Jul 28 2009

In their own words

Category: illegal alien,left,Obama — harmonicminer @ 10:31 am

Latino Identity Politics and Immigration Payback

Over the past several years, pro-immigrant groups, Latino organizations, and Democratic Party-linked institutes in Washington have been on the same page about immigration and politics. Basically, it’s been a politics of numbers—bringing the growing number of Latinos and immigrants into the Democratic Party.

The entire article is basically a confession that both Democrats and “immigration rights” activists intend for people who entered the USA illegally to become Democrat voters, overwhelming the electorate with people who don’t understand the foundations of US society.  The article is not written by raving right-wing lunatics.  It is written by the people who are DOING it.

There is even a thinly veiled admission that “comprehensive immigration reform”  and “pathway to citizenship” are simply code phrases for “adding more Democrat voters who came here illegally.”

Read and weep, if you love your country.

Then call your senator and congressional representative. You haven’t been hearing so much about this issue lately, with economic issues center-stage. But “comprehensive immigration reform” is still back in the dressing room, waiting to make a dramatic appearance in the second act.

Jul 27 2009

The Dangerous Conservatives

Category: guns,left,right — harmonicminer @ 9:04 am

It’s popular to view so called “right-wingers” as nuts with guns and bad attitudes, not really suitable for polite society, probably unstable and dangerous.  From the panicky news coverage given to the murder of a late-term abortionist, to the Napolitano Homeland Security Office labeling conservatives as possible terrorist threats, to lies about how many US firearms make it to Mexico for use in the murderous drug wars,  the general feeling is that conservatives are just barely holding themselves back from mass murder….  and that’s on a good day.

So, for the innumerate among you, a little analysis.  First, some raw numbers.

America is now estimated to have between 238 million and 276 million firearms, compared with some 250 million legally owned guns, or 84 for every 100 people, recorded in a July 2001 survey.

This survey is a bit old.  There are now lots more guns in civilian hands in the USA.  In fact, there’s been something of a boom in gun sales since the 2008 elections.

It seems likely that a disproportionate number of firearms are in the hands of conservatives.  Given that a great many people own more than one firearm, there are likely a very large number of liberal-left folks who own none (although the rich ones hire bodyguards who are armed…  and are probably conservatives), while probably a majority of conservatives do own guns of some kind.

Let’s say, just for a talking point, that 50 million conservatives in the USA own guns, or have easy access to them in their households.

When was the last time you heard of a liberal/left government official of any kind, whether elected or appointed, who was murdered by a conservative with an agenda, using a firearm?  If conservatives are just angry people looking for an excuse, they certainly have the means.  If just a thousandth of a percent of conservative gun owners are looney-tunes crazy enough to shoot a lefty politician, that would leave 500 crazy, roaming Rambos, each one with blood in his eye and a round in the chamber.

I was just wondering.  Did they all miss?  Did they all take a shot and miss and get arrested?  Did the major media (with it’s well-known reticence about saying negative things regarding conservative gun owners) just fail to report it?  Were they all mistaken for ex-lovers of the lefty/lib politicians they shot at, and therefore ignored?  (After all, dog bites man isn’t news, is it?)

I dunno….  but IF the folks I saw out on the range last week wanted to shoot themselves a commie pinko gay-loving taxing/spending multi-cultural  baby-killing global warming socialist, I don’t think they’d be likely to miss.  Those conservative folks may be ignorant, selfish, bigoted and gap-toothed, but they can hit what they aim at, usually more than once, even if their drive-bys involve shooting from the back of a 1962 Ford pickup the color of primer.

If there were 500 of them (or just one!) out looking to kill a lefty tonight, it would show up on the news tomorrow.  I’m thinking that while some of them may have considered it, just about none of them would do it…  because, unlike the Left, they actually believe in right and wrong, and divine judgment.

So, lefty/libs everywhere, some advice.  Better stop accusing conservatives of the thing they almost never do.  Better stop accusing them of conspiring to murder the righteous redistributers of wealth.

First, it’s not true.  And second, you wouldn’t want to give them ideas.

Jul 15 2009

The wrong kind of people

Category: abortion,left — harmonicminer @ 8:57 am

In a wide-ranging interview of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, we get this damning admission.

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.  So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

Are you a not-so-wealthy person of color?  Judge Ginsburg thinks we just don’t want to have too many of your kind.  Clear?

In fact, you should abort more often, so there won’t be so many of you.  Apparently some of you agree.  Quite a lot of you, based on abortion statistics for African-Americans.  Black babies are five times more likely to be aborted than white ones.  Are you trying to beat the racial percentages in the NBA, or what?  I think you won the race already.  But you sure aren’t winning FOR your race, if you’re aborting your babies, or encouraging easy availability of abortion, or voting for candidates who support that.  All you’re doing is making it easier for massa to make a buck controlling the population that he doesn’t want too much of.

That would be you.

Thankfully, and to the dismay of the White Left, some of you are fighting back.  Not enough of you yet, but the numbers may be gradually growing.  Some of you are getting positively uppity about the whole thing, for which I applaud you.

Here’s a new movie you’ll want to see:

Because it’s hard to get movies on topics that threaten the Left into the theaters, you’ll probably have to buy the DVD.

Massa is hoping you won’t bother.  Massa wants you to just shut up and chill.  Do what massa wants, OK?  Massa knows best.

UPDATE:  Ken Blackwell has some comments on the matter here.

Jul 05 2009

We’re in the Twilight Zone, Part 1

Category: government,healthcare,left,legislation,politics,society — harmonicminer @ 8:27 am

There is a Twilight Zone episode called “Button, Button “ in which an unhappy couple is given an unusual offer. Push a button on a box and someone they don’t know will die, but they will get $200,000.

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis are unhappy. Their car is broken. They live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment. They’re often bickering. One day, their doorbell rings but there’s nobody there. A package addressed to both of them was left by the door. Inside it is a wooden box with a plastic dome on the locked lid. A note on the bottom says a “Mr. Steward” will come that night. He comes on schedule and explains the offer to Mrs. Lewis. If she unlocks the lid and pushes the button under the dome, someone they don’t know will die and she’ll receive $200,000, tax-free. She tells the details to her husband and he’s adamantly against it. He opens up the bottom of the box and finds nothing inside. Cynical, he throws the box into a dumpster but she retrieves it after he’s asleep. They continue to argue about whether to push the button. Finally, Mrs. Lewis presses it. Mr. Steward appears and gives them their $200,000. They’re incredulous and wonder what will happen to the box. Steward explains that it will be reprogrammed and the same offer will be given to another couple, “somebody you won’t know…”

The story is based on a short story by Richard Matheson, with a slightly different ending, but the gist of the story is the same, namely the willingness of people to receive benefits that don’t belong to them, when the only risk — really, certain doom — is to strangers.

It seems to me that this is a perfect model for the desire of many people who want to have nationalized health insurance of some sort.  Particularly if they are people who don’t now have health insurance, and want a national system to give it to them, they are perfect examples of the willingness to damage other people —  all strangers, of course — for selfish gain.

Imagine a rewrite to the story.  You are offered a button which, if you push it, guarantees that a stranger will not receive the health care they’ve always paid for, resulting in their likely death, but the reward for pushing it is that you have a minimal level of health coverage for life.

There seems to be a lot of people who are only too willing to push the button.

Of course, the entire class of people who stand to benefit the most from national healthcare — the Lefty political class that will claim it has done America a great service — will be the group that doesn’t have to live with the arrangement.  Does anyone think that the political class will settle for the DMV standard of medical care to which the rest of us will be doomed?

Button, button, who’s got the button

Jun 04 2009

Seeking identity in the USA

Category: affirmative action,diversity,left,race,racism — harmonicminer @ 9:29 am

Lost in the Labyrinth of Race  (much more at the link)

One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action-or the belief that the U.S. government should use its vast power to ensure an equality of result rather than a fairness of opportunity.

In the last fifty years, United States has evolved into a complex multiracial state. Race no longer is necessarily an indicator of income or material success-as the record of, say, Japanese-Americans or, indeed Asians in general, attests.

And what criterion constitutes race itself nowadays, when almost every family has someone who is half-Hispanic, a quarter-Asian, one-half black, or part Pakistani? What percentage of one’s lineage ensures purity of race, or qualifies for minority status? Are California Hispanics minorities, or so-called whites that are now a smaller percentage of the state population?

And what constitutes racial authenticity? Lack of income? An absence of success in the American rat race? Is the fourth generation upper-class Cuban an “Hispanic” who should qualify for affirmative action because his name is Hillario Gonzalez? Does the one-quarter aristocratic Jamaican qualify for American redress on account of his partial blackness?

And how does affirmative action-or even the fuzzy notion of “diversity”- adjudicate all this without mirror-imaging the statisticians of the Old Confederacy who could precisely calibrate the 1/16 drop of black blood? The university where I taught was full of South Americans and Europeans with Spanish surnames that allowed their various departments to be considered “ethnically diverse,” while others, having Russian émigrés, or the foreign born from New Delhi, Israel, and Egypt, struggled to satisfy the dictates of diversity czars.

In other words, affirmative action, and the racial identity politics that fuel it, are swamped by their inherent racialist contradictions-and made irrelevant by the dynamism of popular culture of the last three decades in which intermarriage, assimilation, and integration have challenged the notion of racial fides itself.

So begins an article from Victor Davis Hanson on the state of race in the USA, including affirmative action, “diversity,” racial preferences, racial identity, the nature of privilege in modern USA, the whole nine yards in the current race discussion and its political and social implications.  It’s all worth reading and difficult to summarize, a sign of pithy, concise writing.  Suffice to say that it highlights all the inner contradictions of the race conscious, and the futility of policies that were designed to redress grievances and correct imbalances, but cannot even identify who should qualify in any rational way.

Here is what’s clear to me: the election of a president of African ancestry has done nothing to satisfy the Left.  It has not convinced the Left that America is no longer significantly racist in its average viewpoint.  Instead, it appears simply to have placed the Left in the driver’s seat for every race-based preference and accommodation that it can construct.

We’re a long, long way from the “content of his character” vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., and getting farther away every day.

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May 31 2009

Woman on woman violence in Islam and the third world

Category: higher education,Islam,left,multi-cultural,society — harmonicminer @ 9:20 am

Western Law Remedies Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman Among Muslim Immigrant Communities.

In 2001, the mother of an 11-year-old girl spirited her out of Gothenburg, in Sweden, and back to Somalia where she had her brutally genitally mutilated (and without anesthesia). The mother and two other women held her down while a man made sure that she would never experience sexual pleasure and would instead, experience a great deal of pain for the rest of her life.

It’s not hard to understand the silence of the American Left, the multi-cultural Left, and particularly the feminist Left, on the matter of Islamic violence against women, whether perpetrated by other women or by men.  Its existence calls into question all the assumptions at the core of the Left’s belief system, about moral equivalence, about who does violence to whom, about whether there is such a thing as an objective standard of right and wrong, etc.

Just as sex-selection abortion in Asia (and, increasingly, other places) highlights the cognitive dissonance for the Left in supporting easy access to abortion — at any time in the pregnancy, for any reason–, Islamic violence by women on women and men on women highlights the fact that some cultures ARE simply better than others, more free and more just, regardless of the putatively equivalent status of all cultures that lies at the root of multi-culturalism and diversity activism.

But the multi-cultural pieties of the Left, and the absence of a moral center based on absolutes of human dignity flowing from a conception of the imago dei, make it impossible for the Left to speak up consistently about this kind of injustice.  It’s far easier to blame white males and colonialism for everything under the sun than to deal with the hard work of challenging — and changing — cultures.

Read the entire article linked above, and thank God that you live where you do, assuming you live in a western-style liberal democracy of some kind.  And, while you’re at it, reconsider any belief you may hold in cultural equivalence and moral equivalence.

Here’s a book that can help you get started.   The author is not a Christian.  In fact, I think she’s an atheist…  understandably, given what was done to her in the name of religion, or at least under cover of it.  You may speculate about why she is not a constantly invited speaker to American feminist groups.  Maybe it’s because American feminism isn’t fundamentally about protecting women, but about pursuing Leftist agendas with feminism as cover.

May 29 2009

Obama and his “pro-life voters”

Category: abortion,left,Obama — harmonicminer @ 9:38 am

CSPAN coverage of Panel on Sanctity of Human Life

Catholic University of America hosted a discussion on “The Obama Administration and the Sanctity of Human Life: Is there a common ground on life issues? What is the right response by ‘Pro-Life’ Citizens?”

The panelists are Professor Robert P. George (Princeton University) and Professor Douglas Kmiec (Pepperdine Law School). Well worth watching. A bit long, but if you’re a Christian who voted for Obama on the grounds that his overall social policies might reduce abortion, you owe it to yourself to watch it. These are two very articulate representatives of their positions, and the issues are fairly laid out. 

For reference, here are earlier dialogs involving these two academics.

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May 09 2009

Altered States

Category: church,left,media — harmonicminer @ 9:36 am

At this place, on the front page:


You get this ad for “church,” United Methodist style.


And this one for sex toys, hookups, and pornography.  Don’t bother to click it, I didn’t link it.


I’m trying to remember the last time I saw an ad for church and an ad for sex services in the same place.  Oh, yeah.  The LA Times.  Craigslist.  The Yellow Pages.

But really:  wouldn’t you think ONE of these groups would think this wasn’t the place to advertise?

Oh well.  Welcome to the modern Christian Left.  Crackpot politics, sexual liberty, and a feeling of moral superiority, all in one.

It would seem that the United Methodists really know where to advertise to find like-minded folk.

So I went to “RethinkChurch” (just click the graphic above and you can, too).  In the search engine on the site, I typed in the word “Jesus.”

Here’s what I got:


I typed in “salvation,” and got even less.  So, let’s see.  This is a United Methodist Church website, with no mention of “salvation”, and almost none of “Jesus.”  I wonder if that “Carnal Nation” website links to a seminary.

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Apr 09 2009

Islamic leftists?!?

Category: cognitive dissonance,Islam,left — harmonicminer @ 8:26 am

In a very complete and fascinating survey of the penetration of Islamic sharia law into American public life, and the contradictions it reveals, Power Line makes this cogent observation:

Minneapolis is represented in Congress by Keith Ellison, the left-wing Democrat who is famous as Congress’s first Muslim. Ellison embodies the American left’s weird alliance with radical Islam. How Ellison reconciles his Islamic faith with the Democratic Party’s devout belief in homosexual rights, leftist feminism, abortion rights and every other element of the party’s most radical agenda is a subject that the media have somehow left unexplored. We have yet to learn of the branch of Islam that comports with the dogmas of the left.

Consider the mystery: most American Jews vote Democrat. Muslims appear to be doing the same.

The congnitive dissonance is overwhelming.

The party that radically supports homosexual marriage, abortion, radical feminism, etc., is supported by Muslims who are required by their religion to despise all those things.

The party that seems often willing to bargain away Israel’s right to self-defense in the name of “multi-lateralism” and “negotiation” is supported by Jews.

The congressman with ties to Hamas, which wants Israelis pushed into the sea, runs as a candidate of the party that is supported by Jews, and by Muslims who don’t much care for Jews.

Go figure.

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Apr 05 2009

The Left At Christian Universities, Part 11: You know your school has gone left when….

Category: higher education,left — harmonicminer @ 8:32 am

The previous post in this series is here.

The following are culled from discussions with faculty and staff at several Christian colleges and universities.

You know your Christian college or university has gone or is moving Left when:

1)  Faculty close their office doors to discuss with other faculty the political changes (to the Left) on campus.

2)  People are generally a bit nervous about speaking up to buck the trend, at all levels, from newbie faculty all the way through the hierarchy.  In a world where a Left-leaning fellow like Larry Summers at Harvard can speak the plain truth and be pilloried for it, it’s pretty clear that  no one is safe.  Summers eventually had to resign, too.

3)  You can walk through the faculty parking lot and count Right leaning bumper stickers on the fingers of one hand, but you see large numbers of Left leaning ones.  (This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Left is a majority…  but it means they’re a LOT more vocal about it.)

4)  Students start forming groups to promote conservatism and traditional values (because they see so little defense of them on campus).  And if no faculty member will stop and talk to such students at booths displaying literature promoting such values, that’s a bad sign, too, not because that proves there are no faculty who agree, but because faculty may fear being seen to agree….  or even being interested.  A corollary: faculty who are considering joining the facebook group of conservative students pause for a moment, and count the cost.

5)  Every chapel speaker for two weeks straight seems to come from the Left.

6)  It is always completely safe, in public discourse (meetings, workshops, councils, etc.), to express your fidelity to the aims of diversity activism, but not to express your commitment to working politically towards a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade, or for a Right to Life constitutional amendment.

7)  You feel that it’s safer to “feel people out in person” before sending them a document expressing conservative or libertarian values.  On the other hand, people from the Left constantly send email to the entire campus expressing their point of view, and appear to feel perfectly safe in doing so.

8)  Official college publications begin using the phrase “speech codes” in a non-pejorative manner.

9)  Your campus has “justice weeks” in which there is no mention of abortion; anti-Semitism’s rise in the West; out-of-wedlock birth leading to fatherless children (with the inevitably higher rates of crime, time in prison, poverty, etc.); Muslim treatment of women (in Western nations, not just “Islamic” ones); the responsibility of society to care for military veterans and their families, especially disabled veterans, and the families of killed soldiers (a scandal if there ever was one).  Huge injustices all, but somehow never in view during campus “justice week.”

10)  High level administrators try to suppress student political activism towards the Right.  Corollary: the administrators may be forced to apologize via legal action by the students.

11)  The cafeteria goes “green” and refuses to give customers “to go” containers even as an extra cost item.  There are recycling bins all over campus, but not enough trash cans…  or at least, they’re someplace distant from the recycling bins.  The cafeteria doesn’t supply trays anymore (to save water), so you have to juggle plate, beverages, utensils, soup bowls, etc., the hard way.  Corollary:  the cafeteria carpet has more stains than it used to.

The next post in this series is here.

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