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   PoliticsAmerican Presidential Politics and foreign affairs


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To: d.taggart who wrote (19317)4/18/2007 7:53:55 PM
From: Carolyn
   of 71588
 
Democrats favor infanticide. That is what partial birth abortion is.

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To: Carolyn who wrote (19318)4/18/2007 7:59:08 PM
From: d.taggart
   of 71588
 
Yes thats true and if the cannot get their momies to kill em they do their best to not educate them,I could rouse the blacks from their slumber and I am an old white guy

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To: haqihana who wrote (19300)4/18/2007 8:22:24 PM
From: steve harris
   of 71588
 
A great man he is.

But with one political party destroying America for votes, and those voters accepting the payoffs, it seems we are doomed.

I'm not going to mention the people I have played golf with on 100% disability from their jobs.

I think it would reduce crime. Too much idle time. If people were working they wouldn't be bored into doing something they thought they could get away with.

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To: Peter Dierks who wrote (19294)4/18/2007 8:24:08 PM
From: steve harris
   of 71588
 
Mama has it right when she says "Idle time's the devil's time".

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To: longnshort who wrote (19303)4/18/2007 10:43:07 PM
From: Mr. Palau
   of 71588
 
i think every gopper should run in 2008 on the platform that they will completely ban abortion, it would be fun to watch the dems win 70 percent of the women vote

the clean government platform isnt going to work that well for them

"Doolittle's Home Raided

Roll Call is reporting that the FBI "has raided the Northern Virginia home of Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA)... No details are publicly available yet about the circumstances of the raid, but Doolittle and his wife, Julie, have been under federal investigation for their ties to the scandal surrounding imprisoned former lobbyist Jack Abramoff."

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To: sandintoes who wrote (19315)4/18/2007 11:40:42 PM
From: Peter Dierks
   of 71588
 
Rounding would equalize the results of eliminating the small change. Some businesses might adjust prices to take advantage of it, but after consumers bought just a few items, the law of average would eliminate merchants' advantage.

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From: Peter Dierks4/19/2007 12:04:39 AM
   of 71588
 
No Guardrails
August 1968 and the death of self-restraint.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 10:00 a.m. EDT

(Editor's note: This editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 1993.)

The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don't understand the rules, who don't think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control. We are the country that has a TV commercial on all the time that says: "Just do it." Michael Frederick Griffin just did it.

An anti-abortion protester of intense emotions, he walked around behind the Pensacola Women's Medical Services Clinic and pumped three bullets into the back of Dr. Gunn. Emptied himself, Michael Griffin then waited for the police to take him away. A remark by his father-in-law caught our eye: "Now we've got to take care of two grandchildren."

As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn't seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, did so many become undone?

We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won't like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals--university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators--who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. After Chicago, the justifications never really stopped. America had a new culture, for political action and personal living.

With great rhetorical firepower, books, magazines, opinion columns and editorials defended each succeeding act of defiance--against the war, against university presidents, against corporate practices, against behavior codes, against dress codes, against virtually all agents of established authority.

What in the past had been simply illegal became "civil disobedience." If you could claim, and it was never too hard to claim, that your group was engaged in an act of civil disobedience--taking over a building, preventing a government official from speaking, bursting onto the grounds of a nuclear cooling station, destroying animal research, desecrating Communion hosts--the shapers of opinion would blow right past the broken rules to seek an understanding of the "dissidents" (in the '60s and '70s) and "activists" (in the '80s and now).

Concurrently, the personal virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. In the process, certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were repeatedly lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.

You can argue, as many did and still do, that all this was necessary because the established order wouldn't respond or change. But then you still need to account for the nation's simultaneous dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction. You need to account for what is happening to those people within U.S. society who seem least able to navigate the political and personal torrents that they become part of, like Michael Griffin. Those torrents began with the antiwar movement in the 1960s.

Those endless demonstrations, though, were merely one part of a much deeper shift in American culture--away from community and family rules of conduct and toward more autonomy, more personal independence. As to limits, you set your own.

The people who provided the theoretical underpinnings for this shift--the intellectuals and political leaders who led the movement--did very well, or at least survived. They are born with large reservoirs of intelligence and psychological strength. The fame and celebrity help, too.

But for a lot of other people it hasn't been such an easy life to sustain. Not exceedingly sophisticated, neither thinkers nor leaders, never interviewed for their views, they're held together by faith, friends, fun and, at the margins, by fanaticism. The big political crackups make the news--a Michael Griffin or the woman on trial in Connecticut for the attempted bombing of the CEO of a surgical-device company or the '70s radicals who accidentally blew themselves up in a New York brownstone. But the personal crackups just float like flotsam through the country's hospitals and streets. You can also see some of them on daytime TV, America's medical museum of personal autonomy.

It may be true that most of the people in Hollywood who did cocaine survived it, but many of the weaker members of the community hit the wall. And most of the teenage girls in the Midwest who learn about the nuances of sex from magazines published by thirtysomething women in New York will more or less survive, but some continue to end up as prostitutes on Eighth Avenue. Everyone today seems to know someone who couldn't handle the turns and went over the side of the mountain.

These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life's margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They're guardrails. It's also true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules. But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in. All of them did so to transform the country's institutions and its codes of personal behavior (abortion, for instance).

In a sense, it has been a remarkable political and social achievement for them. But let's get something straight about the consequences. If as a society we want to live under conditions of constant challenge to institutions and limits on personal life, if we are going to march and fight and litigate over every conceivable grievance, then we should stop crying over all the individual casualties, because there are going to be a lot of them.

Michael Griffin and Dr. David Gunn are merely two names on a long list of confrontations and personal catastrophe going back 25 years. That today is the status quo. The alternative is to start rethinking it

opinionjournal.com

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To: TimF who wrote (17866)4/19/2007 12:07:23 AM
From: Peter Dierks
   of 71588
 
Patricia Taylor Buckley
R.I.P.

An NRO Primary Document

Patricia Taylor Buckley died on 2 A.M. on April 15, 2007, at the Stamford Hospital in Stamford, Conn., of an infection, following a long illness.


Born Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, July 1, 1926. Father Austin Cotterell Taylor. Mother Kathleen Elliott Taylor. Her father was a self-made industrialist whose racehorse Indian Broom competed against Seabiscuit. Mr. Taylor died in 1965. Her mother, a civic leader in Vancouver, died in 1972. Mrs. Buckley’s maternal grandfather was chief of police of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Mrs. Buckley’s brother, financier Austin G. E. Taylor of Vancouver died in 1996. Her sister, Kathleen Finucane of Vancouver, died in March.

Patricia Alden Austin Taylor was educated at Crofton House School, Vancouver. She attended Vassar College where she met her future husband through her roommate Patricia Buckley. She and her roommate’s older brother, William F. Buckley Jr. were married in Vancouver on July 6, 1950, in what was then the largest wedding in the city’s history.

Mrs. Buckley went from being a glamorous debutante to a vacuum cleaner-wielding wife of a junior faculty member of Yale. She and Mr. Buckley lived in Hamden, Connecticut, while he wrote his first book, God and Man at Yale while working as a junior instructor in the Spanish department. After Mr. Buckley did a brief stint in Mexico City with the Central Intelligence Agency — working for E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate break-in fame — he and his wife settled in Stamford, Connecticut, their home ever since.

Their only child Christopher Taylor Buckley was born in 1952.

Mrs. Buckley became a leading member of New York society and was active in many charities and civic causes. She raised money for a number of hospitals, including St. Vincent’s. She served on numerous boards and was an honorary director of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. For many years, she chaired the annual dinner of the museum’s Costume Institute.

Pat (as she was called) Buckley moved easily amidst notables from the worlds of politics, literature, the arts, philanthropy, fashion, and society. Her friends included Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Jerome Zipkin, Betsy Bloomingdale, Clare Boothe Luce, Bill Blass, Tammany leader Carmine DeSapio, Abe Rosenthal and Shirley Lord, Mrs. Gary “Rocky” Cooper, David Niven, John Kenneth Galbraith, (British director) Peter Glenville, Princess Grace of Monaco, the Don Juan de Borbon (father of the King of Spain), John Fairchild, Richard Avedon, Dominick Dunne, Bob Colacello, Alistair Horne, Aileen Mehle, Richard and Shirley Clurman, John and Drue Heinz, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, Tom Wolfe, Taki and Alexandra Theadoracopulos, Clay Felker, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, C.Z. Guest, Kenneth J. Lane, Valentino, Halston, Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, David Halberstam, Vladimir Nabokov, Roger Moore, Truman Capote, Rosalyn Tureck, Alicia dela Rocha, James Clavell, King Constantine of Greece, Malcolm Forbes, Brooke Astor, Anne Slater, and (Mortimer’s owner) Glen Birnbaum. The late Nan Kempner was a close and lifelong friend.

Mrs. Buckley became an American citizen in the early 1990s.

She was known for her exacting taste in everything from clothes to decorating and food. She maintained a notably slender figure — Woman’s Wear Daily referred to her as the “chic and stunning Mrs. Buckley” and to her “belle poitrine.” She was an early booster of — and walking advertisement for — American designers, particularly Bill Blass. A regular on the Best Dressed List, she was inducted into its Hall of Fame in the 1990s. She favored costume jewelry made by her gin-rummy-pal, designer Kenneth J. Lane. In his memoir, Mr. Blass noted that he and Mrs. Buckley would occasionally play hooky from their hectic schedules in order to see as many movies as they could back-to-back in one day, “an operation that required near-military planning.”

Despite her elegant figure, Mrs. Buckley was a famous foodie (not a term she herself would ever have used). Unable to boil a three-minute egg when she married, she dutifully took cooking classes with no less a teacher than James Beard. In the 1970s, she became a champion of Glorious Foods, the now-famous catering firm started by Sean Driscoll. She refined her skills as a giver of fancy benefit dinners for up to 1,000 people by improving “Pat’s Pot Pie,” a chicken pot pie that eliminated the time-consuming need for serving vegetables and sauces separately. It was an innovation hailed by her famously impatient husband.

Over the years, Mrs. Buckley acted a kind of den mother to the modern conservative movement, giving dinners to the editors of her husband’s magazine, National Review every other Monday, starting in the mid-1960s. At her husband’s 80th-birthday celebration in 2005 at the Pierre Hotel in New York, her son Christopher noted in a toast that “No one ever left my mother’s house less than well and truly stuffed.”

Though she was often in the limelight, Mrs. Buckley tended to shy from it, content to leave center stage to her husband, the political and literary figure. She liked to say that she was “just a simple country girl from the woods of British Columbia,” though by any account she was anything but simple and had long since left the woods of her native British Columbia.

Patricia Taylor Buckley is survived by her husband of 56 years, William F. Buckley Jr. of Stamford, Conn.; and by her son Christopher Taylor Buckley of Washington, D.C.; also by her daughter-in-law Lucy Gregg Buckley of Washington, D.C.; granddaughter Caitlin Gregg Buckley of Charleston, S.C.; grandson William Conor Buckley of Washington, D.C. She is also survived by 52 nieces and nephews, including Kathleen Finucane Armstrong and Patricia Taylor Kreiger, both of Vancouver, Canada.

Memorial service to be announced.

article.nationalreview.com

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To: longnshort who wrote (19303)4/19/2007 12:09:21 AM
From: Peter Dierks
   of 71588
 
April 18, 2007 1:20 PM

Partial Victory

By The Editors

In 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled that states could not prohibit partial-birth abortion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a concurring opinion in which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined. “Although much ink is spilled today describing the gruesome nature of late-term abortion procedures, that rhetoric does not provide me a reason to believe that the procedure Nebraska here claims it seeks to ban is more brutal, more gruesome, or less respectful of ‘potential life’ than the equally gruesome procedure Nebraska claims it still allows. . . . [T]he notion that either of these two equally gruesome procedures performed at this late stage of gestation is more akin to infanticide than the other, or that the State furthers any legitimate interest by banning one but not the other, is simply irrational.”


The line-up on the Supreme Court has changed: Justice Samuel Alito has, mercifully, replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. So the result has changed as well: Earlier today the Court ruled that laws against partial-birth abortion are constitutional (while leaving open the possibility that they could be applied unconstitutionally). This time, Justice Ginsburg wrote in dissent, joined by Stevens and the other two liberal justices. The dissenters raise the same objection that Ginsburg and Stevens had seven years ago, albeit a bit less pithily. They even quote the earlier opinion. Their argument deserves an answer.

Partial-birth abortions are not really worse than other methods of late-term abortion. There is indeed something irrational about concluding that a method of killing a seven-month-old fetus should depend on the location of his foot. But just who is responsible for making a fetish of location in the first place? It is the Supreme Court itself that has declared — with no support in the Constitution — that what distinguishes a fetus with no claim to legal protection from an infant with such a claim is whether it is in the womb. The child’s stage of development does not really matter in this jurisprudence: A premature baby has more legal protections than a full-term fetus. In an earlier abortion case, Justice Stevens himself has suggested that a “9-month-gestated, fully sentient fetus on the eve of birth” is not “a human being.”

Legislators seeking to ban partial-birth abortion are, therefore, trying to work around the irrational policy the Supreme Court, with the blessing of these dissenters, has created. They are trying to mark an outer limit to that policy: If children within the womb are not going to be protected, then at least children partway outside it should be.

The liberal dissenters have not merely made a minor logical error here. Take their argument seriously for a moment. They claim that it is conceivable that in some cases, partial-birth abortion is the safest method of abortion, and therefore it has to be allowed. (And it has to be allowed whether or not the pregnancy itself threatens the mother’s health.) They further claim that it should make no difference to anyone where the child’s feet are positioned when he is aborted.

Let’s apply this argument to infanticide. It is conceivable that in some cases removing the child from the womb completely before killing it is the safest option. And surely it should make no difference to any rational person whether the infant was fully within the womb, partly inside it, or all the way out when his skull is crushed? Four justices on the Supreme Court have accepted all the premises for a constitutional right to infanticide. They lack only the nerve to take their reasoning to its logical conclusion.

It is good that the Court has offered back a limited measure of democratic authority over abortion policy. The major theoretical concession in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion — that the courts should make sure laws against partial-birth abortion are not misapplied — may not in practice prove important. Pro-abortion litigators, we suspect, are going to have a hard time finding cases in which laws against partial-birth abortion can plausibly be said to have been applied too broadly. But let’s not forget how far four justices are willing to go in defense of abortion.

article.nationalreview.com

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To: PROLIFE who wrote (18370)4/19/2007 12:11:07 AM
From: Peter Dierks
   of 71588
 
Wanted: A Culture of Self-Defense
Enough is enough.
April 18, 2007 12:00 AM

By Michelle Malkin

There’s no polite way or time to say it: American colleges and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregated dorms, politically correct academic departments, and designated “safe spaces” to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions—while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University’s anti-Minuteman Project protesters).




Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.

And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.

Yesterday morning, as news was breaking about the carnage at Virginia Tech, a reader e-mailed me a news story from last January. State legislators in Virginia had attempted to pass a bill that would have eased handgun restrictions on college campuses. Opposed by outspoken, anti-gun activists and Virginia Tech administrators, that bill failed.

Is it too early to ask: “What if?” What if that bill had passed? What if just one student in one of those classrooms had been in lawful possession of a concealed weapon for the purpose of self-defense?

If it wasn’t too early for Keystone Katie Couric to be jumping all over campus security yesterday for what they woulda/coulda/shoulda done in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, and if it isn’t too early for the New York Times editorial board to be publishing its knee-jerk call for more gun control, it darned well isn’t too early for me to raise questions about how the unrepentant antigun lobbying of college officials may have put students at risk.

The backstory: Virginia Tech had punished a student for bringing a handgun to class last spring—despite the fact that the student had a valid concealed handgun permit. The bill would have barred public universities from making “rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit . . . from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun.” After the proposal died in subcommittee, the school’s governing board reiterated its ban on students or employees carrying guns and prohibiting visitors from bringing them into campus buildings.

Late last summer, a shooting near campus prompted students to clamor again for loosening campus rules against armed self-defense. Virginia Tech officials turned up their noses. In response to student Bradford Wiles’s campus newspaper oped piece in support of concealed carry on campus, Virginia Tech Associate Vice President Larry Hincker scoffed:

[I]t is absolutely mind-boggling to see the opinions of Bradford Wiles. . . . The editors of this page must have printed this commentary if for no other reason than malicious compliance. Surely, they scratched their heads saying, ‘I can’t believe he really wants to say that.’ Wiles tells us that he didn’t feel safe with the hundreds of highly trained officers armed with high powered rifles encircling the building and protecting him. He even implies that he needed his sidearm to protect himself . . .

The nerve!

Hincker continued:

The writer would have us believe that a university campus, with tens of thousands of young people, is safer with everyone packing heat. Imagine the continual fear of students in that scenario. We’ve seen that fear here, and we don’t want to see it again. . . . Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.

Who’s scratching his head now, Mr. Hincker?

Some high-handed commentators insist it’s premature or unseemly to examine the impact of school rules discouraging students from carrying arms on campus. Pundit Andrew Sullivan complained that it was “creepy” to highlight reader e-mails calling attention to Virginia Tech’s restrictions on student self-defense—even as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence rushed to capitalize on the massacre to sign up new members and gather e-mail addresses for Million Mom March chapters. “We are outraged by the increase in gun violence in America, especially the recent shooting at Virginia Tech,” reads the online petition. “Add your name to the growing list of people who are saying: ‘Enough Is Enough!’”

Enough is enough, indeed. Enough of intellectual disarmament. Enough of physical disarmament. You want a safer campus? It begins with renewing a culture of self-defense—mind, spirit, and body. It begins with two words: Fight back.

© 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

article.nationalreview.com

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