Want to get into trouble nowadays? Publically state an unvarnished truth that rubs brain-dead celebs with ideological pretentions the wrong way. Oh, and be Bristol Palin while you’re doing it.

After President Obama came out in favor of same-sex marriage, Palin opined in a blog post that “We know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home.” Inarguably true. Also a thought crime! And the reaction was of course immediate: Palin was deluged with sneering putdowns and personal insults, many of them from such incisive social commentators as Jersey Shore star JWoww. This genius tweeted: “Bristol should keep her uneducated ignorant mouth shut. If Ur living in the past u wouldn't have a kid w/out marriage #hypocrite. It's 2012!” (Incidentally, JWow went on to say that her best friend is a gay guy. Yeah, sure, isn't everyone's?)

You look at these preening celebs with their outsized egos and tiny minds and you think: Typical Obama voters…

Posted by tmg110 at 2:44 PM EDT

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Now here’s something I did not know: Abortion is illegal in Chile. It was outlawed in 1989 and since then, the South American country has been a prime target of the international pro-choice movement.

The pro-abortion mob claims that the Chile’s maternal mortality rate is increasing because women must resort to unsafe illegal abortions. Earlier this week, however, the release of a study of statistical data from 1957 through 2007 blew that claim out of the water. It turns out that Chile’s maternal mortality rate fell by more than 60% between 1989 and 2007. It turns out that Chile has the lowest maternal mortality rate in South America, not to mention a lower maternal mortality rate than the United States, where there are essentially no limits on access to abortion.

Something to think about, eh?

Posted by tmg110 at 11:41 AM EDT

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Here’s an interesting story by John Fund for NRO showing just how far the progressive mob that rules academia will go to silence a heretic.

It’s long been an open secret that the field of ethnic studies is an intellectual wasteland. Assuming that you belong to an officially sanctioned minority group, anything goes—as the case of Ward Churchill shows. And in the field of black studies, the situation is particularly bad. Everybody knows this; no one will speak of it.

But Naomi Schaefer Riley did speak of it, in an article she wrote for the online edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Its title: “Black Studies: Swaggering Into the Future.” The article begins with a bang:

You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

 

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.

Riley goes on from there in a tone of mockery that must have been less than easeful in the ears of those young guns in black studies. There was the predictable outcry, marked by personal attacks, smears and infantile name calling. It culminated in a petition, signed by 6,500 professors and graduate students, demanding that the Chronicle fire Riley. And guess what? She was fired!

I take this sordid little incident as a clear sign that Riley was absolutely correct in her comments about the silliness of black studies, and that her enemies knew perfectly well she was right. Lies are easily shrugged off; it’s the truth that stings.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:14 AM EDT

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President Obama’s decision to come out in favor of same-sex marriage thrilled the Democratic Party base and the mainstream media, but otherwise it appears to have fallen flat. This is partly due, I believe, to the fumbles that preceded Obama’s statement: Joe Biden jumped the gun, necessitating a hasty rollout of Barry’s “evolution” on the issue. Bloviating on Fox News just now, Karl Rove opined that Team Obama had intended to make this announcement much closer to the Democratic convention, to maximize its political impact. If so, the Veep screwed their master plan.

Why make the announcement at all, though? Polls show that a healthy majority of Americans simply don’t care about same-sex marriage. In these tough economic times, they have what they believe to be more important things on their mind. On the other hand, opposition to gay marriage is strongest in red and purple states, e.g. North Carolina and Virginia. Obama carried them both in 2008, but the outlook is clouded for 2012. On Tuesday, North Carolina voters approved an amendment to the state constitution, banning same-sex marriage, by a 60-40% margin.

Obviously one reason why Obama wants to talk about same-sex marriage is that he doesn’t want to talk about other things: the failure of the stimulus, Obamacare, the “green jobs” fiasco and his generally poor record on jobs and the economy. No wonder he’d prefer to change the subject.

But same-sex marriage? I used to be against it on the usual conservative grounds, but I’ve come to realize that it’s really a trivial matter. Now that marriage has lost its status as a key social institution, why shouldn’t gays be permitted to go through the empty formalities of a wedding ceremony? Contemporary marriage is just one lifestyle choice among many, and we must not be judgmental!

Anyhow, I suspect that once same-sex marriage becomes legal throughout the United States, it will prove to be a boutique phenomenon. The gay lifestyle (on the male side, at least; gay women are a different matter) is hardly conducive to family formation. I doubt, therefore, that gay men in their twenties and thirties will demonstrate much interest in getting married. The total number of gay marriages will be relatively small and concentrated in a few urban centers. In the long run, the main beneficiaries of this supposedly earth-shaking social revolution will probably be divorce lawyers.

So that's that. Can we move on now to the next big political story of 2012, prep school bullying…?

Posted by tmg110 at 10:13 AM EDT

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President Obama kicked off his reelection campaign last week—and things didn’t go very well. That’s commentator Jeff Greenfield’s take on the Obama campaign kickoff, which included a half-filled stadium, a Biden gaffe, a lackluster campaign commercial and Saturday Night Live’s flirtation with a sketch mocking the President’s self-congratulatory commemoration of the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. (SNL decided not to run with it but the script was leaked and as Greenfield notes, “[T]he existence of the sketch indicates that the notion of Obama exploiting Osama’s death has enough currency to be parodied on a show seen by millions. That notion, if it spreads, could undermine one of the president’s best arguments.”

To Greenfield's list I would add the truly creepy "Julia" slideshow—who the hell on Team Obama thought that was a good idea?

Small incidents, you might argue—and I would agree. But they signal that times have changed. In 2008, Barack Obama ran a tabula rasa campaign. Uplifting but vague, he persuaded people across the political spectrum to see in him what they would. No more. We know Barry now—and his supposedly healthy personal approval ratings to the contrary notwithstanding, I don’t think that the majority of us like him very much.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:51 AM EDT

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Here’s a great idea: welfare for journalists!

You’ll probably not be shocked to discover that this proposal comes from Katrina vanden Heuvel of that reliably left-wing rag, the Nation. Writing as a guest columnist for the Washington Post, she bemoans the demise of “responsible journalism”—by which she means, journalism that toes the progressive line:

It’s not simply that newsrooms lack resources, or that aggregating sites that prioritize dancing kittens get so many hits (though both are true). It’s also that in a high-minded effort to impartially represent all sides of a story, reporters frequently give more credence to an argument than the facts warrant. But as the political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann recently wrote in the Washington Post, “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality.” The role of journalists is not to give every party equal space, or accede to the red herring of false equivalence, but to pursue and publish the truth.

In other words, progressive pieties like global warming and affirmative action are never to be questioned by reporters. They must instead “pursue and publish the truth” as handed down by…Katrina vanden Heuvel. And how to ensure that reporters “pursue and publish the truth” in a manner congenial to vanden Heuvel and her comrades? No problem! Just put them on the public dole:

If we are to successfully combat the corporatization and gutting of media, we must develop new public funding sources for accountability journalism, and train the next generation of reporters to honestly and boldly seek the truth. This is not a radical proposition; other countries, including those at the top of The Economist’s index of free and democratic states—publicly fund independent journalism. But necessary change will not come until an engaged society demands it.

Now it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. Rattled by the rise of alternative media—Fox News Network, conservative talk radio, the freewheeling World Wide Web—the Left seeks to create its own little quasi-official Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, which you and I would have the privilege of supporting with our tax dollars.

Vanden Heuvel has come up with a fine oxymoron, though “Publicly fund independent journalism”—that’s a good one, Katrina!

Posted by tmg110 at 9:23 AM EDT

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I'm voting in the Indiana Republican primary today.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:12 AM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 8 May 2012 8:14 AM EDT

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Who knew that American women are such helpless, pathetic losers? I had no idea how bad their situation really is until I met Julia, one of Barack Obama’s composite women. Okay, sure, she’s just a slide show artifact, but I have no doubt that her pathetic addiction to government assistance and support is based on hard scientific data. After all, this slide show was produced on behalf of a president who has restored Science to its rightful position at the pinnacle of American life.

Ladies, you should get down on your knees and…um…thank our Philosopher King-in-Chief for his beneficent largesse. Or maybe you should get good and damned mad over the condescending and contemptuous attitude toward you that's embodied in Julia: The Slide Show. Either way, you now know what Barry thinks of you.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:09 AM EDT

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Great news for picky eaters! The former Borders building on Grape Road in Mishawaka, Indiana, is to be transformed into a Whole Foods market. Which got me wondering: How is it that with a major university (Notre Dame) in this area, we’ve not had a Whole Foods up to now? Organic fare is tres chic among with-it lefties, after all, and ND boasts a sizeable faculty…if you see what I mean…

Posted by tmg110 at 3:04 PM EDT

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Earlier this week, five men, described by federal authorities as anarchists, were arrested in Cleveland for plotting to blow up a highway bridge linking two affluent suburbs to downtown Cleveland. The terroristic quintet was busted after attempting to procure C4 explosive from an undercover FBI informant.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that the five anarchists have links to the Occupy movement. An Occupy Cleveland organizer denied that they were acting on behalf of the group, and this is probably true. Occupy is kooky, angry and not infrequently violent, but to call it a terrorist group is a wild exaggeration.

Still, the Occupy movement has a big problem. Somewhat like Barack Obama in 2008, its appeal is broad but unfocused, its rhetoric stirring but vague. People see in it what they will, from student loan forgiveness all the way to violent revolution. And such lack of precision in a populist political movement benefits no one in the long run but committed extremists who know what they want.

Fanatics like the Cleveland Five are flocking to Occupy like flies to a piece of rotting meat. I predict that the movement as a whole will become angrier and more violent as these hardcore revolutionaries grow in numbers and influence.

Posted by tmg110 at 6:52 AM EDT

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