Which advertisement inspires you?  Free stuff or an equal opportunity?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbH8XnAEmZI

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqGlutCQNFA

Maybe the biggest change enacted by Gov. Walker, and now confirmed by the Wisconsin electorate, was ending the practice of deducting money from public employee paychecks and giving it to unions.  It seems that the unions are having trouble getting people to pay up.  Michael Barone wrote:

Walker’s law … gave public employees the choice of whether to pay union dues.  The membership of AFSCME, the big union of state employees, fell from 62,818 to 28,785.

Apparently, half the members didn’t really want to be members, after all.

This will, in turn dramatically decrease the amount of money they are able to take from public sector employees and give to Democrats.  Michael Barone wrote:

Public employee unions insist that dues money be deducted from members’ paychecks and sent directly to union treasuries. So in practice, public employee unions are a mechanism for the involuntary transfer of taxpayers’ money to the Democratic Party.

This is a huge blow to socialist fundraising, and it might get even worse.  Charles Krauthammer reports that in Indiana, similar reforms have reduced public-sector membership by 91%!

There is perhaps one more victory in Tuesday’s vote that is bigger than every other victory put together, and that is the whole notion of school choice, which is another reform put into place by Gov. Walker.  Dick Morris commented on this victory in his “Lunch Alert” yesterday.  When schools have to compete for students, you can bet that Planned Parenthood, socialism, and a host of other evils will fall by the wayside.

Fascinating video on the founder of the modern-day entitlement state.  It was none other than Otto von Bismarck, who invented social welfare to frustrate the demand for democratic rule.

The people wanted the power of self-determination.  Von Bismarck did not want the poeple to have that power, so he bought their compliance with free stuff.  Sound familiar?

Here’s the video from DickMorris.com:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb34etEVIFw

Just before the Wisconsin recall election on Tuesday, the Real Clear Politics website posted its final average.  It was a 6.7 % lead for Gov. Walker.  Walker won by 6.9 %. That’s close.

In the final hours of the election, theleft-wing media gleefully announced that the exit polling indicated a dead heat, meaning that Mayor Barrett had real shot at winning.  The exit polling wasn’t necessarily wrong, it was the reporting.  Raw exit poll data should never be reported, because they mean nothing until they are corrected to mitigate the inevitable sources of bias in the sampling.

For example, Jon Cohen wrote yesterday that different types of people vote at different times of day.  It’s not hard to imagine that a lot of people who work for a living will vote after they get off work, resulting in a big surge in Republican votes later in the day.

Mr. Cohen identified several sources of bias, but he missed the biggest one.  He made several references to “random” sampling.  In practice, exit poll sampling is anything but random.  I was at the Shannondale Elementary School on Election Day in 2004.  Nationally, early exit poll numbers were erroneously being reported to suggest a huge John Kerry win.  Democrat operative John Schrum famously asked Sen. Kerry, “Can I be the first to call you Mr. President?”

I heard the reports, but I didn’t believe them because I saw how the exit polling was being done.  Process matters.  The woman doing the polling, obviously an untrained temporary worker, waited behind a table for people to walk over to her.  The people who responded tended to look like her … young, female, and minority.  They also appeared to be the people not in a hurry to get back to work.  All of these factors would have skewed the exit poll results toward the Democrats on the ballot.  There was nothing random about it.  I’m sure the scenario I observed was repeated in many other places.  Temporary workers would be (I’m guessing) disproportionately young, female, and minority, resulting in more exit-poll respondents from those groups.

Biases in the sample can be corrected, but that process surely takes hours, if not days, to accomplish.

The process for correcting exit poll data was described by Sean Trende:

In other words, the exit pollsters in the field missed a lot of Walker voters. Now, exit pollsters have ways to fix this. For one thing, they weight different regions of the state to the actual vote returns. For example, if northeast Wisconsin exit polls are showing a 50-50 race, and the actual results are 60-40 for Walker, they will simply assign greater weight to a Walker respondent in the region, bringing the reported result in line with the actual result.

… if the non-respondents are disproportionately male, white, and older, the exit pollsters will make sure that the final weights account for those discrepencies.

Going back to Cohen, his bottom line was this:  Exit polls tally how different groups voted in an election.  They do not predict results.

I wouldn’t get too exited about the suggestion that Tuesday’s exit polling indicates a huge lead for Pres. Obama in the November election.  First of all, that election is months away.  Further, we never know if they are reporting raw (biased) data or corrected data.  Gov. Haley Barbour said Wednesday that the corrected numbers indicate a dead heat.  Trende also talked about this in greater detail.

Sandra Fluke wants us to pay for her contraceptives.  Amanda Clayton won $500,000 and bought a new house and a new car, but she still wants us to pay for her food.  She said she has a right to public assistance, “I have no income, and I have bills to pay. I have two houses.”

At the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park, we are told not to feed the bears, because it breeds dependency.  They end up with the habit of coming to humans for food, and then they forget how to take care of themselves.  They can appear friendly at first, but when you don’t give them what they want, they become hostile and dangerous.  The greater the dependency, the more aggressive they become.

Among humans, we call it Leftist Dependency Syndrome (LDS).

Of course, giving free stuff to Sandra Fluke and Amanda Clayton is small potatoes.  The real bear we should quit feeding is Big Government.

Great quote today by Dick Morris:

My head is for Romney, because he has the best chance of winning,

My heart is for Santorm, because of his purity,

My gut is for Gingrich, because he’s Newt, and

My feet are uncommitted.

Morris is a big homer … he tells you what the home fans want to hear … but he is smart.

Americans United for Life (AUL) has launched this educational campaign to help people understand the manipulative and deceptive policies in the pending healthcare law that are forcing both an abortion mandate and an abortion-inducing drug mandate on all Americans — regardless of their personal beliefs.  In a public relations bait-and-switch tactic, the administration pretends that this is about contraception.  But that’s a con—this issue is about mandating abortion-causing drugs.  Be sure to click here to sign up for updates on this issue from AUL.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_QZFHHUmms

Now that the dust has settled a bit, I wanted to share with you this column by Steven D. Greydanus.

For one thing, Greydanus has given us the best summary of what Komen has said and not said.  That’s worth reading, because there is considerable confusion on the degree to which Komen “caved.”

Greydanus goes on to point out that the real story has nothing to do with Komen.  The real story is ” the swiftness and ruthlessness of the Culture of Death Left backlash against Komen.”  He wrote,

I’m sure Komen executives expected to take some heat in the media for their decision.  They probably weren’t anticipating that the American Association of University Women would immediately bar Komen from approved community service opportunities for college women at the AAUW’s annual leadership conference.

That’s right:  As far as the AAUW is concerned, … [fighting] breast cancer isn’t enough. You have to fund America’s largest abortion provider.

It has been widely reported that the Susan G. Komen Foundation caved to pressure from Planned Parenthood (PP).  I said so myself in an e-mail to CBR friends and supporters.  But it might be too early to tell.  At any rate, Komen will not be getting the personal donation that my wife and I had planned.

Here is Komen’s statement.  Three points about it:

1. Komen has said that they will continue to fund existing grants.  We already knew that.  It’s called “keeping your commitments.”
2. Komen clarified that they would disqualify grantees who were under investigations that are “criminal and conclusive in nature and not political.”  Again, no surprise there.  Planned Parenthood is certainly guilty of criminal misconduct, and the video evidence is conclusive.  (Note:  This is true if you consider PP to be one organization, as we certainly do.  But if Komen intends to only disqualify PP affiliates who are currently under criminal investigation, then this is a big loophole.)
3. Komen said that PP would be eligible to apply for future grants.  I suppose anybody can apply; that’s no guarantee they will get anything.  We can’t assume anything, except that Komen is keeping their options open.  We shall have to wait and see.
4. Komen also said that they would maintain “the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”  Hiding behind affiliate autonomy is a common tactic to disavow responsibility for bad behavior.  That ruse won’t work with us.  Komen would never allow any affiliate to give a grant to the KKK.  If we see that Komen affiliates are giving new grants to PP, we will know that Komen has caved.

So where does that leave us?  One Komen board member said this is not a reversal.  I think we’ll just have to wait and see.

Interesting commentary:

• Planned Parenthood: Vicious Not Victorious, by Micheal New
• Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer Press Release.  (They will be getting that donation from my wife and myself.)
• Media genuflects before Church of Planned Parenthood.

One reader told me there are better places to give our money than the Susan B. Komen Foundation.  I agreed, but I pointed out that few of us decide how to spend our money that way.  If we did, there would be plenty of money for pro-life work and Comcast would be trying to figure out how to get Christians to support cable TV every month.  (Full disclosure: we have cable TV at our house, but we give more every month to pro-life work than we give to the cable TV company.)

The pro-life world is abuzz this week about the great news that the Susan G. Komen Foundation (SGK) has cut off funding to Planned Parenthood (PP), the nation’s largest chain of abortion facilities. This is great news, no matter how you look at it.

SGK had planned no public announcement; they were content to allow their existing commitments to PP expire quietly and say nothing about it. It was PP who made it all public. Jill Stanek has the story.

After PP forced their hand, SGK didn’t just stick PP with the proverbial knife; they twisted it a couple of times. They stated publicly that PP would no longer receive grants because they are under investigation by local, state, or federal authorities. Ouch!

This is a huge blow to PP. The loss of half a million dollars will hardly affect the number of children PP is able to kill, but the loss of prestige is huge. This public and very dramatic rebuke will further stigmatize PP in the eyes of school systems, governmental agencies, and corporate donors across the country.

More good news: SGK is cutting all funding to embryonic stem cell research. Story here.

The left is in a rage, because abortion matters more to them than fighting breast cancer. Howard Dean and other leftists are encouraging corporate sponsors to punish SGK. Several links here.

Please send an e-mail to news@komen.org with the subject line: “Thank You for Defunding Planned Parenthood!” Last we heard, pro-life responses are outnumbering pro-abortion complaints by 2 to 1, at last count. We need to improve that response.

Also, please register your approval at www.istandwithkomen.com.

My wife and I are making a personal donation to both SGK and their local affiliate. Some pro-lifers are concerned that we can’t support SGK until it stops working against its own mission, i.e. misrepresenting the abortion-breast cancer (ABC) studies and downplaying the pill-breast cancer link. But this is a disagreement over science, not principle. Now that it is decoupled from PP’s abortion agenda, perhaps SGK will be in a better position to evaluate the ABC data more objectively.

Of course we are convinced that the ABC connection is real, but that’s really beside the point. It’s bad strategy to punish people who did exactly what we asked them to do, just because they haven’t done something else. It tells other potential allies and converts that you are petty and unreasonable.

In general, we must reject the all-or-nothing mentality that seems to prevail among some pro-lifers. If we demand 100% fidelity to everything we believe, we’ll have few allies and accomplish very little. We can and should set aside differences to form alliances and friendships based on mutual goals. Like my Aunt Jane used to say, “Don’t major in the minors.”

What SGK has done is quite remarkable and they are taking a vicious hit for it from their former allies. They have de-funded the abortion giant. We must thank them for this.

Withholding our support because of smaller disagreements will not make SGK listen to us, it will make us look petty and small. SGK needs to realize they have good friends in pro-lifers, allies in the battle for women’s health. Furthermore, we must also send a strong message to other corporations that if they sever ties with PP, we will welcome them with open arms.

We’ve been trying to make sense of the controversy over a Canadian doctor’s proposal that doctors be prohibited from telling parents the gender of their children until 30 weeks into a pregnancy.  Editorial by Dr. Rajendra Kale here.  Coverage from here and here.  Favorable commentary in the Calgary Herald here; opposition in the Ottawa Citizen here.

According to Dr. Kale, who is from India, “Female feticide happens in India and China by the millions, but it also happens in North America in numbers large enough to distort the male-to-female ratio in some ethnic groups.”

Reaction has been mixed, but a narrative is beginning to emerge:

1. It’s a perfectly acceptable choice to abort your baby if the child might be poor, might delay the attainment of educational goals, is incompatible with the parent’s chosen lifestyles,  might be handicapped, etc.  In fact, for any reason or for no reason at all.
2. Abortion to kill a baby because the parents wanted a different gender is “abhorrent” and “deplorable” and “repugnant.”
3. Abortion should be an absolute right, except when it shouldn’t.  Articulated here.  Supported by polling here.

They hypocrisy of this narrative is so obvious, we struggle to see how it can be advanced, outside a Saturday Night Live (SNL) parody or an MSNBC editorial.  (Note: SNL, no doubt, would be offended by our grouping them with MSNBC, so let us stop to reassure SNL that we recognize the difference between comedy and folly.)

Anyway, this all has to make sense.  One might have to stand on his head to see all the pieces line up, but they do line up.  But how?

Under the Judeo/Christian/Western (JCW) ethic, each of us is a created being, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights.  In this hemisphere, we created a collective (i.e., the good ole US of A) for the primary purpose of protecting the rights of each and every human person.

We are held accountable by our Creator to protect the rights of others.  Not because of any good that might accrue to the collective or to ourselves, but because each person is created with value equal to our own.  Hence, depending on whose rights are in jeopardy at the moment, white people are required to advocate for black slaves, men to advocate for women, born people to advocate for the preborn, etc.  To the JCW like us, abortion is wrong because each abortion destroys an individual person.

But under the Darwinist/Marxist/Leftist (DML) worldview, we are not created.  We are evolved.  We are simply a reformulated extention of primordial organic soup.  We have no claims to individual liberty, any more than dogs or rocks.  As individuals, our only identity is our membership the collective (e.g., the “human race” or perhaps the “life energy of the cosmos” or whatever).  We get more rights than dogs only because we can.

However, what we do have is an instinct for survival.  (We can’t justify why our survival is important, only that our instinct for it must have evolved into existence and therefore must be accommodated.)  So we make laws that protect ourselves and other members of our collective.  But these laws are an expression of our instinct for personal protection; they are not based on the notion that every human being has intrinsic valuable.

For the DML, abortion is OK because, first of all, it does not threaten the DML himself.  He is already born.  Unlike other forms of murder, he isn’t threatened by it, even if it is conducted on a large scale.  Nor does he believe it to threaten his collective.  It only threatens other individuals (who have no intrinsic value).

If that were all there was to it, the DML would remain neutral about whether abortion should be legal or not.  But there is more.  He is selfish.  He likes sex and he demands to have it without responsibility.  (We know about selfishness, because our sin problem is just as big as his.)  Therefore, in his mind, unlimited abortion must be a “right.”

But wait a minute, the good Canadian doctor has alerted us to a form of abortion that threatens our own society.  When we imagine a culture in which young men outnumber young women by 10 to 20%, we reel in horror.  “Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live,” Mara Hvistendahl wrote in her book, Unnatural Selection.  “Often they are unstable. Sometimes they are violent.”

The DMLs don’t want to live in such a place, so their instinct for self-preservation kicks in.  The abortions that lead to this horror are, unlike every other kind of abortion they can imagine, “deplorable” and must be prohibited.

But the DMLs won’t want to think about this for very long.  They won’t want to defend the hypocrisy that some children may be killed and some may not.  Or that the “reproductive rights” of some women are inviolate, but the rights of others women (i.e., Indian, Korean, and Chinese minorities living in Canada) must be trampled upon.

When they see how big and ugly this hypocrisy truly is, they will quit talking about it.  They will reason that sex-selective abortions threaten somebody else’s collective, not their own, so they will let this dog go back to sleep.

What do you think?

We are sometimes criticized for writing about the economy, freedom, etc., on these pages.  Best to focus on pro-life issues, they say.

There is some merit in that assertion.  In our Pro-Life Training Academy (PLTA), we teach pro-life activists how to convince even atheists and communists that abortion is wrong.  Even if they believe we are wrong about politics, economics, etc., that does not justify killing a child.

But it’s important for us to understand how saving children is related to saving the economy.

Over the past 50 years, a deadly idea has been growing in the collective American psyche:  the notion that all of us are “entitled” to whatever we need, and sometimes even what we want, and we have no responsibility to work for it or pay for it.  The list of “entitlements” includes food, shelter, health care, a college education, etc., … and the list is growing.

Entitlement, along with its twin monster Dependency, are cultivated and used by political charlatans as tools for obtaining and consolidating political power.  They make outrageous promises, but of course, those promises must be kept by somebody else (i.e., the productive class), if they can be kept at all.  But it really doesn’t matter if they can be kept or not, because the people on the receiving end are “entitled.”

As to paying for the promises?  Well, somebody else can worry about that tomorrow.

Couple that general sense of entitlement with the non-stop portrayal of free sex on TV, in movies, at school, etc.  Everybody is having sex, nobody gets pregnant, and nobody gets STDs.  In the popular culture, sex is just an expected part of teenage life.  So it’s easy to see how young males would think sex without responsibility is just one more item on their long list of “entitlements.”  All a boy has to do is get a girl to give in to his “request,” and when she does, it’s all good.

Since contraception so often fails or is simply forgotten (source), recourse to abortion is necessary for having sex without responsibility, so abortion must be a “right” as well.  They will even say it, “But if I agree with you about abortion, I’ll have to give up sex!”  Not necessarily, but they might have to accept responsibility, and of course, responsibility is antithetical to entitlement.

Some are more callous than others, “Yep, my girlfriend has the right to kill my child, and I’ll do anything in my power to make sure she does, but the ultimate guilt … er, decision … is hers!”

The more we promote the entitlement philosophy, the more abortions we will have.  The politicians who work hardest to cultivate entitlement/dependency also promote the most extreme child-killing policies, because responsibility and entitlement are incompatible values.

Conversely, although the 2010 elections were not a pro-life mandate, per se, but rather a mandate to roll back entitlements gone wild, the result was a record number of pro-life laws passed at the state level in 2011.  Many of the newly-elected lawmakers who promised fiscal sanity also worked to protect children and moms from abortion.

Furthermore, we must always remind ourselves that the first order of business for the political class is to stay in power.  That means paying off powerful political allies like Planned Parenthood.  They tell us our money will go for food, shelter, education, health care, etc., for people who need it.  But in reality, they take money from the productive class and use much of it to grow the bureacracy and pay off their political friends.

You know about Solyndra, but the half-billion they got is chump change.  Planned Parenthood stands to take in billions of dollars (that’s “billions” with a “b”) annually from ObamaCare (source).  (Annually means every year, for all you people in Rio Linda.)  The more we feed the beast that is our federal government, the more entitlement, dependency, and abortions we will have.

What do you think?  Please comment!

Great column in the National Review Online (NRO) by Mark Steyn.  I’m currently reading Steyn’s latest book, After America.  Scary, to say the least.

For the full NRO piece, click here.  Leave your comments below!

Highlights:

Broke nations are being bailed out by a broke transnational organization bankrolled by a broke superpower in order to save a broke currency.  Good luck with that.

***

The “you’re not on your own” societal model of Western Europe has run out of people to stick it to.

***

America “invests” more per student than any other nation except Switzerland, and it has nothing to show for it other than a vast swamp of mediocrity presided over by a hideous educrat monopoly.

***

These are dangerous times — and, as many will discover, whatever assurances the statists give, in the end you’ll be on your own.

For the full piece, click here.  Check out Steyn’s new book, After America.  I’m reading it now.  It’s scary, but you need to know what’s going on.

Please comment below and/or on Facebook!

Interesting op-ed in the National Review asks the question, “Are Evangelicals or University Professors More Irrational?”

At the same time, the opposite position — the position of nearly the entire liberal intellectual world, that everyone’s sexual orientation is fixed — is also driven by ideology rather than by science. Society has a huge influence on how people act out their sexuality, including the sex with whom they choose to be sexual. Human sexuality — especially that of the human female — is far more elastic than the intellectual community admits. And the widespread liberal belief that, all things being equal, it makes no difference if a child is raised by a mother and father or by two fathers or two mothers is hardly rational. On the issue of homosexuality, the intellectual Left is just as driven by ideology as are evangelicals.

***

If you disagree with race-based affirmative action, you are a racist; disagree with the ever-expanding welfare state, you lack compassion; disagree with redefining marriage in the most radical way ever attempted in history, and you are a hater.

Entire article here.

Obama on Capitalism (source):

… there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.

Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ‘50s and ‘60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

Friedman on Capitalism:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A