I’d use a different adjective, but then, I’m not the target audience.

A stunning 20-something woman hooks up with a seemingly innocent guy at a rowdy singles bar. Hot foreplay starts on the cab ride home and progresses into the bedroom.

That is until, while searching for a condom in the bedside table, she sees a photo signed "Thanks for your support!" from Republican candidate John McCain.

Horrified, she bolts, dropping her bag and spilling a campaign button on the sidewalk: "I only sleep with Democrats." The camera quickly cuts to a cool, bespectacled man with a donkey pin on his lapel. The couple’s eyes lovingly lock.

"Blue Balled" — an edgy, video short distributed on YouTube and other Web sites this week — has a simple message: If you vote Democrat, you are intellectual, hip and savvy. If you vote Republican, you are an untouchable — bumbling, square and uptight.

…and are less likely to have an STD, perhaps? 

The 527 group putting this out is called "Truth Through Action".  They actually sell "I Only Sleep With Democrats" shirts on their web site.  OK, so then, what’s the truth that their action is trying to convey?

Technorati Tags: Democrats, politics, Truth Through Action,

No, not the 80’s song by Nick Lowe. The “kindness” brought to you by a government that just doesn’t seem to understand basic economics. Employment of minimum wage earners keeps going down (the cruel part) because of the hikes in the minimum wage the government keeps mandating (the “kind” part).

The percentage of teens classified as “unemployed” — those who are actively seeking a job but can’t get one — is more than three times higher than the national unemployment rate, according to the most recent Department of Labor statistics.

One of the prime reasons for this drastic employment drought is the mandated wage hikes that policymakers have forced down the throats of local businesses. Economic research has shown time and again that increasing the minimum wage destroys jobs for low-skilled workers while doing little to address poverty.

According to economist David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine, for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, employment for high school dropouts and young black adults and teenagers falls by 8.5 percent. In the past 11 months alone, the United States’ minimum wage has increased by more than twice that amount.

So it should be no surprise to see teen jobs disappearing or to hear bleak testimony from employers across the country that make these hiring decisions.

And it’s not just teens looking for a summer job that this hurts.

There’s no end to the economic data that confirm these common-sense observations. Research from the University of Georgia, the University of Connecticut and Cornell University indicates that increasing the minimum wage causes four times more job loss for employees without a high school diploma than it does for the general population.

Furthermore, minimum wage hikes don’t effectively target the people who are typically portrayed as the key beneficiaries — low-income adults raising kids. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, just 14 percent of those who benefited from the most recent federal minimum wage hike are sole earners in families with children.

The whole “living wage” canard used to buttress the case for increased minimum wage, then, is an incredibly small amount of those who benefit, and arguable more folks are hurt because of it. The question always asked is, “Is it better to have a lower-paying job, or no job at all?” Democrats will consistently ignore or hand-wave away this question, in the interest of “caring”.

Well ask those unemployed folks how much that “caring” helped them.

Technorati Tags: minimum wage, economy

I really can’t add anything to Don Surber’s observations, other than to say that somehow I don’t think we’ll learn from the mistakes we made pillorying politicians who didn’t toe the AIDS funding line.

Question: What lesson does AIDS teach us about the dangers of government-run health care?

Answer: The politicization of health. AIDS was peddled as being able to happen to anyone, when in fact it was transmitted mainly via male homosexual sex. Anyone who dared challenge that was branded a “homophobe” and merrily sent on his way. The Independent reported on Monday: “A quarter of a century after the outbreak of Aids, the World Health Organization has accepted that the threat of a global heterosexual pandemic has disappeared.”

We also know that embryonic stem cell research is not going to make Michael J. Fox all better and that with a 90% 5-year survival rate for breast cancer in the USA (lower in Britain and other government-run health countries) women would be far better served with pink ribbon money going to lung cancer, which has less than a 20% 5-year survival rate.

But politically correct diseases will get the research money. Sickle cell anemia, yes. The heart disease that actually is the No. 1 killer of black people, no.

Technorati Tags: AIDS, health care

Democratic Senator John D. Rockefeller claims victory in investigating whether or not Bush lied in order to get us into war with Iraq. 

"In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," he said.

"Bush lied, people died!", went the call, which is now a piece of Received Wisdom on the Left.  But just a the slogan was disingenuous, so is Rockefeller’s pronouncement on the report.  Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post (no stalwart of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, they) lays it out.

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president’s statements "were substantiated by intelligence information."

On chemical weapons, then? "Substantiated by intelligence information."

On weapons of mass destruction overall (a separate section of the intelligence committee report)? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information." Delivery vehicles such as ballistic missiles? "Generally substantiated by available intelligence." Unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to deliver WMDs? "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."

As you read through the report, you begin to think maybe you’ve mistakenly picked up the minority dissent. But, no, this is the Rockefeller indictment. So, you think, the smoking gun must appear in the section on Bush’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to terrorism.

But statements regarding Iraq’s support for terrorist groups other than al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists with ties to al-Qaeda "were substantiated by the intelligence assessments," and statements regarding Iraq’s contacts with al-Qaeda "were substantiated by intelligence information." The report is left to complain about "implications" and statements that "left the impression" that those contacts led to substantive Iraqi cooperation.

So what went wrong?  Hiatt comes to admit that it’s what the Right has been saying all along.

But the phony "Bush lied" story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

(Wow, is having the MSM call the "Bush lied" meme "phony" one of the signs of the apocalypse?) 

So the line has been drawn, ironically by the Democrats themselves.  Henceforth, anyone parroting this idea is themselves lying or hopelessly uninformed.  Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Bush lied, Washington Post, Frank Hiatt, Senator John D. Rockefeller, Iraq war

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic. – Pope Benedict XVI, Truth and Tolerance; p. 116.

(Hat tip Kyle-Anne Shiver, on a great post on Black Liberation Theology & Marxism, via Don Sensing.)

Many of the pundits watching the 2000 election returns kept referring to the voting bloc they labeled "angry white males", who were supposedly bringing Bush the victory.  For 2008, we may have to modify the tag for the potentially election-changing group; angry white females.

The woman who shouted "McCain in ’08" at the Democratic rules committee was speaking for a multitude. After mounting for months, female anger over the choreographed dumping on Hillary Clinton and her supporters has exploded — and party loyalty be damned. That the women are beginning to have a good time is an especially bad sign for Barack Obama’s campaign.

"Obama will NOT get my vote, and one step more," Ellen Thorp, a 59-year-old flight attendant from Houston told me. "I have been a Democrat for 38 years. As of today, I am registering as an independent. Yee Haw!"

A new Pew Research Center poll points to a surging tide of fury, especially among white women. As recently as April, this group preferred Obama over the presumptive Republican John McCain by three percentage points. By May, McCain enjoyed an eight-point lead among white women.

If Obama’s going to be the unifying candidate, he’s got his work cut out for him.  Yes, I’m sure that some of this intensity will die down by November, and he’ll certainly get that convention bounce, but in an election that most, including me, thought would be a walk-away for the Democrats, Obama has a lot longer way to go that he could have ever imagined.

Technorati Tags: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain, angry white females, US presidential election, Democrats

Shire Network News #132 has been released. The feature interview is with Ann Bayefsky, editor of the Eye on the UN website and Director of the Touro College Institute of Human Rights and the Holocaust.  She says the 2001 Durban Conference on Racism, which turned into an anti-semitic hatefest, is being repeated shortly in Geneva, and as happened the first time, it’s been hijacked by Islamic countries, who seem bent on widening the focus to include taking away the right to free speech. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News, asking you to "Consider This!"

It’s time to go through the "Consider This" mailbag because, well, frankly, it’s never been gone through before, and my wife is wanting some floor space back in our basement.  So I’ve combed through the sacks and sacks of letters, found that most of them were filled with clothes our kids have outgrown, and come up with some of the burning questions that simply must be answered.

Is your real name Doug Payton, or is it a pen name, like Tom Paine or Brian of London?  Indeed, that is my real name.  If I was going to use a fake name, I’d hope I could come up with something more interesting and more obviously fake, like Barack Obama.

Why are we losing in Iraq?  Well, Mr. Bin Laden, I find it very interesting you should ask that question.  The fine folks at the Strategy Page website have indeed been reading what different factions in your organization have been saying on that very matter.  Aside from the fact that most of your leadership and soldiers are dead, captured, running away or just quitting, I’d have to say that killing fellow Muslims in an attempt to kill the infidels probably had a lot to do with it.  Framing those casualties with the oxymoronic term "involuntary martyrs", while probably enriching some public relations firm, didn’t seem to turn the tide.

Will Susan Sarandon really move to Italy or Canada if McCain is elected US President?  I think she technically said she’d "be checking out a move".  And, like all those other Hollywood types that threatened a move when Bush was elected, and then re-elected, maybe she’s just acting.  The "Consider This" Magic 8 Ball replies, "My sources say no."

I read that Harvey Korman died.  Who was he?  Oh, you poor, poor youngster.  Harvey Korman, who died at 81 this past week, was a comedian who, among many other things such as a few Mel Brooks movies, was one of the regulars on the old Carol Burnett Show.  Now that was comedy.  It was so funny that Korman himself, after rehearsing the sketches over and over, still often had to stifle his own laughter, or turn his back to the audience to hide it, when Tim Conway delivered some zingers.  But Korman most certainly pulled his own weight on the show and made it the classic it is. 

Is Al Gore’s movie "An Inconvenient Truth" really going to be done as an opera?  Yes, it seems so, for the 2011 season in Milan, Italy.  No, you just can’t make up stuff like this.  Pavarotti with charts and graphs just seems like it would chase off all but the most liberal of opera lovers, but if it works, I wonder if setting the US Constitution to music would be useful.  I’m betting that the opera house will initially have its thermostat set at a chilly 65 degrees, and programmed to rise to 80 by the end, just to enhance the experience.  Dave Barry thinks that, at the end, the fat lady will burst into flames.

I like Obama’s idea of talking with our enemies without preconditions.  We just need to sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, explain our point of view, give him some economic incentives, and make friends with him.  Then he won’t pursue nuclear weapons, if you really believe that’s what he’s doing.  Is that all it would take?  Have a heart-to-heart, give him some goodies, try to identify with his inner anti-Semite, and we’d all be hunky-dory.  I don’t know, Mr. Carter, I just seem to remember that that sort of "diplomacy" didn’t work out so well with North Korea.

Where are people disappearing from at an alarming rate?  From Barack Obama’s "Faith Testimonials" page.  First Jeremiah Wright mysteriously disappeared.  Now Father Michael Pfleger has dropped off the radar after saying, from the pulpit of Trinity Church, that Hillary Clinton thought she was entitled to the presidency because she’s white, which is demonstrably false.  Actually, she thinks she entitled to it because she’s a Clinton.  And now, Obama himself is disappearing from the Trinity Church rolls.  I guess after 20 years, the Trinity pulpit got too outrageous in just 6 short months.

I have a math question: If a missile leaves Tehran at 3pm traveling 125 miles per hour, and 10 minutes later a missile defense system in Jerusalem launches countermeasures traveling at 150 miles per hour, where will they meet and who can I blame it on?  Well, Mr. Ahmadinejad, I’m just going to forward this to someone who could figure that out.  "Jimmy Carter, Plains, Georgia."  There, that should be educational, for the both of you.

Consider that.

Technorati Tags: podcast, humor, Shire Network News, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, Harvey Korman, Carol Burnett, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran, Jimmy Carter, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger

"You’re fired."

The firebrand pastor of St. Sabina parish was removed from his duties there Tuesday, according to a statement released by the Archdiocese of Chicago.

In the statement, Cardinal Francis George says he asked the Rev. Michael Pfleger, 59, to "take leave for a couple of weeks from his pastoral duties." The statement said Pfleger "does not believe this to be the right step at this time." "While respecting his disagreement, I have nevertheless asked him to use this opportunity to reflect on his recent statements and actions in the light of the Church’s regulations for all Catholic priests," George said.

Are we to take it that this is the very first time Rev. Pfleger has spewed this kind of vitriol?  Kinda’ doubt it.  Just like Obama’s recent leaving of Trinity UCC, this seems more like a case of being unable to avoid ignoring the issue once it hit the national stage. 

What a hassle, those internets.

Technorati Tags: Rev. Michael Pfleger, Barack Obama, Cardinal Francis George, Catholicism, St. Sabina

Barack Obama, after having to distance himself from his own pastor, had to distance himself from a guest speaker as well, Father Michael Pfleger. But he was more that just a guest.

Father Michael Pfleger, a fiery liberal social activist and a white reverend at an African-American church — St. Sabina’s Catholic Church on the South Side of Chicago — is a longtime friend and associate of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, having known him since the presidential hopeful was a community activist. In September, the Obama campaign brought Pfleger to Iowa to host one of several interfaith forums for the campaign.

Their relationship spans decades. Pfleger has given money to Obama’s campaigns and Obama as a state legislator directed at least $225,000 towards social programs at St. Sabina’s, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Pfleger, as you probably know, mocked Hillary Clinton’s crying, and suggested that her continued fight in the primary was because of racism. Of course, someone could turn that around and say that Obama’s continued fight was because of sexism. Neither is accurate, I imagine, but the accusation was outrageous enough that Obama had to distance himself from yet another speaker at his church.

In addition to the verbal distancing, Father Pfleger became the next person to be scrubbed from Obama’s “Faith Testimonials” web page, following Jeremiah Wright. (Seems that web page is a precarious place to be featured. They’re disappearing faster than political dissidents in the old Soviet Union.)

Which then led him to the, no doubt difficult, decision to leave the church after over 20 years. But even as he did so, he was hoping more people weren’t paying attention to his connection to Pfleger.

“I suspect we’ll find another church home for our family,” Obama said.

“It’s clear that now that I’m a candidate for president, every time something is said in the church by anyone associated with Trinity, including guest pastors, the remarks will imputed to me even if they totally conflict with my long-held views, statements and principles,” he said.

“I have no idea how it will impact my presidential campaign but I know it was the right thing to do for me and my family,” he said.

“This was a pretty personal decision and I was not trying to make political theater out of it,” he added.

His association with Father Pfleger, as noted, goes back far, far longer than the Father’s recent appearance at Trinity. This isn’t someone “associated with Trinity”; it’s someone associated with Barack Obama. Again, this is a question of who one chooses to associate with, and combine this with close ties with former, and unrepentant, member of the Weather Underground, calls into question Obama’s judgement.

And this judgement extends to his choice of church. I don’t want to paint all members and guest speaker with a single, broad brush, but I do want to note that he’s attended this church for more than 20 years. Is it really reasonable to assume that this incendiary rhetoric just started in the 5 months since the Iowa caucuses? I find that hard to believe, so if it’s worth quitting the church over now, why wasn’t it worth quitting over years ago?

(Scott Ott, who writes the humorous ScrappleFace blog, has a serious piece at Townhall.com called “Dear Sen. Obama, Join My Church” that speaks perfectly to this issue.)
Obama’s statement gives the impression of not wanting to have to answer to every person standing in the Trinity pulpit. This is most certainly not the problem. The problem is the people in that pulpit who have over the years been his spiritual leaders by choice, and who have longtime relationships with him. Was this parting of the ways a political move or not? If it wasn’t, he’s projecting a false impression of his ties and expecting us to believe this vitriol is new to him. If it was political, then his explanation is disingenuous; this was much more a political decision than a personal one. Either way, this doesn’t speak well for Obama.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Trinity United Church of Christ, Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, religion

Geraldine Ferraro discusses how the protracted and nasty Democratic primary season has split the party, enough for her to be concerned about November.

LAST YEAR at the beginning of the presidential primary season, Democrats were giddy with excitement. Not only did we have an embarrassment of riches in our candidates but we had two historic candidacies to enjoy. Once and for all our country would show that racism and sexism were not part of our 21st-century DNA.

Here we are at the end of the primary season, and the effects of racism and sexism on the campaign have resulted in a split within the Democratic Party that will not be easy to heal before election day. Perhaps it’s because neither the Barack Obama campaign nor the media seem to understand what is at the heart of the anger on the part of women who feel that Hillary Clinton was treated unfairly because she is a woman or what is fueling the concern of Reagan Democrats for whom sexism isn’t an issue, but reverse racism is.

As you may know, Ferraro is a Clinton supporter, so her criticism needs to be looked at through that lens. But the main issue here I think is that identity politics hath wrought this on the Democrats themselves. Frankly, I’ve not seen the sexism or racism Ferraro alludes to. I have read criticism of Obama from Clinton-supporting sites like TalkLeft, and I’ve read (rather nasty) criticism of Clinton from Obama-supporting sites like Daily Kos.

What I have seen are complaints that the Clintons are corrupt liars, Obama doesn’t have broad enough appeal within the base, jabs against folks in Appalachia, and other such sniping, but not sexism or racism. In fact, Ferraro’s column later notes that some are requesting an investigation in whether or not it actually happened.

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