Two articles I read recently got me thinking about this. The first was an opinion piece by Jane Chastain called “We the Ignorant.” In it, she states,

One can only imagine how our founders would feel if they could see our attempts to chase people down, who have demonstrated no interest in the political process, in order to get them to register to vote. That is what was accomplished when Congress passed the motor-voter bill which was signed into law by President Clinton. Motor-voter required that anyone applying for a driver’s license be offered a voter registration form. As a result, we put more politically ignorant people on our voting roles and we have continued to add more each and every year.

It would be unthinkable to give someone a license to drive an automobile without first requiring the applicant to pass a basic driving test. The results would be disastrous. Likewise, it is equally disastrous to register people to vote without making sure they understand the political rules of the road and are otherwise qualified.

The second was a story about a report that found that most college students failed a basic civics test. What do people go to college for, anyway? I agree with the writer’s observation that

…while our nation’s most elite colleges are not imbuing our children with a knowledge of our history and our government, the study makes it clear that those universities are becoming round the clock factories churning out poorly instructed liberals with little civic knowledge and even less faith and less devotion to principles of liberty than those Americans who didn’t go to college.

Incidentally, you can take the test yourself here. It’s scary to think that 71% of those surveyed failed it.

I understand being indifferent, but I really do not understand why someone would want to prevent public celebrations of Christmas. What is so offensive about the holiday? How ridiculous is it to try to clear the air of Christmas songs and pretend that no one is celebrating? How bitter do you have to be to want to eliminate tradition?

I’ve lived in Japan for almost eight years now, and what do I hear in the background at stores and banks after around the third week of November? What do I see plastered about everywhere from train stations to department stores? Yes, Christmas music and signs wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. You know what percentage of Japanese people are Christians? Less than one percent. What are they thinking, right? Don’t they know they’re supposed to be offended by the words to “Silent Night” and signs that say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Season’s Greetings”?

I said it last year, and I’ll say it again:

The point is, if you don’t like Christmas, then don’t celebrate it. Why do you want to ruin it for everyone else? As a Christian in Japan, I’m a part of a minority. It has never occurred to me nor to any of my friends, however, that we should protest the Buddhist and Shintoist festivals that the municipalities here hold. I don’t participate in them, but I’m not going to go out and tell everyone else that they can’t because I don’t. Why would I? Because the message at these events “offends” me? Boo hoo. Suck it up, people.

President Obama’s rhetoric last night summoned the memory of “1984,” George Orwell’s novel of a nightmarish future — where the slogan of the rulers is “War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”

The president assures us that he will cut health-care spending . . . by adding $1 trillion to health-care spending.

He says that “health-care decisions will not be made by government” . . . while he sets up a new Federal Health Board to tell doctors what treatments they can offer and to whom and under what circumstances.

Obama told the media, “I will free doctors to make good health-care decisions” . . . by telling the physicians what to do.

He goes on to show point by point how Obama’s rhetoric does not match his actions when it comes to his health care plan. I’d go further and say that the observation applies to everything about Obama’s policies. He tells us he’s against running automobile companies as he takes them over. He tells us he wants to get past partisan politics then excludes Republicans from the debate. Everything he says seems to be the opposite of his true intentions. The same goes for his nominee to the Supreme Court who basically repudiated everything she had ever said up until the hearings. Jay Nordlinger summed her performance up nicely:

Well, that was an amazing performance by Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate committee. The Sonia Sotomayor of the past was completely gone. Gone was the woman who talked about the role of “physiology” in judging, who insisted that impartiality, objectivity, neutrality — all of that — was a fantasy, and a bad one. In her place was a champion of impartiality, disinterestedness, and the rule of law: the rule of law, and nothing but. Doesn’t make a difference whether you’re a Latina or a whitey or whatever. “Empathy”? Never heard of it. Certainly has no role in the courtroom.

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, ranking Republican member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, recently announced he was holding up the confirmation of law professor Cass Sunstein–a close friend of the president rumored to be on the fast track for the Supreme Court–as the White House’s “regulations czar.” The reason: Sunstein explicitly advocates animals’ being granted legal standing.

…Of all the ubiquitous advocacy thrusts by animal rights advocates, obtaining legal standing for animals would be the most damaging–which makes Sunstein’s appointment to the overseer of federal regulations so worrisome and Senator Chambliss’s hold on the nomination so laudable. Chambliss plans to meet with the nominee personally “to provide him the opportunity to fully explain his views.” Chambliss said:

Professor Sunstein’s recommendation that animals should be permitted to bring suit against their owners with human beings as their representatives, is astounding in its display of a total lack of common sense. American farmers and ranchers would face a tremendous threat from frivolous lawsuits. Even if claims against them were found to be baseless in court, they would still bear the financial costs of reckless litigation. That’s a cost that would put most family farming and ranching operations out of business.

But animal standing would do more than just plunge the entire animal industry sector into chaos. In one fell swoop, it would both undermine the status of animals as property and elevate them with the force of law toward legal personhood. On an existential level, the perceived exceptional importance of human life would suffer a staggering body blow by erasing one of the clear legal boundaries that distinguishes people from animals. This is precisely the future for which animal rights/liberationists devoutly yearn.

Do you remember back when right-wingers used to joke, “If a liberal Democrat is elected president, and commander-in-chief, we’ll be reading terrorists their Miranda rights”? Do you remember that? It was funny, wasn’t it?

Yes, I remember that. I’d have to say I found it more frightening than funny. I also remember people telling us not to worry, that Obama was serious about keeping our nation and our soldiers safe…

I think it’s possible that there is a genetic connection, but I also find it very improbable. As homosexuals generally will not have children, it is unlikely that the genes would be passed on, so eventually they should disappear from the population. If it were a recessive trait carried by heterosexuals, it obviously does not provide a reproductive advantage (in fact, it is a disadvantage reproductively speaking), so you would think it would be selected out in that case as well. The research described in the WND report would seem to support the conclusion that homosexuality is indeed a learned behavior.

HT: Flopping Aces