For months, Santorum has been the only Republican presidential candidate whose campaign didn’t have a big custom bus – and he still doesn’t, because this bus actually belongs to the famous Duggar family of Arkansas, who arrived in the Hawkeye State this week to join their favorite candidate’s final push in the Iowa caucuses. I interviewed John Duggar, one of the family’s 20 children, at the event in Boone:

A statement released by the Santorum campaign quotes the family’s super-mom Michelle Duggar:

“This year’s Presidential race outcome will set the course of America for the next several years! Rick Santorum is a pro-life, Christian conservative with the family values and common sense business perspective that we need to get our nation back on track, to create jobs and to stand for what is right! Rick has a proven track record as a leader in the US Senate he fought to end partial birth abortion, he has stood for defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Rick believes in lower taxes and less government control in our lives. He also will fight for drilling our own oil out of Alaska, which will lower fuel prices, create jobs and put thousands of dollars back in families pocketbooks. Rick is the man for the job, and the entire Duggar family asks those who are looking for a conservative candidate to support to join them in voting for Rick Santorum for President. He will be a voice for senior citizens, the working families and the unborn.”

The event in Boone was jam-packed, and not just with the numerous Duggars. The national media, who spent most of 2011 ignoring Rick Santorum, have turned out in droves to cover his suddenly surging campaign. It was impossible for me to get near the candidate inside the restaurant, where he was surrounded by reporters, photographers and TV cameramen. However, I did talk to two members of Santorum’s South Carolina campaign operation, who are here to lend a hand in the final Iowa push. One of them told me, “I’m laughing at all the media that keeps saying Rick doesn’t have any organization in South Carolina. He’s campaigned in South Carolina more than any other candidate has. … All we needed was a spark, and it looks like we got one.”

The plan for the Santorum campaign, if the surge comes through tomorrow with a strong result, is for their 24-year-old Iowa field director Jake Braunger to leap-frog ahead to help the South Carolina operation. Meanwhile, those who have discounted Santorum’s strength in New Hampshire may be in for a rude shock. In fact, as I pointed out yesterday, Santorum’s national campaign director Mike Biundo is a veteran GOP operative in the Granite State with strong Tea Party connections.

Many have apparently underestimated Santorum’s campaign all year, and now some are even claiming that “A vote for Rick Santorum is a vote for Mitt Romney.” Such arguments evidently assume that some other candidate in the GOP field is better prepared to be the strongest pick for the conservative “Anybody But Romney” movement. Yet as I pointed out today in The American Spectator, what happens in Iowa tomorrow night could destroy all such claims:

If the numbers in the final Des Moines Register poll are accurate, however, Santorum’s closing surge may be strong enough to vault him into second place, ahead of Paul — a result which would turn the “electability” argument on its head. How can Gingrich and Perry’s advocates claim that they are credible alternatives to Romney, if they can’t even beat a low-budget underdog campaign like Santorum’s? And what does it say for the vaunted superiority of those other campaigns that they failed to realize Santorum was moving ahead here until it was too late for them to respond effectively?

Pundits who imagine they can predict the future based on polls and media reports are often embarrassed by the actual results when ordinary voters have their say. It is probably impossible to predict what the outcome will be here Tuesday night, and even more difficult to guess what will happen as the campaign moves forward to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and beyond. But those who have preemptively declared that Rick Santorum can’t win the GOP nomination may soon need to re-calculate their assessments.

“Right now, I’m typing this in the passenger seat while Aaron is driving his brand new Honda Civic with less than 9,000 miles on the odometer. I’m sure this car could hit 110 mph, but Aaron has this whole Midwestern law-abiding thing going on, so he refuses to push it past 80.”

Where I come from, real men drive fast. High-speed driving is a cultural trait of my people. As I explained to Aaron, we Appalachian-Americans inherit the “NASCAR hillbilly gene” and when he asked me who was my favorite stock-car driver, I said Junior Johnson — the moonshiner-turned-racer immortalized by Tom Wolfe as “The Last American Hero.”

Of course, we Appalachian-Americans are the victims of discrimination by law enforcement agencies who have never been sympathetic to our cultural traditions. First they outlawed homemade whiskey and in recent decades, using an infernal Yankee invention called “radar,” they’ve been infringing our natural-born right to drive as fast as we can. (Which is to say, pretty doggone fast.)

My driver’s license has about as many points as your average NBA final; score and my monthly car insurance payments exceed the Gross Domestic Product of several Third World countries. This discriminatory oppression of Appalachian-Americans — we are routinely hassled by cops for “Driving While Redneck,” as we call it —  is actually a serious immediment to my journalistic career. Because when I’m late for a press conference halfway across the Hawkeye State, that’s when it would be a real advantage to do some all-out hillbilly driving like my Grandpa Kirby did when he was running whiskey into Phenix City, Alabama.

Nevertheless, Aaron Rupp was probably right to set the cruise-control at a steady 78 mph as we traversed I-80 Monday afternoon on our way from Cedar Rapids to Adel, even though his low-slung Honda probably could have been zipping along at triple-digit speeds. Rupp knows that Midwestern culture is particularly hostile to the ancestral folkways of a downhome Good Ol’ Boy who can’t resist the urge to drive a four-lane interstate highway the way Dale Earnhardt (may he rest in peace) used to drive the back straightaway at Talladega.

Iowa’s law enforcement community continues to enforce the vehicular bigotry they call “speed limits,” but the wisdom of our Founding Fathers prevents them from violating another natural-born hillbilly right, killing stuff with shotguns:

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Rick Santorum bagged at least four pheasants during his hunting trip Monday at Doc’s Hunt Club. Those four birds were just the “clean kills” that he was certain were the result of his own marksmanship — a conservative count, Santorum emphasized to the crowd of reporters who showed up at the hunting club in Adel, west of Des Moines.
While the former Pennsylvania senator was pleased with his outing, most of the reporters who showed up were more interested to know if Santorum had bagged even bigger game during this political season — the endorsement of his hunting companion, Iowa Rep. Steve King. But the conservative Republican congressman said he wasn’t quite ready to make that commitment.
“You know, I came here today to shoot some pheasants with my friend Rick Santorum and we’re having a great day,” King told the reporters assembled for Monday’s press conference. “So I’m going to deliberate on all of this and I’ve got a few days yet before a decision has to be made.… I’m leaving that open.” …

You can read the rest of that at The American Spectator. I apologize that low-speed driving impaired my ability to get more complete coverage, but it’s not Aaron’s fault that Iowa law doesn’t recognize the cultural imperatives of the NASCAR Nation.

Nevertheless, by camping out in New Hampshire — where independents can vote in the Jan. 10 GOP primary — Huntsman has managed to work himself up to third or fourth place in polls there, assisted by preposterously generous coverage from the liberal media. Yet it is impossible to imagine what the pundits call a “path to the nomination” for Huntsman, and his only obvious purpose in the 2012 campaign is to suck up debate time that might otherwise go to actual Republican candidates.

You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Huntsman has been adopted as the pet GOP hopeful on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. If there is a “Huntsman bubble,” Joe Scarborough is the guy blowing on the nozzle to inflate that bubble:

MSNBC has in recent weeks become the daily venue for one of the most bizarre reality shows on cable TV: Morning Bromance, starring Joe Scarborough as a man helplessly smitten with “Republican presidential candidate” Jon Huntsman.
When he isn’t blowing air-kisses at Huntsman, Scarborough is citing every possible media blurb about Huntsman as ratification of the former Utah governor’s make-believe campaign. Joe is to Jon what 11-year-old girls are to Justin Bieber, or what Chris Matthews is to Barack Obama. If Scarborough hasn’t yet announced his leg-tingles for Huntsman, it’s only because the MSNBC host wants to save his final orgasmic gush for the eve of the New Hampshire primary, where some polls show Joe’s teen-idol candidate in third place behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. …

Click here to read the rest.

While I have no firm estimate of how many eligible voters were in attendance, I can state officially that the number of kids was ginormous. Lots of big home-schooling families showed up – families with seven, eight, nine kids. Santorum is traveling with his own family of seven kids, so the super-size families certainly seem simpatico with the former Pennsylvania senator. . . .
He was quite impressive, and I very much agree with Santorum’s complaint that the media has unfairly ignored his candidacy.

That was more than four months ago and, unfairly or not, the media are still ignoring Santorum’s candidacy — except when they mock it, as liberal writers like Timothy Noah of the New Republic have begun doing:

Tim McNulty of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a tongue-in-cheek “Daily Santorum” blog feature, just in case. And my former colleague at Slate, Dave Weigel, has started a “Santorum Surge Watch,” though I think he’s mostly kidding, too. In this environment, though, today’s wisecrack is tomorrow’s front-runner. Let the Santorum surge begin.

Keep in mind that Santorum is the only candidate in the Republican field who has visited all 99 counties in Iowa this year. He’s in Iowa today. He’ll be in Iowa tomorrow. He is going to be more or less a full-time resident of Iowa until Jan. 3, and you might think that would count for something in a state where social conservatives are supposed to be a key GOP constituency. Yet Santorum’s campaign is being treated like a joke.

Why, of all the main contenders for the Republican 2012 nomination, has Santorum never had his moment in the sun?

• Theory One: Liberal media especially hate Rick Santorum because of his staunch advocacy of social conservative values, in particular his outspoken opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. So the media are ignoring Santorum out of spite, and the lack of coverage is effectively suffocating his campaign. This is Santorum’s own analysis of the problem. However, liberal bias can’t account for why even Fox News treats Santorum’s candidacy as an afterthought, which brings us to . . .
• Theory Two: Republicans have finally surrendered on social issues. Nearly two decades after Pat Buchanan declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that our nation was in a “religious war … a cultural war … a struggle for the soul of America,” the GOP has grown tired of fighting a losing battle. Lawrence v. Texas settled the gay issue, Roe v. Wade is never going to be overturned, and there’s no point arguing about it anymore: America is now, permanently, a nation that doesn’t blink an eye at “Heather Has Two Mommies” or a million abortions a year. Not only is the economy the main issue Republicans are supposed to be talking about in the Obama Era, but the Smart People like Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer seem to believe it’s the only issue Republicans should be talking about. According to this theory, Santorum is being punished by GOP voters for refusing to shut up about social issues where, as all the Smart People know, the battle has already been lost (if indeed the people in charge of the Republican Party were ever really serious about fighting such a battle).

Does Theory Two explain Santorum’s lack of traction in the polls? Has the Culture War ended in the unconditional surrender of social conservatives, so that whoever wins the 2012 Republican presidential nomination will have nothing to say on such issues?

Santorum’s low-budget campaign recently took out an ad in Iowa newspapers declaring “no surrender” on social issues, and none of the best-known spokesmen for conservatism — you know, the famous faces on Fox News — even bothered to notice. Have we now become a nation of sophisticated cosmpolitans, so that even self-declared conservatives are silent on social issues and everybody politely ignores those few holdouts like Santorum who didn’t get the memo?

Maybe. And maybe not.

Because I’m thinking of that famous scene in Animal House, after the Deltas have been expelled from Faber College and D-Day says to Bluto: ”Let it go. War’s over, man.” Rick Santorum’s family-values supporters probably wouldn’t approve of Bluto’s memorably R-rated reply:

Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no! … And it ain’t over now. ‘Cause when the goin’ gets tough…  The tough get goin’! Who’s with me? Let’s go! …
What the f— happened to the Delta I used to know? Where’s the spirit? Where’s the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you’re gonna let it be the worst. “Ooh, we’re afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble.” Well just kiss my a– from now on! Not me! I’m not gonna take this.

It has long been my belief that the Republican Party keeps making the mistake of trying to be the Omegas — arrogant, privileged bullies — when instead they should emulate the defiant Deltas. Not necessarily in the sense of throwing decadent toga parties, but in the sense of having fun, confidently being themselves and thumbing their noses at the liberal Dean Wormers who enforce the “double-secret probation” rules of political correctness: “No more fun of any kind!” (Feel free to substitute bogus accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia for “fun” in that sentence.)

None of the developments in this wild and crazy year have so shocked me as the latest strange turn in the road to the White House: When the Cain Train ran off the rails — Herman allegedly “took a few liberties with our female party guests,” as Otter says in another famous Animal House scene — the surprising beneficiary was Newt Gingrich, the most Omega-like Republican candidate in the 2012 field.

Do GOP voters really want to nominate Greg Marmalard for president? I don’t think so. So permit me to play the role of Otter in that pivotal scene at Delta house: Santorum’s right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part — and the voters of Iowa are just the guys to do it.

If there is anywhere on the planet where social conservatives still have anything to say about electing Republicans, it’s the Iowa caucuses, and there were two events last week that got my attention — first, Sarah Palin singled out Rick Santorum for praise on Hannity’s Fox News show. And second, Santorum was endorsed by Pastor Cary Gordon.

Pastor Who?

Yeah, I know. I never heard of the guy until he endorsed Santorum, but he’s the Sioux City evangelical minister who led a successful fight to defeat the re-election of three Iowa state supreme court justices who had voted to make gay marriage the law of that Midwestern land. Not only did Pastor Gordon endorse Santorum, but he recorded this 19-minute video explaining his endorsement:

Pastor Gordon might not be much of an Animal House fan, but he is in effect acting as the Eric Stratton of Iowa conservatives, providing the decisive approval of a madcap scheme proposed by the frat-house slob who, as we all know, is destined to become Senator Joseph Blutarsky. And the dramatic parallel is almost perfect, in that the major media seem to have decided for us that this year’s GOP race is going to be as orderly as a homecoming parade — “now that the GOP race has narrowed to a two-man contest between Gingrich and  Romney,” as Maggie Haberman of Politico said.

Really? Is that it?

The only choice is between Mitt RomneyCare and Newt the Scozzafava-Hugger?

Maybe. I dunno. I’m not one of those Smart People like Rove and Krauthammer.

Maybe social conservatives in Iowa are going to let Maggie Haberman tell them who to vote for. But forgive me for having the urge to walk into the five-and-dime store and ask the clerk, “Could I buy 10,000 marbles, please?” Because if the Iowa caucuses are the Faber College homecoming parade, then the Rick Santorum campaign is a float in the shape of a birthday cake, emblazoned with an immortal motto: “Eat Me.”

And if Sarah Palin should follow up her praise for Santorum’s consistent conservatism by answering the prayers of his supporters and actually giving him her public endorsement, she would be like D-Day inside the Delta Tau Chi Deathmobile: “Ramming speed!”

The new ad, clearly aimed at social conservatives who are a key GOP constituency in the Hawkeye State, is timed to coincide with Santorum’s three-day “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour of Iowa, which began Sunday in Sioux City.

“I believe what makes America exceptional is not just our economic potential or our remarkable innovation, but the fact that we are a moral enterprise,” Santorum says in the ad (click here to view in PDF format). “As President, I will protect America’s moral foundation, empower American families and build America’s economic freedom. And I won’t compromise on my values to do so.”

In a press release, the Santorum campaign said the new ad will appear “in several major Iowa papers” including the Des Moines Register.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

Asked by host Christianne Amanapour about Gingrich’s stand on “social values,” Santorum said: “I think Newt has consistently put those in, let’s say, the back of the bus. He has never really been an advocate of pushing those issues. Newt is someone who likes to get issues that are 80 to 90 percent in the polls, and 80 percent in the polls are generally not necessarily conservative — strong conservative issues.”

Santorum touted his own record as he prepared to begin a three-day “Faith, Family and Freedom Tour” of Iowa, where social conservatives are a key constituency in the Republican caucuses, now less than a month away. (Full transcript here.)

“I think character is definitely an issue,” the former Pennsylvania senator said. “You know, I think they have to make a decision based upon the person’s entire record. And certainly character counts. And I think you look at — you know, I’ve been married 21 years, I have seven children, that’s a factor that people are going to look at and should look at when it comes to, you know, the person.”

While Santorum continues to lag in polls, he has campaigned relentlessly in Iowa, visiting all 99 counties and building a solid grassroots operation in the Hawkeye State. … CLICK HERE to read the rest at TheOtherMcCain.com

A northwest suburban man says he needs to clear the air after coming to the support of his fiancee, who accuses GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain of making a sexual play for her.
For starters, Sharon Bialek isn’t his fiancee, said Mark Harwood in an exclusive interview on Wednesday night.
“We were engaged last year in June but I think there have been some assumptions that Sharon still lives here in Mundelein with me” Harwood told the I-Team. “Sharon and her son moved out in February of this year and now live in their own home … so effectively we’re no longer engaged.”
On Monday, when Ms. Bialek was the first of Cain’s alleged groping victim’s to go public, Harwood was contacted by news organizations trying to find out information about her. He did numerous interviews during which he was referred to as her fiancé. “I made reference to the fact that we were engaged and got engaged last June, 2010 and I think the assumption then-we were still engaged. I think most people seemed to be under the belief that Sharon lived [in my house] but she’s not here.”

Here’s video of the interview:

I don’t know if this has any particular significance, but for several days the media wanted the world to think Sharon Bialek was engaged to this guy, because that seemed to undercut suggestions she might be in it for money, e.g., Ben Smith at Politico:

In fact, per the Tribune, she’s living with her fiance, described as an executive in the medical equipment industry, in “a large, five-bedroom home… in north suburban Mundelein.”

He was described as her fiancé in the lead of an Associated Press article citing him as corroboration of Bialek’s account (although he didn’t know her in 1997 and says she never told him about it until Nov. 4). It was Thursday before WLS-TV got this interview, so that little bit of misinformation got corrected by the local ABC station in Chicago, three crucial days after it had been widely reported and woven into the media narrative as evidence of Bialek’s credibility.

Like I said: Things that make you go “hmmmm.”

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

This week’s uproar over Herman Cain’s CNN interview with Piers Morgan will likely be a distant and irrelevant memory by Jan. 3. Despite Cain’s rhetorical difficulty in consistently articulating a pro-life position, his bona fides on the issue have long been established, as demonstrated in 2006 when he led a $1 million effort to encourage black voters to vote pro-life.

What should be more troubling for Cain’s supporters are persistent concerns about the strength of his campaign’s “ground game” in Iowa. Organizing for the Iowa caucuses is a time-consuming, labor-intensive effort and 10 weeks is a very short time in terms of building effective operations in each of Iowa’s 99 counties. That’s why many people were startled a week ago when ABC News showed Cain’s Iowa headquarters nearly empty:

Duane Lester of All American Blogger interviewed Cain’s Iowa communications director Lisa Lockwood this weekend at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Forum and asked her about that video:

Lockwood’s explanation — that many of Cain’s volunteers in Iowa are working from home, rather than from the campaign office in Urbandale — may help reassure Cain’s supporters, as do the latest poll numbers from Iowa. But the poll numbers also point toward a looming danger for the Cain campaign:

When you look at the RCP average, you see that every Iowa poll for the past two weeks (beginning with the Oct. 7-10 PPP poll) has shown Cain in first place and Perry in single digits. It is therefore scarcely surprising … that the prime directive of the Perry campaign is now “Destroy Herman Cain.”

Allahpundit yesterday explained what Perry’s situation means going forward:

[W]hile Perry can skip New Hampshire, I think he’s stuck having to compete in Iowa. Sooner or later he’ll have to suck it up and start attacking Cain in earnest.

And this is very much in line with what I wrote Friday:

That the Perry campaign has become a purely negative organization — a machine whose prime directive is the destruction of other non-Romney candidates, leaving Perry as the sole hope for the Anybody But Romney movement — is an inevitable consequence of how the campaign began with the goal of becoming the overnight front-runner. When you begin with that kind of plan, with your campaign organized around the idea of raking in front-runner money, you inevitably encounter a problem when, for example, a poll shows your candidate in sixth place in Iowa. …
[T]he Perry campaign’s relentlessly negative message now – the turn to the Dark Side, as it were — is a predictable reaction to the failure of their original plan to become the overnight front-runner and Only Legitimate Alternative to Romney.
Those who bought into the original plan, which fell completely apart within six weeks of Perry’s Aug. 13 announcement … are now trapped into an all-or-nothing effort to destroy Herman Cain.

That lengthy contemplation of the strategic logic of the Perry campaign was prompted by an item from Alexander Burns in Politico, showing how Cain has previously given ambiguous answers, based on a Human Events article in 2003, when Cain was beginning his campaign for Senate in Georgia. Having spent enough time on the campaign beat to know how these things happen, I observed: “$17 million buys a lot of opposition research, as well as a team of people paid to disseminate it. Excuse me for suspecting that Politico columnists don’t spend their spare hours reading eight-year-old back issues of Human Events, IYKWIMAITYD.”

Of course, there’s no telling who dug up that 2003 article. Mitt Romney’s also got an ace team of opp-research guys on their staff and, when I mentioned the Politico column in a phone conversation Thursday with Cain campaign communications director J.D. Gordon, he pointed out that Team Obama isn’t exactly shabby when it comes to planting oppo-research hits in the press. So it would be unfair to jump to the conclusion that Team Perry was responsible for that item, however …

The poll numbers in Iowa and the strategic logic of the Perry campaign point inexorably to the necessity of Team Perry “going negative” on Herman Cain — and doing so PDQ, while Perry can still get the maximum advantage of his fund-raising advantage.

Perry finished the third quarter with more than $15 million cash on hand, whereas Cain had about $1.5 million cash on hand. But the Cain campaign is now getting a huge influx of contributions and it has been suggested they may be raking in $200,000 a day online now, which would translate to more than $5 million by the end of October. That would be “Romney-esque money,” as one GOP consultant put it, and if they could keep up that pace, Team Cain might be approaching financial parity with Perry and Romney by Thanksgiving. So if the Perry campaign wants to strike hard on Cain with TV and radio attack ads, it behooves them to do it before the Cain campaign can accumulate the money and organizational resources to fight fire with fire.

And if Team Perry does mount an attack-ad campaign against Cain, they will almost certainly do so in Iowa. The combination of poll numbers and the campaign calendar explains this:

Iowa caucuses ………………… Tuesday, Jan. 3
New Hampshire primary …. Tuesday, Jan. 10
South Carolina primary …… Saturday, Jan. 21
Florida primary ……………… Tuesday, Jan. 31
Nevada caucuses ……………. Saturday, Feb. 4

Notice that there are 10 days separating New Hampshire (Romney’s must-win state) and South Carolina (Perry’s must-win state). If we assume that Mitt wins his must-win, Perry would be under extreme pressure in South Carolina, and the pressure would be even worse if Perry fares poorly in Iowa. And if recent poll numbers are any indication, Perry could fare very poorly indeed in the Hawkeye State:

Public Policy Polling (Oct. 7-10) ………….. Perry 9% (4th place)
Insider Advantage (Oct. 16) ……………….. Perry 6% (6th place)
University of Iowa (Oct. 12-19) …………… Perry 6% (5th place)
Rasmussen (Oct. 19) …………………………. Perry 7% (6th place)

Can the Perry campaign afford for their candidate to finish fourth, fifth or sixth in Iowa? No way, José. They don’t necessarily have to win it, but if Perry finishes as far back as fourth in Iowa on Jan. 3, it’s unlikely he will do much better in New Hampshire on Jan. 10. By the time the South Carolina primary rolls around on Jan. 21, the media will have been doing “death watch” reports on Perry campaign for more than two weeks. If Perry then underperforms in “must-win” South Carolina, there will be another ten days of “death watch” coverage before the crucial Florida primary on Jan. 31. Romney is reputedly strong in Nevada, so by the time votes are counted there on Feb. 4, Perry could be batting .200 in the first five nominating events, and perhaps even 0-for-5 if he were somehow to lose his “must-win” state.

The strategic situation clearly indicates the necessity for Team Perry to leverage their current cash-on-hand advantage by mounting an attack ad campaign against Cain in Iowa, in hope of restoring Perry’s status as the most viable choice for the Anybody But Romney voters, who are a majority in the GOP primary electorate.

The big news that Friday was that Standard & Poor had downgraded the credit rating on the U.S. national debt, and I got video of Bachmann’s press statement calling for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s resignation. It was not until Sunday, Aug. 7, that I posted this video of Bachmann giving her Christian testimony at the festival:

As you can see, Bachmann began her presentation with a joke, asking the rain-drenched crowd, “Who likes wet people?” and then said that, as Christians, they serve the “God of the winds and the rains.”

Nearly three weeks later, on Saturday Aug. 27, a left-wing anti-Christian blog, “On Knees for Jesus,” posted a pirated version of my video, edited and with a caption falsely asserting that Bachmann asked the crowd, “Who likes white people?” — with the contextual clue about “the winds and the rains” removed. That dishonest smear was then given prominence by the left-wing gossip site Gawker.

Chris Moody of Yahoo News exposed this vicious falsehood and, after I learned that my video had been stolen and misused for such a defamatory purpose, I put up a blog post denouncing the smear, and sent an e-mail to the anonymous proprietor of the “On Knees” Web site. He then deleted his first lie and substituted another vicious smear as a “correction.” But his pirated and re-edited version of my video — a clear violation of my copyright, and of YouTube’s terms of service agreement — is still online. I have spoken to an attorney and fully intend that the perpetrator of this crime will be brought to justice.

(Cross-posted at Right Wing News.)

Stodden and Hutchison married in Nevada, where 16-year-olds can marry with parental consent, which Courtney’s parents provided, but even through it’s perfectly legal — and Courtney has said she was a virgin on her wedding night — Hollywood has treated their marriage as a shocking scandal. Last week, I wrote a post in which I remarked on two facts Courtney Stodden wrote on her Facebook page: “Courtney describes herself as a Christian and a Republican. She’s on our side, whether we like it or not.” That resulted in my interviewing Courtney’s mother Krista Stodden yesterday:

Courtney Stodden and her husband Doug Hutchison are being criticized because of jealousy, the mother of the teenage singer/actress said Wednesday in an exclusive interview.
“I mean, a girl that every man would love to have, and she’s a woman that every woman would like to be, and women know this, and they try to discredit her,” Krista Stodden told me in a phone interview, describing the negative reaction to her 16-year-old daughter marrying 51-year-old Hutchison. “And so what is out there in the media is just their insecurities, just flying all over the place.”
What Mrs. Stodden called a “media circus” has enveloped the couple since they disclosed their June wedding in Nevada. . . . The bride’s mother — who at 51, is the same age as her new son-in-law — said the couple are “so wonderful together,” and defended the marriage as “biblical” and “a blessing.”
Doug Hutchison . . . wasn’t the first older man ever to take an interest in Courtney, her mother said.
“She had a bunch of men all over the world trying to contact her through the computer. We’re talking rich, rich men. Even police officers were really wanting to get together with her,” Mrs. Stodden said of Courtney, the youngest of her three daughters. “She was getting messages all the time . . . Professional cage fighters, even [members of a major-league baseball team], a couple of guys from the [team]. Professional baseball players — they wanted to come out and see her, and I said no.” . . .

Read the rest at The Other McCain.

A first-term North Carolina Republican, Ellmers will be joined by fellow GOP freshman Rep. Rep. Randy Hultgren of Illinois and Rep. Bill Huizenga of Michigan, as well as third-term Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado) at a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday to express their concerns about evidence of wrongdoing contained in The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood, a new 181-page report by Americans United for Life.

In a letter to fellow Congress members, Ellmers wrote:

“I invite my colleagues to review the findings of this Report and to join us on Thursday as we voice our concerns about the issues raised by AUL’s Report and express our renewed commitment to seeking accountability for taxpayers and for investigating whether taxpayers are funding an organization that misuses government funding and violates state laws.
“I will be hosting a press conference on Thursday, July 14, 2011 together with Rep. Randy Hultgren to discuss the AUL Report’s extensive documentation of the systemic fraud and abuse inherent within Planned Parenthood and the need for Congress to investigate how Planned Parenthood is using federal money.”

Thursday’s noon press conference in room 2360 of the Rayburn House Office Building is expected to be the first step toward congressional hearings into taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood.

• Ellmers to Host News Conference on Investigation of Planned Parenthood — Press Release, Rep. Renee Ellmers, July 13
• Freshmen Congressmen Call Thursday News Conference to Discuss Hearings and Investigations of Planned Parenthood Based on Americans United for Life Report — Media Advisory, Americans United for Life, July 13
• “Members of Congress Press for Planned Parenthood Investigation” — July 13, LifeNews.com
• The Case for Investigating Planned Parenthood (PDF) — Americans United for Life.
• “Pro-Lifers Tell Congress: Investigate Planned Parenthood!” — July 7, The American Spectator

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

The political situation in Greece is not encouraging. The Greek parliament will vote this week on an austerity plan — which bankers are demanding in order to extend the country further credit — and it is by no means certain that the unpopular cost-cutting measures will pass: “If Greece refuses to accept more austerity measures, the consequences for Greece, the EU and indeed the global economy could be dire.”

The good news, such as it is: French banks have reportedly agreed to a plan to roll over Greek debt. However, Germany’s finance minister doesn’t sound optimistic: “We are doing everything we can to prevent a perilous escalation for Europe but must at the same time be prepared for the worst,” Wolfgang Schaeuble said, invoking the specter of 2008, when “the world was able to take coordinated action against a global and unpredictable financial market crisis.”

Recall that the 2008 meltdown led to the Dow Jones Industrial Average — which had been above 12,000 in June 2008 — falling below 7,000 by March 2009. If Europe dodges the Greek bullet this week, stocks should gain, but the threat of civil unrest in Greece is sufficiently serious that there have been rumors of a military coup.

So while CNN is consulting stargazers and necromancers, I am citing a more mundane prophet:

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” Margaret Thatcher once observed, and for Greece, “eventually” is now.

(Cross-posted at Right Wing News.)

The Tea Party Express showed up in the Rochester, NY area [Monday] to officially endorse Jane Corwin in the NY26 special election. They also denounced the fake Tea Party candidate Jack Davis.

State and local Tea Party activists joined with Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express, who said: “Jack Davis is no more ‘Tea Party’ than Barack Obama. . . . Jack Davis is a phony who has run three times as a Democrat and has endorsed and supported Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel.”

It is perhaps necessary to make mention of what should be obvious: The liberal media are trying to elect the Democrat, Kathy Hochul, by hyping Crazy Jack so that they can claim a Democrat win in NY-26 as a repudiation of the GOP’s conservative agenda. The New York Times:

Mr. Davis’s ascension comes as a race that had once seemed a certain Republican victory has become fiercely competitive because of a House Republican plan that calls for overhauling Medicare.

Read the whole thing, even thought it tells only part of the story, and tells it from a biased viewpoint. It’s bad that Paul Ryan has to defend himself against Newt Gingrich without Ryan also being scapegoated for the dysfunctional condition of the New York GOP establishment. However, if Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) can trick enough idiots into voting for Crazy Jack, that result will be headlined as evidence that the Paul Ryan budget plan is a political liability for Republicans.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain. Follow Robert Stacy McCain on Twitter.)

Wait, did I say “war” in Libya? I meant “kinetic military action.”

There I go again, cracking jokes. But if what is happening in Libya really matters, then why has the U.S. become involved on such a half-assed basis? If it was important, wouldn’t Congress have been consulted before we started shooting cruise missiles at Tripoli?

The Don’t-Call-It-a-War is being conducted under a United Nations “humanitarian” mandate that doesn’t include overthrowing Qaddafi. Only air power is involved, with no U.S. boots on the ground. It is being fought (or should I say “kinecticized”?) by a coalition led by the French while “the United States will play a supporting role” so that ”the risk and cost of this operation — to our military and to American taxpayers — will be reduced significantly.”

Insert punchline here.

We have a war that’s not a war, in which we are merely “supporting” a mission supposedly limited to protecting civilians, yet Obama continues to boast about getting rid of Qaddafi.

CBS headline: Obama: Qaddafi regime’s “days are numbered”

MSNBC headline: Obama: ‘Gadhafi will ultimately step down’

If Bush was mocked by liberals for his ”cowboy” swagger, at least he was willing to assume the political risks associated with being Gary Cooper in High Noon. Obama apparently expects to be taken seriously while playing Woody from Toy Story 2: “Ride like the wind, Bullseye!”

These jokes just write themselves, you see, and the biggest challenge of Barack’s Excellent Libyan Adventure is trying to keep a straight face while discussing it. . . .

Read the Rest at THE OTHER McCAIN

“Oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education,” Diane Schneider told the audience at a [United Nations conference] panel on combating homophobia and transphobia. Schneider, representing the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the US, advocated for more “inclusive” sex education in US schools. . . . She claimed that the idea of sex education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students are still able to opt-out.
Comprehensive sex education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender conformity,” Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.” . . .
A panel sponsored in part by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) advocated for “comprehensive sex education” not only as a tool to combat “gender oppression,” but also as the key to achieving all of the Millennium Development Goals.

It turns out that the NEA representative, Diane Schneider, is actually a leader in the radical group GLSEN (Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network):

Diane is a high school health educator in Spring Valley New York. She is very active with GLSEN in the Rockland County area, where she is its co-chair. She is also proud of the GSA that she advises in her high school. She is an online professor and has been active with the Health Education Leadership Team for NY State. She brings you this workshop as part of her training from the National Education Association’s (NEA’s) LGBT Trainer of Trainers.

You probably didn’t realize that America’s largest teachers’ union has an “LGBT Trainer of Trainers” program — I never imagined any such thing existed until I found Schneider’s bio on the Web site of a “PrideWorks” conference.

Something else that never crossed my mind, until it was pointed out by Maggie’s Notebook, is that Schneider’s role in GLSEN connects her to the infamous “FistGate” controversy involving Obama’s “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings. (In 2007, Jennings was paid more than $270,000 as executive director of GLSEN.)

How was Schneider chosen to give this presentation to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW)? Was it the NEA or Jennings who chose her? Did Hillary Clinton’s friend Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, have any role in arranging Schneider’s participation in this conference?

Whoever arranged it, apparently it is now a key aim of U.S. diplomacy that we must teach the world’s children “oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms . . . to combat heterosexism and gender conformity.”

Call it the Obama Doctrine.

They’ve taken a huge gamble, producing this ambitious film under a tight deadline and on a tight budget.

During the CPAC blogger bash at FreedomWorks, they previewed four scenes from the movie. Clearly, they’re hoping to generate major buzz before the film’s theatrical release on April 15.

Yeah: Tax Day. Pretty clever.

Learn more at the official Atlas Shrugged Movie site.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

Revealed: The Group Behind the Bills that
Could Legalize Killing Abortion Providers

“Revealed,” really? In fact, Americans United for Life has made no secret of promoting the ”Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act,” versions of which have already passed in two states and are under consideration in three others. And AUL’s vice president of legal affairs Denise Burke says the law doesn’t do what Mother Jones claims:

AUL’s “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” expressly provides that a pregnant woman may use force to protect her unborn child when she reasonably believes that unlawful force is threatening her unborn child and that her use of force is immediately necessary to protect her unborn child. The language explicitly limits the permitted use of force to a pregnant woman and does not expand it to third parties. Thus, under the express terms of AUL’s carefully crafted and narrow language, the “Pregnant Woman’s Protection Act” could not be used to justify criminal violence against abortion providers or anyone else.

There is nothing at all secretive — nothing to be “revealed” – about AUL promoting pro-life legislation, which is a service they describe on their Web site:

AUL attorneys are highly-regarded experts on pro-life legal language and the Constitution, consulting on bills and amendments across the country. In addition, our model legislation enables legislators to easily introduce bills without needing to research and write the bills themselves, helping ensure that their efforts will have the desired impact and withstand judicial scrutiny. . . .
We are continually working to help legislators enact new pro-life laws that will go into effect and not be unnecessarily tied up in court . . . . To do that, we educate legislators on the issues and provide them with model legislation and legal advice on legislative language. We work hand-in-hand with legislators to minimize avoidable problems . . .

So the Mother Jones article not only mischaracterizes the legislation AUL is promoting, the article also falsely claims to be “revealing” a fact that was already entirely public.

Anger over a decision to pay Bristol Palin several thousand dollars in student fees to talk to Washington University students about abstinence led to a decision Thursday night to nix Palin’s appearance on a panel here next month.
Washington University’s Student Health Advisory Committee had extended an invitation to Palin, a spokeswoman to prevent teen pregnancy, to speak on abstinence as part of the university’s Student Sexual Responsibility Week. . . .
A Facebook petition to compel the school to nix Palin’s appearance had hundreds of signatures Thursday evening. “It’s not necessarily in opposition to the ideas that are being presented,” explained Philip Thomas, the Washington U. student who initiated the petition. “People are getting so angry because of the opposition to Palin’s lack of expertise and the high cost she is charging,” especially in light of budget cuts that have adversely affected other student activities, he said.

Let us stipulate that, at any university in America, there are hundreds of students who would sign an anti-Palin petition. Washington University has 13,000 undergraduates. The student who organized the anti-Palin petition posted this last month at his blog:

The Economist on Dec. 9 2010 quotes Gallup polls that state that only 6% of scientists self-identify as Republican. It tickles me that, among those pursuing the systematic search for truth, so few align with Republican beliefs. Politically, the irrational actions of the GOP reinforce this poll quite clearly.

So a Democratic student organizes an anti-Palin petition and the university administration caves. What if there were “hundreds of signatures” on a student petition against a campus appearance by Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, Al Gore or Barack Obama?

Why is it always Republican speakers whose speaking appearances are the objects of these hateful efforts to silence them?

So much for the “systematic search for truth,” eh?

(Via Memeorandum. Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

When I pointed out the facts, Millard responded by doubling down on stupid:

No, Don. It was debunked by me in a Dec. 23, 2008, American Spectator article:

The tactic of blaming Palin for “racist anger” toward Obama developed as a theme during the fall campaign, evidently based on post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking within Team Obama. Threats against Obama increased as the campaign heated up after Labor Day, and since this followed the Aug. 29 announcement of the Alaska governor as Republican running mate, Palin herself was scapegoated.
That claim was distilled in a November article in the London Daily Telegraph with the misleading headline, “Sarah Palin blamed by the US Secret Service over death threats against Barack Obama.”
The Secret Service never said any such thing and the Telegraph‘s story didn’t actually say that they had said it. Rather, Telegraph reporter Tim Shipman was paraphrasing a Newsweek account of the campaign that quoted Obama adviser Gregory Craig in mid-October expressing concern about “the frenzied atmosphere at the Palin rallies.” The same paragraph of the Newsweek story asserted (without attribution) that the Obama campaign had been “provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October.”
It was the Obama campaign, not the Secret Service, which suggested a connection between the “frenzied atmosphere” around Palin and the threats. Obama himself appeared to believe there was such a connection, raising it in his final debate with John McCain.
That accusation evidently stemmed from an Oct. 14 newspaper report that an audience member at a Palin rally in Scranton, Pa., shouted “kill him” when Obama’s name was mentioned. The Secret Service investigated but was unable to corroborate that account, as Newsweek subsequently reported, and yet the alleged threat has entered the colloquial what-everybody-knows version of the campaign.
All this fits within a narrative arc that Democrats and their media allies are constructing around Palin, portraying her as an uncouth rabble-rouser leading an angry (and perhaps dangerous) populist opposition to Obama.

More than two years ago, you see, the origins of that Big Lie were documented and the Obama campaign propaganda was shown to be false. Nevertheless, as I said, by the time the truth could be discovered and reported, the Big Lie had become part of “what everybody knows.”

This was where the media’s “Blame Palin” narrative about the Tucson massacre began, and we see how liberals continue recycling the same dishonest talking points, long after their lies have been exposed.

While I was on Capitol Hill to cover Wednesday’s swearing-in of the 112th Congress, I dropped by Marco Rubio’s office:

Alas, poor Marco! Florida’s Tea Party superstar has been stuck in a temporary office in the basement, behind the cafeteria, on a dead-dead corridor across the hall from the Senate stationery store!
The new senator himself wasn’t in — “spending some family time” after the swearing-in, his receptionist said. Rubio’s office is next door to the temporary office of newly-elected Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana. A staffer in Coats’ office explained to me that unlike the House — where departing members are whisked out of their offices and the new members whisked in before the swearing-in — the Senate gives departing members up to five months to clear out of their offices. So new senators like Rubio and Coats might not be in their permanent offices until May.

You can read the rest of my report (including video interviews with new GOP congresswomen Ann Marie Buerkle and Renee Ellmers) at The Other McCain.

“How long will it be before Hollywood makes a movie glorifying Wikileaks ringleader Julian Assange?
“Not long! Hollywood, after all, has a long and sordid history of making movie heroes out of left-wing villains, con men and charlatans.”
– John Guardiano, “Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Assange, The Movie”

What we need is an Army of Photoshoppers to do movie posters for the Assange biopic, perhaps cleverly parodying various other movies.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

“While right-wing groups certainly don’t come out in support of rape, they do promote an extremist ideology that enables rape and promotes a culture where sexual assault is tacitly accepted. The supposedly ‘pro-family’ marital structure, in which sex is exchanged for support and the woman’s identity is absorbed into her husband’s, reinforces the idea of women as property and as simple accoutrements to a man’s more fully realized existence.”
– Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape (2008)

“Nothing catches an editor’s eye like a good rape.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels (1966)

In London today, a left-wing group calling itself “Justice for Assange” is protesting to demand the release of Julian Assange, who has been arrested on a warrant accusing the WikiLeaks founder of having committed sexual assault against two young women in Sweden.

Most of the people who want to see Assange locked up believe that the 39-year-old Australian has committed wrongs far more grievous than those allegedly suffered by these 20-something Swedish women, but it is quite often the case that serial wrongdoers are eventually jailed for relatively minor crimes.

 Al Capone finally went to prison on tax-evasion charges, you know.

Any charge that puts Assange behind bars will do just fine, so far as I am concerned. If he jaywalks, litters, smokes in a restaurant or fails to properly signal a lane-change on the freeway, lock him up and prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. Assange is a menace to society — “a micro-megalomaniac with few if any scruples and an undisguised agenda,” as Christopher Hitchens says — and I heartily approve any law-enforcement effort that would prevent him from further undermining the interests of America and her allies.

Not even my eagerness to see Julian Assange doing hard time in prison, however, can compel me to endorse the silly nonsense of feminists like Jill Filipovic.

You see, the Swedish crime for which Assange has been arrested is something akin to what we Americans would call “date rape,” except it’s even more ambiguous than that. Assange is accused of “sex by surprise” and perhaps the Swedish term loses something in translation, but in essence the two women say that while they consented to sex with Assange, the way he had sex with them somehow violated the terms of consent.

The fullest account of Assange’s alleged sex crimes was reported in August by the British Daily Mail, with all the nudge-nudge, wink-wink salaciousness one expects of the Fleet Street press. To summarize briefly:

Assange flew into Stockholm to speak at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Swedish Social Democrat party. A 20-something woman who worked for the party invited Assange to spend the night at her one-bedroom apartment and they had sex.
The next day at the conference, Assange was approached — “stalked” might be a better word — by an even younger 20-something woman who had seen him on TV and was evidently quite starstruck. A couple of days later, Assange spent the night at the second woman’s apartment and they had sex twice.
Subsequently, the two women talked, each shocked to learn that the other had also slept with Assange, who of course hadn’t told either of them about his other amorous adventures. Comparing notes of their experiences, they realized a common theme, namely Assange’s evasions of their requests that he wear a condom during sex.
The two women then went to the police to accuse Assange of the crime for which he has now been arrested in London.

At least, that’s the way the Daily Mail tells the story and, if that’s all we’ve got to go on, then clearly Julian Assange is not guilty of “rape-rape,” to borrow Whoopi Goldberg’s memorable phrase.

What we seem to be dealing with in this case, as is true of nearly all accusations of date rape, is one of those “he-said, she-said” situations, in which there were only two witnesses to the alleged crime, one of whom is the plaintiff and the other the defendant. And, as is so often true in these cases, those who plead for the acquittal of the defendant will call attention to the belated nature of the accusation. Neither woman had accused Assange of any crime until afterward, when each woman learned she hadn’t been Assange’s only Stockholm girlfriend. This fact makes it look a lot less like rape and a lot more like buyer’s remorse.

If being a two-timer is now a felony in Stockholm, the Swedes will probably need to build a lot more prisons.

The nature of the accusations against Assange, however, inspired Jill Filipovic to lecture her Feministing blog readers on the proper pro-sex feminist protocols for consensual hook-ups:

Consenting to one kind of sexual act doesn’t mean that you consent to anything else your partner wants to do; if it’s agreed that the only kind of sex we’re having is with a condom, then it does remove an element of consent to have sex without a condom with only one partner’s knowledge. To use another example, if you and your partner agree that you can penetrate her, it doesn’t necessarily follow that she has the green light to penetrate you whenever and however. . . .

OK, let’s all agree: ”No” means “no” and “stop” means “stop.”

And if she says, “Slower, and a little to the right,” you’d better comply instantly, buddy, or you can expect to find yourself in court explaining to a jury why you didn’t provide her with exactly the sort of sexual experience to which she consented.

Filipovic seems to imagine not merely a “world without rape” (to borrow the title of the Friedman-Valenti feminist manifesto to which she was a contributor); she is also imagining a world without confusion or misunderstanding, a utopia in which strangers who hook up for one-night stands are in such a perfect accord of mutuality that they can negotiate the terms of their actions with calm precision.

The point of dispute here is not whether Assange is a selfish, sexually exploitative creep — he certainly is, if the Daily Mail account is true — but, instead, how best to protect women from such creeps.

Conservatives who reject and condemn casual promiscuity would argue that the hook-up culture tends to reward and encourage predatory creeps, providing them with an endless series of willing (or perhaps, half-willing) conquests like these two young Swedish women who were evidently eager to have a go at the nearly middle-aged bachelor, Julian Assange, and only regretted that he didn’t live up to his end of the implicit bargain of “consent.”

Critics of the hook-up culture would say that women who engage in such behavior are exposing themselves to all manner of risks, not only the risk of assault, nor merely the risk of disease or unwanted pregnancy, but also emotional and — is it still permissible to say this? — spiritual and moral risks. The best way to avoid the physical, emotional, spiritual and moral hazards of casual hook-ups is simple: Don’t sleep around.

For saying such things, however, conservatives are condemned by Filipovic’s feminist friends as promoting “an extremist ideology that enables rape and . . . a culture where sexual assault is tacitly accepted.”

But whose ideology is it that truly “enables rape”? Is this an accusation that can be fairly made against conservatism? Or is it more proper to cast suspicion on the so-called “pro-sex feminism” of Filipovic & Co.? Theirs is the ideology that urges women to reject the “supposedly ‘pro-family’ marital structure,” instead encouraging women to pursue non-marital sex By Any Means Necessary — up to and including their endorsement of the sort of sexual services that Monica Lewinsky provided to President Clinton. (Nina Burleigh: “I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”)

This, then, is the ideology of the “pro-sex feminists,” who invite all women to share their vision of a world of hook-ups without hassles, without risks, without misunderstandings, without any possible negative consequences — at least for women. Men participate in this carnival of concupiscence at their own risk, subject to arrest and prosecution whenever one of their one-night stands goes awry.

And men also dare not call attention to the impossibility of the feminist utopia, lest they be accused of misogyny and the tacit endorsement of rape.

Such was my predicament when I decided to mock Jill Filipovic on my own blog and discovered that my meaning was misinterpreted even by some conservative regular readers. A clarification was necessary and, in the process of making my meaning clearer, I wrote a sentence that I think summarizes what’s fundamentally wrong with “pro-sex” feminism:

“The International Society for Running Around With Sharp Sticks cannot also command respect as the International Society for Eye Safety.”

For the record: I’m against rape. While we’re at it, I’m against pre-marital heavy petting and also take a rather dim view of kissing on the first date, so how the heck can I be accused of being pro-rape?

Never mind. They’re feminists, and it’s unfair trying to confuse them with facts.

• Robert Stacy McCain is co-author (with Lynn Vincent) of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party (Nelson Current). He blogs at The Other McCain.

Capri Anderson told ABC News in her first interview that she was hired that night for $3,500 to escort Sheen to dinner, but that the night quickly turned violent in a room at The Plaza Hotel in New York. Sheen, she said, threatened to kill her and called her a “whore.”
“She’s filing a police report against Mr. Sheen today,” Anderson’s lawyer Keith Davidson told “Good Morning America” today. “She’s going to the NYPD and report the action.” . . .
The day after the incident, which ended with police storming the room and taking Sheen to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, she was contacted by the actor via text message, Anderson told “Nightline” in a separate interview, and offered $20,000 for her silence.
“Just to not talk to anybody about it and go about my business,” she said. . . .
Anderson said she was asked by a friend of Sheen’s’ to escort him to his hotel room and make sure he stayed there.
“At this point he was fairly intoxicated,” she said.
“I was sitting on the edge of a coffee table and he was serving us both drinks and he was snorting something,” Anderson said, adding that she doesn’t know what he was using, but that it was a “white powdery substance.” . . .
“When I became really uncomfortable is when he put his hands around my neck,” she said.
Anderson said Sheen became incensed when she begged for him to release her.
“He started throwing things. He threw a lamp. That was the first thing he picked up,” Anderson said, her voice cracking. “And he threw it across the room at me.”
“When he started throwing things at me I became shocked, scared,” Anderson said. . . .

Anderson (or Walsh or whatever) eventually ended up locking herself in the bathroom of the suite at the posh hotel — she says Sheen’s young children were staying on the same floor of the hotel — until cops arrived and hauled him away for psychiatric evaluation. But Anderson/Walsh, who also gave an interview to ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield that will be aired tonight on Nightline, went on to describe Sheen’s language toward her:

“He was, from the beginning of the night, very loud and he had no hesitations when it came to using derogatory language or cuss words,” she said to Ashleigh Banfield in the “Nightline” interview, adding that “towards the latter half of the night, it got really bad. He started yelling racial slurs.” . . .
“He was calling me a whore a lot. And he was yelling things like, you F–ing b–. If you don’t come out here, I’m going to kill you. If I get in there, you’re going to be sorry. If I get in there, you . . . whore, you whore, whore. Like he just keep screaming and slamming on the door,” she said.

“Yelling racial slurs”? Remember the reaction to Mel Gibson’s use of racial slurs? Remember when former Seinfeld star Michael “Kramer” Richards was caught on tape using the n-word?  With such recent history in mind, I remarked:

Hollywood is happy to tolerate a famous star with a penchant for booze, drugs, hookers and violence. But racism? That’s intolerable.

We don’t yet know what slurs Sheen (allegedly) yelled at his porn-star date — who is Irish-American – which means we don’t know which ethnic grievance lobby will call for a boycott of Two and a Half Men. 

Of course, unlike Mel Gibson, Sheen appears to be a liberal in good standing: He’s a 9/11 Truther and he makes fun of Christianity. Knowing that his fellow liberals will stand in solidarity with Sheen probably explains why Sheen’s manager Mark Burg, who is also executive producer of Two and a Half Men, thinks he can get away with this lame defense:

“This is a woman who, for the right amount of money, sleeps with strangers.”

In other words, she’s not just a whore, she’s a lying whore.

You stay classy, Hollywood!

Exit Question #1: Has anyone heard feminist bloggers like Melissa McEwan and Jessica Valenti make a peep about Charlie Sheen?

Exit Question #2: If Charlie Sheen wants to go on TV to rebut these accusations, which show do you think will book him?

The activist described a Friday rally in Charleston, W.Va., where the three main speakers were Republican Senate candidate John Raese, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Raese “was like, ‘I’m with you guys’” — meaning the Tea Party movement — the activist said, and even an establishment figure like McConnell was giving voice to the  populist themes of the grassroots conservative insurgency. “What we can fairly conclude, even before the votes are counted on November 2, is that America is not interested in becoming France,” McConnell said.

The success of the Tea Party has clearly made Republican leaders aware that their constituents are tired of status quo politics in Washington. McConnell’s Kentucky protege Trey Grayson was one of the first scalps claimed by the grassroots uprising, when he lost a May primary to Rand Paul. Despite establishment concerns and a barrage of attacks, Paul continues to lead his Democratic opponent Jack Conway with 10 days to go until Election Day. As veteran political analyst Michael Barone noted this week, Tea Party candidates have done far better than many pundits expected, demonstrating the political viability of the movement.

One Republican who seems to have gotten the grassroots message is Arizona Sen. John McCain. My sources with the campaign of Ruth McClung, the Tea Party-backed GOP candidate in Arizona’s 7th District, say that Senator McCain has been McClung’s staunchest supporter in her underdog campaign against Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva. As I reported two weeks ago at The American Spectator, “Arizona’s two Republican senators, John McCain and John Kyl, have reportedly started directing campaign donations and other resources toward the 7th District campaign. Within the next week, McClung’s candidacy is expected to gain $100,000 worth of Republican support, in addition to a steadily increasing stream of online small-donor contributions from grassroots conservatives eager to defeat Grijalva, who is co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus.” 

That combination of grassroots and establishment of support has helped the GOP challenger put Grijalva on the defensive, with new TV ads and offices all over the district. “The very fact that a district like Arizona’s 7th has become competitive is a testament to just how far the wave of anti-incumbent, anti-Democrat sentiment has spread,” as Joshua Miller of ABC News reported this week.

Similar trends are being reported all over the country, as in Massachusetts’ 4th District, where Sean Bielat has Barney Frank pinned down on the defensive, and Maryland’s 5th District, where Charles Lollar is giving Steny Hoyer the fight of his career.

Examiner columnist Peter Ingemi recently visited five congressional districts in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia where grassroots enthusiasm is helping fuel “the Big Red Wave” for Nov. 2. Analysis by Nate Silver of the New York Times indicates the Republicans will gain at least 50 House seats on Election Day. Winning a Senate majority is a much steeper hill to climb, but Silver’s analysis shows the GOP favored to add six or seven seats, upping their numbers to 47 or 48.

Of course, as Professor Glenn Reynolds keeps reminding us, “Don’t get cocky,” but if Republicans do win big on Nov. 2, party leaders will know that this could not have been accomplished without the many thousands of Tea Party activists who contributed to candidates, manned the phone banks, distributed yard signs and canvassed precincts.

Ten more days until Nov. 2, when the Democrats get the message: Not just no, but hell, no!

And starting Nov. 3, we’ll see if the Republicans have gotten the message, too.

At least that’s the message young people are getting from media coverage of the death of Tyler Clementi, which portrays the 18-year-old’s suicide as a sort of martyrdom:

A moment of silence will be held before the nationally televised Rutgers University football game today to mourn Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide after he was allegedly taped by his roommate during a sexual encounter with another man.
But at Rutgers, where Clementi had been a student for only a month, a public outpouring for the 18-year-old was already under way.
Many of the school’s students had already paid homage to Clementi with a makeshift memorial in the middle of school’s New Brunswick, N.J., campus. . . .

This glorification of Clementi’s suicide violates what my Old School editors taught me back in the pre-Internet age of medieval journalism when ink and paper were still relevant: Suicide is not front-page news.

If suicides were reported at all, they were relegated to the back pages, usually only in the roundup of police-blotter items. And the reason suicides were treated this way, my Old School editors explained, was that if people ever got the idea they could get a front-page headline by killing themselves, we’d have people blowing their brains out in the middle of Main Street every day.

Old School editors weren’t indifferent to the pain of others, but a newspaper publisher has a responsibility to the community. Turning someone’s act of despair into front-page news is an abdication of that responsibility, as it tends to encourage other despairing souls to emulate such acts.

There are tens of millions of your friends and neighbors suffering silently from feelings of hopelessness and humiliation:

Nearly one in 10 Americans is depressed, and one in 30 meet the criteria for major depression, with the rate higher among the unemployed and those who can’t work, a study said Thursday.

Every day, people fail. Every day, people suffer because of other people’s failures, or from circumstances beyond anyone’s control. People go bankrupt, they get divorced, they flunk out of school, they are teased and tormented, they get fired from jobs, they lose their homes, they are diagnosed with terminal illness.

Should all of these people throw themselves off bridges, thereby earning themselves a spot on the evening news and a makeshift memorial where people can pay homage to them?

To ask such a question in our hypersensitive age is to invite the accusation of callousness toward whatever “cause” the suicide celebrity is supposed to symbolize. In this case, of course, those who refuse to join the pilgrims worshipping at the shrine to Tyler Clementi are accused of bigotry toward homosexuals — or perhaps sympathy toward college freshmen who think it’s cute to secretly video their roommates’ private sexual acts.

 That these accusations are baseless was brought home quite vividly by my Twitter friend Sooper Trev, who wrote a blog post explaining that he had also once been a college student with an embarrassing secret:

[W]hen I broke down and told my straight college roommate that I was attracted to men, specifically him, and that I couldn’t take my infatuation with him anymore . . . he held me. It was something he’d never done before nor wanted to. He assured me of his steadfast friendship. He bought me lunch, listened to me, and prayed with me too. . . .

You can read that whole thing, and probably should, but the upshot of it was that Sooper Trev — who still struggles every day with his sexuality — found hope in the idea of human dignity.

Every human life is infinitely precious to the Creator of life, and the destruction of life is always a tragedy, perhaps never more so than when promising young people are the conscious agents of their own death. Yet it happens every day in America, and every day some newspaper editor of the Old School tradition lives up to his responsibility to the community he serves by relegating that tragedy to a three-sentence item in the police roundup. It is not a pleasant duty, but a duty nonetheless.

There is no school like the Old School, and often I remember the late Paul Miles, who was editor of The Calhoun (Ga.) Times when I was the young sports editor of that twice-weekly newspaper nearly a quarter-century ago. Mr. Miles had suffered polio as a child and limped around with a heavy steel brace on his withered leg. He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and would be the first to tell you that if you’re looking for sympathy, you can find it on the same page of the dictionary as syphilis.

Mr. Miles had begun his career in journalism as a teenage copy boy at the newspaper in Columbus, Ga., during World War II when nearby Fort Benning was (at it remains) the most important training facility for U.S. Army combat troups. While the Infantry School at Fort Benning is still in operation, however, it no longer provides training for paratroopers, as it did during World War II. 

Mr. Miles once explained — I’ve forgotten the context — that during the war, soldiers died in training accidents at Fort Benning as a matter of routine. “Chute didn’t open, and that was it,” he said.

And those deaths were never more than a two-paragraph blurb in the local newspaper.

Think about that for a minute. Here were young men in the prime of life, preparing to serve their country in the greatest war of all human history, killed by circumstances beyond their control. Think how those soldiers’ families felt when they got the telegram informing them that not only was Johnny never coming home again, but that he had died without even getting a chance to fight the enemy.

No big headlines. It happened every day.

None of those soldiers were recognized with a moment of silence before a nationally televised football game. The only homage they received was from their relatives and hometown neighbors. Their makeshift shrines were a picture on the mantle and a gold star in the window.

When you think of things like that, it puts your own minor troubles in perspective. You can be like Rick Sanchez and blame our Zionist Media Overlords, or you can be like Tyler Clementi and throw yourself off a bridge. Either way, the most influential voices in American culture will say it was not your fault. What Christopher Lasch described three decades as therapeutic morality absolves us of responsibility, inviting us to imagine ourselves helpless to shape our own destinies, to embrace our victimhood:

Good mental health is characterized by optimism and a sense of agency — that is to say, the belief that we are ultimately in control of our own lives. The sense of agency is critical to success and happiness in every area of life, in large part because it is necessary to self-improvement and problem-solving.
Everyone encounters failure and disappointment, but a person who believes that his life is within his own control will respond to such setbacks in a positive, constructive way — analyzing the cause of the failure, seeking ways to improve, determing to work harder to overcome disadvantages and remedy personal deficiencies. A psychologically healthy person therefore must accept responsibility for his failures and shortcomings just as willingly as he accepts reward for his successes and abilities.
While it is true that other people sometimes contribute to our failures by undermining our efforts, it is also true that our successes generally require the assistance of others. Factors which are genuinely beyond our control tend to even out over time. In a free and prosperous society, few people are so disastrously disadvantaged as to have no hope whatsoever of improving their lot in life.
Thus, it is psychologically unhealthy to blame others whenever things go wrong in our lives, but this is exactly what “therapeutic morality” encourages.
Attempting to comfort people by flattering their sense of blamelessness — “It’s not your fault” — therapeutic morality ultimately undermines the vital sense of agency, in effect telling people that they are neither culpable nor competent. It promotes the notion of innocent victimhood, the blameless self, and encourages people to avoid responsibility for their failures by wallowing in self-pitying rationalizations.

It is perhaps ironic that our Narcissist-in-Chief feels the need to tell his dispirited supporters to “buck up,” even as he leads them toward an apparent political catastrophe that is now only a month away. (Blame those gosh-darn bloggers!)

Political suicide is one thing — about which I expect to be laughing loudly on Nov. 3 – but actual suicide is not a joke. Nor should suicide be exploited for political purposes, as Pam Spaulding has done by using Tyler Clementi’s death as a weapon to attack the Republican attorney general of Michigan. Before you object to Spaulding’s non sequitur, however, be warned that calling attention to the nature of this political hijacking will cause liberals to accuse you of striving “to preserve the climate that made it possible for Mr. Clementi’s humiliation to be so powerful.”

The folly of liberalism is one of those misery-inducing factors that would seem to be beyond our control. We can only point out the folly and urge others to reject it, perhaps by supporting the campaigns of Charles Lollar, Sean Bielat, Ruth McClung and Morgan Griffith.

However, even if the political results of liberal folly are beyond our control — even if we are the ones who become Election Day laughingstocks as the result of a Democratic mid-term miracle — there is certainly no reason that we should accept liberalism’s invitation to embrace victimhood as the narrative of our personal lives. Each of us is given a choice, and we make that choice every day.

As I remarked in a gloomy jest Friday, it’s just a four-hour drive from my house to the George Washington Bridge. But I didn’t make that drive, nor will I ever. Neither would I dream of encouraging anyone else to emulate the tragic example of Tyler Clementi.

It is in our darkest hours, when everything seems to be going against us and the future appears to promise only further failure and humiliation, that we should pause to consider the source of human dignity. A great man who experienced no small measure of failure in his famous life once said, “It is history that teaches us to hope.” Reflecting on that lesson two years ago, I said, “If God wishes to destroy us, nothing can save us. Yet if God wishes to save us, nothing can destroy us.”

So when you find yourself broken, humiliated and hopeless, when pain and shame and failure are piled upon you, know this: Survival is victory.

Decide to live, and tomorrow becomes a triumph. Each day you decide to live, you defeat death. And with every breath you can laugh at those who those who would welcome your destruction.

Your choice is yours, as my choice is mine, and I’m still just a four-hour drive from that bridge.

“I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life . . .”

O’Donnell (in rhetoric, anyway) is more staunchly anti-earmark, anti-TARP, anti-Obamacare, and anti-cap-and-trade, all of which she stresses more than her Norman Maileresque views on self-abuse. At every campaign stop she emphasizes being “anti-establishment,” reverent of the Founders, and in tune with Tea Party nation.

Welch illustrates his point with visual reference to a memorable (but not necessarily family-friendly) cinematic encounter between Judge Reinhold and Phoebe Cates, which brings us to the topic at hand . . . err, so to speak.

Noted paragon of moral virtue Rachel Maddow got all snarky about the Delaware Senate nominee’s Bible-based critique of onanism:

Professor William Jacobson accused Maddow of “sexualizing” O’Donnell, but what struck me was that the MSNBC hostess felt it sufficient merely to play the 1996 video and then grin sarcastically, as if:

• No intelligent viewer could possibly consider O’Donnell’s exegesis of Matthew 5:27-28 as a serious argument; and
• This implied criticism of O’Donnell’s view did not require any counter-argument on Maddow’s part.

In other words, those who advocate chastity are presumed to be ridiculous, while their critics — who may or may not be degenerate atheists — need never explain or defend their own perspective on appropriate sexual conduct. I had some jocular fun with this, suggesting that Maddow should do an hour-long MSNBC special about masturbation which “would draw much higher ratings than anything Chris Matthews might say about his Obama-inspired leg thrills.” As with O’Donnell’s views on evolution, many liberals have slid into the self-congratulatory assumption that, because opposing opinions have been excluded from elite circles, those opinions are indefensible. No smart person they know takes the Bible seriously, ergo, only morons accept the Bible as authoritative. And in the context of O’Donnell’s slippery-slope arguments about coed facilities on university campuses, it struck me how successful liberals have been in marginalizing advocates of Judeo-Christian tradition:

Sneering contempt for old-fashioned virtue is a very dangerous thing. It is remarkable how far gone our popular culture is in this regard. All sophisticated people are now supposed to scoff at the notion that young people can refrain from premarital intercourse, much less be “masters of their domain,” as the Seinfeld show once phrased it. 
So casual is our cultural assumption that “everybody’s doing it” that we are shocked when anyone dares suggest we shouldn’t do it. The only acceptable morality is now amorality — an agnostic indifference to virtue — and our society has become strikingly intolerant toward those who publicly dissent from the New Sexual Orthodoxy.

You can read the whole thing, or perhaps you would like to consider how hypocritical liberals are to accuse Christine O’Donnell of being a conspiracy theorist. I think they’re talking about The Other O’Donnell:

“I do believe that it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. . . . Miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.”
– Rosie O’Donnell, 2007

You can’t accuse liberals of not having standards. They’ve got exactly two: One for them, and one for everybody else.

On July 30, 2010, the FBI released one file with three sections totaling 423 pages on Howard Zinn, a best selling radical historian, teacher, playwright, and political activist. . . .
In 1949, the FBI opened a domestic security investigation on Zinn (FBI File # 100-360217). The Bureau noted Zinn’s activities in what were called Communist Front Groups and received informant reports that Zinn was an active member of the CPUSA; Zinn denied ever being a member when he was questioned by agents in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the Bureau took another look at Zinn on account of his criticism of the FBI’s civil rights investigations. Further investigation was made when Zinn traveled to North Vietnam with Daniel Berrigan as an anti-war activist.

Cliff Kincaid summarizes the FBI documents:

Although Zinn denied being a member of the CPUSA, the FBI file discloses that several reliable informants in the party identified Zinn as a member who attended party meetings as many as five times a week.
What’s more, one of the files reveals that a reliable informant provided a photograph of Zinn teaching a class on “Basic Marxism” at party headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. A participant in the class said that Zinn taught that “the basic teaching of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to by those present.”
The FBI file also includes information on Zinn’s pro-Castro activism and support for radical groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Progressive Labor Party (PLP), Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and Black Panther Party. Much of the latter was in connection with Zinn’s support for a communist military victory in Vietnam.

Read the rest of that. What is important to note here is that Zinn evidently joined the Kremlin-controlled CPUSA not during the “Popular Front” era of the 1930s — when many idealists were seduced — but after the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which Stalin cruelly and cynically sacrificed Poland to the Nazis. Zinn was a card-carrying Commie who advocated Marxism-Leninism after the Red Army’s “Iron Curtain” occupation of Eastern Europe, after the treachery of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss had been revealed, and even during the height of Stalin’s anti-Semitic “Doctors’ Plot” purge!

Read more — including key excerpts from Zinn’s FBI file — at The Other McCain.

For some baffling reason, liberal journalist seem to have believed that they could expand the membership of an email listserv to include 400 people without worrying that anyone would be ethically flexible enough to violate the off-the-record ground rules. They are now being spectacularly embarrassed by leaks from that listserv, called Journolist mostly through the reporting of the Daily Caller. . . .
[W]hile the threads we’ve seen give the impression that Journolisters spent all their time discussing what the media should cover, the list was dominated by mundane questions along the lines of “does anyone have so-and-so’s email address,” and . . . many of the most memorable threads were casual discussions of pop culture and other frivolous topics.
The thread below the fold, which was given to me by a member of Journolist under the agreement that it be printed it in full, is one such discusssion. . . .

Read the whole thing.

Does Israel Make Us Safer?
. . . Though many Americans think of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. as part of an inevitable “clash of cultures,” not one American died at the hands of a politically motivated Arab or Muslim until June 5, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death by Sirhan Sirhan.

Russell then goes on to assert that anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world is entirely a consquence of U.S. policy. Change the policy — especially, end U.S. support for Israel — and everybody who hates us now will be our friends. There are two clear errors in this way of thinking:

• It is never smart to allow your enemies to tell you who your allies should be.
• Yielding to aggression tends to result in more aggression.

This is what Churchill understood, but Chamberlain did not. Chamberlain believed that Hitler was an ordinary politician who could be dealt with as if dealing with were any responsible leader. Churchill was never deceived about Hitler’s nature, repeatedly describing him as a “gangster” who could only be stopped by force. So when Hitler, having repudiated the Versailles Treaty, remilitarized the Rhineland and annexed Austria, then demanded that the Czechs surrender the Sudetenland, Churchill clearly saw that Hitler was preparing for further aggression (i.e., the invasion of Poland) while Chamberlain foolishly thought he could bargain for peace.

Israel is analogous to the Sudetenland here because no change in U.S. policy will appease Hamas, Hezbollah and other America-hating extremists in the Islamic world. Yes, the annihilation of Israel is a major goal of the jihadis, but it is not their only goal.

They are gangsters, as Churchill would say and, to borrow another of Sir Winston’s favorite expressions, those who hope t0 appease these gangsters are feeding the crocodile, hoping to be eaten last.

Russell advocates abandonment of Israel as an act of foreign-policy “realism,” but as Elder of Ziyon says, “This is not realism — this is surrender to an enemy that will be emboldened by a show of such weakness.”

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

Did the CNN reporter over-interpret the general’s remark?

I asked him if he sees himself doing anything to change the 2011 deadline to begin troop withdrawal. We’ve heard, already, Republicans are saying that they hope he does away with it. Democrats are saying, “No, no, no, we’ve got to keep it.” The answer was, “No. No. As I said, I support the president’s policy and I will also provide the best professional military advice as we conduct assessments.”

Which is not exactly the same as, “Yeah, we’re gonna cut and run.” The pace and scale of withdrawals scheduled to begin in July 2011 is still entirely up for grabs.

Keep in mind that the general is strictly about the military, while Obama is strictly about politics. Under the rubric of “conducting assessments,” it’s not difficult to envision a scenario in June 2011 where Petraeus tells Obama, “Look, chief, we’d better go slow here. The Taliban are just biding their time, and if we start pulling out entire brigades of our troops, you’re probably three months away from a Tet Offensive situation, maybe a total Mogadishu-type crisis. We can trim back a little, draw down our total deployment by about three or four thousand without hurting our basic operational capacity, but beyond that, it could get dicey.”

That’s a win-win, and if the Left or the media give Obama a hard time about the slow pace of withdrawal, his answer is that the situation has changed, he’s “listening to the commanders on the ground,” seeking “a sustainable peace,” blah blah blah.

BHO as LBJ, in other words. And your average independent “swing” voter — to say nothing of your average CNN reporter – is too stupid to figure out they’ve been suckered in a bait-and-switch scam.

And McChrystal? Just another liberal under the bus. Sucker.

Paul Bedard at U.S. News & World Report:

[T]he video . . . . shows Kagan in 2006 praising retired Judge Aharon Barak during a ceremony at Harvard when she was dean of the Harvard Law School. At the event, he was presented the Peter Gruber Foundation 2006 Justice Prize. According to the group, the $500,000 award “acknowledges individual efforts and encourages further advancements toward bringing about a fundamentally just world.”

In a Wednesday morning press briefing, Judge Robert Bork — whose 1987 nomination to the Supreme Court was blocked by Democrats — said that Elena Kagan’s experience at Harvard Law School was not proper preparation for a seat on the high court: “The academic world is not a place in which you learn prudence and caution and other virtues of a judge.” Bork also implied that Kagan is a token:

Bork believes that Kagan’s nomination was rooted in the president’s desire to make history with the nomination of an additional woman to serve on the high court. “For some reason, presidents get all excited for having ‘firsts’, and this would be the first court with three female judges on it,” Bork said.

Kagan has called the Bork hearings “the best thing that ever happened to constitutional democracy.” But with groups like Americans United for Life fomenting opposition to Kagan and the latest Rasmussen poll indicating support for Obama’s nominee to be Borked, the White House is pushing back:

Yesterday, in advance of the AUL conference, the White House organized a conference call of its own with three people who were fellow Supreme Court law clerks with Kagan in1987 and 1988, at the time she clerked under Marshall.
They stuck closely to the administration’s script: Kagan, they said, was fair-minded and nonideological.
“I don’t think that Elena was thought of amongst the clerks as being either liberal or conservative,” said Teresa Wynn Roseborough, a former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens. “She approached things without an agenda. She was a consensus-builder and wanted to understand the points of agreement as much as possible.”

Yeah. Asking her former fellow clerks if Kagan is an ideologue — kind of like asking a World Cup soccer ref if the U.S. is offside.

UPDATE: Twenty-three hours later . . . Sigh.

Did I mention that I drove to Alabama in February to cover the Rick Barber campaign?

• VIDEO: Republican Candidate Rick Barber Talks Tea Parties, Pool Halls and Blue Dogs
• Politics and Mardi Gras Beads in ‘Bama: Rick Barber Campaigns in Millbrook

Did I mention that I learned about Rick Barber because I met his campaign manager, Yates Walker, while covering the Hoffman campaign in NY-23?

Look: If this kind of stunt was boring when Adam Lambert did it last year, why does Miley Cyrus think it’s exciting this year? At what point will these celebrities figure out that their faux-bohemian épater le bourgeois gestures are no longer avant-garde?

Exit question: If this is what Miley has to do to get attention in her post-Disney career, how long before Selena Gomez or the Jonas Brothers get into a sex-video scandal?

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

I will not be discussing the details of that relationship, nor will I be granting any additional interviews about it to members of the media beyond what I have already been compelled to confirm.

Now that Will Folks has been compelled to confirm it, he won’t shut up about it. In an interview Wednesday, he rehashed the “protect my family” excuse for WCBD-TV:

Chicks in South Carolina dig that half-shaved baseball-cap slacker look.

Race for Murtha’s seat could have national implications
– CNN

“Potential national implications will be gleaned from the vote tally today in the special election for Pennsylvania’s 12th district . . .”
– Real Clear Politics

“. . . the high stakes here in Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district, in a race that is being watched nationally for its implications for the November midterms.”
– Washington Post

Cliches have a way of being true, but you’d think some of these people might think to grab a thesaurus and use “ramifications” or “significance” or some other way of saying the same thing. At any rate, I’m on the road this morning for my fourth trip to Pennsylvania’s 12th District, providing Election Day coverage of this key, crucial, critical and otherwise pretty doggone important special election.

The polls show a statistical tie, and Dave Weigel at the Washington Post suspects Democrats are feeling confident, but they may just be playing the expectations implications game. From my column today at The American Spectator:

Debbie Lee came all the way from Arizona to campaign for Tim Burns. She was “deployed” to western Pennsylvania on behalf of Moving America Forward, a pro-military organization “committed to supporting America’s efforts to defeat terrorism,” and she brought with her a $5,000 check for the Burns campaign from the group’s political action committee.
Lee is a “Gold Star Mother” whose son, a Navy SEAL, was killed in a 2006 firefight in Iraq. She praised Burns as “a candidate who understands and will uphold the Constitution and who recognizes the sacrifices our troops make.”
In the battle for Pennsylvania’s 12th District, Lee is one member of a veritable of army of volunteers fighting to elect a Republican to the seat held for more than three decades by the late Democrat John Murtha. For weeks, volunteers have stuffed envelopes, manned phone banks and walked precincts, and today they’ll make the final push to get their voters to the polls in a special election that many observers are calling a crucial test of whether the GOP can win back the House of Representatives in November.
On the eve of this key election, only one man was willing to predict the final result. “I can assure you, we’re going to have a victory tomorrow,” Burns said in an interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Monday night. . . .

Please read the whole thing. And wish me luck in PA-12 today, where the weather is cool and overcast, with a 52% chance of widely scattered national implications.

PREVIOUSLY:

• May 15 – VIDEO: New PA-12 Ad for Tim Burns
• May 9 – PA-12: Code Red Calls for Volunteers, Eight Days Before Pennsylvania Special Election
• May 2 – PA-12 Special Report: Behind the Scenes of the Pennsylvania Patriot Revolution
• April 30 – PA-12: Tim Burns vs. Murthanomics

(Hat-tip: SusanAnne Hiller at Red State.) Meanwhile, the American Action Network — which is helping bring campaign volunteers to PA-12 — is running this ad in support of Burns:

(Hat-tip: Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit.) I was in Washington, Pa., yesterday when Sen. Scott Brown came to campaign for Tim Burns:

Here’s video of Scott Brown’s speech at the courthouse in Washington, Pa. — the coincidence of the town’s name gives him an opportunity for some pointed humor:

Afterwards, Scott Brown was interviewed by a reporter from Pittsburgh station KDKA-TV:

The reporter tried some premature presidential speculation:

KDKA Political Editor Jon Delano asked [Brown] if he was considering running for president.
“Well, I have to be honest with you. I’m focused on doing my job for the citizens of Massachusetts and helping people like Tim get elected,” he said. “I have no interest in running for president.”
But others say his new celebrity gives him presidential potential.
“I think he’s a true conservative, and right now that is absolutely what we need,” Chrystal Fidazzo, of South Franklin Township, said.

Before anybody starts jumping aboard the Brown 2012 bandwagon, however, there is this special election on Tuesday. You can get the latest updates on the PA-12 campaign by checking #PA12 on Twitter, and also by following @TimothyBurns or his campaign’s outreach coordinator, Angela Lash (@Lash3).

The Burns campaign is still inviting all Tea Party activists and conservatives to come volunteer in the final push to Election Day. To find out how you can help, visit TimBurnsForCongress.com, or e-mail the campaign or call 814-619-3414.

PREVIOUSLY:

• May 9 – PA-12: Code Red Calls for Volunteers, Eight Days Before Pennsylvania Special Election
• May 2 – PA-12 Special Report: Behind the Scenes of the Pennsylvania Patriot Revolution
• April 30 – PA-12: Tim Burns vs. Murthanomics

This morning, I received an e-mail from Allen Nieschwietz of the Brenham (Texas) Banner-Press, who asked if I could help him verify a bit of local news. Mr. Nieschwietz said that a Brenham resident had seen the photo and come into the Banner-Press office to report that he had built that rocking horse and sent it to the Palin family as a gift.

Nieschwietz wanted to verify this fact and solicited my assistance. Always eager to help a small-town reporter, I forwarded his e-mail to a couple of my sources and one of them quickly replied:

Thanks, Stacy. We got in touch with him to confirm that it’s the same rocking horse.

So residents of Brenham, Texas, will soon be reading about this remarkable local story in the Banner-Press, but I hope Mr. Nieschwietz won’t mind my scoring an online exclusive here first. (Hey, I started at a 6,000-circulation weekly in 1986 and didn’t make it this far by missing out on scoops.)

As for Piper Palin’s rocking horse, let us hope she absorbs some of that courageous Lone Star spirit that earned Texans their famous praise:

“They have fought grandly, nobly,
and we must have more of them.”

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

Dear Fellow Patriot:
We are on the ground in PA-12 for the special election. We have called and identified several thousand conservative democrats and independent voters that need to be visited in a door-to-door program this week.
Because of the make-up of the district, this election will be a nail biter and EVERY vote picked up could make a difference in the outcome. Conservative CODE RED is organizing door-to-door efforts around the district. Please come to PA-12 and help us turn out the vote.
You can make a difference! Be a part of history. Come help us send a LOUD limited government message to Nancy Pelosi. We want less government and MORE freedom!!
If you can come to western Pennsylvania to help out in this vital election, please email me at pa12codered@gmail.com or call me at (740) 792-2400.

Learn more about Code Red here. Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, House Republican Conference Chairman, will campaign Monday with Republican Tim Burns, appearing at a noon rally at the Richland Township Fire Hall (1321 Scalp Ave., Johnstown, PA) and Sen. Scott Brown will appear Friday at a Burns rally in Washington, PA.

The PA-12 special election was featured Sunday in the Washington Post:

This once safely Democratic district where Murtha reigned for 35 years is now a toss-up. Longtime Murtha aide Mark Critz, 48, vows to carry on his former boss’s legacy, while Republican businessman Tim Burns, 42, tries to leverage anti-Washington passion by treating his opponent as an incumbent tied to the “liberal Pelosi-Obama agenda.”
The May 18 special election is the first competitive matchup of the 2010 cycle, and the stakes are high: Both parties are showering the district with high-wattage names and an overwhelming amount of paid media. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent about $650,000 on the race and the National Republican Congressional Committee nearly $700,000.

You can get the latest updates by checking #PA12 on Twitter, and also by following @TimothyBurns or his campaign’s outreach coordinator, Angela Lash (@Lash3). Learn more at TimBurnsForCongress.com.

PREVIOUSLY:

• May 2: PA12 Special Report: Behind the Scenes of the Pennsylvania Patriot Revolution
• April 30: PA12: Tim Burns vs. Murthanomics

Female Sterilization is the method used by 17.8% of American women 15-44. . . . Oral Contraceptives are second at 17.3%.

Well, having cleared up that little misconception about contraception, how about the idea that The Pill, by erasing worries about pregnancy, enhances women’s sexuality? Also not true:

Researchers found a link between using hormonal contraception and female sexual dysfunction, a condition most often caused by a lack of desire.
The findings back up previous anecdotal evidence that the pill reduces libido and also calls into question the long term use of the contraception especially in ever younger women. . . .
The researchers found that the women who took hormonal contraception suffered the most sexual dysfunction . . .
Dr Irwin Goldstein, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sexual Medicine, said this had huge implications for women at the beginning of their sexual lives.
“The irony is that these women are provided a medication that enables freedom from reproductive worries but these same women are not provided information that there are significant adverse sexual effects that may ensue,” he said.
“Agents that interfere with the hormonal milieu of women may adversely affect their sexual lives.”

To anyone with a basic knowledge of biology, isn’t it just common sense that there would be serious side effects from administering artificial hormones to an otherwise healthy person? And yet the Contraceptive Culture has become so pervasive that this common-sense skepticism is seldom even voiced, let alone taken seriously — until people start dying. Let’s hear from the tort bar about that little problem:

Regarding pregnancy, [a recent Time magazine] article says that “63 percent say they know little or nothing about birth control pills, and much of what they think they know is wrong.” I would venture a guess that over 63 percent are unaware of more than 1,100 lawsuits filed by women who were injured after using Yaz or Yasmin, and that women taking these fourth-generation pills containing the hormone drospirenone face a risk twice as high as other oral contraceptives. Research has shown that 35 to 40 women out of 100,000 experience thromboembolic effects (formation in a blood vessel of a clot that breaks loose and is carried by the blood stream to plug another vessel) each year.
Nowhere did this in-depth article mention the risks involved in fourth-generation birth control pills, nor did it mention countless women who have suffered — and some have died — from Yasmin and Yaz.

The recent Time magazine article on the 50th anniversary of The Pill included this heavily freighted sentence:

“Its supporters hoped it would strengthen marriage by easing the strain of unwanted children; its critics still charge that the Pill gave rise to promiscuity, adultery, and the breakdown of the family.”

Well, the critics were right, of course. And what is seldom comprehended — even by most people who consider themselves pro-life — is this: Contraception causes abortion.

The Arithmetic of Death

I don’t mean merely that methods like The Pill and so called “emergency contraception” can act as abortifacients, although that is certainly true. What I mean is that all contraceptive methods, except abstinence or surgical sterilization, have a failure rate. And when contraception fails, abortion is a likely consequence of the unexpected pregnancy that results.

Let us stipulate, arguendo, that The Pill is 98% effective. Sounds “safe,” huh? But what that means is that The Pill fails in 1 out of 50 uses. Now apply The Law of Large Numbers to that statistic: With hundreds of thousands of American women relying on The Pill to keep them “safe,” there are then many thousands of women each year who are surprised to find themselves pregnant anyway.

Given that they wouldn’t have been taking The Pill if they felt they were ready for motherhood, and quite justified in feeling that their pregnancy is unfair — they were doing what they had been told was the “responsible” thing, and this unintended outcome was not due to their failure — these women easily convince themselves that abortion is now necessary.

Therefore, it was hardly surprising that the decade after The Pill was introduced, there was an alarming rise in abortion. It is true that illegal back-alley abortionists — as well as more “respectable” doctors who sometimes performed abortions privately and illegally — had existed for decades. But after the advent of The Pill in 1960 (just as the first Baby Boomers were becoming teenagers), hospitals experienced a horrifying influx of bleeding and infected victims of botched abortions. If you go back and read contemporary accounts of the abortion debate in the late ’60s, you discover that the pressure for legalization came not so much from radical feminists or sexual revolutionaries as from doctors and nurses who were simply exhausted by this dreadful problem.

The Pill — and the accompanying media hype about how this scientific miracle would free women of sexual worries — was therefore a major paving stone on the road to Roe v. Wade.

Unnatural Ideas Have Natural Consequences

More generally, The Pill fostered a prevalence of the belief that sex without pregnancy is normal. This utterly unnatural idea is the foundation of the Contraceptive Culture.

Throughout human history, recognition of the natural connection between sex and procreation was fundamental to society’s laws, customs, attitudes and behaviors in regard to relationships between men and women. These traditions had varied from place to place, and shifted slowly from time to time, but in all times and all places, social norms had been founded on the understanding that sex and pregnancy were intrinsically linked. Indeed, from a strictly biological perspective, reproduction is the sole purpose of sex.

The Contraceptive Culture, by contrast, is based on the negation of what we may rightly call natural sexuality. As previously mentioned, The Pill was launched in 1960 with a blitzkrieg of media hype, much of it sponsored by non-profit foundations. Historian Donald L. Critchlow chronicled this phenomenon in his excellent 2001 book, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America, and as I explained last July:

The population control movement . . . was largely the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Rockefeller funded much of the movement himself and through a number of family trusts and foundations, and he encouraged other foundations (Ford, Scaife, Carnegie) to do the same. . . .
[B]etween 1959 and 1964 one organization alone, the Population Council, got more than $5 million from the Rockefellers, $8.4 million from the Ford Foundation and $2.1 million from Scaife. So that’s $15 million in five years, back when a million dollars was a lot of money.

The Population Council was among a number of groups that helped promote positive publicity for The Pill, a P.R. campaign orchestrated by some of the best marketing strategists in the business. Among the ideas central to that public-relations blitz were (a) that unwanted pregnancy was a horrible burden on families, as well as on society at large, and (b) that The Pill, by exempting women from the dreaded prospect of becoming pregnant, would usher in a carefree new era of sexual fulfillment.

What actually happened, of course, was something quite different. The 1960s were a decade of unprecedented increases in divorce, drug abuse and teen suicide. Most especially, the ’60s saw skyrocketing rates of sexually-transmitted diseases, an ugly reality that Tom Wolfe described after visiting San Francisco in 1968, the year after the famous “Summer of Love”:

At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

So if the Contraceptive Culture failed to deliver on its propaganda promises of sexual bliss, does this mean that The Pill has failed? Not in the least.

What ‘Success’ Looks Like

Remember that the promoters of The Pill weren’t really interested in their product’s alleged emotional benefits or personal convenience to women. Both the development of The Pill and its marketing campaign were funded by wealthy donors who could fairly be described as fanatical advocates of population control.

In this regard, it is important to note that by the time The Pill was introduced in 1960, the Baby Boom peak of the U.S. birth rate had already passed. From 1952 to ’57, the rate had exceed 25 births per 1,000 population, with the total fertility rate (TFR, i.e., projected lifetime births per woman, based on current annual rate) peaking at 3.77 in 1957. The birth rate declined 6.3 percent (from 25.3 to 23.7 births per 1,000) from 1957 to ’60, a 2.1 percent average annual decrease which if extrapolated forward would have amounted to a decline of more than 30 percent (to about 17.5 births per 1,000) by 1972.

What this means is that the propaganda push which accompanied the introduction of The Pill — ushering in the Contraceptive Culture — came at a time when birth rates were already beginning to trend downward. The result was what can only be described as demographic overkill:

Year Birth Rate Total Fertility Rate
1957 . . . 25.3 . . . . . . . 3.77
1958 . . . 24.5 . . . . . . . 3.71
1959 . . . 24.3 . . . . . . . 3.69
1960 . . . 23.7 . . . . . . . 3.65
1961 . . . 23.3 . . . . . . . 3.62
1962 . . . 22.4 . . . . . . . 3.46
1963 . . . 21.7 . . . . . . . 3.31
1964 . . . 21.0 . . . . . . . 3.19
1965 . . . 19.4 . . . . . . . 2.91
1966 . . . 18.4 . . . . . . . 2.72
1967 . . . 17.8 . . . . . . . 2.55
1968 . . . 17.5 . . . . . . . 2.46
1969 . . . 17.8 . . . . . . . 2.46
1970 . . . 18.4 . . . . . . . 2.48
1971 . . . 17.2 . . . . . . . 2.27
1972 . . . 15.6 . . . . . . . 2.01
1973 . . . 14.9 . . . . . . . 1.87
1974 . . . 14.9 . . . . . . . 1.83
1975 . . . 14.8 . . . . . . . 1.77
1976 . . . 14.8 . . . . . . . 1.74

In the decade 1957-67, the birth rate declined 23.3 percent, and TFR declined 27.8 percent. Demographers refer to a TFR of 2.1 as the “replacement rate,” at which births are sufficient to replace the existing population (2 parents, 2 babies, with a 0.1 allowance for infant mortality, etc.) in modern industrial nations. The U.S. fell below 2.1 TFR in 1972 — the year before the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

By 1976, the U.S. birth rate declined still further to 14.8 (41 percent below the 1957 rate) while TFR declined to 1.74 — 54 percent below 1957 TFR and, significantly, 17 percent below “replacement rate.” It was not until 1987 that the total fertility rate again reached as high as 1.9. Not until 2006 did TFR again reach the replacement level of 2.1; the United States experienced sub-replacement fertility for 34 consecutive years.

The social, economic and political consequences of this demographic decline — the “graying of America” — have been widely discussed (see, for example Mark Steyn’s America Alone.) Whatever those consequences might be, we might shrug with indifference if it were the case that all this was the result of people acting independently and voluntarily in accordance with their own wishes, based upon a more or less rational assessment of their own needs and interests. This is not the case, however, because Americans were deliberately misinformed, their opinions actively influenced and, in some cases, their choices directly controlled, by the population-control advocates who popularized The Pill.

False ‘Crisis,’ Real Results

In 1967, by which time birth rates were already declining rapidly, an influential article in Science magazine was published by Kingsley Davis, a University of California professor who had been a leading population-control advocate for 20 years. Davis complained about colleagues who believed that “something they vaguely call population control can be achieved by making better contraceptives available,” a belief he declared to be dangerously mistaken:

“By sanctifying the doctrine that each woman should have the number of children she wants, and by assuming that if she has only that number this will automatically curb population growth to the necessary degree, the leaders of current policies escape the necessity of asking why women desire so many children and how this desire can be influenced.”

Davis advocated not merely greater efforts to influence women’s desires, but also coercive government measures to achieve the sort of “drastic” reductions he believed necessary. Keep in mind that the American public was already being bombarded by anti-baby propaganda, as Critchlow chronicles in Intended Consequences:

[T]o raise the public’s consciousness about the threat of overpopulation . . . the population movement undertook a concerted public relations campaign through a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper articles. This campaign was aided by the involvement of key publishers and editors who were actively involved in the movement, including George Hecht, editor of Parents Magazine. The drumbeat around the population crisis reached crescendo by the early 1960s. Readers of popular magazines were faced with a barrage of articles warning of an impending population crisis . . . Women readers were inundated with articles like “Are We Overworking the Stork?” (Parents Magazine, 1961), “Why Americans Must Limit Their Families” (Redbook, 1963), “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to the Population Explosion” (McCall’s, February 1965), “Overpopulation: Threat to Survival” (Parents Magazine, 1967) and “Population Increase: A Grave Threat to Every American Family” (Parents Magazine, 1969).

This incessant output of birth-control propaganda reached its apex with the 1968 publication of Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, which went through 13 printings in two years with the help of a massive publicity campaign that included Ehrlich’s multiple appearances on “The Tonight Show.”

Having fomented a false sense of crisis — issuing dire warnings about overpopulation even while U.S. birth rates were declining precipitously — the population-controllers then pushed through Congress the “Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970,” known as Title X. From the official federal description:

The Title X program is designed to provide access to contraceptive services, supplies and information to all who want and need them. By law, priority is given to persons from low-income families. . . .
In fiscal year 2006, 88 Title X grantees provided family planning services to approximately five million women and men through a network of more than 4,400 community-based clinics. . . . In approximately 75% of U.S. counties, there is at least one clinic that receives Title X funds and provides services as required under the Title X statute. . . .
The Title X program also supports three key functions . . . (1) training for family planning clinic personnel through ten regional general training programs and three national training programs that focus on clinical training, enhancing quality family planning services for males, and/or coordination of training activities on the national level; (2) data collection and family planning research aimed at improving the delivery of family planning services; and, (3) information dissemination and community based education and outreach activities.

Title X resulted from a 1969 request by Richard Nixon (not exactly a progressive hero) to create a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future and, in signing Title X into law, Nixon said:

This measure provides for expanded research, training of manpower, and increased family planning services. In addition, it provides for the development of family planning and population growth information and education.

Note that word “education.” Few appreciate the degree to which the population-control message was embraced by textbook publishers and the public school system, and promoted with the assistance of federal grants under Title X. This was in addition, of course, to the cooperation between Title X clinics and school officials to refer teenagers for “family planning services,” with or without parental consent. It would be worth the effort and expense, I think, for some pro-life organization to commission scholarly research into the content of the “information and education” disseminated with Title X funding, especially during the 1970s when — as Nixon noted in his signing statement — such programs enjoyed “strong bipartisan support.” (The pro-life “family values” movement did not become an influential force in GOP politics until the 1980s.)

Research into Title X’s education element might examine whether there was adequate emphasis on the health risks and failure rates of various contraceptive methods, the potential complications of abortion, and the dangers of sexually-transmitted disease. It would seem obvious that these risks were inadequately emphasized, when you consider the prevalence of abortion and STDs among the “persons from low-income families” toward whom Title X was targeted. (Does anyone familiar with the political climate of 1970 doubt that “low-income families” was a euphemism for “ghetto blacks”? And does anyone doubt that this accounted for the “strong bipartisan support” of which Nixon boasted? Is anyone surprised to learn that, 40 years into the Title X program, blacks account for 36 percent of all abortions in the U.S.?)

Across the Barren Plain

What is at issue is whether, given the “crisis” atmosphere incited by population-control advocates, women were properly informed about the consequences of the choices they were being encouraged to make. Because as we approach Mother’s Day 2010, half a century past the advent of The Pill, more American women than ever are childless:

About 18 percent of women ages 40 to 44 in 2002 had never had a child, compared with 10 percent in 1976. Women in the same age group, on average, had 1.9 children in 2002, considerably fewer than the 1976 average of 3.1 children . . .

In case you flunked statistics, that’s a 90 percent increase in childlessness (and a 39 percent decline in the number of children borne by the average woman) in the span of a single generation. It would be one thing if all these childless women were “childless by choice,” but they aren’t. The mainstream media has given insufficient notice to America’s silent plague of infertility, a direct consequence of the Contraceptive Culture.

“Fertility delayed is fertility denied,” as demographers say, and a major effect of the Contraceptive Culture has been to encourage women to delay motherhood. The average age of U.S. first-time mothers is now over 25 — four years later than in the 1970s — and this trend has consequences, including an increase in the number of women who will never become mothers:

Marcelle Cedars, a reproductive specialist at the University of California-San Francisco, said that fertility in women peaks around age 22 and that pregnancy becomes much more difficult to achieve after age 35. After age 35, “[e]ach egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal. And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize,” Cedars said, adding, “It’s less likely to develop. It’s less likely to implant. If it implants, it’s more likely to miscarry.”

Beyond this inescapable fact of age-related infertility, there is the damage to women’s reproductive systems wrought by STDs. A half-century ago, nearly all public-health efforts to control “veneral diseases” (as they were once known) focused on syphilis and gonorrhea, infections that were readily diagnosed and treated with antibiotics.

Ah, but that was before The Pill unleashed that pathological avalanche of “the mange, the grunge . . . the scroff, the rot” which Tom Wolfe saw doctors confronting in Haight-Ashbury clinics in ’68. These exotic disorders were eventually disagnosed with appropriate Latin terminology, by which time they were far less exotic than had been true in the immediate aftermath of the Summer of Love.

Nowadays, once-rare STDs like herpes, chlamydia and human papillomavirus (HPV) are quite widespread, resulting in an increased number of severe obstetric complications. As a recent Los Angeles Times article reported:

Chlamydia infections in the United States now top 1.1 million, the most since record-keeping for the disease began . . .
Women bear the brunt of both chlamydia and gonorrhea, especially their long-term consequences, CDC officials said.
Untreated, both can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease – an infection of the uterus and fallopian tubes that can cause chronic pain, infertility and life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, or pregnancy outside the uterus. . . .
The report found that chlamydia infections occurred at a rate of about 370 per 100,000 people in 2007. That’s a 7.5% increase from 2006. . . .
[M]any people with the disease are not identified, and public health officials believe that the true number of chlamydia infections is closer to 3 million.

In a nation of 300 million people, it may seem inconsequential that 1% are infected with chlamydia, except that (a) the infection rate is certainly much higher among sexually-active young people, with children and the elderly being largely exempt from the pandemic, and (b) the infection rate appears to be increasing rapidly. And here’s a news story for which an appropriate headline might be, “Sexual revolution triumphs; women, minorities hardest hit”:

About 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 are infected with genital herpes, making it one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.
Black women had the highest rate of infection at 48 percent and women were nearly twice likely as men to be infected, according to an analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 21 percent of women were infected with genital herpes, compared to only 11.5 percent of men, while 39 percent of blacks were infected compared to about 12 percent for whites, the CDC said.

Let’s not forget about the carcinogenic virus HPV:

Data from a national study suggests that about one in four U.S. females between the ages of 14 and 59 years may have the sexually transmitted infection human papillomarivus . . .

And there’s more:

A groundbreaking study . . .found more than half (56 per cent) of young adults in a new sexual relationship were infected with human papillomavirus (HPV).

Given the increasing prevalence of STDs, what about the reproductive consequences? The American Fertility Association:

Every year, people trying to create families make the awful discovery that their ability to achieve or sustain a pregnancy is compromised by the effects of an STD . . .
[O]ne in ten U. S. couples are affected [by STD-related infertility] . . .

These are the unintended medical consequences, then, of those promises of consequence-free sex that accompanied the introduction of The Pill. The population-control fanatics inadvertantly got what they wanted — a drastic decline in fertility — by ensuring that many thousands of women never got the children they might have wanted.

An Expert Prediction

If these specific consequences were entirely unintended, however, not all consequences of the Contraceptive Culture were entirely unforseen, and one expert made a few remarkable predictions in 1968:

[C]onsider how easily [the widespread acceptance of artificial contraception] could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. . . .
Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Not all experts are recognized as scientific, of course, but a recent analysis by economist Timothy Reichert largely confirmed that prediction:

According to Reichert . . . contraception separates the traditional mating “market” into two separate markets: a market for marriage, and a market for free sex, created thanks to the significant cost reduction of sex uncoupled from pregnancy. . . . .
As it turns out, Reichert maintains, women end up entering the marriage market in greater numbers than men . . . Meanwhile, the economist notes that men . . face far fewer incentives to move from one market to the next.
“The result is easy to see,” writes Reichert. While women have higher bargaining power in the sex market as the “scarce commodity,” he writes, “the picture is very different once these same women make the switch to the marriage market”: “The relative scarcity of marriageable men means that the competition among women for marriageable men is far fiercer than that faced by prior generations of women.
“Over time, this means that the ‘deals they cut’ become worse for them and better for men.”

Ain’t that a kick in the head, ladies? The Pill has not only increased your potential for STDs and infertility, but also increased the chances you’ll marry a loser. Similar findings are cited by author Mary Eberstadt:

Eberstadt provides numerous examples of secular researchers who have followed the data, vindicating each and every one of Paul VI’s four primary predictions about the consequences of contraception: “a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.”

Such are the unhappy consequences of the unnatural ideas of the Contraceptive Culture. A half-century after The Pill was introduced, there are more women than ever who will spend Mother’s Day hopelessly and inconsolably alone. No tiny arms will embrace them, no childish smiles will greet them, no little hands will scrawl their love for “mommy” on a card, nor will these lonely women ever know a mother’s incomparable pleasure in hearing the sweet music of her children’s laughter.

I heard Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died.

What an unhappy “birthday” this is.

(Cross-posted at The Other McCain.)

It’s hard to overstate just how important this election is, in terms of whether (a) the Tea Party movement will be a real political force in the mid-term campaign this fall or (b) that whole Scott Brown thing in January was just a fluke. With so much at stake, Republicans are mounting a massive effort in PA12.

This is the call center near campaign headquarters in Washington, Pa., where about two dozen phones were in operation Friday, as volunteers contacted voters throughout the district.

The candidate talks with volunteers at the call center.

Douglas Cannon, 20, from Boca Raton, Fla., is a student at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. This kid’s so fast on the phone, the camera blurred!

This is enthusiastic Burns volunteer Margaret, an immigrant from Scotland who’s only been a U.S. citizen for four years. She says, “I love the Constitution, and I don’t want it changed!”

Interviewing campaign staffer Jonathan Gohrband at the call center, an operation involving advanced sophisticated technology so top-secret that I’m not allowed to describe it, even if I could possibly understand how it works.

Everybody’s watching this district as a bellwether, because PA-12 is home to so many of the working-class voters whose support the Republicans must win back if they are to win the 40+ seats necessary to recapture a House majority in November. As Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard notes, it’s not quite accurate to call them “Reagan Democrats,” since this region was twice carried by Jimmy Carter in 1976 and ’80 and by Walter Mondale in ’84. Bill Clinton carried this region twice, Kerry won it in 2004, and Hillary Clinton stomped Obama 2-to-1 here in the 2008 Democratic primary. (Hillary carried Greene and Fayette counties by 3-to-1 margins.)

That’s when Obama described these small-town Pennsylvanians as bitter gun-clingers. The McCain-Palin ticket carried the 12th District in November 2008, and the anti-Obama phenomenon among some Democrats here is quite real. While I was at Burns campaign HQ Friday, I interviewed a registered Democrat from Fayette County who stopped by the office to pick up a yard sign. This was a blue-collar working man who had voted for Murtha in the past, but who has no use at all for the agenda currently being pushed by Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Democrats are pouring in money for Critz:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.), Majority Whip James Clyburn (S.C.) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Chris Van Hollen (Md.) hosted a fundraiser in Washington on April 20 for Critz, a former Murtha aide. . . .
Since winning the backing of the Democratic Party to run for Murtha’s seat in the May 18 special election, Critz raised $ 376,088 in the last couple of months.

Democrats are running blatantly deceptive ads against Burns, who is now firing back with this TV ad portraying Critz — quite accurately — as a Washington bureaucrat beholden to Pelosi:

The Burns campaign can count on lots of votes from what one staffer described as “pissed off” Democrats and independents, but the real key will be the ability of Burns to appeal to some of the 12th District’s more affluent voters, who drifted away from the GOP in recent election cycles. A look at the district map may be helpful:

The 12th District is a psychedelic gerrymander on steroids — a Rorshach inkblot, as one campaign source described it — and includes some upscale “exurban” areas in Westmoreland County, east of Pittsburgh. Turning out GOP votes in Westmoreland will be crucial to victory for Burns on May 18. On Election Night, staffers in the campaign “war room” will have a keen eye on returns from those Westmoreland precincts.

Wednesday, I was at Westmont Hilltop High School, where the candidates debated and my buddy Chris Renner got video of both candidates’ closing statements — first Burns, then Critz:

“Do you think Nancy Pelosi would be working so hard to get Mark Critz elected… if she thought for one minute that he was going to vote against her agenda?” Burns said in his final remarks Wednesday, which ended with a cheerful invitation. “I can’t come to Johnstown without stopping at Coney Island for a hot dog, so that’s where we’re going after the debate — maybe I’ll see some of you there.”
– “Special Time in Pennsylvania,” The American Spectator

Burns shakes hands with the loser of the debate.

Burns is congratulated by supporters after the debate, and he was as good as his word about the post-debate celebration at Coney Island Lunch . . .

The diner is a landmark in downtown Johnstown, where I got this video of the hometown candidate describing the speciality of the house:

Tim Burns for Congress campaign headquarters is at 157 S. Main Street in Washington, Pennsylvania.

Two doors down the street . . .

Uprisings against oppressive government are kind of a local tradition, you might say. Here’s a video about this latest Pennsylvania Patriot revolution:

This is Angela Lash, outreach coordinator for the campaign, whose job Friday was to deal with “that crazy blogger guy,” as Tim Burns now calls me. The Pennsylvania Patriot revolution needs volunteers for their army. To learn more, visit TimBurnsForCongress.com, or e-mail the campaign or call 814-619-3414.