CPAC's Pays the Price for Political Promiscuity

My recent post on Milo Yiannopolis being invited--and then disinvited--to CPAC at Intellectual Takeout:

Movement conservatives are finding out that the enemy of their enemy is not necessarily their friend. In fact, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) seems to be finding out that they are themselves their own worst enemy.

After just having invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at its annual conference, it was revealed that right-wing gay provacateur had publicly defended sex between adolescents and older men.

Within twenty-four hours of CPAC inviting him, he was dis-invited. Now the only pearls you'll see worn at CPAC will be worn by women ...

Read the rest here.

AG Beshear says he won't defend one of Kentucky's new prolife laws

The Lexington Herald-Leader ran the story yesterday. I am quoted in the latter part of the story:

Attorney General Andy Beshear said Tuesday he will defend only one of two new laws that limit abortion in Kentucky. 

In a statement, Beshear said his office would defend House Bill 2, which requires doctors to perform an ultrasound and present the results to their patient before providing an abortion, but will not defend any legal challenge to Senate Bill 5, which bans abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Read more here.

The Tortured Logic of the #Gender Revolutionaries: #NatGeo goes Medieval on Common Sense

My most recent article at Intellectual Takeout:

But, says Henig, some people with XY chromosomes (who we used to think were males) did not have fully developed male genitals. And some people with XX chromosomes (who we used to think were females) did not have fully developed female genitals (or even had developed male genitals). 

Rather than conclude that in such cases the person is a male whose male chromosomes were not allowed to do what male chromosomes do in males, or a female whose female chromosomes were not allowed to do what female chromosomes do in females (the obvious inference), Henig simply concludes that chromosomes don’t dictate whether someone is male or female. 

Perhaps Henig was just not genetically predisposed to be logical.

Read the rest and join the dicussion here.

Climate Scientist quitting because of political activism of her profession

KY House Democrats have little ground to criticize Republicans on prolife bills #KYga17

On the day that the New and Improved Kentucky General Assembly passed two prolife bills, Planned Parenthood held a rally in the Capitol Rotunda to warn against the dangers of saving unborn babies.

But at least no one was offering fetal body parts for sale. We'll give them that.

Planned Parenthood's defenders in the House, of course, voted against the bills. The opponents charged Republican leadership with "railroading" the bill through (at "breakneck speed," said the ACLU). That's right. A bill (or something very similar to it) which has been introduced repeatedly and which has even had several legislative hearings (but no votes, other than in the Senate) over the course of several years just hasn't received enough scrutiny.

And, anyway, it's a pretty simple bill.

House Democrats, of course, don't like railroads when it comes to passing prolife legislation. They prefer cemetaries.

The Republicans "played ... political games" in passing the legislation, said Jeff Greer, (D-Brandenburg).

Now let us pause for a moment to consider the fact that no one has ever played political games in Frankfort before. Particularly Democrats. And Jeff Greer has never done it himself.

Democrats have never buried bills in committee. Democrats have never threatened members with punishment for either voting for bills they didn't like or for not voting for bills they did like. They've never replaced members of the committee the night before the committee was to take up a bill. They've never used parliamentary rules to make it impossible to make amendments to a bill. They've never held a bill in the Rules Committee indefinitely.

Ever.

And no Democrats were seen on the floor yesterday assailing parliamentary moves that they themselves not only defended just last year, but used themselves.

Did House Republicans use parliamentary procedures to further their legislation? Of course they did. Lawmakers do it all the time. That's what parliamentary procedures are for. Legislatures pass rules so that members can use them. That's what House Republicans did when they recessed to hold a judiciary committee meeting and rolled changes to House Bill 2 (the "ultrasound" bill) into a committee substitute to prevent Democrats from offering amendments, many of which were "poison pills" to make the bill unconstitutional and therefore subject to rejection by the courts.

And did any of the people now criticizing House Republican leadership for "playing political games" to pass the bill stop to consider that the games the Republicans were playing were designed to prevent Democrats from playing political games to kill the bill?

If they did, they kept it to themselves.

The people now criticizing House Republicans for "playing political games" with a prolife bill need to ask themselves whether having their motions to suspend the rules voted on in open roll call votes isn't a little better than having the Democratic speaker ignore Republican calls for roll call votes and instead take voice votes and rule that their side won when clearly the votes were in the other direction.

Or maybe they should just stop being hypocritical.

What difference will a conservative majority in Frankfort make?

My opinion piece on the prospects for conservative issues in this years Kentucky General Assembly ran in the Louisville Courier-Journal today:

On election day this year, Kentuckians voted to clean out the Augean stables and sent a hundred years of cronyism, backroom deals, and abuse of legislative procedure down the river of history.The change of power in the Kentucky House, complete a trifecta of Republican victories that began with the takeover of the Senate in 2000.
What difference will it make?

Read the rest here.

Politics as Religion: The Real Reason for the Anti-Trump Rallies

My most recent post at Intellectual Takeout:

The anti-Trump demonstrations we now see in the streets are not just examples of the immaturity of many modern secular liberals, who seem to think that everyone else is somehow obligated to agree with them. They’re also a symptom of the distorted influence politics now exercises over our culture. 

But in addition to being a symptom of our culture, the dominance of politics in every aspect of life is also a consequence of liberalism itself.

Read the rest here.

How an Ancient Philosopher Predicted the Outcome of the #2016Election

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout: 

Many people depend upon polls to predict the outcome of elections. What pollsters do appeals to all the prejudices of the post-Enlightenment modern mind: They employ a distinctive technique (thank you Rene Descartes), they focus on empirical evidence (thank you Francis Bacon), and they invoke the mathematical forms of statistics (thank you John Graunt and William Petty).  

But the responsibility for making an accurate prediction of this year's election might better have been put into the hands, not of a pollster, but a philosopher.

Read the rest here.

You want racial politics? I'll give you racial politics

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

Get out the Doritos. Pop the top on your Bud Light. Go down to your man cave, plop down on your La-Z-Boy, invite your friends over and turn on the Packers game.

Here come the White people.

CNN commentator Van Jones, clearly upset by the results coming in last night, claimed that Democrats got “White-lashed.” In a way, he was right. But he has only himself to blame.

Read the rest here.

Tim Kaine compares the Democrat's plight to that of the defeated Confederacy

Tim Kaine compared the Democrat's political situation after Trump's win to the situation of the South after the Civil War in his introduction to Hillary Clinton's concession speech. He quoted William Faulkner's character Wash (from a short story by the same name), who tries to cheer up Thomas Sutpen, decorated by General Lee and released from the defeated Confederate army, telling him, "They kilt us, but they ain't whupped us yet." (the quote Kaine used)

Kaine repeated those words in describing the condition in which Democrats find themselves after Donald Trump's unprecedented victory, apparently unaware of its source and context. Better talk to that speechwriter.

The remark was lauded by David Gergen on CNN, apparently unaware if its source, who said it expressed the "spirit of her speech."

Pretty soon they'll be waving the Confederate flag. That'll help things.

Kentucky voters "have cleaned out the Augean stables"

The Family Foundation's press release tonight on the Republican's wholesale slaughter of House Democrats:

LEXINGTON, KY--"Kentucky voters have cleaned out the Augean stables tonight and sent a hundred years of cronyism, back room deals, and abuse of legislative procedure down the river of history," said a spokesman for The Family Foundation, a social conservative group which a has been a presence in Frankfort for over 25 years.

"Kentucky is a conservative state that has suffered under liberal rule for decades," said Martin Cothran, spokesman for the group. "A liberal House leadership has stifled important conservative legislation at every turn. Now that the Iron Curtain of liberal rule has come crashing down, the challenge for the new conservative leadership will be to conduct a process that treats legislation that reflects Kentucky values with respect. We are confident that the new conservative House leadership will do this, and it will have a great model for how to do it in our State Senate, which is one of this nation's premier conservative legislative bodies. It will also benefit from the excellent leadership of our new governor."

Cothran pointed to the killing of popular pro-life, education, and religious freedom legislation he said would have easily passed on the floors of both chambers as examples of how many good laws never saw the light of day because of a rigged process.

"We now have a state government that is reflective of the conservative values of this state."

###

The question is not whether Trump, will accept tomorrow's election results, but whether the rest of us will

Amid all the absurdities of this year's election, one of the more inane issues the took up hours of media time was the fear that Donald Trump would not accept the results of the election if it didn't go his way. 

Apparently Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon were under the impression that an intransigent Trump could just bring the whole election to a grinding halt and they would have to park their cameras outside Trump Force One waiting in unrelieved suspense until he relented and agreed to sign off on the vote.

I mean, we all know about that section in the Constitution that says that a presidential election cannot be certified until billionaire reality televisions stars running for president agree to it. Right?

WHO CARES IF DONALD TRUMP DOESN'T ACCEPT THE RESULTS?!!! ARE YOU PEOPLE COMPLETE IMBECILES???

The correct answer is "Yes."

In fact, it had to be rather gratifying to Trump's ego (which was rather substantial already) that leaders of the liberal media were running around like frightened chickens worrying that Donald Trump might dislike the election results. Fortunately the media—every bit as ADHD as Trump himself—flitted to some other Trump outrage and spared us another week of the ridiculous discussion.

The more important question is whether most Americans are going to accept the election results. 

I don't know how most people feel (we'll find out tomorrow), but I'm less disturbed by a Trump win than a Hillary win, since the decision tomorrow is between bufoonishness and evil. Faced with that alternative (although, as I suggest in my last post, those are not the only alternatives), I guess buffoonishness is less scary. Trump is merely silly and inept, but Hillary represents a positively malignant political force.

Trump represents America at its most trivial and fatuous. It's fitting that he is a reality TV star. If elected, he will need full time political care. Forget the warnings that a Trump presidency will result in a nuclear war. The man will be too busy insulting people on Twitter in the wee hours of the morning to even think about wars. 

Storage Wars, maybe. But not nuclear ones. 

In fact, has anyone ever asked Hillary how she cay say that Donald Trump is cozy with Putin AND that he might start a nuclear war with Russia at the same time?

We won't have to worry about government interference in much of anything under a Trump administration, since that takes a lot of thought and a lot of knowledge of how the government works. He is incapable of the former and devoid of the latter. He is more likely to spend his time watching The View than thinking of ways to bother average Americans.

Hillary, on the other hand, is the Nanny from Hell who will make sure you eat according to government dietary guidelines, get the proper government-approved amount of daily exercise, and make sure no one ever questions what gender you decide to be when you get up in the morning. She's against the government in your bedroom, but will have government bureaucrats stationed in every other room in your house.

She's the quintessential representative of modern secular liberalism who wakes up every morning thinking of new ways in which she can bring about a society efficiently administered by secular elites. She thinks in talking points and talks in jargon. She's got a 4-point plan for putting on her pants suits in the morning and wants to require you to have one too (It will be dresses for men).

Hillary is not incompetent. She knows what she wants and how to bring it about. It would be far better if she were incompetent. Trump doesn't have the competence or the inclination to do bad things. He will only do bad things by accident--because he doesn't know any better. Hillary will have the bad things planned out months in advance, and will speak about why they are good for us in speeches paid for by questionable foreign governments who donated to her foundation.

The choice in this election is between stupidity and corruption. I don't think Americans will accept either of these. Our culture will continue to come apart no matter who wins.

If the founders could only see what we've made of their noble republic.