CPAC - Friday Morning

Here I am back in the Bloggers' Lounge bright and early and Herman Cain is speaking. He's good. He's a businessman from Pennsylvania and a Fox business news contributor. Too bad there are so few people in the room. I'd never heard of this guy before. Wish they'd given him a different slot because he could have pumped up an audience.

Where is everybody? I was in the lounge drinking along with everybody else and I'm here. I went to bed a little after midnight, but maybe they didn't. I didn't start until late because I had to "appear" on a radio talk show in Florida at 9:00 PM with Andrea Shea King, whom I met last year here. She's a sketch and I wanted to float around to the various bloggers' receptions she always hears about.

Met so many great people from all over the country and we're all here for the same reason - we're conservatives. There were as many in the lounge alone as there are in all of Maine.
I attended an awards ceremony at Accuracy in Media (AIM) where Marc Morano got an award for his wonderful work on Climategate. Andrew Breitbart was getting one too for his expose of ACORN and it was a small venue. He's a pit bull with liberals. Love to watch him whenever I can. Both guys gave great presentations. AIM has picked up my pieces a few times in their "guest columns" section and I'm proud to be associated with them in a small way.
Got to get ready for Pam Geller's thing at 10:00. Don't want to miss that! More later.

More Surprises at CPAC

Scott Brown just showed up to introduce Mitt Romney. He wasn’t on the program either. Said he had his pickup truck right outside - and he’ll need it to get around this city. There’s way more snow here than there was in Lovell, Maine when I left yesterday.
Romney said, “Whoever thought you’d hear anyone say at CPAC: Thank you Massachusetts!”

Then he said that Leanne Smith has to give back her medal because, as it turns out, “Barack Obama has been going downhill faster than she has.”

Those are good lines and Romney is a good guy. I've heard him speak many times - at every one of these conferences I've attended - and I've interviewed him once at The Conway Daily Sun. He seems to have everything but one essential thing - fire in the belly. He has never convinced me that he's got steel in him. I just don't sense it and that's something the next president is going to need desperately. Colonel West has it as you can see if you clicked on the link in the post above (sorry I didn't add it until just now). West has steel. He has fire in his belly. I don't know him well enough yet as to his positions on other issues, but I'll find out and I'll be watching him.

Author Richard Spencer and blogger Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugs just passed me a reminder of their presentation tomorrow at which West will be speaking along with Stephen Coughlin, Wafa Sultan, and other luminaries who raise public awareness of our battle against Radical Islam. Looking forward to that one. More tomorrow.

Thaddeus McCotter, congressman from Michigan is talking. I like him. He's smart, and a low-key kind of guy. He's a good Catholic and a scholar. Someone said he can play the guitar behind his head, but that's tough to visualize while I listen to him speak.

Having so much fun I haven't eaten anything all day. Supper is going to taste good tonight.

CPAC 2010 - There's Energy Here

I'm at CPAC again and I'm stoked. I'm recharged already and it's only been three hours. It's worth the time, the expense, and the bother to get here each year. This is my fourth and I've finally gotten smart about how to operate. Got my bloggers credentials and I'm writing from "Bloggers Row." Got wireless access, a table to work on - they even pass out candy to us. I recognize other bloggers from around the country. I'm loving this.
Marco Rubio is genuine. He's about to become the next senator from Florida and he's a real conservative. Charlie Crist thought he was going to walk into the senate seat the way Martha Coakley thought she was going to walk into her's in Massachusetts, but Marco Rubio got in the way. He was 30 points behind a few months ago. He's 10 points ahead now.

He was introduced by Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who alone has a 100% conservative rating in the US Senate. He said, "I'd rather have 30 senators like Marco Rubio than 60 like Arlen Spector." Here here. Are you listening Olympia Snowe?

Rubio is real. I was seated close to the podium to tell and he never set off my BS alarm. It never even peeped. He’s the genuine article. There was a crack behind his voice when he talked about where he came from that wasn’t staged. I've heard a lot of politicians tell their stories and darned few passed my gut test. "This guy really believes what he’s saying," I was thinking, and the audience picked that up bigtime. He's going to do great things.

"I was raised by [Cuban] exiles," he said, "by people who know what it’s like to lose their country. I’m one generation removed from a very different life. [I live in] a country that recognizes that our rights come from God and not from anybody else. Americans chose a limited government to protect our rights, not grant them."
He said more things than I had time to type (I've got to get faster), and these quotes aren't necessarily in the order he said them, but say they he did. This guy is good and he's only 39.

"[The] 2010 [election] is a referendum on the very identity of our nation. People get it. They understand that if we get this wrong, there may not be any turning back for America. [Our leaders] are asking us to abandon the things that separate us from the rest of the world."

I love this guy.
This is a Tea Party guy I met in the lobby early this morning. He led the September 12th March on Washington last fall. It was only about 7:00 AM and very few people were around, so he posed for me.

I walked around the lounge last night after unpacking in my room, but didn't sit down and order a glass of wine. The trip exhausted me and I decided to go to bed early. Tonight will be different though. I have to speak on The Andrea Shea King radio talk show in Florida at 9:00 PM. Met Andrea last year and she introduced me to Colonel Alan West - a candidate for Congress from Florida and an Iraq veteran. He's speaking later in the conference and I very much recommend you click on this link to one of his speeches. Good people down there in Florida, huh?

Oh my. Dick Cheney just walked to the podium. He wasn't on the program. His daughter, Liz, was speaking and she brought him along. "As 'arm candy' her father said. Then he said, 'I think Barack Obama is going to be a one-term president."

Here here. I believe he's right.

More updates later. Got to go to the bathroom.

The Vagina Monologues

“The Vagina Monologues” just won’t die. When I first read of the play more than a decade ago, it sounded bizarre. When I saw the playwright, Eve Ensler, interviewed on TV, she was another kooky, man-hating feminist and her play was becoming a rallying point for NOW (National Organization for Women) types and “Women’s Studies” majors across the country. When I spoke disdainfully of it last year in front of a young, female colleague, she asked, “Have you ever read it?”

“No,” I admitted and she offered to lend it to me. I promised to check it out, but not to read it all if it didn’t grab me. It was interesting the way train wrecks are interesting and so short that I read it all. It was even more bizarre than the newspaper descriptions because most of its content couldn’t be published in a newspaper. Women chanted several dozen slang terms for that part of their anatomy - way more than I’d ever heard. Then they described what their vagina looked like, smelled like, what it would say if it could speak, and what it would wear if it could get dressed up. It reminded me of puerile conversations sixth grade boys would have about their anatomy when out of the earshot of adults. But these were grown women.

My wife didn’t want to read the book last year, but I persuaded her to watch an HBO film of the play I rented from Netflix starring its author, Eve Ensler. Her impression was the same as mine - bizarre. Then a local theater company decided to produce it at the Magic Lantern in nearby Bridgton, Maine - a community whose newspaper carries this column. I thought it would be interesting to watch local women willing to shout the C-word to an audience and see if the audience would join in the chant. Again, it would be interesting the way a train wreck is. I bought tickets, but then gave them away when the date conflicted with a trip to Ireland.

Last weekend, a theater company in North Conway, New Hampshire produced it - another community whose newspaper carries this column. My wife said, “Nah. I’ll stay home. You go.” It was a very small venue at M&D Productions, but nice enough and quite reasonable at $15. They even served wine which I could take into the theater with me - very civilized. Most of the actresses were my age - late middle age - and so was the audience - mostly women and about 80% late middle aged. The script was modified with local writers adding monologues, but the flavor was the same. Women offering feminist laments about bad treatment of them and their vaginas by the world at large - especially by men, of course.

Being familiar with the script, I was more interested in watching the audience. Most laughed in that way some junior high school girls will when they’re shocked at outrageous sexual comments made by junior high boys. They don’t consider the remarks funny, but laugh because they don’t know how else to react. It seemed that some of the men laughed because they thought they were supposed to and it would have been impolite not to. I smiled at one performance by a local woman mimicking a triple orgasm. She bettered Meg Ryan’s performance in “When Harry Met Sally.”

The play’s nadir was a monologue by an actress playing a 13-year-old girl describing her seduction by a 24-year-old woman.

“Vagina Monologues” explored many aspects of vaginas except what I would consider their most important one - procreation. Vaginas are, after all, vehicles for pregnancy and birth. Ensler said in a revised version of TVM: “I had been performing this piece for over two years when it suddenly occurred to me that there were no pieces about birth. It was a bizarre omission.”

Um, yeah.

Radical feminists’ disconnect from the maternal is the essence of what’s bizarre about them. Ensler went on: “Although when I told a journalist [about] this [bizarre omission] recently, he asked me, ‘What’s the connection [between vaginas and birth]?’”

Uh-duh. It’s hard to imagine any journalist asking that question. I know there are dumb ones out there, but still. Ensler then described how she was present at a birth and what she saw. I’ve been present at four and it wasn’t a bad piece of writing.

TVM’s forward was written by feminist guru Gloria Steinem, who seems to deny that women have a maternal instinct at all. In his television special “Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women, and the Sex Difference,” ABC’s John Stossel asked Steinem: “Aren't women, in general, better nurturers?” Icily, she answered: “No. Next question.” In TVM’s forward, she referred to the women’s movement as an alternative to the “patriarchal/political/religious control over women’s bodies as a means of reproduction.” Is Steinem referring to abortion here? I learned elsewhere that she’s had at least one herself and described it as “a pivotal and constructive experience.”

Constructive experience? Abortion?

Given that vaginas are the vehicle for 40 million-plus abortions in the United States alone, and given that abortion is the single most important issue on the radical feminist agenda, it’s very interesting that it's completely ignored in what has become the iconic feminist play. Maybe that’s because the worst and most horrible violence perpetrated on a vagina is by a woman’s own choice.

We're The Best

A few months ago, the Language Arts teacher in the next classroom asked the following question for a writing assignment: “Is the United States the best country in the world?” Only about 25% of our students thought so. We used to teach that to schoolchildren, but now they grow up hearing more about slavery and killing Indians than the ideals spelled out in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution with its Bill of Rights. It’s those documents that make us the best. We will remain so as long as we abide by them.

I asked the 75% who said the United States wasn’t the best, which country they thought was better. Although nobody could name one, they were certain it couldn’t possibly be us. For months I’ve been wondering why. There are several possible reasons, and most originated in the 1960s. My generation of baby boomers - the one most famous for rebelling against their parents generation as all generations do - never grew up. If it had, it would have realized that utopia is only a dream - that humans are imperfect and always will be this side of the grave.

I watched a PBS fundraiser last week with Pete Seeger and his fellow leftists performing sixties songs like “Blowing In The Wind” and “If I Had A Hammer.” They’re nice tunes and I still like them, but it occurred to me that my generation really believed it was possible to eliminate war forever.

Bob Dylan wrote and sang nice lyrics like:

“Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?”

and

“Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?”

Pete Seeger wrote and sang nice lyrics like:

“It's the hammer of justice
It's the bell of freedom
It's the song about love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land”

Yahoo Answers asked about the meaning of “If I Had A Hammer” and picked the following as the best explanation:

“It was recorded during the early '60s as a song of enlightenment. It tells about the injustice of our society at that time, which really hasn't changed much in 40-plus years. It speaks of the effort by the then baby boomer generation, to set the world straight about freedom and justice for all people regardless of race. We're still waiting!”

Indeed. The baby boomers are still waiting. Many still believe it’s possible to ban war and death and create justice and peace everywhere, and they’re running our universities. They control the mainstream media. A year ago, they took over the federal government. Now their savior, President Obama, goes around the world bowing to foreign leaders, apologizing for our country, and trying to redistribute our wealth.

At ninety-one, Pete Seeger is still a communist. President Obama’s good friend Bill Ayers claims he is a “small c” communist. He trains our public school teachers and writes textbooks about what they should teach. According to an article by Stanley Kurtz: “[Ayers] believes teacher education programs should serve as ‘sites of resistance’ to an oppressive system. The point, says Mr. Ayers in his ‘Teaching Toward Freedom,’ is to ‘teach against oppression,’ against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.”

Ayers and the University of Illinois are typical of professors and universities who train our teachers all over the country. Their “sites of resistance” are our public-school classrooms. It’s almost exclusively “American oppression” their teachers “teach against” rather than the communist variety, or the more recent Radical Muslim variety because that’s what was drilled into them. Far more students are taught about Japanese internment camps in the US, for example, than about the Americans who died in the Bataan Death March at the hands of the Japanese in the Philippines.

Although it goes against the multicultural shibboleths purporting that all cultures are equal, I would point to strong evidence that the United States is not only the best country in the world, it’s the best country in all of recorded history - a shining city on a hill, as John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan called us. The finest example would be our role in World War II. The war had been raging for years but we were reluctant to enter until attacked by the Japanese. Then we mobilized, fought on two fronts, and won against terrific odds. At war’s end, we possessed a huge military, were the only country with nuclear weapons, and the only country not damaged in battle. What did we do with that hegemony? Unique in all of history, the United States did not establish an American empire. Instead, we assisted other countries to rebuild - even our enemies - and did everything we could to preserve the autonomy in every country on earth large and small.

In the face of all that, petulant, leftist baby boomers still wring their hands and call the United States “imperialist.” I shouldn’t be surprised by the way my students see their country, but I can’t help being saddened and dismayed. Whenever I have the opportunity, I shall emphasize more strongly what is unique and wonderful about the United States. We remain, as Abraham Lincoln described us: “The last, best hope on earth.”

Unsustainable Benefits and Entitlements

Teachers are being laid off. People are having fewer children and enrollments are declining. That, together with state revenue cuts, is forcing a RIF - a “Reduction In Force.” Now, the detested (by me) teachers’ unions are applying their cherished (by them) contract rules so that younger, lower-salaried, and often more-effective teachers will get the ax, while older, higher-salaried, and, oftentimes, sclerotic teachers will not. It’s “last-hired, first-fired” regardless of the effects. All of us - students, parents, administrators, and teachers - know who the good teachers are and who the bad ones are, but thanks to the unions, little of that knowledge will apply in the RIF.

As the most-senior teacher in my school district with 33 years of service, my position is safe. I’ll decide whether to continue teaching year-to-year and, as of now, I’m planning to sign a contract for September, 2010. One factor in my decision about retirement will be whether I can depend on the Maine State Retirement System I’ve been paying into for more than three decades. I simply don’t think I’ll be able to rely on it if I live to be 78, or whatever the average life expectancy is for heterosexual American white guys like me.

Why? Because the Maine State Retirement fund has declined with the economy, just like everyone’s IRA has. Public employee retirement in Maine and other states is guaranteed by the taxpayers if the fund is insufficient to meet the “defined-benefit” obligations to people like me. Therein lie my doubts. If I retire at 60, I’m supposed to get around $40,000 a year and a third of my individual medical insurance premium until I’m dead. That’s not too good compared to what public employees in other states and in the federal government get, but very good compared to what the average Maine taxpayer can expect. Maine is not only one of the poorest states in the country, it’s also one of the highest-taxed. That’s not a good combination. How long will Mainers be willing and able to continue supporting retirees like me and my fellow baby boomers should the retirement fund run out of money? Not too long would be my guess.

Governments at every level are rapidly reaching the point where they cannot continue to deliver what they’ve promised, and millions of people have, unfortunately, learned to expect. It isn’t just me and my pension. It’s Medicare for everyone. It’s Social Security. It’s disability payments, welfare payments. All of it. We know this, but we pretend not to. We put off the day of reckoning as if maybe it won’t really arrive. Rather than cut back on entitlements before the system collapses completely, we increase them. We borrow money from a country like China, which can’t afford to provide these benefits for its own people. Up to now, they’ve lent it to us because we obviously can’t afford it either. Lately, however, they’re getting reticent. They see that we’re printing money so they’re abandoning the dollar along with everyone else in the world.

While the number of students in my school district has remained fairly constant over the past three decades, the number of employees has about doubled. We’re looking at layoffs for next year, but around the country government jobs are increasing rapidly while private sector jobs decline. Government employee unions are now bigger and more powerful than private sector unions. One big reason General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt is because they couldn’t pay the generous benefits of retired United Auto Workers, which amounted to almost $5 billion in 2006 alone. For every active worker, General Motors was supporting 3.8 retirees and dependents. President Obama and congressional Democrats took over the auto companies to protect bloated union contracts, not to help our economy. Now taxpayers are on the hook for them.
States and cities are going bankrupt. Government unions are strangling taxpayers just as private-sector unions have strangled stockholders. Unsustainable entitlements are growing and Democrats are trying desperately to prop it all up while blaming Bush for it all. Ordinary Americans, however, are seeing through that. The growing Tea Party movement represents grass-roots citizens who want to stop the madness before the whole country goes over the cliff. The November elections are going to be very interesting indeed, just as special elections in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts have been.

Since I can’t expect government to take care of me, I’m being a lot nicer to my children. Meanwhile, I anticipate that I’m going to have to keep working until about five years after I’m dead.

Three Monkeys

Lots of news last week: Haiti’s earthquake, Scott Brown’s victory, the Pentagon report on the Fort Hood Massacre, and the beginning of the Geert Wilders trial in Holland. Three out of the four stories pertain to Radical Islam. Only Haiti doesn’t, but it and the Massachusetts election drowned out coverage of the last two stories.

One of the many facets of Scott Brown’s upset win was what his Democrat opponent Martha Coakley, said about the Afghanistan’s Taliban in their debate. Even though the Taliban has been killing American soldiers in Afghanistan for years, and at a accelerating rate, Coakley said: “They’re gone. They’re not there anymore.” That is astonishing ignorance in someone vying to become a US Senator during wartime. The scary fact that she almost won makes me wonder: How many other high officials in our government are that stupid? A big clue is in the Pentagon’s report on why Major Nidal Hasan shot forty-something people at Fort Hood. It looks like the answer is quite a few of them are - perhaps even most.

When I was a little boy, I had a recurring nightmare in which I was in the back yard of our suburban Boston home being chased by a monster. My father was cooking at his grille but didn’t even look up. I knew my father could defeat the monster if he would only look and see what was happening, but he never did - and that’s what scared me the most.

Now I’m afraid that way again, only this time it isn’t a dream. The Pentagon report on the Fort Hood Massacre, says columnist Diana West, “is 86 pages long and doesn't mention the words ‘Muslim,’ ‘Islam,’ ‘jihad,’ ‘Sharia’ (Islamic law), ‘Koran’ -- despite the fact that we know, among other things, that the killer, who initiated his massacre with a cry of ‘Allahu Akbar,’ was a Muslim inspired by Islam to perform an act of jihad as sanctioned by Sharia derived from the Koran.”I’m afraid. I’m very afraid. As I wrote last November: “After US Army Major Hasan openly admired Muslim suicide bombers, declared the US an ‘oppressor’ of Muslims, asked an al Qaeda recruiter what he could do “to further the Jihad,” shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ while he gunned down forty-three US soldiers. President Obama said: ‘Well, look, we -- we have seen, in the past, rampages of this sort. And in a country of 300 million people, there are going to be acts of violence that are inexplicable.’ Inexplicable? We’re in deep trouble.”

Then, three days after the Christmas Pantybomber burned out his crotch trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253, Obama said Abdulmutallab was “an isolated extremist.” Then, last week, the Pentagon again pretended Radical Islam had nothing to do with the Fort Hood Massacre.

Some of us look for the truth. Some of us run from it. Others of us claim there’s no such thing. Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders went on trial last week for rubbing the painful truth in the faces of his countrymen. He made a film called Fitna in which he quoted sermons made by Radical imams (clerics), and quoted from the Koran as well - juxtaposing these words with images of Radical Muslim attacks. Then he compared all this with quotes from Mein Kampf - Hitler’s autobiography. The similarities were obvious, painful, and apt. No one questioned their veracity. Radical Muslims threatened Wilders with death if he released the film, but he released it anyway - knowing he would have to spend every minute of every day under armed guard for the rest of his life.What did the Dutch government do? Did it root out the radicals in its midst? Did it offer protection to a member its Parliament threatened with death? No. Incredibly, it charged Wilders - one of its own - with hate crimes for “offending” Radical Muslims with their own words! I wish I were making this up, but that’s what is happening. Last week, the Dutch government started laying out its “case” against Wilders. If convicted of “hate speech” for telling the truth, Wilders faces two years in prison and fines of 18 thousand Euro, or about $25,000.

Multiculturalism trumps truth in Holland - and in the rest of old Europe as well. Radical Muslims are killing us, but we mustn’t hurt their feelings. It's as if we had do discuss fighting Hitler's Germany without mentioning the evils of Nazism.

The truth is - there is evil in our midst once again. It threatened western civilization twice during the 20th century in the form of fascism and communism. Both times we ignored it, then appeased it, until it got so bad that tens of millions died before it could be subdued. We listened to wimps like Neville Chamberlain and ignored leaders Winston Churchill until it was almost too late. Then "sophisticated” and “nuanced” intellectuals ridiculed Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union “The Evil Empire.” Then they scoffed at George W. Bush for calling Syria, North Korea and Iran “The Axis of Evil.” Now the USA, the UK and the EU are the three monkeys of “See no evil, Hear no evil, and Speak no evil.”
Those monkeys seem to have originated with an 8th century Chinese proverb, declaring: “If we do not hear, see, or speak evil, we ourselves shall be spared all evil.” But we won’t be spared until we pull our hands away, look Radical Islam in the face, and call it what it is.

Hateful? Who Is?

Last October I made a TV commercial for “Stand For Marriage Maine,” the Catholic-led organization to repeal the gay “marriage” law passed by the Maine’s legislature. We won, and it was a setback for homosexual activists nationally as liberal Maine became the seventeenth state in a row to vote against it. Wherever citizens vote, it loses, but fallout from bitter homosexual activists continues.

Three of us made the same commercial. My version was rejected, but Nokomis High School guidance counselor Don Mendell’s version ran for weeks. Now his job is threatened because two other guidance counselors filed complaints with Maine’s licensing board claiming he violated the NASW (National Association of Social Workers) code of ethics by appearing in the ad.

If there’s an occupation with more homosexuals than hairdressing or interior decorating, it’s social work. In the first complaint, social worker and guidance counselor Ann Sullivan claimed “Don [Mendell] has a history of being unsupportive of GLTBQ issues.” That long acronym would mean “Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Bisexual, and Questioning.” Sullivan complained that “When Nokomis High staff assisted students in beginning the Gay Straight Alliance [GSA], Don was very vocal in his opposition to this group.”

Mendell should be commended for opposing a GSA at his high school, considering that President Obama’s embattled Safe Schools Czar, Kevin Jennings was “the faculty advisor to the nation's first Gay-Straight Alliance” Jennings then founded GLSEN - the “Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network” - and used taxpayer money to teach fourteen-year-olds sexual techniques like “fisting” - too perverted to describe or this column couldn’t be printed in family newspapers. Jennings also passed out guides to gay bars in Boston, pointing out which ones specialized in “leather” fetishes. That’s code for homosexuals who prefer sick, sadomasochist practices such as those favored by Maine gay “marriage” activist Bruce LaVallee-Davidson, recently convicted of manslaughter. GLSEN gives such literature to students all over the country. Instead of being praised for trying to protect Maine students from depravity, Mendell is harassed by the state.

Days before the vote, I was invited to appear at a press conference where I spoke about some of this. Private school, and retired public school teachers were there, but I was the only active public school teacher present. Why? Mendell’s ordeal is a good example of what we can expect if we speak out against homosexual propaganda in school or even in private life.

In December, the Baldacci Administration ramped up pressure. According to the Sebasticook Valley Weekly: “Maine Assistant Attorney General Robert Perkins . . . has requested that Mendell turn over transcripts of the video commercial he made in support of a YES vote on the recent gay marriage referendum [and] provide copies of any ‘letters to the editor’ that he may have written in the past year concerning the gay marriage issue.”

That’s chilling.

Mendell says his First Amendment rights protect him from charges other counselors made to shut him up. Clearly, they’re supportive of propaganda groups like GSA and GLSEN who actively recruit students to their miscreant subcultures. Considering the average life expectancy of homosexual men is twenty years shorter than other men, it is the two complainants’ ethics which should be questioned, not Mendell’s.

Twenty years ago, homosexual activists jumped on the civil rights bandwagon with the dubious claim that homosexual orientation is biological or “in the genes,” for which there’s absolutely no scientific proof. Nonetheless, the majority of psychotherapists and social workers, like the two complainants, believe homosexuality is inborn and immutable. That’s the kind of propaganda GSA and GLSEN pushes in Maine and in thousands of schools across the nation.

But what if they’re wrong? What if schoolchildren are malleable and can be steered toward homosexual or transgender inclinations by exposure to GLSEN propaganda? It’s one thing for Maine public schools to provide “transgender bathrooms” (which some do), but it would be quite another if they should refer children to newly-opened “transgender clinics.” Children’s Hospital in Boston offers hormone treatments to prevent the onset of puberty in children as young as seven! According to Foxnews.com: “The drugs stop the natural flood of hormones that would make it difficult to have a sex alteration later in life, allowing patients more time to decide whether they want to make the [surgical] change.”

“‘Treating these children with hormones does considerable harm and it compounds their confusion,’ said Dr. Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at John Hopkins University. ‘Trying to delay puberty or change someone’s gender is a rejection of the lawfulness of nature. . . . At some point in childhood,’ McHugh said, ‘many children role play as the opposite sex, but it is a social, not a medical issue.’”

Especially when they’re only seven.

That’s one direction in which homosexual activists are heading. Maine voters set them back and Don Mendell is feeling their wrath.

Deadly Infection

Only recently have I become aware of the depths to which political correctness has permeated our culture. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad. It’ll be the ruin of us if we don’t kill it and comb its nits out of our hair.
I began to get a clue at a private reception for Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders in Washington last February. After Wilders was escorted out by his bodyguards (radical Muslims ordered him killed for making a movie called “Fitna.”), I found myself in extended conversation with a young Defense Department analyst who had been tasked by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to research and report on the ideology of our radical Muslim enemies. He immersed himself in Islamic law and came to the conclusion that it’s the radical Muslims who appear to have the doctrinal base in Islam, not the moderates.

He said that most of the highest officials at the Pentagon rejected his brief. Then they rejected the young man himself - and that was during the Bush Administration. The Pentagon, he said, “as an institution,” wanted to believe that the Radical Muslim interpretation of jihad, which is holy war against infidels worldwide - convert them or kill them, was an aberration.

I had hitherto believed that our National Security planners knew the threat, but were just being polite in their public statements. Not so, according to my young friend. Radical Muslims posing as moderates had more influence with Pentagon planners than he did, he told me. It was their advice the Pentagon was heeding. I’m withholding his name because that’s how he apparently wants it at this point. Last week he was interviewed by Bill Whittle of Pajamas TV (Go here, then click on "The Islamic Infiltration, Part 1") and appeared only in silhouette as he told his story.

Next, Whittle interviewed a former FBI special agent (also a silhouette) who spent most of his fifteen-year career working on the Islamic movement in the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Islamic doctrine. He said our Department of Homeland Security is being advised by people from the Council for American Islamic Relations or CAIR. The trouble is, he claims they’re a front for Hamas - a Radical Islamic organization. The Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America - ISNA - a huge financial entity for Hamas in the United States.”

A little background for readers: The Muslim Brotherhood, according to author Robert Spencer, spawned both Hamas and al Qaeda. Khalid Sheik Muhammed, who planned the September 11th attacks for al Qaeda and goes on trial in New York City soon, belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now back to the anonymous FBI agent in Whittle’s interview: “CAIR and ISNA (both closely affiliated with Hamas),” he said, “are the two groups that DOD, DHS, the State Department all use to do their Muslim outreach in North America. “They sit in on brainstorming about investigative techniques that our agents are using in the field.”

“I have to stop you,” said Whittle, “because, frankly, that sounds so absurd that I have to really make sure I’m understanding you correctly. Are you saying that the radicalized Muslim groups are invited in to learn our investigative techniques, that they’re invited in to get their feedback on how we’re going to fight against them. Is that what I understood you to say?”

“Yes,” he answered. “The General Counsel of the FBI invites them in as well as the ACLU and other groups in [to make sure that whatever our government agencies did] was okay and not offensive to these organizations.  . . . that’s nothing short of outrageous.”

“So you’re giving away the farm in order to make sure their feelings don’t get hurt,” said Whittle.

Evidently, political correctness could be fatal.

“There’s no training for local law enforcement officials about the real nature of the threat,” said the agent. “The training they get is given by agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“How did this happen?” asked Whittle. “How did [it] get this far?”

“The Muslim Brotherhood has a long-term strategy,” said the agent. “They’re well organized with hundreds of front groups that support their public relations, their research arms, they have insinuated themselves into our largest universities. They have Muslim Student Associations (MSA), which is [sic] the first Muslim Brotherhood organization that formed in the United States in 1963. MSA is on every major college campus in the United States recruiting people to the Brotherhood on our own campuses.”

No wonder we haven’t captured Osama Bin Laden after eight years.

When we know how closely foxes are consulted on the design our National Security chicken coop, we can begin to understand why our Commander-in-chief said he wasn’t sure Fort Hood’s Major Hasan was a radical Muslim after he shot more than forty of our soldiers while yelling “Allahu Akbar!” or why he said the Christmas Pantybomber was “an isolated extremist.” We can understand why he won’t call this a war with Radical Islam and instead refers to it as “Overseas Contingency Operations.”

Radical Muslims are fanatic, yes, but they understand us better than we understand ourselves. They know we’re so infected with political correctness that we’re more afraid of offending them than we are of losing a war to them.

Bias? What Bias?

Graphs courtesy of Media Research Center

As a history teacher, I must strive for objectivity. However, I know it’s not possible for a thoughtful person to study history, politics, or economics and not develop biases. Best practice would be do disclose those biases to students because it’s inevitable that I’ll teach concepts I believe in with more enthusiasm than concepts I don’t believe in. It’s human nature. To detect this, students would need to understand the left/right political spectrum and the terminology used to describe it, so I sketched one out and taught it. Then I advised them point out my bias when they detect it. Those exercises train them to identify and to be aware of a presenter’s political perspective when any sort of information is promulgated.

As their own biases develop, students need to be conscious of them as well when they listen to information. Facts are facts, and when they learn things that contradict their tentative understanding of cause and effect, they have to be willing to do the work necessary to adjust it. Thoughtful, informed teachers and students inevitably develop a point of view on issues. Only a robot could play it completely down the middle every time.

The same would be true for a reporter. Some stories are just straight news and bias doesn’t come into play, but when a reporter researches background to find causes for example, it probably will. He or she will look for certain things and not others according to his/her understanding of cause and effect. An editor can mitigate that by suggesting alternative areas of inquiry to the reporter, but when the reporters and editors all share the same biases, that’s just not likely to happen, and that’s been the case for decades in our mainstream media.

Up to now, I’ve been pointing out unintentional bias, but evidence is increasing that Mainstream Media (MSM) bias is becoming more and more deliberate. By MSM, I mean the three major broadcast networks of ABC, NBC and CBS. I mean the big-city broadsheets like the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. I mean the weekly newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek, and I mean taxpayer funded media like PBS and NPR.

Although MSM influence is waning fast due to the rise of the internet, of talk radio and of cable news, it still predominates with much bigger audience share. The clearest example of MSM left-wing bias is their coverage of the last presidential campaign. Compare the merciless vetting of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin with the almost complete lack of scrutiny into Senator Barack Obama. Obama had been impressing crowds with his oratorical skills - especially compared to the hum-drum speechifying of Republican rival Senator John McCain. But when McCain picked Palin as his VP nominee, she gave a speech that electrified the GOP base and many independents as well. Then she followed up with another hard-hitting speech at the GOP convention and the MSM went after her relentlessly. One poll indicates that 90% of Americans believe he MSM actively helped Obama get elected and 70% believe they’re promoting his presidency.

When he promised to lower ocean levels by reducing carbon emissions, the MSM cooperated by hyping alleged human causes of global warming. When Democrats pushed Obama’s Cap and Trade bill, CBS’s Scott Pelley compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. When a hacker exposed the bias, lies and hypocrisy of global warming scientists in Europe and the United States just prior to the big “climate change” summit in Copenhagen, again the MSM ignored the story.

When Obama made his speech before Congress on health care “reform,” he used erroneous examples of people who allegedly suffered at the hands of insurance companies, but the MSM declined to investigate. When he made a speech in New Hampshire claiming surgeons would rather make $30-50 thousand on a amputation than treat a patient to save his leg, that was a whopper. Medicare pays $700-1200. Did you see any scrutiny of that? Not unless you saw it online, or on AM Radio, or on Fox News.

Then there was ACORN, the “Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now,” for which President Obama worked on and off while an attorney in Chicago. ACORN officials were filmed during a sting operation in five cities across the country offering to help people avoid tax laws, start prostitution services, and smuggle in underaged illegal aliens to work in them - all with public tax money. The MSM ignored the story until Congress cut off ACORN’s funds.

As a columnist, I deal in opinions. Pushing a point of view and is part of my job. However, my turf is increasingly encroached upon by people purported to be reporters in the MSM. They brazenly amplify stories reinforcing their point of view and they play down or ignore stories that contradict it. Do they do so consciously and deliberately? Evidence is mounting that they do, and that is the most insidious form of propaganda.