HARVEY MILK DAY--OR ELSE!

The Donald has declared that Carrie Prejean can keep her Miss California title. Trump’s “you’re not fired” decision ended a chapter in the media frenzy swirling around the Vista High School graduate--but it didn’t close the book.

Following Trump’s announcement, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s prime-time hatemonger, launched a six-minute tirade against Prejean that showed the leftist network’s verbal inquisition against Miss California wasn’t quite over.

Ten days earlier Olbermann had chuckled through a hate-fest with the Village Voice’s Michael Musto. Olbermann began by observing that Miss California “has fully endorsed…marriage between a man and a woman who’s partially made out of plastic.”

Musto was more blunt. “She’s dumb and twisted…a human Klaus Barbie doll… This is the kind of girl who sits on the TV and watches the sofa.” Olbermann added that Prejean is “not just a boob, but a fake boob.”

The interview goes on in the spirit of the vile, vicious, and morally vacuous Perez Hilton—the talentless judge whose question about same-sex marriage assured one of two possible outcomes: either Prejean would toe the gay-marriage line or she would be vilified, ridiculed, and destroyed by press lackeys like Access Hollywood, Musto, and Olbermann.

Locally, our TV hairdos couldn’t get enough of the “nude” photos that weren’t really nude, weren’t taken for publication, and were about as risqué as the bikinis worn at the Miss USA competition.

The bottom line of this brouhaha isn’t so much the courage and conviction of Prejean. As I noted in a prior column, Miss California’s response to the same-sex marriage question (“That’s how I was raised.”) was apologetic and shallow. The answer was, however, on an intellectual level appropriate for a pageant judged by the likes of Perez Hilton.

The real bottom line is the power and willingness of the mainstream media to slime and destroy anyone who gets in the way of its cultural agenda—a power that was nakedly displayed last fall to transform a popular and effective pro-life governor of Alaska into a Saturday Night Live caricature.

These media advocates regularly turn reality on its head. An apologetic utterance in defense of traditional marriage is labeled “divisive” and “controversial.” Meanwhile, Hilton, Olbermann, and crew viciously trash a decent person with impunity. The “1984” Ministry of Truth moment occurred when the supremely intolerant and self-infatuated Olbermann accused Prejean of “holier than thou…know it allism.”

Make no mistake, the left and the mainstream media will not tolerate dissent—especially on their “entertainment” turf. And now Obama’s minions are out to muzzle talk radio.

The same intolerance was on full display when opponents were targeted for financial reprisals during and following the Proposition 8 election—and when a member of the arts community had to resign for voting the wrong way.

If anyone wants to see the future of California, it isn’t “Carrie Prejean Day,” as Vista school board trustee Jim Gibson would have it. Rather, it’s “Harvey Milk Day”—or else!

THE MISS CALIFORNIA MESSAGE: WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU OPPOSE GAY MARRIAGE

Miss California, Carrie Prejean, 2005 Vista High graduate and student body president, is asked a politically charged question about gay marriage by a gay activist and blogger who calls himself Perez Hilton. She provides an almost apologetic response at the conclusion of which she expresses her belief that marriage should continue to be—as it has been throughout history—between a man and a woman. “No offense to anybody… but that’s how I was raised.”

As a result, for perhaps the first time in Miss USA history, a contestant is booed for her answer—though there are also cheers and applause. Another result is that “judge” Perez Hilton, and probably his nearly-as-undistinguished colleagues on the pageant panel, ding Prejean’s scores—almost certainly costing her the Miss USA title.

The aftermath of this incident illustrates the depths of mendacity that surrounds the word “tolerance” in post-modern, deconstructed America.

Hilton, a talentless boor tagged “the queen of mean” by no less an authority than Rolling Stone Magazine, proceeds to publicly insult Prejean on his profitable and unprintably crude trash-blog. Hilton later apologizes for calling Miss California the “b” word. The very next day, however, Hilton retracts his apology while being more-than-respectfully interviewed by MSNBC’s Nora O’Donnell. O’Donnell doesn’t flinch when Hilton says he was actually thinking of the “c” word.

Later Hilton adds to his verbal insult a vile blog depiction of Prejean that can’t be euphemistically described in a newspaper destined for the eyes of decent citizens. All the while it is Prejean who is interrogated by the Fairness doctrine media about whether her answer was divisive!

Can anyone imagine the furor that would have ensued had an oddball judge zeroed out a contestant for giving a pro-gay marriage answer and then proceeded to insult her in terms that are increasingly punishable as hate-speech?

Can anyone imagine San Diego public relations representative Roger Neal urging a pro-gay Miss USA “to heal some wounds” with the traditional marriage crowd—a crowd that presumably, if disingenuously, includes the President of the United States?

Neal, a putative “advisor” to Prejean, went on to accuse Miss California of lying when she said recently at a North County church that she was told by pageant officials to apologize to the gay community and to avoid mentioning religion in her TV interviews.

It doesn’t take a lawyer to know that the word “lie” in this case is a pejorative way of parsing the legal difference between “solemnly encouraged” and “told.” Those who think Prejean wasn’t pressured by the same people who selected Perez Hilton as a pageant official probably also believe that Fidel Castro is Santa Claus.

So tolerance in America now means this: No gay marriage, no Miss USA. It means that one is free to insult and degrade a young woman for timidly supporting traditional moral views. It means that Hollywood sleazebags like Perez Hilton now define cultural mores and that decent individuals like Carrie Prejean will be trashed if they dare open their mouths.

TEA PARTY TERROR WATCH?

On April 15th dangerous homegrown terrorist types in hundreds of cities around the country gathered to peacefully protest what they see as an unprecedented expansion of government authority and spending that promises to triple the national debt in eight years.

In Oceanside, scores of these Timothy McVeigh wannabes were cleverly disguised as mothers with kids or mature ladies tastefully garbed in informal attire. Elderly, middle-aged, and young males were also present for this “hate-group” demonstration. Somehow these ticking time-bombs managed to conceal their “cling(ing) to guns and religion” rage while displaying signs that denounced high taxes, generational theft, and government bailouts.

If the previous paragraphs seem oxymoronic, readers should seek clarification from Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security Department—the bureaucracy that recently composed an intelligence report warning of right-wing extremists who might exploit the current economic and political climate for nefarious, anti-government ends.

Here’s a sample of the drivel (based on “no specific information” of planned violence) that now passes for “intelligence” at DHS:

“Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented…and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”

By this expansive definition, Texas Governor Rick Perry got himself placed on an extremist watch-list for recently declaring that America’s federal system is being shredded by an overreaching national government that’s aggressively inserting itself into matters that were formerly the Tenth Amendment preserve of states.

The anti-tax multitude gathered in Oceanside was clearly teeming with terrorist types since the DHS assessment also included “disgruntled military veterans” in their potential extremist list—alongside groups worried about firearm confiscation. (Listen up, El Cajon gun shop.)

Following this DHS logic, one Obamaland blogger issued the following alert: “These Tea Parties bear watching. It could be the birth not of a nation but (of) a dangerous terrorist network.”

Unfortunately for Napolitano and this internet nutcase, the closest thing to an “incident” at Oceanside’s massive tea party involved a surly-looking bearded guy who at least twice shouted insults at demonstrators, then grabbed his black sports-bag and stalked away. Amazingly, none of the protestors returned his insults or pulled out AK-47s to blow him away.

From what I saw, the tea party “terrorists” at Pier View Way and Coast Highway were overwhelmingly focused on lower taxes, limited government, and a projected national debt of eleven trillion dollars. A few banners were explicitly anti-Obama or anti-Schwarzenegger, but none were as incendiary as comments routinely directed toward the prior Commander-in-Chief.

The sign that best summarized collective sentiment was this one: “Give Me Liberty, Not Debt”—not exactly the rhetoric of extremists. Instead, it sounds like an epigram for citizens who are deeply concerned about governments that no longer recognize reasonable limits—in spending, competence, or terrorist threat assessments.

ABORTION CHAIN OWNER DIES IN PLANE CRASH AT CATHOLIC CEMETERY WITH "TOMB OF THE UNBORN" MEMORIAL

The irony of this incident tempts even the skeptical to wonder whether some "invisible hand" was at work in this "accident" that ended the life of the owner of the nation's largest for-profit abortion chain at a Catholic Cemetery where a memorial is dedicated to the unborn victims of abortion.

"WATERMELONS" AND "RED HOT" CLIMATE LIES

Watermelons: “green” on the outside, “red” on the inside. That popular definition of environmental statists is what Czech President Vaclav Klaus had in mind when he denounced global warming zealots for promoting “a new religion” that “threatens to undermine freedom and the world’s economic and social order.”

Klaus would not have been welcome a week ago Saturday when lights were dimmed in San Diego and other local communities to celebrate “Earth Hour”—a global PR event sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to tout the profound dangers of manmade climate change.

As is typically the case, our local television hairdos enthusiastically aired the proceedings without providing (as an honest “Fairness Doctrine” would require) comment from team-Klaus or team-Richard Lindzen (MIT Professor of Meteorology) or team-Freeman Dyson (Princeton physicist emeritus) or team-Bjorn Lomborg (Danish author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”).

That’s only a short list of dissenters who possess credentials at least as impressive as those held by members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Indeed, “climate criminal” Christopher Horner notes in his book, “Red Hot Lies,” that the IPCC is chock full of government-picked “scientists” with degrees in sociology, economics, and even “transport management.” That unimpressive list includes IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who as an economist and industrial engineer felt sufficiently qualified in atmospheric dynamics and psychohistory to compare critic Bjorn Lomborg with Adolf Hitler.

Horner supplements his analysis of the IPCC’s general scientific expertise with two lengthy chapters that document IPCC malfeasance—exemplified in the practice of hyping summaries for policymakers months before completion of the work purportedly being summarized. New Zealand climate scientist Dr. Vincent Gray provides his own succinct institutional summary: “The IPCC is fundamentally corrupt.”

Horner, Klaus, and others have explained why today’s global warming propagandists are knee-deep in statistical manipulation, character assassination, intimidation, and censorship.

First, financial incentives for jumping on the global warming gravy train are enormous—dwarfing the alleged “buying” of scientists by Exxon-Mobil. Billions are now headed toward alarmists like Al Gore who stand to gain billions more from their ties to favored green industries. Ironically, this idea of “monotizing” environmental groups was made famous by Enron’s Ken Lay.

Secondly, climate hysteria creates an opportunity for top-down statist policies—the preferred governmental arrangement of “Watermelons” whose political dreams revolve around the redistribution of wealth and ever-expanding social controls.

A prime example of the hugely successful indoctrination tactics employed by alarmists is the shameless targeting of intellectually defenseless children. One prominent proselytizer recently spoke at a San Marcos high school and was described in a North County Times headline as a “Nobel Prize winner” and “expert in global climate change.” Paragraph thirteen noted that the “author” (actually one of many authors) of an IPCC climate change report teaches “conservation biology.”

Nowhere was it mentioned that Antarctica’s ice-mass is actually increasing or that polar bears are flourishing. Least of all, I’d wager, did the feted butterfly specialist divulge any such inconvenient truths to her captive audience.

BARACK OBAMA: LIVE BIRTH ABORTIONIST

Barack Obama: Infanticide Supporter.

THE "UNFAIRNESS" DOCTRINE

Customers who peruse the Current Affairs section at a prominent Oceanside bookstore may be getting a preview of what access to contrary opinions will be like if the Obama Administration reinstitutes governmental regulation of radio broadcasts.

Whether a left-wing patron or some Obama-worshipping employee is responsible, I don’t know. What I do know is how frequently I find conservative books concealed behind leftist volumes or scattered about the shelves in alphabetical disarray.

My most recent visit to this establishment provided an egregious example of ideological rearrangement—with Bill O’Reilly’s mug obliterated by some “pinhead’s” oeuvre, Ann Coulter’s books given a minimum of semi-orderly exposure, and works by Bernard Goldberg, Dick Morris, and Newt Gingrich distributed across the a-to-z spectrum.

By contrast, a veritable shrine was devoted to publications by and about Barack Obama. (Mind you, this is the Current Affairs section, not the coffee table memorabilia shelf.)

Not surprisingly, the store didn’t have the book I was looking for—or perhaps it was in stock (as their computer indicated) but had been moved to an undisclosed location for politically incorrect titles.

The good news is that a same-brand store in Encinitas seemed to have a handle on things—with almost all Current Affairs material displayed in proper alphabetical order. There was a nice “Obama” section, but not one that dominated the racks. Furthermore, face-front displays seemed evenly divided between left and right opinion. Finally, the Encinitas store had the un-PC book that had apparently gone missing in Oceanside.

My “where’s Waldo” browsing experience foreshadows the difficulty most Americans will have gaining access to dissenting opinions if Obama’s leftist allies succeed in reimposing, either through the front or back door, the Orwellian-titled “Fairness Doctrine.”

It’s staggering to think that Democrat Senators like Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have expressed support for this Constitution-trampling relic of a world where electronic media outlets could be counted on one hand. But then leftist politicians tend toward a totalitarian mentality where opposition to their own thinking is denounced as “divisive” but a 24/7 attack machine on their side (replete with character, and real, assassination scenarios) is taken for granted.

Not content with the overwhelming left-wing bias of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, Hollywood, Letterman, Leno, “Law and Order” and most of the nation’s major newspapers, Schumer and friends want to stifle opposition voices in the one medium where conservatives, by dint of commercial success, have achieved a modicum of balance in the total media universe.

While President Obama has said he opposes reinstituting the “Fairness Doctrine” (more honestly called The Anti-Limbaugh Democrat Enabling Act), FCC commissioner Robert McDowell warns that the policy will probably be rebranded and promoted in the name of localism and diversity—a likelihood reinforced by Attorney General Eric Holder’s evasive “Fairness Doctrine” responses to a Senate committee.

Under McDowell’s worst-case scenario, community advisory boards, filled with book-squelching ACORN activists, would determine whether Rick Roberts or Roger Hedgecock are serving what they conceive to be “the public interest.” For leftists, that’s “fairness.”

PROP 8: THE CRITICAL ISSUES JUDGES MAY IGNORE

The March 1 Perspective pages of the North County Times contained a spirited two-on-two reprise of arguments for and against Proposition 8.

I say “two-on-two,” but supporters of the November measure doubtless noted that one of the arguments against overturning Prop. 8 was authored by an editorialist who opposed the law but hopes to preserve the integrity of the amendment process. Thus, only one of the four pieces agreed with Proposition 8 on the merits—a law approved by about 60% of North County voters.

On the positive side, at least there were two substantive reasons given for upholding the will of the people when it comes to maintaining as normative the male-female definition of an institution as it exists in all but a handful of “progressive” bastions in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe.

Still, little was said that countered the hyperbolic rhetoric in the anti-8 piece that claimed citizens throughout California were in grave danger of losing their rights unless an institution that’s existed for millennia is redefined to post-modern specifications. Ignored in this argument were the two central questions at issue: Are there persuasive reasons for defining marriage as male-female? Are there persuasive reasons for defining homosexuality in the same class as race?

The answer to the first question is clear. The reason marriage is male-female is because only male-female unions produce children, and without children a compelling rationale for marriage as a state-sanctioned institution disappears.

The fact that some men and women get married and don’t have children doesn’t alter the basic link between marriage and raising children. Laws are general, and the essential component of reproduction is male plus female.

On the other hand, changing the definition of marriage to include unions that by their nature exclude procreation sends a quite different message—that marriage is not about children but rather about “feelings of affection.”

Beyond the biological facts of life, sociological evidence demonstrates that children are best raised in families with a mother and a father. Thus, laws promoting this ideal are warranted and can’t be logically equated with segregation codes rooted in notions of racial superiority.

One race isn’t superior to another, but male-female households are better (in general, and thus in law) than households where one sex does all the child-raising or (presumptively) where only one sex is represented in the parental mix. Similarly, Western societies have long presumed the superiority of monogamous over polygamous households.

Concerning parallels drawn between homosexuality and race, there is no compelling evidence, after decades of partisan research, that sexual inclinations are in the same genetic class as skin color. What’s obvious, however (from Greek antiquity to the present) is that social mores greatly impact sexual behavior, whatever the hormonal or genetic givens.

Unfortunately, I suspect that four of California’s Supreme Court jurists have already made up their minds and that same-sex marriage will soon become a “right” like abortion—conjured out of emanations from “progressive” penumbra. Judges rule—history, nature, and democracy be damned.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND OBAMA RHETORIC

Here's an AP story, for goodness sake, that exposes the "emptiness" (i.e. deceptions, lies) in the Obama-Messiah's Congressional Address last night.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090225/D96IFSC80.html

FIREFIGHTER HARASSMENT MINIMIZED IN GAY PRIDE PARADE TRIAL

Last week a jury determined that four San Diego firefighters who were ordered to participate in a 2007 Gay Pride parade had been sexually harassed.

The four were awarded a total of $34,300 in damages—a figure that clearly suggests a “separate and unequal” calculus when it comes to harassment of straight employees by a sexually demonstrative crowd. One can hardly imagine any jury coming up with figures of this diminutive size if the roles were reversed—if, for example, four gay firefighters had been subjected, because of department orders, to demeaning taunts from an unsympathetic crowd.

Still, a positive verdict for the plaintiffs is better than no verdict at all—as was the case last October when another jury fell one vote short of the required nine votes to sustain a harassment verdict.

Plaintiff’s attorney Charles LiMandri also noted that a judicial ruling in the earlier trial had found that the firefighters’ freedom of speech hadn’t been violated—“even though the courts have consistently held that participation in a gay pride parade is a form of constitutionally protected expressive conduct, and the right to speak on a controversial public issue includes the right not to be compelled to speak.”

According to plaintiff John Ghiotto, the firefighters (who had all objected to their last-minute assignment to this public relations “duty”) were subjected to verbal abuse and sexual gestures throughout the parade route—the most explicit of which exceeded even crotch-grabbing and requests for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Elsewhere in California’s culture wars, a student at Los Angeles City College, Jonathan Lopez, is suing a professor, John Matteson, for allegedly calling him a “fascist bastard” in class and not allowing him to finish a speech in favor of Proposition 8.

The incident took place in a public speaking class shortly after the November vote in favor of the constitutional amendment that defined marriage in California as between a man and a woman. According to Lopez, the speech professor also informed him that he should “ask God what your grade is.”

Lopez is being represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, a group that, alongside the Thomas More Law Center, represented the San Diego firefighters. In a letter to ADF a school dean observed that two students were “deeply offended” by Lopez’s speech and that one of them said, “this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom.”

Lopez is reportedly asking for a jury trial—a good idea in view of the emerging gap between public sentiment and the views of our black-robed betters when it comes to matters like marriage, freedom of speech, and sexual harassment.

For many of California’s judicial legislators freedom of speech and sexual harassment are one-way streets. Maximum latitude is allowed to groups with “victim” status, whereas individuals without this prestigious moniker must carefully observe the “do not offend” signs erected by “victims.”

All awards, of course, (even those for only $34,300) are subject to judicial review.

SAVING TREES VS. SAVING BABIES

Cutting down large trees is a mortal sin according to the green mores of many Californians—an offense that prompts significant television and newspaper coverage when someone decides, as recently happened in Encinitas, to take a stand (or a seat) in the branches of an endangered leafy organism.

Even health concerns engendered by bird poop right outside an Oceanside restaurant don’t mitigate the righteous indignation of some environmentalists who viscerally feel the pain that neurology suggests is denied our wooden neighbors.

On the other hand, an individual who protests the termination of a nascent human life is unlikely to get much media coverage—much less media sympathy. The same can be said about the attitude of most state legislators toward ending the development of what used to be called “a baby.”

Indeed, Sacramento is so unconcerned (or embarrassed) about the culling of human fetuses that it no longer keeps track of the state’s annual contribution (around 100,000) to the estimated 1.2 million abortions that are performed in the United States each year.

What the state does apparently care about is access to abortion providers—a practice known in the Orwellian language of the Healthcare Workforce Pilot Project as “early pregnancy care.”

In 2006, for the sake of this “Pilot Project,” the state legislature suspended regulations that required abortion providers to be licensed physicians. According to State Senator Sam Aanestad, a trenchant critic of the program, Planned Parenthood has since employed procedure-trained nurses, midwives, and physician assistants to perform abortions by suction aspiration.

Aanestad further notes that HWPP #171 exploits a program that was established in 1973 to address shortfalls in the gerontology workforce in order to expand access to abortion in “underserved areas” of California—including San Diego.

Perhaps the proper name for this little-advertised “research project,” designed to facilitate abortions in poor communities where they are already common, should be “No Abortion Left Behind.”

This “clinical study” has been conducted under the auspices of the University of California San Francisco, Kaiser of Northern California, and several Planned Parenthood affiliates. The program is scheduled for renewal in March—in case there are readers out there who care to climb down from their trees long enough to contact their legislators about Healthcare Workforce Pilot Project #171.

It is unlikely, however, that tree-climbers who weep over the fate of vegetative life will show similar concern over the loss of human life in utero. After all, the former activity is popular and demands only episodic commitment on the part of the activist. The latter activity is likely to invite ridicule from powerful media sources (Hollywood and major television networks) and requires, on the part of those most intimately involved in the decision, years of commitment to the welfare of a child.

The psycho-dynamics of these moral priorities are as follows: As crucial moral standards are increasingly ignored by the public, matters of marginal moral significance take their place—filling a yawning void with moral distractions.

SET ASIDE CHILDISH BUDGETS

Barack Obama in his inaugural address observed that “the time has come to set aside childish things”—that the time “of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions…has surely passed.”

That rhetoric is sound advice for Californians who just last November, in the midst of an economic recession and rising budget deficits, voted to approve a 10 billion dollar high-speed rail program designed to get folks from Escondido to San Francisco in three-and-a-half hours--for only $67.

The childish aspect of this proposal was right there in the proposition voter guide, which declared IN CAPS that the 10 billion dollar project (20 billion according to opponents) would be funded “without raising taxes.” Well, if billions in bond indebtedness is a tax-neutral event, why not fund the state government with bonds—in perpetuity?

As the proposition’s “adult” opponents pointed out in the voter guide, the “full faith and credit of the state of California” is pledged for the payment of these bonds—a pledge with profound fiscal implications for a state sporting a budget deficit projected to reach forty billion dollars by June, 2010.

The city of San Diego was only recently able to float infrastructure bonds after starting to get its pension-happy finances in order. And North County residents should be familiar with the huge cost overruns associated with construction of the Sprinter.

Those children who believe there’s “free money” available to build a really fast choo-choo probably also believe that governments can (as candidate Obama frequently promised) create “five million green jobs” with the stroke of a pen.

As for the state’s yawning budget gap, the Governator has no good options. Higher taxes are sure to depress an already bad economy and send even more residents scurrying out of state. (During the last fiscal year 135,173 more people moved out of California than moved in from other states.)

On the other hand, cutting business taxes isn’t going to stimulate growth soon enough to balance the books—which is mandated by law.The only realistic solution is to muddle through with smoke and mirrors--tactics (like fees and accounting gimmicks) that represent the legislative equivalent of bonds unrelated to taxes.

For the long run, “adult” solutions might include undoing the auto-pilot budgeting that’s been put in place for education and other items by California voters, developing the state’s energy reserves (including offshore drilling), providing tax incentives for businesses, and implementing policies aimed at reducing costs associated with illegal immigration.

Based on passage of the high-speed rail proposition, however, I’m not optimistic that California voters and legislators will be adopting the aforementioned suggestions in the near future. Instead, I anticipate more “green” taxes and fees that are magically expected to generate thousands of “green jobs” as opposed to creating an even longer wagon train of U-Hauls headed out of state.

I also expect the kids in Sacramento to throw tantrums to get their hands on bailout funds dispensed by the teenagers in Washington D.C.

A CASE OF STATISTICAL DECEIT

A popular aphorism identifies three types of lies—lies, darn lies, and statistics. A variation on that theme declares that figures don’t lie, but liars figure.

Both observations apply to the widely publicized study by Northeastern criminologist James Fox that touted an “alarming” increase in murders by and of black teenagers and attributed the spike to (what else) cuts in federal programs during the Bush years.

Fox’s spin on his numbers was released in late December and was reproduced without critical scrutiny by newspapers throughout the country. (See Dec. 29, North County Times: “Study: Murders among black youths on rise”)

A few weeks earlier Southern Californians had the rare privilege of hearing Mayors Jerry Sanders and Antonio Villaraigosa announce that crime in their cities had been reduced to levels not seen since the 1960s. Then came Fox’s black cloud standing ominously within those silver linings.

According to news accounts of Fox’s study the “rate” of black teenage murders had increased precipitously (40%) from 2000 to 2007. This “rate” of increase, however, was illustrated by providing absolute numbers, not ratios. As anyone of modest intellectual ability knows, official crime statistics are always translated into ratios (usually per 100,000) in order to take into account population shifts. (A numerical increase of 20% in a population that increases 20% produces a statistical straight line, not a 20% increase.)

I found the omission of ratios odd and was pleased to see that “Freakonomics” author and University of Chicago economist, Steven Leavitt, felt the same way. Indeed, Leavitt isolated for analysis the same ratio chart within Fox’s data that I found revealing of a publicity ruse.

That chart, taking demographic changes into account (a 15% increase in the 14-17 year old black population), showed only a modest increase in black teenage murders during the last seven years—a virtual straight line that remained near the bottom of the precipitous statistical slide that began in the mid-1990s. As Leavitt notes, this statistical “blip…doesn’t seem so frightening.” The ratio chart, of course, was absent from Fox’s publicity spin or any newspaper accounts that I saw.

While no increases in murder figures are welcome news, it would be nice to see some skepticism on the part of journalists vis-à-vis academic reports that are funded by government grants and whose bottom line focuses on the need to devote more public money to their area of concern.

The problem of gang violence, which ticked up in San Diego during the first 9 months of 2008 (but declined in L.A.) is a continuing source of concern. But according to County Supervisor Pam Slater-Price, the feds last year targeted $1.3 million for the San Diego region to help address this problem.

What’s sure to boost crime rates among blacks, whites, teenagers, and adults is a policy of early release of criminals that’s been proposed by California lawmakers and may be required by a panel of jurists intent on capping the state’s prison population. That story line, however, doesn’t warm the cockles of most journalistic hearts.

Mark Steyn: Gaza has its version of rocket scientists

Mark Steyn on Gaza, crucifixion, and Western wishful thinking.

BAG BANS AND COW FLATULENCE

It’s amazing what people focus on in order to avoid having to deal with really serious problems. Psychologists see this phenomenon all the time, where toilet seats and personal ticks become the ostensible reason for huge rows out of all proportion to the alleged offense.

The same mind-games apply in the world of politics. While public budgets and economic activity in California are going to heck in a handbasket, politicians in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and now San Diego are focusing on matters of monumental triviality—such as the urgent need to ban those ultra-thin plastic bags that stores have used for decades.

A committee of the San Diego City Council recently passed a resolution (2-1) to support a ban of these grave environmental hazards that apparently aren’t biodegradable and allegedly have damaged some marine animals. Encinitas is considering a similar proposal.

For retrograde heathens who might persist in the sinful habit of toting their groceries in paper bags, a 25-cent fee per bag is being considered. This “fee” (not a tax, of course) has also been pondered by our nothing-else-to-do state legislators. Perhaps these geniuses hope to close California’s 12 to 20 billion dollar budget deficit with this new assessment—thus balancing their books on the back of seniors who have enough trouble getting purchases from the check-out counter to their deadly carbon-emitting vehicles.

The words of Gaia priestess and city council member Donna Frye sums up the over-the-top argument against these dastardly petro-gauzes: “The fact of the matter is that when you think that almost every single piece of the planet probably has a piece of plastic on it, at some level you have to start asking yourself, 'Is that the kind of planet we want to pass on to our kids?’”

Personally, I can remember when these gossamer-thin containers were considered the P.C. thing to ask for—as opposed to those evil (but biodegradable) paper bags that only “wascally Wepublicans” were insensitive enough to use. Now our cultural commissars want to give us a new choice: Bring your own reusable bag or pay 25 cents for each paper bag.

This polyethylene crisis came upon us quite suddenly, and alternatives to an outright ban have been considered as little as objections raised by that large chorus of scientists who reject global warming alarmism.

What about those biodegradable organic-based bags? What about recycling alternatives? How about providing some definitive evidence of the grave environmental damage done by those wispy polyethylene sacks that have the great virtue of sealing up refuse thrown in trash bins at apartment complexes—thus reducing the bins’ allure to flies and minimizing wind-blown debris?

On the other hand, in the midst of a significant recession with ballooning budget deficits and out of control pension obligations, what better issue for clueless politicians to tackle than plastic bag pollution. Maybe the matter can even be placed on the next ballot as a constitutional amendment—alongside urgent global warming, cow flatulence legislation.

A HOPEFUL CHRISTMAS TRAGEDY

Another thousand meters, a matter of seconds, and the F-18 jet would have crossed I-805 and crashed in the uninhabited western terrain of Miramar Air Base. Assuming the pilot’s successful ejection, the event would have been a scary and costly “incident.” As it was, the aircraft destroyed two houses and killed four members of a family—an infant, a 15-month old child, a wife, and her mother. The “incident” thus became a Christmas-season tragedy.

I suspect the pilot was following the railroad valley that separates the apartment-rich area around University Towne Center from the residential housing to the south. I once lived in an apartment to the north and spent many hours walking through the canyon’s trails. Amid the usual finger pointing and outrage that the deadly crash has spawned, the amazing comments of the grieving husband and father, Dong Yun Yoon, haven’t received the attention they deserve.

During a gut-wrenching seven minutes before national media cameras (with jets flying overhead) this simple man of faith, backed by his pastor and members of his religious community, exhibited qualities seldom seen under such circumstances.

Of the pilot Yoon said, “Please pray for him not to suffer from this accident.” Yoon also referred to the pilot as “one of our treasures for the country” and said that he didn’t blame him for the accident: “I know he did everything he could.”

Remarkably, Yoon also said, “I know there are many people who have experienced more terrible things”—a statement that’s certainly true, but not for most Americans whose current “catastrophes” center on 401(k)s, home values, and job security.

Rather than expressing bitterness, Yoon said, “It was God’s blessing that I met her about four years ago… She was such a lovely wife and mother... I just miss her so much.” He also expressed confidence that God would take care of the loved ones that had been so violently ripped from him. Yoon was uncertain, however, what he could say to his father-in-law, whose grief he also took upon himself: “I don’t know if he will ever forgive me.”

Whether this attitude will survive contemporary pressures toward litigation and recrimination is unclear. I recently saw a news scroll that said Yoon was seeking legal representation—a reasonable action for which he can hardly be criticized. I suspect that many folks would be reassured by a more “typical” response from Yoon—especially those folks who discount religious faith and who view Yoon’s willingness to forgive as a sign that he hasn’t yet been Americanized.

Then there are those who feel that Yoon’s response harks back to a spirit of grace and gratitude that many of us have lost—to the ability to think of others and thank God, even in the midst of great suffering. What’s undoubtedly the case is that the spirit exhibited by Dung Yun Yoon reflects the true spirit of Christmas—the spirit of divine hope and forgiveness in a world filled with darkness.

WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT ART CENTER BUDGET DEFICITS

When belt-tightening time comes, every group has reasons for preserving its share of the public pie—for explaining why a budget cut will precipitate an apocalypse of Katrinaesque proportion.

My favorite self-serving rationale was put forward by an arts group that claimed cuts in its budget constituted an attack on the poor. I don’t know if the perpetrators of this argument actually believed what they were saying or if they were just employing a logical ruse they thought might succeed.

To me it’s clear that the primary beneficiaries of government support for the arts are individuals in the artistic community, especially managers who pull down salaries well north of a hundred grand. I also suspect that poor folks, given a list of government programs, wouldn’t put art subsidies high on their priority list—which brings me to the annual “quo vadis” inquiry about the California Center for the Arts.

I’ve not yet heard the Arts Center called a poverty program, but I suppose anything’s possible, as cutbacks get closer to the bone. What’s true, I think, is that the Center was conceived as a status symbol and merchant magnet by individuals who wished to change Escondido’s image from that of a “migrant-rich” bedroom community to that of an inland haven for artistic sophistication.

The tug-of-war between those two cities played out year after year in terms of program offerings, ticket prices, and empty seats. The winner of that struggle, as burgeoning deficits suggest, is a community more at home with concerts on the green than with a majestic venue comparable to one recently built in Mesa, Arizona—a Phoenix “suburb” with a population nearing 500,000.

This result doesn’t reflect badly on the Hidden Valley, especially given the fact that the arts, at least in recent decades, haven’t clearly served to elevate the culture or to present a reasonably accurate portrait of reality. Instead, what many of the arts have regularly provided has been an elite community’s warped view of the world—a view through the eyes of what critic Lionel Trilling long ago dubbed the “adversarial culture.”

A prime example of this perspective is the Broadway smash musical “Rent”—an “updated” version of Puccini’s “La Boheme” that features a cast of struggling New York artists, half of whom have contracted AIDS or are HIV positive. Not surprisingly, this slice of self-referential artistic life didn’t fare all that well at the CCAE in 2007. By contrast, “Jesus Christ Superstar” packed ‘em in—an audience preference the programming director described as fickle.

I suspect that the avant-garde, Vietnam-centered dance-play “Movin’ Out” ($52-67) and “The Mortified Guide to…Epic Romance” ($27) will meet with the same tepid reception as “Rent.” Clips of the latter production (that invites audiences to “witness personal redemption through public humiliation”) are available online. Here is one of its tamer comic lines: “Social (life) in college means beer drinking and cheap fondling of ugly girls.”

Given fare of this caliber, CCAE budget deficits reflect well on the community.

TOLERANCE ON PROP 8: A ONE-WAY STREET

In the wake of California’s Proposition 8 vote, the rhetoric against its supporters has grown increasingly strident. In the name of freedom of speech, I presume, letters have been published on the page opposite that blatantly accuse those who oppose same-sex marriage of bigotry.

I doubt that messages exhibiting the same degree of animus toward “No on 8” activists would make it to print (nor should they) given the epithets they might contain. On this issue, and many others, tolerance is a one-way street.

No matter who’s tossing around the slurs, such tactics undermine the essential attitude of respectful disagreement that makes democracy possible. It’s one thing to insult marginal groups whose publications make clear their hostility toward Catholics, Jews, and blacks. It’s something else to employ similar terms to describe people whose views are embraced by a large majority of human beings of earth—views that have been accepted for millennia for reasons as obvious as the complementary biological structure of males and females.

If Prop 8 supporters are bigots, then most Americans and most of the people in the world are bigots. Included in this burgeoning sphere of bigotry are major world religions that have long served to undermine ethnic and racial prejudices and to shape the consciences of men like Martin Luther King Jr. and the great anti-slavery advocate William Wilberforce.

Given the scope of this presumed bigotry, it must also be the case that these same-sex marriage advocates are among the few enlightened individuals who’ve ever lived on the face of the earth—persons whose Hollywood-based insights could only be questioned by rubes whose arguments and votes need not be taken seriously.

Indeed, not only can these adversaries be ignored and vilified, they can also be economically decimated. Developer Doug Manchester was targeted by “No on 8” activists prior to the election. Now like-minded forces have assembled “black-lists” of individuals (several from North County) who contributed sums as little as a thousand dollars to the “Yes on 8” cause.

A Hillcrest businessman whose establishment wrongly appears on one list reported a plethora of hate-messages from individuals who confidently ascribe that trait to their opponents.

In Sacramento the artistic director for the California Musical Theater resigned after his support for Prop 8 was disclosed—a grim but unsurprising reminder of what the term “diversity” really means in the arts community.

Since election day the most convenient target for abuse has been the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But given the number of “bigots” available, Mormons seem to be receiving an inordinate share of opprobrium.

African-Americans constitute an as-yet unchastised class of bigots—a group whose support of Prop 8 (70 to 30% in one poll) clearly showed what they thought about the “homosexuality equals race” argument.

It’s time for reasonable “No on 8” supporters to reject the heavy-handed tactics being employed by its frenzied partisans before these zealots start aiming fire at blacks and that 64% class of bigots known as parents with kids.

HATE THY POLITICAL NEIGHBOR

Why are some folks so eager to brand political opponents as hateful bigots? And what follows, logically, from the widespread acceptance of this practice?

One thing that follows from viewing adversaries as ranting haters is sign vandalism—as numerous statewide stories about the disappearance of “Yes on Prop 8” signs indicate. The rationale one enthusiastic North County sign-snatcher gave for her actions was that government should only be in the business of giving rights, not taking them away.

It didn’t occur to this speech-suppressor that she was violating someone else’s First Amendment rights or that the issue in question is precisely what rights California should recognize when it comes to marriage.

I’d be surprised if this petty political thief would cling to her rights-only logic if the topic were smoking cigarettes on the beach or allowing her Carlsbad neighbors the “right” to do whatever they please with their property. In those critical cases (as opposed to the question of changing a basic, millennia-old social institution) pros and cons would surely need to be discussed.

The real beauty of branding political opponents as haters is that one doesn’t have to deal with specific arguments. Mere declarations of rights and ad hominem invective are all that’s required. By stigmatizing the other side as less honorable than pond scum, one can ignore arguments as smokescreens.

A common inference made by advocates of same-sex marriage was that Prop 8 supporters fell in the same class as individuals who denied rights to black Americans or interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. By this logic the reasonable assertion that male-female marriage reflects natural law and promotes the optimum child-rearing framework was transformed into hate-speech—not a category of discourse that voters need to accord a respectful hearing.

It’s ironic that the lion’s share of negative epithets in the marriage campaign came from the supposedly “tolerant” side of the debate. Just check the Letters page and review the TV ads for derogatory terms that concerned personal character.

Moreover, while I’m sure that some “No on 8” signs were snatched or defaced by Prop 8 proponents, every indication I’ve seen (including a prominent YouTube video) is that most of the vandalism came from the side that was utterly convinced it occupied the high political ground.

That’s because traditional folk tend to honor long-established ethical rules (like “Thou shalt not steal”) and are somewhat less likely to violate mom’s oft-repeated injunction against name-calling. “Progressives,” on the other hand, are more likely to embrace an “ends justify the means” philosophy, to view personal morality and f-bomb language as flexible conventions, and to impute the basest of motives to political enemies—all for the sake of political goals that are embraced with religious fervor.

The future of democracy isn’t bright when half the voting population are routinely labeled as bigots. After all, bigots deserve no respect, and trivial democratic procedures needn’t be observed by partisans whose political ideas (like religious dogmas) are considered beyond questioning.

WHAT DEREGULATION?

This Wall Street Journal article by James Freeman analyzes the "deregulation" that did NOT occur under the presidency of George W. Bush.

PROPOSITION 8: ARGUING THE OBVIOUS

Injustice is good and justice is naiveté. That’s the proposition Socrates’ irascible interlocutor put forward in The Republic—a viewpoint the Greek philosopher admitted was hard to counter because it fell so far outside the norms of ethical discourse.

The debate about gay marriage falls in the same category. Who would have thought twenty years ago that politicians and activists would seriously propose changing the definition of marriage? Who would have suspected that a state Supreme Court majority of one would equate inherently barren same-sex relationships with male-female unions whose reproductive consequences are typically enormous?

Who would have believed that rational individuals would repeatedly declare with a straight face that males and females are essentially identical when it comes to child rearing—or that natural and obvious biological differences are as irrelevant as variations in skin pigmentation and eye color?

Yet same-sex unions for which promiscuity can have absolutely no reproductive consequences are blindly said to be identical to unions for which marriage has constituted (by promoting fidelity and on-going responsibility to offspring) the greatest institutional protection for women and children.

Logically, if these two types of union are the same, then children and sexual fidelity can’t be central to the definition of marriage. Instead, deconstructed marriage will become (even more than it already has) a mere matter of legal benefits between two or more individuals with amorous feelings toward each other.

Only persons with constrained imaginations could assert that this radical redefinition won’t significantly impact society. Indeed, it’s already had an impact.

In San Francisco first-graders in a public school were recently taken on a field trip to witness their teacher’s lesbian wedding—another lesson in diversity by folks who assert, incredibly, that defenders of traditional marriage are injecting government into people’s private lives.

Yet it was gay activists who “injected” their lifestyle into government via parades in which San Diego firemen were ordered to participate. And it was a lesbian who sued a North County doctor for declining to participate in her insemination—thereby “injecting” government into the doctor’s own conscience.

Indeed, were it not for an unprecedented judicial fiat, the issue of gay marriage wouldn’t have been “injected” into politics at all.

Now this radical innovation, justified by the narrowest of legal margins, is being advertised (thanks to Jerry Brown’s linguistic revision of Prop 8's voter summary) as a “right” that presumably existed from eternity alongside the rights to life, liberty, and abortion on demand. Other anti-8 ads claim that same-sex marriage will have no educational consequences—just as the aforementioned first grade field trip was occurring.

Anyone who believes that public schools won’t take the defeat of Proposition 8 as a signal to aggressively promote a “King and King” educational agenda is also probably unaware of the million dollars donated by the California Teachers Association to oppose Prop 8.

Unfortunately, students in public school won’t be the only casualties of calling black, “white”. Children throughout the state will also be victims—along with freedom of conscience.

OBAMA'S ABORTION EXTREMISM

Princeton Professor Robert George discusses "Obama's Abortion Extremism."

This is a withering critique of Obama's extreme stand on abortion that promises to make all Americans complicit in this slaughter by doing away with the Hyde Amendment, funding abortions with taxpayer money, and ditching parental notification laws in all the states. With Barack, even living babies will be in danger.

"Sen. Barack Obama's views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket...."

EXAMPLE OF OBAMA THUGGERY TO COME?

Obama's treatment of political opponents in Chicago (see THE CASE AGAINST BARACK OBAMA) foreshadows this fascist-style intimidation on the part of Obama workers and the Feds.

Roger Hedgecock's World Net Daily article.

REAL CULPRITS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: GOVERNMENT COMPASSION AND CRONYISM

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” That’s the simplified version of H. L. Mencken’s sound bite unfriendly proposition.

As evidence in favor of the maxim, I point to the popular wisdom that “deregulation” got America into its current financial straits—a mess whose local consequences are happily exaggerated by gee-whiz graphs that transform a leveling off of prices into a precipitous drop in the rate of price increase, before proceeding to the really bad news. (Graphs that show the huge ups and halfway downs of actual home prices in San Diego aren’t nearly so exciting.)

Returning to the “blame deregulation” line that Pelosi and press pundits are peddling to a docile public, here are the actual facts:

In 1998 the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston produced a document called “Closing the Gap: A Guide to Equal Opportunity Lending.” This influential policy statement asserted that lending standards in the U.S. were “unintentionally” racially biased and urged lenders to employ new underwriting standards that would expunge this moral blot from their books.

These “new and improved” standards essentially pressured banks to abandon prudent norms that had been employed for decades—debt-to-income ratio, credit history, and ability to make down payments from personal savings. While aimed at minorities, these new rules naturally applied to all borrowers. Ignored in the process was the obvious fact that folks who have bad credit, low income, and little money invested in an asset are more likely to walk away when its value declines.

In 1999, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began easing their credit standards, and between 2004 and 2007 these Government Sponsored Enterprises became the biggest purchasers of subprime mortgages. Other lenders, “encouraged” by “fairness” politicians, followed in the steps of Fannie and Freddie—none more aggressively than Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, who was honored by Harvard’s Center for Housing Studies for his “socially conscious” approach to mortgage lending.

When the Bush administration and other Republicans pushed in 2004 to rein in Fannie and Freddie’s irresponsible practices and to expand regulation of these GSEs, they were met with a chorus of Democrat opposition led by that voluble choirmaster, Rep. Barney Frank. (See www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MGT_cSi7Rs) Their uncritical praise of Fannie and Freddie extended to Fannie CEO, Franklin Raines, the former Clinton budget director whose alleged book-cooking ingenuity netted him a cool $90 million.

Thus, the money kept flowing (especially to the coffers of Democrat Senators Chris Dodd and Barack Obama) as long as prices were going up. When the inevitable happened and prices turned south, then all those homes purchased in Oceanside zip code 92057 by folks who had no business assuming a $500,000 mortgage were transformed into “bad paper” —and Angelo Mozilo was no longer a Harvard hero.

Long story short, it wasn’t deregulation that precipitated the financial seizure we’re now experiencing. It was benighted government lending standards promulgated in the name of fairness and instituted within the framework of K Street cronyism.

DEREGULATION THE PROBLEM? NO, DEMOCRAT POLS!

Give this article by Peter Ferrara a look if you think deregulation is the root of the financial crisis.

Note especially this YouTube video of Democrat perfidy.

ADAM GADAHN: HOMEGROWN AMERICAN TERRORIST

Adam Gadahn may be dead. That was the gist of a September 12, North County Times article about the al-Qaida propagandist who was raised in remote Winchester, California, and possibly met his end in Pakistan’s distant Waziristan region. The absence of an annual September 11 video message from Gadahn was taken as another clue that he might have been killed in a January airstrike.

So how did a lad who grew up in Riverside County come to join an Islamic terrorist group and find himself, in 2006, charged with treason by his native country? Or, as the aforementioned article put it, how did “a shy and intelligent boy who played Little League baseball and attended area Christian home schooling support groups” become “Azzam the American”?

The answer to that mystery isn’t as farfetched as the misleading references to Little League and Christian home schooling suggest. In point of fact, the apple didn’t fall that far from the parental tree—as an extensive January, 2007, New Yorker magazine piece demonstrates.

If Adam Gadahn changed his name and rejected his roots, he was only following in the footsteps of his father (the son of a prosperous Santa Ana physician) who dropped the name Pearlman for Gadahn and took very seriously the utopian rhetoric of the 60s counterculture.

If Adam immersed himself in “death metal” music—a subculture in love with its own offensiveness—he was largely reprising his father’s passionate attachment to psychedelic rock during his long-haired days at U.C. Irvine.

If Adam adopted a radical stance toward American society, he was affirming in a different way his father’s decision to reject professionalism and to choose for his family a near subsistence life on a goat farm by the San Jacinto mountains.

If Adam converted to Islam in 1997, the elder Gadahn experienced his own awakening to eco-spirituality in 1975—a self-fashioned religion that the “happenings” musician described in an album called “Relatively Clean Rivers.”

Finally, if Adam’s spiritual journey led him to embrace an uncompromising ideology that saw unbelievers as benighted evildoers, he was only exhibiting a virulent version of his father’s outlook. According to acquaintances, the elder Gadahn, though gentle, was an inflexible perfectionist attracted to people who were “exactly the same (as) he was.”

Adam’s pre-conversion views, summarized by a friend, reflect a similar mind-set: “Most of the people around me are brain-dead, nobody cares about anything that’s going on, we’re wrecking everything that’s good, all the trees are disappearing, everything is being turned into suburbs. I feel like I’m the only one who notices this.”

Only thematic key-shifts are required to change the tune from 60s counterculture to eco-fanaticism, from psychedelic rock to death-metal, from self-serving contempt for those who disagree to ideological solidarity with terrorists.

By contrast, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence urges a “decent respect (for) the opinions of mankind.” Such humility is absent among ideologues of every stripe—whose opponents are invariably portrayed as liars and fools.

ABSTINENCE, LIES, AND SEX EDUCATION

On July 23rd the North County Times published an editorial written by a Fallbrook High School student that last spring was pulled from the school newspaper by the school principal. The article was a grammatically well-written piece about sex education.

Specifically, the piece decried “abstinence only” programs that are “ideologically, rather than empirically, driven” and faulted the Bush Administration for “forcing” such programs on state and local governments.

The editorial also cited a 2007 study by Mathematica Policy Research to show that abstinence-only programs are ineffective and that “comprehensive” sex-ed programs effectively reduce behaviors that put teenagers at risk of STDs and unintended pregnancy.

While the editorial probably wasn’t pulled from the school newspaper for this reason, most "real-world" editors require documentation (whether included in the piece or not) that vouches for the accuracy of a column’s factual assertions. On those grounds a conscientious editor would have had good reason for deep-sixing the aforementioned article.

One major inaccuracy was the assertion that abstinence-based sex education is a policy being “forced” on schools throughout the country by the Bush Administration. In point of fact this Title V Program began in 1996 (under President Clinton) and isn’t “forced” on anyone.

Rather, it’s a relatively small program that has annually devoted 50 to 150 million dollars to this grant-based project. Ironically, these grants have been rejected by the state of California, and various data suggest that most schools employ more “comprehensive” sex-ed formats—some of the “abstinence-plus” variety.

The article also fails to disclose that its Mathematica study only analyzed four outdated abstinence programs where instruction ended in middle school. Nor does the piece mention that the study showed (not surprisingly under the circumstances) no significant difference between the abstinence cohort and the “comprehensive” sex-ed group.

At worst, this dubious finding suggests that short-lived abstinence-based programs are no less effective than the morality-free sex-ed programs designed by groups like SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of the United States), an institution closely associated with the ideologically-driven and fraudulent scientist, Alfred Kinsey. (I direct readers to Dr. Judith Reisman’s exhaustive work on Kinsey.)

To give folks a sense of SIECUS’s ideological baggage, the organization’s first President, Planned Parenthood’s Mary Calderone, once diminished the moral significance of pedophilia by declining to call it “bad” or “wicked.” Later, in 1980, SIECUS published a report entitled “Attacking the Last Taboo.” That article stated that “we are roughly in the same position today regarding incest as we were a hundred years ago with respect to our fears of masturbation.” In short, SIECUS is insanely amoral.

Given that the Federal Forum on Child and Family Statistics last year reported a significant decline in sexual activity among high school students since 1991 (54 to 46%) and given that condom use simultaneously increased among sexually active teens (46 to 63%), I’d be inclined to reinforce both these trends with abstinence-plus programs rather than impose on students morally vacuous curricula designed by the likes of SIECUS.

DOCS' BELIEFS DON'T COUNT

On Monday, August 18, the California Supreme Court ruled that doctors may not follow their consciences when deciding whether or not to participate in the artificial insemina-tion of a female homosexual. Instead, medical institutions are obliged to either quit offering fertility services or to participate in a process whose goal is to produce a child within a fatherless, same-sex household.

The ruling was delivered in a case brought by an Oceanside woman who, in 2001, was offended when doctors at the Vista-based North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group referred her to a facility that didn’t exhibit moral scruples about bringing children into the world under the aforementioned circumstances. From now on that same moral indifference to marriage and child welfare has become mandatory in California.

News stories generally portrayed this ruling as a “civil rights” victory for gays and minimized or ignored the religious freedom and child welfare issues. “Docs can’t refuse gay patients” is a headline that fits this template—as if doctors weren’t treating sick individuals because they were gay or as if a potential child (as abortion absolutists would have it) falls in the same category as a malignant tumor.

A similar state court ruling was handed down over two years ago in Massachusetts. In that case Catholic Charities of Boston was given a drop-dead ultimatum that required the charity to offer gay adoptions or to get out of the business. The 100-year-old organization chose the latter option—to the detriment of special-needs kids the group regularly placed in caring homes.

The basis for the California Court’s unanimous ruling against individual conscience was state legislation that “imposes on business establishments certain antidiscrimination obligations.”

Observers who applaud the court’s interpretation of state law typically equate this judgment with rulings against racial discrimination. This analysis clearly ignores natural and complementary differences between males and females that don’t correspond to superficial racial distinctions. To an unprejudiced eye, these sexual differences demand respect—especially when it comes to child-rearing.

Political correctness, however, demands that we close our eyes to the obvious for the sake of “tolerance.” This “tolerance,” however, requires inflexible acceptance of the view that men and women are essentially interchangeable, that marriage is no big deal, and that fathers, in particular, are irrelevant when it comes to a child’s psychological development.

In short, modern tolerance is “intolerance.” Accordingly, the state won’t allow professionals to act on defensible moral principles contrary to the feels-good secularism that’s become an unofficial state religion—a faith promulgated relentlessly by our pop-culture.

Thus, the “free exercise” of religion in California now means the freedom to believe what you want, provided you leave those beliefs in the pew. At work, as the state Supreme Court bluntly put it, those convictions may be ignored as “incidental” conflicts with Sacramento’s social engineering project.

The licentious state religion that now permeates public schools will be intolerantly enforced throughout society (even among private organizations) if Californians no longer give a rip about freedom of conscience.

Joe Biden on Barack Obama

Barack Obama doesn't have the experience to be President. So says his V.P. pick, Joe Biden, in this You Tube McCain ad.

Barack's Boners

A good article that documents a few (not all) of Barack's boners! This guy makes the much-maligned Dan Quayle look like a genius.

MICHAEL BARONE AND THOMAS LIFSON ON THE CLOSE TIES BETWEEN BARACK OBAMA AND TERRORIST WILLIAM AYERS

Here is a link to Michael Barone's piece on the CLOSE association between Barack Obama and terrorist William Ayers. And here is another piece on the same topic in The American Thinker.

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' OR CALIFORNIA DRILLIN'

A recent Public Policy Institute poll shows that Californians now favor (by a 51-45 percent margin) drilling for oil off the state’s coastline. What many Golden Staters may not realize is that offshore production has been going on for decades. What’s currently verboten is new drilling.

In 2005, for example, state and federal offshore wells accounted for more than 40 million of the 255 million barrels of petroleum produced statewide. By the way, those on-shore wells include some discretely camouflaged rigs in Beverly Hills.

The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill was the event that transformed offshore drilling from a profitable state enterprise (one that contributed significant revenues to Governor Pat Brown’s budgets) into an industrial pariah.

I recall walking along a beach near the University of California campus in Santa Barbara in 1991 and being astounded that my sneakers were thoroughly coated with tar—a remnant, I thought, of the ecological disaster of ’69. In point of fact, those tiny pellets were (and are) the result of natural forces—an oozing up of the black gold that lies untapped beneath the surface.

Obviously Mother Gaia hadn’t gotten the memo that these geological excretions don’t fit her recently cultivated image. Indeed, these mini-tar pits are reminiscent of the vision of nature offered by writers like Jack London—namely, indifference.

Whether nature cares about mankind or not, it’s clear that Californians aren’t indifferent to gasoline at and over four dollars a gallon. The good news is that drilling technology has improved greatly over the last four decades—as indicated by all those rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that withstood hurricanes Katrina and Rita without significant spills.

The billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas that lie restively off California’s shores represent a boon both in terms of private economic stimulus and public revenue. (Texas and Alaska both sport significant state surpluses.) Moreover, some experts believe these resources can be accessed within a year of lifting existing moratoria.

Equally significant is the fact that increased American production means fewer dollars going abroad to hostile and unstable regimes in Venezuela and the Middle East.

The ace-in-the-hole for anti-drilling forces is the global warming argument—the assertion that petroleum production and consumption harms the planet via its “carbon footprint.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer, however, provides a cogent ecological response to that objection.

Krauthammer notes that sweeping restrictions on domestic drilling or shale oil development inevitably promote environmentally unfriendly exploration (or devastating biofuel production) in areas like the Niger Delta or the Amazon rainforests. Russians, he observes, won’t be concerned about caribou when they start drilling in the Arctic.

HR-6566, a comprehensive energy bill co-sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, includes measures that expedite deep-water drilling in federal waters off California’s shore. The billion barrels off San Diego’s shoreline, however, remain off limits as long as the state legislature continues to dream about how optimum tire pressure can offset burgeoning oil demand in China and India.

THE AUDACITY OF WISHFUL THINKING: THE NINE-POINT OBAMA ENERGY POLICY

In an off-the-teleprompter comment from Springfield, Missouri, the less-than-one-term Illinois Senator, Barack Obama, recently remarked that Americans could save as much fuel as might be obtained from offshore drilling merely by tuning up their cars and keeping tires properly inflated.

Since the MSM hasn’t seen fit to accurately publicize this amazing insight, I must insist that the senator’s complete Obama-fuels program be immediately broadcast to the nation. This bold nine-point initiative will make both oil imports and new domestic drilling completely unnecessary by the end of Barack’s eight-to-ten-year presidency.

In addition to tune-ups and tire inflation, Senator Obama also proposes the following transformative energy measures:

Point two: Diet and exercise. If Americans lose, on average, ten pounds per person, each national car trip will be lighter by three billion pounds—saving enough fuel in a year to offset weeks of ANWR oil production. This healthy-choice initiative will also allow Michael Moore and Al Gore to make outsized personal contributions to energy independence.

Point three: Turn off the auto A/C. Car trips made without activating the air compressor not only save barrels upon barrels of petrol, they also contribute to national fitness targets—especially in Southern states where drivers and passengers can only obtain sauna relief by rolling down their windows.

Point four: Don’t roll down car windows. This simple aerodynamic tip, if followed religiously in gun-toting and bible-clinging regions, will not only marginalize the oil output of a “tiny country” like Iran, it will also bring home to Sunbelt motorists the mortal dangers of global warming.

Point five: Kill the motor when sitting in a drive-through queue and plan half as many trips to fast-food restaurants. This two-pronged fuel- and weight-reduction strategy will make Hugo Chavez’s oil reserves seem as trivial as the ten-year national supply that lies untapped off America’s own shores.

Point six: Roundabouts and tap-the-brake intersections. By transforming busy cross-streets into roundabouts and employing “California stops” at other interchanges, inertial fuel savings throughout the 58 states will more than compensate for the trillion barrels of oil shale available in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. Moreover, accidents resulting from these traffic modifications will decrease driving hours in damaged vehicles—further reducing the need for new domestic production. Drivers should remember, however, to kill their engines while waiting for collisions to clear.

Point seven: Charge for petroleum-based water bottles distributed on airplane flights. Fortunately, airlines have already begun to institute this “change we’ve been waiting for.”

Point eight: National Ride-your-bike-to-work Day. Even with only fifty percent compliance, this program could save almost half-a-day’s supply of gasoline—enough to fuel all the cars in America for about thirty minutes. Imagine the extra savings if Al Gore and Michael Moore participate. Moreover, if only twenty percent of Americans make this fitness activity a regular choice, it won’t matter what country decides to drill for the stuff that’s killing us only sixty miles off the coast of Florida.

Point nine: Subsidies for fuel-savvy driving. By going with the gravitational grain, the nation’s auto fleet can get vastly better mileage than by defying Mother Nature. Indeed, experts have estimated that if all auto trips were downhill, Americans could travel in open-air soapboxes and eliminate oil imports in a matter of days.

This extraordinary program represents the kind of visionary thinking that no typical politician has had the audacity to propose. It’s a vision that looks different from the economic policies and presidents of the past. It’s a “yes, we can” initiative that brings all Americans together around the goal of energy independence without drilling for oil, without importing oil from hostile countries, and without constructing CO2-free nuclear reactors. To all those grim alternatives President Obama isn’t about to say, “Merci beaucoup.”

Combined with a global warming policy that includes breath retention, antacids for cows, and Jimmy Carter snuggle sweaters, this incredible “energy package we can believe in” will make Americans, for the first time in their miserable lives, “really proud” of their country—proud of a trim, sweaty, bicycle-riding, non-nuclear, petroleum-averse, inertia-loving, nature-respecting America that’s only going downhill.

THE LIMITS OF HELPFULNESS: GOVERNMENT AND THE MORTGAGE MELTDOWN

“The average price of unleaded gasoline in San Diego County this week is $4.36. That’s eleven cents less than a week ago but a dollar and thirty cents more than this time last year.”

This mantra has become so familiar that many media hairdos can recite it in their sleep. What’s amusing about this formulaic sound bite is how little “news” it contains. No price in the country is so publicly advertised or so regularly observed by so many individuals.

The example is useful, however, to illustrate the typical depth of analysis offered by television and radio—and sometimes by newspapers. The preferred media storyline is simplistic, with a hero and a villain. The villain-victim format is also immensely popular.

So it is with the mortgage meltdown story where “predatory” lenders take advantage of innocent consumers who are struggling to achieve the dream of home ownership. The heroes are politicians with bailout funds.

The actual dynamics (as economist Thomas Sowell, among others, has recently shown) are more complex. The inconvenient truth for do-gooders is the extent to which the foreclosures that clutter several North County neighborhoods are actually a function of government helpfulness.

The most direct example of this “helpfulness” is the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of federal legislation that makes sure banks and other lenders aren’t using “arbitrary and outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or low-income minority applicants.” Included among these “arbitrary and outdated criteria” are an individual’s income, net worth, and credit history.

Lax underwriting standards were bound to proliferate when lenders like Countrywide received government kudos for loaning cash to folks who wouldn’t be candidates for home ownership absent regulatory pressure and the “helpful” efforts of community action groups like ACORN. It’s more than ironic that this particular “predatory” lender found itself going belly-up for offering loans that couldn’t all be fobbed off on other financial institutions.

The two government-created institutions for buying up most of these dubious loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, served as financial backstops until the political goal of extending home ownership to every American brought even these huge, amphibious institutions to the brink of insolvency.

Sowell notes that state and local governments also contributed to the mortgage fiasco by putting ever-greater restrictions on home construction—a practice that helped send home prices in California skyrocketing. Those higher prices demanded more “creative” financing, and creative financing was further stimulated by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates. When rates were finally adjusted upward and home prices peaked, the limits of “helpfulness” became apparent.

Put succinctly, government promoted and guaranteed bad loans, discouraged due diligence, and helped drive up home prices. Now those same governments are called upon to make everything better. Never mind that Sacramento and Washington are awash in red ink and that San Diego’s pension woes persist. The quick-and-easy solution to our problems is always more government control—making sure financial markets work as well as our public schools.

Imagine what gas prices would be if the DMV were in charge.

MAKERS AND TAKERS by Peter Schweizer

Makers and Takers: Why Conservatives Work Harder, Feel Happier, Have Closer Families, Take Fewer Drugs, Give More Generously, Value Honesty More, Are Less Materialistic and Envious, Whine Less . . . and Even Hug Their Children More Than Liberals by Peter Schweizer. Doubleday, 2008. (258 pages, $24.95, Hardcover)

“I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their political duties, they lead their country, by a short route, to chaos.” So said Robert Bolt’s Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons.

The opposite side of that moral coin is explored by Peter Schweizer in his book, Makers and Takers—namely, the personal consequences of a moral compass that points unswervingly to the political left. Schweizer’s answer is given in his extended subtitle—a list of declarations that clearly suggest the royal road to happiness isn’t paved with fervent commitment to government health care.

In this short, generously spaced work Schweizer debunks the popular notion that liberals are better people than supposedly tight-fisted, hard-hearted, mentally unstable conservatives. After providing a gut-wrenching sample of popular elite opinion—from tendentious “studies” that classify Stalin as a conservative to the vacuous blatherings of Bill Maher—Schweizer proceeds to demolish those opinions with peer-reviewed sociological data that show liberals are generally more selfish, more focused on money, less hardworking, less emotionally satisfied, less honest, and even less knowledgeable about politics than their conservative counterparts.

In addition to anecdotal evidence (like Bill Clinton’s 957-page monument to self obsession) Schweizer cites his favorite source, the “highly regarded General Social Survey,” to show that self-described strong conservatives are much more likely than their liberal counterparts (55-20%) to say they get happiness by putting another person’s happiness ahead of their own. Similar results were obtained in response to queries about caring for a seriously ill spouse or parent. Another study found that students who called themselves “very liberal” or “radical” tended to have a “narcissistic pathology” that exhibited itself in “grandiosity, envy…and a sense of entitlement.” Not surprisingly, these students were not only the most power-oriented but also the most pot-oriented.

This professed gap between liberals and conservatives when it comes to self-centeredness also carries over into practice. While liberals tout their generosity and berate conservative greed, the hard facts (and IRS data) tell another story. That Al Gore gave just $353 to charity in 1998, out of an adjusted gross income of $197,729, appears to be a common occurrence among the former V-P’s ideological associates. The 1040s of leftists like Robert Reich, Andrew Cuomo, Ted Kennedy, and even Franklin Roosevelt tell a similar tale. Indeed, as Schweizer notes, Al Gore looks “downright benevolent” when compared to John Kerry, who gave none of his 126,179 taxable dollars to charity in 1995.

Schweizer’s General Social Survey shows that this anecdotal evidence corresponds with the tendency of conservatives to donate more money than liberals and to volunteer more time to charitable causes. Even after eliminating church activities, conservatives still volunteered for charitable work more frequently than liberals (27-19 %). Professor Brooks, author of Who Really Cares?, calculates the annual giving gap between religious conservatives and liberals at $2,210 to $642. This disparity suggests the accuracy of Merryle Rukeyser’s witty definition of a liberal as someone who’s liberal with other people’s money.

Since liberals squeeze their greenbacks so tightly, it follows that they also value money more highly than conservatives when it comes to job satisfaction, a conclusion born out by Schweizer’s statistics (36-24%). Consistent with their entitlement mentality, liberals also put twice as much value on leisure time than conservatives and considerably more value on a low-stress work environment (56-36%). It clearly takes a government-run Wunder-Village to produce these labor conditions—high pay, leisure time, no pressure. Add to these job priorities the fact that conservatives value hard work more than liberals, and it’s easy to see why Schweizer tells employers to “think long and hard” before hiring someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Unrealistic workplace expectations doubtless foster another unpleasant characteristic that pervades the left—envy. This trait is perfectly illustrated by an anecdote Schweizer provides about a student who traded his $15-an-hour pizza job for one paying only $6.25-an-hour. The reason for this counterproductive economic decision was envy over the fact that the enterprising student who started the business was making $50-an-hour. Such reasoning coincides with the thought-patterns of that Russian who, given only one wish by a genie, wished that his neighbor’s barn should burn down.

It should come as no surprise that liberals don’t score as well as conservatives on honesty, since leftists frequently subscribe to a “higher” morality that covers a multitude of stained blue dresses. As radical organizer Saul Alinsky put the matter, “Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.” Such flexibility is certainly helpful when it come to rationalizing the biographical liberties taken by poet Quincy Troupe, Professor Edward Said, and Yale Professor Paul de Man—to say nothing of the dialogical liberties taken by Robert Reich in his recent “memoir.” Not surprisingly, this ethical flexibility only extends in one political direction.

On another statistical front, Schweizer provides data that show Michael Douglas’ angry character in Falling Down should have been a liberal with a UN-WORLD license plate. It turns out that “very liberal” folks are three times more likely to “let fly” than corresponding conservatives. That lamp-shattering stat corresponds with another from the General Social Survey that shows extreme liberals six times more likely than extreme conservatives to have reported a mental health problem (30-5%). Schweizer notes that the left’s emphasis on victimization contributes to this psychic distress—as does the idea that individual initiative counts for nothing against a “lottery of life” rigged by and for conservatives. Beyond those political factors, the left’s sympathy for philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre also contributes to the frustration of folks who find an absurd universe mentally taxing.

Probably the most distressing assertion in Schweizer’s book, for liberals, is the claim that conservatives generally know more about politics. Indeed, the gap between the political knowledge of strong Republicans and strong Democrats, based on the calculations of George Mason law professor Ilya Somin, equals several years of formal education. “Independent” and “weak” Republicans also scored higher on Somin’s scale than their ideological counterparts. So much for Thomas Frank’s assumption that folks in Kansas are too dumb to know what’s good for them.

Perhaps the most unexpected findings in Schweizer’s statistical and anecdotal compendium were those related to the paranormal: that liberals are more likely to believe in ghosts than conservatives (Gallup, 42-25), that they are more likely to believe in communication with spirits (CBS, 43-29) and that they are significantly more likely to say UFOs have visited the earth. Actually, those ratios shouldn’t come as a surprise—given Hillary’s chats with Eleanor Roosevelt and Dennis Kucinich’s stated views on extraterrestrials. [Note to aliens: Dennis is ready for beaming.] Schweizer explains this data by noting that many liberals, absent a belief in God, have gravitated toward superstition, thus confirming G. K. Chesterton’s assertion that those who don’t believe in God will believe in anything.

In sum, Schweizer has created a compact sociological tour de force that is destined to meet the same fate among the MSM as Dr. Brooks’ book on giving—malign neglect. I suspect that those few leftists who deign to acknowledge its existence will focus on methodological flaws that are bound to exist in any large collection of social science data. But then, what else would one expect from a group of thin-skinned, stingy, ill-informed, and mentally unstable journalists?

SHOVING CONSCIENCE IN A CLOSET

What’s the big deal? Live and let live. It doesn’t affect anyone else. What really matters is the price of gas. Such are the “arguments” put forward by individuals who favor changing society’s most fundamental institution—or think the matter of no consequence.

No amount of fact-based discourse about nature or disease would be sufficient to change the views of folks who think men and women are interchangeable. Nor will essays on child pedagogy or historical precedent influence those who view four mommies from a severed same-sex relationship as equal to a divorced mom and dad, each with new spouses.

What’s harder to deny is the ultimate legal goal involved in a marriage debate of little direct interest to most gays. That goal is to criminalize public opposition to homosexuality and to brand all verbal opposition as hate speech.

It’s not only North County doctors who will find themselves facing an “inseminate or else” alternative vis-à-vis same-sex couples. It’s also photographers like the couple in New Mexico who discovered that freedom of religion in America no longer means freedom of conscience. When this husband and wife team decided against taking photos at a same-sex commitment ceremony, the offended pair appealed to the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, which fined the photographers $6,000 for discrimination.

In San Diego the county clerk recently discovered that he was unable to fully accommodate the consciences of employees who wished not to be part of joining Party A to Party B in a union whose procreative possibilities are, in every case, nil—to sanction unions that make the terms “husband and wife” offensive and inappropriate on common legal documents. A year earlier San Diego firefighters were ordered, against their expressed desire, to participate in a gay pride parade.

The most distressing portent of what awaits California’s children is a custody dispute in Vermont where a gay plaintiff sued for visitation with a child born to her former partner—a woman now living in Virginia. Last March the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that Lisa Miller must share her own daughter with an individual who isn’t related to the child by blood or adoption, who abhors Lisa’s new Christian values, and who wants the child to call her “mommy.”

Because of a “civil union” formalized on a weekend trip to Vermont in December of 2000, a child is being ripped from its mother and placed in the regular company of a near stranger and her new partner—an arrangement sure to become commonplace if the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is gutted under President Obama. (Kids are always sacrificial lambs on the altar of political correctness.)

Already freedom of religion is being reduced to a shell of the Constitution’s guarantee of “free exercise.” In the future (as now in Canada) columns like this will be classified as hate speech and “the closet” once reserved for same-sex liaisons will become a restrictive holding pen for those who still honor a basic moral tenet that’s guided civilization for millennia.

BREAKING THE BACK OF HIGH OIL

An Investors Business Daily analysis that shows how to reduce oil prices. DRILL!