Is it polite to meow when you eat...?

Very cute.

(HT: my daughter Julie)

Equal opportunity opportunists

But some things never change...

Commentor Joey quotes conservative scholar Thomas Sowell on the evolution of 'racism' in America:

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today."

Martin Luther King, a Republican who believed in equality under the law, would today be labeled a racist for his I Have a Dream speech:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Try judging an applicant/employee/student today by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin and you're likely to end up in federal court or in front of the EEOC.

Liberal Democrats have so distorted our discourse that today a commitment to a merit-based color-blind society is labeled "racist", and a commitment to racial profiling is called an "affirmative defense" in court. If you abhor racism, you're a racist. If you practice explicit racism, you're not a racist. Go figure.

Democrats, as you might imagine, have always been on the racist side. To Democrat pols, "color blind" has always meant "lost votes". Democrats championed slavery, civil war (to protect slavery), the KKK, Jim Crow, segregation, race-huckstering (here and here) and affirmative action with equal fervor and without blinking an eye. To paraphrase Tom Joad, wherever there's race hate, the Democrat party will be there.

Race hate worked for Democrats in Ft. Lauderdale in 1935 and it works for Democrats in Sanford Florida in 2012. Democrats use race hate to maintain power. They ain't particular about the race.

Democrats are equal opportunity opportunists. 

Dennis Prager and me on gay marriage and gays

Dennis Prager has a great post on Conservatives and Gays: Where Do We Stand?

Excerpt:

... I am not anti-gay. Proponents of same-sex marriage may conflate opposition to same-sex marriage with being anti-gay. But conservatives must not.

Those of us who fear the consequences of redefining marriage — asking children if they hope to marry a boy or a girl when they get older, banning religious adoption agencies from placing children first with a married man and woman, denying the importance of both sexes in making families, choosing boys to be high-school prom queens and girls to be high-school prom kings, and much more — must make it clear that we regard homosexuals as fellow human beings created in God’s image just as heterosexuals are... 

Conservatives must object to values, not to individuals.

I agree. I oppose much of the agenda of the gay Left, more because it is left than because it is gay. I believe that homosexual acts are sinful, but I have plenty of my own sins, and I make no claim that my sins are less grave than those of my neighbors.

The truth that we are all sinners in need of His grace and redemption does not eliminate our responsibility to speak out against sin. My responsibility-- our responsibility-- is to be truthful, and to struggle against sin wherever it appears.

Yet we conservative Christians should always take care-- and generally do take care-- to respect the worth and dignity of each of us. We are all sinners. We all need forgiveness. And we all have a responsibility to work against sin.

There is no contradiction in those last three assertions. They are, really, the essence of Christian moral teaching. 

Unabomber: 'Don't you dare classify me with those environmentalist butchers!'

Kaczinsky: 'I'm a putz compared to
 the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Population Council, etc'

(Dissociated Press) Convicted unabomber Ted Kaczynski complained today to the Heartland Institute about the libertarian organization's billboard campaign that links the environmentalist serial killer to global warming alarmism.

From Kaczynski's press release:

'I take strong exception to being linked to radical greenie organizations who peddle global warming alarmism and a whole host of anti-human ideologies, such as the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Population Council. 

I may be a serial killer, but I've never perpetrated crimes against humanity. 

I never banned DDT and then stood by congratulating myself while malaria resumed killing a million people each year (40 million people to date and counting) in developing countries. I never advocated programs that sterilized millions of people against their will and or programs that led to tens of millions of forced abortions or programs that caused the selective abortion, infanticide and abandonment of tens of millions of infant girls-- a modern female genocide. I've never used fake climate science scares to try to shut down world economic development and consign billions of people in developing countries to poverty and starvation in order to peddle a socialist hoax designed to enrich a small group of scientists, ideologues, and speculators.

I may be a killer, but don't lump me in with these bastards.' 

Kaczynski provided a comparison between his killing and killing facilitated by mainstream environmental organizations:

Ted Kaczynski: 

Killed-- 3 people, injured/maimed-- 23 people. 

Mainstream Environmental Organizations (Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Population Council): 

Killed-- at least 40 million malaria victims (mostly impoverished women and children) since 1972, who were deprived by environmentalists of the most effective pesticide (DDT) against mosquitos that spread malaria.

Killed-- tens of millions of newborn girls in the womb by sex-selective abortion in China, India. 

Killed-- tens of millions of newborn girls murdered after birth in China, India. 

Killed-- countless thousands killed by botched involuntary sterilizations in China, India, and Peru.  

Maimed-- tens of millions of women subjected to forced abortions/sterilizations under One-Child Policy in China 

Abandoned-- millions of baby girls discarded in male-preference societies in which births are limited by law in China, India.

The Heartland Institute apologized to Mr. Kaczynski, stating that it never meant to compare the serial killer to the mainstream environmental movement. 'We know that Mr. Kaczynski has never advocated letting tens of millions of people die of malaria just to establish his environmentalist bona fides and advance his lucrative non-profit and he never collaborated with crimes against humanity by hawking forced abortions, sterilizations, and infanticide in China and India. We know the difference between Mr. Kaczynski and the mainstream environmentalist movement-- we know the difference between murder and genocide', officials at the Heartland Institute said.

The Institute also pointed out that Mr. Kaczynski, unlike global warming alarmists, has never peddled junk science in an effort to gain personal power and enrichment. He has never committed scientific fraud nor has he rigged peer review nor admitted to manipulating data to hide temperature decline nor fraudulently made historical warming periods disappear nor violated Freedom of Information Act laws.

The Institute pointed out that it didn't mean to insult Mr. Kaczynski, and acknowledged that comparing Kaczynski to mainstream environmental organizations was 'way over the top'.

Kaczynsky has retained counsel, and has indicated that he may sue for defamation.  

Barack Obama 60%; Keith Judd 40%

West Virginia had its Democratic presidential primary this week. With 83% of the precincts reporting, President Obama won, but it wasn't a walk. The runner-up, Keith Judd, got 40% of the Democrat vote, an astonishingly large vote for an unknown challenger to an incumbent president.

Who is Keith Judd?

Keith Judd is a repeat candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination. He ran for president in the Democrat primary in Idaho in 2008. He got 1.7% of the vote. He also claims to have run for mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico and for governor of New Mexico. He currently lives in Texas.

What does he do for a living, besides run for president and almost beat President Obama in the West Virginia Democratic primary? He makes license plates, mostly.

Judd is an inmate in the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Beaumont, Texas. He is a felon who has been convicted of "mailing a threatening communication with intent to extort money or something of value" and was sentenced to 210 months in federal prison.

Bottom line: in the West Virginia Democrat presidential primary this week, 40% of Democrats preferred an imprisoned felon over President Obama.

Perhaps it was an error-- voting for a machine Chicago politician isn't all that different from voting for a felon.

It's going to be an interesting election. 

Michael Barone on Elizabeth 'Vanilla Squaw' Warren

Michael Barone has a great post on the affirmative action fraud perpetrated by Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Excerpt:

... what may undermine racial quotas and preferences most effectively is ridicule. For isn't the idea that the blond, blue-eyed Warren suffered some terrible disadvantage and is in need of special preference because she is 1-32nd Cherokee just laugh-out-loud funny?

It seems not to have troubled Warren at all that by flopping her paste-white derriere in her endowed Harvard chair she necessarily displaced a genuine "minority" applicant who maybe had a little more than 3% Cherokee genome, even the rare applicant who perhaps might have faced some actual adversity due to their particular heritage.

Elizabeth Warren is an uncommonly smarmy practitioner of the affirmative action con-game. She used it for personal gain, unconcerned about who she walked over to get her sinecure, and she now dissembles, calls critics "anti-woman", and whines about getting caught-out as a hypocrite. 

Did I tell you that she was a liberal Democrat? You probably already guessed that.

Affirmative action is racial sifting and the bestowal of favors and impediments based on race. In other words, affirmative action is racism. Ms. Warren's affirmative action ruse is a particularly repellent form of racism-- particularly repellent because it lacks the only positive attribute racism can have, which is honesty.

The parasites feast on Detroit

Walter Russell Mead has a great essay on the political corruption that has destroyed Detroit.

Excerpt:

There is something profoundly wrong with an American political culture that accepts chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It is not OK; the people who do these things may call themselves liberal Democrats and wear the mantle of defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions place them among the most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak. 

American cities have been festering pits of graft and bad governance since at least the early 19th century, but there is a difference between the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction practiced by some of today’s urban machines. Today’s situation, in which some city machines are so dysfunctional that the parasite is literally killing the host (and not just in Detroit), is new and, again, the most vulnerable in our society suffer the worst consequences. Minority children are the greatest ultimate victims of this loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and grow up in decaying, unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs and no opportunity for the young.

Liberal Democrats love the poor, like ticks love blood.