Evil Speculators

Democrats blame “evil” speculators for the high price of oil. Speculators figure that, with liberal Democrats in firm control of Congress and a left-wing Democrat leading in the polls for president, the ban on drilling for oil on our coasts and in the Arctic will continue indefinitely - and oil prices will keep going up.

I’ve been speculating on the price of oil too. Does that make me a bad person? I sent a check to B&L Oil of Fryeburg to assure that I would pay no more than $4.85 per gallon for heating oil through next winter. I left my foot in the door a bit though. If the price should go down, I’ll pay market price. (Maybe Democrats will be forced to lift the ban? Heck, you never know) I could have paid up front for all 750 gallons - the amount I burned last year - at $4.60 per gallon. I have the money, but I chose what I chose because I still have the liberty to do so.

Some people are avoiding oil and laying in a lot of firewood. I have a couple of cords left out in the yard, but I’d prefer to burn oil. Some people are converting to wood pellets. Others are buying coal. Some will burn used motor oil, or even old vegetable oil from restaurant fryolaters. We’re all speculating. We’re exercising the liberty to make our own choices and live with the results. If we choose right, we’ll be happy. If we choose wrong, too bad for us. That’s how liberty works. As Benjamin Franklin put it: "The U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself."

Lots of people have been speculating in real estate over the past ten or fifteen years. Some made a lot of money at it, causing many others to jump in. They took out mortgages for more than they could afford to pay back. They took risks, and that’s what speculation is. They figured they would make interest-only payments while the value of their new real estate climbed. Then they would flip it - sell at profit. It worked for a while and many got rich. Were they bad people? Some think so because their speculation helped drive home prices up. People who already owned real estate, however, thought that was wonderful. People who were renting and wanted to buy a home didn’t think it was so great. Oh well.

Somewhere along the way, liberal Democrats noticed that banks avoided granting mortgages to people in certain neighborhoods. They called it “Redlining” and accused loan officers of racism. Banks pointed out that it was bad business lending to individuals who were unable to make their payments. If minorities happened to comprise a higher percentage of such people, or if certain neighborhoods had lots of them, that was not evidence of racism. Mortgage decisions were based on numbers, not colors. As economist Thomas Sowell pointed out in a recent column: “In our own personal lives, common sense leads us to avoid some neighborhoods. If you want to call that "redlining," so be it. But places where it is dangerous to go are often also places where it is dangerous to send your money.” Liberal Democrats in Congress, however, passed legislation forcing banks to make risky loans to certain people, and in certain places, where they never would have otherwise.

Eventually, real estate prices stopped rising. Many who speculated couldn’t make their payments and defaulted. Then prices fell and more defaulted. Then prices fell still further. Banks who lent money to a lot of risky speculators went belly up. No one knows when it will all bottom out because, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out a long time ago, there are no guarantees. Liberal Democrats in Congress, however, don’t believe that. They passed a $300 billion bill to bail out nearly half a million speculators. They want Americans who made the right choices to bail out those who chose wrong. We who are making our payments now have to help speculators make theirs too.

I don’t like that. I don’t like it one bit. I don’t want to take away from speculators the liberty to fall on their faces. They should have the freedom to fail because, as British farmer Thomas Tusser said half a millennium ago: “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

The question now is, are we fools too? Does the Democrat-controlled Congress take us for fools? It appears that way. What’s even worse? Our “Republican” president - the guy who put the “Dub” in Dubya - is going to sign the bill.

And here’s another question. Why are people who speculate on oil prices “evil” to be punished by excess-profits taxes, but those who speculate on real estate prices are “innocent victims” to be protected by taxpayer-funded bailouts?

Life Is Good

“Can you scrunch together more?” the photographer would say when he can’t back up any further. The people posing rub shoulders, and sometimes feel uncomfortable if they have to put their arms around others they don’t really like, or hardly know, to fit in the camera’s frame.

“Come on, now. Smile!” I almost never feel like smiling when I’m ordered to. Someone has to say something genuinely funny or I can only fake it. If the photographer has to take more than one shot and fumbles with the camera in between, my cheek muscles cramp up. I don’t like posing for pictures and I suspect most people are that way. I do like taking pictures and always have, but I don’t like getting people to pose any more than I like posing myself. I much prefer shooting people when they’re not aware of it, when they’re not self conscious about how they look to others, when they’re being themselves. I do take posed group shots, however, because people ask me to and it’s usually my wife who is doing the asking. She knows I almost always have a camera with me and, though it’s more work for me than fun, I seldom refuse.

With my economic stimulus check I bought a new camera: a Nikon D-60 SLR and it came stock with an 18mm to 55mm zoom lens. Now all that’s required for those tight group shots is a twist of the wrist and everybody is in the picture. I’d never used a camera with a wide angle capability before and I love it. Trees are a favorite subject - old individual trees with distinctive shapes. Many are in tight locations and it’s not always possible to move backward to include the entire tree from ground to crown. Again, the wide angle capability is terrific; just a flick of the wrist and the tree can be framed perfectly.

Another great feature of the D-60 is that the shutter clicks as soon as I press the release button, just like my old analog camera. For three years I used an earlier digital camera with a two-or-three-second shutter delay and it drove me mad. If I were shooting a moving object, I’d have to anticipate where it would be seconds after I pressed the shutter release. If a human subject wore a particular expression, it usually changed two seconds hence when the camera finally recorded it.

My wife and I rented a cottage on the Maine coast last week so I had lots of time to play around. I watched terns dive into the Little River at Reid State Park and come up with sardines in their beaks. I got several nice shots of their aerobatic diving that would have been impossible to obtain with my old camera. Then a huge osprey appeared and hovered high over the waves further out. He hung in the air long enough for me to change lenses and I was able to get several images of him (her?). The auto-focus feature was problematic at times with only blue sky as background. It was difficult to keep the bird in the center of the frame and the lens wanted to go to infinity when my aim was off. The osprey’s eyesight was apparently off a bit too because, as much as I wanted him to, he never dove for his dinner while I was shooting and eventually flew back inland. Oh well. Can’t have everything.

A quote I read recently keeps reverberating in my head: “We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.” I’m happy to say that I’ve been seeing many interesting and beautiful things lately and I’m taking the time record them. Life is good. The old man who sold me the camera said there are two kinds of photographers: “those who bring their camera to photograph a particular thing, and those who always have it with them because they see something beautiful every day.”

Graffiti and Anarchy

Some people consider it an art form, but I’m not one of them. To me it’s a canary-in-the-coal-mine thing, an indication of an unraveling civilization. It was appropriate that one of the symbols was an upper-case A with a circle around it - a symbol of anarchy. Last week, someone spray-painted graffiti representing whatever crude impulses entered his head around the Lovell Dump, or what is probably referred to as the Lovell Solid Waste Recycling Center now. If there ever were a proper venue for graffiti I suppose it would be a dump, but it was offensive even there.

Why do I say “his” head you may ask? Because the perpetrator was likely an adolescent male who knows very little but thinks he knows much. That two giant phalluses were among the symbols is also a clue. It’s possible he’s former student since I’ve taught nearly every fourteen-year-old who came through eighth grade around here for more than a generation. It’s also possible that he’s already been charged by the time this goes to print, but I’m out of town and out of touch, where there’s neither cellphone nor internet service and that’s nice. There’s no graffiti around here either. If he was caught and he’s under eighteen, his name won’t be published. People in town will know who he was though. They always do, and you can find out if you listen to the talk at one of the local lunch counters.

Graffiti “artists” who render crude phalluses probably wear their pants low on their rear ends - because they desperately want to belong to other groups of boys like themselves who don’t pull their pants up. Graffiti is part of their lifestyle. When they get old enough to drive, they’ll have sub-woofers installed in their cars to vibrate everything within a wide radius, blaring their angry “music” which they impose on us along with their graffiti. Sound and symbol go together, and those of us who pull our pants up consider both obnoxious.

Adolescent males who run in packs are anarchist by nature. The only limits they recognize are the impulses of the alpha male and change hour to hour. Anarchy is as old as the human race, but during the past two centuries, anarchists have adopted a loose philosophy. They believe there should be no government and they behave as if there weren’t any. They don’t respect private property, and that squares nicely with communists over on the extreme left of the political spectrum. Anarchists and communists have historically worked together to bring down governments. Once they’re successful in that, however, they part company. To fill the power vacuum, communists create huge government bureaucracies to control everything everybody does, and that’s the opposite of what anarchists profess.

Several anarchist groups like “Unconventional Action” and “Recreate 68” are planning to disrupt the Democrat Convention in Denver next month. According to the Denver Post: “A draft law proposed by the Denver Police Department would ban the possession by protesters of materials such as weighted pipes and chains and items that can make urine and feces bombs.” Hmm. Urine and feces bombs, huh? The excremental equivalent of rap “music” and graffiti, I guess. Would these be aimed at police or at Obama delegates?

Few adolescent boys understand anarchist history, but they’re attracted to symbols like the A with a circle around it because it’s associated with other angry young males who become sub-cultural heroes. Our media magnifies them as they make “music” and destroy things and treat young women like whores. Big media like Time Warner feed this subculture and profit mightily in the process.

The majority culture either accepts this adolescent anarchy, or even celebrates it because it’s associated with protected minorities. It is therefore an element of Multiculturalism - which purports that all cultures are equal. No culture, or subculture for that matter, is any better or any worse than any other. Cultural relativity has become a sacred principle and it’s not politically correct to question it. It’s even a hate crime in Canada where provincial Human Rights Commissions can bring charges against you and impose huge fines if you should publicly criticize a culture to the point where its adherents’ feelings get hurt. They don’t have a First Amendment up there.

Our society seems to have swallowed all this even when it means many of our adolescent boys behave like characters from “Lord of the Flies” and many of our adolescent girls look like prostitutes. Many grumble about it privately, but few speak out publicly lest they be called intolerant or even racist.

Such were my thoughts while I was photographing the graffiti before the dump attendant painted over it last week. That’s what we have to do with graffiti - kill it before it spreads, disinfect before it reproduces. Some claim this prevents “the broken-window effect” - if a broken window isn’t fixed right away, others around it will soon be broken too. Let’s hope we caught it in time.

Baby Bust

Hey liberals: I have good news and bad news.

Good news first: Remember how worried you were about increasing human population taking over animal habitat? Westerners using too much energy? Eating too much meat? Cutting down too many trees? Sending too much carbon into the atmosphere? Oppressing “people of color”? Well, the Western Civilization you hate is in decline. Europeans aren’t reproducing much and it looks like they’re just going to fade away in a few more generations. Immigrants “of color,” especially Muslims, are having lots of babies. They’re out-breeding Europeans (people “of pallor,” I suppose) as much as four-to-one. Won’t be long before Muslims “of color” are the majority, which is why some already refer to Europe as “Eurabia.”

The bad news? Europeans work few hours, take lots of vacations, then retire early with full benefits - just what liberal Americans think they should do too. Trouble is, that lifestyle requires working young people vastly outnumbering geezer retirees - and they’re just not there anymore. Not in Europe. Not in Canada. Not in blue-state America either (red staters are still breeding). A European cradle-to-grave socialist welfare system cannot sustain itself without lots of babies every year. It doesn’t work when there are more geezers than young people. So, the socialist utopia envisioned by American liberals and temporarily actualized by Europeans will disappear.

One great book covers this: “America Alone” ©2006 by New Hampshire’s Mark Steyn. He documents, in his tragic-comic style, how Western Civilization is committing suicide by refusing to reproduce. Meanwhile, Europeans bring in millions of Muslim immigrants from former colonies in Turkey, Pakistan, and Arab countries - most of whom refuse to assimilate and who breed like rabbits. They also collect welfare at higher rates than native-born French, Spanish, Italians, British or Germans. And, they would rather impose Sharia Law than support European geezers.

The New York Times finally got around to reporting the story in their June 29th Sunday magazine supplement with a cover piece called “Childless Europe.” Although author Russell Shorto quotes twice from “America Alone,” it’s as if he never read it. He acknowledges part of the problem, but doesn’t agree with Steyn about what caused it or how to deal with it. While Steyn blames multicultural, diversity-celebrating socialist welfare states for the continent’s baby bust, Shorto suggests they’re the solution, vainly in my opinion. He insinuates that because of it’s more generous child-care and maternity/paternity-leave programs, northern Europe’s birth rates are declining more slowly than southern Europe’s birth rates. North and south are both dying, but at different speeds. Steyn makes the case that Europeans don’t have children because of laziness, narcissism, and selfishness. Shorto claims it’s because they cost too much.

Steyn uses gallows humor to skewer sacred icons of liberalism - abortion and homosexuality - as obvious causes of Europe’s baby bust along with the social welfare state. Shorto ignores them completely - never mentioning either in his long article although there are 33 abortions for every 100 live births in western Europe and 105 abortions for every 100 live births in eastern Europe. Dead babies outnumber live babies there. How could Shorto overlook those statistical 800-pound gorillas in a cover story called “Childless Europe”? How could he disregard homosexual “marriage” as a factor in population decline? That’s hard, unless you work for the New York Times where they publish “All the news that’s fit to print.” Guess it’s not fitting to suggest that either abortion or homosexuality may be detrimental to society.

Steyn and Shorto both reference Paul Erlich’s “The Population Bomb.” Steyn ridicules Erlich’s predictions of demographic disaster and the western world’s Chicken Little reaction to it. Shorto interviewed Erlich and quoted him saying: “It’s insane to consider low birth rate as a crisis. Basically every person I know in my section of the National Academy of Sciences thinks it’s wonderful that rich countries are starting to shrink their populations to sustainable levels. We have to do that because we’re wrecking our life-support systems.”

It’s wonderful, huh Mr. Erlich? Just what is a “sustainable level”? Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population” made a similar “running out of resources” case back around the turn of 19th century when there were fewer than a billion people worldwide. Charles Dickens’ “Ebeneezer Scrooge” reflects Malthusian thinking when he talks about “decreasing the surplus population.” Malthus was off the mark in his population disaster predictions since there are more than six billion humans on the planet now. In 1968, Erlich wrote: “the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Uh-huh. Now, about Al Gore’s writings . . . Nah. Never mind.

Worst That Could Happen

Thirty years ago, I remember feeling complimented when asked if I were an anti-nuclear activist. If I ever was, I’m not anymore. The world has changed and I have too. In my idealistic world-view, I thought it might be feasible to rid the world of nuclear weapons - too naive to realize that once the toothpaste is out of the tube, we’re never going to get it back in. People like me were against all things nuclear - weapons and power plants producing uranium and plutonium that could be made into weapons.

In 1979, Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant nearly melted down. In January of 1986, I was in my first term as a selectman when the federal government notified us that my town and others in southwestern Maine were being considered as a repository for high-level nuclear waste. Maine was moving rapidly leftward because of an in-migration of people like me and we were in high dudgeon as we berated bureaucrats from the US Department of Energy at hearings around the state. They tolerated us calmly and then abandoned their plans after the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear plant melted down in late April.

Shortly thereafter, Presidents Reagan and Bush negotiated the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviet Union and after four decades of building them, we actually began dismantling nuclear weapons.

Trouble is, the Soviet Union disintegrated. It was as inept monitoring its nuclear weapons as it was monitoring its nuclear power plants. Its huge military was not getting paid. Its nukes, its plutonium, its enriched uranium, and its nuclear physicists were hanging around - lots of weapons and weapons experts looking for cash. Radical Muslims just to the south were flush with cash and looking for nuclear weapons. It doesn’t take an expert in international politics to understand deals were likely made. We must operate under the assumption that our enemies have nukes and are anxious to use them against us.

In January, 2007, I was in the audience in Washington DC when former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said: “At some point down the road, we run a serious risk of losing two or three [American] cities to nuclear weapons [in terrorist attacks], and it’s a lot better to act now before we lose a city.”

And it’s not just conservative Republicans warning us. On the other side of the aisle, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden said: “the most dangerous threat America faces is the possibility that one of the world's most extreme groups -- like al Qaeda -- gets its hands on a nuclear bomb."

Graham Allison, Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government claims: “a successful terrorist nuclear attack devastating one of the great cities of the world is inevitable.”

Scotland’s Sunday Herald quoted Ian Dickinson, who leads the police response to chemical, biological and nuclear threats there: "These materials are undoubtedly out there, and undoubtedly will end up in terrorists' hands, and undoubtedly will be used by terrorists some time soon," he claims.

Although he didn’t use the word “nuclear,” Senator Joseph Lieberman said on CBS’s Face the Nation: “"Our enemies will test the new president early. Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. 9/11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration."

What Lieberman didn’t mention is that al Quaida returns to a target if they’re unsuccessful destroying it the first time - as they did with the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001. United Flight 93 was believed to be headed for either the White House or the US Capitol Building before it was taken over by passengers and crashed in Pennsylvania. Does al Qaeda plan to go back to the Capitol and finish the job?

SITE Intelligence Group revealed a horrific, computer-generated image of what the US Capitol would look like after a terrorist nuke attack. SITE found the image on two password-protected al-Qaeda-affiliated web sites. Evidently, our enemies found the image somewhere and use it to salivate while making their plans. With our porous borders and port facilities, we’re vulnerable.

Every American needs to look long at our enemies' vision for us. Perhaps it will help us understand that we need to get a whole lot tougher if we’re going to prevent it from becoming reality. Five Supreme Court justices should have gazed at it before voting to grant rights of habeas corpus to Guantanamo terrorists who would live only to bring down the Great Satan - that’s us, in case you didn’t know. To accomplish that, nothing would be more effective than nuking Washington, DC.

Last Word

“Shit.”

From all accounts it was my father’s last word, and he uttered it as paramedics struggled to lift his large body from his bed onto a stretcher thirty-one years ago last month. He died on the way to the hospital of a massive heart attack. He was fifty-five, and he’d been expecting it. I’m left with the dilemma of how to interpret his last remark.

Was he summing it all up? His had been a difficult life. Was he afraid of death now that it was finally visiting him? He said too often that it was imminent. When I objected, he’d say, “Every Irishman is born with one foot in the grave,” and I think of that whenever I hear someone singing “Danny Boy.” Or, it could have been just a casual remark, as you might say when the alarm goes off for work after going to bed too late the night before and you sit up on the edge of the bed. You’re not really ready, but you’re resigned to go anyway. Guess I’ll never know for sure why he said it.

He visits me in my dreams some nights. The last time, I was going into a cafeteria and I saw him sitting at a table in back by a window. He was looking at me. His face was peaceful and he smiled a bit as if he were glad to see me. That wasn’t typical in life. I don’t remember him smiling much and he seldom seemed peaceful, but it looks like he is now and I’m glad for him.

My mother told me they’d gone out to dinner that last night at the Harvard Club in Boston. On the way home, they drove around Charlestown where he grew up. He pointed out the many places around the Bunker Hill Monument where he had lived. He was the oldest son of an alcoholic father who often drank away his paycheck instead of paying the rent. Often they had to move to a different apartment late at night to avoid the landlord. With five younger brothers and sisters, he shouldered the responsibility that should have been his father’s - and he resented it. For the rest of his life, that accumulated anger was always just below the surface and it permeated the atmosphere of the household in which I grew up.

The last time I’d seen him, he passed me the research project he typed up for me. It was the final piece of my master’s degree program and he was proud that I’d finished it. He was sad too because he knew I was moving to Maine soon. As I was leaving I told him my wife, Roseann, was pregnant with our third child. “Hmm,” he said - not “Congratulations,” or “That’s great.” I’m not sure what he meant by that “Hmm” either. Was he afraid I was following his pattern of siring children in rapid succession? I’m the fourth of eight. I’ll never know because my not-quite-three-year-old daughter, Jessica, was pulling on my finger and telling me “Come on!” She wanted to go home and play with her one-year-old sister, Sarah. My father would have loved his granddaughter Annie though, who was born that December after we had moved to Lovell.

It was a busy winter - new job, new house, new child, new state - but I thought a lot about my father and what made him the way he was. When school was out the following June, we went back to Massachusetts for a visit and I looked up my father’s Uncle Bill - my alcoholic grandfather’s younger brother. We’d never met, but I wanted to pick his brain about my great-grandfather, James McLaughlin Sr., who immigrated here from County Donegal around 1900 and who had been a notorious alcoholic as well. At his request, I met Bill in the parking lot of a windowless American Legion Hall in Medford, Massachusetts. We shook hands and he invited me in for a drink. It being 10:00 am, I suggested a cup of coffee somewhere else instead. He agreed, but then he opened his trunk of his Cadillac and took two snorts from a half-gallon bottle of whiskey first. Later, he took me to visit his brother, James McLaughlin, Jr. and his wife because they’d been in contact with the McLaughlins who stayed in Ireland, and knew where they lived. I wanted to go there - to Isle of Doagh in Donegal - but it would take thirty years before I’d be ready.

When I go in August, perhaps I’ll learn something about the source of the addiction that has plagued the American McLaughlins for more than a century. I’ve learned more than I ever wanted about what comes with it - summed up succinctly by my father’s last utterance.

AIDS And Our Tax Money

Originally, it was called GRID - Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Homosexual men, who were the first to acquire the disease in the United States, didn’t like that name. In 1982, the Centers for Disease Control changed it to AIDS - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome - and so began the sustained effort by homosexual activists to separate male homosexual practices from the disease in the public mind. This they largely accomplished by orchestrating a fear campaign about a world-wide heterosexual AIDS epidemic. That epidemic, however, never materialized. Last week, the UK’s Independent reported that: “Threat of world AIDS pandemic among heterosexuals is over, report admits.” AIDS continues to spread among men having sex with men.

The fellow making that announcement has the unfortunate name of Dr. Kevin de Cock, head of the WHO’s Department of HIV/AIDS. He said, that except for some peculiar circumstances in sub-Saharan Africa, “It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries.”

The article went on to say that “AIDS organisations, including the WHO, UN Aids and the Global Fund, have come under attack for inflating estimates of the number of people infected, diverting funds from other health needs such as malaria . . .” This seems to be a general pattern when it comes to AIDS. According to a Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) report: “Since the first federal resources were made available to state and local health agencies for AIDS prevention in 1985, federal funding, which now includes money for research, treatment, and housing, has skyrocketed to $13 billion for fiscal 2003. As a result of the work of highly mobilized lobbying forces, more is spent per patient on AIDS than on any other disease, though it does not even currently rank among the top 15 causes of death in the United States.”

What do you suppose are the chances that those “highly mobilized lobbying forces” were homosexual activists who early-on got themselves appointed to key decision-making positions governing taxpayer expenditures for AIDS? I’m willing to cover any bets here.

The CAGW report went on to say: “Research expenditures at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) demonstrate the uneven use of federal resources. In 1996, NIH spent an average of $1,160 for every heart disease death, $4,700 for every cancer death, and a whopping $43,000 for every AIDS death.”

AIDS is unique in that it became a political disease. Public health measures such as contact tracing - used effectively for decades to fight syphilis and gonorrhea - were abandoned with AIDS. With contact tracing, nurses would contact the sexual partners of people reporting to clinics for treatment of STDs to inform them of their exposure, encourage them to seek treatment, and avoid spreading the disease to others. Homosexual activists fought contact tracing because it would lead to the closure of San Francisco and New York City “bathhouses” in which promiscuous anal sex proliferated. That, of course, remains the most dangerous vector for spread of AIDS.

Ever hear about that development? Probably not. To take the focus off their own behavior, homosexual AIDS activists staged demonstrations around the country in which they blamed President Reagan for spreading the disease. That’s what the media reported on. And those bathhouses? They didn’t close. Instead, they got federal government subsidies. According to the CAGW: “In 1998, CDC approved a $338,000 grant to Hollywood Spa in Los Angeles, a gay bathhouse. The upscale spa is complete with strobe lights and club music. Patrons check each other out while wrapped in tiny gym towels. Is AIDS likely to spread in such an environment? As a 1997 Los Angeles Times article noted, ‘Local AIDS prevention workers do not pretend that all the sex is safe in bathhouses.’”

That’s the tamest of many nauseating examples of taxpayer money squandered on outrageous “AIDS prevention” activities in the CAGW study. If I wrote about the others, the family newspapers in which this column runs could not publish them. They’re that bad.

Under the original pretext of AIDS prevention, homosexual activists have gotten access to public schools as well, where for years now homosexuality is presented as a positive alternative lifestyle. Not mentioned in their seminars is data from the Family Research Institute indicating that, since the outbreak of AIDS, the average life expectancy for a homosexual man is only thirty-eight, and only about 2% live past age sixty-five. Yet, taxpayer-funded seminars continue for middle school and high school boys such as : “Queer, Questioning, Quiet: Developing Gender Identity & Male Sexual Orientation.” It was promoted by a Portland organization called “Boys to Men” for its 2008 conference at the University of Southern Maine. The conference cancelled that particular seminar when a representative from Maine’s Christian Civic League signed up to attend. Were they afraid taxpayers would discover what our middle school boys are being taught with their money?

Nah. You’d have to be homophobic to think that.

Color and Sex

Men are four to ten times more likely to be colorblind than women. Color is important to women. Men don’t generally care about it much unless they’re gay.

When my daughter bought a house last summer, all the women who checked it out said the house was “cute.” Without exception, however, they were appalled with the blue-painted woodwork in the living room and the pink walls in the bathroom. “I can’t live in here until I paint that over,” said my daughter, while the other women nodded gravely. Several volunteered to help put on a new color because it would have been too much to expect any women to exist in the presence of that blue. “Why would anybody do that?” they asked each other, referring to the previous owner’s color selection.

None of the men noticed the paint. None. They looked at the roof, siding, plumbing, wiring, septic system, and boiler. “Nice,” they said. The women didn’t like the yellow paint on the outside either, but the men were unaffected. “What’s wrong with it?” they asked. “It won’t need to be painted again for four or five years.”

“That yellow is icky,” said the women. The men shrugged.

Another woman told me how she saw a beautiful blue in the sky above the ocean one day and tried to capture it with her camera. When she got home and examined it, she was so disappointed, she cried. “You actually cried?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm,” I said.

Colors are related to creativity,” said my wife. “They affect your mood and women are more attuned to their mood than men are. Color affects mood for everyone, but women are more aware of it.”

That reminded me of something a poet said several years ago contrasting women and men about how they deal with their feelings. Women, he said, have a huge vocabulary to describe how they’re feeling and they tend to discuss it endlessly with each other. Men, however, do not, and if they should be feeling something strongly, they won’t necessarily know what’s going on inside them. It’s as if they turn their eyes backward and look down into their chests, he said. They see a maelstrom of feelings swirling there, but can’t label any of them.

Women have a huge vocabulary for colors too - several dozen at least - whereas most men I know have only six or seven basic words describing color corresponding to the spectrum. Men could talk on and on about the advantages and disadvantages of forced hot air heating systems compared to forced hot water or radiant heat systems. How they feel about them would never come up.

A University of Maryland study discussed how something called the OPN1LW gene for perceiving color resides in the X chromosome. “Because females can have two different versions of this gene, but men can have only one, females may be able to perceive a broader spectrum of colors in the red/orange range. Men and women may be literally seeing the world differently,” said one of the researchers.

It’s not just what they see that makes women different from us. How we process that data is important too. On any given day, men tend to use their heads more than their hearts, so color and mood would not be as significant for them as it would be for women who tend to use their hearts more than their heads. Head and heart are each necessary for an integrated human existence but balancing the two would seem best. Some men and women do this individually, but most of us have to do it in union.

While reading recently, a quote about mood and attitude jumped out at me: “We see the world not as it is. We see it as we are.” Since we’re all different, our existence would be awfully narrow if we didn’t listen to and ponder how people around us see things. I’ve lived long enough and been married long enough to know that men and women do indeed perceive the world differently and only some of that has to do with color. Most of the rest is still a mystery and likely to remain such - for me at least.

Can't Drill It Into Them

No blood for oil? Okay. How about food? Is anyone willing to fight for that? A gallon of milk is going up about as fast as a gallon of gasoline. Rice is going up too and so is corn. Why? Simple. It’s Economics 101: Supply is down and demand is up for both oil and for food, and now we’re using grain for biofuel instead of food and our federal tax dollars are subsidizing it. China and India are developing quickly, eating more, and buying more fuel. Supplies haven’t been going up to keep pace. The result? Higher prices. This isn’t rocket science.

Why haven’t supplies been going up? Congress won’t allow more drilling. They want to protect wildlife in Alaska (mosquitoes mostly) and along our coastlines. Animal lovers and their Democrat patrons are still traumatized by memories of sea birds coated with oil after the Exxon Valdez spill and nothing could be worse for them than a repeat of that. So, no drilling in ANWR. Local governments won’t allow construction of more refineries to produce gasoline and heating oil. Ted Kennedy won’t allow any windmills near Nantucket and nuclear power plants are not even discussed.

So we buy foreign oil. As the price of that goes up, more of our money goes to real or potential enemies like Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. We get weaker and they get stronger. But hey, we’re preserving mosquito habitat in Alaska and shark habitat in the Gulf, right? Soaring fuel prices get Americans to think about walking, riding bicycles and taking the train more, right? Carbon emissions are going down and Al Gore likes that, right?

After the Arab Oil Embargo thirty-five years ago, fuel prices soared. That was the kind of warning some forty-year-old guys get when they have a mild heart attack. The smart ones realize they better stop smoking, start exercising, and change their eating habits. The dumb ones ignore the warning and die of a big one by fifty. Our federal government ignored our early oil warning in the seventies and we’re still not ready to handle rising prices thirty-five years hence.

And it’s not just Democrats. Republicans have been in control of the White House and Congress a few times since then and they’ve done next to nothing about national energy policy either. It’s been nearly seven years since September 11th and still nothing from our alleged leaders in Washington. Doesn’t look like it’s going to change in the foreseeable future either. Obama doesn’t support drilling ANWR and even John McCain said he wouldn’t allow it either. It’s maddening.

Monday night, Maine’s First District congressional candidates debated at the Magic Lantern Theater in Bridgton. The primary isn’t until next week but Democrats and Republicans were on the same stage answering questions - pretty unusual. Judging from audience reaction, rising fuel prices were foremost in people’s minds. When asked about what they would do about them, the Democrat candidates offered the same old pap about alternative energy sources and conservation. They went on about wind, geothermal, hydro, solar and tidal energy, government-mandated miles-per-gallon limits, excess-profits taxes on oil companies - the same stuff we’ve been hearing for decades.

Republican candidate Dean Scontras pointed out that our our tax dollars are wasted on federal subsidies for biofuels. “It takes two gallons of gasoline to produce one gallon of ethanol,” he said. “There’s 86 billion barrels of oil off our coast and Congress says we can’t go out there [and drill]. All these alternative energy sources are great, but oil is going to be $200 a barrel by the end of the year. Those alternative sources aren’t going to reduce the cost to heat your home anytime soon. I’m for lifting the restrictions on drilling off our coasts, in North and South Dakota, in Alaska - increasing supplies so our prices go down. That’s how the market works. We haven’t built a refinery in this country in twenty-five years because of all the regulation required to construct one. Twenty-five years! That’s outrageous.” He added that the Chinese, the Cubans and the Canadians are drilling off our coasts, but we can’t. That answer brought - by far - the biggest applause of the night.

As I left the theater, I didn’t see anybody getting on a bicycle. On the way home, I didn’t see any windmills or solar panels either. I did see numbers outside gas stations advertising gas prices approaching $4 per gallon though. I saw lots of those.

Cracks in Barack

Growing up, I learned several things that Barack Obama seems to have missed. Most people I knew were civil, but some were downright mean. I learned that not everybody liked me, even when they found out how nice I was. They were dishonest, selfish, cruel, and ruthless. They didn’t care whom they hurt while getting what they wanted unless they were afraid of getting beaten up or arrested. I learned to avoid dealing with them unless I had to, and then to be prepared for the worst, and never go in without backup. I don’t know how it was where Obama grew up in Honolulu and Indonesia. Maybe he didn’t meet people like that, but that’s unlikely because they’re everywhere, at least everywhere I’ve ever been.

Maybe Obama has led a charmed life. Maybe he was able to enchant everyone he’s ever known the way he’s enchanted American voters. If he becomes president, he will definitely come into contact with some bad people who will challenge him to see what he’s made of, and some of what he’s saying lately worries me. He claimed several times that he’s willing to meet with world leaders who are sworn enemies of the United States - without any preconditions.

He wants to talk to Ahmadinejad. As a radical Shiite, President Ahmadinejad of Iran believes the 12th Imam, or Mahdi, has been living in a well for over a thousand years and will come out to rule the whole world if Iran creates chaos. To accomplish that, he’s defying the US, the UN, and the EU to build nuclear weapons with which to “wipe Israel off the map.” There’s nothing like a nuclear war in the Middle East to create chaos. If that weren’t bad enough, Ahmadenijad is supporting Hezbollah - a terrorist group dedicated to destruction of Israel and the United States. He supports Hamas, another terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of Israel. He trains and supplies weapons to Shiite terrorists who kill American soldiers in Iraq. Obama said he would talk to Ahmadinejad without preconditions. When scores of experienced American diplomats were appalled, Obama tried to backtrack.

How about Chavez? As a radical socialist, Hugo Chavez is nationalizing American oil companies in Venezuela. He threatens to choke off oil to the United States, supports communist guerillas in Colombia and Bolivia who smuggle cocaine into the United States, and conspires with Iran to bring us down. Obama said he will talk to Chavez without preconditions. When scores of experienced American diplomats expressed shock, Obama tried to backtrack again.

Maybe those crowds he speaks to while campaigning in the primaries don’t understand what Ahmadinejad and Chavez are like. Or if they do, maybe they believe Obama will charm them as he’s charmed Democrat voters. Does Obama believe he can work things out with foreign leaders like those guys? Obviously he does. “Yes We Can!” he says. How? Well, he is “The Change.” What change, you might ask? “Change You Can Believe In.” Hey - it’s worked for him with Democrats. Who is to say it won’t work for him with foreign tyrants?

One reason Obama looks good is that so many Americans are embarrassed by President Bush. They think he’s dumb, and when he speaks he tends to reinforce that impression. Obama seems smart because he speaks well and he went to Harvard. That he’s black is a bonus for a lot of Democrats who suffer from “white guilt” and are always looking for ways to prove they’re not racist.

Other are suspicious of Obama because he put down small-town Americans, saying: “They get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” He thinks they’re not sophisticated enough to understand economic dynamics as he does and that attitude has cost him votes in West Virginia, Indiana and Kentucky. Perhaps those “bitter” voters are wondering if he and his wife got into Ivy League schools through Affirmative Action and have become snooty about ordinary working-class people like them. They or their brothers-in-law have been passed over for jobs as firemen or policemen because of Affirmative Action and they resent it. They’re small contractors who have lost jobs to competitors employing illegal immigrants - and they resent that too. They don’t like it when Obama ridicules them while speaking to rich liberals in Marin County who use illegals as nannies and gardeners. Obama represents a Democrat Party which has played the racial victimhood card and the class envy card for decades. If I can paraphrase Obama’s spiritual mentor, could it be those Democrat chickens are coming home to roost?

Voters are beginning to suspect that Obama is naive and he doesn’t know how to handle bullies like Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Putin or Kim Jong-il. Most voted against him in the last several primaries. Come November, when their choice is between Obama and McCain, it’ll be interesting to see what they do.

Choices

The slogan “pro-choice” has been very helpful for those supporting abortion during the past three decades since Roe v Wade. People who call themselves pro-choice on this most controversial of issues can claim to be personally against abortion, but open to allowing others to have one if they choose. Their “mind my own business” approach is very American and, as such, has wide support. Supporting people’s right to choose, however, may prove a double-edged sword for pro-abortion groups. Recent advances in medical imaging technology are threatening their denial that what is being aborted isn’t human life and that abortion is about a woman’s control of her own body. It’s becoming more and more clear that there’s another body involved and abortion kills it.

How many times has a pregnant woman shown you an ultrasound image of her baby? Just about everyone has seen several by now. How many times did the mother say, “Would you like to see an ultrasound of my fetus?” My guess is never. When a pregnant woman is going to have an abortion, she calls what she’s carrying is a fetus if she talks about it at all. Otherwise, it’s a baby. Every year, the images are less blurry and it’s more and more difficult to deny that the image is that of a tiny human being just like us. Such images make their right to choose abortion vastly more difficult and that’s a big problem for the abortion industry.

On May 15th, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford signed a bill into law which requires abortion clinics to notify a woman seeking an abortion that she has the right to see an ultrasound image of her child one hour before the abortion. According to Lifesitenews.com: “Only [South Carolina] and Oklahoma require the one-hour waiting period after the ultrasound to give women a chance to reflect on the information without feeling pressured to continue with the abortion. In South Carolina an ultrasound is mandatory if the baby's gestational age is estimated to be 14 weeks or older or is unknown, according to state regulations. The ultrasound remains optional before 14 weeks of pregnancy.”

Women who have been brainwashed by radical feminists into believing that what they’re aborting is just a lump of tissue don’t make an informed choice. Activist groups who call themselves “pro-choice” like the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) should favor provisions that inform women of what their choices are, but instead they fight these statutes vehemently. “A woman has already made an agonizing choice before showing up at an abortion clinic and this law would put them through more unnecessary anguish,” they argue. What they don’t take into account, however, is the anguish many women feel for the rest of their lives after abortions. According to a 2004 study of Russian and American women, “65% report symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder they attribute to their abortions.” Suicide rates are many times higher in women who have aborted. One hour of reflection required by South Carolina may save a lifetime of torment.

Women need as much information as possible to really make a choice. According to the May 16th Elliot Institute News:

A survey released by Feminists for Life of America has found that many college students who become pregnant are unaware of resources available to them or don't have access to good resources. FFL president Serrin Foster noted that when pregnant students look for resources, ‘either they can't find them or the resources are inadequate or expensive.’ One pregnant student noted that without resources, ‘it sure doesn't feel like I have much of a choice.’ . . . [S]tudents who become pregnant are often immediately referred for an abortion by campus health center officials and are not given any information about other options or resources. [Other] surveys have found that lack of resources or support, and pressure and coercion from others, are leading factors for abortion.

Coercion indeed. The leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is homicide and several of these murders have gotten wide national attention. For too many pregnant women, the choice isn’t theirs; it’s someone else’s. Too often it’s the man who fathered the child or the under-aged girl’s abuser who is really choosing the abortion, not the mother. If people insist on being pro-choice, they should go all the way and insist that enough information is available for a women to really know what she’s choosing.

Being Catholic

Reactions to Pope Benedict XVI’s recent visit prompted reflections of how it is to be Roman Catholic in America. I was born a Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrat and that heritage is a big part of me whether I like it or not. And, “like it or not” sums up how I felt about it while growing up - part of me liked my heritage and part of me didn’t. Eleven years of Catholic education shaped me from ages seven to eighteen. I had little choice about going to Catholic schools while my friends attended public schools. My parents insisted on it and I resented it. I was deprived of some things - my high school had no girls for example - but there were compensations. Those nuns, brothers and priests did whatever it took to keep me in line - including many a whack in the head - and that was good for me. I might have gotten into much more trouble if I’d gone to the public schools with my friends. They certainly did.

After graduation from high school, I began my decade as a heathen. For about ten years, I didn’t go to church at all except for weddings and funerals, and doubted nearly everything I’d been taught. It was as if I had to reject it and then take back only what I came to believe for myself. I say nearly everything because I’ve always agreed with the church’s position on social issues, especially abortion, homosexuality and our obligations to the poor. Everything else was pretty much up for grabs. I even allowed myself to entertain doubts about whether there was a God at all. That seemed necessary for me to accept fully that, yes, He really does exist. More than that - He knew me before I was even conceived.

When my children were old enough to ask questions about God, my wife and I decided to bring them to church right in our community. The Lovell United Church of Christ was the only game in town and a lot of good people were members. The two ministers there at the time became good friends. The wider UCC was quite liberal, however, and becoming ever more so while I was moving in the other direction, both spiritually and politically. Gradually, I gravitated back to the Catholic Church and have been attending regularly again for about twenty years in Fryeburg, Bridgton and North Conway. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Fryeburg is my home church.

While I was away from the Catholic Church, it had liberalized as well. Boston’s St. John’s Seminary had been co-opted by homosexuals and graduated most of the priests who sexually assaulted all those altar boys, bringing the American Catholic Church its greatest scandal. Bishops and cardinals who oversaw other seminaries similarly corrupted covered up for the predatory homosexual priests they produced. The problem is that most of those bishops and cardinals are still in office. As the scandal was breaking in 2002, the rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC, Monsignor Eugene Clark said from the pulpit: ''In some seminaries in the United States, known homosexual young men have been accepted as candidates against every rule of church wisdom and church requirements. One need say no more of this as a breeding ground for later homosexual practice after ordination, and the manifest danger of man-boy relationships.''

Although many were glad that Pope Benedict addressed the clergy sexual abuse scandal, I was disappointed that he referred to it as a pedophile problem and not a homosexual priest problem, which it clearly is. I was also dismayed to see Cardinal Egan play such a prominent role during the pope’s mass at Yankee Stadium because he’s one of the most notorious enablers mentioned above.

He annoyed me with his speaking voice. Contrasting sharply with Benedict’s humility, Egan was theatrical. He seemed like he was paying less attention to what he said than to how he said it. It was a painful reminder that Rome should have overhauled the American Conference of Catholic Bishops [and cardinals] after the scandal broke and didn’t. Benedict is a reformer, but seems to prefer a quieter and slower reform where many Catholics like me would have preferred an immediate and thorough housecleaning.

As a cardinal himself, Benedict wasn’t shy about enforcing Catholic orthodoxy, so I hesitate to question his courage. He has bravely confronted Islamofascist resurgence and has dressed down administrators of Catholic colleges and universities in the United States who have strayed far from Catholic teaching. As leader of a two-thousand-year-old institution, he doesn’t rush things. I’m impatient, but he obviously is not.

Multicultural History

Every week I’m reminded of my love/hate relationship with the US History textbook used in my class. It blatantly panders to America’s public school teachers who favor politically-correct interpretations of history. That’s what I hate about it - and it’s also what I love about it. The book’s bias is easy for my students to recognize, and I can contrast it to my own conservative bias which I acknowledge very early in the school year. The book does not acknowledge its bias, purporting to be an objective account of events. It’s an easy foil.

I use the text mostly for students to read and answer discussion questions as homework, which we correct in class. In its coverage of the Vietnam War, one two-part question asks: “Why did civil war break out in [neighboring] Cambodia?” and “What were the results of the war?” As I walk around the room checking homework, a student volunteer acts as “assistant teacher” using the teachers’ edition to go over the questions and answers. He or she will read a question, listen to various answers from students, and then read the “correct” answer. As for what caused the Cambodian Civil War, the teachers’ edition gave the answer as: “US/South Vietnamese forces bombed and attacked Cambodia's bases; as Cambodians took sides, civil war erupted.” The clear implication is that America started it.

As for what the results of the war? The “correct” answer was: “Communist Khmer Rouge won; more than a million Cambodians died." They weren’t worked to death or murdered by the communists. They just “died.”

The first time I heard that I was appalled and I asked the student to repeat what the teachers’ edition said. President Nixon was no prize, but he didn’t start the Cambodian Civil War when he ordered US forces into North Vietnamese and Viet Cong sanctuaries there, and he didn’t cause the Khmer Rouge to murder millions of Cambodians either. Communists own that. It’s part of their dismal legacy around the world in the twentieth century, but the three historians who wrote my textbook seem deliberately blind about the evil effects of communism wherever it has been applied. They define it as: “an economic system is which all wealth and property is owned by the community as a whole.” Sounds fine when put in those terms, no?

Contrast the text’s definition with Random House’s (2006) definition: “a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.” Based on about ninety years of applied communism around the world and tens of millions dead as a result, which definition is most accurate?

Communism’s first application was in Russia after Bolsheviks took control of the revolution and instituted the Soviet Union. The text’s harshest criticism of their depredations is a description of how Americans were shocked “when the Soviet government did away with private property and attacked religion.” Then it covers the first Ukrainian famine saying: “Despite disapproval of the Soviet government, Congress voted $20 million in aid when famine threatened Russia in 1921. American aid may have saved as many as 10 million Russians from starvation.”

The text doesn’t speculate about why the Soviet government would “disapprove” aid to its own starving people. Neither does it mention that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin engineered a “famine” in Ukraine ten years later to purposefully starve 7 million Ukrainians when they resisted “community ownership” of their farmland.

What about the Soviet Union’s military repression of eastern Europe after World War II? When the text begins its coverage of the Cold War, students are asked: “Why did tensions develop among the Allied Powers?” The “correct” answer is: "The US and Britain distrusted the Soviet Union's communist government; the Soviets, also distrustful, feared invasion." There’s no moral superiority in America’s $12 billion rebuilding of western Europe under the Marshal Plan compared to the Soviet Union’s virtual enslavement of eastern Europe.

Like it or not, that’s the multicultural, morally equivalent theme permeating nearly every textbook used in America’s public schools. No culture may be depicted as superior to any other culture, even when it is.

Outing the Democrat Left

Ordinary Americans, including many long-time
Democrats, are getting glimpses of how the left sees our country and they’re shocked. Guess they didn’t understand that a sizable portion of the Democrat Party is just plain crazy and hates America.

“No-no-no! Not God bless America! God damn America!” shouted Barack Obama’s minister, friend, and spiritual advisor - the Reverend Jeremiah Wright in a sermon recorded on DVD for sale by his church. Then he told Bill Moyers on PBS that when the media broadcast sections of that sermon and others like it, he was victimized: “I felt it was unfair. I felt it was unjust. I felt it was untrue. I felt for those who were doing that, were doing it for some very devious reasons,” said the Reverend last week.

Devious reasons? Using the video Wright himself was selling to show Americans how people at Obama’s church think? How is that devious? Because it may cause people to remember what Michelle Obama said in February that, because her husband is running for president: “For the first time in my adult life, I’m proud of my country.” She’s been an adult for more than twenty years. Has she been ashamed of her country up to now? Why? Americans are thinking about this. Evidently she was very comfortable sitting next to her husband in church and listening to Wright’s sermons.

Wright said America is trying to kill black people by introducing AIDS and drugs into black neighborhoods and deserved the September 11th attacks. Barack Obama said he didn’t know Wright preached any of this. Americans wonder how he could sit in Wright’s church for twenty years and not know it.

Obama is friendly with fellow Chicagoan William Ayers, who bombed the Pentagon, the US Capitol, and New York City Police Headquarters in the 1970s. Ayers summed up his terrorist group’s guiding philosophy thusly: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents." He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001 claiming that he wished he’d bombed more - that he didn’t do enough. He is Obama’s buddy too and contributes to his campaigns. He thinks America is evil and he’s a tenured education professor at the the University of Illinois. How can Obama be friendly with a guy like that? Easily. The Democrat Party is loaded with people who admire terrorist bombers - as long as they’re left-wing terrorist bombers. That’s you see so many Che Guevara posters in their homes and offices - including Barack Obama’s Houston office.

Remember: Ayers’ students at the University of Illinois are studying to become public school teachers. He molds the faculties in public schools all across that state - teaches them how to teach - and teachers’ unions are the biggest supporters of the Democrat Party nationally - just ahead of trial lawyers (Ayer’s wife, and fellow terrorist, Bernadette Dohrn teaches at Northwestern Law School). Most of the $400 per year I paid in dues to the National Education Association went to Democrats and that’s why I quit. Too many of America’s public school history teachers have a view of America very similar to those of the Reverend Wright and William Ayers and they’re teaching your kids. Most Americans have not been aware of all this. Now it’s being rubbed in their faces and they’re not liking it.

When Hillary criticizes Obama for associating with someone like William Ayers, Obama’s campaign points out that Bill Clinton pardoned left-wing terrorists just like Ayers. Americans are thinking: “Wait a minute. You mean both Democrats running for president associate with people like this?” The answer, of course, is “Yup. You betcha,” and Americans are starting to get it. That’s why Democrat Party Chairman Howard Dean wants it all to stop.

Not me though. I want it to continue as long as possible.

Conservative Congressman in Maine?

As a conservative in Maine, I’ve accepted that liberals run things here - for now anyway. Most Republicans are liberals too. Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins are known nationwide as RINOs - Republicans In Name Only. First district Republican congressional candidate Dean Scontras, however, is different. He’s definitely not a RINO, not by a long shot. Although a young man, Dean Scontras is a small-government, conservative Republican from a mold I thought had been broken long ago in this state. There’s no one else like him running and he expects to win. He’s confident. He knows what he thinks and believes he can convince voters that he’s right. After chatting with him for more than an hour at the new Magic Lantern, I came away believing it too. If a conservative can get elected in southern Maine, Dean Scontras is that person. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but after interviewing him face-to-face, I believe he can pull it off.

Scontras is the only congressional candidate addressing illegal immigration, unless you count Ethan Strimling, who actually likes Governor Baldacci’s sanctuary-state policies. Scontras is firmly against them. He believes a crackdown on employers who hire illegals, along with a curtailment of their welfare benefits, will persuade most of them to go home.

Scontras alone is unequivocally pro-life and even supports a Constitutional Right to Life Amendment. He’d rather see the Supreme Court reverse Roe v Wade, which he considers inherently flawed. His Republican opponent, Charlie Summers, doesn’t even list abortion on his web site. As for his Democrat opponents? No need to comment.

Gay marriage? Scontras would watch how the courts deal with the Defense of Marriage Act and hopes they view it as constitutional, but if not, he would support a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

Regarding national security, Dean Scontras is one of the most knowledgeable candidates I’ve interviewed including five who were running for president. He understands the threat we face and speaks about it plainly. He knows Iran funds Hezbollah and Hamas and wants Israel gone. He supports Israel’s right to exist and isn’t confident that the United Nations will do what’s necessary to protect it. He would support a joint US/Israeli effort to stop Iran should the UN continue to drag its feet. He didn’t seem thrilled about Bush’s decision to go into Iraq, but he supports the surge and seeing the policy through to victory.

Scontras believes the United States is dangerously dependent on foreign oil, but he’s realistic about how to mitigate that. “We know the Chinese government is drilling off the coast of Cuba,” he said, and he would allow US oil companies to drill under the Gulf of Mexico and ANWR. “You do the math on this, and even with all the alternative energy sources we’re talking about [cellulose-based or corn-based ethanol, etc.] it isn’t going to replace even 10% of our reliance [on petroleum] . . . I’ve doubled back on myself and said, you know, it sounds good, and Maine should take a part in [national efforts to produce ethanol with our wood resources], but is it going to resolve our reliance on foreign oil? No. It’s just not.”

He believes the Second Amendment is unambiguous - that it grants citizens the right to have guns, period. He disputes justices like John Paul Stevens who, according to Scontras, “say the Second Amendment isn’t really about self defense. It’s really about building militias. To me as a Second Amendment guy, this is a no-brainer. There are things in the Constitution I struggle with, but this is not one of them,” he said.

“Okay, so it is for personal protection?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.

I asked him what he thought about Democratic efforts to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine which would force stations broadcasting conservative programs to give equal time to liberal programming. “The free market is the Fairness Doctrine,” Scontras said. “If the free market dictates something and consumers buy it, whether it’s talk radio or something else [leave it alone]. The Fairness Doctrine is inherently unfair from a fair-market perspective.”

“Why did you decide to run for run for Congress?” I asked.

He said he has always been interested in public policy. He studied it at UMO and in graduate school at Georgetown. “I went into business and I loved that - that was fun - but my wife will tell you, I can go out and campaign all day long and into the weekend, but when I was at work, it was like at five o’clock I was done. I truly love doing this.”

“The Republican Party is up against the wall right now. I think it needs some new leadership, some new voices. I’ve got some hope in the party nationally, but in this state, it’s like the Boston Red Sox of the 70s and 80s - every time the Yankees come to town everybody puts their chins down. I don’t care what kind of lead you’ve got, you know you’re going to lose in the end. That’s the leadership of the state [right now]. You’ve got to think to win first and then go win.”

“So you think you can win in the First District?” I asked.

“Oh yeah. Absolutely. I know I can win now. I’ve debated some of these folks. When it turns to the economy, you look - these people I’m running against here in Maine have had a hand in crafting this economy. According to Forbes Magazine, it’s third worst economy in the country. It’s the second most taxed state. Our young people are leaving during their prime earning years and they’re not coming back. We’ve got all the wrong economic indicators. Our entitlement programs are so big people are coming from out of the country and in the country to get [them]. We’re $200,000,000 in the hole and everybody I’m running against says, ‘Hey look - I’m an authority on the economy.’ Look what they’ve done to the economy here in Maine.”

I’ve known many politicians and my internal BS alarm is finely tuned. During the three hours with Dean Scontras, it never went off. This guy is the real deal and I believe he can win.

Am I A Bad Person?

Does it make me a bad person when I take pleasure in another’s misfortune? Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on the person. Schadenfreude is a German word meaning “pleasure from misfortune” and I’ve been feeling it a lot lately. Was I happy to read that ultra-liberal New York Governor Elliot Spitzer was forced to resign after being charged with hiring prostitutes? Darn right. It’s partly because his politics and mine are polar opposite, but it isn’t just that. Barack Obama’s politics are opposite mine as well but I wouldn’t feel as much schadenfreude if he were publicly humiliated the way Spitzer was. Spitzer has a hyper-arrogance that Obama didn’t seem to possess, so when I learned about the former’s demise, I heard myself saying, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy” instead of a more neutral, “Oh. I see.”

When the Mainstream Media played clips of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s outrageous sermons over and over, I felt it again. Whose misfortune was I taking pleasure in then? Well, it was hurting Barack Obama’s campaign that his longtime friend, pastor, and spiritual mentor was espousing crackpot ideas, but that wasn’t why I felt it. I wanted Obama to finish trouncing Hillary before he self-destructed. Obama was taking heat for keeping his membership in, and his contributions to a church in which people cheered as Pastor Wright blamed “White America” for the September 11th attacks, and blamed the US government for introducing AIDS and drugs to kill off black people. However, that wasn’t it either. Not entirely. It was the Democrat Party’s misfortune I was taking pleasure in, because it is comprised of people who either believe such crazy ideas as Wright was spouting, or of people who refrain from correcting them when they’re expressed. That’s what was being rubbed in the face of every American who watches the news. Democrats were forced to take a hard look at the victim mentality they have watered and fertilized for the past forty years.

That’s why Obama had to make the big speech about “race.” Winning the Democrat nomination depends on his maintaining the image of a black man who isn’t obsessed about being a victim, who is beyond all that. He had to put some distance between himself and what the Reverend Wright preached. Conservatives like me don’t think he did that successfully but Democrats do, so he’s still their man for now. That prompted more schadenfreude because it means Obama can still take the nomination away from Hillary. It’s her misfortune I’m taking pleasure in as well as the Democrat Party’s.

My schadenfreude got even stronger when, shortly after Obama’s big speech, the Mainstream Media broadcast three of Hillary’s speeches in which she described how in 1996 she allegedly had to run with her head down from her plane to a waiting car to avoid sniper fire. Then the MSM showed actual film of her and her entourage doing nothing of the sort on the tarmac of a Bosnia airport. They played those embarrassing clips over and over to leave no doubt in any voter’s mind what an abject lie she had been telling. That was a wonderful, heaping helping of schadenfreude. There have been so many other opportunities to expose her like this during the past seventeen years but the MSM refused to pull the trigger on her. That they’re finally doing it as she runs for president made it that much sweeter.

Then Hillary went on Jay Leno’s program and tried to joke about it but she flopped. That was nice too, but it got even better when after the story had largely died down, her slick husband Bill resurrected it when he lied about Hillary’s lie. Hillary had to tell him to shut up. I was thinking, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.” What does the credit card company say in its ads? “Priceless.”

Now we hear that Obama was pandering to elite leftists at a fundraiser in San Francisco saying small town Americans are angry and bitter. We’re typical white people clinging to our guns and our religion and our resentment of illegal immigrants because we don’t know any better. Then the rabidly-anti-gun Hillary told a story about her dad taking her behind a cottage and teaching her “to shoot when I was a little girl.” Then Obama says Hillary is all of a sudden “talking like she’s Annie Oakley.” Then Hillary criticizes Obama’s remarks about us typical bible-thumping, gun-nut honkies and gets booed by Democrats in Pennsylvania.

I just can’t wait to see what happens next - and it looks like it’s going to continue like this for four more months until the convention! Like I said: it doesn’t get any better than this.

Am I a bad person for enjoying it all? A little naughty perhaps but heck, I’m human.

The Pure Of Heart

They’re superior to you and me in every way. They’re smarter, more tolerant, and they care more than we do about everything. Luckily, they’re also patient with us. They’re thoroughly nice. They ride bikes while you and I pollute the atmosphere with our vehicles. They want to bring us around to their way of thinking and feeling gradually and they want to spend our money to fix everything for everybody. They know many of us will object because we’re stubborn, but they won’t give up easily and they will prevail.

People at National Public Radio (NPR) also know how to pronounce things better than you and I do and it shows how smart they are. They’ve gotten together with the National Geographic Society and published a map of the earth to show us how we’re ruining the whole earth by driving our cars, our trucks and by mowing our lawns. We’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and killing polar bears, but they’re not mad at us because they know we just don’t know any better. So they’re trying to educate us, bring us along. Only after they’ve convinced us about the wisdom of their world view will they restrict usage of our lawn mowers and snow machines.

They care a whole lot more about frogs than you or I do too. If you hear the peepers soon where you live, then you can rest assured that the Green/Caring/Audubon/NPR people will do everything they can to preserve every last one of those frogs and the mud puddles they swim in. They know greedy landowners don’t care a whit about toads and salamanders and only care about exercising their property rights regardless of how many worms or beetle larvae may be dismembered as they scar Mother Earth with their development projects. These are the kind of people who make Gaia cry. People who care, however, been patrolling the woods looking for vernal pools to map out and preserve. They’re passing ordinances in towns all over New England to prevent landowners from building anything within hundreds of feet of precious vernal pools.

The state of Maine has also passed legislation to prevent development near any vernal pools. Greedy property owners who thought they had a few building lots on the land they inherited or invested in for retirement will find out that they may not become developers at all. When they go to apply for a permit, they will instead be informed that they have become stewards of frog and salamander habitat and it’s their responsibility to make sure nothing ever happens to those precious amphibian eggs they inherited along with the land.

Of course it’s hard to go into the woods during spring anywhere in the state of Maine without having to walk around or hop over a vernal pool. Most disappear in summer and fall, but if they’ve been documented by some of the caring people who have been trying for years to inventory them, their very existence will keep Maine from being changed. We may be one of the poorest and highest-taxed states in the country, and we may have had an stagnant economy for the past several years while other states have been growing significantly, but we can be proud of the fact that frogs and salamanders are safer here than nearly everywhere else. Taxpaying humans may be disappearing in Maine, but amphibians will be just fine.

Some of those greedy landowners are not proud to be stewards of amphibians. They’re angry that caring people have passed this vernal pool legislation while they weren’t paying attention. They think their Fifth Amendment rights have been violated where it says: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation” and they’re talking about filing law suits.

Hopefully, the Green/Caring/Audubon/NPR people will convince the courts that amphibians are much more important than taxpaying citizens and the peepers will be saved, but we’ll just have to how this plays out. President Bush has appointed many judges who only see what’s written in the Constitution and don’t want to help. There may still be enough judges on the courts appointed by the previous administration, however, who understand that our founding fathers weren’t as smart as they are. These judges are Green/Caring/Audubon/NPR people too and they see our Constitution as a living document that can be added to if necessary for very important reasons like saving frogs. They won’t be swayed by the arguments of greedy, uncaring landowners with their out-date ideas about property rights. They’ll listen to other Green/Caring/Audubon/NPR people who care way more than greedy property owners because their hearts are pure.

Dismal Season

Out like a lamb? Not this year. Not here in Lovell, Maine anyway. Going out, March is more like the Ram of Aries putting its horns to us again and again. There have been no balmy days with sun and warm breezes - the flirt and foreplay Spring usually offers in March, if only occasionally. This year March has been nothing but an extension of the very trying winter that tested the strongest among us and is still very much with us as I write this Saturday morning, March 29th. It’s 25 degrees and windy. Snow blew off the trees and down my neck as I attempted to blow off Friday’s snow from my driveway. There are no flowers in sight, no bare ground even, just huge, dirty snowbanks that block my view of passing cars. Perhaps by the time these words are published my outlook will be different. Part of me understands that, but I’m not feeling it today. Maybe I will tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Not now.

My garage is as dark as my mood because of the plywood I had to put over the windows to prevent ice chunks falling from the roof from crashing through the glass. I thought I’d be able to remove them long before the end of March, but there just hasn’t been enough melt. They’re still barricaded against the sashes by huge piles of snow interspersed with ice. We’re supposed to be in mud season now but the ground hasn’t thawed enough. Usually we see the first green sprouts of crocus and then even daffodils in time for Easter. Well, Easter has come and gone and there’s not a sign of growth, unless something is sprouting under the ice where I can’t see it. I have seen buzzards flying around today though and they usually follow the receding snow pack looking for corpses of animals that died and were covered in snow months earlier. I don’t know what they’re seeing from up there, but down here on the ground I see nothing but deep snow.

On Sunday, my drive to Portland offered some glimpses of brown ground. It isn’t warm enough to smell the mud, but I felt a bit more hopeful. That’s what drew the buzzards I saw yesterday. They strayed far inland but there’s nothing to eat in Lovell yet. The closer I got to home the higher the snowbanks were. Behind them were more porches and buildings collapsed into a mess someone’s going to have to clean up. Then it snowed again on Monday, the last day of March.

Misery loves company and most people around here have been depressed as winter was followed by an alleged Spring. That depression has been exacerbated by the economic downturn now becoming the biggest issue in the presidential campaign. As snowbanks on the north sides of roads begin to shrink, we can see the tops of all the real estate for sale signs that have been buried inside them all winter. Soon we’ll be able to make out the words “price reduced” as well. It won’t be long before they say, “price reduced again” because we don’t know where bottom is yet. All we know is that the value of our most valuable asset is going down while the price of food, oil and gas is going up fast. We go to work every day as our net worth goes down and cost of living goes up. Then it snows again.

It doesn’t help that our three presidential candidates are less-than-promising and unlikely to lead us out of it. One speaks eloquently but says nothing. Another is shrill, saying the same old things over and over. The third one is just old, calls us “My Friends,” then can’t remember his lines very well. One will replace the stuttering lame duck next winter. After the longest, most expensive campaign ever, this is the best we can do?

I can understand the sub-prime mortgage aspect of this economic mess. People borrowed too much, betting that real estate prices would keep rising. Banks issued the loans believing the same thing and both have been caught when the market tanked. Should government bail them out? I don’t think so. They gambled and lost. A fool and his money are soon parted.

The aspects I don’t understand are “derivatives” and “hedge funds.” Evidently these were government bonds, but were changed somehow, then sold and resold until nobody knows what they’re worth anymore - not even the people who designed them. They’re worth hundreds of billions one day and nothing the next. The dollar is worth less because the world is losing confidence in America’s ability to manage itself. It’s all very confusing. Economics isn’t called the “dismal science” for nothing.

Will our emotional depression over this endless winter lead to economic depression? I hope not. I just want the snow to melt. I want to see some green.