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October 11, 2012

Biden’s Strategy: Be a Jerk

By Selwyn Duke

Is there a human being on this Earth more obnoxious than Joe
Biden? It appears that the following was his strategy in the vice-presidential
debate:

Okay, I’ll smile wide like a
used-car salesman, shake my head and laugh while Paul Ryan is talking. This
will give all watching the idea that everything he says is nonsense. The only
other option is to actually support my side with real ideas, sound reasoning
and appeals to virtue. I can’t do that!

The other thing I need to do is
make myself look assertive, like a real alpha male, by interrupting my opponent
continuously. Hey, then if TOTUS and I lose the election, anyway, I may still
be able to take a leaf out of Bob Dole’s book and do commercials for male
enhancement—of course, in my case it would be testosterone booster.

(more…)
October 11, 2012

Study: Young Americans Dumping Religion at Rapid Rate

By Selwyn Duke

According to a recent study, religion is dying in America. And it’s a
trend that has grave implications for our politics, culture, and the
fate of our civilization. Ben Fearnow of CBS News reports on the story, writing:

The number of Americans who do not
identify with any religion continues to grow at a fast pace. One-fifth
of the U.S. public — and a third of adults under 30 — are religiously
unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center
polling.

In the last five years alone, the
unaffiliated have increased from just over 15 percent to just under 20
percent of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million
self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6 percent of the U.S.
public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no
particular religious affiliation (14 percent).

The study also found that the “lower the age group, the less likely people are to be affiliated.”

The study also posits some theories for this burgeoning
irreligiosity, which, writes Fearnow, “run the gamut from a backlash
against the entanglement of religion and politics to a global
relationship between economic development and secularization.” Now, I
don’t know if that “gamut” includes the obvious, but these two theories
miss the mark.

Read the rest here.
October 8, 2012

Judge: No Jail for Newborn’s Killer Because Abortion is Accepted

By Selwyn Duke

When the great philosopher G.K. Chesterton said, “Let all the babies
be born. Then let us drown those we do not like,” he wasn’t advocating
infanticide but was just making a point. Unfortunately, though, we’re
getting closer to a time when people would take his words literally. An
example of this is a judge’s decision in Canada that a woman who
strangled her newborn baby shouldn’t be incarcerated because Canadians’
failure to criminalize abortion indicates that they “sympathize” with
the mother.

Lifesite News reports on the story, writing,
“Katrina Effert of Wetaskiwin, Alberta gave birth secretly in her
parents’ downstairs bathroom on April 13, 2005, and then later strangled
the newborn and threw his body over a fence. She was 19 at the time.”

Effert was subsequently convicted of second-degree
murder. But this was overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal, which
reduced the charge to infanticide, punishable by no more than five years
imprisonment. Yet when Effert appeared for sentencing before Justice
Joanne Veit of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench in September, even
this punishment was deemed excessive. Instead, the judge gave Effert a
three-year suspended sentence, which means that she won’t serve even one
day in prison. Writes Lifesite News:

Read the rest here.
October 8, 2012

Do We Want Mr. Nice Guy as President?

By Selwyn Duke

Watching the debate on Wednesday, I truly can’t imagine
Barack Obama having come off as the more likeable candidate. Continuously glancing
downwards, perhaps looking for inspiration (I glance upwards, myself), and
often displaying an angry countenance, he seemed stiff, detached and petulant;
in contrast, Mitt Romney appeared energetic, nimble-minded, affable, engaged
and engaging. It was the Mind vs. the Unkind.

(more…)
October 4, 2012

The Debate: Obama’s Affirmative-action Performance

By Selwyn Duke

Hey, just blame it on Bush.

The consensus on the presidential debate
last night is that Barack Obama could resurrect the Choom Gang and star
in a remake of Dazed and Confused. Conservative pundits are all aflutter with praise and liberals are all on Twitter with groans. Andrew Sullivan wrote,
“Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp
statements of passion or argument; he wasn't there.” A very upset
Michael Moore tweeted, “This is what happens when u pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” And million-dollar-donor Bill Maher chimed in,
“Obama made a lot of great points tonight. Unfortunately, most of them
were for Romney.” Well, don’t feel too bad, guys. At least he did
slightly better than when he debated Clint Eastwood.

Chris Matthews, clearly perturbed that he’s lost that tingling feelin’, asked,
“Where was Obama tonight? … What was he doing…?” Chris, he was doing
what he always does: nothing well. It’s just that you’ve finally
noticed.

And now, after the Denver dose of reality, can we finally put to bed
the myth of Obama the intellectually gifted? Yeah, I know, after eight
years of a media narrative about Bush the cranially compromised, it was
easy to say that, hey, now we’re getting the smart guy. As Joe Biden put
it, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is
articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a
storybook, man." Or, at least, that’s the story by the book — of cultural affirmative action (CAA).

Read the rest here.
October 3, 2012

The Real Real Reason Romney is Losing

By Selwyn Duke

According to the script, Barack Obama’s campaign should be leaking
some serious oil. The economy is listing badly, with an anemic growth
rate and a record 88 million Americans no longer in the labor force. The
Middle East is spinning out of control, with anti-American riots and
Islamists gaining power. Obama has exacerbated the racial divide at home
with irresponsible rhetoric and policies, and diminished the United
States abroad with apology tours and bows before potentates. His
administration is ridden with scandal, from Fast and Furious to Solyndra
to the rape of GM bondholders to Benghazi. He has stifled domestic job
creation by opposing the Keystone Pipeline and prohibiting Gulf drilling
while shipping jobs overseas by financing oil exploration in Brazil. He
has increasingly acted undemocratically in ruling by executive decree
and has trampled our long-held understanding of religious freedom with
his contraception mandate. And this is a mere sampling of the
transgressions of the most incompetent and corrupt presidency in
American history.

So Republicans are befuddled when they see Obama leading among
voters. One common explanation is that the polls are rigged. And while
they’re no doubt flawed and the race likely closer than they indicate,
it’s unreasonable to think Obama isn’t at least slightly ahead of Mitt
Romney; moreover, if Romney’s internal polls told a different story,
he’d certainly trumpet them.

The other common explanation is that Romney is a poor candidate, too
ideologically weak, too stiff, too blue-blooded, and too hard to connect
with. But to whom are we comparing him?

Read the rest here.
October 3, 2012

10 Horrible Leftists People Respect

By Selwyn Duke

While image isn’t really everything, it certainly appears so when
it’s all people are allowed to see. What follows is a list of 10
individuals who have Dr. Jekyll images that obscure a Mr. Hyde reality.

1. Alice Walker

While The Color Purple author and feminist icon masquerades
as a champion of women, the woman she should have cared about most in
her life, her own daughter, Rebecca, she viewed as a “millstone” around
her neck.

As Rebecca reveals,
her mother called her birth a “calamity” and would leave her in the
care of others or to fend for herself while she was still a child. Her
mother drummed into her head that motherhood was slavery, but was happy
when she became sexually active at 13 — Alice fancied it “empowering.”
And while she was “supportive” when Rebecca had an abortion at age 14,
this changed when Rebecca decided to become a mother as an adult. In
fact, Rebecca’s rejection of the culture of death led to a spat that
ended when, writes Rebecca, “she wrote me a letter saying that our
relationship had been inconsequential for years and that she was no
longer interested in being my mother. She even signed the letter with
her first name, rather than 'Mom'.”

But, hey, I’m sure Alice Walker has read It Takes a Village.

2. Alfred Kinsey

It’s not just that this bug researcher turned self-proclaimed human-sexuality expert was a scientific fraud.

Read the rest here.
October 3, 2012

How Government Will Take Meat off Your Table

By Selwyn Duke

The British pork industry is collapsing, and it’s a story that should
serve as a warning to all of us. Why? Because the agents of its demise
have the entire West in their crosshairs.

The numbers are staggering. With a pig herd halved during the last
decade, Britain has gone from producing 110 percent of its domestic
consumption of pork to only 40 percent. This is due to many of the
nation’s pig farmers having left the business, and they’re poised to be
joined by 100 more this year, which represents “10% of Britain's small
to medium-sized producers,” reports the Guardian. Consequently, it’s predicted that domestic production will decline another 20 percent by Christmas.

Britain’s pork farmers’ woes have been worsened by the droughts in
the United States, which have increased the cost of feed. But what’s the
source of their underlying problems? If you guessed government, go to
the head of the class. As the Financial Times writes, “UK farmers are part of a global trend as the cost of feed and compliance with welfare regulations hits suppliers worldwide.”

The “regulations” in question are animal-welfare regulations….

Read the rest here.
September 27, 2012

The Election: What’s “Like” Got to Do With It?

By Selwyn Duke

“I like Obama,” said a man I know of when explaining his support for
the president. His sentiment isn’t unusual, as Barack Obama is, we’re
told, a likeable man. In contrast, we hear that people have trouble
“connecting” with Mitt Romney, that he’s an overly-starched blueblood
who can’t relate to the common man.

Of course, it’s hard for people to connect with you when the only
connection they have to what you say and do is through a media that
hates you. In contrast, when that same media smoothes out your rough
edges and whites out damning comments you make, it’s a lot easier to be
likeable. This certainly is the case with Obama, a man who has called traditionalist Americans “enemies,” said
that they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't
like them…,” and considered his brief time in the corporate world as a
case of “working for the enemy” (he seems to have a very unlikeable
habit of viewing fellow Americans as “enemies”). And based on what I’ve
heard through the grapevine, the real Obama exudes an arrogance that’s
anything but appealing.

Let’s say, however, that I’m wrong and Obama is just the most affable
bloke around. Is this really meaningful? Could it even be a red flag?

Read the rest here.
September 27, 2012

When Michelle Obama Starts Starving the Kids

By Selwyn Duke

Unprecedented school-lunch regulations have just gone into effect,
and they suggest a new answer to the question “Where’s the beef?”: not
on students’ plates— or on their bones. The regulations are a result of
Michelle Obama’s “Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act,” which was passed by
the lame-duck, Democrat-controlled Congress in December 2010. And the
result has been wasted food, endangered health, and hungrier kids.

The problem is that, in typical nanny-state style, the regulations
not only prescribe foods many children find unpalatable, they also apply
unrealistic calorie restrictions on students: “650 calories for
elementary-schoolers, 700 for middle-schoolers and 850 for
high-schoolers,” writes Suzanne Tobias of the Wichita Eagle.

Yet more perspective is gained when you consider that the
government’s dietary limitations wouldn’t be out of place in a wartime
prison camp. For example, writes
PJ Media, “Current regulations limit servings of protein, which could
be anything from a hamburger to a side of beans, to 1.5 ounces two days a
week and 2 ounces the other three days.”

Read the rest here.