Gallup Poll: More Americans pro-life than pro-choice on abortion

Add comment May 15th, 2009

The Gallup Poll says that for the first time, more Americans identify themselves as pro-life than pro-choice on abortion. Gallup says 51 percent are pro-life, 42 percent pro-choice.

Perfect transitional leader for GOP: F.W. de Klerk

Add comment May 13th, 2009

I’ve been thinking about the Republican Party lately, and the fact that its perfectly respectable conservative principles, many of which I agree with,  have been hijacked by a gang of crazed wing nuts, the dozen or so radio ranters who think Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin are great intellectual giants.

There’s a reason that the GOP’s formal leader, Michael Steele, looks like a fish out of water at Republican gatherings — because he is. My slogan for the GOP remains what it always has been: “Unum — e-Pluribus need not apply.”

Then the other night I was watching C-SPAN and up popped F.W. de Klerk, who was giving a speech in the U.S.  I’d forgotten about old F.W., but there he was, looking calm, cool and collected as he discussed world affairs with a high degree of sophistication and keen analysis.

F.W. is a good guy. The last president of apartheid South Africa is the one who led that nation out of its shameful past and into its current status as a multiracial democracy where all men and women can vote and the majority population is not relegated by law to segregated ghettos. De Klerk said candidly that the new South Africa is not perfect by a long-shot. He described it as a young democracy where the old revoutionary party, the African National Congress, is inevitably losing dominance as the new country progresses. Despite the election of radical Jacob Zuma, de Klerk does not expect the rule of law, or the capitalist economy, to collapse.

For helping to create the new South Africa, de Klerk was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize, along with Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president and the man de Klerk released from prison.

Mr. de Klerk would be the perfect transitional leader for the Republican Party. After attending  Republican functions for three decades I can report with a high degree of accuracy that our Republican Party looks and talks much like South Africa’s old National Party. And just like that party, the Republicans are doomed to permanent minority status if they maintain their unofficial policy as the southern white people’s party.

Just think: F.W. could lead the GOP out of its apartheid mentality and into the bright new world of 21st America, a rainbow land of many colors, nationalities and cultures and American idols.

The late Jack Kemp tried for years to convince his fellow Republicans to take the conservative message out of the board rooms and country clubs and preach it in the nonwhite neighborhoods of America. Kemp, a former NFL quarterback, was convinced that millions of nonwhite Americans were being harmed by liberalism and could benefit from common sense, business-oriented conservatism. But Kemp’s party just laughed at him.

However, Americans love to import consultants to tell them what to do. So let’s give F.W. de Klerk a chance. I think he’s available.

Notre Dame student video opposes Obama speech

Add comment May 12th, 2009

Some Notre Dame University seniors have made a video that illustrates their opposition to President Obama’s upcoming speech Sunday at the Catholic university’s graduation. Obama is pro-choice on abortion; he also supports the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act,” a bill in Congress that would overturn state restrictions on abortion. Most Americans support restrictions, but do not want to ban abortion outright.

(If Democrats want to maintain their wide majorities in the House and Senate in 2010, they will make sure this bill does not come up  up for a vote, because it is already re-energizing the Christian right like no other measure would.)

Save your money to control your destiny. Don’t spend money you don’t have.

2 comments May 9th, 2009

Countries that don’t make things are colonies of countries that do. So when we decided in the U.S. to stop making things and base our economy on consumer spending — we began to give up our riches to other countries who bought our massive debt so we could go on a massive spending spree. Some 70 percent of the U.S. economy today is consumer spending, mostly on goods we do not make.

We were told not to worry, just go out and spend, spend, spend, charge, charge, charge, and spend some more.

Meanwhile we stopped saving — in 2005 Americans, not their government, spent 2.7 percent more than they earned. That’s called a negative savings rate. The virtues of thrift that Ben Franklin taught went right out the window. Patriotic Americans had a duty to spend all their money, then borrow some more. Just like the government under George W. Bush, who doubled the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in 8 years, with nary a word of criticism from his fellow Republicans who ran Congress for all but two years of the reign of Bush The Lesser.

Unfortuantely, Barack Obama has picked up on the deficit spending and multiplied it. We’re spending like there’s no tomorrow — as a government, that is.

But this story in The New York Times  details the fact that we are again becoming a nation of savings. Our savings rate has gone from zero to 4 percent, still not great, but better than zero, which is what it had been before the recession began.

That’s a good thing, right? The more we save, the more we control our own destiny. We can pay cash instead of charge it. And we can have a nest egg for when times are bad. Ben Franklin would approve.

Well, no. We are supposed to spend to fix the economy. But now that we don’t have so much, and we are saving again, we’re not going spending like we’re crazy.

So the story concludes that we may not get back to where we used to be — spending money for no reason at all on oodles of stuff we don’t really need — and stuff that was made in China anyway.

My advice: Keep saving. Encourage Congress and the president to set a national policy of returning to a manufacturing based economy, which is where we derived all that money we squandered in the last three decades.

We don’t need all the junk they sell at the Big Box store.

Save your money so that when you buy a car, you can make a big down payment and can borrow less. And etc.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling, we’re all going to die

Add comment May 5th, 2009

It’s looking as if the R2D2 flu, or C3PO flu, or swine flu, or Mexican flu, or H1N1 flu or whatever they call it, isn’t so bad as the media/government hype machine would have had us believe.

Meanwhile, the Mexican travel industry is taking a big hit financially, and some schools in the U.S. overreacted by closing down because a student might have, could have, we really don’t know, the flu.

It’s like SARS of 2004 all over again. The rush to sensationalize exotic disease outbreaks is stoked by the eternal quest for TV ratings and the modern culture that tolerates no risk whatsoever.

And this time, it was stoked by the goofy Vice President of the United States, Say it Ain’t So Joe Biden. He panicked people last week when he said he advised his family not to fly in an airliner or take the subway. Mayor Mike Bloomberg of NYC was so furious that he hopped on a subway with TV cameras in tow just to rebut the Veepster.

The president had the right approach: wash your hands a lot. If you or your child have flu-like symptoms, stay home. Other than that, feel free to roam about the country.

The real problem with the Henney Penney “the sky is falling” approach is that people stop paying attention, because they consider everything a false alarm. If there’s a real threat to our well-being, chances are a lot of people won’t take it seriously.

Let’s be a lot more prudent. the U.S. has had slightly less than 300 cases of this new flu. That’s less than one per million.

Meanwhile, 36,000 Americans die each year from regular flu.