CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS

That marriage laws can only be protected by a constitutional amendment is a great example of how the legislative and executive branches are in defensive mode against the courts. We're living in a time where the people have to put together a supermajority to protect an institution because a few powerful judges can do as they wish with the law.

But even a constitutional amendment isn't a guarantee of anything. Political Correctness on government funded college campuses has all but ruined the free exchange of ideas that were supposed to be the basis of the First Amendment. The arbitrary ban on assault weapons, guns that were used in less than 2% of crimes but look scary, is an infringement of the second amendment. The tenth amendment plan for the federal government to leave state governments alone was gone with the New Deal.

Speaking of the Tenth Amendment, I've heard a lot of liberals argue the Tenth Amendment when it comes to gay marriage. They don't ever make this argument for abortion, though it's a natural for the Tenth. States like California and Mass. are passing laws that forbid gay marriage, and they are being ignored by the courts in those states. The courts won't leave anyone alone.

It's the downfall of decisions like Brown versus the Board of Education. The court was right that there was a problem with school integration, but they overstepped their boundaries by trying to fix the problem themselves. You can get tired and weary of the slow going legislative branch, but they're elected and answer to the people. What kind of representative government do we have if the legislative body is ignored in favor of an unelected minority?

When bodies are allowed to overstep to solve a "crisis" they only have to suggest a crisis the next time they want to overstep. Now our elected representatives think they have to propose amendments to the constitution to stave off anticipated decisions from courts that they fear. Why is it that the courts are so much wiser? Can't they make bad decisions?

The court in Kerry country is ready to ignore the law passed by the legislature. The California courts won't uphold the marriage protection law. Instead they're allowing the fiasco continue in San Francisco against the referendum passed by the citizens. The legislative branches will probably enact some sort of civil union compromise that will solve the problem if the courts focus on upholding the laws on the books. Where are all the critics of Judge Roy Moore now?

Why do the people who refused to let the United Nations set American policy allow unelected judges to write legislation from the bench? Isn't that why we got rid of the king?

Instapundit has a nice little point to make:

ALBRIGHT LIED -- PEOPLE DIED:

THE HAGUE -- The prosecution in Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial moved yesterday to rest its case two days early as the chief prosecutor conceded her team had not produced "the smoking gun" to convict the former Yugoslav president of genocide, the most serious charge against him.

No doubt we'll see handwringing, doubts about intelligence reliability, and charges that the Clinton Administration "sexed up" intelligence and misrepresented

Milosevic as a genocidal dictator in order to build support for unilateral action that even Wesley Clark called technically illegal -- but justified on the basis of an "imminent threat" of genocide, one that is now, of course, completely undermined by the absence of a "smoking gun." Massive criticism of the Clinton Administration's warmaking, which landed us in a "Balkan quagmire" from which we have yet to extricate ourselves, is sure to ensue.

Yeah, right, that's going to happen.

SOCIAL SECURITY CRISIS?

Greenspan told Congress on Wednesday that soaring budget deficits from out-of-control entitlement programs could lead to a "very debilitating" rise in interest rates and threaten the economy in coming years.

Democratic front-runner Sen. John Kerry said the way to address the deficit was to roll back tax cuts for the wealthy and "the wrong way to cut the deficit is to cut Social Security benefits. If I'm president, we're simply not going to do it."

If you developed a pyramid scheme through the mail using the rules of Social Security, you would be arrested for mail fraud. Only fools and drunks think this system is solvent. I won't ever see any of the money I poured into it.

You have to love Kerry's solution. There's not a problem in the world that can't be solved by raising a rich person's taxes. It’s getting tired, though. Let’s make the rich dress up like working class people and stand in line at the DMV. Then they can make us a sandwich and mow our lawn.

KERRY AND THE POW/MIA COVERUP

From the Village Voice. . .

The stated purpose of the special Senate committee—which convened in mid 1991 and concluded in January 1993—was to investigate the evidence about prisoners who were never returned and find out what happened to the missing men. Committee chair Kerry's larger and different goal, though never stated publicly, emerged over time: He wanted to clear a path to normalization of relations with Hanoi. In any other context, that would have been an honorable goal. But getting at the truth of the unaccounted for P.O.W.'s and M.I.A.'s (Missing In Action) was the main obstacle to normalization—and therefore in conflict with his real intent and plan of action.

Kerry denied back then that he disguised his real goal, contending that he supported normalization only as a way to learn more about the missing men. But almost nothing has emerged about these prisoners since diplomatic and economic relations were restored in 1995, and thus it would appear—as most realists expected—that Kerry's explanation was hollow.

What was the body of evidence that prisoners were held back? A short list would include more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live U.S. prisoners; nearly 14,000 secondhand reports; numerous intercepted Communist radio messages from within Vietnam and Laos about American prisoners being moved by their captors from one site to another; a series of satellite photos that continued into the 1990s showing clear prisoner rescue signals carved into the ground in Laos and Vietnam, all labeled inconclusive by the Pentagon; multiple reports about unacknowledged prisoners from North Vietnamese informants working for U.S. intelligence agencies, all ignored or declared unreliable; persistent complaints by senior U.S. intelligence officials (some of them made publicly) that live-prisoner evidence was being suppressed; and clear proof that the Pentagon and other keepers of the "secret" destroyed a variety of files over the years to keep the P.O.W./M.I.A. families and the public from finding out and possibly setting off a major public outcry.

What did Kerry do in furtherance of the cover-up? An overview would include the following: He allied himself with those carrying it out by treating the Pentagon and other prisoner debunkers as partners in the investigation instead of the targets they were supposed to be. In short, he did their bidding. When Defense Department officials were coming to testify, Kerry would have his staff director, Frances Zwenig, meet with them to "script" the hearings—as detailed in an internal Zwenig memo leaked by others. Zwenig also advised North Vietnamese officials on how to state their case. Further, Kerry never pushed or put up a fight to get key government documents unclassified; he just rolled over, no matter how obvious it was that the documents contained confirming data about prisoners.

A year after he issued the committee report, on the night of January 26, 1994, Kerry was on the Senate floor pushing through a resolution calling on President Clinton to lift the 19-year-old trade embargo against Vietnam. In the debate, Kerry belittled the opposition, saying that those who still believed in abandoned P.O.W.'s were perpetrating a hoax. "This process," he declaimed, "has been led by a certain number of charlatans and exploiters, and we should not allow fiction to cloud what we are trying to do here."

Kerry's resolution passed, by a vote of 62 to 38. Sadly for him, the passage of ten thousand resolutions cannot make up for wants in a man's character.

Let's hear from Senator McCain on this.

HOW THE DEMOCRATS STOPPED DEAN

As The Washington Post reported on Feb. 11, a group called Americans for Jobs & Healthcare spent $500,000 on ads attacking Dean in the run-up to the primaries. The Post said the group was headed by David Jones, a longtime adviser to Gephardt. It said the group's spokesman was Robert Gibbs, who had previously been working for the Kerry campaign. And where did the money come from? According to the Post, disgraced former Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, a Kerry supporter, gave $50,000.

By the time the Iowa caucuses arrived, the attacks and the spendthrift Mr. Trippi had taken their toll. And then came The Scream -- which wasn't really a scream but just a weary man in a noisy room trying to rally his troops. In one wild night, Dean had been stopped. He hadn't been allowed to try to take back the country. And, more important, he hadn't taken back the Democratic Party. It remained safe in the soft, manicured hands of the Teddy Kennedys, Bill Clintons, Terry McAuliffes, John Sweeneys, and, yes, John Kerrys of the political world. And Howard Dean became Howard the Duck.

It would have been refreshing to have a liberal candidate that admitted he was a liberal candidate.

CITIZEN KERRY

WinterSoldier.com has a bunch of stuff about Kerry and his anti-war activity. It's bookmarked on the left column now. It's worth surfing through. I found some funny stuff about Doonesbury making fun of Kerry in 1971 and contrasting that with Trudeau’s praise of the same man today. This particular article, explains how much of the supposed atrocities were pure theatre.

Kerry described the Winter Soldier event in Detroit as “an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” The veterans, said Kerry, “had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

But strangely, all those horrific accounts of rape, torture, arson and slaughter that the VVAW had recorded in Detroit seemed to evaporate once the real investigation demanded by Senator Hatfield began. As recounted in Guenter Lewy's 1978 book “America in Vietnam,” few witnesses agreed to talk with military investigators, even after being assured that they would not be asked about their own crimes. Many of those who did permit interviews turned out never to have been in combat. Some of the most gruesome claims came from men who were imposters using the names of real Vietnam veterans. One Marine who had been in combat eventually told investigators that a member of the Nation of Islam had helped prepare his statement, and admitted that he had never witnessed any of the atrocities he had testified to in Detroit. In the end, the Navy was unable to verify any of the hundreds of war crimes alleged by the Winter Soldier Investigation. Neither has anyone else during the 33 years since, including journalists, historians, and military and Congressional investigators.

We'll spend a week talking about Bush's attendance record in the National Guard, but who is out there asking Kerry to verify the atrocities he claimed in 1971? It's pretty much assumed that Kerry saw none of this, but was reading from a script.

This could be a really fun dirty campaign on both sides if the media would just take turns playing up the discrepancies.

NADER

I don't think Nader will make a big difference in this race. It was easy for Conservatives to embrace protest candidates like Perot or even Buchanan when they were in power. Liberals having Clinton in office might naturally want to overextend and go for Nader in 2000. When you're out of power you usually disregard the cranks and vote for the guy you think will defeat the enemy. That's why Republicans chose Bush in 2000. There wasn't even much of a primary. It was more or less a coronation with John McCain hanging on for dear life. It's also why Kerry is being chosen this time around. Edwards is losing because they want a nominee quickly to do battle with Bush. Nader hasn't been listening.

REFLECTING ON THE PRIMARIES

These last four weeks have convinced me that the primary season is an inefficient way of finding a nominee. Kerry has won practically everything because he nabbed a surprise win in Iowa. The main reason he wins primaries is that he is "electable" according to the exit polls. Maybe he is a better candidate than Howard Dean, but only because he doesn't have the honesty of Howard Dean.

The key to Kerry's candidacy is convincing voters that he isn't a liberal. The beauty of Dean is that he defended who he was. A Dean nomination would have staved off any potential Ralph Nader run, which might negate any impact Kerry could win from moderates. In other words, the more Kerry moves to the middle, the more likely that Nader gets into the race.

I'm convinced that Dean isn't as liberal as Kerry. Dean played up the liberal message as a way to raise money and get grass roots Democrats on his bandwagon. Kerry always had an eye on the general election voting for things like the war in Iraq so that he couldn't be marginalized when the United States won the war. Dean has always been a defender of the second amendment, which is really a bold stand inside his party, especially from a northeastern liberal perspective. I always thought his anti-war talk was a natural way to separate himself from other candidates like Gephardt, Kerry and Lieberman that voted for the war. The war was unpopular among died in the wool Democrats and Dean found a natural constituency.

Joe Lieberman was the only candidate in the race that was as moderate as portrayed. If anything, Joe was probably more moderate than he played. Clark is probably not a flaming liberal either, but he has no record on which to judge it.

Edwards, Dean and Kerry are three peas in a pod. Now that the candidates are down to two, the only real policy difference between Kerry and Edwards is trade, which Kerry is quickly trying to change position on that. The Democrats are making a big mistake if they nominate the waffling smug Kerry over the more consistent affable Edwards. If Kerry wins he can thank the momentum he got from Iowa. Voters in other states jumped on the Kerry bandwagon to deny the shaky Dean, but in the meantime ignored Edwards. Had Edwards won in Iowa, he'd probably be winning all of the primaries instead, and the Democrats would have a better general election candidate.

You could argue that Kerry is whom voters think can best defeat Bush, but I think momentum and not message helped Kerry. Edwards connects with people much better. The pundits keep saying that when voters meet both men in person they like Edwards the best. If the Kerry vote was just a way to deny the unelectable Dean, then Edwards may have a real chance to rack up some wins in a one on one race.

ZOGBY SEES DIVIDED NATION

Democrat John Kerry would edge George W. Bush 46% to 45% in the “blue states” – or states won by Al Gore in the 2000 election. In the “red states,” or states won by George W. Bush in 2000, however, Bush wins handily by a 51% to 39% margin.

Voters gave Bush a decided edge when asked who would do a better job of dealing with Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gaddafi, North Korea and Iran. Bush was the clear choice among Red State voters (53%) and Blue State votes (47%). Only 31% of Red State voters and 35% of Blue State voters felt Kerry would do a better job in dealing with rogue states and leaders.

You can see why the Democrats are questioning Bush's service record. They don't think they can win the election if the defining issue is the war. And since all of the other issues combined seem meaningless compared to the safety of the nation, Kerry has selling to do.

THE NEXT PLAGUE

I tend to ignore sky is falling rhetoric, but this interesting none the less.

According to one molecular biologist who should know, there are already 20,000 labs in the world where a single person will be able to synthesize any existing virus within the next decade. In the same 20,000 labs, five people with $2 million will be able to create an enhanced pathogen -- meaning a virus that could infect people who have been immunized with conventional vaccines -- and kill perhaps a billion of them. With an additional $3 million, the same five people could build a lab from scratch, using equipment purchased online.

The threat, then, is not merely from the diseases we know about -- anthrax, smallpox, plague -- but from the diseases that haven't been invented yet. The threat is also coming from a new kind of science that by its very its nature is not susceptible to traditional forms of control. DNA cannot be monitored in the way enriched uranium can. It isn't possible to distinguish "safe" lines of biological engineering research from "dangerous" ones, since they are identical.

Most of the people in general don't worry about problems they haven't got the vocabulary to discuss, which allows most of the politicians to ignore them most of the time. The fact that this subject isn't part of our regularly scheduled programming itself indicates how far we, as a country, are from grappling with the diseases that will be invented a few years from now.

OSAMA and SADDAM

Bill Safire has found another smoking gun in the Al Qaeda and Saddam partnership. But better than that, he scorns the critics.

The notion that these serial killers are not central players in the global network that attacked us — that the Ansar boss in Iraq must be found carrying an official Qaeda membership card signed by bin Laden — is simply silly.

DENNIS MILLER

I hadn't made an effort to see his new show, but found it twice last week surfing around. It's really intelligent and funny in ways that these kinds of shows have never been. He begins with a weekend update type funny take on the news. He then has an interesting guest. I saw Scott Ritter one night and Jon Bon Jovi another night. Then he has a panel of pundits talk about the news and politics. The show ends with him solo making some more jokes.

He had to be bleeped a couple of times during the broadcast but he apologized to the kids. All those years on HBO relaxed his inhibitions. I use to watch Bill O’Reilly everynight during the 2000 election, but he gets tiresome with the way he makes everything a crusade. He’s not entertaining like Rush. I now see the show maybe once a week. Hannity and Colmes books interesting guests, but there is hardly an unexpected moment in the show.

Maybe it’s just because Miller is new to those channels, but it seems that he is doing something different. Has anyone else seen it?

WIMPS AND BARBARIANS by Terrance Moore (Condensed by popular demand)

Here are some choice excerpts with a little commentary by me.

Moore says our educational and cultural systems, in an attempt at equality have neglected the needs of boys. Many boys reach the age of maturity and do not know what it means to be a man. They either exhibit unbridled machismo or pathetic self-pity.

One extreme suffers from an excess of manliness, or from misdirected and unrefined manly energies. The other suffers from a lack of manliness, a total want of manly spirit.

BARBARIANS
Today's barbarians act as though they never leave the playing field or the gym. They wear the same clothes, speak the same language (just as loudly), spit and scratch themselves just as much, whether on the field or off. More properly, nothing off the field matters to them, except perhaps sex, which they also treat as a game, and alcohol. As a result, they live almost a divided life. On the field, they can be serious, competitive, eager, and disciplined. Off the field, they are lazy, careless, disorganized, and disaffected.

Young males, of course, have always been rough around the edges. But in the past, their edges were smoothed, in part, by being introduced into female company. Boys learned to behave properly first from their mothers and later around other women and girls. They held open doors, pulled out chairs, stood up when a woman entered a room, stood up in public places to offer their seats, took off their hats in the presence of women, and carefully guarded their language so as not to offend the fair sex. All that is gone. In no other aspect of their conduct is barbarism more apparent among a large number of young men these days than in their treatment of women.

WIMPS
At the other extreme from true manliness is the wimp. Wimps are in many ways the opposite of barbarians. We would be mistaken, however, to classify wimps as simply young men without muscle. Often enough they are the stereotypical 98-pound weaklings who get sand kicked in their faces at the beach. But slightness of build and want of talent in sports do not make one a wimp.

If barbarians suffer from a misdirected manliness, wimps suffer from a want of manly spirit altogether. They lack what the ancient Greeks called thumos, the part of the soul that contains the assertive passions: pugnacity, enterprise, ambition, anger. Thumos compels a man to defend proximate goods: himself, his honor, his lady, his country; as well as universal goods: truth, beauty, goodness, justice.

Many of today's young men seem to have no fight in them at all. Not for them to rescue damsels in distress from the barbarians. Furthermore, wimps vote. As Aristotle pointed out, to the cowardly, bravery will seem more like rashness and foolhardiness than what it really is. Hence political and social issues that require bravery for their solution elicit only hand-wringing and half-measures from the wimps. Wimps are always looking for the easy way out.

A Summary of why he thinks boys are behaving this way. . .

Brave New World

The world has always had its share of wimps and barbarians. Throughout history and literature they have appeared under the names of rogues, scoundrels, boors, ne'er-do-wells, namby-pambies, fops, and macaroni men, to name a few. What needs explaining is why these two obviously defective character types have become so common, at times seeming like the norm.

The demanding regime of physical and moral instruction that used to turn boys into men and the larger cultural forces that supported that instruction have been systematically dismantled by a culture that ostensibly enables all individuals but in reality disables men.

Schools for Sissies

No less than at home, at school the boy encounters a world that thwarts any natural drive to become a true man. As Christina Hoff Sommers has shown, some schools are actively trying to remove any vestiges of traditional culture that work to the benefit and inspiration of boys: older forms of academic competition such as math and spelling bees, the preponderance of male heroes who can no longer outnumber female heroines, even school playgrounds and games like dodge ball. Even when schools are not deliberately trying to emasculate young boys, the world of education can appear feminized and overly pampering to young males. In elementary school, over 90 percent of the teachers are women. Having no decent curriculum to guide them, as is the case in most schools, these female teachers will quite innocently and unimaginatively choose books and assignments that do not appeal to boys in the least. The boy student will have to suffer through Charlotte's Web three or four times but never hear of Captains Courageous or Treasure Island or Sherlock Holmes.

I have to interject here. This was exactly my experience in school. Teachers read us Judy Blume and Heidi and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I grew up hating to read. Meanwhile, girls were checking out books at the library. I read some baseball biographies in Junior High School, but I was still sure that reading fiction was worthless.

In college I picked up the Maltese Falcon book, because I liked the movie. I realized that it wasn’t reading that I hated, but the stupid sissy stuff that was fed to me in elementary school. The male teachers assigned us decent books in High School like 1984 and LORD OF THE FLIES, but I read the Cliffs Notes instead, already positive that reading was a waste of time.

Rites of Passage

Finally, today's boys mill about their adolescent and post-adolescent years lacking any formal, approved rite of passage that would turn them into men.

While the opening up of commerce and industry to women has increased their economic freedom and equality, men have lost one more arena in which to prove themselves, as George Gilder has elegantly shown. Moreover, most of the jobs offered in the new economy hardly appeal to the spiritedness in man. Certainly, the military still beckons many spirited boys coming out of high school, but the entire armed services constitute less than one percent of the American population and must make room for a fair number of women in their ranks. In short, modern America lacks what virtually every society in the past has established and governed with great effort and concern: a proving ground for male youth seeking some legitimate expression of their erratic and as yet undisciplined spiritedness.

The recent statistics comparing girls' to boys' academic achievements worldwide demonstrate what any teacher in the country knows: that girls are achieving as never before and are outdistancing boys. Perhaps the kinder, gentler, nurturing, egalitarian, consultative, non-competitive approach to education and family has been a boon for girls. Yet what is good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander.

In essence, society isn’t going to turn young boys into responsible men. It’s geared towards inner feelings. This either causes a masculine backlash of barbarians, or hopeless wimpy men who don’t stand for anything. It's easy for a boy to become one or the other by default, but it takes effort to bring out the best in him. It's one of the reasons that many men seem without purpose and many women are unhappy with them.

DON'T BLAME THE CIA. BLAME THE CYA

CYA (Cover Your Ass) is the opposite of leadership. Leaders take bold moves to deal with a problems. Managers do the expected minimum. We've all seen this in the workplace.

The reaction to North Korea in 1994 was pure CYA. No one can say that Clinton didn't try to peacefully solve the problem. He has a treaty in hand to prove it. No one is asking Clinton why he thought that North Korea's past track record indicated they could be trusted. He did the minimum and faces no scrutiny.

Bush, instead took the war straight to the enemy, regardless of how many in the world and in this country would have been satisfied had Bush done the CYA alternative. The fallout is that he gets all kinds of scrutiny that the CYA Guy never gets. The dictator is now defeated, but somehow this is a worse alternative than the situation in North Korea. To George Soros, and internationalist liberals, the world is less safe now.

Bush used false pretenses -- by saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and implying a connection with al-Qaida -- to get the country to go to war, he said. "The invasion in Iraq has been a dismal failure,'' he said.

Contrary to the assertion that other rogue rulers might now fear the United States, he said he believes America is in a weaker position than before the invasion.

The world knows "we are not going to spend another $160 billion and sacrifice 500 lives to remove another heinous dictator,'' he said.

America needs to act as the leader of the free world to promote democracy, not simply as the world's only superpower. "You can't be the godfather of the world,'' he said.

I'm really baffled by the number of Americans that see the United States as a danger because it's the lone superpower. I'd certainly grant that many agencies within the government are corrupt, but those are the agencies that the same people usually see as the solution to the problems of mankind.

They'd like to see the kind of world where everyone gets along. They think the American super power is getting in the way. But would we really be better off with the butchers of Tiennaman Square competing with us?

What George Soros and other critics don't offer is the specifics of how to do it better than Bush. They want a peaceful world like the rest of us, but they don't know how to get there other than by begging rouge nations to be nice.

Wimps and Barbarians - by Terrance Moore LINK FIXED

For more than a decade I have been in a position to see young men in the making. As a Marine, college professor, and now principal of a K-12 charter school, I have deliberately tried to figure out whether the nation through its most important institutions of moral instruction—its families and schools—is turning boys into responsible young men. Young women, always the natural judges of the male character, say emphatically "No."

This is a long article, but I would recommend that my friends who have sons read the whole thing. It gets to the heart of a problem that’s really undiagnosed. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

It tastes like Chicken.

WHAT YEAR IS IT?

Between re-fighting Vietnam and the bimbo eruption, I'd think we were back in 1992.

It would be ironic if Hillary was behind Kerry's bimbo leak. Her career has been based on denying these things about her own husband and then getting sympathy when she herself is proved wrong. If Kerry were guilty he'd just admit it right and move on? After all, Clinton's dalliances led to his lying in court and he still got off easy.

But a number of things point to it being true. The U.K. Sun has unearthed the girl in question. The article says that there is no proof, though the girl will not comment. Hummm, I would think any accused bystander would comment.

Kerry has been harping on Bush for the bogus National Guard Story, and it's fun to see the heat on him for a while. Maybe now that they've both had their medicine, we can settle down and have a debate what we're going to do when we run out of money to fund these entitlements.

PATERNITY

A woman can choose to have a kid, but the man has no choice in whether to acknowledge the kid she decides to have. Paternity judgments are for the protection of children, but are abortion rights are for the protection of the mother. Fathers get to write checks. Women get protected for everything, children get protected if they manage birth, and men are protected if they are gay, I suppose.

That would make the hierarchy:

1. women
2. children
3. dogs
4. men

In California, they're kicking it up a notch further. Matt Welch writes in Reason Magazine about how the state is putting the burden of paternity proof on the father. A man can be ordered to pay thousands without the state offering any shred of evidence.

What Pierce didn’t realize, and what nearly 10 million American men have discovered to their chagrin since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, is that when the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn’t, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop -- even, in most cases, if there’s conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child’s father.

Welch goes on to talk about how California doesn't even have to prove a summons was delivered. Therefore, 30 days can come and go before a man even knows he was accused. Men who are innocent still have to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees which they will never recoup. No penalty is written into the law to punish women for naming the wrong men.

Former California Legislator Rod Wright is trying to reform the system, but dopey feminist Legislator, Sheila Kuehl is having none of it.

"What makes a father?" California state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) said in an August 2002 interview with the Los Angeles Times, explaining why she was voting against Rod Wright’s latest reform bill. "This bill says the donation of genetic material makes a father. I don’t agree."

There was a time when paternity was the burden of the state. Now Kuehl is saying that not even DNA can protect men as far as she is concerned. I can’t think of a better example of how feminist policies result in a war between men and women.

SKIRT CHASER

I think rival Democrats are behind the story of John Kerry's girl chasing. It would make more sense for Republicans to wait and spring such charges in the last month or so of the campaign. It would also be foolish to do so now when the natural alternative to Kerry is Edwards, a tougher candidate to beat in a general election.

Kerry told Imus this morning that:

"There was nothing to report. So there is nothing to talk about. I'm not worried about it."

"I'm not worried about it" sounds more like you're not worried about the evidence getting out than it didn't happen. I think an innocent person would have said, "Same old campaign smear tactics. If they want to accuse me of something like that they'd better produce my alleged girlfriend."

If Kerry is just 1% guilty, he'd be better coming clean. Arnold Schwartzenegger apologized and put the issue behind him. It will be tougher for Kerry if he is caught lying.

FURTHER THOUGHTS: I think that this must have come from the Clintons. The Clinton's handpicked candidate Wesley Clark hinted that something was about to erupt. In fact, I think those loose lips are what led Clark to his endorsement of Kerry. It was the only way to remove the scrutiny.

STEROIDS

If they are indicting Bonds' personal trainer on the possession of steroid trafficking, wouldn't it be a good idea to test Barry Bonds for steroid use? If Bonds' personal trainer was being indicted for bookmaking, I bet they wouldn't hesitate to investigate. If baseball really cares about cheating, they have an opportunity to prove it.

NBC war correspondent Bob Arnott has left the network. (via Instapundit)

In a 1,300-word e-mail to NBC News president Neal Shapiro, written in December 2003 and obtained by NYTV, Dr. Arnot called NBC News’ coverage of Iraq biased. He argued that keeping him in Iraq and on NBC could go far in rectifying that. . .

"We’ve been at a significant disadvantage given NBC’s reputation in Iraq," Dr. Arnot wrote Mr. Shapiro. He argued that due to his excellent relationships with military and C.P.A. personnel, NBC News could repair its standing with government authorities by airing more of his material.

"I’m uniquely positioned to report the story," he wrote. "NBC Nightly News routinely takes the stories that I shoot and uses the footage, even to lead the broadcast," but "refuses to allow the story to be told by the reporter on the scene."

In other words, he suggested, NBC News did not like putting him on the air.

The media likes the angle that the war goals are falling apart. This allows them to find drama and take the adversarial approach that they are use to. Dr. Arnott has been finding stories that contradict the basic premise and they hold no interest to the bosses. Think of it from the business standpoint. If the media cannot give John Kerry an issue to run on, the news coverage of the campaign is going to lose money. Already the networks are limiting their convention coverage. To point out successes as well and setbacks in Iraq would give the viewer the idea that war is proceeding normally.

The media is far from objective anyway, but if you can marry a sort of liberal skepticism against authority to the bottom line, then it doesn't matter how successful the war in Iraq proceeds, there will always be enough negative stories to report to give the audience the idea that they're doing their job and that the presidential campaign that they have so much money riding on isn't going to be a slam dunk.

ONE MORE THING: If you're interested in seeing how the media orchestrates "spontaneous" moments, you need to see this photograph on Roger Simon's webblog.

USING VIETNAM TO GET ELECTED

If John Kerry is serious about being the leader of this country he will have to quell his opportunism for a moment to explain why Clinton's actions during Vietnam were defendable and his accusations toward Bush are "serious."

The primary season has demonstrated that Kerry has no plan to defend this country. No Democrats save Lierberman has articulated a plan because the hippy element within that party won't hear of it. To be a winning Democrat you've got to explain how Bush fumbled everything and that it was a mistake to depose Saddam. Is that really a serious position to hold if you want to be elected President in this country? I can believe that a large percentage of the registered Democrats in this country would just as soon trade missiles for poppies, but certainly a majority would rather live in a strong nation that chooses to act.

If the Democrats have an argument about how different actions would have made us safer today, I'm all ears. So far, it's been nothing but vague statements about how we should have defeated every last Al Qaeda guy first (More than 75% of them have been disposed of already) or we're alienating the world (noted warmongers France and Germany who have recently traded their bayonets and mustard gas for Birkenstocks) with our unilateral actions.

Those criticisms are probably great applause lines for campaign breakfast, but they are not plans for dealing with the real problem of terrorism. It's not a budget plan that a candidate can just whip up after the convention. Kerry, for instance, has been in the United States Senate long enough to have a ready-made plan for defeating terrorists if he were desirous or capable of doing so. He doesn't mind using the war for political gain by playing Monday morning quarterback on every decision, but he doesn't intend to offer a better plan either. Just put Kerry into the White House and he'll go to work micromanaging the caribou populations in Alaska and the minimum wage hikes that the unions demand.

A President Kerry couldn't lead an assault on terrorism if he wanted to. His allegiances and funding and base are all tied up into a party that shuns any kind of war, regardless of provocation. Vietnam is a great example of how Democrats got us into a bungled war and other Democrats marched in protest and yet it's somehow the Republicans fault. The Republicans have never gotten us into a "Vietnam." They usually spend their time getting us out of one.

In fact, Vietnam isn't even Vietnam. We don't ever discuss the intentions and the reasons we had problems there. Instead we jump to the conclusion that we should have never bothered those noble people; although forgotten is that the same noble people butchered a million of their own when we vacated. No, we don't discuss Vietnam seriously in this country. All it would have taken to win that war was the will to do so. Congress refused to declare war. Johnson ducked out of re-election not knowing how to solve the problem. And Nixon got the ultimate blame according to any random Vietnam movie.

Now John Kerry wants to use Vietnam as a credential for protecting us from terrorism. All the things he said defending Clinton don't count anymore. All that matters is the candidate with the most medals should win. Those medals are supposed to substitute for a real plan for defeating the bad guys. Kerry's service was a fine example of the American soldier, but if you listen to his words from then and now, he doesn't like the idea that America carries the big stick. And we'll need a big stick if we're going to protect this country.

BUSH’S MILITARY SERVICE RECORD

A person’s military service record was an issue until November of 1992, when the American people voted that war service records were unimportant. The country elected a President who wrote in a letter that he “loathed the military” and didn’t want to serve in any capacity.

Democrats like John Kerry were quick to defend Clinton’s “principled stand” of not serving. Today’s standard seems to be that all men who didn’t serve in the same capacity as John Kerry let their country down. Bush is getting the same flack that Dan Quayle got for serving in the National Guard. That National Guard troops fought and died in Vietnam is never mentioned. Does it really matter what Bush’s attendance records were when we know that Clinton was absent.

Wait! Now the Democrats have a candidate that served combat in Vietnam, we want that sort of stuff to count again. Too late, you sold that issue down the river. Military service can’t have a relative value according to what the Democrat happened to do.

FOOD OR EDUCATION ?

What’s more important in life, food or education?

People who insist that the government must provide education for every citizen do not argue that the government should provide them food, although any reasonable person would agree that food is more important.

The old saying give a man a fish and feed him for a day or teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime would be a decent argument for government provided education if they were teaching kids to fish. Only, public education in this country is not designed to make people think or make them smarter. It’s not even provided to teach them the basic skills they will actually need in the real world.

It doesn’t teach them how to provide for a family. It doesn’t teach them to manage money. Many kids graduate and yet they can’t balance a checkbook. They don’t know how to obtain a loan. They don’t understand the danger of usury. Wouldn’t these be the first skills you’d teach a young person who would someday need to function in the real world?

Public schools somehow teach English composition without teaching Logic. Students are expected to write brilliant compositions without being taught to form a proper argument.

They do have time to teach students to conform to today’s version of social enlightenment. It usually boils down to a brand of political correctness designed to make children feel guilty for the alleged sins of their parents and grandparents. Just the kind of education that parents would order right off the menu.

The government can’t provide everyone food, because people are picky about their food. Some people are vegetarians, some people like seafood, while others prefer land animals and still others just want pizza every night. People like and need different things and wouldn’t stand for the government to tax them equivalent to their grocery bill and then provide a random dinner. And yet, this is just how politicians have designed public education.

Bill Buckley once suggested that we rid ourselves of food stamps because it would be cheaper to provide every citizen, not just the needy, enough bulgar wheat and powered milk to feed them for an entire year. No one would starve, but people would have to pay for luxuries. That proposal has some things in common with current education. We’re offering every child the bulgar wheat and powdered milk equivalent of education, but still charging them gourmet prices.

Those who argue against school choice say there aren’t enough schools for these kids to choose from. How many grocery stores and restaurants do you think would exist if the government provided food for everyone? The supply will always meet the level of demand. This kind of competition may doom the public schools or it may force the public schools to compete in the marketplace. Either way, the consumer wins. The opponents always threaten that evil corporations will use education to make “profit.” Don’t evil grocery stores and restaurants use our hunger to make a “profit”?

In this country the very poor get food stamps to eat, but even they can buy their food at the private grocery store. Why will the government let poor people choose where to buy their food, but won't let taxpayers choose where to educate their kids? And why do we stand it?

THE FEEDBACK

I made a mistake editing the feedback on this page and deleted your comments. If you remember them or wrote them down elsewhere, please repost them. It shouldn't happen again.

The new look is due to the trouble I had with the last feedback service. I upgraded to a new company. This is a paid service so they shouldn't be unreliable like the last one.

I always look forward to everyone's take on an issue. It's nice to have smart friends.

WHY ARE WE AT WAR?

I heard weapons inspector, David Kay on NPR this morning bemoaning the quality of intelligence that led us to war. He himself knows that the weapons could still be hiding. After all, Saddam successfully hid for months and he needs food and water and air. The weapons could also have been moved to Syria. Remember Colin Powell played a surveillance tape at the United Nations where it was obvious that a Iraqi official was telling another man running a compound to move the contraband because the inspectors were on the way. What were they hiding?

More importantly, it has to be remembered that Weapons of Mass Destruction was just one of the reasons for pursuing a war with Iraq. It was the justification that got the most play in the media, because other Nations could just say, “No they don’t!”

Other reasons include:

1. Saddam had violated the terms of the ceasefire from 1991, which meant that we were already legally in a state of war. Bush 41 had him under control when he left office, but the Clinton Administration didn’t make him live up to the agreements because it might have meant sending in troops.

2. The President decided to fight a war against Islamic terrorism, not just against Al Qaeda. This was a popular proposal when Bush expressed it. The idea that only Al Qaeda was dangerous became something Al Gore championed when he opposed the war before the invasion. Let’s not forget that it was this kind of surgical thinking that led to 911. Clinton was never willing to take a broad approach to beating terrorism. He wanted to treat each case as an isolated event, and not hold nations responsible for harboring the bad guys. Iraq’s dealings in the past put them squarely in the middle of the conflict. Don’t forget that invasion led to the capture of the guy who hijacked the Achille Laurel and threw that man in the wheelchair overboard. Our inability to do things in the past made Iraq a safe haven for guys like that.

3. Whether or not Saddam actually possesses the WMD is less important than whether he was trying to acquire or manufacture them. North Korea didn’t have any when Jimmy Carter went and signed that peace treaty in 1994. Somehow despots can’t be trusted and North Korea now has the weapons. The North Korean problem is good example of what happens when a country negotiates instead of acting.

4. Maybe unspoken but every bit as important, we had to show the world that we would defeat nations that harbored terrorists and cause upheaval. It’s the kind of culture that only understands action. Since the invasion, Libya has tried to normalize relations with the United States, the people of Iran have been marching for freedom, and Saudi Arabia has made overtures to allowing their citizens to vote.

Kay’s conclusion was “no weapons found” discredits the doctrine of preemption. Now that was a bold statement and NPR didn’t even call him on it. Kay is a weapons inspector, not a foreign affairs specialist. NPR let him use his expertise in one area to give himself credibility in another. That mistake is taught in Freshman level journalism class. The big media will criticize the Internet and Talk Radio, but turn around and present stories like this one as objective reporting.

Preemption prevents weapons from being made. Weren’t we better off invading a country before they had the weapons to use on our troops? Kay’s conclusion is that we can only use preemption if the enemy has the weapons. That leads us to this quandary; If we invade a country with usable WMD, that country will use them on our troops, therefore we won’t get support in Congress for an invasion. That’s why we haven’t invaded North Korea. If we invade a country who openly states they are pursuing WMD, we must actually find working WMD to make the action just.

Hidden in Kay’s conclusion is that the only time we can justify going to war is when the danger to our troops is so great that popular support for the war will be nil. At some point this thinking leads to an actual nuclear war. If we cannot use ground troops tp secure areas, eventually we'll have to nuke them before they nuke us.

According to Kay's approach, we should just take terrorism and like it, lest we make the Europeans uncomfortable with our power.

FIND A CANDIDATE

Check out Presidential Match to find the candidate that best reflects your views.

My rankings according to the poll

1. Bush
2. Lieberman
3. Clark
4. Edwards
5. Dean
6. Kerry
7. Sharpton
8. That guy from Ohio who finishes even lower than Sharpton

The Select Smart Poll is a little more interesting. It allows you to weight your positions. Therefore you may agree with a particular candidate a lot, but if he disagrees on a big issue he will suffer. They scored me:

1. My Ideal Candidate 100%
2. Bush 70%
3. Libertarian Candidate 61%
4. Lieberman 39%
5. Edwards/Kerry 38%
7. Dean 35%
8. That Guy From Ohio 35%
9. Howard Phillips 28% - Constiution Party
10. Sharpton 23%
11. Clark 16%

In most years the Libertarian candidate would no doubt score higher than the Republican, but with Cato opposing the war, Bush tops the list, after my ideal candidate that doesn't exist anywhere but my own mind. When I took Select Smart 4 years ago, I remember Howard Phillips finishing in the top three. Have I changed or has Select Smart's new weighted categories made Phillips less important.