Pervert Parade

• Yes, Art… I have seen the book as well. I have to tell you and honesty I found a depressing read. The reasons are rather simple; your first problem is that it does in fact make sense. I’m that basis alone it would never fly. Getting the idea? Of course, the second one is of a kind with the first, and it’s the one you list as your personal favorite, the current taxes will longer be used to manipulate and punish the American people for doing various things or not doing various things. Frankly, I don’t care what party they’re in. I suspect that in the end they will not want to give up that power. At least, that would include the crop of Republicans we currently have. By the way, I told Neal this several months ago after the book first came out. by all means go ahead and write them, but don’t expect them to be very conversant. He does get out of the hospital a couple days ago… a knee operation, I believe. I have to tell you that the plan would of gotten an awful lot farther if they’d pick somebody better than Mike Huckabee to represent it to the American people. I figured a reason that he got into politics is that Huckabee wasn’t much of a used car salesman. I have my doubts on his ability to sell water in the Sahara Desert. Certainly nobody was going to take the tax plan from him when itw as clear even HE didn’t understand the ramifications of it.
• And by the way I will address “Expelled”, some other time. Probably Monday.
• My, my… but the vultures are certainly circling. Mark Penn, aren’t they? you know, the amount of stuff that they’re laying on his doorstep, about half of it is garbage. I’ve said it before about him, that the Clinton campaign has been using the guy as a scapegoat. That perception hasn’t changed. It’s very true that he got himself into this, and his troubles just now are a direct result of his politics. But it’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for this sap. Let’s face it; he had an impossible job, putting lipstick on a pig. Yes, I know, but there are a number of people who swore up and down that it was hers for the taking, and that she’d have the nomination quite quickly. Frankly, those people overlooked her massive negatives in both parties. For all of the defense that the Democrat party put up for the Clintons, the fact of the matter is they are just plain tired of defending them. Of course, what’s also going on here is the influence of Moveon at the upper levels of the party. the Democrats have yet to learn just how far out of sync with the Ameruican people they have become as a result. Come November, they’ll get a reminder.
• By the way, Speaking of the Clintons, there are rumblings from the horizon than Hillary Clinton is going to be in some serious doodoo very shortly, as regards Whitewater.  In reading the Washington Times story, I can’t help but wonder if this doesn’t explain some of the desperation on the part of the national party to get out from underneath the threat of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Bad as all bomb a is, he would be far less damaging to the party in the long-term than Hillary Clinton going to court over the last time she was president.
• I notice they got Abu Ayyub al-Masri. Sadly, he’s still alive. With any luck, the Iraqis will be changing that siutation shortly. It is true that Al Qaeda has been managing to replace their fallen number two and number three operatives in various regions without too much difficulty. Trouble is for them, that the quality of the people they’ve been replacing their fallen with, is not all that great. The result is that even Al Reuters has admitted that AQ is reeling. The Belmont club is suggesting that intelligence figures that Al Qaeda is in the process of making their last stand at Mosul. There’s a bit of a rat line that runs from there to Syria. Once all so nice about this, and I don’t notice it being mentioned very much, is that the Iraqi security forces are the ones that made the arrest in this case. Here again we see Iraqis standing up, Americans standing down, which was always the plan, and the news media refusing to it knowledge the direction these things have taken.
• A third place, and an honorable mention at the Outside the Beltway caption contest. You know, I see pictures of parrots like that and wonder if somebody’s been screwing with the colors.

Bernie Ward, liberal talkshow host finally admitted distributing kiddie porn on the net.

(05-08) 18:49 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — Bernie Ward, the most prominent liberal voice on Bay Area talk radio for more than two decades, admitted Thursday to distribution of child pornography by e-mail in a plea deal that will send him to federal prison for at least five years.

Ward, 57, a former Roman Catholic priest, was a fixture on KGO-AM 810 for three hours every weeknight, known in recent years for his fervent denunciations of President Bush and the war in Iraq during his news talk show. He also hosted “God Talk,” a Sunday morning program on religion, and was a prolific fundraiser for the station’s charity drives.

Is mentioning where he was… a Preist… and not where he is now… a liberal talkshow host, their version of ‘balance’, I wonder? He’ll be finding out how much time he is to serve on August 28th.

Apologists for illegal immigraton argue that there are some jobs Americans won’t do.    They may be right.   A nine year old girl was raped, illegal alien charged, Araksya Karapetyan, KIDK: reports:

We broke the unbelievable story last night of a 10-year old girl in St. Anthony who gave birth to a baby.

She’s now one of the youngest kids in the country to become a mother.

Residents both on and off camera were shocked and in dismay over the situation, today this is what they had to say about our story

Well now I suppose that Guadalupe Gutierrez-Juarez will argue he can’t be deported because is the parent of an American citizen.

?

Ann Coulter says it well, here:

Well, it looks like it’s the end of the road for Hillary. Time for her to pack up her pantsuits and go back to — wherever it is she’s pretending to be living these days. Now we just have to get rid of the other two. Perhaps if I endorse Obama …

This week, Bill Clinton lost his second presidential election for a protege.

Ronald Reagan was so popular, he not only won a 49-state landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own “no new taxes” pledge).

By contrast, in addition to not being able to get half the country to vote for him in two tries, Clinton’s connection to any other presidential candidate spells utter doom. Both his vice president and his wife have been defeated in elections they should have won, but lost because of their unfortunate association with him. The country has spoken. It wants to be rid of the Clintons.

There is certainly much in the way of history to back what she’s saying here.

Look, Hillary Clinton has higher negative ratings … in both parties…. than any other presidential candidate in recent memory. Given that we’re talking about such people as Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and George McGovern, and other various nitwits and wannabes that roll off everyone’s tounge like so much drool, that’s really saying something. So how is it she managed even get this close to the nomination?

From where I sit, the largest question revolves around who it is that she’s running against. What we ended up with… Clinton and Obama, is not because they’re particularly good, it’s that the remainder are particularly BAD….. Think about all the various Democrats that came up in this cycle, that nobody wanted anything to do with. We are talking here about the largest collection of self implosions as has ever graced the headlines of the nation’s newspapers. To give you an idea of just how bad all those candidates were, let me just point out that she and Barack Obama got by all of them. For Obama’s part, he managed to do so, despite being linked to a screaming racist, and a large group of politically questionable individuals who worship the ground that Marx is under, and having what is arguably the shortest qualifications list for the job that this country has ever seen, inclduing that of Jimmy Carter.  Despite this distinctly anti-American grouping, he managed to make it to the final round, only to come very close indeed to losing to somebody who is only slightly more popular than used Spam snot. Such is the popularity of Barack Obama, and frankly, such is the quality of our candidates today.

All of the foregoing should not be read to imply that the Republicans are in a better shape at the moment. On the Republican side, we have John McCain. (OK, granted, that he was chosen from the party opposite.) The Democrats, apparently seeing the crop of presidential candidates that they had on their side of the aisle was the best reason to vote Republican, apparently decided to mitigate those circumstances somewhat by crossing the political aisle and voting in Republican primaries for John McCain. Interestingly, when Rush Limbaugh,and the aforementioned Ann Coulter, tried the same thing, the Democrats had a cow. (Of course, they later changed their minds thinking Cow flatulance would add to global warming.)

For all that McCain could be running as a Democrat or as an independent as easily as he has managed to rise to the top of the heap in the Republican party, he still ends up being the best choice from the Republican point of view. Unfortunately, in this particular cycle at the least, choosing a president ends up being a game of margins.

But here’s the thing; If McCain is only marginally better than Obama, and Obama only marginally better than the Clintons, what are we in for in the next four years? Ann says it herself:

Americans rank Bill Clinton with national misfortunes on the order of the Great Depression and the Vietnam War. (This, of course, is an overreaction: The Great Depression wasn’t that bad.)

So, in short, since Hillary Clinton was really running things back in the 90’s and not Bill, what we’re going to end up with is something that is only slightly better than the Vietnam war and the Great Depression, Gee… I know I feel a whole bunch better, don’t you?

And how did we on the Republican side get to this stage?

Recently, when John Hawkins wrote and asked me to provide him with a list of the 25 most influential people on the right, I could only come up with a dozen of them… barely what he asked us for. I was appalled  to find so few that I could place in such a list. I told him via mail:

I must say I’m a little frightened by what I have found in my examination of my personal list of influential people. That is to say, what I found was a lack of people to fill the list with. There are certainly a few more than I’ve given you here, who I would consider very influential. But not a great deal more. .

One other thing I pointed out to him was that none of the people who I would consider both influential and conservative, are current office holders. None. certainly, there are many ostensibly on the right who are influential. Certainly, there are many ostensibly on the right who are conservative. However, none are both. I think, for example, that it’s arguable that John McCain is influential. Whether or not he is a conservative, seems to me a totally different question. Amazingly, McCain ends up being more influential than do true conservatives. And for anybody with a conservative bone in their body that should be a large area of concern.

Newt Gingrich a few days ago, issued a patent for the Republicans in the Congress that they face an election Day disaster come fall.

“Either congressional Republicans are going to chart a bold course of real change or they are going to suffer decisive losses this November,” Gingrich wrote on Tuesday in HumanEvents.com, a leading conservative voice.

it’s interesting; the Democrats have been screaming for some time about change, and certainly Barrack has been using a manta chant of ‘change’ to his own advantage in his campaign. However in all those circumstances, ‘change’ is not defined.

Apparently in the case of the Democrats, the only thing they’re concerned about is whether or not the same faces inhabit the same seats. The only change that Hillary Clinton offers is that she isn’t George Bush.  Similarly, that’s the only real change that Obama offers. And, I see, similarly, the only change that John McCain offers is that he has none of the first three. Yeah, that’ll sell.

The obvious conclusion to draw here is that the best thing that the Republicans could possibly do is to offer real change in the form of a real conservative, as opposed to a middle-of-the-road milquetoast like John McCain, or more liberalism, bordering on socialism such as Clinton, or outright socialism, such as Obama. Unfortunately, that decision has already been made for us in terms of John McCain, and perhaps now in terms of Obama… But we can save the Republican Party, and the nation as a whole, the complete and utter disaster that surely awaits us with any of the three presidential candidates, working in concert with a Democrat Congress, by offering the people real conservatism for a change. Imagine a Congress packed with real conservatives.

Here’s the secret to getting there;  Offering change, people, does not mean that we have to change to be like the people we’re running against. As a matter of fact, changing ourselves to be more like the people we’re running against is the change at all. We’ve had centrists and leftists out our ears. How about some real change? How about offering real conservatism, instead of just lip service? Anything else is simply more of the same. Frankly, the American people won’t stand for it. Are you listening, RNC?

John Hawkins has posted  the results of his informal polling on “The 25 Most Influential People On The Right According To Conservative Bloggers”

BitsBlog participated. I’ll have some thoughts on this later this morning, and doubtless will have further in the Ramble, too.

It’s amusing to watch this little trainwreck, and some of the comments on it, such as at TalkLeft:

This is the supposed Michigan compromise.

The state party’s executive committee voted today to ask the national party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to approve the 69-59 delegate split when it meets May 31. The plan would shrink Clinton’s delegate edge in Michigan from 18 to 10 and allow the state’s 157 delegates and superdelegates to be seated at the convention.

Clinton won the Jan. 15 Michigan primary and was to get 73 pledged delegates under state party rules, while Obama was to get 55. The state also has 29 superdelegates.

The 69-59 split was proposed last week by four prominent Michigan Democrats who have been working for months to find a way to get Michigan’s delegates seated at the Aug. 25-28 convention in Denver: U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin and DNC member Debbie Dingell.

Shorter version: It not only gives Obama all of the uncommitted delegates, a number that includes those who voted for uncommitted for Edwards, it includes those who voted for Dodd, Kucinich and Gravel and gives him some that voted for Hillary.

Did you notice something? It’s something that even TalkLeft dare not notice, for fear of having it’s rather sandy foundation shaken… This is exactly the same kind of high-handed attitude that was behind the actions of Al Gore in 2000. That votes don’t matter, if they get in the way of Democrat power, and cheating and changing the rules to gain that power is an acceptable alternative to allowing the will of the people, to prevail.

And this doesn’t even begin to address the Florida voters, who are being treated just as badly. All because they wouldn’t knuckle under to Howard Dean.

Even the Democrat rank and file in other states is starting to rebel,

I’m telling you, folks, this is going to come down to the Fla and Mich delegations marching on the assembly hall in Denver, demanding to be seated…as the votes went down, not as Howard Dean dictates…. thus recreating Chicago ’68, a little differently than planned. There will be riots in Chicago Denver, of that you can be assured. I offer no encouragement to the rioters, I merely predict. The result of the convention will be that the party is so badly split, it’ll make Nixon’s landslide that year look like a close match.

Do you understand the depth of the power hunger, the need for control being shown by the Democrat leadership, here? Do we really want them running the country?

Addendum:  ( David l )

So who died and made Howard Dean into a modern day Joseph Statlin?    It is the mark of Soviet style election to be allowed the right to vote on condition of voting as directed by the state.   Such a Soviet style plan may indeed seat the the lemmings from Michigan and Florida.   However the delegations will be seated minus their dignity and lacking any integrity.   Call this sham what you want.   It is not democracy.

• We now hear chatter again about Hillary being offered the VP slot on Obama’s ticket. Not a shock to hear it, I suppose but it still strikes me that Obama would have to be suicidal to make such an offer.  The name Vince Foster leaps to mind.
• NBC’s been caught with more fake film. This time, Gobal warming, not pickup trucks.  Hey, listen, anything for the cause.  Isn’t that what Al Gore did?
• Reports have it that help is finally starting on on Burma, from outside agencies. Well, now, let’s see; How long did it take for outside help to get to NOLA? Of course the usual suspects are complaining how our people there were helped first, as Joyner informs us. I tell him,
  

  It strikes me that in the aftermath of Katrina, those at the bizzarely named “think progress” were busy blaming BOOOOOSSSSSSCCCHHHH for people not getting help, there, instead of putting the blame for their not getting help squarely on the shoulders of the local and state governments there.

  Are we now, based on their reaction to this, to assume that the state and local governments in and around NOLA are as helpless as those in Burma?

  And there it is, gang.. Besides which, Burma rejected our help, opting to go with the UN only.  We couldn’t go in to help THEIR people, if we wanted to. As to the UN’s help, we’ll see how that works out. What you wanna bet the US gets the blame when they take six months assessing the situation of what color the chairs are in the meeting rooms,  why isn’t the Bree of better quality, and which starving villagers are the best sex slaves?  That’s what it devolved to in Darfur, after all. (Shrug) It’s clear the best interest of the people in Bruma was never a high priority with those thugs, anyway.

• I want to make special note of Chuck Simmins, and his response to our call about “Books for Soldiers”. A nice job, Chuck. Thank you.  It’s amazing what can be accomplished when people of quality put their efforts together. If you’re helping the cause on your site, let me know via feedback, and I’ll link it here.
• Oh, speaking of Chuck, he beat me to a local story, today. (Yeah, I know… he usually does), where a local 911 dispatcher got herself in trouble for accessing the terrorist watch lists. Was arrested in fact.  Of course she levels the charge she’s only in trouble because hse’s a Muslim. yeah, right.
• I don’t think there are many with less crediblity than George McGovern.  So I suppose Hillary Clinton can take his calls for her to drop out with some salt and a dismissive wave.  Welll… Except of course for the idea that Hillary Clinton is one of those few with less credibility than George McGovern.
• McDonalds is reporting the sales on their “Happy Meal” combos was up 5% in April. Usually, the experts translate that into good times, economically, since it suggests more expendable income. Another sign of a recovery, earlier than the experts predcted.
• Mother’s day is Sunday. Not much planned, realy. Supposed to rain here on Sunday. We’ll see.
• A Sex scandal at the Weather Channel?  Interesting. Bob Stokes used to work here in Rochester, at WROC-TV. Like, they need added problems, eh?

The Tennessee Plowboy is gone.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. —AP-    Eddy Arnold, whose mellow baritone on songs like “Make the World Go Away” made him one of the most successful country singers in history, died Thursday morning, days short of his 90th birthday.

Arnold died at a care facility near Nashville, said Don Cusic, a professor at Belmont University and author of the biography “Eddy Arnold: I’ll Hold You in My Heart.” His wife of 66 years, Sally, had died in March, and in the same month, Arnold fell outside his home, injuring his hip.

He was a favorite of my Dad, who, while he was never large on country styled singers, liked Arnold’s easy-going style. He made up a reel to reel tape of his songs, years ago, that I still have. The last one on Dad’s tape works well. It’s an old Cindy Walker tune. (She wrote “Dream Baby”, which Roy Orbison had a hit with)  Cindy died, herself, just a couple years ago, now, so I guess she won’t mind if I attach her lyrics to this: (From memory)

Jim, I did everything that I could
But your fever just wouldn’t die down
So I tied your horse to the wagon bed
And last night I brought you to town.

But when I got there you were gone Jim
And there was nothin’ nobody could do
I bought you a suit and a tie Jim
And today I wore one too.

Jim I wore a tie today
The first one that I ever wore
And you’d have said I looked like a dummy
Out of a dry goods store.

Jim they said a lot of things
But I don’t know a thing they said
My mind kept wanderin’ off down the trail
Back to the times that we’ve had.

Well Jim, you’re ridin’ on ahead
I guess that’s how it has to be
But when you reach those streets paved with gold Jim
Stake a claim out for me…

Rest in peace, Eddy.

Well, almost.

The AP is )( this close to openly questioning if the vote in Indiana was tainted… not by Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos, but by Obama supporters.

GARY, Ind. (AP) —It was midnight and the nation was still awaiting results from the Indiana primary, one of the biggest remaining prizes of the epic Democratic presidential battle between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

But as the clock ticked, the questions and accusations grew louder: What was wrong in Lake County? Was this more politics as usual in a county often suspected of harboring Chicago-style corruption?

A day after Clinton eked out a narrow victory in the primary, no one raised allegations of illegal activity. But some say old-school politics were certainly at play in the state’s second-largest county, at the southern tip of Lake Michigan.

“They wanted to put Barack Obama over the top with Lake County’s vote and games were being played like in the 1950s,” said Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott, who endorsed Clinton. “It went bad when a lot of people were watching.”

The late returns came in a primary that attracted record voter turnout across the state. Many counties ran short of Democratic ballots and had to print extras, which had to be counted by hand. In Lake County alone, voters cast 11,500 early ballots — about three times the number cast in the 2004 primary.

Moreover, the absenee ballots were well over the norm… and when broken down, the absentees almost to a man went for Obama. PLUS, several of the voting machines went flooey in some manner, fouling their calculated totals… a near impossibility, unless someone’s been software tampering, as I understand the matter. No word on how the vote totals from those machines broke down.  Also no word on who made the machines, but since there’s a paper trail availble in the Diebold machines, one assumes that Lake county would want nothing to do with them. (Remember, this is the same group of bandits who objected to the photo ID being required)

 And finally, the Democrat who runs the Lake County elections board is an Obama supporter. AND, the lake county electons board itself is stuffed with Democrat party hacks, from what I’m hearing. Shushannah Walshe at Fox:

Rokita mentioned Lake County’s less than stellar reputation when it comes to their election board. He said he usually sends teams of his deputies up to Lake County to monitor their elections and he is hoping for more transparency in the future. However, county election boards in Indiana are autonomous and state government can merely suggest changes and cannot regulate their behavior as long as it is lawful. Rokita said he is not going to investigate and does not suspect any illegal activity, but that he will continue to monitor the situation. He added that he wouldn’t put political mischief past the board:

“This is a board made up of politicians and political wannabes and I don’t put politics past delaying the vote or anything like that, but I can’t find anything they did that is contrary to Indiana law at this point.”

Well, “against the law” is an interesting turn of a phrase, given that we’re dealing with primaries, which is a vast different situation, than is a general election.   Now, balance all that against the idea that we’ve got a couple of Chicago natives… Obama and Clinton.. running against each other.

Make your own choices, here, but personally, I smell a fish.

• How does one prepare for the unexpected, which is by definition, unpredictable? Apparently, you don’t. Chuck Simmins makes mention of a WMD course that was less than successful. Sounds rather like a problem with the teacher, to me, but then this is NY state, where idiocy knows no bounds.
• Saw a hybrid camping trailer, heading out, this morning. Loaded to the gills it was, and by the way it was going, I’d say it was headed for the north country. All I could think of was, maybe if I followed them, they’d keep me.  Been a while since I’ve had a decent vacation. the weekend stuff we’ve been doing for a few years is great but it’s no substitute for taking a week or two and hitting the road. This morning put an exclamation point on all of that for me.
• Speaking of the trailer, no, I’ve still not gotten it ready, though it looks like I should be able to this week. Gotta do the plumbing, the tires… the wheel bearings ought be OK, we didn’t go out much last year.  roof is OK, the awning needs cleaning but is OK otherwise. The TV Antenna need fixing; the crankup isn’t working well.  Not taht we watch much TV, but the scanner we use to listen to the railroads in the area works pretty well on it; it’d be nice to have it back again.
• Joyner remarks yesterday about Bloggers as opinion leaders. I tell him:
  

  What we have here is a situation where just being a blogger, of itself isn’t all that influential, unless that status is used in distributing some truth or another that isn’t available elsewhere. Which would seem to suggest that those who read blogs are more discerning than most.

  And that’s really the story, here. I’ve been convinced for some time that the readers we have here… the regulars particularly, are among the best around.

• Many thanks to McQ at Q&O for his backlink to the Books for Soliders post. I owe you one, Bruce.
• Yes, I’m watching the predictions for $200/bbl oil. Sorry, I’m not buying. You shouldn’t, either.  We’ve seen this before with other commodities at the end of a bubble. These noises are brokers trying to hype casual investors in to buy up what the more professional speculators have bought, so the pros don’t take a bath when the bubble breaks which it will do in a cuple months… possibly less.  We saw this with Copper, not long ago, now.  Look, the unemployment situation isn’t nearly as bad as was predicted, the dollar’s fall has slowed if not outright stopped, the credit crunch has eased, the sub-prime mess ended up affecting less than the ‘experts’ figured, people are starting to take advantage of the lower prices and rates and have begun buying houses again… and that financial situation is what started the mess with oil in the first place. As I’ve been saying for months, now, the current oil price situation is not a supply issue.  This bubble is about to break, and we’re pretty much on schedule for a full meltdown on this nonsense by midsummer… just as I predicted. Woe to them in commodities, at that stage.
• The Anti-war BS simply isn’t selling anymore. Big shock, huh? this does NOT bode well for Democrats who have been using the war as a political prop.
•  

Britt Hume last night:

And an artist in Portland, Oregon has stuck a 23-foot needle into the ground by the Willamette River and hopes to plant more. Adam Kuby says it’s a really large version of acupuncture. Kuby says he wants to help the city rejuvenate its “chi” — its vital energy.

“It’s a visual way of expressing what a lot of people already know. [The city is] one organism, one body, one very complex, independent system,” Kuby said.

This isn’t the first odyssey into oddity for Portland, which is or has been home to the 24 Hour Church of Elvis, the voodoo doughnut shop, nude bike festivals and what was billed as the world’s longest drag queen chorus line.

Which links up rather well with the veggie rights thing I linked to the other night.  And don’t they just both play into the morality/cultural  shift I spoke to earlier today?

Now, guess who these people will be voting for?

(On a Jeep that’s been set up for rock crawling… mounted upside-down:)

If You Can Read This, blame my spotter

Gerson at the WaPo:

There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a “war on science.”

According to Hillary Clinton, the Bush administration has declared “open season on open inquiry.” “When I am president,” she promises, “scientific integrity will not be the exception; it will be the rule.”

Which means, of course that you’ll tell Al Gore to sit down and shut up, right, Hill?
I mean, ignoring, of course, all the stuff Bush has been able to accomplish, which Gerson does a fair job of scratching the surface of:

The exceptions, in this case, are pretty exceptional: Elias Zerhouni, who has reformed the National Institutes of Health with widely praised efficiency; Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who helped set in motion large-scale AIDS treatment in Africa; Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the effort to map the human genome. The “war on science” recently has allowed some extraordinary achievements.

Exactly so. And understand, we’re not talking about particualr candidates, here, we’re talking about the prevailing worldviews of left to right. In that light, Gerson’s identification of the reasons behind these statements is spot on, too.

For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy — actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled “anti-science.” Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as “theological” and thus illegitimate.

But of all the passages in his article, this is perhaps the most remarkable, and perhaps the one the left will be screaming most loudly about if they deign to respond at all:

In “Science and the Left,” his insightful article in the latest issue of the New Atlantis, Yuval Levin argues that a belief in the power of science is central to the development of liberalism — based on the assertion that objective facts and rational planning can replace tradition and religious authority in the organization of society. Levin summarizes the liberal promise this way: “The past was rooted in error and prejudice while the future would have at its disposal a new oracle of genuine truth.”

But the oracle of science is silent on certain essential topics. “Science, simply put,” says Levin, “cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal.”

Without a firm, morally grounded belief in equality, liberalism has been led down some dark paths

And there, dear reader, is the crux of it all. The lack of a moral foundation, due to an over-reliance on science…. morality being something science simply cannot address. This is the logical conclusion of the attempted separation of religion and morality. this goes to the point I made to Billy the other day in the Ramble about the enlightenment, and how that would not have been possible without the moral underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian ethic that predominated western culture.

Rights, you see, are not proved by science. they are in fact, as I have said often enough previously, a cultural construct. When we depend on science to prove rights exist, we find that in fact it cannot prove that existence. That’s because rights are based upon the culture’s  morality and that in turn upon it’s dominant Judeo-Christian ethic, which in it’s own turn is rooted in the religions thereof.

We ignore or try to minimize that relationship at our own peril.

NEW YORK —(AP via Fox)- A sadistic gang of police impersonators abducted and tortured scores of East Coast cocaine traffickers, forcing them to hand over multimillion-dollar stashes by threatening to squeeze their testicles with pliers, authorities said Tuesday.An indictment unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn charged eight men with robbery conspiracy, drug dealing and an array of other crimes.

Since the spring of 2003, the gang injured about 100 people while committing 100 holdups targeting large-scale traffickers in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, investigators said.

The take: more than 1,650 pounds of cocaine worth $20 million and $4 million in cash.

The scheme “was breathtaking in the scope of its crimes and in the danger it posed to our communities,” said U.S. Attorney Benton Campbell.

Ya know, Mr. Campbell, it occurrs to me you should be hiring these people. They apparently managed to do your job in locating these drug rings. Doesn’t it bother you that they were able to come up with information you didn’t have? And exactly who, other than other drug dealers,were their operations a danger to, hmmm?