However you describe it, the argument is so gossamer thin that the tiniest scratch on the paint exposes the underlying foolishness.  Why does the pro-life position have any merit at all?  There can be only one reason, namely, that what is carried in the womb is a human being.

If the unborn child is not a child, then there can be no justification for restricting abortion in any way whatsoever.  This is the view of NARAL and other pro-abort groups.  They think the fetus is not a child, not a human, not a person, and thus has no rights.  Therefore, abortion is solely a question for the woman (and don’t say “mother” when they’re listening).  There are no federal consent laws on removing a bad appendix.  Nothing restrains us from excising colon polyps, warts, or any other unwanted piece of tissue.  Just so, a fetus. It’s my body and I’ll D&C if I want to.

But if the unborn child is a child, then the government is duty bound to protect that life by criminalizing its destruction. The protection of innocent life within its precincts is the most fundamental duty of any government.  A government that violates this requirement is not a legitimate government. See Assad, Bashir.

The claim that this is about the woman’s body is only half true once she’s pregnant.  This is the unique thing about pregnancy, is it not?  Pregnancy means another life is present, so it’s now as much about the child’s life as it is the woman’s body.

If this is the case, then who can argue that the child’s life should be subordinated to any interest of the woman’s except her life?  If an abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life — exceedingly rare, but it happens — then it’s done to save one life where a term pregnancy would destroy two.  Short of that, the arguments about rape or incest are just empty, and they’re indistinguishable from those that justify the destruction of people with Down syndrome or other congenital problems.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Jimmy once killed a baby rattlesnake in his yard and showed it to his nasty sons. The snake was about eight inches long. The boys were naturally curious about the fangs, so Jimmy opened its mouth and showed them the two fishbone-like teeth. Being a farm worker, his hands were perpetually skint up. In the act of squeezing open the snake’s mouth, a tiny droplet of venom dribbled onto one of his hands, wicking its way into an open sore. By nightfall he was gravely ill. His boss drove him to the hospital, and the effects cleared up after a week in intensive care. The episode embarrassed him, and it was best not to ask him about it.

Some time later Jimmy and his wife were taking a stroll along the Arkansas river at a placed called Trulock, looking for treasures in the sand. The hunt consisted of turning over drift logs, tearing into the occasional trash bag, and poking a stick through little scumps of debris washed up here and there. One mound held what appeared to be a canvas sack. Jimmy split the canvas with his pocket knife and was gouging at the mass inside when he realized the sack was actually pants and the mass inside was a rotting human corpse. Leaving his stick embedded where it was, he experienced an actual spontaneous run-away, yelling and fleeing to the safety of his bride who was still lumbering up the beach like an Imperial Walker.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Your normal facial expression gives off a vibe that somebody just made you mad. Practice smiling. Study the jokes of Ronald Regan who obviously had a great deal of fun skewering the dopey ideas of Democrats. One of the secrets of his success was his irritating good humor. Learn that. Internalize it. It’ll drive your enemies bonkers, and the voters will love you for it. Hire Mark Steyn, the happy warrior, to write some clever lines for you. A happy man looks like a winner. People will follow that. You’re a politician, not Michael Wigglesworth wailing about the day of doom.

Compare people on the left. They’re are always offended, little wads of walking resentment, always filing suit about something. Being a leftist means living with wounds that never heal, ever raw, bleeding, festering, getting injured again right on the same spot. And they learn it young. Somebody posts a prayer where an atheist kid could see it; she files suit. Somebody else says a cheapskate is “niggardly;” they move to fire the guy. People who fail at life are jealous against successful people; they occupy Wall Street and Oakland and who knows where else. Hurt feelings, bitterness, anger, jealousy, rage, petulance, forever indignant when somebody expects them to pay for their own lunch. That’s who they are, Earth’s biggest collection of sour washrags.

Sheesh. Working Americans have heard enough of the tot-like caterwauling of America’s pathological left. You can look better than Democrats just by enjoying yourself, laughing at them, extracting humor from the fact that their voting bloc consists of every social sickness with a constituency.

So get happy, Rick. Have a good time. Let us see some happy teeth. Please. Do it for America.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Wind farms are the ugliest, most stupid, environmentally damaging, expensive, wasteful and utterly pointless monstrosities ever to deface the British landscape….  [It] wipes out birds (400,000 a year in the US alone), drives anyone who lives nearby mad with its strobing effects and low subsonic hum, trashes property values, costs between three and nine times the amount of conventional energy, creates the fuel poverty which has caused hypothermia deaths to soar this year, slows economic growth, blights views[,] destroys jobs and produces such unreliable, intermittent energy it requires near-100 per cent backup from conventional power.

As my twenty-something friends might say of a quote like that, “I’m, like, whoa.”  His article leaves out only one significant problem, which is that wind power usually requires extensive construction of transmission lines owing to wind farms being sited in locations remote from consumers.

To focus on one particular criticism, he notes that wind power requires nearly 100 percent conventional back-up to compensate for its intermittent availability.  It’s likely that the back-up requirements are a bit less in the United States, but the point remains: Wind turbines can’t replace conventional power stations for the same reason sailing ships cannot replace engine-driven ships.  Something has to replace the power lost when the wind dies down, and that means keeping coal, nuclear, and gas plants on hot standby.  Think about it: If conventional generation has to stay available, then the cost of power plants doesn’t go down except for fuel.  The hardware, capital investment, siting costs, personnel expenses, transmission lines, and maintenance (not to mention various taxes and license fees) all stay the same, and wind turbines only add to it.  This, in turn, means, that every wind turbine you connect to the grid actually increases the price of electricity.

That said, America would be well served to allow private wind power companies forge ahead with finding their market niche.  There are places where the wind blows hard and steady enough for people to make money out of it.  There’s nothing to be gained by locking these people out of the market like they’re doing in Nantucket and other places.  On the other hand, taxpayer funding for windy Solyndras is a really bad idea.  We just need the government and the environmentalists out of the picture.  Nothing beats freedom for getting people to adjust their actions naturally to the real needs of energy consumers.  Those real needs would, in the long run, afford wind power a small niche in the nation’s energy mix, a niche that would be profitable for people on both ends of the energy business.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

As the squabble rumbled on, I changed my mind and suspected that the contraception rule was a typical leftist operation.  They advance by finding a crack in the foundation and driving a wedge in it.  In this instance, a huge majority of American Catholics disobey their church’s doctrine on contraception.  Mr. Obama’s statist zealots know this.  To establish the supremacy of state authority over church authority, they issued a decree to divide parishioners against their church and forced Constitutional Conservatives to defend a matter of principle where we disagree with how the principle is being employed.  Doing this requires explaining things to Americans.  With the average American attention span shrinking to nanoseconds, that looked daunting.

While conservatives have been busy explaining all this, it’s begun to dawn on many of us that the administration proposal to “compromise” by exempting religious institutions is now evolving into a classic baseball play, a sacrifice fly.  They’ll give the enemy an easy out in exchange for scoring a winning run.  I honestly don’t think the administration is canny enough to have planned all this.  But that’s how it’s working out.  We all ran to the same side of the boat in defense of religious freedom, leaving economic freedom unattended.

To fix this, conservatives need to return to the basic principle of adjective-less liberty.  The administration wants control.  Instead of free Americans managing their own affairs, statists want to order everyone to do everything their way.  Never mind whether those affairs are religious, economic, or something else.  Conservatives should remind everyone that they’re about to trade their entire inheritance of liberty for a handful of birth control and abortion pills.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

The basics are these.  A 16-year old self-described atheist named Jessica Ahlquist objected to a written prayer hanging on the wall of Cranston High School West’s cafeteria.  The New York Times article linked here has a photo of the dreadful prayer.  Honestly, it just barely qualifies as a prayer.  If ever there existed a vague wish for niceness directed generally toward Somebody Up There Whoever You Are, this is it.  The intelligence being addressed in the prayer has no name other than “Heavenly Father,” a hint that the prayer’s composer might have been a Christian but not really qualifying as a sectarian supplication.

Nevertheless, it was enough to summon Ms. Ahlquist’s inner freedom fighter.  She and her enablers found some lawyers at — where else? — the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a suit which they have now won.  A federal district court has, with dreary predictability, ruled that the prayer violates “the separation of church and state,” a phrase never used in our Constitution.  Under the heading of, “irony can be very ironic,” the U.S. District Court ruling took place in Providence, Rhode Island.  Will they have to rename the city so atheists won’t be offended all over again?

If you want to read the opinion of Judge Ronald R. Lagueux (from where else but Harvard Law?), you can find it here.   I can save you some trouble by summarizing the salient parts.

His Honor recounts the provenance of the written prayer and notes how often Ms. Ahlquist has been subjected to it.  He describes the actions of various fools who said nasty things about her but declines to explain how her detractors’ churlishness bears on the merits of her case.  I suspect the judge of making an ad hominem argument but leaving the conclusion tacit so it won’t attract attention.  His argument is that the defendants are supported by trolls; therefore they should lose.

His Honor established Ahlquist’s standing (her right to sue) by noting that she is a student at the school and that the prayer made her feel “excluded, ostracized and devalued.” He also allowed that Ahlquist had in fact denied that she was offended by the prayer.  Lagueux commented on that blazing inconsistency by saying, “The Court fails to find these statements inconsistent.” Okay, now that’s just retarded, but whatever.

The judge then ran a pointless rabbit trail by affirming that Ahlquist is “captive” at school — his word, captive.  The claim is actually false (she could go to school elsewhere) though I am assured by legal counsel that Ahlquist’s ability to go elsewhere would not be accepted by the court as a reason to deny her standing.  Further, since the claim of captivity was apparently neither brought up at the trial by either side nor proved by any evidence presented to the court, one wonders why the heck he brought it up at all.  After pages of this gobbledygook His Honor gets to the bottom line: Ahlquist is a student at the school, and he thinks the Supremes would accept that alone for standing.*  Okay, fine… so why didn’t he just say that in one sentence and be done with it?  If you’ve got the needle in your hand, why throw it in the haystack if not to hide it?

His Honor eventually meanders his way over to what matters, which is whether the prayer poster is forbidden by the Constitution.  On page 26 of his decision he quotes the First Amendment and makes what must be described as a stunning, screaming, banzai  omission, “‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…;’” and the ellipsis is in the judge’s original text.

In other words, His Honor omitted the key phrase, “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  Yes, it’s true!  The judge deleted the free exercise clause from his ostensible quote of the First Amendment!  You simply cannot make this stuff up.

His Honor then proceeds to argue that the religion clause was “extended to the states with the enactment of the fourtheenth amendment.”  Here’s your link to the text of the fourteenth amendment.  The judge is talking about the second sentence which says,

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Rather than rebut the judge phrase by phrase, I will say only that the judge neglected to explain how stringing together the First and Fourteenth Amendments makes the prayer illegal.  If it’s not illegal under the First Amendment (and it isn’t), then why bring up the Fourteenth?  More importantly, we are left to wonder how the Fourteenth Amendment might have enlarged upon the “free exercise” of religion if only the judge had been able to unearth the existence of this phrase in the Constitution.

And free exercise is the point actually at issue.  No reasonable, historically-informed person could possibly maintain that a poster in a school cafeteria actually posed a legitimate threat that the government was about establish a religion.  To affirm so is not just false; it’s stupid.  A disinterested judge ruling strictly on the text of the Constitution would have thrown out the case with a horselaugh.

But this sheds light on why the plaintiff could show no harm, why the judge resorted to a half-stated ad hominem argument, an incomplete quote from the Constitution, and invalid logic about the Fourteenth Amendment in order to support his decision.  No fair reading of the Constitution could ever make this case for him.

The judge then proceeds to case law supporting his position including various tests about purpose, coercion, etc.  I must confess at this point that John Whitehead long ago poisoned my mind against over-reliance on case law.  My summary: We’ve done it like this for a long time, and here’s the proof, ibid., ibid., ibid., as if this actually settled the crucial question of what the Constitution actually says about the poster.  Then he finishes up with fatherly assurance that we’re all better off with the result he decrees, and thus spake Zarathustra, amen, over and out.

So much for the suit.

My other comment is far shorter — and here I go stomping barefoot through the minefield.  The whole notion of a “public,” which is to say, a government school is really what should offend civil libertarians, not the vapid, Gospel-free prayer posted in the school cafeteria.  The real dagger in the heart of liberty is people hatching the idea of using government power to make their neighbors pay for the education of their own children.  Further, was it not obvious where this would lead once the government got involved?

A republic cannot long remain free with the state in possession of the minds of the children.  To folks in Rhode Island: If you want freedom, start exercising it by opting out of the system.  Educate your own kids.  You can’t control what your neighbors are going to do, and it’s obviously a fool’s errand to expect the courts to defer to the Constitution at any point where it conflicts with the goal of establishing an aggressively secular state.  However, you can control your own actions.  Do the part that is possible for you to do, and leave the results to Providence — God, that is, not the city.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

____________________________________________

*I’d like to forward that argument to Philip Berg who filed the first Obama “birther” case.  Berg’s suit was dismissed because he had no standing.  Berg had argued that he any American citizen had standing when seeking to have the terms of the Constitution enforced.  The federal court denied that and said he had to show how he personally would be injured even if it were true that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen.  The court said the harm to the country would be so diffuse that no individual would ever be able to show any personal injury even if it could be proved that Mr. Obama was born abroad.  Now a different federal judge who is clearly vested in protecting a different outcome has accepted a plaintiff’s standing based solely on membership in a group (she was a student) and despite her explicit denial that she had suffered any harm!  And people wonder why courts are often so contemptuously esteemed as self-serving enforcement units for America’s contingent of hard-left malcontents.

The jump from molecules life is, not least, a vast leap from soupy crud to a level of sophistication that the brightest minds cannot grasp.  But even that doesn’t quite cover it.  There is also conceptual gap.  Does life consist merely in a sufficiently complicated arrangement of atoms?  Or to ask the same question another way, if we had all the right atoms assembled in the right order, would the assembly be alive, or would something else have to be done to animate it?

Speaking strictly from what people have observed, we would have to say that no such arrangement of chemical substances as ever been seen spontaneously becoming vivified merely by being sorted into the correct order (with the necessary pressure, temperature, absence of radiation, etc.).  Indeed, the word correct should probably be in quotes to indicate that we don’t know whether such an arrangement is possible.  Maybe life is more than a mere chemical process, so picking an advantageous permutation of atoms does nothing more than create the possibility of carrying something imparted from outside itself.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Why this matters.  China owns a controlling proportion of so-called rare earth metals.  Rare earth metals such as neodymium are key to the development of greed gadget energy because they have unique properties such as the ability to form the strongest possible permanent magnets.

So here’s the deal.  Western governments have mandated creation of green gadgets such as wind turbine generators and electric cars.  These industries absolutely, positively must have rare earth metals.  China owns the market on rare earths.  Being good capitalists, they’re seeking to capitalize on their market advantage.

What’s wrong with that, you ask?  As far as I can see, nothing.  But it’s given the WTO officials a case of the vapors.  The one thing you Must Not Do is take advantage of your advantages.

Just a hunch, but I’m thinking the WTO may look forward to China sending some guys to apologize and weep with repentance while their mining industry does as it pleases.  In a way, it’s refreshing to see some people who want what’s best for their country and their industry and don’t care if all bureaucrats in Geneva have a conniption about it.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Long ago, the Constitution permitted taxation of property, sales, imports, exports, etc.  All these were taxed at different rates depending on how the politics all worked out.  But we didn’t allow direct taxation of people’s wages.  Then the Constitution was changed, and now we do allow direct taxation of income.

And no big surprise here, the rate of taxation on personal income is different from the rate of taxation on increases in the monetary value of a piece of property.

That’s what all the hoopla is about with Mr. Obama’s deceitful blather about taxing the billionaire at a different rate from his secretary.  The truth is — and if he doesn’t know this, he shouldn’t be president — we might not tax the billionaire at all if he has no personal income stream.  What we do tax is the increase in the value of his property.  And, yes, we long ago decided to tax increases in property value at a different rate from personal income.

What with all the bloviating about this, you’d think the president had recently discovered some long-hidden subterfuge in the tax code.  Fact is, all taxation of every form, sort, kind, and variety is like this.  Virtually no two taxes are the same, and politicians have long kept it this way.

If you want a truly flat tax, you’ll have to do it Moses’ way.  He had a flat, 10 percent tax on net production along with a flat user fee on people who came to the tabernacle or temple.  If the president were truly interested in what he calls “fairness” rather than just playing the demagogue for his ignorant voters, he’d be pushing a Moses-style flat tax.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Say what you will about the substance of Gingrich’s campaign or his marriages and the circumstances under which they went kaput. But it was sure fun to see him yank down CNN’s pants (and ABC’s) over their attempted mugging with Marianne. And what Newt said about the “elite media protecting Obama” by attacking Republicans was right on the money. The leftist media have been shilling for Mr. Obama for the past five years, what with thrills up their legs, comments about him being “God,” and their fierce uncuriosity about his missing college and financial records, absence of Harvard Law Review articles, passport records, name changes, personal finances, terrorist connections, ghost-written books, his sojourn in Pakistan, ad nauseum. It’s heartening for a POTUS candidate point out the pattern in a tone that doesn’t sound like a whine.

But it’s not enough. Where the media have hounded Newt and Mitt about their tax record, business records, and past sins, the GOP’s nominee should echo those same demands concerning Mr. Obama and hammer on it till it gets some traction. At some point, even the rudderless middle-of-road voter will begin to wonder why GOP nominees have to bare it all while Mr. Obama steadfastly conceals it all. In a campaign where distrust of D.C. is already factoring heavily into the outcome, sowing some richly deserved distrust of D.C.’s wholly-owned elite media is sure to help matters.

GOP’s Ivy Leaguers be hatin’ on South Carolina

The great thing about Gingrich’s win in South Carolina is that it reminded the GOP’s northeastern clique that other parts of the country 1) vote, 2) matter, and 3) are in no mood to obey their betters.

Note to the Ivy League wing of the GOP: lots of people outside the Boston-D.C. corridor have somehow formed the impression that you’re a bunch of godless, amoral, unpatriotic, big-spending, media-attention-craving, bribe-taking, gutless RINO sellouts more eager to cut a deal with home-grown Marxists than to defeat them with courage and wisdom and the principles of of the Constitution.

Who can say where the rabble gets such ideas!

But perception being sorta-kinda like reality and all, you have to take these yokels into account. If they can vote a thumb in your eye, they’re in a mood to do it good and proper. Over the next couple of years, see what you can do about changing their impression of you. And with deeds, not spin. It’s almost like they’re catching on to the spin thing.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com