Paul Ryan

Walter Russell Mead has a fine essay on Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate for vice-president.

Excerpt:

With Governor Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, the vague contours of the presidential race have suddenly become sharper. Up until now, partly because Romney’s image has been so fuzzy, we were looking at a referendum on President Obama rather than a clear-cut contest between political philosophies. Now, given Ryan’s prominence as a budget hawk and entitlement reformer, the public has a choice to make...

2012 looks like an election between two united parties who will both be enthusiastic and both be convinced that the fate of the nation hangs on the November result. That’s a good thing, on the whole, for the country. Whatever else can be said about our electoral politics, nobody can argue that they are inconsequential or that real issues have disappeared. This is a serious election about important affairs and the two sides will both be offering a coherent vision of American values that allows voters to make a clear choice.

But if both parties are offering a clear vision of their values, I’m not yet sure that either party has what the voters want most. From the Democrats, they want some idea about how the entitlement state and the blue social model more broadly can actually be preserved. The fiscal trajectory does not look good; how exactly do Democrats plan to pay for all the programs they want to protect and extend?

From the GOP, they want something else. How is this new economy going to work? How will middle class Americans benefit from all these tax and spending cuts? What will the GOP put in place of Obamacare and the current entitlement program? Appeals to capitalist ideology and American exceptionalism are all very well and they will likely hold the GOP base together and deliver high turnout, but to win over swing voters, Romney and Ryan will likely have to come up with a little bit more in the way of showing how Americans can still get the benefits they most want and need from a shrinking and fiscally sustainable federal government.

Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan may or may not help him in the Electoral College. But the selection has made this a better election, clarifying the issues and giving the country something more consequential than attack ads and gaffes to think about. We will have to wait and see whether Governor Romney helped himself with this choice; he has, however, helped the country and that seems like a good start.

I really like Ryan. He's a brilliant honest conservative with guts. He's also a devout pro-life Catholic-- what's not to like? He insists that we confront and solve our nation's fiscal problems-- problems that threaten to destroy our democracy and our freedoms if they are allowed to grow unchecked. Unlike so many politicians, Ryan is a man of courage and integrity.

The Democrats will savage him. He has a very clear long public record, and the left will use every weapon it can imagine to destroy the man. There will be commercials of an actor who looks like Ryan pushing grandma off a cliff, poor people starving while an actor who looks like Ryan laughs, etc. The politics will be filthy. They have already run an ad accusing Romney of killing a woman because of his work at Bain. They will try to eviscerate Ryan. And the mainstream media, in the thrall of a 24-7 Obama-orgasm, will offer their free services in the ad campaign. It will be ugly.

But Romney's courageous choice means that this will be a consequential election. The choice is stark. It speaks well of Romney that he has the insight and the guts to nominate Ryan.

The election will be a war, but highly educational and fascinating. Expect all the ugliness the left can muster to be on full display. But there will be some delightful entertainment.

I can't wait. 

Christian winter

William Dalrymple has an insightful essay on the increasing repression of Christians in the Middle East.
 
Excerpt:

Wherever you go in the Middle East today, you see the Arab Spring rapidly turning into the Christian winter. 

The past few years have been catastrophic for the region's beleaguered 14-million strong Christian minority. 

In Egypt, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood has been accompanied by anti-Coptic riots and intermittent bouts of church-burning. On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Christians are emigrating fast as they find themselves caught between Benjamin Netanyahu's pro-settler government and their increasingly radicalised and pro-Hamas Sunni Muslim neighbours. Most catastrophically, in Iraq, two thirds of the Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam. 

It was Syria that took in many of the 250,000 Christians driven out of Iraq. Anyone who visited Damascus in recent years could see lounging in every park and sitting in every teahouse the unshaven Iraqi Christian refugees driven from their homes by the sectarian mayhem that followed the end of the Baathist state. They were bank managers and engineers, pharmacists and businessmen - all living with their extended families in one-room flats on what remained of their savings and assisted by the charity of the different churches.

"Before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim," I was told on a recent visit by Shamun Daawd, a liquor-store owner who fled Baghdad after he received Islamist death threats. I met him at the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus, where he had come to collect the rent money the Patriarchate provided for the refugees. "Under Saddam no one asked you your religion and we used to attend each other's religious services," he said. "Now at least 75 per cent of my Christian friends have fled."

Whatever leeway Christians in the Middle East had under the boot of the Religion of Peace is slipping away. The Islamist revolutions are drawing the curtain of Islamic totalitarianism over beleaguered religious minorities. Jews are already nothing but targets as far as Islamists are concerned, and Christians are heading into that category.

I think that our invasion of Iraq was a serious mistake, although I supported it at the time. We tipped that balance of power to the radical Islamists-- as evil as Saddam was, he was no Islamist. I believe that the "Arab Spring" is just a ridiculous idiot liberal phrase for an Islamic totalitarian awakening.

Islam is not the threat to mankind that Communism was, but it is a threat, and it must be confronted. I don't believe that military confrontation is generally the best choice, although Islamic military prowess is a joke. They are no match for the West in military conflict, and have not been since Vienna and Lepanto.

Islam, in conjunction with the boot-licking secular left, is an enormous cultural, political and demographic threat to the West.  I believe that a full-throated political, economic, and cultural confrontation of Islam by Christians is needed.

Christian culture is far superior in every way to secular and Islamic culture, and we need to say so unabashedly. And we need to fight for Christian culture with every peaceful means at our disposal.

Please pray for our Christian (and Jewish) brethren in the Middle East, in this time of great peril. 

Urban dictionary defines "Harry Reid" as a sexual position

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has been immortalized in the Urban Dictionary.

Under Reid's leadership, the Democrat-controlled Senate has failed to pass a budget for the past four consecutive years.

The Urban Dictionary defines "Harry Reid" as "a sexual position where you climb on top and then do absolutely nothing."

If everything came from nothing, and God is nothing, then...

"Nothing" Himself, as in "everything came from..."

There's nothing funnier than an atheist scientist dipping his toe in metaphysics.

Recently atheist physicist Lawerence Krauss got pwned by... Stephen Colbert. Krauss has argued emphatically that science has proven that the universe came from "nothing".

From Philip Clayton:

The perfect example of this debate was played out in a Colbert interview with Lawrence Krauss recently; it's worth re-watching in the wake of the Higgs. Krauss, the New Atheist, touts his new book, "A Universe from Nothing." There are three kinds of nothing, he insists, and according to the laws of quantum mechanics, each one left to itself will produce the something that we see around us. "It sounds like the ultimate free lunch," Krauss admits, but there you have it; it's just science. "The universe is more remarkable than the fairy tales that were talked about by Bronze Age illiterate peasants."


"Why does it have to be an attack on my God?" Colbert asks. "There's just no evidence for God," replies Krauss, "All I've said is that you don't need Him." Colbert, as always, gets the last word, however. Suppose that something always comes from nothing. "If there is no God, no 'thing' called God, if He is nothing," concludes Colbert, then by your own theory "can't something come from Him?"

If everything came from nothing, and God is nothing, then...

I love this stuff. We Christians should pay atheists to publicly debate metaphysics. 

"Let me see you adopt one of those ugly black babies"

A Charlotte North Carolina abortionist lets it all hang out in this confrontation with pro-life demonstrators.

More at Hot Air.

Excerpt:

Charlotte abortionist Ashutosh Ron Virmani was caught on camera telling pro-lifers to “adopt one of those ugly black babies.” … 

Virmani defended his practice of abortion as an effort to save taxpayers money and prevent crime. “I as a taxpayer do not wish to pay for those babies to be born and brought up; and kill those people in Colorado,” he said in reference to the Colorado theatre killer. 

Notably, the Colorado killer who killed 13 and injured 58 moviegoers was a physically healthy white male born to a middle-class couple.

The abortion movement is a eugenic/racist project, with a thin patina of "women's rights, etc". Non-white babies in the U.S. are aborted at three times the rate of white children. Planned Parenthood clinics  have always been heavily sited in minority neighborhoods.

The abortion movement is so vile that it's other motive-- massive profits-- actually makes it look good, compared with its transparently eugenic and racist motives.

A cesspool, paid for by you and me via public funding of Planned Parenthood. 

We need a giant cultural condom

From Sunny Hundal at the New Statesman:

The left cannot remain silent over "honour killings"

We have become complicit in this epidemic of abuse and violence by not doing more to challenge it.

The murder of the teenager Shafilea Ahmed is likely to stand out in British history as a particularly gruesome example of what we now refer to as "honour killings". Shafilea had warned that her parents were trying to marry her off to Pakistan; others knew she had sustained injuries from beatings by her parents; she had even tried to commit suicide in Pakistan. But right until the end, her own life was fated to be out of her control - she went missing in 2003 and her dismembered body was found a year later.
Shafilea's case wasn't a one-off. It took eight years for the murderers of the Sikh woman Surjit Athwal - her own husband and mother-in-law - to be brought to justice in 2007. It took ten years for Mehmet Goren to be jailed, in 2009, for murdering his daughter Tulay, because she fell in love with an older man of a different Muslim sect. Last year Gurmeet Singh Ubhi was found guilty of murdering his 24 year old daughter Amrit because the Sikh girl was dating a white man. There are others too - Heshu Yones, Banaz Mahmod, Nuziat Khan - the list of women murdered in the UK over their "honour" is depressingly long. 

Any decent person would be angry and sad when presented with these names. But it isn't enough to be sad: we have become complicit in this epidemic of abuse and violence by not doing more to challenge it. This should be a left-wing cause célèbre but instead there is an embarrassed silence. Left-wing activists robustly challenge racism and homophobia - so why isn't more being done to stand up to this social evil?...

There is a patronising attitude at work here, too: well-meaning liberals have been known to assume forced marriages and such abuse are an inherent part of Asian culture and therefore must be left alone. A few months ago, activist Jasvinder Sanghera's charity Karma Nirvana convinced a teacher in East London to put up posters at the school that said: "Forced Marriage is Abuse Not Cultural". But the posters were taken down and the charity was told the head was concerned they would upset Muslim parents.

Honor killings are the penultimate war on women (femicide by abortion and female infanticide is the ultimate war).

Note that both both honor killings and femicide are treated by the left with virtual silence, and in fact in important ways are abetted by the left. China's totalitarian One-Child Policy-- which, along with communism, is the most egregious crime against humanity since the Holocaust-- has been championed by the left, and much of the rationale for it was advanced in the 1970's by prominent scientists and population-control fanatics. John Holdren, President Obama's senior science advisor, is the most powerful scientist in the United States, and has in extensive writings in the past advocated forced abortions and mass involuntary sterilizations.

Although Holdren now claims to not support coercive population control measures, he has been virtually silent on the abuse of science to justify totalitarian population-control schemes. In fact, leftist scientists like Holdren have been instrumental in laying the theoretical groundwork that is used to justify such policies. The Catholic News Service notes:

Coercive population control measures, including forced sterilizations and abortions, have been used in China’s one-child policy. In Peru in the 1990s, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the United Nations Population Fund provided support for what became an involuntary sterilization program which victimized an estimated 300,000 women.

On honor-killings, the left has been notably unwilling to criticize the religious and cultural practices of the primary cause of honor killings in the West-- Islam.  When was the last time you heard a leftist refer to honor killings as a "war on women"? When was the last time you heard a leftie mayor at a ground-breaking ceremony for a government-funded mosque excoriate Muslims for their degradation and violence against women? Against gays?

Birds chirping.

The double-standard of the left regarding Islam and Christianity is breath-taking. As I have noted before, Islam represents a very serious threat to the West. It has a very poor record on human rights.

The left is an even more serious threat. It has not a shred of genuine morality. It is the ideology of power, abetted by relativism. Leftism (and its metaphysical correlate-- atheism) is like AIDS, inflicted on a society. It stirs racial hate for naked political reasons, and it is largely responsible for the disintegration of the family in many parts of our society. The left is almost wholly responsible for gun violence in the United States. Nearly all gun violence in the U.S. is committed by people in leftist-Democrat municipalities-- violence committed by leftist Democrats against leftist Democrats in municipalities governed by leftist Democrats.

The left kills by weakening a culture's resistance to diseases like violence and family disintegration.

We need a giant cultural condom to protect us from the left.

Mouthpiece for huge politically influential corporate oligarchy complains about huge politically influential corporate oligarchies

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow has an essay decrying voter I.D. laws and the political influence of huge corporations.

Blow:

First, there’s the specter of the oligarchy lingering over this election, which disproportionately benefits Republicans. According to a report by Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, “So far this year, 26 billionaires have donated more than $61 million to super PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that’s only what has been publicly disclosed.” That didn’t include “about $100 million that Sheldon Adelson has said that he is willing to spend to defeat President Obama; or the $400 million that the Koch brothers have pledged to spend during the 2012 election season.” 

During a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Sanders put it this way: “What the Supreme Court did in Citizens United is to say to these same billionaires and the corporations they control: ‘You own and control the economy; you own Wall Street; you own the coal companies; you own the oil companies. Now, for a very small percentage of your wealth, we’re going to give you the opportunity to own the United States government.’ ”

It's not true that Mr. Blow lent his name to coin the word 'bloviate', but the belief is understandable.

Mr. Blow writes for the New York Times Corporation, a 150 year-old media empire ("oligarchy" wouldn't do it justice) with total assets of $3.286 billion and annual revenues of $2.393 billion.

Here is a list of the assets the Times owns:

Newspapers and radio 

New York Times Media Group
New York Times' marquee newspapers.
International Herald Tribune of Paris, FranceThe New York Times of New York City[edit]New England Media Group
Two of the three largest-circulation newspapers in Massachusetts, purchased in 1993 (Boston) and 1999 (Worcester). This group also includes boston.com.
The Boston Globe of Boston, MassachusettsTelegram & Gazette of Worcester, Massachusetts[edit]Former assets
[edit]Regional Media Group
Thirteen dailies and one weekly newspaper primarily in the Southern United States, including titles in Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina.
The Gadsden Times of Gadsden, AlabamaThe Tuscaloosa News of Tuscaloosa, AlabamaPetaluma Argus-Courier of Petaluma, California (weekly)
The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, CaliforniaThe Gainesville Sun of Gainesville, FloridaThe Ledger of Lakeland, FloridaSarasota Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, FloridaStar-Banner of Ocala, FloridaThe Courier of Houma, LouisianaThe Daily Comet of Thibodaux, LouisianaThe Dispatch of Lexington, North CarolinaTimes-News of Hendersonville, North CarolinaThe Star-News of Wilmington, North CarolinaSpartanburg Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, South Carolina[edit]Joint ventures
Fenway Sports Group (7%)
Boston Red SoxFenway ParkLiverpool Football ClubFenway Sports ManagementNew England Sports Network (NESN) (80%)
Roush Fenway Racing (50%)
Donohue Malbaie, Inc. (49%) with Abitibi-ConsolidatedMadison Paper Industries (40%) in Madison, Maine

The New York Times is without question the most politically influential media conglomerate in the world, rivaled only by the BBC.

So to what exactly does Mr. Blow object? Huge rich conglomerates getting involved in politics? It seems he finds it unacceptable that other huge politically influential corporations participate in the political process, especially it seems if the interlopers support Republican causes (something never even mentioned at New York Times' soirees, unless the servants passing the hors d'oeuvres bring it up indiscreetly.)

It seems that a few evil conservative billionaires are exercising their constitutional rights, and Mr. Blow believes that participation in the public sphere is not for the nouveau riche.

Blow scolds 26 billionaires and Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers for their Republican political activism. The left is decidedly disadvantaged, funded only via Democrat public relations firms like ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and the overwhelming majority of print media, Hollywood, all public and private unions, and by poor folks like George Soros, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and tiny organizations like the Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and on and on.

Blow is not merely angry with political involvement by corporations who don't share his views. He's really steamed at Republican legislatures (with my commentary):

Then, of course, there’s the widespread voter suppression mostly enacted by Republican-led legislatures. 

Actually, we voter suppressors call them 'Voter ID laws'.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, at least 180 restrictive voting bills were introduced since the beginning of 2011 in 41 states, and “16 states have passed restrictive voting laws that have the potential to impact the 2012 election” because they “account for 214 electoral votes, or nearly 79 percent of the total needed to win the presidency.” 

Democrats complaining about voter ID laws are like burglars complaining about home alarm systems. Audacious, but understandable.

A provision most likely to disenfranchise voters is a requirement that people show photo identification to vote. 

We need photo ID to do many things, including fly on a plane and enter the headquarters of the New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, etc., etc. (you get the point).

The Democratic National Convention this year will also require photo-ids.

Why shouldn't voting-- the most important process in our democracy-- require photo id?

Millions of Americans don’t have these forms of ID, and many can’t easily obtain them, even when states say they’ll offer them free, because getting the documentation to obtain the “free” ID takes time and money. 

Some voters won't get ID even if it's free and the state passes them out?

Surely most of these poor people are getting some form of government check for something. That's free and the state passes it out.

And we don't even ask them for ID?

This is a solution in search of a problem. The in-person voter ID requirements only prevent someone from impersonating another voter at the polls, an occurrence that the Brennan Center points out is “more rare than being struck by lightning.” 

"A solution in search of a problem"? Here's a problem. Oh, here too. And here.

The voting rights advocates I’ve talked to don’t resist all ID requirements (though they don’t say they are all necessary, either). They simply say that multiple forms of identification like student ID and Social Security cards should also be accepted, and that alternate ways for people without IDs to vote should be included. Many of these laws don’t allow for such flexibility. 

So change the laws to allow flexibility. But it's outrageous to allow someone to vote if we don't even know who they are.

Make no mistake about it, these requirements are not about the integrity of the vote but rather the disenfranchisement of voters. This is about tilting the table so that more of the marbles roll to the Republican corner. 

We're trying to disenfranchise the dead, people who've already voted 1,937 times today, and Disney characters, mainly.

Asking people for ID is not disenfranchisement of voters. Allowing people to vote illegally, and thus nullify the votes of legal voters, is disenfranchisement of voters.

Look at it this way: We have been moving toward wider voter participation for a century. States began to issue driver’s licenses more than a century ago and began to include photos on those licenses decades ago. Yet, as the Brennan Center points out, “prior to the 2006 election, no state required its voters to show government-issued photo ID at the polls (or elsewhere) in order to vote.” 

And there's been an epidemic of fraud.

Furthermore, most voter laws have emerged in the last two years. What is the difference between previous decades and today?

We found out about the fraud. We're fighting back.

The election of Barack Obama.

Oh. We're racists. Sorry.

It is no coincidence that some of the people least likely to have proper IDs to vote are the ones that generally vote Democratic and were strong supporters of Obama last election: young people, the poor and minorities. 

And the dead and Disney characters, who form the fourth and fifth legs of the Democrat base.

Republicans are leveraging the deep pockets of anti-Obama billionaires and sinister voter suppression tactics that harken back to Jim Crow to wrest power from the hands of docile Democrats. 

Blow is confused. Jim Crow laws didn't "wrest power from docile Democrats".

Democrats-- the party of slavery, the KKK, segregation, and black voter suppression-- wrote the Jim Crow laws, to protect Democrat hegemony. Jim Crow the legal structure enforced by the Democrat party (Mr. Blow's party) in the only part of the country that was solid Democrat (the South) for a century.

Most blacks in the Jim Crow South were Republicans.

Now Democrats are opposing voter ID laws, implicitly advocating the suppression of legal voters, to protect Democrat hegemony and steal elections from Republicans

Just like before.

The Democratic Party has a strong sense of tradition.

[edit]