whether they are of parents repeating the same things they heard as children or politicians making promises that only sound new to people under 40. It seems that the words stay the same, only the speakers change – as if life has a finite set of scripts for a limited number of roles. If the patterns are obvious to me in middle age, I can’t help but wonder how the elderly feel. They must be bored senseless from hearing the same crap over and over again.

As I watch President Obama’s bubble of importance shrink around him, I wonder whether he appreciates the future that lays before him. Jimmy Carter should be falling off his perch any day now, but when he does he can die knowing that his role of playing “Misunderstood, Unappreciated Genius President” will soldier on long after he bumps knuckles with Lucifer. Obama has played Carter’s understudy for 3 years now, but being kicked out of office in an electoral rout will not be the end of his career. No, Obama will haunt American policy for decades to come just as Jimmy Carter has. Obama can then whine about America’s missteps to an eager world as he wines and dines with dictators just as Carter has done, and write op-ed pieces in the New York Times that will inspire future generations of young Leftists until it is time for Obama to groom one just as Carter has groomed him.

Speaking of dictators, seeing Qaddafi off may be a relief to spell check designers worldwide, but rest assured there are others waiting in the wings to subject innocents to terror and atrocities. Julius Malema is a sprite 30 year old future president of South Africa who is being groomed as the heir to Robert “Comrade Bob” Mugabe of Zimbabwe “national impoverishment scheme through killing white people and taking their stuff.” While Malema is too young to have  put a few years of being a decent human being under his belt the way Mugabe did after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, he’s not going to let that inexperience stop him from taking over Mugabe’s mantle as “Despot of a Country You Know is in Africa but Aren’t Sure Where in Africa,” although the “South” part of the name should make that task easier. I’m sure that in a few years we will even have a replacement for Qaddafi, and hopefully we will contract a hit on him too.

Of course the Republicans are auditioning for the role of Ronald Reagan, but so far conservative voters playing the role of “director” haven’t been happy with any of those answering the casting call. Mitt Romney was first to show up as he was four years ago, but he sounds too fake reading Reagan’s lines even though he has the part memorized. Rick Perry must have hit the audition after practicing his best Richard Nixon in the mirror because he came off sounding mean and liberal at the same time – amazing considering his experience and record in Texas. The director’s hopes were so high when Rick strode on the stage but then fell when he opened his mouth. Michelle Bachmann gave it her best shot, and the director was really pulling for her but unfortunately she really doesn’t understand the Reagan character. If conservatives ever have a call for a Margaret Thatcher role, I think she would do well. Herman Cain shows some promise but improvs in the audition by adding an un-Reaganesque sales tax. Newt Gingrich plays the role as Newt Gingrich. Reagan was no professor unlike Newt, and I think that Newt has a future in acting but just not for this part (but man I’m sure he’d be a hit!) Ron Paul reminds me of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now; when he’s not flipping out he sounds like the sanest person alive. Then there’s Jon Huntsman. He’s got Community Theater written all over him. Next!

One thing is for sure, the roles will all be cast and the lines will all sound familiar to anyone who has been paying attention over the past 5 decades.

I am a supporter of Herman Cain, but I am a bigger supporter of the effort to defeat President Obama in November 2012. With that goal in mind I believe that it is critical to do what the Democrats failed to do in 2008 and vet our candidate thoroughly. At one of the debates (I’ve seen every one and honestly they start to blend in to one another) Cain led off with his fight against colon cancer but otherwise no one has mentioned it.

Until October 13th when the Washington Post ran a story “Cain beats odds against surviving colon cancer.” The story explains how in 2006 he was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer that had spread to his liver. He underwent four treatments of chemotherapy then had a third of his colon, 70% of his liver and 48 lymph nodes surgically removed followed by another round of chemotherapy. Cain believes he is cancer free, and in his autobiography writes that he is “Cured!”

In the interest of selecting the strongest candidate to beat Obama in 2012 Republicans have to ask, “Is he?” because if they don’t the Democrats will raise the issue after he wins the nomination.

Colon cancer is considered to be Stage IV after it has spread to other places in the body. Usually it metastasizes to the lungs and in Cain’s case, the liver. In most cases, removal of the tumors along with chemotherapy are not curative, but there are cases where they are. In his book Cain claims that he has been monitored by doctors and that the cancer hasn’t reappeared since the 2006 diagnosis; based on his being cancer free for 5 years, he writes that according to his doctors he is cured.

I am not a cancer specialist, but I do have access to the Internet and what I’ve found leads me to believe that what Cain writes is a little optimistic. Colon cancer can be cured, but it also can reappear years after treatment. It can then be treated again using chemotherapy and surgery, but it is still a big deal when a future Commander in Chief is the subject. What are the odds that Cain will remain cancer free? Not 100%, and you can bet that the Democrats will use the battle which Cain is rightly proud of fighting and winning to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt over his condition once the GOP has settled on him. It will be subtle at first like the Washington Post piece, with later reports from doctors less sanguine about Cain’s prognosis gradually creeping in to stories. Then there will be the inevitable stories about the importance of his running mate although little fuss was ever made about Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as his, possibly the least intelligent VP pick since George Bush Sr. chose Dan Quayle (although to his credit, Quayle has matured a lot over the decades whereas Biden is still a garden variety moron). In the heat of the campaign battle a year from now I would expect there to be continuous health statuses discussed daily, with every cough a symptom of lung cancer and verbal gaffe the result of a cancer metastases to the brain.

Again, I am not a cancer specialist, but I have watched elections unfold since 1972 and I know that every possible weapon will eventually be used. Nothing is left on the table. Ever. Cain supporters and Republicans need to open this line of inquiry into their candidate today while most Americans aren’t paying attention to immunize and strengthen Cain’s candidacy if and when he does become the GOP standard bearer.

 

 

Tonight’s debate was the best so far, probably in part because Jon Huntsman wasn’t there in protest of something Nevada said about his momma or something. I had to add CNN to my DirecTv channel list, so it’s the first time I have seen Anderson Cooper moving. He had a creepy, otherworldly look to him, almost vampirish – the Ann Rice vampires, not the sparklers in the Twilight saga. With his white hair, pale skin and blue eyes he reminded me of a Japanese anime villain; I kept expecting him to ask questions using that high pitched yet sinister girlish voice that nearly all dubbed Japanese anime villains use. But overall his questions weren’t nowhere near as loaded as the MSNBC debate; no dying people without insurance tonight.

The candidates performed well. At least most of them did. Rick Perry just can’t debate. I guess it’s not his thing. He came across as mean when he attacked Romney, and Romney handled him the way a strong man might when challenged by a skinny guy waving his fists and shouting “Put up your dukes ya’ big palooka!” I can’t help but feel that Perry simply isn’t ready for the Presidency. I also think America needs a longer break from Texan governors. 2016 might be his year if Obama wins and the Democrats haven’t banned elections as NC governor Bev Perdue suggested.

Newt Gingrich is funny. He speaks like a man who has nothing to lose, probably because he knows in his heart that he has a snowball’s chance of making it past South Carolina. The man should have a show on TV. He gives insightful commentary that everyone listens to – including the other candidates.

Michele Bachmann got emotional tonight when asked a question about how she would stop foreclosures. The directors sensed it and zoomed in the cameras as she spoke about women losing their homes “their family nests.” Cut to shots of women getting teary eyed in the audience. The whole sequences struck me as extremely contrived and practiced. She just couldn’t manage a tear; she needed someone dripping glycerine in her eye or whatever soap opera actresses use to simulate tears. Sorry Michele, you’re done as far as I’m concerned.

Rick Santorum avoided all the gay bashing of the last debate and sounded reasonable for most of the debate, which is why I probably have forgotten everything he said.

Ron Paul. I want to like Ron Paul, I really do. When it comes to his domestic policy I think he’s a genius. His line tonight about replacing the Income Tax with nothing was classic. Libertarians watching everywhere whooped for joy. I just think he’s batshit insane whenever he opens his mouth to talk about foreign policy.

Herman Cain held his own tonight under a barrage of questions about 9-9-9. He’s got to formulate a better answer then “visit HermanCain.com.” As Perry pointed out his plan isn’t as simple as Cain says it is, and he needs to develop short scenarios that explain how it works for poor and middle class workers because all his opponents have to do is say “consumption taxes are regressive,” and he’s burned. He’s improved his foreign policy points, but whether or not he realizes it (and he had better if he doesn’t) he will live or die by 9-9-9. I’ve begun looking into it myself and I think it’s revolutionary, but like every revolution there are enemies behind every rock and tree. He needs to formulate quick responses to those – and fast.

Mitt Romney. Conservatives hate him to the point where I’m just not sure they will vote for him no matter how much they hate Obama. Maybe they’ll come around, but I can’t help but think that the Obama machine has daily war plans for how they will attack him on everything from his Mormonism, to his venture capitalist days, and every decision he made in the Massachusetts State House. He’s slick and polished, an excellent debater. But people in the party really hate him. I don’t; I think he’ll pull better from the independents than Perry, but he might lose the base.

Overall it was a good show, but even after several of these debates I still am not sure who is the best candidate to defeat Obama next year.

For some reason most of the conservatives I know tend to have more liberal than conservative friends even though statistics show that conservatives outnumber liberals in the US by two to one. My fellow Watcher’s Council colleague Bookworm Room is married to one, and even my wife aligns more to the Left although her recent experiences with Medicaid and other government interference in health care is steering her hard to the Right. The vast majority of my “Facebook Friends” are liberals and regularly post about politics. Being conservative and polite I try to keep my mouth shut, but it takes some serious effort sometimes and every once in a while I just can’t help but open it.

Recently Elizabeth Warren’s little canned speech about taxation “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own,”  made the rounds among liberals and sure enough a couple of my friends posted it on their “walls”. I noticed that it originated at a site called “The Other 98%.” I recognized that immediately as a liberal meme that 2% of Americans own the other 98% or something to that effect, and when matched with Warren’s speech it implied that 2% owned factories and broke the social contract which liberals like her were going to rectify by imposing taxes on them. I did a little research then broke my “no posting about politics on Facebook” rule.

“As best as I can figure out the bottom of that 2% is around $200k for a married couple filing jointly (IRS statistics use 1%, 5% etc). I doubt anyone earning that who owns a factory. Even the 1% cutoff of $388k could mean 2 doctors or a pair of lawyers.”Those earners making $200k might be considered bourgeoisie by some making do with $30k a year, but I doubt that Warren Buffett, George “Judenrat” Soros or even Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon would hang out with them after they washed the smell of hippies of themselves (except Moore; by the looks of him I doubt he washes much.) I later wrote, “What concerns me is that the rhetoric is being directed at the top 2% of taxpayers – not solely billionaires. Warren is including people making $200k with the likes of those worth tens of billions of dollars.”

Well that opened me up to friends of my liberal friend. One posted:

“Why? Sorry, but I find it hard to feel terribly concerned that people who are earning “only” 200k per year might have to pay more in taxes. The words “cry me a river” somehow get stuck in my head every time I try to muster up some pity in my heart for folks bringing home only 6 or 7 times my annual income.”

I didn’t know this woman, but a review of her profile found that she was evidently a librarian who got her undergrad degree from one of the best public schools in the country, then went to graduate school at one of the country’s most expensive private schools, albeit one not considered top-tiered. Judging by her photograph she was younger than me, although not by much. For all that education, by her own admission she was making $35k year, max?

Long ago while the Wife was attending preparing for medical school, I invited a salesman from Appleby windows into my house to learn about vinyl replacement windows (big mistake; don’t ever mess with Appleby Products.) The guy was not a salesman, he was a con-artist. I like salespeople; my mother was a saleswoman, and the best never lie or cheat their customers. This guy was a con man. He dodged questions about the price of the windows and instead asked personal questions about our backgrounds, searching for emotional leverage over us. We were honest, but we knew what he was doing. We mentioned the Wife’s graduate degrees from Japan and her continuing study while prepping for med school. He eventually asked, “You care about your baby, don’t you?” We nodded. “You don’t want him to catch cold now do you?”  “I thought viruses cause the common cold,” my wife chirped. The salesman went on for a few minutes until it became clear to him that we weren’t going to by his crappy overpriced windows he went from being pleasant to rude in a heartbeat.  In exasperation he said to my wife, “All that education gone to waste.” It was the first time I’ve ever physically grabbed a guy and threw him out of my house. I didn’t know I had the strength or the body mass to actually throw another man out of my house, but I did heave him through the door.

When I read the librarian’s comment on Facebook I remembered, “All that education gone to waste.” It was true in this librarian’s case. Grad school and making $35k a year? Whose fault is it that? Society’s? Mine? George W. Bush’s?

6 years after I graduated college I was faced with a problem: I was back in the USA, had a wife and a baby to care for, and my political science degree and the experience I had overseas teaching in Japan wasn’t worth anything on the job market. So I took a job working at a help desk in the IT field. It’s not that I loved answering phones and being yelled at by my boss, but it gave me a foot on a path that led to better paying jobs in the IT field. In two years I had parlayed that job into one making more than the librarian does today. I kept learning new skills which lead to better paying jobs. Some of these involved risk. The technology changes quickly in IT, and worse, both India and China had coders that charged 1/10th what American programmers charged. But I stepped from technology to another which netted me a little more money to pay the bills while the wife went to school. I eventually left coding altogether, not because I don’t like it (I do) but because it had become a commodity that had been offshored.

The Wife’s story is even less conventional. After 7 years active duty in the Navy, she went to college and got her undergrad. Then she went to Japan and got her D.Sc in zoology. After we returned to the US, she was accepted in a postbac program and eventually got accepted to medical school. For years she worked hard while piling up a massive student loan debt. Now she’s working 60 hours a week and saving people’s lives. I don’t know any librarians who do either of those.

This brings up an important point: marriage or even cohabitation where the two parties pull their resources together is important. The librarian is evidently single. If she paired up with someone, even another librarian at $35k they together would be making just shy of a third of that 2% $200k figure. She is also a government employees; these tend to have lower dollar salaries but better benefits packages. It is unlikely that she is including those benefits in her “6 or 7 times my annual income” statement. She might think she’s only making $35k but is receiving another $15k in benefits such as pension, health care, etc. I have spent most of my career as a contractor in the IT field, so there are no benefits; the hourly wage I make is all I get.

But with all that education, $35k benefits or no isn’t a lot. At that salary she isn’t even paying income tax, and I’ll leave it to others to decide whether someone who pays nothing should have a say on those who do pay income tax. It sounds to me that she resents her salary, so why doesn’t she change it?

Are librarians worth more? The market seems to think so. The median salary (base pay only) of librarians is $56,749 – so I’m not sure why she’s making much less. Perhaps she’s working part-time, but if so she shouldn’t compare herself to those working full time (and usually many more hours) for more money. If she wants to make more money, what’s to stop her?

I feel like telling her: Change careers. I did, and so did my wife. She started medical school beyond the age of 40; I had to start my career chained to a phone being yelled at by computer illiterates at the age of 31. There are plenty of jobs out there that she could get that pay more. It takes courage and some preparation, but it’s better than resenting others who took the risks, work much longer hours, and reap the rewards – which we should remember by supporting Warren and other limousine liberals she wants the Government to steal.

Our system has its flaws. I have personally lost a job in a futile campaign against offshoring and labor dumping through the government’s meddling in the labor market. I worry about things like the cost of education and the future value of college degrees. Just like many liberals I too resent seeing the same people who caused the financial meltdown still in power instead of the chains they deserve. But for all of its flaws, it’s still the best at providing choice to anyone who demands it.

If you want to become a doctor, you can become one. If you want to start your own business and sell tutus to little girls studying dance, you can. If you want to start a restaurant or cook at one, there is no bureaucrat needing a bribe or law preventing you. Our system excels at providing choices to people whereas other systems provide outcomes. You are a farmer, but you will sell your produce to us at a price we determine. You are a doctor, but we will determine how much you are paid for each patient. You want to sell shoes in my district, you will have to pay me a flat fee every month (that’s how my friend Jan Mohamed was shaken down in Tanzania under socialism).

It takes much more than education and hard work to become a millionaire or a billionaire. To reach those heights one needs luck, family connections – a variety of things that are out of reach to all but a very few. But if you are young and your goal is to make a solid middle class salary of $100k a year, or $200k for the top 2% of households, you have to choose a career that pays well and you have to marry or live with someone with the same goal. There’s nothing magical about that formula, and no reason to resent those who have achieved that goal.

As my late mother-in-law said, usually when I had come home complaining after a rough day at the office or the Wife had a particularly tough night on call, “You chose this path.” And we have, all of us, chosen our paths. The Wife and I could have chosen to forgo having children, moved to a major city and gotten higher paying jobs; but we chose to live in a rural area with our rescued animals and our son. She could make much more money as a dermatologist or cardiologist, but she chose the lower paying specialty of family medicine because she wanted to be an old country doctor.

I almost titled this “Chosen Paths: Why I Don’t Resent Those Who Are Better Off Than I Am,” but that would have undermined the very theme of this essay. I am better off than anyone else, living in a beautiful area of the country, with a woman I adore and a son whose every breath is a miracle to me. Sure people have more money than I do, but I don’t resent them; why should I when what I have means more to me than a figure on a bank account statement? My mother-in-law, crazy as she was, was right; I did choose this path, just as the librarian chose hers. Instead of resenting those who make more than she does, perhaps its time that she changed her path to one that will end in a place where she will feel much the same as I do here, among my family and my misfit pack of dogs in the North Carolina mountains.

UPDATE: As the Occupy Wall St. movement has grown, so has the percentage it claims to represent. The Other 98% has morphed into We Are the 99% – probably after some Lefties realized $200k won’t make you rich enough to steal from, especially in their favorite hangouts in San Francisco and New York City where $200k is almost poverty level.

I’m a white guy and I don’t claim to understand what it means to be black in the United States although I try. I grew up in a house with a father who worked with black people and spoke about them using an assortment of epithets. When I referred to my late father as a bigot, my elderly mother was shocked and defended him saying that he didn’t have a problem with black people just those he worked with. I grew up in a different era after the Civil Rights struggle had been won, raised by a mother who cultivated a conscience within me, one based on the morality of her strong Roman Catholic faith mixed with egalitarianism arising from her German work ethic. My political heroes were men like Martin Luther King Jr., FDR and Abraham Lincoln. My favorite baseball player electrified the diamond whenever he made it to base: Lou Brock. And the music I listened to with my friends as we explored the woods surrounding our suburban neighborhoods: rap pioneers Grandmaster Flash, the Gap Band and Kurtis Blow.

But appreciating black culture doesn’t mean that I understand what it means to be black. Living in Japan I was regularly discriminated against because I was a foreigner, and that gave me an insight into what it must be like. I’d walk into a store and the clerk behind the counter would watch me suspiciously afraid that I would steal something (and afraid I’d speak English to him). Newspapers regularly insinuated that foreigners were behind all crime even though statistically 95% was carried out by native Japanese. Restaurants with empty seats that I entered suddenly became “full.” Landlords refused to rent an apartment to my wife and I, so the rental agent who assisted us resorted to calling prospective landlords and asking them flat out, “Are you willing to rent to Americans?” After 25 or 30 we found one willing to take the $8,000 bribe known euphemistically as “key money” (reikin) and rented to us. At the English Language school I taught at one of the teachers had been warned not to date a Japanese girl. A few days after that warning he was assaulted by a biker gang and nearly killed, spending 3 weeks in the hospital.  For four years there I was a subject of scorn and fascination wherever I went, and it took several years after leaving Japan for me to regain my perspective and love of the Japanese and their culture. But escape from that racist environment was only a plane ticket away, and for a variety of reasons I chose to live there. I recognize that isn’t an option for black Americans.

I lived in a very isolated place in Tanzania for a year and that showed me the limits of skin color. The people I associated with shared the same skin color but were very different. The Tongwe tribe that I lived with had avoided Arab slavers during the 15th-19th centuries by hiding in the mountains. They had been forced off the mountains and their small villages into large towns of mixed tribes during President Nyerere’s socialist collectivization experiment known as Ujamaa. They were very poor and viewed as backward by the other tribes, especially the Chagga, the tribe making up most of Tanzania’s ruling elite. I noticed these differences whenever I traveled up Lake Tanganyika from our research site to Kigoma with some Tongwe I hired as guides and helpers. They were quite uncomfortable in town, and acted in the way you would expect someone from Iowa might after stepping foot for the first time in Manhattan, and relied upon me to deal with government officials and merchants even though my command of Swahili was rudimentary. At the time I was noticing the differences between tribes in Tanzania, I was also exposed to the aftermath of the greatest genocide since the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Outside of Kigoma refugee camps had been set up for the Hutus who escaped to northern Tanzania after the Tutsi took over of Rwanda, ending the Hutu’s slaughter there. There was no difference in skin color between Hutu and Tutsi – but like the Tongwe and Chagga they came from cultures different enough to cause trouble. To the Tongwe that meant a lower standard of living and subservience to the Chagga; to the Tutsis it meant slaughter on a horrific scale.

Skin color hasn’t mattered in other conflicts either. Consider the Troubles in Ireland. There is not a spot of difference in skin tone between the Irish Republicans and the Irish Unionists. You could take DNA from both and find that the two had the same genetic makeup. But that didn’t stop them from killing each other for almost a thousand years. The two groups are culturally distinct however, and that is what matters most to them. The two groups even pronounce the letter “H” differently; simply reciting the alphabet would betray one’s unionist or republican sympathies, a tactic used by the paramilitaries on suspected spies.

So if skin color doesn’t matter in places like Africa, why should it be valued so highly by African-Americans in the United States?

Barack Obama has skin the same color as  African-Americans, but he does not share their culture. Obama was raised by white women and attended schools that weren’t available to most African-Americans. He has lived in a predominantly white culture over his entire professional career, that of liberal white academia, which is why when he tries to sound “black” he sounds as phony as a white guy talking “street.” Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesa, not Detroit and Philadelphia. The only streets he knew were the quiet suburban ones that his grandmother lived on – not the streets alive with the scent of ethnic cooking,  rap music and occasional police sirens.

In 2008 Barack Obama was black and his election to the presidency was a milestone in our history because it was the first time America elected a president having black skin. But America didn’t elect an African-American. It elected a liberal Democrat that happened to have black skin.

To Barack Obama that should be enough to placate the African-American community. He garnered 90+% of the community’s vote in 2008, and expects the same support in 2012. For the past 3 years he has done nothing more for the community. In fact he has put in place policies that make black unemployment worse such as his administration’s refusal to close the border with Mexico. Illegal immigrants don’t compete for jobs held by white people in investment banks; they compete with jobs held by African-Americans at factories and construction sites.

Why? He believes he has the African-American vote in his pocket be he has to compete with the Republicans for the Hispanic vote.

Until the 1960’s Democratic Party was a bastion of unreconstructed racists. Today the party practices the racism of low expectations and the assumption that African-Americans are best served by the culture of liberal whites and too stupid to learn otherwise. Republicans, the party of emancipation, once received the lion-share of the black vote. It receives only a few percent and has written off even attempting to garner support from the community.

That is a shame for both Republicans and African-Americans. Columnist John Hall gives 5 good reasons why African-Americans should reconsider their knee-jerk support of the Democratic Party, including the one I mention above: they are taken for granted. GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain has gone so far as to claim that the Democrats have brainwashed black Americans into voting for them. If true, it’s time for African-Americans to wake up and wield the power they have to control their destiny.

The American Jewish community is waking up to the damage their support has done to one of their most important causes: Israel. The Republican Party supports Israel in such a big way that it scares liberals who believe that peace in the Middle East can only be achieved by Israel giving up more land for Palestinians – to launch rockets and mortars from judging by the Israeli experience after its withdrawal from Gaza. American Jews are questioning whether their socialist economic policies that are anathema to the GOP are more important to them then unwavering GOP support for Israel. Simply by questioning whether they should continue to allow themselves to be taken for granted by a party that appeases Israel’s enemies they improve their status as viewed by both parties. The Jews are now in play for the 2012 whereas the African-American community is not. Yet.

Blacks need to put their votes in play for the 2012 election. They need to honestly reevaluate the GOP and see whether the party will give them more for their support than the Democrats. Merely by doing so they will force the Democrats to respond and improve their status within the political sphere.

African-Americans need to recognize that skin color is shallow, and it is time in the immortal words of Martin Luther King jr. for politicians to “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  The GOP has also been reconsidering its relationship to the black community. Two of its rising stars are Herman Cain and Congressman Alan West. Both men happen to be black, but you wouldn’t know it judging by the support they garner among whites. They symbolize the demise of racism even as white liberals call them racists.

Liberals want to keep black Americans down. They want them to remain dependent on government programs that the liberals can control. The moment African-Americans like Cain, West or even Bill Cosby question this control, the liberals slap the word racist on them. That is the liberal way of dealing with “uppity n———” just as their Democratic forefathers in the South resorted to the lash.

UPDATE: Lloyd Marcus takes O’Donnell to task, “Arrogant White Liberal Tells Cain How To Be Black.”

I’ve been keeping Dr. Wife abreast of the controversy raging among conservatives about Texas Governor Rick Perry’s mandate to vaccinate 12 year old girls against HPV. She is very supportive of the vaccine saying “It is one of the few weapons against cancer we have,” and believes that boys should get it as well since they can be carriers of the virus, and it is not known whether the virus contributes to other male urinary tract diseases such as prostate and bladder cancer.  What is known is that it prevents cervical cancer in women, and may protect them against other cancers as well.

I have been an apologist for Michelle Bachmann, believing that she has been treated unfairly by a misogynistic press that hates conservatives. But her attempts to beat Perry down with this controversy have crossed the line from political theater into the absurd. By courting the anti-vaccine crowd she has shacked up with Ron Paul in Crazytown and shown that she may be just as loony as the left-wing press has made her out to be.

I have serious issues with Perry’s mandate. I believe the government has the right to interfere in parenting only in certain egregious cases of abuse. Being a libertarian-minded parent myself I have had my share of run-ins with ideologues who think they know better than I do what is best for my child. It is an issue that resonates in my family since my parents fought an effort in the 1950’s to force my brother to have an experimental open-heart surgery that most likely would have killed him. My father risked going to jail rather than see his son experimented on, and it was only after my brother’s pediatrician intervened on my father’s behalf that the state backed down.

So Perry’s open for some serious criticism on the mandate issue. Since the HPV virus is only sexually transmitted it’s not like he had to mandate the vaccine in order to prevent the disease easily spreading like measles or meningitis.

But what Bachmann has done is conflated the mandate issue with the vaccination issue – and here she has gone off the rails. There is no scientific evidence that the vaccine is dangerous. All vaccines have side effects and some may even cause deaths in a tiny fraction of recipients, but that risk is overwhelmed by the lives they have saved and the cases of diseases they have prevented.

I am a climate change skeptic because consensus shouldn’t mean squat in science and the data isn’t there to support the AGW theory. But I am at heart a scientist and the evidence that vaccines save lives is overwhelming. Anyone who doubts their power should visit the 3rd World and see children dying from diphtheria and mumps as I have; it’s not pretty and it’s completely preventable. Bachmann needs to walk back her statements on this controversy or risk losing the support of people like me who are Republicans AND scientifically-minded. The GOP shouldn’t become the party of ignorance, but it is well on its way if Bachmann continues this line of attack.

Jane Jamison, the writer behind the conservative blog Uncoverage.net, has passed away. Details are not clear, her last post was on August 26 where she mentioned a family emergency.

The conservative blogosphere is small, so news travels quickly. Although I had never met Ms. Jamison (not her real name, by the way) I found her writing to be insightful, clever and even downright sentimental at times. Often I kicked myself after reading one of her pieces, thinking that it was much better than mine. She posted frequently, much more than I do, and I followed her on Facebook to keep up with her. Her ideas came fast and furious, including her unique coverage of the Fast and Furious scandal.

Politics shouldn’t matter when a writer pens his or her last word. The silence that follows is always deafening. Farewell, good lady.

h/t: VA Right

I probably shouldn’t waste my time writing about Jon Huntsman because chances are that few people outside of China and Utah know he exists. Jon Huntsman’s biggest claim to fame so far in the 2012 Republican nomination process is the fact that his campaign staff have had trouble spelling his name properly. It’s not their fault. Most people don’t have anything against the letter “H” – but for some reason Jon’s parents did. Maybe it’s because he had nightmares about the letter H after watching Sesame Street, I’m not sure; all I know is that unless your last name is Bon Jovi and your name is John, you might want to keep the “H” in your first name.

I’m not sure what qualifies Huntsman to be president other than he was governor of Utah, Obama’s ambassador to China and he’s the same religion as Mitt Romney who is doing much better in the polls. Of course everyone is doing better in the polls than Jon Huntsman; Casey Anthony is doing better in the polls than Jon Huntsman, and she’s not even announced her candidacy this year (too busy livin’ la vida loca in Boca I guess…) At the last Republican debate in Iowa, Huntsman merged into the background behind the podiums and even the few “pity questions” thrown his way by the panel couldn’t pull him out of it. In most of the commentaries I read (and a few I wrote) there was hardly any mention of Huntsman.

And that’s the problem with Jon Huntsman. To misquote Gertrude Stein, there simply is no there there. Huntsman’s conservative credentials are non-existent. Many of his positions are taken straight from White House talking points: He believes in anthropogenic global warming, supports Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and supports the same comprehensive immigration reform as Obama and his allies in the Senate. While he does differ from the Democrats on issues such as abortion and gun control, he has spent the last 2 years working for one of the most polarizing administrations this country has seen in decades. He now expects Republicans to ignore his cozy relationship with the Obama administration and its Chinese creditors and to embrace his “center-right” candidacy.

The Obama administration helped its old friend, encouraging stories early in the Spring that Huntsman was the candidate Obama feared facing the most next year. Unfortunately for Huntsman no one believes what Obama says anymore, especially not Republicans. Huntsman is the kind of candidate the Democrats would like to run against. He would be restrained in his attacks on Obama and his record, would put up a decent showing in the election and would lose gracefully – proving that the “system worked.” He would be Mondale to Obama’s Reagan in a reenactment of the Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory. The Republicans sense this and have ignored Huntsman more than they have Ron Paul. There is no way in “H” that Republicans will nominate Jon Huntsman as their candidate in 2012.*

Jon Huntsman at the Republican Debate in Iowa

Jon Huntsman’s “cloak of invisibility” does indeed open him up for a job in a future Republican administration – as Vice President. A Romney-Huntsman ticket might make Tea Partiers like me lose our lunches, but it could appeal to the independents. I don’t see Perry, Palin or Bachmann putting up with such a milquetoast on their halves of ticket, but stranger pairing have happened (like Kennedy-Johnson and Bush-Quayle).

• After 10 years of writing here, I really hope that I don’t have to update this post in a year and eat my words…

UPDATE: Looks like Jon’s already thinking along the same lines as me: Huntsman says he’d be open to run as Bachmann’s VP. I doubt she or anyone else will bite for the simple reason that Huntsman doesn’t bring anything to the ticket. He doesn’t come from an electorally important state. He doesn’t have a large contingent of supporters. He might have a stash of Chinese cash, but that’s doubtful. There’s already talk of Marco Rubio who could peel away some Hispanics in Florida, but the Utah/Mormon vote is already deep in the Republican ticket’s pocket.

One can’t fault the guy for trying. The only thing worse than having never been in the limelight is being in it briefly and liking it.

Bookworm Room wonders whether the internecine attacks on the GOP candidates is really a good idea, a topic taken up by Joshuapundit. Michelle Malkin has been vicious in her attacks on Texas Governor Rick Perry for his mandating the gardasil vaccination of elementary school girls. Ron Paul supporters have begun a fishing expedition for sex partners of Rick Perry. And Ron Paul himself has been targeted by Republican establishment figures as Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove.

Nowhere is the ancient Chinese proverb “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” more appropriate than politics. If the Republican-on-Republican attacks make a GOP supporter squeamish now, imagine how she is going to feel a year from now when the Obama Machine and its mainstream media attack dogs are running at full speed with an election 80 days away. Republicans need to vet their candidate in a way that the Democrats never did 4 years ago because this president is not going to become the first one term president in 20 years without a vicious, unfair – even possibly illegal – dirty fight. If the candidate can display his (or in the case Michelle Bachmann and possibly Sarah Palin, her) mettle through a vicious and dirty vetting process, then he or she will be able to survive the Summer and early Autumn of 2012 without submarining in the polls. Obama may be the weakest and thinnest skinned president we’ve seen in a generation, but the support apparatus cocooning him makes Nixon’s 1972 CREEP look like it was run by Tibetan monks by comparison. I don’t think that Republicans, emboldened by his low poll numbers and numerous political missteps, fully appreciate the ugliness that awaits the person receiving the Republican nomination next Summer. Better to forcibly inoculate the candidate – and the party – now when most American voters aren’t paying attention than a year from now when they will be.

Most of the attacks by the Republicans on each other aren’t that big a deal to me. I like Michelle Malkin a lot and value her opinion, but I think her fury over the gardasil vaccination is overblown. First Dr. Wife has told me that it’s effective and will prevent numerous deaths from cervical cancer. She would like to see boys get the vaccine too since they can be carriers of the HPV virus. Second I agree with Malkin’s assertion that the mandatory aspect of the vaccine is an affront to parental rights. But should I rule out Gov. Rick Perry simply on this one issue?

How about the topic of Evolution? Here is an exchange between Gov. Perry and a child being goaded by his mother, a Democrat using her child to make a point, in which Perry says that evolution is a theory that’s “way out there” and “has some gaps.”

Let me just mention that I have serious issues with parents using their children as proxies in a fight – especially a political one. I don’t like seeing children picketing abortion clinics just as I don’t like seeing them marching down the street demanding collective bargaining rights for teachers in Wisconsin. Maybe it’s because I’ve studied the Cultural Revolution in China where Mao used children as tools of terror against their parents; or perhaps it is because children will do anything to please an adult they trust, an instinct that has been exploited by the Taliban mullahs in the madrassas in Pakistan to turn their students into suicide bombers. I think it’s sick to use children in an adult fight and question the decency, morality and intelligence of anyone who does so. That woman thought she was being clever in making him admit his position on Evolution; all she did was point out what an ignorant and downright crappy parent she is.

I don’t believe in Evolution the same way I believe that the universe is far more complex than our minds can possibly understand. I believe in Evolution the same way I believe in gravity. I understand the theory behind it. I have read about and even personally performed experiments that prove it (breeding cichlids and assisting in wild chimpanzee research). But I’m not going to rule out Gov. Perry receiving my vote just because he doesn’t believe in it.

I might disagree with Perry on Evolution, gay marriage and a slew of other social issues. But I agree with him on economics, foreign policy and other topics that are far more important to me than whether or not the governor accepts that we are descended from a common ancestor of the apes or not. Walter Russell Mead points out why:

Let me put it this way. A GOP candidate might feel a need to please creationist voters and say a few nice things about intelligent design. That is politics as usual; it gins up the base and drive the opposition insane with fury and rage. No harm, really, and no foul.

But if that same politician then proposed to base federal health policy on a hunt for the historical Garden of Eden so that we could replace Medicare by feeding old people on fruit from the Tree of Life, he would have gone from quackery-as-usual to raving incompetence. True, the Tree of Life approach polls well in GOP focus groups: no cuts to Medicare benefits, massive tax savings, no death panels, Biblical values on display. Its only flaw is that there won’t be any magic free fruit that lets us live forever, and sooner or later people will notice that and be unhappy.

Perry might believe that it’s okay for Texas schools to teach Creationism (in the form of it’s politically correct form “intelligent design”) alongside Evolution. I completely disagree with this stance and if I were a parent of a student in Texas I would vociferously challenge the law in every forum possible. But I would not think that the governor was an idiot just because he and I disagreed on this one topic. Now if he wanted to ban all teaching and references to Evolution in Texas schools or stop biotech companies based in Texas performing work that was based on evolutionary principles, then I might think he had crossed the line, as Mead put it, into “raving incompetence.”

Bookworm Room states “(m)y current candidate of choice is the William Buckley candidate,” and I agree with her. Buckley believed that the Republicans should select the most conservative candidate who could win the general election, and as someone who believes the past 3 years of the Obama administration has been as disastrous as the Carter years 30 years ago – perhaps more so in the long run – I would vote for just about anyone the Republicans coughed out of their convention next year with one exception: Ron Paul – who I believe would be a complete disaster for the GOP and for America if he were elected.

So to agree with Tom Friedman, the Chinese are right – or rather their ancient proverb is. Let the Democrats take delight in the carnage now. Whoever survives the carnage now will be prepared for anything that the Democrats and their mainstream media propaganda wing lets fly a year from now. And may the best candidate win.

Some pundits and Ron Paul’s dedicated supporters are wondering why Ron Paul is being ignored by media on both sides of the political divide. Jon Stewart claims that Paul is being treated like the 13th floor of a skyscraper. Charles Krauthammer has said it’s because he stands no chance of garnering the Republican nomination let alone winning the presidency.

He has a lot of supporters online, and according to pundits on the Left and Right they’re just as deluded. But for all their craziness, there is a sound reason for the “media blackout” on Ron Paul: He is a true isolationist while both the Democratic and Republican parties are staunch internationalists.

For those of us whose memories start well after World War 2, we haven’t seen true isolationism. For all intents and purposes isolationism died on December 8, 1941 when Montana congresswoman Jeanette Rankin cast the sole vote against Congress’s declaration of war against Japan. Yet for most of its history prior to that war America was primarily an isolationist power. Protected by two large oceans on either side, and the arrival of immigrants who were escaping wars in Europe, America had followed the advice given by President George Washington in his farewell address to avoid foreign entanglements. Throughout the 19th century American foreign policy was motivated by commerce. Commodore Perry opened up Japan in the 1850’s not to spread Democracy but to provide a refueling station for ships whaling in the area and trading with China. In this respect America’s foreign policy prior to World War 1 was most similar to China’s foreign policy today. China will sell anyone anything without exercising moral judgement. As America learned such actions do have consequences, such as when the scrap iron it sold to Japan came back in the bodies of its servicemen. Similarly China’s support of Pakistan has not stopped the Pakistanis from supporting terror groups operating from Pakistani territory into western China.

America’s isolationist instincts first faced change under the McKinley and later Roosevelt presidencies which moved to acquire colonies in Latin America and the Pacific. But even the Spanish-American war was more about commerce than it was about any type of trans-national belief in Democracy. It wasn’t until America was dragged into World War 1 under the Wilson administration that America’s isolationist history began to change. Wilson was an avowed internationalist who saw himself as uniquely suited for ending War on a continent that had never known peace. The League of Nations was supposed to be the first step on this path, but Wilson was unable to overcome the tide of isolationism that returned as American troops were quickly demobilized and returned home from Europe. The US Senate never ratified the treaty or joined the organization, a blow that Wilson never recovered from. It wasn’t until Franklin D. Roosevelt, another internationalist, who resurrected Wilson’s ideology through Lend-Lease and covert support of UK and France against Germany and Italy in Europe. But even then, resistance against involvement in Europe was strong throughout 1939, 1940 and 1941.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor mortally wounded the philosophy of isolationism in the United States. Although American internationalist policies such as America’s oil embargo on Japan had made the United States a target in the minds of the Japanese junta in power in Tokyo, the attack shocked Americans because it happened on American soil without apparent provocation. Suddenly the oceans separating the United States from Europe and Asia weren’t so large anymore, and isolationism lost its allure as people realized that what happened “over there” had consequences “over here.”

Since World War 2 all governments in power in Washington, whether Democratic or Republican, congresses or presidential administrations, and all their champions, think tank residents and pundits have been internationalists. Isolationism has not been taken seriously by anyone. Except Ron Paul and his supporters.

The problem with Ron Paul is not that the media isn’t giving him a fair shake: it’s that his beliefs are so paleolithic that the media can’t understand it. His entire vision of American engagement in the world makes Obama’s 2009 Apology tour look like American imperialism by contrast. He seems unaware that there are these things called “missiles” that you can put bombs on and launch from very far away. “Iran doesn’t have an air force,” he said during the Republican Debate in Iowa, ignoring that the reason it doesn’t are the sanctions we’ve put on them – sanctions which he opposes. Evidently Paul thinks the only way nukes get used is if you drop them from planes. He also avoided mention of Israel; Cain mentioned that Ahmadinejad promised to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and candidate Herman Cain said “I take the man at his word.” He also doesn’t believe that Iran supports terrorism.

Paul’s vision of the world makes sense for 1911 – but not in 2011. While he does offer a true choice in a leader, it is one that not anchored in the present but in the distant past. As I have argued numerous times over the years, the default state of America is isolationism, and Ron Paul provides an important reminder of that state. But looking at the challenges America faces today and will face in the future, we cannot return to an era when steamers took 3 weeks to cross an ocean when planes can do so in 3 hours. Nor can we return to a time when news from the war in Europe took days to reach Americans at a time when one can learn what’s happening on the other side of the planet faster than what’s happening down the street.

As one commentator noted during the Republican debate in Iowa, Ron Paul forces America to have the debate between isolationism and internationalism. Unfortunately we cannot have that debate while the media is puzzled by Paul’s candidacy and therefore ignores it. Paul’s naivety towards international threats is balanced by the internationalist’s desire to have America involved in every conflict, regardless of its impact on American national security. While I may personally disagree with nearly all of Paul’s positions, I would like to see that debate held.

UPDATE: VA Right has an excellent review of Ron Paul’s performance in the Iowa debate, and an even better explanation about Paul and his libertarian beliefs. VA Right suggests Federal Reserve Chairman: ” I would love to see Ron Paul replace Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman in the next Republican Administration. It would be the shortest appointment in history.” 

Spyridon Mitsotakis at Big Peace compares Ron Paul to Henry Wallace, writing “The conspiracy-minded John Birch Society, long ago expelled from the conservative movement by Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, Jr., is abuzz over Congressman Ron Paul’s “Blame America First” performance at Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate.” I used the term paleo to describe Paul in the piece above intentionally. Buckley purged the Republican party of anti-Semites, racists and isolationists in the 1950’s, thereby paving the way for the party’s success in the 1980’s. Ron Paul’s popularity proves that he left the job unfinished.

Two and a half years ago, a Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive formulated a stimulus plan that was supposed to help America through a recession. It was a grand $787 Billion scheme meant to put Americans to work, keep unemployment below 8%, rebuild our infrastructure, and insure our nation’s solvency. Resorting to a Keynesian stimulus was a big risk; the equivalent of an individual maxing out his credit card for a trip to Las Vegas and betting all his money on a single roll of the dice. If the dice land in his favor, he wins big, but if they don’t he loses everything – except for the credit card bill that comes due.

Einstein once said of the universe that “God does not play dice,” but politicians do with the economy – especially with money that is not their own. At the time a number of people opposed the stimulus plan including me. I, along with many others, also opposed the bank bailout and demanded the heads of the banks at least figuratively, if not literally once the Democratic Congress coached by a Republican Treasury secretary pushed that through. Aside from the moral hazard the bailouts caused, the biggest problem was the assumption of debt.

As anyone who is indebted knows, debt limits freedom. If I’m paying the bank $400 a month on a car, I can’t spend that money on something else even more important. Say the car breaks down and I need to repair it; I can’t use that $400 to fix my car. Debt is the last thing you want in times of crisis. If your job situation is precarious or a new mouth is on the way, you need more cash and less debt.

Our government is now realizing the pain of indebtedness. The stimulus has failed; the Vegas dice throw has come up box cars and the $787 billion the politicians put on credit cards must be paid. Even though they could really use that $787 billion right now to calm the markets or stop the economy from moving into another recession, they can’t use it because they don’t have it.

It seemed like a great idea at the time. The trip to Vegas was very exciting. All the Democratic constituencies were purring like kittens in the laps of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama. Had it worked, the Democrats and Obama would be heroes – and the Tea Partiers would truly be at the fringes as tax dodger/Vietnam War hero-pretender Sen. John Kerry imagines them to be today.

But now the Democrats are left with the hangover after the Vegas trip, and the bills are coming due. There’s no room on America’s credit card for another trip to Vegas for “double-or-nothing” and taxpayers like me are tapped out. There is a very good reason, aside from my personal belief that gambling is immoral, that I don’t gamble: I don’t want to lose everything. The Democrats gambled and lost; I hope they feel as bad as they pretend to feel, although I doubt it. While Clinton might be able to feel the pain of others, I doubt Pelosi, Reid, Kerry and the other millionaires in their party, can.

This doesn’t excuse Republicans. When the GOP controlled Congress and the White House government spending ballooned on everything from the Department of Homeland Security to entitlements. In fact the 2006 election which saw the GOP lose control of Congress was in part due to the dissatisfaction of many conservatives and libertarians who felt the party had become a clone of the Democrats, at least when it came to raiding the treasury.

But what spares the GOP some of the blame is the Tea Party within it. The Tea Party has fought for smaller government and reigning in spending since its inception during the government bailouts of 2008 and the stimulus of 2009. If it wasn’t for the Tea Party America would be in even worse shape. Don’t forget that it was the Democrats who demanded last Spring a “clean” debt ceiling bill that would have raised the debt ceiling without any spending cuts whatsoever.

Where is the Tea Party in the Democratic Party? Where are the fiscal conservatives on the Left? There aren’t any. They were purged by the fiscal liberals who took power in 2006 under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Men like Congressman Dick Gephardt and Zell Miller resigned rather than fight for their own seats against left-wing ideologues desperate to push their way to the government trough. Senator Joe Lieberman only survived the purge by leaving the party.

The Democrats looked to the left in Europe and dreamed of a party along the lines of European socialists, and after the 2008 election that landed them the White House, they had it. Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money, and reality has reasserted itself. The new era of fiscal conservatism has dawned on America and the Democrats (and a large group of Republicans) are woefully unprepared for it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and Dafydd at Big Lizards discusses the conservative/liberal divide on Gay Marriage and find both sides lacking. Liberals want “society to applaud perversity” while Conservatives pretty much follow the same argument but come to a different conclusion: “If you have a right to cohabitate with anybody, that necessarily implies a right to marry anybody. Therefore, you have no right to cohabitate.” I’ve argued numerous times that the State shouldn’t even be in the marriage business, and that people should be able to incorporate the way businesses can.

He concludes:

Where does this leave us? It’s not the only issue on which conservatives can be as mulish and irrational as liberals. Immigration and drug policy are two others, but the worst is modern biological evolutionary theory. The last is the most similar example to conservative allergy to sexual liberty:

Many dyed in the wool atheists—including Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchens, Philip Pullman (of the wretched His Dark Materials books)—insist that accepting the idea of evolution by natural selection requires one to reject God and faith and embrace atheism.

A large number of conservatives with inadequate scientific schooling—including Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Michael Medved, Ben Stein—completely swallow the liberal argument.

Therefore, being unwilling to reject God, they instead reject modern evolutionary biology, casting overboard more than a century of brilliant and apolitical science.

In fact, there is no logical or rational connection between allowing sexual freedom and requiring the definition of marriage to include any old relationship somebody might want; just as there is no reasoned conflict at all between biological evolution and faith in a theistic God, as Francis S. Collins conclusively proves in the Language of God; but there you are: Conservatives reject both as unthinkingly and reflexively as liberals denounce the Koch brothers, and for eerily similar reasons.

So I say again: Extremism in defense of conservatism is certainly less annoying than the liberal strain… but it’s no less extremist—and no more rational.

Slate on the current dating scene makes me glad I’m not in it:

As a result, Match began “weighting” variables differently, according to how users behaved. For example, if conservative users were actually looking at profiles of liberals, the algorithm would learn from that and recommend more liberal users to them. Indeed, says Thombre, “the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.

Waahut? I thought conservatives=closed minded troglodytes and liberals=open minded human beings, at least that’s what I had been lead to believe reading the Huffington Post and Vanity Fair. But here was Amarnath Thombre, the engineer hired by Match.com to update the sites matchmaking algorithm, stating the near opposite: conservatives may still be troglodytes, but they are open minded trog’s at the very least. And liberals might be closed-minded, but they are still human beings and better than their lesser human right-wing counterparts.

What’s interesting is that in my personal experience, Liberal-Liberal pairings predominate. The Wife has a wealthy friend who was horrified to learn that neither Linda nor I voted for Obama in 2008. “But you can’t be Republicans,” she spat. The very idea that the Wife could share the woman’s viewpoint on humanitarian issues like health care in Africa, yet diverge on other issues such as health care and foreign policy simply didn’t make any sense at all to her.

Recently I had the opportunity to meet one of her colleagues and his wife. He is primary care physician with over 35 years of experience and a fundamentalist Christian who believes in Intelligent Design. His wife also does mission work in Nagorno-Karabakh, and seem stunned that I was familiar with the area and its history. Yet both are hard-core Leftists that left me bemused at the dining table for the cognitive dissonance that must exist between their religious and political beliefs. I saw the same situation with a sister of mine and her husband, a retired Lutheran minister who believed in Hope and Change but not Evolution. My son couldn’t believe it and began to challenge him, but a wink and a wry smile from me made him back off.

Although she did vote for McCain, I consider our relationship to be a Liberal-Conservative pairing with either one of us taking the opposite position depending on the issue. For example, I support killing America’s enemies no matter where they hide. This requires international engagement. The Wife thinks America needs to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, – and Europe and Asia too. When it comes to gays in the military, I am 100% in support of allowing them to serve openly while the Wife thinks it’s a bad idea that could endanger unit cohesion and soldier’s lives. Being that she served and I didn’t, I weight her opinion significantly although not enough to switch my position.

As for conservative-conservative pairings, I don’t know of any although I don’t doubt their existence. Perhaps its my educational background, but the vast majority of my friends and colleagues are Liberal-Liberal, with a few in Liberal-Conservative relationships. It’s the reason why I avoid discussing politics with all but the best of friends, and avoid it altogether on social media sites like Facebook. I learned that the hard way when an old friend defended Helen Thomas’s comments on Israel. Certain subjects are friendship killers, and the anti-Semitic rant that came out of his mouth reminded me why I was no longer friends with the bigot. Unfortunately his Jew-hatred was generally accepted and condoned by other liberal friends we held in common. The argument was one of the more gut-wrenching experiences that I have had online.

As my experience suggests, people are more complex than the labels used to describe them. I’ve personally never felt comfortable with the label “conservative” that I’ve donned to differentiate me from “liberals” on certain issues like the Global War on Terror over the past 10 years. Conservatives like Mike Huckabee and John Boehner don’t represent me just as liberals like Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid don’t. I hold a leftist position on gay marriage, a rightist position on support of the military, a hard-leftist position on the bankers (I want to see them tarred and feathered – seriously) and a hard-conservative position on the size of the federal government (the 14 Amendment was put there by Satan). Thombre’s algorithm at Match.com would have a heckuva time finding me a mate – which is why I’m grateful and appreciate my luck at finding the Wife when I did.

I have found self-described “liberals” some of the most intolerant folks around. We couldn’t raise the topic of politics around my brother-in-law our last trip to St. Louis for fear that he would blow his top while arguing. The Wife’s wealthy friend admitted to her that she was the only “Republican” friend she had. These are but anecdotal incidents that anyone could refute with their right-wing brother or crazy Republican aunt. And I do have liberal friends who are open-minded. I treasure these friendships because they keep me from the excesses of the extremes, reminding me that while they may have a different opinion on a specific topic, they are still decent human beings.

By I do wonder if Thombre is on to something. On broader issues self-identifying liberals seem as keen on censoring the media and viewpoints they disagree with as much as the Moral Majority did in its heyday in the 1980s. Conservative or libertarian groups are not pushing a “fairness doctrine” to take a popular radio personality off the air the way liberals are with their attempts at silencing Rush Limbaugh. Nor are activists on the Right writing sponsors to avoid advertising on MSNBC the way Leftists are with their DropFox campaign backed by Emperor Palpatine George Soros. People laugh at the “fair and balanced” tag of Fox News, yet I’ve seen just as many Democratic politicians on it as Republicans, watched left wing commentators Bob Beckel, Mara Liasson and Juan Williams hold their own against Charles Krauthammer, Bill Krystol, and Steve Hayes, and seen stories achieve notoriety there long before they appear in the New York Times.

Whereas Ed Meese and other conservative Reagan appointees raised the banner of censorship in the 1980’s, the flag was passed to Tipper Gore and the Left who have carried it through the ‘90s to today. Campus hate speech codes put in place by progressives are nothing more than censorship with a happy face slapped on it. 25 years ago the Religious Right controlled the Conservative agenda. Today the religious right is increasingly irrelevant to the Republican party’s fortunes as the libertarians gain influence and the party becomes open to ideas that were owned by the Left until now.

If true, what could explain the open mindedness of conservatives? Most of the conservatives I know are former liberals, while most of the liberals I know have never changed. It is possible that conservatives who for whatever reason changed their thinking may have not forgotten their previous beliefs and affiliations. During the 1980’s I protested against the Reagan administration and supported Leftist causes. 9-11 changed my worldview but it did not change my core beliefs. I still value human rights; I just don’t support Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch anymore because of their anti-American and anti-Israel biases. I still want to help the less fortunate, but not by replacing personal initiative with entitlement. I want to protect the environment, but not by covering property owners or businesses with red tape. It would be interesting to survey self-described liberals and conservatives to see if they have changed their affiliations over the years. If as I suspect more conservatives are ex-liberals than vice versa, then the change could explain Thrombre’s finding.

I haven’t written much about the News of the World scandal that is engulfing the Rupert Murdoch empire. I’m not going to waste my breath defending a billionaire; he has more resources than I do to do that, nor do I believe what has happened in the UK matters to his empire over here. British tabloid journalism has always been in the toilet. There’s even a princess in an early grave because of it – or at least partly. The focus on News Corp is like being swarmed by mosquitoes in the woods, killing one, and blaming that one bug for all your bites. . But I do think that the interest sparked on this side of the pond by the phone hacking scandal is pure politics. Janet Daley of the Daily Telegraph agrees:

This has gone way, way beyond phone hacking. It is now about payback. Gordon Brown’s surreal effusion in the House last week may have made it embarrassingly explicit, but the odour of vengeance has been detectable from the start: not just from politicians who have suffered the disfavour of Murdoch’s papers, or the trade unions (and their political allies) who have never forgiven him for Wapping, but from that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre.

Daley believes that the British Left is using the scandal to assassinate a political rival.

There is scarcely any outfit on the Right – be it political party, or media outlet – which demands the outright abolition of a Left-wing voice, as opposed to simply recommending restraint on its dominance (as I am with the BBC). That is because those of us on the Right are inclined to believe that our antagonists on the Left are simply wrong-headed – sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes malevolent but basically just mistaken. Whereas the Left believes that we are evil incarnate. Their demonic view of people who express even mildly Right-of-centre opinions (that lower taxes or less state control might be desirable, for example) would be risible if it were not so pernicious.

The Left does not want a debate or an open market in ideas. It wants to extirpate its opponents – to remove them from the field. It actually seems to believe that it is justified in snuffing out any possibility of our arguments reaching the impressionable masses – and bizarrely, it defends this stance in the name of fairness.

This concerns me. If Murdoch owned the New York Times or MSNBC I doubt that Eric Holder would be investigating – especially while he’s too busy stonewalling one of the biggest scandals that I’ve ever seen: Operation Gunrunner/Fast and Furious. Besides, if Murdoch is a key component of the vast right wing conspiracy I’m beholden to, he sucks at it: According to OpenSecrets.org, Donations by News Corp members favor Dems 2-1. Biggest recipient? That paragon of conservative virtue Barbara Boxer.

I recently heard of a business that is employing illegals and paying them sub-minimum wage. The owners even make them work everyday except one a month and threaten to fire them if they sit down or take a break at any time during the day. It’s an agricultural based business, and like many in rural America it is dependent on cheap labor. As far as I know it doesn’t force the people to work there (I’ve heard that at least one employee quit because of the working conditions and pay), but this information posed a dilemma to me, one that challenged my populist and libertarian instincts.

What is the ethical thing to do? Call ICE? Doing this would guarantee the illegals and their families would get deported. Now I may be a registered Re-thuglican, but I’m not heartless. The vast majority of illegals working here are hard working, honest folk (except for their complete disregard for America’s immigration laws), and alerting Immigration would hurt the workers more than their employer, who would most likely get a small fine if they received any punishment at all. The enterprise is based in one of the poorest counties in the state, and they do employ citizens (although they don’t treat them any better than the illegals.)

Should I do nothing and allow “slavery” to rise again in the South? Funny how that word gets abused almost as much as the “H” word (“Holocaust”) does. This isn’t slavery. Before the Civil War slaves could not leave their jobs; doing so could result in severe punishment and often their death. This business isn’t holding any of its workers behind barbed wire. Each is free to leave, and many do – usually involuntarily when the supervisor fires them. They are then replaced by others. In this area there are tens of thousands of illegals working the tobacco and corn fields with more flooding in daily.

And that’s the problem. Those of us who want to close the border to illegal immigration are often viewed as heartless, even un-American for our views. But those who support open borders and lax immigration rules never discuss who their policies hurt the most: the immigrants already here.

Consider that a worker at the agribusiness is fed up with working 29-30 days a month for $25 a day. His competition isn’t an American citizen; it is another illegal immigrant, perhaps a newly arrived one desperate for any type of wage to survive. If that person was still on the other side of the border, there would be much less competition for his job and the agribusiness would be forced to either improve his wages and working conditions, become more efficient and productive, or go out of business. But lax immigration would mean the continuation of a steady stream of workers willing to replace him, thereby guaranteeing a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions.

This is Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work, and indicative of how progressives who support “immigrants rights” often pave the road to hell with their good intentions. In order to improve the lot of the workers at the agribusiness, a call to ICE won’t do – unless it’s to demand they do their job to secure the border. In fairness to them, it’s not possible because the politics of the issue prevent them from doing that job. Preventing the agribusiness from checking documentation and immigration status of their employees will not help the workers, nor will any laws as long as the supply of workers from abroad continues. “Guest worker programs” may seem good in theory, but the fact that such programs guarantee wages and working conditions (and increase business expenses due to maintenance of records) will always make the option to hire illegal immigrants more attractive. Those guest workers would then find themselves in the same predicament that many low-skilled American citizens find themselves today: not skilled enough to demand better paying jobs, but more expensive than illegal immigrants.

The Left likes to lay claim to the issue of illegal immigration in the hope that the immigrants will follow in the footsteps of those newly arrived in the past who built the Democratic patronage machines in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere. I suspect that their interests would decline if the illegal immigrants voted Republican after becoming citizens. It’s not a stretch: socially, Mexican families are much more conservative than typical Democratic households and have more in common with Republicans on issues such as gay marriage and abortion.

In order for the lot of such workers to improve, demand has to increase for their work and the only way that is going to happen is for everyone in the USA to start farms to boost demand for their labor or for the supply of labor from abroad to be cut off. Once shut off, workers will be able to demand higher wages and better working conditions because they could not be replaced so easily.

Over 120 years ago a big chunk of my ancestors arrived from Eastern Europe and did manual labor. Back then there were no minimum wages, no OSHA or other such regulation, yet they did okay. While they arrived legally, I don’t completely begrudge the illegals for wanting to improve the lot the way my ancestors did. But I don’t want them to be treated badly either. Anyone who wants to improve the lives of farm laborers should support closing the border. It’s the only viable solution to improve the lot of illegal immigrants and to force outfits like the one I’ve heard about to treat their employees better.