conservatism

CBC News:

Katrina Effert was 19 on April 13, 2005, when she secretly gave birth in her parents’ home, strangled the baby boy with her underwear and threw the body over a fence into a neighbour’s yard.

The fact that Canada has no abortion laws reflects that “while many Canadians undoubtedly view abortion as a less than ideal solution to unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancy, they generally understand, accept and sympathize with the onerous demands pregnancy and childrbirth [sic] exact from mothers, especially mothers without support,” [Justice Joanne Veit] writes.

Apparently in Canada, if you kill your baby quickly enough after you give birth, it’s pretty much the same thing as abortion. This is disturbing on so many levels. It gives a whole new depth to the question “What’s in a choice?”

Unfortunately, this type of thinking is unsurprising when morally-vagrant individuals such as Peter Singer are given prestigious tenures at Ivy League institutions.

Paul Krugman at The New York Times:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te [sic] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Aside from all the baseless claims, what’s interesting to me about this is that 9/11 was the most unifying event of my lifetime. Sure, I’m only 24 years old, but for about a year after 9/11, it seemed like I could talk to anyone on the street and have two things in common: we despised the people who attacked us and were immensely grateful for our country and the people who protect it.

I’m not going to address Krugman’s points because he provides not a shred of evidence to back them up. I will make a point of my own though, regarding 9/11 becoming a wedge issue. It was a liberal—Harry Reid who voted for the war, turned around and voted to defund it. He then claimed we already lost and the surge was a failure while we still had men and women over there fighting.¹ He stuck to his guns even after other democrats were admitting the surge was a success.

All that, and we still have combat forces in Iraq under president Obama. Not a word from Harry Reid now on the urgency of getting out. 9/11 may have become a wedge issue, but not by any fault of president Bush or any other “fake heroes”.

UPDATE: Great comment from user Maguro over at Althouse:

Should we be ashamed of bombing the crap out of Libya, too? Inquiring minds want to know.

Brilliant question.

I’m proud of the media this time. They really stuck it to Obama when he incorrectly called Abraham Lincoln the founder of the republican party. Here’s the New York Times on his speech:

Jay Carney at Time thinks it was “a good speech,” but gets all picky about truthiness: “He called Abraham Lincoln the founder’ of the Republican Party. Nope. Lincoln was not the founder of the party; he wasn’t even the first Republican nominee (John Fremont was, in 1856). Lincoln was, of course, the first Republican to be elected president.”

Whoops. Looks like I got my facts wrong. That was the New York Times commenting on Huckabee making the same error back in 2008. Silly me. Nope, the media has pretty much ignored this one.

UPDATE: Looks like this was not in the original prepared transcript—meaning Obama went off teleprompter to throw in the remark about Lincoln. I’d love to see him deliver a state of the union address—wait, no let’s not start there. I’d love to see him address a class of 6th graders without a teleprompter.

Chris Moody at The Ticket:

“The White House Press Office has vomited all over my inbox,” wrote Talking Points Memo’s Callie Schweitzer.

I feel the same way. Just replace “inbox” with “country”.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC Chair: “Well, the Republicans who think the Recovery Act (stimulus) didn’t work are simply wrong. The Recovery Act, as of the beginning of this year, created an additional 3.6 million jobs. We have — the Recovery Act had a direct impact on making sure the teachers, firefighters, police officers were able to remain in their jobs. It begun — it helped begin to turn the economy around.

(Via Real Clear Politics)

I’ve written about this before. You can’t measure jobs created based on what could have happened. We could have lost 20 million jobs last year and the stimulus could have created 20 million jobs. That’s pretty unlikely, but it could have happened. Nobody gets judged on ‘ifs’ and ‘could-haves’.

There is something we can measure: what has actually happened. That’s how people are judged. What’s happened since Obama’s been elected? I’m so glad you asked:

• The nation’s debt has increased by $4.0 trillion in a matter of 2.6 years.¹
• The unemployment rate has skyrocketed and currently sits at 9.1% ²
• Not only has the unemployment rate risen, the total number of people in the labor pool has dropped from 62.9% of the US population when Obama took office to 58.2% today. That amounts to a 4.7% shrinkage³ in the total number of people in the labor pool as a percent of population.⁴
• The Democrat-controlled congress passed a healthcare bill that America doesn’t want⁵ and several judges (even a Federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton) have ruled it’s unconstitutional.⁶
• The total number of uninsured Americans has risen.⁷

Yep, anyone who thinks the stimulus didn’t work is simply wrong.