MARTHA RADDATZ, the moderator of last night’s vice presidential debate, failed to control the show. She did nothing while Joe Biden frequently interrupted Paul Ryan, who came across as sincere and had a few good lines, but was generally disappointing and overwhelmed by Biden, who was laughing and grinning like the Joker in Batman. At times, both candidates were talking at once.

Lydia Sherman writes:

For some reason the comments by Ryan: “This is the…this is the inspector general,” reminded me of some words in the song “The Very Model of the Modern Major General,” from the Gilbert and Sullivan show, The Pirates of Penzance. When my daughter plays and sings it on the piano for her children, some of them fall on the floor laughing. When she read the debate script to them, they did the same thing.

 Here is some of the transcript: Read More »

THERE is a vacuum of authority at the  highest levels of the Church. Once again last night, Joe Biden, whose diabolical smirk dominated the vice-presidential debate, stated his support for Roe v. Wade. He said he doesn’t support abortion in his private life, but doesn’t believe it’s right to impose his belief on others, including Jews and Muslims, as if  opposition to abortion was a private religious practice, comparable to abstaining from meat on Friday or attending Mass. Biden, who met privately with Pope Benedict XVI just last year, knows full well that his position is rejected by the Church. When Benedict met with Nancy Pelosi in 2009, he explained to her why her position was wrong. He surely did the same with Biden. The Vatican News Service reported after Pelosi’s visit: Read More »

SAILORS were once known for spending their leisure hours in brothels in foreign ports. Okay, they were not just known for it. They actually did it. That, for better or worse, was considered compensation for hard work and long hours at sea. Things have changed dramatically. Now men in the Navy have much less incentive to visit these fleshpots. On many naval ships, as much as 40 percent of the crew is women. And, there is plenty of opportunity for sex with shipmates. News flash: The typical naval vessel is becoming more and more like your average college dorm.

In his interesting and candid article “Co-ed Crew: Reality vs. Taboo,” in Proceedings Magazine of the U.S. Naval Institute, Capt. Kevin Eyer writes:

[I]t would not be unusual for you to be glad, believing that your Navy has grown up into a service no longer sullied by raw, alcohol-fueled lust. You may reasonably think that the Navy is a professional and sober organization in which the worst elements of human weakness have been stamped out. Certainly that is the image that leadership jealously promotes and guards.

But you would be naïve to believe this mythology. You see, human nature has not changed, and water inevitably finds its own level. So, even despite the Navy’s ever-increasing efforts to legislate morality (or perhaps because of it) sailors have discovered new ways in which to be, well, sailors. Over time, they have largely replaced those historic foreign dalliances with that which is more expedient and close at hand: sex with their shipmates.

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IN THE entry on a billboard that depicts a woman in the National Guard hanging in the air on a rescue line with a small child, apparently in her off hours while attending college full time, Terry Morris writes:

She is Woman! Look at ‘er roar … or, soar!

You wrote: “Normal women don’t yearn to rescue, they yearn to be rescued.”

Exactly. And this is what I find to be so ironic about the billboard. The young woman depicted does not look like a strong, self-confident, determined rescuer. Rather she looks small and frail, and the way she’s peering upward gives the impression that she, in spite of the military garb she is wearing, is actually being rescued along with the child, instead of rescuing the child. Somehow I imagine that there is a (heterosexual) man at the other end of that rope.

But, of course, how could she be an effective “rescuer” and a full time college student too?

A reader writes:

This is a billboard sign from McAlester, Oklahoma. As you can see it is a petite young woman on a rescue line. I thought you might find it interesting.

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I DID not watch a single moment of the Democratic Convention during prime time last week. I did, however, later view some of Sandra Fluke’s speech, which you can see here. Rarely has the socialist project to denigrate womahood been presented in such glowing terms. It’s too hysterical and adolescent of a speech, the sort of thing you’d expect to hear at the Women’s Resource Center at any university or college, to take seriously. As Lawrence Auster says, “The human mind is designed for the contemplation of reality, not for the contemplation of sheer insanity.” It’s sheer insanity to view Fluke as a champion of women.  She is an avid proponent of their manipulation, unhappiness and corruption. And, truly, a childless woman who lectures the nation about the need to prevent birth is suffering from an insane level of presumption.

The Democrats scored two public relations victories against the Catholic Church. In the first, Caroline Kennedy presented herself as Catholic in her pro-abortion speech. Kennedy apparently believes Catholicism is hereditary and has nothing to do with what one believes. Kennedy is an airhead; she’s a human hot air balloon. Read More »

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THE Republicans utterly failed to respond head on at their convention to the Democrats’ claim of a “war on women.” Instead of the pandering “We Love You, Women” address by Ann Romney, which was essentially a form of capitulation, the Republicans should have hosted something like this fantastic speech by the media figure Star Parker.

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THE Baltimore Catechism defines mortal sin as a “grievous offense against God:”

To make a sin mortal three things are required: a grievous matter, sufficient reflection and full consent of the will.

Is it not a “grievous matter” to be an accessory to abortion, same-sex “marriage,” mass contraception and the organized, unconstitutional redistribution of property, which is arguably a form of theft? And, if it is a mortal sin to vote for a politician who believes in all these things, what does it mean for the Church if thousands of Catholics continue to receive Communion after having cast a vote for Obama and failed to repent?

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DANA LOESCH at Breitbart.com writes about the buttons worn by women at the Democratic National Convention. The great thing about modern feminism is that it has elevated political discourse and brought out the very best in women, in ways that male oppression never could.

We should also thank the suffragettes for making it possible for political conventions to become the War of the Wives. Last night, Michelle beat up Ann Romney and made her own “Women, I Love You” Speech, in which she sang the praises of the heroic single mother. We were also treated to more tantalizing details about one of the most serious political issues of our time — the romance and marriage of Michelle and Barack, whose idea of romance and marriage includes men marrying men. Obama was weeping offstage. Unfortunately, he is not smart enough to laugh uproariously at it all. Little did he know that that first kiss would set the course of an entire nation.

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THE out-sized ego of the American woman, which is like a bobbing inflatable on the political landscape, received major injections of hot air last night at the Republican Convention in Tampa. Ann Romney is beautiful and bright. But her speech — before the bank of hypnotizing, Orwellian screens onstage — was so much sugary pablum. Mrs. Romney’s answer to the hostility so many liberal women feel toward her is to tell them how heroic they are. Imagine a man taking the convention floor and saying, “We love you, men!” or telling the assembled that the hard-working men (in contrast to women) are the “best of America.” All that was needed was a chorus of men to burst into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “There Is Nothing Like a Dame.”

When women were denied the vote, they could reside on a higher plane, far from the oily ministrations of politicians. Now, at every convention, we must hear about the first date of the presidential candidate and his wife. We must see them kiss and be told by both how wonderful women are. The governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, and Luce Vela, the wife of the governor of Puerto Rico, also appeared last night and I couldn’t help but feel, given their outfits and grooming, that I was watching a political version of the Miss America contest.

Mrs. Romney stated the following: Read More »

THE RESPONSE of the Republican Party to the “legitimate rape” remarks made by Missouri Congressman Todd Akin show once again how, on cultural issues, the GOP would rather concede than defend its views or attempt to persuade.

When asked to explain his position that abortion should not be allowable in cases of rape, Akin said: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” There is a reason why Akin felt the need to use a qualifier. The term “rape” encompasses violent assault by a stranger and coercion by a friend or “date.” While both may involve coercion, they do not have the same traumatizing effects. Judie Brown at LifeSite News writes:

While I am not quite sure what he meant to say, I can guess that he was attempting to define an actual criminal act in contrast to the rape claims sometimes attributed to dating experiences gone wrong, when the female in question changes her mind and decides she never said yes in the first place. Read More »

MICHAEL SAVAGE, as a reader points out in a previous entry, makes the case here and here that John Roberts has suffered mental slowing and irrationality due to the medication he takes for epilepsy. As Savage notes, the New York Times raised the possibility at the time of Roberts’ confirmation hearings that his medication would compromise his mental functioning.

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SJF writes:

I just realized, the HHS Mandate is being imposed by a Catholic (Kathleen Sebelius), and Obamacare was upheld by the swing vote of another Catholic (Chief Justice John Roberts). Roberts is a practicing Catholic who faithfully attends Mass at his parish in Maryland. We’re committing suicide as a Church and as a country. Unbelievable.

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FRED OWENS writes:

Compare the photos. The first one shows the Supreme Court Justices in 1917, with stern and serious faces — one would even describe them as being “judgmental.”

Of course, we don’t see the justices of 1917 in their private moments, and no doubt they smiled, joked, and laughed at certain moments in their lives, but they reserved their serious faces for their serious work of judgment.

But we’ve come a long way, baby. Now we serve up justice with a smile in this 2012 photo of the Supreme Court. Let’s be lighthearted, joyful and casual — not “judgmental” or, God forbid, serious.

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THE NEWS media reported last week that Obama’s executive order granting work permits to illegal immigrants who came here as children would give citizenship to some 800,000 people. The number is closer to two to three million, according to Roy Beck at Numbers USA. He blames Republicans in Congress for their failure “to tackle immigration priorities the last two years.”

— Comments —

Buck writes:

Roy Beck’s column is about numbers; about the economics. No one is better at that than Beck. Sadly, he says nothing about the existential damage being done to the American nation; the permanent and fatal damage. If the United States had the extra three million jobs, would Beck see this as a problem or a solution? Would any but a few Americans care that they are disappearing as a people – jobs or no jobs?

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STEVE KOGAN writes:

Ronald Dworkin has had a long career in legal studies as a liberal-left philosopher of politics and law.  His bibliography is extensive, and his NYU faculty profile states that he is “probably one of two or three contemporary authors whom legal scholars will be reading 200 years from now.”  It is a fitting prophecy for this craftsman of exaggeration.

Dworkin’s recent essay “Why the Mandate is Constitutional,” is, as the expression goes, a piece of work. The reader is confronted with the following hyperbole at the opening of the piece:

The Supreme Court’s hearings in the health care case, US Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, over a nearly unprecedented three days of oral argument in late March, generated all the attention, passion, theater, and constant media and editorial coverage of a national election or a Super Bowl.  Nothing in our history has more dramatically illustrated the unique role of courtroom drama in American government and politics as well as entertainment. Read More »

PRESIDENT OBAMA, in another speech demonstrating his selfless devotion to female voters, told the graduating class  at Barnard College yesterday that it’s totally unfair that women have not taken over the world yet. He said every single woman, no matter who she is, needs to participate in the struggle to help women take over the world.

He’s right, of course. It is truly shocking how powerless women are. When I look at this picture of women dressed up as Barbie dolls, it reminds me of how much we have yet to gain. These women could be CEO’s or congresswomen or even PRESIDENT. If not for the Republican War on Women and millennia of oppression, they would be very busy right now. Someday, when equality is achieved, they — or women like them — will ascend the heights of power and become the bureaucratic goddesses they are meant to be.

There is a beautiful mountaintop, a Valhalla where all women will someday reside as CEO’s, congresswomen, college presidents, generals, franchise owners, etc. There they will rule the world, feasting on contraceptives and looking down on the male mortals below, who will have finally gotten their comeuppance. The laughter and shrieks of joy of these divine CEO’s will resound throughout the universe. Their home will look something like this:

Walhal, Max Bruckner

Obama said yesterday, “You are now poised to make this the century when women shape not only their own destiny, but the destiny of the whole nation.” How stirring! It’s amazing what a good deal a degree at Barnard is. If we are lucky, we may have Barbie as a president this century or, if the Paycheck Fairness Act is passed, Barbie as Ruler of the Universe. Imagine how smoothly things will run. Barbie never makes a false move. Despite what people say, she is extremely smart.

Thank you, by the way, to the reader Natassia, who sent the above photo of the real-life Barbies. Natassia makes some interesting comments below about women who are already residing in an earthly Valhalla of their own. She writes:  Read More »

NOT only did Obama finally say he supports same-sex “marriage” today, a statement which was no surprise at all, but he specifically affirmed the importance of redefining marriage for members of the military:

I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” he told ABC.

Of course, there are no soldiers constrained from committing themselves in marriage. All soldiers can marry. There are, however, no soldiers who are permitted to weaken military morale and dignity by “marrying” members of the same sex and to raise children under such conditions.

It is good that Obama made this statement, barring a complete change of direction on his part. It was clearly his position all along.

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