Friday, May 28, 2010 at 10:00 am
At the Front of the State Capitol Building
490 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe, New Mexico

If you’re there, please introduce yourself. I’ll be the one with all the kids.

Kokesh for Congress Ad

[S]ome of our analysts see a developing problem for Susana [Martinez] — the strength of GOP lieutenant governor candidate John Sanchez. He is spending heavily on TV and is the favorite to take the prize over Brian Moore and Kent Cravens. But will many GOP voters want to balance their ticket by voting for an Anglo governor candidate and therefore shy away from Martinez? It’s a possibility, but there’s little she can do about it.

I don’t know any Republicans who would have a problem with a Martinez-Sanchez ticket on ethnic grounds.  The people I know who are supporting Weh, Turner, Arnold-Jones, Domenici, Cravens or Moore are not doing so out of the desire for some sort of ethnically balanced ticket.

The idea that any of my fellow Republicans would decide not to vote for a ticket that contained two candidates committed to reining in the out-of-control growth of government that is crippling our state, just because both of those candidates happened to have Spanish surnames, is absurd.

If Democrats really think Republicans are such bigots that we’d rather have more of the Richardson-Denish politics as usual than have a Republican governor and lieutenant governor who share our values and our priorities, then they are simply projecting their own race-obsessed political sensibilities onto us.

Why? It’s complicated. My eyes started to glaze over the first time I read the story and I had to backtrack several times to figure out exactly what was going on.

Why am I not surprised? Because when hundreds of Congressmen pass a multi-thousand-page behemoth of a bill that none of them have read and few of them even begin to understand, bad things happen.  Truly, this is not something it takes an advanced degree to understand.

This is why Republicans are against government takeovers of huge swaths of the economy.  Big Government = you lose.

And don’t think you’ve seen the end of the bad things happening. Not by a long shot. That monster bill is going to be a long time unveiling all its “quirks,” as NMI’s Trip Jennings kindly calls the legislative land mines on which we will all be stepping for years to come.

Whenever I read one of these tragic stories in the paper, I wait for the follow-up story in which it is almost inevitably reported that the killer, often driving the wrong way, had a BAC twice, three times, four times or more than the legal limit, and that he (occasionally she, but more often he) had multiple previous convictions for DWI.  The New Mexican reported that Jaramillo had been arrested twice for DWI; it was not clear whether he had ever been convicted.

I have often heard it claimed, as in this page at DrugLibrary.org, an organization dedicated to the legalization of drugs, that most DWI fatalities are caused by people without previous convictions.  DrugLibrary claims that

FARS data indicate that 2,252 drivers with at least one prior DWI were involved in fatal crashes in 1992 while 47,880 other drivers involved in fatal crashes did not have a prior DWI on their record.

I would be willing to bet that this is simply not true, and I have been trying to get in touch with someone at FARS (the Fatal Accident Reporting System) to verify it.   The figures are partially broken down by state, and (surprise) New Mexico has the highest percent (47%) of fatal crash drivers with previous DWI convictions.  I still think this figure is low, because just about every fatal crash I read about involves a driver with multiple previous DWI convictions.

The most egregious case I  have encountered is that of Apolonio Lopez, who was just arrested for the 18th time for DWI.   In less than 30 years of driving, the 44-year-old Lopez has managed to get arrested for drunk driving 18 times.  Imagine how many times he’s endangered innocent motorists without being caught.  Court records show that he has been convicted of DWI at least nine times.

I would like to know why we New Mexicans stand for someone who presents such a clear and present danger to innocent motorists and pedestrians — and who has demonstrated such obvious contempt for the law — to remain at liberty.   He was driving with a revoked license when he was arrested for the 18th time.

As I wrote in the New Mexico Independent last year,

When I looked up the sentencing minimums and maximums on the New Mexico Department of Transportation’s Web site, I was stunned almost speechless by how light the sentences were:

A first offense carries a minimum sentence of 48 hours and a maximum of 90 days. For a second offense, 96 hours to 364 days. The third time gets you 30 to 364 days, the fourth 6 to 18 months, the fifth 1 to 2 years, the sixth 18 to 30 months, and the seventh 2 to 3 years.

Are they kidding?

Someone convicted of driving drunk seven times can be incarcerated for a maximum of three years? Anyone who is caught and convicted of endangering the lives and limbs of his fellow New Mexicans seven times ought to be locked up and have the key thrown away.

I’d be in favor of a life sentence for the fifth conviction, maybe even the fourth. And the third certainly ought to get you a lot more than a single year minus a day — especially if you’re at double or triple the legal limit.

Those sentencing guidelines need to be revised, and revised immediately. Repeat drunk drivers, the kind who routinely drive with blood alcohol levels well above the legal limit, need to be taken off the streets, and kept off.

Take a look at those sentencing guidelines.   Do you want your spouse, your parents, your children, your grandchildren driving on streets where people with contempt for the law and a complete disregard for the lives of their fellow man are free to drink, drive and kill because the lawmakers of New Mexico don’t have the backbone to pass the kind of sentencing guidelines that will keep these people off the public streets and highways?

This is one of the many reasons that I am running for State Legislature, District 47.

Congratulations, Adam.  When Michelle Malkin picks on you, you’ve hit big time.

Malkin calls Kokesh “an anti-war smear merchant in GOP clothing” and urges her readers who have friends and family in New Mexico to “make sure they know who the real Adam Kokesh is.”

Does Ms. Malkin, I wonder, know who “the real Adam Kokesh” is?  I’m  not sure, but I’d guess she doesn’t know Mr. Kokesh personally.  When I see Adam at the New Mexico State GOP Convention tomorrow, I’ll ask him.  Because, you see, I do know Adam Kokesh.

Michelle Malkin has no doubt read the anti-Kokesh smears circulating on Free Republic, and has seen photos of him at anti-war protests, and believes that he dishonors the U.S. Marine Corps uniform he once wore by his anti-war activism.  I believe, on the other hand, that when Adam Kokesh volunteered as a Marine and then risked life and limb serving in Iraq, he earned the right to say whatever he damn well pleases about that war.  I may disagree with him about whether the U.S. should immediately pull all of our troops out of Iraq, but I would never presume to call a man who fought in that war unpatriotic.

What Michelle Malkin has not seen is Adam Kokesh driving up and down the highways of New Mexico building a grassroots campaign organization that is stronger than that any other Republican has built in our 3rd district in recent memory.  She has not seen him at high schools and colleges and Indian reservations and VFW meetings and Republican county meetings and candidate forums and Tea Parties and just about anyplace else New Mexicans gather.  I have seen Adam at more Santa Fe political events than any other candidate who is running for state or national office this year.  I can’t imagine how he keeps up the pace, but keep it up he does.

New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District is generally considered a lost cause for Republicans, and it is difficult to get good candidates to spend their time and money running for a seat that they have historically had little hope of winning.  Bill  Redmond did it in the special election of 1997 due to a lucky confluence of circumstances, but he was promptly ousted the next year by Democrat Tom Udall.  When Udall left the seat to run successfully for the U.S. Senate, Democrat Ben Ray Luján, who had little to recommend him as a candidate, beat Republican Dan East handily, even with liberal independent candidate Carol Miller siphoning off some of his votes.

Perhaps Michelle Malkin doesn’t mind if Ben Ray Luján, who has voted in perfect lock-step with President Obama’s leftist agenda,  is re-elected to the seat this November.  But I’m a New Mexican, and I do mind.  For the first time since 1997, this district actually has a viable Republican candidate, a candidate who works like I’ve never seen a candidate work, and has built one of the best campaign organizations I’ve ever seen.

Malkin calls his anti-war activism unpatriotic, but it is precisely his anti-war credentials that just may win over enough liberals in this district to elect him.   Northern New Mexico is dominated by Santa Fe, “the City Different,” which is as left-wing as Berkeley or Santa Monica, California.  A Congressional candidate who echoes Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh on every issue doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected here.  Adam Kokesh does.

As if I didn’t have time management problems enough, my husband and I are going to take up racquetball again, which we haven’t played since the dark ages before we were married.

Being physically fit feels wonderful, but it was a heck of a lot easier when I was younger and had fewer responsibilities.

It’s only fun if she has on her clothes and, ideally, her shoes as well.

Therefore, anytime I fill or drain the bathtub, I need to stay in the room, or post a guard.

Regrettably, the guards (the older girls) are the sort that would get themselves and their fellow soldiers killed if they were on real guard duty in a real army.

Were I superstitious, I might suspect it was a sign I should be doing something more productive with my time. Mercifully, I am not.

I know, I know. It’s absurd that I didn’t know this before, but I am not great with the technical side of things. I’m learning, but I’m not there yet. Not by a long shot.

So anyway, I thought this speech by Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) would be suitable for Moralia’s maiden voyage into the world of video — a voyage now christened with champagne, or Scotch, or whatever it is the good Senator’s poison might be.

If I was going to write something interesting, it would be about my insane fellow countrymen who think we should all have to take our shoes off to get on planes, and be told we can’t use the bathroom or read books for the last hour of our flights, because we don’t want to allow airport screeners to use full body scanners or to engage in profiling of potentially dangerous passengers, and don’t want to stop letting people who want to kill us come and live in our country.

But I don’t have time, so here’s one of my favorite pictures instead.  Not only is it beautiful, but it features one of my favorite philosophers of all time, who, if he were alive today and living in the U.S., I am quite certain would agree with me about the TSA lunacy.

And yes, that means that I can now insert photos into my blog whenever and wherever I want, thanks to a very nice and very competent web designer named Canton Becker, whose services I cannot recommend highly enough if you happen to live in or around Santa Fe and need a website built or repaired.

Thanks to Mr. Becker, I am now also happily upgraded to WordPress 2.9, the brand new version, which is better than the old in myriad ways.

Life is good, even if the country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Obviously, I figured out how to get a new photo onto the blog, since Portia was a little bitty baby when my technical difficulties began.  I still can’t upload pictures to the blog, but I can upload them to Flickr or Picasa and then paste the photo URL into the post.

Well, I could when I put this picture in, but I can’t anymore.   I did that with a couple of test photos, and then that application (is that what you call it?) started to malfunction as well, and now I can’t even get pictures in that way anymore.  I am really at a loss to explain this.

But there is light at the end of the Technical Difficulties Tunnel.  I have found a consultant in Santa Fe who knows far more about WordPress than I do, and we have an appointment for the Monday after Christmas.  So get ready to go back to the good old days of Blogging with Pictures.  I can’t promise to produce photo essay after photo essay like my friend MIT Mommy, but at least Moralia will not be a monochrome world anymore…except of course when the right picture is black and white.

You’ve seen this picture before.  You’re not seeing a new one because I have been unable to upload new images to my blog for many, many months now, and it’s really got me, well, blue.

It used to be so easy.  I’d press the “insert an image” icon, and then click the “Choose files to upload” button and choose whichever of my many JPEGs struck my fancy.  Now, I click the “Choose files to upload” button and nothing happens.  Nothing at all.

Obviously, I can still use previously uploaded photos, and since the monochromatic monotony of my blog was starting to get to me, I thought I’d re-use a couple of my favorites while I try to figure out how to upload some new ones.

For you young folks, the post title is the name of a very old song.  Please excuse the poor sound quality — not to mention the politically incorrect costuming and props — but Ethel Waters sure can sing.

My 8-year-old and 4-year-old are the ones on holiday, getting to eat a dazzling array of sweets and watch appalling amounts of telly at their grandmother’s house, and my 6-year-old and 1-year-old are home with me.

Here on the home front, baby Portia is on a campaign of devastation that reminds me of the credit card commercial where the Vikings (or was it the Mongols?) are trashing a department store (or was it some other kind of store?).  The commercial is a few (or was it many?) years old, but you get the idea.  That’s Portia, battle-axe in hand, making like a Valkyrie and my house is an Irish monastery.

Cordelia, my 6-year-old, is wonderfully helpful, as she always has been, but she’s also been expecting to be treated like a pampered only child in her sisters’ absence, so yesterday after I took her and Portia to the top of the Sandia Mountains on the tram, then to lunch at the restaurant of her choice, then to the public indoor pool (Portia was with the babysitter for that) where she went down the amazingly awesome water slide about a hundred times and played “Drown Mommy” to her heart’s content, she wanted to know, “Okay, where are we going now?”

I guess maybe the other half works hard, too.

Over the next week or so, presumably, we can expect to hear that prostate screenings can be pushed back to every 5 years over age 70, and colonoscopies…well, why not just get rid of those nasty things altogether?

Well baby visits for infants will be scaled back to a newborn check in the hospital (an outpatient stay, if possible) and a check-up on the first birthday.  After that, it’s see you when you need to get birth control pills or have an abortion if you’re a girl and, I guess, see you whenever if you’re a boy.  What about vaccinations, you’re thinking.  Well, since all the Lola Granola moms insist they have so much mercury in them that they do more harm than good, why not just dispense with them altogether?

Maybe if we get rid of all that costly, unnecessary diagnostic testing and preventative medicine, we’ll be able to afford nationalized health care after all.  I mean, if we’re all dead before we’re old enough to need nursing home care, paying for it will be a breeze.  Besides, think of the savings to Social Security.  Too bad W. didn’t think of something as beautifully simple as killing off all the old people when he tried so hard to reform Social Security.  Who needs death panels when we can just let everybody die of benign neglect?

Or maybe you think I’m being paranoid?  The New York Times does:

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians’ group that developed the Pap smear guidelines. The group updates its advice regularly based on new medical information, and Dr. Iglesia said the latest recommendations had been in the works for several years, “long before the Obama health plan came into existence.”

She called the timing crazy, uncanny and “an unfortunate perfect storm,” adding, “There’s no political agenda with regard to these recommendations.”

Thank God.  It’s all just a big, incredible coincidence.  Don’t I feel silly.

Ed Pound at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, blamed the apparent disbursement of your tax dollars into non-existent congressional districts

on the recipients not knowing in which congressional districts they live. He said recovery.gov did nothing wrong, because it reported incorrect information correctly. “Our job is data integrity, not data quality,” he said.

Data integrity, not data quality.  Ah, I see.  The quality of data is irrelevant to the guys at the Accountability and Transparency board.  Well, that’s some transparency and accountabilty, all right.  I wonder what the IRS would say if I showed up at an audit with a bunch of receipts from non-existent businesses, and told them I had reported incorrect information correctly.

I’m getting to this story a bit late, as Jim writes on his Facebook page that Drudge, Limbaugh and even the Washington Post have already picked up the story.  I just checked Drudge, and sure enough, the story is the top headline, though it links the ABC story rather than the NM Watchdog’s.

I have an idea the New Mexico Watchdog is going to become one those websites that well informed people cannot afford to miss reading.  Maybe you didn’t hear it here first, because I’m sure a lot of other people are saying the same thing, but you did hear it here.

It snowed last night and this morning, the second or maybe the third time this fall.  Or is it winter now?  With snow on the ground, it’s sort of hard to think of it as autumn still, but I suppose it is.  This will be my fourth winter in Santa Fe, and snow is finally starting to seem like a normal part of life.

Today was a busy day.  Religious ed for the girls in the morning, and for me one of those parent classes Catholic churches make us take when our kids are preparing for sacraments (Elizabeth will make her first confession and first communion this year).  Keeping Portia relatively calm while being taught things I already know left me tired.

Then it was off to lunch (the pizza place which Portia trashed by throwing all her food on the floor) and then the babysitter’s to leave the kids while I went to the GOP phone bank and made a lot of calls about the election this Tuesday to increase the Santa Fe County sales tax.  I convinced two people who were planning to vote yes to vote no instead, and informed quite a few people who hadn’t heard there was even going to be an election (it’s a single-issue ballot and the sneaky bastards know people don’t pay attention when it’s not a presidential or gubernatorial election) when and where they should vote.  That was tiring, too, but worth doing.

The little girls are in bed but the big girls are up way past their bedtime, transfixed by Typing Instructor for Kids, which my friend and fellow homeshooling mom Lisa recommended, and for which I thank her profusely.  I’ve been wanting to teach them to type properly, using the correct fingers, for ages, but just couldn’t seem to get around to finding the right program.  Thanks to Lisa, we found it, and the girls love it and are really doing well.  We’ve only just started using it, but so far I’m very impressed.

Meanwhile, around the blogosphere, my friend MIT Mommy is having fun and being very silly in Japan.  Anne, the Palm Tree Pundit, gave me a quote of the day post, an honor which I share with Mark Steyn.  It’s not every day I’m placed in such august company.  Mahalo, Anne.  Pauline is writing her post titles in Polish again.  Patrick is reading his fellow Hawaiian (that’s the President for the non-birthers among us) the riot act again.

In case you’re wondering about the recent lack of “It’s Tuesday, so here’s the link to my new NMI column” posts, it’s because I’m no longer writing for the New Mexico Independent.  NMI has decided to focus more on reporting and less on commentary — or less on conservative commentary, anyway, which at that illustrious publication consisted of me, myself and I.  Their three remaining columnists, Arthur Alpert, Tracy Dingman and V. B. Price, are all good, solid liberals.  Long live diversity.

In many ways, it was a relief to give up the column.  I had really been feeling the time pressure intensely, trying to juggle too many things in too few hours, and another project (besides the homeschooling and childcare and running a household and all that stuff that really ought to take care of itself but somehow doesn’t) has pushed its way to the front of the list, and I really need to get to work on it.  It’s not something I want to discuss on the blog yet, but hopefully I will be able to before long.

What’s new politically is far more interesting than what’s new personally — a resounding Republican victory in Virginia, and what’s looking like one in New Jersey, too.  Two states Obama won easily, now swinging red.  How sweet it is.  This time, anyway, since the swing voters are swinging my way.  When His Own Fine Self is not on the ticket, the Democrat brand doesn’t shine quite as radiantly.  The sad thing is, they’ll swing back again as soon as they get bored or some other sweet young thing comes along and talks pretty.

But at Scarlett O’Hara used to say, I’ll think about that tomorrow.  Tonight I’ll savor the sweet taste of victory.

The political — I’d say Chris Christie is going to win a big, fat gubernatorial victory, wouldn’t you?

Ricardo Leon Sánchez de Reinaldo, aka Rick Sanchez, fails to toe the CNN party line in the great Taos hotel name Anglicization debate.  This isn’t new, but it’s interesting since Taos is nearby, and it’s been relatively big news here in New Mexico.  Facebook even has a Create an Anglicized Name for Rick Sanchez page, which, as you may well imagine, has quite a few less than flattering suggestions, some of which, predictably, involve a nickname for Richard that rhymes with Rick.  Santa Fe New Mexican columnist Inez Russell (no relation) is a fan, and contributes to the merriment.

Pelosi and company have delivered a 1990 page health care monstrosity. War and Peace is only about a thousand pages.  So is Gone With the Wind.  So if you were going to read the whole health care bill, it would be like sitting down and reading War and Peace from cover to cover, then immediately picking up Gone With the Wind and reading that cover to cover too — except that both of those books have interesting plots that hold your attention, and aren’t written in dense and dreary legelese.  That’s not new news either, but it’s been a busy week, non-politically speaking.  As usual.

So, off to the laundromat, I guess, kids in tow.  Dragging wet and dirty laundry across town is enough to take most busy moms’ minds off politics — and that’s exactly what Nancy Pelosi et al. are counting on.  We’re all too busy with our own lives and our own problems to pay attention to politics.  Well, not this mom.

Not this one either.   Thanks, Pauline.   Thanks for staying in the game.

I cannot tell you how much Doug Hoffman’s surge in the polls encourages me.  If angry conservatives can bring down a RINO annointed by the GOP and actually elect a third party conservative candidate, it will deal a significant blow to my longstanding cynicism.   If they bag their RINO in elephant’s clothing but end up just splitting the Republican vote so as to elect a Democrat, that will only reinforce the perception that you can’t fight the Demopublicans, and any third party effort is doomed to failure.  I hope and pray that Doug Hoffman’s supporters in New York prove that longstanding assumption wrong.  Dead wrong.  Deader than the political future of Dede Scozzafava unless she stops pretending to be a Republican and follows in Arlen Specter’s footsteps.

Perhaps the best thing about a Hoffman victory would be another nail in the coffin of Newt Gingrich’s presidential prospects.  Newt’s following the “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach on NY23, but it’s beginning to look like that pound is going to come out of his own political flesh.

Update:  I was really tired when I wrote this last night (what else is new?).  Nice Deb is the creator of the image. The New York Post has endorsed Hoffman (hat tip to McCain).

Big name Republicans like Rick Santorum, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey and Sarah Palin have broken with the Party establishment to endorse him.  I wonder who will be next?  If Mitt Romney really wants to be president — and is as smart as people say he is — it ought to be he.

The baby is teething and had me up twice last night, and once happened to be when Fox was replaying Glenn Beck’s interview with Hoffman.  I haven’t been watching much TV lately, getting all my news from the paper and the internet, so I’ve read a lot about Hoffman and seen his photo, but had never seen him on video.   He isn’t a particularly impressive speaker, not at all smooth and eloquent like Obama.  He isn’t handsome or telegenic.  He isn’t any of the things that candidates in the age of imagery usually are.  And yet he is beating both major party candidates.  He’s not doing it by good looks, snappy rhetoric or political connections.  He’s doing it by sticking to conservative principles when others will not.   This is the most important factor in the Hoffman phenomenon — and the most inspiring.

Personally, you couldn’t pay me (or my favorite charity) enough to shave my head, but Tanya’s less vain than I, and she’s going to — unless she chickens out (she’s pretty fearless) or her husband manages to talk her out of it (he may, but I doubt it).  I won’t shave my head, but I will donate on Tanya’s behalf, since it would be a crying shame if she shaved her lovely hair for nothing.

If Doug Hoffman does defeat the GOP’s appalling nominee in the NY23 race, it just may be the wake-up call the party needs.  Or maybe I’m being unduly optimistic.  Maybe guys like Gingrich who just don’t get it are too deeply entrenched and the party will go on making gargantuan blunders and supporting candidates like Scozzafava.

We shall see.

More on NY23 from Malkin, McCain, Hot Air, Caffeinated Thoughts, Manly’s Republic, Jawa Report and Joshua Pundit.

It’s still a relatively free country, so Mr. Obama can spend 150 minutes of his time with anyone he likes, but I find it ironic than one of his guests, Mr. Olbermann, complained on his show back in the bad old Bush days of 2006:

The President takes 90 minutes worth of your taxpayer dollars to entertain right-wing radio yackers in the Oval Office…

H/T to Allahpundit at Hot Air for that priceless little gem.

I wonder if the esteemed Mr. Olbermann — a genuine journalist if ever there was one, unlike non-journalists such as Bret Baier, Chris Wallace or Brit Hume at Fox — recalled the remark during the 150 minutes he spent hanging out with the commander in chief and  absorbing his pearls of wisdom?

Now you can stop wondering about the title.

I’m not taking a complete media holiday, however, as I will be down in Albuquerque tomorrow to tape an episode of New Mexico in Focus on KNME.  I’ll be one of the panelists in a segment called “The Line.”  It’s the first time that I’ll have appeared on television as a political pundit.

The penultimate day of our trip began for me at 5:30 a.m., and for my poor husband half an hour earlier, when he awoke in the dark, turned on the laptop and read that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.  He read it on Free Republic, so he assumed that some Freeper had read a satire in The Onion and made a fool of himself posting it as a genuine story.  A little web surfing disabused him of this very natural assumption.

I write “poor husband” because the man had to sit there for half an hour with no one to whom to express his utter incredulity.  When I woke up and he told me, I said, “Very funny,” and went to the computer.  “No, I’m serious,” he said.  But I wasn’t falling for it.  The guy’s an inveterate joker, and likes nothing better than to telll some outrageous lie and get you to believe it, so he can then laugh at your gullibility.

My first source for news is usually Memeorandum, and sure enough, there it was:  Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize.  I laughed till I cried, literally.  My husband and I laughed so hard together we were both too breathless to explain to Elizabeth, who is a light sleeper and awoke at the sound of so much mirth, what was funny.

After incredulity and hilarity came compassion.  Poor, poor President Obama, I thought.  He must be mortified.  He thinks a lot of himself, but I was sure he would see the absurdity of the award, and could not help but be embarrassed by it.  I have little doubt that Mr. Obama has fantasized about winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but winning it in the eighth and last year of a staggeringly successful two-term presidency over the course of which he’d brought peace and joy to the world.  Nuclear weapons would be a distant memory, Ahmadinejad would bestow the kiss of peace upon Netanyahu, and the lion would lie down with the lamb.

But now those fawning jackasses in Oslo have ruined the fantasy.  They gave him the prize for doing nothing at all, and now even if he does become the greatest peacemaker in the long, bloody history of humankind, there won’t be any meaningful way of recognizing him for it.

The Wall Street Journal editorial says everything I’ve been thinking.  I have no idea what the columnists and bloggers I usually read are saying, because I’ve been too busy traveling and recovering from traveling to read them.  Maybe I’ll update later with some links, but maybe I’ll just do laundry instead.

Update:  laundry.

There were so many blog posts I mentally composed while driving my tribe of children around the freeways of this accursed city, but since the sci-fi geeks of my youth were wrong and they haven’t invented USB jacks that go straight from your brain to your laptop, I was prevented from casting my pearls of wisdom before your eager eyes.  Oh well.

Tonight I’ll be at a hotel with wi-fi, so you might have an actual post to read instead of a disjointed pastiche of a tired mother’s thoughts.  Or not.

This week, my four children and I are staying with a friend who has one child, along with another friend who brought her two children.  For those of you who went to school after they started that “new math” thing, that makes three moms and seven kids.  And, I might add, only two bathrooms.

I keep telling myself, the Von Trapps had seven children all by their own selves, so it’s really not that many, right?  Well, sort of.  The Von Trapp children were used to being one of seven (not to mention their parents being used to a houseful of servants) and it’s a little different when the children are accustomed to different sizes of households and different styles of parenting.

But my friends and I knew it would be a circus (those were our exact words) before we planned this crazy trip, and we’re still glad we came.  My back will recover from the air mattress, and we and our children will have the memories.  The good memories will remain, and the not so good ones will go the way of the backaches.

Coincidentally, a commenter on the Weh interview linked to his blog post casting doubt on the standard Republican platform of lower taxes and smaller government:

Look, if you want less government and lower taxes, it means you’re not going to work at solving the DWI problem and the low academic achievement in the public schools. And all the other problems that people expect government to solve.

For my rebuttal regarding education, please read my new NMI column.  For my thoughts on DWI, see an NMI column I wrote a couple of months ago.

Later this week, I’m packing up all the kids and heading for a short vacation with two of my best girlfriends and their children, so you may be reading less politics and more posts like this and this.  Or you may not be reading anything at all, if I can’t get the wireless internet to work or if I spend too much time playing Risk with the kids.

Indeed he is.  Not just a Marine, but a decorated combat veteran who served two terms in Vietnam and was recalled to active duty in the Gulf War, in Somalia, and most recently in Iraq in 2003-04.  He joined the Marines as an enlisted man, attended OCS and later UNM, and retired with the rank of Colonel.

Here in New Mexico there are no beaches, but Col. Weh hopes to storm the Capitol here in Santa Fe, first in the primary against Doug Turner, Janice Arnold-Jones and Susana Martinez, and then in November against presumed Democratic nominee Diane Denish.

I’ve always been very open about the fact that I am an active, involved Republican. I do not claim impartiality in the governor’s race. I will support whichever Republican is nominated.  Thus far I have not publicly endorsed any of the four declared candidates for the Republican nomination, since I have met only three of them personally, and would like to meet the fourth before I make my final decision.  Now that I have had the opportunity to speak with Allen Weh at some length, however, I have to say that I am impressed.

Col. Weh graciously gave me almost half an hour of his time on Saturday as he was driving down to Ruidoso, putting in one of many full days spent crisscrossing the state in his truck.  He told me that it is not unusual for him to drive 450 miles in a day, meeting with voters from Farmington to Hobbs in hopes of winning their votes in the Republican primary next spring.  I was not particularly surprised to hear it, since I myself have run into Weh at Santa Fe events no less than three times since June.  This is a man on a mission, clearly.

But what is his mission?  The issues page of his comprehensive and well-organized website highlights a number of areas in which he hopes to make an impact as New Mexico’s next governor.   The first of these is, perhaps not surprisingly, government corruption.  Weh announces on his website that

New Mexicans will see an end to special contracts for big campaign donors and personal friends.

He reiterated this promise during our interview, affirming that businesspeople who contribute to his campaign can expect only one thing from a Governor Weh:

I’m going to create a better business climate, and that’s all.

That better business climate can be created, he believes, by a fiscally responsible budget.  This means, Weh believes,

Three simple things:  keep taxes in line with the states around us, make our state government lean and efficient, and reduce unnecessary regulations.

Could he give an example, I asked, of unnecessary regulations?  He replied that the dairy, agriculture, oil, gas and mining industries were all over-regulated, and that when he meets with businesspeople in these industries throughout New Mexico, they complain about being harassed by regulations that exceed the national standards.  Weh believes this places an unfair burden on New Mexico businesses, affirming:

If it’s good enough for the EPA, it ought to be good enough for New Mexico.

This sounds more like the pronouncement of a businessman than a politician.  Then again, Allen Weh is not a politician.  He is a businessman, the founder and CEO of CSI Aviation Services.  He has never held elective office, but did serve as chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party from 2004 until January 2009.

Because 2006 and 2008 were hardly stellar years for Republicans in New Mexico, there are some who hold Weh responsible for the party’s lackluster performance.  When I asked Weh how he would respond to such criticisms, he replied:

Most people realize that a state party chairman has no control over national political headwinds, and the headwinds that compelled Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008 were the result of dissatisfaction with the disgraceful behavior of some Republican congressmen, with the failure of some Republicans in office to live up to their principles.  It was the result of dissatisfaction with President Bush’s war policies.  If someone things I’m powerful enough to compel all the changes in the national political headwinds…

Clearly, this is a man who holds no illusions about being able to “transform” New Mexico.  He is not promising Hope and Change, just a government free from corruption and over-regulation.

Education is another area which Col. Weh intends to make a priority if elected.  His website affirms that he will expand charter schools and give parents real educational choice.  When I asked if this included vouchers, he replied that he thinks vouchers would be a good thing for education in New Mexico, but acknowledged that they will be a hard sell in the legislature, and that charter schools may be the only thing he can realistically hope for.  Obviously this is one candidate who understands Harry Callahan’s sage advice:  a man’s got to know his limitations.

The last policy area we discussed was public safety.  Weh writes on his website that he plans to strengthen state police, which he says in under strength and lacks the resources it needs to protect New Mexico’s rural communities.

I asked him if prison reform would play any role in his public safety policy, and his response was immediate and emphatic:

Absolutely! We need to have a total review of our policy of incarceration, figure out who really needs to be in prison.  I want to make sure that the bad people who hurt people, people who are doing violent crimes, are put in prison and kept there.  That includes serial burglers.

For non-violent crimes, I’d emphasize some sort of non-incarceration alternative.  Weed out less violent offenders.  We need to hold them accountable, certainly, but that may not mean sleeping in a bed in a prison cell at night.

A law and order Republican who is passionate about prison reform?  A tough, no-nonsense Marine combat veteran who thinks we need a sensitive, nuanced way of dealing with crime rather than just calling for more prisons?  Then again, this is a Marine who posts on his Facebook page recipes of meals he enjoys cooking for his wife and family.

Today, Allen Weh stands out among political candidates because of his military background.  When I was young, almost every politician was a veteran.  Not always a combat veteran, but a veteran who had done military service of one kind or another.  This, of course, is no longer the case.

I asked Col. Weh how he thought his military experience had prepared him for the governorship:

There is no question that that experience has given me certain abilities to do things that no one else can unless they’ve had those experiences.  If you’ve been shot at, it builds a little character.  If you can handle that pressure, you can handle just about anything.  The experience of combat enables me to see things differently than a lot of politicians, who see crises everywhere.  They get upset and emotional about things that don’t upset me at all.  There isn’t anybody I’m afraid of.  Nobody.  Legislators on the other side of the aisle…I’ll reach out my hand to them, but I’m certainly not afraid of them.

Whether they end up being afraid of him we’ll have to wait and see.

]]> http://moraliablog.com/2009/09/allen-weh-candidate-for-governor-of-new-mexico/feed/ 5 http://moraliablog.com/2009/09/youre-all-racists/ http://moraliablog.com/2009/09/youre-all-racists/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:04:02 +0000 Brigette Russell http://moraliablog.com/?p=380 Update:  NMI published this column today, September 27, 2009.  Original post (written September 21) below:

You’re all racists — that was to have been the title of my New Mexico Independent column today.  But about an hour after I submitted it, I received an e-mail from my new editor (my previous editor, David Alire Garcia, having left not only the New Mexico Independent, but New Mexico as well, to my great sadness) at NMI announcing that she was calling a temporary moratorium on columns about race because the comments on recent columns have become so incendiary.

Even though the editor of the New Mexico Independent has decided that “this issue is not going anywhere good,” I’d just as soon all my hard work and profound insights not to go waste.  Fortunately, I have another venue here at Moralia.  My little blog doesn’t get as much traffic as NMI, it’s true, but at least I have sole editorial control here.  And I’m not finished writing about this issue.  Not by a long shot.

Neither are a lot of other conservatives, like Sister Toldjah, Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, A Conservative Teacher, Jonah Goldberg (at whose table I sat at the New Mexico Turn Around conference where both of us spoke on Friday), S. Weasel (who ruminates on how to turn the same savage wit she unleashed on the Clintons for eight years on the Obamas without being raaaacist),  McCain, Cassandra at Villainous Company, Kathy Shaidle, Ed Driscoll, David Brooks (HT: Patrick the Paragraph Farmer), Another Black Conservative and, as I linked the other day, but whose excellent treatment of the issue deserves another plug, Nice Deb.

So here’s the column that was supposed to run at NMI today.  The column that was going to get the commenters at NMI too riled up for safety.  The column my editor didn’t want you to read. But as I said before, here at Moralia, I am the editor, and I get to decide what gets published and what doesn’t.  Having complete freedom of expression doesn’t pay quite as well as writing for somebody else, but as the MasterCard commercials say, it’s priceless.

You’re all racists

written for (but not published by)

The New Mexico Independent

“You’re all racists!”  That’s the meme sweeping the mainstream media and left-leaning websites these days.  Conservative opposition to the Democratic policies championed by President Obama.  Everybody is saying it.  Former President Jimmy Carter is saying it.   Frank Rich of The New York Times is saying it.  Orlando Romero of the Santa Fe New Mexican is saying it.  All the cool people are saying it, so it must be true, right? The fact is, conservatives oppose leftist politicians because they try to enact leftist policies.  Barack Obama is a leftist politician and therefore conservatives oppose his policies.  Because the swing voters who joined committed leftists to elect Obama are now having second thoughts, the liberal media elite is now desperately searching for a way to bring those swing voters back, and has decided that guilt-tripping them with accusations of racism is their best bet.

I frequently hear how racist people still are in the South and in some other regions of the United States.  I will admit that I have never lived in the South (as opposed to the Southwest) so I cannot speak personally of the Zeitgeist concerning matters of race in conservative circles there.  I do have a number of friends who are Southerners and Republicans, and I can say that I’ve never heard any of them make racist remarks about Barack Obama even though I have heard them attack his policy positions.

This is not to say that there aren’t younger racists in the South and other regions of the country.  I’m sure there are.  I just do not believe that there are even a tenth as many of them as the recent glut of opinion pieces suggests. There will always be people with anti-social and even pathological attitudes in our society.  There are people walking the streets among us who will at some point in the future commit murders and rapes, people who will kidnap and molest children, people who will swindle the elderly and the feeble-minded.  The fact that there are sadists and sociopaths among us does not make us a nation of sadists and sociopaths, however.

There are men in our society who hate women, men like George Sodini, who last month went on a shooting spree in  which he murdered three women and injured nine more, because he felt as though women rejected him sexually.  The fact that a small percentage of men burn with murderous rage against women does not make American men as a whole misogynistic.

Likewise, there are people in our society who hate blacks.  A few are violent, pathological racists, who think the murderous violence of the KKK was fully justified.  More are racists of a milder degree, people who would never condone the murder of a black person, but who would be distressed if their son or daughter dated one.

In personal conversations with other conservatives, I have heard exactly three people make racist remarks about the president.  All three of them are in their 80s.  These are people who were already well into adulthood during the 1950s, when segregation was still considered acceptable by a large minority, if not the majority, of the white population of this country. The vast majority of Republicans, Libertarians and registered independent conservatives who voice opposition to Barack Obama do so because they oppose his policy positions.  This is true of the overwhelming majority of conservatives under the age of 60.  For the most part, Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers and people younger even than that do not share the often frankly racist sentiments of some elderly people.

President Obama wants to take the country in a direction those of us on the right see as the wrong direction – dangerously wrong.  That is why the great majority of us oppose him. The allegations of racism against conservatives are not only slanderous, but ignorant.  Didn’t we vote against John Kerry, a white man, in 2004?  Didn’t we vote against Al Gore, a white man, in 2000?  Didn’t we vote against Bill Clinton, a white man, in 1992 and 1996?  And did not Barack Obama, a black man, win a great many more votes from white Americans than either Kerry or Gore?

The case of Bill Clinton is particularly damning to the “they’re all racists” argument.  Imagine Bill Clinton had been a black man rather than a white man.  When Republicans in the House of Representatives impeached Clinton, the pundits would have cried racism, arguing that conservative targeting of Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes was playing to the stereotype of the highly sexualized black male, that the right was demonizing him because we were afraid of a sexually predatory black man who threatened white women. But, alas, Bill Clinton was a sexually predatory white man, and so the argument could not be made.

In the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, it was mainly crackpots like Janeane Garofalo who were insisting that everyone who wasn’t in lock step with the president’s policy agenda was a racist.  Now, more respectable voices are picking up this slanderous rallying cry.  Shame on actual racists, but shame on those who slander principled conservatives as racists, too.

I did want to take time to link to Nice Deb’s excellent post debunking the leftist charges of racism again anyone who has the temerity to criticize any of President Obama’s policies.

Nice job, Nice Deb!

It’s going to be a very long day for me, with Fiesta, the Tea Party, followed by choir practice for the girls and mass at the Cathedral, and I’ll be on my own with all four girls.  Barring illness or other dire emergency, I’ll be there, and hope to see you there, too.

There are enough of these pathetic aging frat boys in the GOP that Talking Points Memo was able to put together a slide show entitled “The Scandalous Fall of the Modern Conservative Movement.”  Thanks, guys.  Thanks so much for your patriotic and disinterested public service.  Number 4 out of 10 in the slide show, Florida State Rep. Bob Allen, couldn’t even manage to trade political power for sex, but was reduced to paying a prostitute (who, unfortunately for Mr. Allen, turned out to be an undercover cop) for fellatio.

At least Duvall, as loathsome as he is, had the sense to resign rather than hanging on and becoming an albatross around the party’s neck, as the ever so romantic Mr. Sanford has done.

Watching Sanford blather on about about his love affair at his press conference was embarassing, but reading what Duvall said about his extramarital affairs was far worse.  I was embarrassed for Mark Sanford.  I was embarrassed to have Mike Duvall as a member of the same species.

No doubt Duvall and his mistress, Heidi Barsuglia, are now very embarrassed — but they probably aren’t ashamed.  Shame means you know what you did was wrong, and your shame is for having done it.  Duvall and Barsuglia must be very embarrassed, but they’re embarrassed because the world knows about their sordid, tacky little affair, not because they had it.  They’re embarrassed because Duvall shot his big fat mouth off when he shouldn’t have, not because they committed adultery when they shouldn’t have.

Really, I can’t decide which of them is more contemptible.  He is a  politician who paints himself as a champion of conservative family values while committing adultery with at least two different women and then discusses the sordid details of his infidelity while in legislative session, boasting about how much younger than he Barsuglia is, and apparently not caring in the least that a woman that young wouldn’t let him near her if he didn’t have the power and prestige of political office.   She plays the whore to the sort of man who brags about his debaucheries.

The truly sickening thing to contemplate is just how often such scenes must be played out in state houses around the nation, only without open mikes to tell the tale.  Today, I really hate politics.

What others are saying:  Malkin, McCain.

I first saw the video at Hot Air, where Mad Congressman Stark had to share billing with two other leftist loonies in a post Allahpundit called “Too many Democratic congressmen behaving like jackasses for bloggers to keep up anymore.”  He got the video from Michelle Malkin, who made it a hot web property even though it’s about a year old.

Picking up on Stark’s sneering where-did-you-go-to-college-and-do-you-have-a-PhD line of defense, Smitty at The Other McCain has less than flattering things to say about “PhD weenies” so I should point out that Pete “do you have a PhD?” Stark does not, in fact, have one himself.  All he’s got is an MBA, which means that my academic credentials (a Redneck Republican blogger has a PhD???) trump his.  Being an intellectual doesn’t make you a weenie, any more than being a Republican makes you a redneck.

Being Pete Stark, however, does make you the internet laughingstock of the hour.  Fortunately for Mr. (not Dr.) Stark, the internet is a fast-paced place, and tomorrow some other jackass will have usurped his place on Memeorandum.

California authorities say a clash between opponents and supporters of health care reform ended with one man biting off another man’s finger.

When I read the headline “Finger bitten off during California health protest,” I would have bet just about anything that the guy doing the biting was in favor of socialized medicine, and sure enough, I was right.  What are the odds?

Isn’t it interesting how it’s always leftists bemoaning the decline of civilized political discourse?  You know, the leftists who routinely call us redneck, fascist and retarded?  Can you imagine what the hue and cry would have been if it had been an opponent of socialized medicine who bit off the finger of a supporter?  As it was not, the response from the left has been more muted.  Ben Smith reports that MoveOn called the incident “regrettable.”  Confederate Yankee’s cleverly titled post — Yes We Can(nibal –  has a link to a Politics Daily story which actually reverses the parties to the incident, claiming that the conservative bit off the finger of the liberal.

In reactions from the right — I particularly liked Another Black Conservative’s post title:  Hungry for health care.  True to her name, Nice Deb doesn’t think Mark Steyn (or presumably anyone else) should be laughing about it. Malkin, Fausta a, The BlogProf, Red County and The Jawa Report also weigh in.

Not quite sure I get Wonkette’s sarcasm, calling the biter “MoveOn.org Librul Monster” — emphasizing, perhaps, just how dumb we Republicans are, I guess?  Maybe some of us can’t spell liberal, but at least most of us aren’t cannibals.  Then again, the MoveOn.org Librul didn’t actually consume the finger (it was reattached at the hospital) so I guess you can’t really call him a cannibal.  What, then?  Truly, words (even misspelled ones) fail in this case.

I’ve been trying to get this posted before someone else uses my title.  Riehl World View almost did, but not quite.  Speaking of titles, McCain gives Yes We Can(nnibal) the Blog Headline of the Day Week Decade award.  Definitely more than day or week, but I’ll have to give it a few years before I say decade.  As I wrote above, however, it’s awfully good.   I’d say finger lickin’ good, but Nice Deb might slap my wrist.

When the news came that Santa Fe’s public schools would get some of the federal stimulus bounty being handed out by a benevolent Democratic Congress and president, few suspected that some of that federal pork would turn rancid.

One of the things the school district did with the federal largesse was to fund an after-school program at seven Santa Fe schools, including E.J. Martinez elementary.  First, grateful parents felt the soothing touch of Uncle Sam’s velvet glove.  Only when it was too late did they feel the iron fist inside.

Click here to read the rest.  If you have children — and maybe even if you don’t — this story will shock and appall you.

‘A real grudge match’

The match is the mayoral race between incumbent David Coss and recently announced challenger Asenath Kepler.  The grudge, the paper obviously means to imply, is Kepler’s, since she had served as city manager until Coss got the city council to fire her.  The actual quote (which is why the headline actually ran inside quotation marks) is anonymous.  I quote (non-anonymously) from SFNM reporter Julie Ann Grimm’s story:

Although other candidates could still try to get on the March 2 ballot, the contest between Coss and Kepler is shaping up as a polarizing race, even if no other contenders emerge before a December deadline. “That’s going to be a real grudge match,” said one politics watcher.

Said one politics watcher.  A “politics watcher.”  An unnamed “politics watcher.”  What, exactly, is a politics watcher?  I watch politics, so I guess that makes me a politics watcher. By that standard, so are my husband, my aunt and my best friend.  So are my hairdresser and my husband’s barber, for that matter.

And because an anonymous “politics watcher” (the reporter’s aunt or hairdresser, perhaps?) calls the race a grudge match, the New Mexican’s editor decided that would make a catchy title.  Never mind that it basically dismisses Kepler as a vindictive former employee out to get revenge on her former boss.  Never mind that maybe, just maybe, Kepler really does think Coss is doing a poor job as mayor, and that she could do better.

Unlike the folks at the New Mexican, I make no claim to impartiality.  I know Asenath Kepler, and am proud to support her campaign for mayor.  I do not know Mayor Coss personally, but I do know that the city’s burglary rate has more than doubled while he’s been on the job.  The top brass of both police and fire departments took early retirement because they didn’t trust Coss and the city council to treat them fairly.  The graduation rate at Santa Fe public schools is only 54% and a staggering 26 out of Santa Fe’s 31 public schools (that’s 84%) failed to meet Federal No Child Left Behind standards.   Public safety and public education are both in shambles.

If you’d like to hear what Asenath Kepler would do as mayor, you can hear from her directly at Cathedral Park Tuesday, September 1 at 5:30.

It’s very much like what happened to Carrie Prejean, whom I never would have heard of if she had won the Miss America (or was it Miss USA?) pageant.  But instead of smiling and saying everyone has a right to get married, she said what she really thought about same sex marriage, so Perez Hilton said all sorts of awful things about her and now everybody knows her name.

It may turn out to be a good thing for the formerly anonymous blogger, Rosemary Port, too, since now she’s got her 15 minutes of fame as well.  Since she’s very attractive (or at least she looks attractive in the only picture I’ve seen of her) she may well be able to parlay that into something less ephemeral if she’s smart.

Fame, that double-edged sword, more often than not entails being mocked and belittled, and just as Rosemary Port mocked Liskula Cohen, now bloggers like Robert Stacy McCain are mocking Rosemary Port.

I’ve written about my ambivalence toward fame – and old hagdom — before.   Frankly, I don’t think I’m ready for fame (or for hagdom), though by choosing to write a blog and a column under my own name I’ve left complete anonymity behind.

I quote extensively from it in my New Mexico Independent column, but the whole thing really is worth a read.  It elaborates lucidly and persuasively on his point that

Insurance is probably the most complex, costly, and distortional method of financing any activity; that’s why it is otherwise used to fund only rare, unexpected, and large costs. Imagine sending your weekly grocery bill to an insurance clerk for review, and having the grocer reimbursed by the insurer to whom you’ve paid your share. An expensive and wasteful absurdity, no?

Is this really a big problem for our health-care system? Well, for every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee—more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance. Much of this enormous cost would simply disappear if we paid routine and predictable health-care expenditures the way we pay for everything else—by ourselves.

His solution is not just a libertarian “pay for it yourselves, guys, tough luck if you can’t” approach, and does include a safety so that the destitute do not fall through the cracks.  As I wrote at NMI,

Despite what you might think, I am not opposed to this.  Our tax dollars already pay for the health care of the destitute.  I am all in favor of a system that would require fewer tax dollars to achieve the same — or in all likelihood far better — results.

Nobody — not even Republicans — wants poor people dropping dead in the streets because they can’t pay a doctor.  Okay, maybe some Libertarians do.  But I’m not a Libertarian.  I’m not opposed to all taxatation and all government.  But I am opposed to the disastrously misguided attempt by Congress to “reform” our system of paying for health care.  If that bill, or some slightly modified facsimile, passes, our health care system is going to get worse, not better.

Don’t take my word for it.  Take Democrat David Goldhill’s.

Or you can admit Goldhill is mostly right, but advocate the passage of an asinine bill anyway, as Matthew Yglesias does with tortuous…what?  You can’t call it logic, even tortuous logic:

Defeat of the current legislative effort will demoralize proponents of health reform, teach politicians that any talk of modifying Medicare is politically toxic, and basically result in another 10-15 years of the status quo followed by some kind of budget crisis.

Passing the kind of ideas that are currently on the table would still leave us with a system with a lot of problems. But it would ameliorate several of those problems, and solve a few. It would also, I think, teach politicians the lesson that it’s possible to change the health care system. And that might lead to more and better reforms down the road.

My head spins at the irrationality.  The bill will not fix the underlying problems anyway, but we need to pass it so that those who want change won’t be demoralized, and legislators can be taught the lesson tha it’s possible to change the health care system.  Um, they’re legislators.  They make laws.  Laws that change things.  They know that already, and don’t need to be taught this obvious fact by the passage of a stupid and pointless law.

I thought people who went to Harvard were suppsed to be smart.  Matthew Yglesias went there, and so he can impress people by dropping the H-bomb at cocktail parties.  But if his brand of deluded irrationality is what Harvard is producing these days, I think I’ll save my money and send my kids to UNM instead.

Not that my family will necessarily have a choice, mind you, since by the time I’m old enough to have chronic health problems, there won’t be any money left for Medicare, and our children’s college fund will have been sucked dry by the maladies of our old age.

As it happens, there is a GOP event at La Posada this evening, and most of the Republican leadership in Santa Fe will be there, and so not available to attend the townhall.   What a coincidence!

The townhall was announced only a few days ago, no doubt to lessen the possibility of any coordinated activity GOP hooligans — that’s what our wonderful and impartial local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican, considers us, to judge from the admonition in its editorial on Saturday:

While many in liberal Santa Fe probably support health-care reform, especially with so many self-employed people who must find insurance outside of the workplace, we trust that those who oppose reform can discuss their concerns without the shouting and hooliganism that has occurred elsewhere in the country.

These town halls, rather than a shouting match, should be a place for citizens to talk to their elected leaders — a discussion that should result in both leaving better informed.

The problem is that so many of our elected leaders have already made up their minds to support this disastrous plan, and they are not in the least interested in becoming “better informed” by hearing what their constituents have to say.  They think we’re a contemptible lot of rabble-rousing hooligans who are too ignorant to know what’s best for us, but since that pesky First Amendment gives us dumb rednecks the right to speak our mind, they have to go through the charade that they are listening.

Update:  This is rich.  And they accuse us of astroturfing.  I guess it’s that old “plank in my own eye” thing.  HT:  Patterico.

It’s hard not to be a misanthrope when you read as many ghastly stories in the newspaper as I did this Thursday morning.  After dropping off the kids at the sitter’s house, I went to get a pedicure, and started reading the paper as the pedicurist got to work.  New Mexico’s appalling drop-out rate on the front page, but I already knew about that sad story.  China executes two men for defrauding investors on page 2.  Heh, maybe we should try that here.   Euna Lee and Laura Ling home, Ahmadinejad sworn in amid protests, and Sotomayor gets more GOP support on page 3 — I’m happy for Lee and Ling, expected as much for Uncle Mahmoud, and am not getting particularly worked up about Sotomayor, since I believe “pick your battles” is as good advice in politics as it is in parenting.

I won’t bore you with the entire contents of today’s New Mexican, so fast-forward to page A-8, where the real ugliness starts:  previously convicted sex offender Kenneth Leon Mills is sentenced to 133 years for kidnapping a 9-year-old girl from her bed and raping her in an alley. I’d link, but as usual, I cannot find a link at the New Mexican’s site.  I know they’re going through hard times, but really, if they’re going to have an online version, they really ought to get their act together and do it right.  Here’s a link instead to KOAT’s story about jury selection for the trial.

Across the page on A-9 was the story of George Sodini, who shot up an aerobics class at a health club, murdering three women and injuring nine more before turning the gun on himself.   Can’t find the link for that one either, so here’s the story in a different paper.  His online diary chronicled years of frustration and anger because women didn’t like him, so he decided to take it out on the ones at the gym who wouldn’t give him the time of day either.

On the same page as the health club massacre was the kind of story that makes any mother get a sick, hideous feeling in the pit of her stomach when she reads it.  It is the horrific story of Diana Schuler who, while driving drunk, high and in the wrong direction, killed her 2-year-old daughter, her three nieces aged between 5 and 8, three adults and herself.  This time, the New Mexican came through with a link.

My head started to spin as I finished reading the Schuler story.  There I sat, getting my nails done of all things, while in terrible world in which I live, little girls were getting raped, women were getting murdered because they wanted flatter abs, and a couple had lost all three of their children and no doubt felt as though their entire world had just caved in around them.  It was all just so soul-crushingly ugly.  And here I was, getting my nails painted red.  Like blood.

Sometimes the ugliness of the world overwhelms me.  Man’s inhumanity to his fellow man reaches such depths of evil that my head begins to ache when I contemplate it.

Surely I was sinful at birth,
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.

So sang a penitent King David in Psalm 51:5, after he had sent a man to be killed in battle so that he, David, might have the dead man’s wife.  Murder, adultery and abuse of power, a story thousands of years old, merely one of thousands — millions — of stories of human cruelty.

Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III proudly inscribing his war crimes on stone, or one of his later successors, Sennacherib, inscribing his on clay:

their strong, walled cities I beseiged, I captured.  People, horses, mules, asses, cattle, and sheep, I brought out from their midst and counted as booty.  And their small cities, which were beyond numbering I destroyed, I devastated, and I turned into ruins.

Cities into ruins, populations massacred and enslaved — Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Huns, Mongols…on and on and on went the killings, the rapes, the mutilations.  The massacres of Jews at Mainz and Worms during the First Crusade, and the massacres of Jews a thousand years later at Dachau and Auschwitz.

I don’t remember when I first became aware of the Holocaust, but it was probably when I read The Diary of Ann Frank.  But I read and read and read about it as a teenager, the tears rolling down my cheeks, stunned at the capacity for cruelty in my fellow human beings. For decades afterward, I avoided books and movies about the Holocaust, because they left me too disturbed for too long.  Now that I am a mother, the children of the Holocaust haunt me.

Diana Schuler killed her daughter and nieces through negligence — or whatever it was — rather than through the kind of sadism that made Kenneth Leon Mills rape that little girl, and whatever combination of sadism and self-deception that made Nazi camp guards herd little Jewish girls and boys into the gas chamber.  The self-pitying narcissism that drove George Sodini to snuff out the lives of three innocent women on exercise mats is far removed from the lust for power that made Sennacherib order the butchery of  women and children and men from one end of his far-flung empire to the other.

Or is it?  What makes us sacrifice the lives of others on the altars of our own egos?  Is it, as David wrote in his Psalm, because we are sinful from the time our mothers conceive us?   David, who earned the hand of  Saul’s daughter by presenting the foreskins of 200 Philistines.  David, who prayed in the same Psalm,

Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Do not cast me from your presence
or take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

If Kenneth Leon Mills had prayed for a pure heart, would that 9-year-old girl still have her innocence?  If George Sodini had not felt cast from God’s presence, would those women still have their lives?  If Diana Schuler had felt the joy of salvation, would it have been enough to save her daugher and the daughters of her brother?

I wonder.  And I pray — for all of them.

Let me say this again:  no family earning less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.  Period.

Every time Old Man McCain would say that Obama was going to raise your taxes, the smooth, slick, suave young senator would smile disarmingly and repeat the promise in that deep, reassuring voice of his.

Do you remember that?  Does it remind you now, perchance, of a certain vilified cowboy ex-president’s dad swearing to all the political gods in 1988,

Read my lips:  no new taxes.

And now Geither says,

We’re going to have to do what’s necessary.

Of course they are.  We — John McCain, Sarah Palin and everybody who voted for them — knew that all along.  The savvier Obamanistas knew it too, and just kept their mouths shut about it so the rest of Obama’s supporters — those poor, gullible fools who actually believed their charismatic young hero — could be led down the primrose path.

Now Obama is saying the government isn’t going to take over private health care.   Some of you poor fools probably believe him.   Because a lot of us don’t, he’s got Linda Douglass of the White House Health Reform Office doing damage control at the White House blog.  Amid the sunshine and roses propaganda, there is even an appeal to good patriotic Americans to report to the White House anything they see on the internet that “seems fishy” (politicospeak for “calls a snow job a snow job”):

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Big Brother is watching you.  And me, no doubt, after somebody e-mails flag@whitehouse.gov to report me.

In the post, Douglass refers to a video that purports to show that President Obama wants to end private insurance…but of course that’s just misinformation from the kind of people you’re supposed to report to the White House for further observation.

Watch the video and make up your own mind.  In it, Obama says clearly back in 2003 that government health care wouldn’t completely replace employer health coverage immediately.  Not immediately, but eventually.  There would be a transitional period.

Whatever.

What others are saying about the health care mendacity, propaganda and intimidation:  Below the Beltway, Drew at Ace, Ace at Ace, Caffeinated Thoughts…more to come.

Blog links on thegood-cop-bad-cop tax farce later — have to go do kid stuff now.

Yeah, well, not today, she doesn’t.  Today, the heretofore apolitical OH Mommy has written an impassioned attack on the government health care plan being proposed by the Democrats.  It was a follow-up to Saturday’s post, entitled Because no one reads blogs on the weekend… here’s a political post.  She found out otherwise, when the post garnered 121 comments.

Karwowski’s post is significant not because she has said anything I or any number of political writers haven’t said already.  It is significant because, until now, she has not been writing about politics, and now she is.  Why?  Because she is frightened by the direction the statists in charge of our government want to take this country.   And well she might be.  She immigrated to the United States from Poland at age five, and there’s nothing like having loved ones who have lived under the iron boot of communism to make you appreciate liberty more than the average upscale suburban soccer mom.

As I wrote not too long ago, I believe the rumors of the death of conservatism in this country have been greatly exaggerated.  I believe that there are a lot of OH Mommys out there, women and men who haven’t been all that political up to now, but who are getting scared at the direction things are taking.  Damn scared.

So let me second OH Mommy’s closing words today

Our voices can be heard.  It’s time to stop corporations and special interest groups dictating what our elected officials do.  Write your representatives. Call them.  Blog about it people!  Don’t be afraid if someone will call you a self righteous soccer mom who got married too early and has no concept of real life.  If you don’t like something or have an idea…. Let your voice be heard.

I will hold your hand.

I will, too.

Update – Also speaking out:  MIT Mommy, [your blog post here].

Saving the endangered newspaper isn’t yet a hot button issue, but it may become one.   Why not?  Once the left succeeds in having the state take over health care, they’ll discover something else that will turn into a national catastrophe if the government doesn’t take action to save all us dumb rednecks from ourselves right now immediately this CAN NOT WAIT!!!!

Saving the newspapers may not be the next great crusade.  It may be the fight against obesity.  It may be the landfill crisis and the unbearable tragedy of free paper and plastic bags being given out at stores.   It may be the fight against global warming.  It may be making college as free as elementary and secondary school, since like medical care, higher education isn’t a commodity, but a right.  It may be a crusade for universal breastfeeding and the end to the horrendous practice of formula feeding or a full-tilt assault on unnecessary c-sections or the implanting of more than one embryo in IVF procedures.   Whatever.  It will be something.  It always is.

Why?  Because leftists are utopians.  They want to create a perfect heaven here on earth, since the celestial heaven is a figment of the imaginations of ignorant fools who cling to guns and God.  They simply cannot accept the fact that the world we live in is not, nor will it ever be, perfect.  There are always going to be problems, and “fixing” one problem with nanny state intervention often gives rise to a whole host of new, unforeseen problems.  Think China and the “one baby per family” campaign that led to a generation so lopsided in sex distribution that millions of men can’t find wives.

I’ve written about this before.  This morning, I read Thomas Sowell’s latest column, in which he makes the same point in his usual lucid way:

The universe was not made to our specifications. Nor were human beings. So there is nothing surprising in the fact that we are dissatisfied with many things at many times. The big question is whether we are prepared to follow any politician who claims to be able to “solve” our “problem.”

If we are, then there will be a never ending series of “solutions,” each causing new problems calling for still more “solutions.” That way lies a never-ending quest, costing ever increasing amounts of the taxpayers’ money and– more important– ever greater losses of your freedom to live your own life as you see fit, rather than as presumptuous elites dictate.

Ultimately, our choice is to give up Utopian quests or give up our freedom. This has been recognized for centuries by some, but many others have not yet faced that reality, even today. If you think government should “do something” about anything that ticks you off, or anything you want and don’t have, then you have made your choice between Utopia and freedom.

I wish Dr. Sowell would run for president.  Every conservative I know would vote for him.  Oh, wait.  I forgot.  Conservatives don’t like Barack Obama because he’s black, not because he’s a statist.  Never mind.