NewsReal

New on NewsReal – NewsHounds’ Spitballs Couldn’t Hit the Broad Side of Sean Hannity’s Mansion

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, capitalism, class warfare, Fox News, Hannity, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Left, liberalism, NewsHounds, NewsReal
My latest NewsRealBlog post:
Remember NewsHounds? These Fox-hating peddlers of arguments that are really, really lame even by lefty standards (the most spectacular of which was falsely accusing Johnny Dollar’s Place of supporting plagiarism using one of my own quotes) never seem to run out of spitballs to shoot at Sean Hannity. In the blog’s latest petty attack, Ellen pulls Hannity over for a TWR—Talking While Rich:

In his Great American Panel segment Friday night (12/3/10), one of many discussions in which Hannity whined about the unfair tax burden on the rich, Hannity asked, “So does the issue of class warfare… does this work, is this a winner for the Democrats?”

Frank Donatelli, GOPAC chairman, said no, but that it would “mobilize the liberal base… It just drives them crazy… They’re demanding tax increases on the most productive citizens.”


Of course, Hannity did not consider THAT class warfare.

Er, no. Talking about class warfare is not engaging in class warfare. Leftists are so pathetically desperate to paint conservatives as hypocrites that they’ll settle for anything, no matter how little sense it makes. Ellen might throw around “class warfare” to describe simply bringing up the subject of wealth in the context of one’s political opponents, but the term actually means something: pitting one economic class against another, urging one to hate and resent the other simply for having more. To demonstrate, I give you…Ellen’s own words.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

NewsReal Debate to Watch – UPDATED: "Swelled-Headed Narcissists"?

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, conservatism, debate, NewsReal, social conservatism, social issues

Yesterday I objected to my NRB colleague Lori Heine’s criticism of social conservatives as “statist control freaks.” At her blog, she has some more remarks on the subject. She mention’s she’s got a NRB rebuttal to my piece waiting in the wings, so I’ll hold off responding for now. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here’s Lori’s NRB reply. I’ve penned an upcoming response which entails some of the themes she touches on at her blog, so I’ll use this space to comment on something else she said yesterday:

First of all, I will again explain my take on social conservatism in general. According to my understanding, it can really only be said to mean one of two things. Either it concerns itself with politics — which is to say, with the workings of government — or it is the self-definition of swelled-headed narcissists who fancy themselves more moral, or more pious than anybody else (usually without any substantial evidence to back it up). NRB’s editors take issue with lumping all social conservatives together as big-government meddlers, and perhaps they are right. But I have not yet heard a better definition than the two that I have given.

Er, what? I’m not sure just what the first option’s supposed to be referring to, and the second – “the self-definition of swelled-headed narcissists who fancy themselves more moral, or more pious than anybody else (usually without any substantial evidence to back it up)” – is an egregiously insulting mischaracterization that’s hard to take seriously. Speaking of a definition “without any substantial evidence to back it up”…

Social conservatism actually isn’t all that hard to define. I’d argue that it’s simply the recognition that a self-governing society cannot be sustained without certain moral principles and institutions, and that while, to use Vindicating the Founders author Thomas West’s phraseology, government can’t “by itself produce the passions and convictions” America needs, it can “weigh in on the side of them” in certain ways, within the confines of the Constitution and consistent with natural liberty.

America’s Founding Fathers certainly didn’t believe that protecting natural rights and maintaining basic infrastructure were government’s only proper functions: George Washington tells us that morality, one of the “firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens,” is an “indispensable support” to political prosperity. John Adams writes that policy should “regulate” human passions, because it is “of the highest importance” that they be “arranged on the side of virtue.” Charles Rowley of George Mason University writes that for James Madison, “a republican order must have a moral content, a cluster of values, without which it would lose its meaning.” Even the Founders we consider relatively secular agree—Thomas Jefferson fears what might become of nations which fail to admit “a chapter of morality in their political code,” while Benjamin Franklin hopes the nation’s “virtues public and private grow with us, and be durable,” because “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”

Also, It’s a little surprising to see myself referred to as a “doe-eyed innocent”; that’s certainly not what a lot of other people would call me…

UPDATE 2: Here’s my NRB response.

New on NewsReal – Are Social Conservatives "Statist Control Freaks"? Not So Fast

Calvin Freiburger abortion, ACLU, Christianity, conservatism, education, evolution, freedom, gay marriage, homosexuality, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, marriage, NewsReal, religion, social conservatism, social issues, statism
My latest NewsRealBlog post:

This weekend, NewsRealBlog’s Lori Heine objected to Ann Coulter’s recent column attempting to tie WikiLeaks enabler Bradley Manning to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Today, she responds to several critical commenters. I’m not terribly interested in revisiting DADT right now—my position is that I’ll defer to military experts on what changes should be made to the current policy, but I insist that the decision be based on military criteria alone, not political correctness or kowtowing to the whims of the radical gay Left.  Lori argues her position well, and successfully refutes several of her critics.
However, I must take issue with the way she conflates social conservatism with statism:

One form of fun of which big-government statists on the social Right never seem to tire is the purity game.  True believers must toe the line and never stray from it, even one jot or tittle.  “You are no conservative,” another commenter harrumphed at me.  Since this person evidently thinks only the big-government, control-freak statists on the social Right are the “real” conservatives, then according to his definition of course I am not.  Nor would I ever want to be.

What I am is a former Leftist progressive who has come to the conclusion that libertarian conservatism is – for a wide variety of reasons – the right direction for America to take.  The relentless and childish tug-of-war of the past few elections has convinced me that the Left and the statist Right are actually as alike as Tweedledee and Tweedledum and that they are, together, pulling the country apart.  Just as Leftists view any liberal who believes in small government and individual initiative a heretic, so do those on the Right who view anyone who does not share their fantasies about Granny Government and her all-powerful magic wand “not a real conservative.”

What I think of the “purity game” is no secret, either, but here I want to consider this talk of “big-government, control-freak statists on the social Right” who believe the government has an “all-powerful magic wand.”

Maybe I just missed them, but I’m struggling to recall a significant number of examples of this nefarious social-con variation. To be sure, there are a select handful of individuals who come to mind—for instance, Joseph Farah and Peter Sprigg—but beyond that, I don’t know how any significant, respected portion of the social conservative movement fits the bill.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New at NewsReal – Eric Alterman Continues to Push Lie That Won’t Die: "Bush Stole Florida"

Calvin Freiburger 2000 Election, Bush, Democrats, dishonesty, election fraud, Eric Alterman, GOP, Gore, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, judicial activism, NewsReal, revisionist history, US Supreme Court

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, leftist Stanford University professor Richard Rorty says something that reveals a great deal—perhaps more than Rorty intended—about the psyche of the Left:

I do not think that there is a nonmythological, nonideological way of telling a country’s story […]Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity. The argument between Left and Right about which episodes in our history we Americans should pride ourselves on will never be a contest between a true and a false account of our country’s history and its identity. It is better described as an argument about which hopes to allow ourselves and which to forgo.

If leftists operate under the assumption that nobody’s version of history is, or can be, objectively true anyway, then it follows that no amount of evidence or counter-argument will persuade them to abandon factually-unsustainable positions. Accordingly, leftists cling to many falsehoods that, no matter how many times they’re killed, just won’t die: the rich aren’t paying their fare share (wrong), human life doesn’t begin at fertilization (wrong), Saddam Hussein had no WMDs or ties to terrorism (wrong and wrong), the Founders didn’t care about slavery (wrong), the Red Scare was much ado about nothing (wrong), women still face pay discrimination in the workplace (wrong), the science is settled on global warming (wrong).

The latest example comes from left-wing media apologist Eric Alterman, who on the Daily Beast decides to revisit the 2000 presidential election, in which, according to leftist mythology, the Supreme Court helped George W. Bush steal the White House from Al Gore. Naturally, Alterman can’t resist opening with a dig at Dubya for being the worst president ever. But “even if Bush had been a great president,” he insists, “Bush v. Gore would have been a disgraceful decision”:

To prevent a careful recount of the vote, the self-professed conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court ignored the decision of lower federal courts, which four times had rejected similar stay requests from the Bush campaign. As a result, the majority could not cite any real, germane Florida statutory law to support its contention that the counting must be ended immediately. Instead, the court chose to overturn a state court’s election laws as interpreted by that state’s supreme court on the basis of a legal theory that the justices simply made up on the spot: that different counting standards violate the equal protection and due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

First, some background: Bush won Florida’s initial vote, albeit narrowly enough to trigger a full machine recount. This recount was conducted. Bush won again. Gore requested a manual recount in four heavily-Democrat counties, as he was legally entitled to do. However, as Mark Levin explains in Men in Black, under the law that would only lead to a full recount in those counties if a partial manual recount—“1 percent of the county’s total votes in at least three precincts”—indicated a vote tabulation error, which it didn’t. Therefore, Levin argues, “there was no statutory authority for the four counties to conduct full manual recounts of all the votes.” But two of the counties went ahead anyway. Thus, the recounts Bush’s lawyers sought to stop and Alterman’s esteemed lower courts sought to continue, weren’t legally authorized.  Further, state law placed a clear deadline, 5PM on November 14, by which recounts had to stop and results had to be turned in. In following the deadline, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was only doing her job and letting the process take its course. It was the Florida Supreme Court, not the federal one, which “chose to overturn a state court’s election laws” by ruling not only against Harris and for Gore’s recounts, but by also ordering additional recounts—without bothering to provide either a deadline or standards of procedure.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – "Hispanic Radicals Giving Beltway Democrats Nightmares Over DREAM Act

Calvin Freiburger Democrats, DREAM Act, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, illegal immigration, immigration, Jeff Sessions, Left, liberalism, NewsReal, progressivism

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Congressional Democrats are determined to do something with their power while they still have it, and since they’re on the way out anyway, it might as well be something the American people really don’t want, like “comprehensive” immigration reform. This week, Sean Hannity spoke with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) about the latest push for the DREAM Act.

The DREAM Act would offer a path to citizenship to illegal immigrants who meet the following criteria:

  • Must have entered the United States before the age of 16 (i.e. 15 and younger)
  • Must have been present in the United States for at least five (5) consecutive years prior to enactment of the bill
  • Must have graduated from a United States high school, or have obtained a GED, or have been accepted into an institution of higher education (i.e. college/university)
  • Must be between the ages of 12 and 35 at the time of application
  • Must have good moral character

Under the proposal, “good moral character” basically means being a law-abiding citizen, though “we cannot be 100% positive on which crimes would impact one’s application,” since the Act “has not outlined specific guidelines” on the subject. In other words, it’s another bill we have to pass in order to find out what it does. That’s progressive governance for you—let the democratic process decide vague, feel-good goals, but leave the little matter of how laws actually work to the unelected “experts” who’ll be implementing it.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Smithsonian Scandal Raises Questions: What’s "Good" Art, and Why Should I Pay for It?

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, Christianity, Founding Fathers, Hannity, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, morality, NewsReal, religion, tax funding

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

The Christmas season just wouldn’t be Christmas these days without government-sponsored desecration of images sacred to most Americans. By now you’ve probably heard about the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s charming new exhibit depicting, among other things, a bloody Jesus Christ covered in ants. That part of the exhibit has been removed, but it still features “male genitals, naked brothers kissing, men in chains, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, and a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show’s catalog as ‘homoerotic.’”

True to form, Media Matters is trying to defuse outrage over the controversy by repeatedly pointing out that while the Smithsonian may receive taxpayer dollars, this particular exhibit was funded privately. Here they highlight last night’s exchange between Sean Hannity and Democrat strategist Joe Trippi, who “tries to get Hannity to understand” that simple distinction:

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/flash/player.swf 

TRIPPI: The money for this exhibit was all private foundations. 

HANNITY: But I don’t agree with that analysis. It’s like saying, we fund the ability for them to open their doors every day. So they don’t get to open the door, except for the American taxpayer.

TRIPPI: The American taxpayer paid for the building and those kinds of things, but it’s an art museum, I mean – and this particular art exhibit is the influence of gay and lesbian artists on portraiture.

HANNITY: Fine. If they wanna have an art museum with this stuff, we shouldn’t pay to open their doors so they can put this type of stuff in there! 

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

Another Cultural Wake-Up Call for the Right

Calvin Freiburger abstinence, children, culture, feminism, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Left, liberalism, library books, Megan Fox, NewsReal, propaganda, sex, society
My NRB colleague Megan Fox (no, not that one) has an extremely important post today highlighting ten examples of kids books from her public library, that are chock-full of left-wing propaganda and disgustingly immoral and destructive lessons about sex. Be sure to take the time to read them all:

It is not a coincidence that the majority of literature written for children is this type of smut. There is a real effort to control your child’s mind to turn them into masturbating plebeians who are more focused on orgasms and cell phone accessories than on the ever-approaching shackles of government.  If leftists can rope your children into behaving in ways that will ruin them financially, spiritually and intellectually then they will own them and their votes forever.

Children are ruled by their wants and childish impulses. They need guidance from stable parents in order to grow into  strong, responsible adults able to make good decisions and leave their corner of the world better than how they found it. None of the books on this list will help any child grow into a decent human being.

Amen, Megan! I’ve tackled this sort of thing before, too. I fear too many conservatives are AWOL on many of the crises they arguably have the most control over. Saving America begins with waking up to what’s going on right in front of you and standing up to restore sanity within your own community. The Right needs to understand that we shouldn’t expect to win major or lasting political victories if we don’t address the many ways in which the Left poisons our culture.

Why Shameless Ron Paul Apologist Wesley Messamore Isn’t Worth My Time

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, debate, dishonesty, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, libertarianism, NewsReal, Ron Paul, spin, Wesley Messamore, YAL

Last month, I wrote a NewsRealBlog post summarizing the case against Ron Paul. A Paul disciple named Wesley Messamore attempted to refute it at the Young Americans for Liberty blog. I responded in another NRB post, demonstrating that Wesley’s screed consisted almost entirely of dishonesty, misdirection, and simply ignoring information that was too inconvenient.

 
Curious to see how our apologist friend’s reaction, I gave him the link a couple weeks ago. No reply. Several days later, I wondered aloud if Wes was unwilling or unable to defend his conduct, to which he politely responded:
I’m a little jammed up presently with the election (timed perfectly to coincide with some other heavy lifting I’m doing for my non-political, commercial enterprises)… give me some time and I’ll respond. Or if you’re up for it, I propose we set up a debate to stream live.
Fair enough; we all have real lives beyond the blogosphere. I’d be happy to give him some time, but I wasn’t terribly interested in a live debate, given a) that my schedule is fairly “jammed up” as well, and b) the caliber of his arguments thus far made me doubt such a debate would be worth the time and effort. For politeness’s sake, I replied with the former explanation, and told him to take his time on a blog response. Simple, right?
 
Wrong. Wes turned around and decided that there was only one option after all, and that it had to be a video debate, because with columns, “it’s too easy to wiggle around, equivocate, ignore key arguments, misinterpret (deliberately or not) assertions, and just generally waste time.” For good measure, Wes also whined: “It’s just more time consuming for me to correct your evasions, obfuscations, and equivocations than it is for you to make them.”
 
At this point, my suspicion of what a waste of time this “debate” would be was confirmed. Wes wanted to change the subject from his ineffectual propagandizing to my supposed unwillingness to accept his challenge (which didn’t start out as a challenge). Unsurprisingly, today he declared victory on YAL using that very spin.
 
But as I told him, my rebuttal’s currently the last word in the debate—the record shows that I’m the one who confronted my opponent’s challenge head-on, not him. My original claims remain intact, while his attempted rebuttal has been discredited. Anyone can read it, and he has done nothing to change the situation. Unless he comes up with a substantive defense of his words or a substantive criticism of mine, I have no need, reason, or obligation to pursue this further.
 
And anybody halfway familiar with the average cable news “debate” ought to recognize that there isn’t a huge difference between the two formats in the ease with which people can get away with rhetorical trickery. I don’t deny the value of direct real-time discussion, but it’s actually just as arguable that blogging provides the most accountability to audiences.
 
For one thing, spoken arguments are not fundamentally different from written ones—people make claims and state opinions, and audiences digest them and compare them to one another. For another, blogging offers the convenience of being able to directly link to sources, which audiences can evaluate for themselves with a single click.
 
Indeed, if you want to know whether or not this medium facilitates sufficient accountability—and, I suspect, the real reason Wes has a problem with it—look no further than the fact that I’ve already been quite able to expose Wes’s use of the very tactics he pretends to oppose (and shamefully attributes to me):
  • I pointed out that he repeatedly made wild, false accusations about what I and other Paul critics think about other issues, apparently without having made any effort to ascertain my actual views first, and without even trying to present evidence that Paul critics are driven by a broader lack of conservatism.
  • I pointed out that he completely ignored the supporting evidence for my claims about Paul’s fringe tendencies and his dishonesty about Israel and other national security & foreign policy issues. His most transparent attempts to change the subject were an astoundingly stupid analogy to David Horowitz and pretending that I criticized Paul for merely being against “Washington running our lives.”
These are specific examples not of Wes being mistaken (although I trounced him for that, too), but of Wes being dishonest. Examples of, to use his words, “evasion, obfuscation, equivocation, dropped context, (etc.).” That dishonesty comes so easily to him, and that he keeps it up even after he knows he’s been called out on it, makes it all the more pitiful when he pretends not to know why I call him dishonest: “Apparently in his eyes, if I say anything in disagreement with him, I’m not merely wrong, I’m lying.”
 
Wes, you know exactly what I’m referring to when I talk about dishonesty. And your conduct only proves I’m right not to expect a live debate with you to be worth the opportunity cost.
 
Lastly, a few words about the time aspect. In one of his trademark lame gotcha attempts, Wes claims the “lengthy” comments I’ve left on his blog take more time than his dream debate would, which is absurd—the small handful of comments I left there each took a minute or two at most. Granted, this post took considerably longer (and is arguably an exercise in futility), but I figured that if Wes can devote another blog post to spinning what went down, I can devote one to setting the record straight.
 
As I said, my daily life is “jammed up” with plenty of responsibilities, such as my senior-year academic duties at Hillsdale College, several extracurricular organizations, holding down an on-campus job, blogging daily for NewsRealBlog, and my own (admittedly-neglected lately) personal blog. Could I make time for a live debate with Wes in the near future? Probably. But again, it wouldn’t be worth the opportunity cost to me, given that I won the blog debate, and that Wes’s conduct has overwhelmingly demonstrated that he’s just not worth the effort.
 
(And please, spare me the absurdity of suggesting that a single live debate would “settle” anything. If you were a genuine seeker of truth, willing to change your opinion when presented with a better argument or contrary information, you would have done so already, and you certainly wouldn’t have engaged in as much blatant dishonesty. I highly doubt you’d concede much of anything, either about Ron Paul’s integrity or your own.)
 
But y’know what? When the holiday season rolls around, and I’ve got more time to kill, maybe I’ll take Wes up on his offer. It would be fun to see his smug propagandizing on full display, challenge him on his dubious idea of character, and watch him try to justify his blind devotion to the personality cult surrounding a single deranged politician.
 
We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m content with the fact that he badly lost this fight, and that he’s demonstrated that Young Americans for Liberty doesn’t deserve the support of serious conservatives.

The Stupidest Thing I Have Ever Read (UPDATED)

Calvin Freiburger abortion, blogosphere, conservatism, debate, insanity, Joseph Veca, libertarianism, NewsReal, pro-life, stupidity, Tea Party

On September 23, I wrote a NewsReal post about abortion and the Tea Party movement, in which I pointed out that supporting the right to life is a moral and philosophical imperative for those who claim to call themselves libertarians. Among the opposing comments was a series of remarks by one Joseph Veca, which may have been the stupidest thing I have ever read. It so perfectly encapsulates why I have so little respect for the libertarian movement – the idiocy, the insanity, the paranoia, and the arrogance – that it demands to be reproduced here for future reference, that the madness might be saved for posterity, for entertainment value, and just maybe, that it might shame a few sane libertarians into reconsidering what their movement has become.

VECA: 

I did some research on the reasons given for abortion, based on what I found, between 1%-3% of abortions reasons fall under the Rape, Incest, Medical Necessity categories.

What should be of note, at the time Roe v. Wade started, those were legal reasons to get an abortion in all 50 states.

As a Catholic and a libertarian, I am totally against abortion and don’t have any real objection moral or ethical to laws against it. However, I am also cognizant of the worry many libertarians have about banning abortions, goes under the heading of “The government that has the power to ban, has the power to mandate.” Whether or not you agree with it, it will remain with a valid concern. You would do well to remember abortion is mandated in Communist China and way to many member of the Obama administration are big fans of Chairman Mao.

ME:

I have no idea what point you just tried to make. 

VECA: 

Calvin, have you ever thought about what it would take to overturn Roe v. Wade?

Believe it or not, it is going to require a Constitutional Amendment. It took the 14th to overturn Dred Scoot. Congress did try a couple of times, but none of them could past muster of Roe v. Wade.

The point that I was making was the fact if we were talking only about the three reasons that I mentioned above, many would make exceptions for allowing an abortion on those grounds. The fact of the matter, was up until Roe v. Wade, that was the case in all 50 states. So the left’s implication those three special cases were illegal back before before Roe. v. Wade is unfounded and untrue in light of the facts.

As I stated before, ‘”I am totally against abortion and don’t have any real objection moral or ethical to laws against it. However, I am also cognizant of the worry many libertarians have about banning abortions, goes under the heading of “The government that has the power to ban, has the power to mandate.”‘

As a political science student Calvin you should know as well as I, that when you involve government, you give the complete control of both sides, pro and con. So think about this, let’s say congress passes a law that bans abortions, that can pass Roe v. Wade muster, there would be nothing stopping congress from mandating abortions if it got such a wild hair up its nether regions.

As I stated before, I believe it will take a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would make mandating abortions a pain, but considering the disdain many politicians (left or right) have for Constitutional protections, they just might not care. 

ME:

Of course I know it’s going to be extremely difficult to end abortion, or to reverse Roe (but while the former would require an amendment, the latter obviously wouldn’t). Nobody in the pro-life movement I’ve ever met has any misconceptions about that. We just understand that you don’t abandon worthy causes, just because the road ahead will be difficult (and contrary to the implications of some socially-left-leaning people I’ve encountered on the Right, true lasting reform to the size and scope of government will be no easier). Conservative reform is the work of generations.

“Let’s say congress passes a law that bans abortions, that can pass Roe v. Wade muster, there would be nothing stopping congress from mandating abortions if it got such a wild hair up its nether regions.”

That’s…that’s…wow. I originally said I didn’t know what point you were trying to make, because I couldn’t bring myself to believe that you were insane enough to say what it sounded like. There had to be something I was missing.

But no, you really said that we can’t ban abortion, because then Congress could FORCE PEOPLE TO HAVE ABORTIONS. Congrats, Joe, you’ve written what has to be the single most mind-blowingly stupid comment I’ve EVER read on NewsRea! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So explain this to me: because murder is illegal, can government now force people to murder? Does government currently have the power to mandate theft? Insurance fraud? Tampering with the mail? Under your logic, there’s nothing to keep the government from forcing the American people to do any of this, because “the government that has the power to ban, has the power to mandate.”

Clearly, this is absurd (and it shows what happens when you take a superficially-appealing, bumper-sticker quip and try to make an actual governing philosophy out of it). The protection of all human beings’ “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are why “governments are instituted among men.” Protecting Americans from injustices like abortion is a clear imperative for anyone who understands the principles of the Founding – and is honest about them. All we’d be “involving government” in is what’s already their basic duty under conservative/libertarian (http://www.l4l.org/)/classically liberal natural law & social compact principles.

As a violation both of the abortion ban itself and of basic human liberty, forcing people to have abortions would neither be authorized by the law nor follow from any semi-sane reading of any legal or constitutional principles. You could say that government might do it anyway (for…some reason). News flash, genius: GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS THE ABILITY TO DO THINGS IT’S NOT AUTHORIZED TO DO. The Founders understood that no amount of constitutional mechanics would be able to completely prevent every single theoretical offense – and they also understood that that was no argument against protecting natural rights and human liberty.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of what precedent pro- and anti-life policies supposedly set, let me repeat something else I said above: Once society has accepted the proposition, I may take an innocent life if it benefits me to do so, why should we think twice about taking from our countrymen anything less vital—income, personal freedom, you name it—for the sake of interest? The rights to go without health insurance or allow smoking in your restaurant is nothing compared to the right not to be deliberately killed. Surrender the right to life, and you’ve already as good as surrendered the others. 

VECA:

You state:

“But no, you really said that we can’t ban abortion, because then Congress could FORCE PEOPLE TO HAVE ABORTIONS. Congrats, Joe, you’ve written what has to be the single most mind-blowingly stupid comment I’ve EVER read on NewsRea! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. ”

I don’t care what you do.

Calvin, you are in college, which makes you roughly half my age (I am just shy of 45). In the last 20 years I have watched the US government do things I thought and was taught impossible for it to do. In short I have had the “It Can’t Happen Here” mentality knocked out of me long ago.

Personally, I like the way John Barlow (co-founder of the EFF) put it:

“The men who drafted the [U.S.] Constitution and its first ten amendments knew something that we have largely forgotten: Government exists to limit freedom. That’s their job. And to the extent that utterly unbridled liberty seems to favor the reptile in us, a little government is not such a bad thing. But it never knows when to quit. As there is no limit to either human imagination or creativity in the wicked service of the Self, so it is always easy for our official protectors to envision new atrocities to prevent.”
[Bill O’ Rights, The Impact of Technology on Civil Rights by John Barlow]

You don’t believe it can’t happen here. Currently there is a 14 year old boy, who is a US Citizen in sitting in a Federal holding cell in Illinois because someone hacked his IP address and sent terrorist threats to the government. He is being held without bail, without legal counsel, and damn near incommunicado with his mother. His 4th, 5th, 6th and 14th Amendment rights are being violated courtesy of the Patriot Act.

You might also want to take a look at the story of Steve Jackson Games and the US Secrete Service (you can read about it in Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling the .pdf can be found here http://pdf.textfiles.com/books/hackcrac.pdf [it is a legal free download])

You might want to take a look at the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 (struck down by the US Supreme Court as unconstitutional); every provision in the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 can be found in one form or another in the Patriot Act and then some. How the Patriot Act constitutional but the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 isn’t?

Would you believe that of the Bill of Rights all but one of the amendments have been violated by the government.

If you take a look at case law for the last fifteen years or so, you will find that the Fourth Amendment has become more or less a dead Amendment. A lot of what remained of it was flushed down the toilet when the Rehnquist Court declared that in the presence of “probable cause”, a phrase of inviting openness, law enforcement officials could search first and obtain warrants later.

This has been stretched even further with the passing of the Patriot Act which gave federal law enforcement agencies the ability to tap our phones, read our email, without getting a warrant and use anything the government had collect against us.

With sweeping prosecutorial enablements as RICO and Zero Tolerance, the authorities could enact their own unadjudicated administrative “fines” by keeping much of what they seized for their own uses. This incentive often leads to disproportionalities between “punishment” and “crime” which even Kafka might have found a bit over the top. There is one case in which the DEA acquired a $14 million Gulfstream Bizjet from a charter operator because one of his clients left half a gram of cocaine in its washroom.

The government abolishes bail for many federal crimes, and creates huge fines and draconian punishments for minor tax, drug, and regulatory offenses. The “War on Drugs” has resulted in various mandatory punishments and fines so Draconian in nature that would make the former Soviet Union’s Communist government look downright lenient.

Our inalienable natural rights to privacy, voluntary association, free exchange of goods and services, and self-ownership are being lost to those who oppose or ignore constitutional limits to government.

This is where the Patriot Act really comes into play, the prosecutorial enablement’s of the Patriot Act, your right to privacy, who you associate with, who you trade services or goods with can all come under scrutiny if “ANY” law enforcement agency “suspects” you, or you are accused of being in league with terrorists.

Currently we are seeing an increasingly centralized federal power undermine the sovereignty of the States and their citizens through federal aid and the attendant regulation of all aspects of society and commerce.

It should be noted most of this has happened since the 1970’s. Some of the silliness is older and dates back to the Great Depression, but most of it has happened in my life time.

It isn’t the here and now we have to really worry about, it is what may happen down the road, China already has mandatory abortions, to say it can’t happen here is to be like a kitten with its head under the couch thinking it is hidden but it rump is exposed. 

So there you have it. Because the government has committed violations of the Constitution and civil liberties in the past (temporarily assuming for the sake of argument that everything Veca describes is accurate, or even happened at all, for that matter), the only thing keeping the government from being able to force you to have an abortion is…keeping abortion legal.

I wonder why I didn’t see it before…oh, that’s right: because I’m not a lunatic. (I highlighted part of my response above, since it still stands as an unrefuted refutation of Veca’s delusions.) Skepticism and vigilance of government power, and defensiveness toward individual liberty are essential, but all too often with libertarians they devolve into wild-eyed paranoia that sees virtually any exercise of government power as a harbinger of totalitarianism. If taken to its logical conclusion, such paranoia can only lead to anarchy.

(Of course, there could be a different excuse entirely: that Veca simply wants to keep abortion legal, but doesn’t want to take responsibility for defending such a heinous practice on the merits…)

UPDATE: In the comments section here, we have another contender for the title, courtesy of Bob Madden:

I am both pro-life, and pro-choice. I abhor the whole idea of abortion, but in the final analysis I put more trust in the prospective mother to make the right decision than I do the government. To me that means I respect the right of individuals to make their own decisions, and at a point where the unborn has no ability to make that choice for themselves I will trust the individual mother.

My situation is kind of unique in this regard. My mother was given a 50-50 chance of living through her pregnancy. Everyone (clergy included) recommended that she abort me. It was her choice to make, and had that decision been left up to anyone else I would NOT be here today. 

I went at it with this moron for a few comments after that gem. It just went downhill form there.

The Blog Post That Should End Two Careers (Updated)

Calvin Freiburger blogosphere, conservatism, David Frum, David Swindle, dishonesty, ethics, evil, FrumForum, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jenn Public, morality, NewsReal, pedophilia, perverts, RINOs, sex crimes

No, not this one. This one. [WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT AT LINK.] My NewsRealBlog colleagues David Swindle and Jenn Public have compiled an absolutely stunning, sickening array of evidence exposing the pedophile tendencies and sympathies of former NRB contributor – and current FrumForum contributor – Alex Knepper. Knepper, you may recall, got canned from NRB and retaliated with a persecution story that didn’t hold water. At this point, it goes without saying that this should be the final nail in Knepper’s career, and if the reaction of Breitbart and NewsBusters is any indication, it may very well be.

But ultimately, Knepper’s a punk of limited significance. More importantly, this post should be the final proof that David Frum has hit rock-bottom, that he doesn’t care about the degeneracy of those who prove useful to him, and is therefore as unprincipled as they come and deserves to be ejected from the few remaining corners of the conservative movement in which he somehow isn’t seen as a disgrace. Frum apologists and lapdogs like John Guardiano – at least, the ones who still claim to have scruples – can no longer ignore the evidence of Frum’s indecency. Those who refuse to abandon this sinking moral ship deserve to go down with it.

UPDATE: Predictably, the pro-dishonesty Guardiano has chosen the sinking ship. That he accuses David Swindle – a socially-liberal blogger with a clear record of supporting not only gay rights, but also (some) gay political causes – of homophobia should be all the proof we need that Guardiano simply does not believe in holding himself to any meaningful standards of honesty and ethics.