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  • Samuel L. Jackson Drops the Act: Admits He Only Voted for Obama because of Race

    By Selwyn Duke

    Hey, Jackson, is it Samuel L. or Jesse?  Actually, it’s more likely that the actor was channeling Jeremiah Wright.

    In a racial-epithet-laced interview with Ebony magazine, the Pulp Fiction star proved that his politics is a fiction and his head is filled with, well, you fill in the blank.  Jackson admitted that he only voted for Barack Obama because of the president’s skin color.  Said the actor, “I voted for Barack because he was black.  ‘Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people – because they look like them.  That’s American politics, pure and simple.  [Obama’s] message didn’t mean **** to me.”

    (more…)

  • How to Win the Marriage Debate: The Flaw in the Ninth Circuit’s (and Most Everyone Else’s) Reasoning

    By Selwyn Duke

    The big news on the culture-war front is a federal court’s striking down of Proposition 8, California’s constitutional amendment protecting marriage.  In a two-to-one ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote, “The people may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry.”  

    Now, I’m not sure why the judges mention a “disfavored group,” as if singling out a “favored” one for unequal treatment would be okay.  As far as I know, the 14th Amendment, on which the court based its ruling, doesn’t offer equal protection to only those the current fashions deem “disfavored.”  Thus, I think this is an example of emotionalism influencing a ruling and its language, sort of as if a judge sentenced a defendant and, adding an adjective, announced him as “stupid” Mr. Smith.  Calling a group “disfavored” is similarly a subjective judgment.  This is not the only thing the judges were subjective about, however.

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  • Obama, Contraception, and Freedom of Association: Constitutional Guys Finish Last

    By Selwyn Duke

    It’s ironic that it is Barack Obama now ramming a contraception policy down Catholics’ and other Americans’ throats. Little more than a month ago, former Clinton operative George Stephanopoulos spent 10 minutes in a Republican debate grilling presidential contenders Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney on, of all things, contraception.

    What inspired the bizarre questions? First, Santorum is a practicing Catholic who doesn’t believe in the use of artificial birth control. Second, responding to a query from ABC’s Jake Tapper about a week prior to the debate, Santorum reiterated a constitutional fact: States have a right to ban contraception should they so choose.

    To place the matter in further perspective for Tapper, Santorum gave the example of the Texas sodomy law overturned by the Supreme Court. Santorum said that he personally wouldn’t support the law, but nonetheless, states have a right to pass such legislation. He then criticized the judicial activism that overturns these laws and pointed out that, if the people find such a law unjust, the proper way to seek redress is through their state legislatures. This, my friends, is Constitutionalism 101.

    For having the temerity to grasp and explain the supreme law of our land, Santorum was portrayed as the second coming of Tomás de Torquemada.

    Read the rest here.

  • High-school Shocker: Lesson Sheet Elevates Communism over “Capitalism”

    By Selwyn Duke

    When parent Jeff Travis saw a lesson sheet his son received in social studies class, he was shocked. Using propaganda that could have been disgorged by the KGB, the flier seemed to elevate communism over “capitalism.”

    Distributed in Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa, the lesson sheet includes a cartoon (portion shown below) that purports to illustrate the differences between the two systems. In the left panel are two unhappy-looking workers with balls and chains tied to their ankles who toil away on one side of a machine while all the profit spills out the other side into a bag held by a smiling, stogie-smoking, portly business owner in a hat. It is labeled “Capitalism — In theory.” In the right panel, communism is presented “in theory” with two smiling workers standing relaxed at the same machine while all the profit comes back their way.

    Moreover, the poorly written, error-riddled worksheet relates the following (mis)information to the students:

    Read the rest here.

  • A Beating and Racial Slurs – but No Hate-crime Charges

    By Selwyn Duke

    Ah, the left-wing capacity for rationalization knows no bounds.  While we’re told that even substantive criticism of Barack Obama is driven by the hatefulness the left has dubbed “racism,” a racial attack by three black teenagers on two white men in Philadelphia a couple of Mondays ago is , somehow, not.

    Consider the scenario, and then tell me why we even have “hate-crime” laws.  Wrote Stephanie Farr at Philly.com:

    About 8:25 p.m., a cab was stopped at a red light at 15th and Chestnut streets when two 17-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy approached and started calling the male passenger in the back seat racially derogatory names, police said.

    The boys then threw an unknown liquid at the cab before they opened the door, pulled the passenger out and started to pummel him, police said.

    The cab driver, Brian Goldman, then exited his vehicle, perhaps to lend assistance, at which point the passenger ran off and the thugs turned their racial wrath on the cabbie.  Despite the three-on-one odds and having suffered some physical injuries, Goldman was able to retrieve a tire iron from his trunk, at which point the brave lads ran off.  They were later apprehended by the police.

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  • Obama the Polarizer: The Most Divisive President Ever?

    By Selwyn Duke

    President G.W. Bush might very well have been sincere when he proclaimed, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” but it nevertheless was boilerplate political rhetoric. Barack Obama, too, campaigned on the idea of uniting our nation. It’s an interesting fantasy.

    But the reality is quite different. Recent polls show that if we’re to measure a President’s unitive capacity based on how divided opinion on him is, Obama is the most polarizing Commander-in-Chief in history. Writes The Washington Post, “For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever.” The President also registered the highest partisan gaps on record for his first and second years in office, 65 and 68 percent, respectively.

    Adding perspective, however, the Post points out how this simply hews to recent divided-electorate trends, with seven of the 10 years with the largest presidential approval gaps having occurred since 2004. Writes the paper, “Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.”

    Of course, it should be noted that Bush and Obama weren’t operating on the same playing field. You’re going to seem a lot more divisive when the whole of the mainstream media — from which liberals generally draw their (mis)information — agitates against you 24/7/365, as was Bush’s fate. As for Obama, his definition of unity may be a bit different from everyone else’s. This is the man who said that middle-American voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment…,” who thumbed his nose at the Senate and made recess appointments when that body wasn’t actually in recess, who used underhanded tactics to buy passage of unconstitutional ObamaCare and who appointed avowed communists to office. He also essentially said that Latinos should view other Americans as enemies and imprudently took the side of black college professor Henry Louis Gates against white Cambridge police officers. In the same vein, when he could have stood up and shown that he really was President of all the people and enjoyed a political win-win situation in the process, he instead dropped a voting-rights case against Black Panthers who were brazenly intimidating white Philadelphia voters in 2008.

    Read the rest here.

  • Watching Our Language: The Left-Right Language Barrier

    By Selwyn Duke

    Language barriers are obviously an impediment to communication. If one man speaks Chinese and another Swedish, it may be hard for them to settle even simple matters, let alone the deep issues of the day. Yet there can be language barriers even within a language, such as when people use ill-defined terminology. In fact, some debates rage on endlessly partially because people who have the same tongue are, sometimes unknowingly, speaking a different language.

    This occurs to me when I hear many arguments about Left versus Right. For example, it’s not uncommon for conservatives and liberals to debate whether groups such as the Nazis and Italian fascists were of the Left or Right. Of course, it’s not hard to figure out who takes what position! What, however, is the truth?

    Some will say that you can recognize the “Right” based on racial and nationalistic ideology, but the fact is that there simply is no unique correlation between groups which textbooks have labeled as rightist and such beliefs. For example, Italian fascism — and the ideology was born in Italy — never had a racial or ethnic component. And this changed only a few decades after its birth when, pandering to Hitler, Benito Mussolini enacted some anti-Jewish laws during the waning days of his regime. Even so, these measures were condemned at the time as un-fascist.

    Read the rest here.

  • “Gender-neutral” Childrearing: When a Sexual Hang-up Leads to Child Abuse

    By Selwyn Duke

    First there was “Pop” in Sweden, then “Storm” in Canada. Now out of Britain comes Sasha, a boy, we hear, who is being raised by his parents in a “sex-neutral” fashion. And this isn’t just your modernistic grandmother’s neutrality, where she didn’t want to push toy guns and trucks on her son. Sasha’s parents, Beck Laxton and “partner,” as he’s described, Kieran Cooper, are going the full feminist monty. 

    On Sasha’s birth announcement, there was no indication of sex; and for years Laxton wouldn’t use the pronoun “he” when referring to him on her blog, but instead just indentified him as “the infant.” She explained why in an interview with the Cambridge News, stating, “I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping. Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Therefore, writes Piper Weiss at Shine:

    Sasha dresses in clothes he likes — be it a hand-me-downs [sic] from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

    Laxton clearly doesn’t know — and doesn’t seem to care. After all, writes Weiss, “[Laxton is] open to her son pursing any career or sexual preference he chooses….” Yes, well, as long as, I suppose, it’s not “hyper-masculine.” This brings me to my first point.

    Read the rest here.

  • Liberal Greed: Barack Obama and the Real One Percent

    By Selwyn Duke

    Forget Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. If you want to find the real greedy one percent, you need look no further than Barack Obama.

    According to tax returns released yesterday, Barack and Michelle Obama earned $1.2 million from 2000 through 2004 yet managed no more than $10,772 in charitable donations. This amounts to less than one percent of their income. Upon becoming public figures, there was hope and some (spare) change, as they did a lot better in earning and a little better in giving. In 2005 and 2006, they donated $137,622, which was just over 5 percent of the $2.6 million that free enterprise distributed their way.

    In contrast, Romney appears the Santa Claus to Obama’s Scrooge. According to the former Massachusetts Governor’s tax returns, he donated almost $3 million to charity in 2010, just under 14 percent of his $21.7 million income; he did even better in 2011, donating $4 million to charity — almost 20 percent of his $20.9 million income.

    In other words, while Obama talks a good game about redistributing wealth, he seems to want his to stay right where it is.

    Read the rest here.

  • In Praise of a Do-nothing Congress

    By Selwyn Duke

    Here's a question: how can we expect to have small government if we condemn Congress for not growing it?

    It's always a disturbing experience when you're accosted with a picture of Harry Reid, as I was upon logging on to Drudge last Monday afternoon.  But at least his image bore a fitting caption: "MOST FUTILE EVER."  I then clicked the link and found myself at The Washington Times – normally a quite sane organ of the media – and learned the meaning of the caption: the Times was lamenting a do-nothing Congress and presented Reid as its poster boy.  Writes the paper, "It's official: Congress ended its least-productive year in modern history after passing 80 bills – fewer than during any other session since year-end records began being kept in 1947."  

    Writes Duke, "It's official: conservatives are completely confused about what begets big government."

    (more…)

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