What is often lost in the hyped up controversy about Congressman Keith Ellison’s religious faith are his bonafides rather than those of Islam. He and his supporters cried foul when Dennis Prager and Representative Goode raised rather naïve questions about Ellison using the Qur’an for his ceremonial oath taking. Let us turn the question another way around. Can Mr. Ellison swear on the Qur’an, and call himself a Muslim with his integrity intact?

The Minnesota Democrat, proudly hailed as the first ‘Muslim’ in the United States Congress has much to answer for about his bizarre understanding of Islam’s teachings. Of all the monotheistic faiths, Islam has probably the most stringent prohibitions against homosexuality, promiscuity, and abortion. And in making those prohibitions, it provides no convenient leeway of “personally I am against but…” Similarly strong prohibitions exist against socialistic economic policies that seek to redistribute wealth or expropriate property. And yet Congressman Ellison is a proud member of the left wing of the Democratic Party, publicly committed to gay marriage, abortion on demand, and wealth redistribution.

It seems the real question should have been not whether Keith Ellison should use a Qur’an to take his oath but rather whether he, in all honesty, could use the Holy Book of Islam with a straight face.

The only talk amongs the chattering class is that of McCain, Giuliani, and Romney. Fair enough..after all most news reporters and columnists are by nature lazy and have a marked inability to resist political glamor. They may be in for a surprise, as they usually are once the fall-before-election-year rolls around. Three possible stealth candidates with potential can steal away the thunder from the early birds.

Jim Gilmore, former governor of Virginia, is a jovial man with a stellar record of tax cutting in an important Southern state. A smiley avuncular demeanor and respectability amongst the social conservatives makes him all the more attractive as a real Republican nominee. There are rumors that he already has a few staffers on the ground exploring the possibilites in Iowa and neighboring South Carolina..both early states.

Speaking of South Carolina, its governor Mark Saford has the advantage of becoming the automatic favorite son, should he decide to run, in a vote rich early state in the GOP selection process. Though not a famed tax cutter like Gilmore, Governor Sanford comes across good on television, has presided over a good economy, and is a full conservative, unlike any of the top three pretenders running.

Despite the temptation to pretende, Tim Pawlenty as eschewed the temptation to appear anything but a solid pro-life, pro-gun, pro-growth conservative. When you consider that this man was re-elected governor of Minnesota in 2006 against a formidable challenger....you see why I find him a potential powerhouse. Throw in the youthful looks, personal likeability, and a record of steady no-nonsense governance of a big Rust Belt liberal state and add to it the fact that the GOP convention is in his backyard. Get the idea?

I am told that tomorrow Representative Pelosi will be at her alma mater Trinity College in Washington DC to receive some honorary sheepskin and attend Mass. Faithful Roman Catholics are quite upset and quite rightly so. It is not that Pelosi is just another cafeteria Catholic. Rather she is going to be leading the Congressional charge against the Church’s teachings for the next few years. By her own open, unapologetic, and forceful promotion of policies that are anti-Catholic, she seems to have put herself in schism with the Church. Now, if Washington DC’s new archbishop was true blue like my fellow Kansan Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, Ms. Pelosi will neither be getting honored at a ‘Catholic’ institution nor receiving the Blessed Sacrament at Mass. Or if our neighbor Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, NE ran the DC archdiocese, Nancy Pelosi would be automatically excommunicated for being affiliated with fundamentally anti-Church hate groups like Planned Parenthood and CFC.

Ted Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington DC, however, is very much a Beltway guy. Relief for Nancy Pelosi, scandalous for the faithful.

I am surprised. It is the new year, there has been at least one working day already between now and Saddam Hussein’s execution and still no wrongful death lawsuit on file from ACLU, the ABA, or the New York Times. Amazing. Maybe they are still busy celebrating their ‘Happy Holidays’ (Christmas to most of the rest of us) in style. Well, next week is only hours away and who knows which podunk Federal district judge in New York or Washington or San Francisco end up with a filing on her desk seeking damages for the pain, suffering, and death inflicted on the poor Mr. Saddam Hussein.

Mind you, as I pointed out in my previous post, had the contemporary American system of criminal justice be in vogue in Iraq today, Saddam would be very alive, watching cable television, and chatting on satellite hookup with news anchor bimbos like E D Hill (or whatever her last name is this week which probably depends on who knocked her up this year).

He is dead. Dead as a door nail. It is not our business to judge the swiftness of the Iraqi justice system that was established by competent, democratically chosen lawmakers, and is staffed by independent judges of reputable qualifications. If anything, we can learn a thing or two about the concept of ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ from the nascent independent judiciary in Baghdad.

 Behold the Tyrant prostrate, and Rome is saved again!

So it was said by an ancient poet at the bloody demise of one of Rome’s most lecherous and brutal emperors. Such must be the feelings amongst the innocent in Iraq today.

Thank God the American justice system wasn’t at work in Iraq…the ACLU would be appealing the death sentence of Saddam, some Clinton appointee podunk district judge would be issuing a stay, and a team of GHW Bush appointed Republican judges on the Circuit Court, hungry for post-retirement adulation of the New York Times, would be ruling the whole trial unconstitutional. Then Justice Kennedy writing for a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court, pronouncing the ‘deeply felt values’ found in the penumbra of some sliver of some shadow of an unwritten amendment would uphold the Circuit Court because the soldiers who captured Mr. Saddam Hussein for got to read him his Miranda rights in colloquial Mesopotamian Arabic.

 The week before Christmas my town was in the national news, with CNN’s Nancy Grace and Fox’s O’Reilly both commenting on a tragedy that, but for God’s Grace, could have been much worse. A chap living with his girlfriend decided he had enough of her three little kids’ antics and decided to put them in a clothes dryer. Fortunately, the kids lived though with burn injuries. As if that wasn’t outrageous enough, the judge, a recently elected supposedly conservative Republican, let the boyfriend out pending trial after a payment of 75.00 dollars. Seventy five measly dollars for being charged with severe cruelty to, and possible life endangerment of , three kids. Twenty five bucks a kid. Well that's one definition of fiscally conservative judicial restrain, I guess.

Sure the question rises where were the ever vigilant commandos of the child protective services (CPS). But that is not the fundamental issue here because by the time CPS has to be called the child is already harmed. The real issue is why our judges and court masters keep on placing thousands of innocent kids in a situation which psychology and statistics have shown to have the potential to be extremely dangerous to children’s physical safety.The overwhelming number of children killed, molested, injured, or otherwise physically harmed inside their residences are victims of an unrelated male who is living with their mother in a sexual partnership. We know it. Feminists grudgingly admit it. Judges and the child welfare bureaucracy realize it. The news media proves the point every day in every community of the nation by publicizing yet another one of these horror stories. Yet, our collective psyches are unable to do anything preventive about this known threat to children lest we be thought of as unenlightened or, horror of horrors, old fashioned!

What good does it do a child who has been fried in a dryer to have the perpetrator spend a few years in jail when the same justice system closed its eyes knowing that such a tragedy could very likely happen in the first place? It would have made much more sense to have a registry system that prevented such crimes against children in addition to one that simply reports it afterwards like we do with the sexual predator registries. Why not require that all unrelated males intimately living with a woman with young children be registered in each community? Why not statutory safeguards put in place for protecting these kids during child custody proceedings?

But then, children don’t have a vote while their potential predators have votes, money, a sympathetic media, and the near full backing of the bar association and the bench.

 My friends have often read the disappointment that seeps through some of my entries as I reflect on how rank hedonism, selfishness, and dishonesty is condoned and even rewarded in our society. To salve our sense of right and wrong, we conveniently put such behavior in the ‘private’ category, thus shielding the perpetrators from social ostracism and the rest of us from a painful conscience. So we have a society where using a politically incorrect epithet in public is liable to make you lose your job but destroying your family by greed and selfishness triggers hi-fives and sympathy for you. How do I, then, keep my sense of sanity, my perspective, in balance for a better future for this, our ‘shining city on the hill’?

Well, I do so by looking at the lives that so many others live in stark contradiction to the prevailing ethos of individual selfishness. Some are friends I know and some are people I have never personally met. One of those is Nicole, whose blog ‘As My World Turns’ I have just added to my blogroll to the right. She is one of those people who does not go about living a life of guided by situational ethics. Rather her life and values are grounded deeply in a sense of right and wrong, values that she readily imparts to her child. As you read her blog, you will see the triumphs, travails, and faith, of a parent who will never succumb to the selfish reasoning that ‘well, as long as I am happy, my child will be too.’ And as long as there are a few good people like Nicole who sacrifice willingly for their children, their friends, and their country….I guess we will get through these times of congratulatory selfishness just fine someday. She is the kind of person who populates my kind of America that I talked about a few posts ago.

I have always liked the quiet civility and genteel manners of the late President Gerald Ford. Nobody would assume him to be anything but a good chap and a thorough gentleman. It is always sad to see a decent man leave us for good. With his passing, the last living legatee of the Rockefeller Republican creed is gone. Sure, there are silly pretenders like Rudy Giuiliani and the half a dozen or so lesser known prima donna wannabees that make up the entire Republican parties of places like Delaware and Vermont. And even these people take a fairly moderate road (by Northeast standards) on crime and taxes most of the time. Thus, by and large Jerry Ford was the last national epitome of the liberal Republicans..you know those nice folks who want to discuss and gently debate with the Democrats how much to raise taxes, how much to fund Planned Parenthood, and how much to cut national defense.

I know quite a few in Kansas who are nostalgic for those days..and blame every little GOP misfortune on its supposed closeness to ordinary people of faith. The problem is that as long as Republicans were simply good ‘ole boy go along-get along version of more proletarian, loud Democrats, they were but a small minority in Congress and shut out entirely from the most heavily growing region of the country. Rockefeller Republicans, good decent people, were largely comfortable with that, happy to leave the nitty gritty of hard-edged politics to Democrats…as long as these Democrats kept the working class happy and provided pork to Republican pet projects.

That started changing in 1980 and changed in 1994 marking the return of a competitive two-party system to the country’s politics. Unfortunately, this also meant that the genteel, compromise-at-any-cost country club Republicans became upstaged by younger, hungrier, much more energetic folks who were willing to vigorously engage Democrats in robust debates at every level of public policy.

May God Bless Jerry Ford and keep him in eternal peace. Let us draw civility from his decency, strength from Reagan’s convictions, and steadfastness from Lincoln’s s faith to keep fighting for principles that made this country great. Let us never forget, as the Gipper famously reminded us, that America is not good because she is great, but she is only great because she is good.

 In my average mid-sized community, in my average middle America state….the state assessment results were out today. In every one of the grade levels and in every one of the tested areas the two parochial schools beat out the public ones by ten points or more. Mind you, in these parochial schools, they spend far less per pupil than the dollar-hungry school districts (we have two public school districts, each having part of the town and part of the smaller rural areas). These are Catholic schools where hard working parents pay from their own pockets to send their kids..and that is in addition to the hefty tax these parents pay to send everyone else’s kids to the public school system.

I suspect that such is generally the case in an overwhelming number of states and communities across America.

These are the schools where teachers come to teach as a calling, not a mere occupation, and are chosen after a careful vetting process that generally weeds out men and women with low ethical standards (i.e. Debra Lefave and Mary Kay Letourneau). The teachers in these schools hand out rigorous assignments instead of flavored condoms. The administrators, the few that are there in these very no-nonsense schools, are busy holding teachers to high standards rather than lobbying legislatures for more money. The students wear uniforms and invoke the blessings of the Almighty. The parents work as an educational team with teachers rather than uninterested progenitors who would rather go to country club ladies luncheons or sleep with the local Y’s tennis instructor.

And yet, it is these good, solid schools that liberals will not allow poor families to avail for their kids. No wonder. Bad public schools serve so many liberal constituencies: pedophile teachers, criminal defense lawyers, therapists, the welfare bureaucracy, and the NEA. But what about the children, you ask!

My friend, when the interests of children collide with those of the NEA, the APA, and the ABA, children definitely come last in the liberal grand scheme of things. After all, ten year olds do not give millions to liberal (both Democrat and Republican) candidates for the legislature and judgeships. The NEA, ABA, and APA do.

Once more they have closed their wagons to ward away the slightest curiosity about their foul deeds. When it comes to slaughtering helpless children and protecting child rapists for hedonistic convenience, Kansas’s elite stick together..and woe to him who dares ask ‘why’. Within minutes of our Attorney General Phil Kline filing a case against secretive abortionist George Tiller this Friday, the Republican county judge, the Democrat district attorney, and the Republican former US Attorney got together in a cabal to engineer the dismissal of the sixty charges of illegal conduct without a single hearing being held to determine how many rapists Tiller helped hide. Kline, as we know, had already paid the price for being too uppity and disturbing one of Wichita’s most profitable businesses. The five thousand-a-child late term abortion industry in Wichita had funneled enough seed money to his opponents in both parties to assure his defeat last month. Kline had still pressed on with his year long investigation that had already yielded horrific tales of child predators being sheltered by abortions on thirteen year old girls.

This too shall pass, my friends. Forget not that this is the same Kansas where a constitution was once written to expressly shield the slaveocracy from any legal accountability. That organic law, the infamous Lecompton Constitution, did not survive the woken up consciences of Kansans. Someday again, Kansans will shake their consciences up and demand that the legal and media elite of the state, of both parties, stop placing some industries above the law. Someday again, there will be prosecutors and judges in Kansas who are better than cheaply bought handmaidens of the Planned Parenthood Federation.

This too shall pass, my friends.

Well, seems North Carolina’s John Edwards is back again in his search for an address on Pennsylvania Avenue. The rest of us are destined to hear ad nauseum that two America theory. Well, I have my own two America theory, one that makes more sense than the class warfare agenda rhetoric spewed by the multi millionaire trial lawyer.

There are perhaps two Americas, though divided along far more real lines than the make believe boundaries conjured up by the Edwards campaign hacks. You find there two Americas in almost every neighborhood, every state, and every income level: an America that is strong, silent, and decent and another America that is loud and lost.

There is that America where people are strong enough to resist the temptations of a corrosive culture that blares at them from televisions, commercials, and swanky workplaces. This is the America that does not fall prey to therapists who want to excise out the conscience or to the lawyers who encourage misconduct to make a quick buck. This is the America that takes its promises seriously, discharges its obligations without excuses, and teaches it offspring to do the same by example. In this America, you will find parents who sacrifice personal fulfillment and cheerfully suffer inconveniences so that their children have a safe, stable, wholesome environment to grow up in. These are not the parents who buy into the narcissistic idea that as long as Mommy/Daddy is happy, baby is automatically happy. These are the men and women who expect the best of their children and thus, with a heavy heart, discipline them and set strict boundaries and lofty expectations. This America takes responsibility for its actions instead of blaming the neighborhood, the immigrant, or the mainstream culture. In this America, God and Country, Faith and Fidelity, Honor and Family are not dirty words. Here the ethical lapses of friends, family, and neighbors are understood with love, corrected with candor, but never excused away with a wink and a nod. This is the America that takes its ethical guidance from its conscience, its founding Creeds, and its God, not from the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association or the ACLU. This is the America I to which I belong.

Then there is an America that funds John Edwards and John Kerry, Rudy Giuliani and Ted Kennedy, Kathleen Sebelius and Claire McCaskill. This is the America where the concepts of right and wrong are derived from Hollywood, arbitrated at country club ladies luncheons, and explained away under a cloak of false indignation. Here parents have therapists to assure them that conscience is an obstacle to be removed on the way to personal hedonism, and that children’s childhoods, even their innocent little lives sometimes, are expendable in that grand endeavor. This America covers up its dark secrets by talking about the plight of the poor while making sure that the offspring of the poor never set foot in the private schools of the privileged. This America comforts its increasingly compromised conscience by sitting on nice sounding committees and boards that do little and percolating in Sunday coffee klatches that were once houses of worship. These are men and women who feign horror at hearing ethnic epithets but chuckle and joke about infidelity, dishonesty, and hurting children. Every value, every ethic, every moral absolute is negotiable in this America for here the Ten Commandments are merely, if anything, the Ten Very Old Suggestions. This America has long lost the endowment of goodness that was bestowed on it by its Founders.

Those, then, are the two Americas in the United States. From where I sit, John Edwards belongs to a different America than I do for sure.

 Character is the measure of a person. For several decades now we have fallen prey to the false dichotomy of a ‘public’ and a ‘personal’ character for an individual. Such a construct of character is largely a by-product of the theory that ethics are situational. That the said theory is quite popular with morally-neutral therapists, liberals, and sleazy politicians is not hard to understand.

What is baffling, however, is the drooling admiration some self-confessed conservatives are oozing for Rudy Giuliani. A serial adulterer who broke faith with every wife he had, broke up his children’s home, and had his conduct considered ‘immoral’ by a court even in ultra-liberal New York city is someone I would expect to be given extra-wide berth by real conservatives. The former mayor brings the same low regard for fidelity to our Constitution, which is hardly surprising: he is against the Second Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and the Tenth Amendment….and probably others that we do not know of yet. His opposition to the Constitutionally guaranteed protection of innocent human life is well known as is his disdain for traditional marriage.

Have we Republicans become so paralyzed and shocked by one election defeat that we are ready to pay obeisance to the first false messiah that comes our way?

For those amongst us, principally the RINOs, that speak big today about the need for 'moderation', let us not forget the words from another era when principled defenders of human rights  faced the same vanilla blathering from the RINOs of their time. One of the foremost doyens of American journalism and an intellectual progenitor of the Republican Party, sensing the faint-hearted selfishness of the 'moderation' elite, had this to say in the inaugural New Year 1831 issue of his newspaper:

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; – but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest – I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.

That was William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery Massachussetts editor/publisher of the Liberator, back in the era when Massachussetts had real men who spoke truth to the debauched Boston Brahmin power.

 My friends excitedly informed me yesterday that they were expecting their first kid. Calling them friends will be inaccurate: he has been a brother to me in every sense except the ties of consanguinity. And after they got married, she promptly co-opted me as a sibling too. I share her sophisticated taste in music anyway…whereas the Chairman has more, shall we say, contemporary tastes in music.

The Chairman…he was the chairman of the College Republicans at my alma mater who found a moribund organization and left a powerhouse on campus that boldly challenged political correctness, battled the dictators in phony departments like Women Studies and Minority Studies, and gave a voice to the silent majority that simply wanted to get a decent education. I was one of his loyal lieutenants running the CR newspaper which itself challenged the extreme bias of the official university newspaper. Together we were there when we and many others like us around the country ushered the Revolution of 1994. Nothing could compare to the sullen faces all around campus faculty lounges we found that Wednesday morning that glorious November.

Little chance does the Chairman’s child have of growing up anything but a good, decent, sharp, honorable, and hard-hitting Republican who knows the difference between right and wrong. And so I should be putting together designs and themes for an exciting campaign about thirty years from now for a Kansas governor who is yet to be born.

A pledge to those Americans yet to be born…so said George Washington.

 In April of 1971, the Sunday Times of London called it the ‘ugliest genocide in history’ save but the Holoucast itself. Eight months later on December 16, 1971 it was finally over and Pakistan’s occupation troops laid down their weapons as a new republic was born soaked in the blood of millions. Once again that republic, now in its thirties, is in the news as one of her most prominent sons received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. And yet, thirty five years later, many in Bangladesh await the day that the perpetrators of the genocide that midwifed the birth of their republic will be brought to justice. Not one of the 153 Pakistani officers indicted for atrocities against Bangladeshis were ever brought to trial for actively overseeing a saga that saw at least a million perish, two hundred thousand rapes, and the wholesale destruction of educational and cultural institutions. Under pressure from the Russians, the United Nations, and our own Nixon administration, the indicted officers were let go by the new Bangladeshi government with the promise that someone, someday soon will hold the murderers and rapists responsible. In that long wait for that justice, some of these officers met their natural ends while living in comfortable retirement in Pakistan while others went on to become generals, cabinet members, diplomats, and senior jihadi cheerleaders assiduously sheltered by successive governments of Pakistan from ever facing a judge and jury.

And to this day, as General Musharraf goes around touting his moderate credentials, the people of Bangladesh still await justice for a genocide that was visited upon them as punishment for demanding freedom.