In November, with a heavy heart KsReaganite endorsed Governor Romney in the following entry. As readers will note, the key reason was the apparent ability of Romney to stop Rudy Giuliani's apparently steamrolling machine. Even as I backed Governor Romney, I said his frequent change of positions bothered me and told you about my deep admiration for Senator John McCain.

http://ksreaganite.townhall.com/g/dd15c113-9d58-451d-a204-f9e05abe2d12

Well, with Giuliani's precipitous and welcome political demise, the main point of the endorsement becomes moot. And several of my entries since have made the point that Governor Romney's campaign has engaged in tactics and postures which I find undignified. Ultimately, it comes down to who can uphold our values (Rudy didn't) and beat the Democratic machine in November. I believe that man is John McCain...a man I admire greatly and one whose heart is in the right place which is a place far removed from the latest Gallup polls on issues of the day. Today, in his gracious victory speech he made a point of mentioning constructionist judges. He needs to continue to do that for that is a perpetually top priority domestic issue for movement conservatives.

 

No candidate in either party has paid a higher price for his love of country than John McCain; nobody is better experienced to handle the terrorist war imposed on us; and nobody understands more deeply the need to keep America faithful to her founding values in good times and in times of profound challenges. And I am satisfied that McCain is right on trade, taxes, spending, immigration, and life. No amount of shrill posturing by self declared conservative pundits like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh can change the fact that McCain's record is one of principled conservatism that appeals to our highest hopes rather than our basest fears.

 

Tonight KsReaganite is relieved to be able to come to the side of the candidate who principles and record match my priorities the most closely: a true American hero, John Sidney McCain.

 

THE MAC IS BACK!!!!

Today is January 29, 2008, the one hundred forty seventh birthday of this great state of Kansas. This is an event which is celebrated across the state by Republicans while Democrats, to the surprise of many unaware of history, generally ignore the day.

 If I were a Democrat I’d probably ignore the birthday of Kansas too…as our governor did yesterday when making the response to the President’s State of the Union. You see, Governor Sebelius’s party fought tooth and nail, blood and gore, and bodies and bones to stop Kansas from entering the Union during those eventful years of ‘Bloody Kansas’ in the 1850s. The newly formed Republican Party wanted Kansas to enter the Union as a free state while Democrats operating out of neighboring Missouri wanted slavery not only to be accepted in Kansas but placed above the reach of laws and courts. So they fought, the Democrats bolstered by armed ruffians and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (see previous post), the Republicans enthused with the radical idea that one human being cannot determine life and liberty for another. Entire Kansas towns (including Lawrence) were burned to the ground by the pro-slavery rights forces and federal courts, the only ones in operation in pre-statehood Kansas, refused to intervene: the ‘enlightenment’ of the lawyers and judges and New York Times dictated that every white man ought to have the choice about what to do with his own ‘property’. Despite such ferocious opposition, Kansas indeed came into being and the rest, as they say, is history.

 A similar battle, more sublime but no less defining, about the rights of vulnerable human beings goes on in the country today and Kansas is often ground zero for it. And once again, the Democrats are on the wrong side, along with the New York Times, lawyers, and federal judges (remember Patrick Kelly?).

 Happy Birthday Kansas…and don’t worry if the Democrats are being sore losers about it.

Not much for writing yet but a quick commemoration of National Sanctity of Life Day today. Our founding document said "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life.." Someday, someday soon we will reach a place where that  First Unalienable Right will be protected by our legislatures and courts unabashedly. Not today, not tomorrow, not in my lifetime or yours..but happen it will someday. This is America....just like Dred Scott vs. Sanford of 1856, the decision of January 22, 1973 will end in the ash heap of history, in the rancid ignomy it so richly deserves. For ultimately, Americans in their hearts know that taking someone's life or liberty, just because of the victim's station of life or domicile, is repugnant to every value that has ever been considered 'American'.

I wasn't planning to come back and write for a few days..just not upto it for some reason. And I won't for a few days except to point out tonight how shameful some so called 'conservatives' have become in pursuit of nefarious electoral agendas. For some, specially in South Carolina, the end justifies the means, no matter how much falsehood is spread. Don't get me wrong...I am not the one to shy away from negative campaigning. Frankly, negative campaigning based on a person's character and record is very fair game.

What is not fair is plain disregard for the truth and a blatant appeal to the lowest demons of our nature. In attacking John McCain, a candidate I find myself at oddes with on several major issues, some of thee self declared conservatives and their champion candidates digust me. McCain has enough things to be criticized for honestly-like campaign finance and lackluster support of the 2001 tax cuts-without making up things about his record. In a deeply conservative state like South Carolina, he has been accused of being a pseudo-conservative and soft on life, for example. The facts are different. John McCain's lifetime rating by the American Conservative Union is above 80 percent, making him one of the most conservative twenty percent of United States senators. His advocacy for the civil rights of unborn children is evident in vote after vote, as is his advocacy on behalf of children who are abused, malnoursihed, and uninsured. Now that is the true definition of being pro life. Were it not for his intervention in the compromise of 2006, we would have never gotten Sam Alito on the Supreme Court, bringing the highest bench of the land just one vote short of someday overturning that nefarious, outrageous blot on our Republic's conscience known as Roe v. Wade.

Issue after cardinal issue, John McCain has been the true conservative with a record to show: free trade, civil liberties, right to self defense, national security, cutting pork, support for Israel and the rest of America's allies....the list goes on. Where he has broken ranks is with narrowly focused special interest groups that pose as conservative but are either really anti-free market xenophobes of the Pat Buchanan-Lou Dobbs variety, or individuals who have never seen a day in combat but fancy being tough warriors behind mahagony desks in Washington DC or Boston.

John McCain is neither perfect nor a saint. But one thing he is is a conservative. A conservative with compassion, honor, and heart.  My friends in South Carolina will do a great disservice to their good name if they were to vote against Senator McCain simply based on shadowy allegations of dubious merits that is being targeted at him. There are several reasons to vote against McCain but a lack of conservative credentials isn't a good one amongst them.

Dear readers, sorry for not updating recently. It's due to a sudden bout of illness that is sapping my energy and making my mind less willing to engage in grand pronouncements as it is wont to here and elsewhere . Chances are I will be spotty in updates for the next few days or week at least. Please bear with me. Yes, and I join those heartily who congratulate Sen. John McCain on his victory in NH. He is a good and honorable man who has given more for this Republic than all the candidates running in either party, combined ten times over. The Mac is Back.

That Governor Mike Huckabee cleaned the clock, after being outspent 15 to1, in Iowa is a testament to the fact that many Iowans bought into the sincerity exuded by the candidate. It is also a reflection of that very sublime and yet ever present American strain of having a soft corner for those considered to be on the margins of society. Unlike many Republican campaigners, Huckabee tapped into that compassion that exists amongst regular Republicans just as much as amongst regular Democrats. Compassion for those who are 'in the dawn of life, in the shadows of life, and in the twilight of life, is what defines the greatness of a civilized society', so said the late Democrat Vice President H Hubert Humphrey. Be such life be that of the unborn child, the abused animal, the wayfarer, the troubled teen, the depressed adult, or the harried immigrant, Huckabee didn't apologize for his belief that all such life has certain inherent dignity. Whether he goes far or not is something I don't know; what I do know is that it is a wakeup call for many of us establishment Republicans who often forget to see beyond the polls, the spreadsheets, and the think tank analyses pouring out of Washington.

Happy New Year to all of you! I must admit it was a good start to the New Year for KsReaganite..he got to usher it in with his friends, family, and loved ones. The past year, at its very end, did see the sad demise of Benazir Bhutto, an iconic former Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Sad as it was, as any violent death of a human being is, the assasination of Bhutto is neither entirely unexpected nor is it a license to call her a martyr for democracy. Fact of the matter is that for all her Oxford clipped rhetoric custom made for Washington comsumption, Benazir Bhutto was hardly a democrat, as the term is understood in the West. The daughter of a Z.A. Bhutto, Pakistan's first popularly elected premier, Benazir inherited the megalomania, ego, and intolerance of her socialist father whose secret police tortured political opponents with methods that are too disgusting and harrowing even for Pakistan. During her two terms as Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto did nothing to ameliorate the plight of women or minorities in her country but rather unleashed a reign of terror in Karachi which was dominated by the ethnic oppostion MQM party. To this day hundreds of disappeared MQM members have never been found. To top it off, Bhutto orchestrated the murder of two of her own brothers, lest they become contenders for her position at the head of the Pakistan People's Party. And even her supporters acknowledge that this 'friend' of the Pakistani masses and her husband Asif Zardari bilked Pakistan's treasury of millions while in power...a scale of corruption massive even by Pakistani standards. It is not without accuracy that the Times of London columnist Jemima Khan, herself a prominent British Pakistani, described the late Benazir Bhutto as a 'kleptocrat in a Hermes scarf'.

Oxford accents and appearances in Washington DC parlors do not a democrat make. God bless Benazir Bhutto's soul but let us not kid ourselves: she was a typical autocratic Pakistani politician who fell victim to the same cycle of violence that she had greedily engaged in a bare fifteen years ago.

I am on vacation till after New Year's Day and will have comments on the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto then. Happy New Year!

Now Mike Huckabee is getting flak from liberals here and even abroad about that campaign ad earlier this month which he closed with 'Merry Christmas'. How dare he?? From the New York Times to the International Herald Tribune to the Guardian of London is after Governor Huckabee for being so open about his faith. It is a pity how little they know about the foundations of this Republic whose founding fathers were all devout believers in God and his Majesty, though they may have approached God on slighty different paths. 'If a bird flap not its wings but by the leave of the Almighty, dare we think that a great Republic shall rise without His blessing?', so asked the supposedly 'secular' Dr. Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention (evidently that was before the time of the ACLU which probably would have promptly sued Dr. Franklin for violating that imaginary separation of church and state).

Who are these liberals kidding?

So the indications and rumors were true, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair did become a Roman Catholic officially. In an academic sense it is not surprising: his wife, Judge Cheri Boothe (and their children) has been a practicing Catholic for a long time, and as political science demographers know, in situations where there is a difference of religion, men often take the lead of their wives (it is the reverse in politics).  Byond the demographic aspect, it is well known that Mr. Blair is, unlike most British public figures, not averse to talking about his faith, his relationship to his Creator, and Judeao-Christian values. For all his leftist rhetoric, he has proven himself to be a man of certain moral absolutes.

Hence, the only church left for him to go to in utterly secular Western Europe and Britain is, unfortunately, the Roman Catholic Church. Britain's premier Church of England (CofE), like its cousin the Episcopal Church in the USA, is but a shadow of its former self whose theology consists of an odd assortment of the most latest Left wing ideological snippets. Many CofE bishops are more intersted in removing crucifixes and endorsing lesbian 'marriages' than preaching the antiquated Ten Commandments; most CofE parishes are empty on Sunday mornings. The CofE is going the same way that the state Lutheran churches in Norway, Sweden, and West Germany, the Presbeteries in Scotland, and Orthodoxy in Ukraine went....into oblivion marked by irrelevance and unmourned by parishioners who had long ceased to come into the Leftist conclaves that those churches had become.

Whether we like it or not, the only national spiritual organization with moral absolutes that exists in most of Western Europe, and specially in Great Britain, is the Roman Catholic Church. It is the last line of defense for Judeao-Christian civilization in Europe. Tony Blair is a fighter....he proved that much on Iraq. I guess he wants to join the fight to defend the last shreds of Western Civilization left in his country.

The President and his domestic social policy advisers often promote marriage as a stabilizer and bemoan the falling rates of the same. His Healthy Marriage Initiative of 2002 even had bi-partisan support. They would do better to reflect on this article which, sadly, portrays an all too common phenomena in America.

http://men.msn.com/articlebl.aspx?cp-documentid=5873934&GT1=10715

The surprise shouldn’t be that fewer men get married than before, but that ANY men get married at all. Nothing in America is a greater gamble for men that getting married. The two stories in the article may make Saudi Arabia look positively average when it comes to law and justice. A more disgusting and deadly perversion of justice is hard to imagine. Please, nobody ask me why I have such a staggering contempt for feminists, family court judges, the domestic violence industry, and divorce lawyers. The State Department should stop lecturing other countries about gender equity and human rights and better use those exhortations domestically.

Don’t expect KsReaganite to shed any tears for Republican Representative Tom Tancredo dropping out of the presidential  race. A more divisive, polarizing, and damaging figure is hard to find in the GOP. That he was effective in promoting his imprudent and xenophobic agenda goes without saying. Thanks to Tancredo, as the report below points out, a core constituency of the Republican Party is parceling out votes and dollars to the Democrats who otherwise could not imagine being the beneficiary of such largesse.  Tancredo appealed to the worst instincts in the human psyche and, in turn, ended up tarnishing the image of the Republican Party and alienated the fastest growing segment of the population, a segment that George Bush had almost split even with the Democrats.  Much of the credit for Democrats winning Mountain West seats in 2006 goes to Tom Tanrecdo. Much of the credit for Democrats outraising Republicans in campaign contribution goes to Tancredo as well. Not surprisingly for little people like Tom Tancredo, their bluster is only skin deep and their courage largely non-existent. Congressman Tancredo, seeing the writing on the wall, has decided he cannot even get elected to his own seat in the House of Representatives, let alone the White House. Thank God and good riddance Tom. Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out. And see if the Democrats can find you a job…for all the help you gave them by backstabbing your own party.

 

http://biz.yahoo.com/bizwk/071218/dec2007db20071214881757.html?.v=1&.pf=career-work

 

Today Jon Corzine, the liberal Democrat governor of New Jersey signed a law abolishing the death penalty in his state, citing the ‘deep moral objection’ to the practice. The same ‘moral objection’ argument was used by the liberal majority in the NJ legislature to pass the bill last month, over objections of victims’ families and the Republican minority.

 

Chances are that you didn’t hear peep out of all those radical liberals who never tire of screaming how horrible it is to impose one’s ‘moral’ beliefs on society. How many times have we heard that those of us who want to protect all innocent life from womb to tomb are guilty of attempting to legislate our morality? But apparently it is quite fine and dandy, as far as the New York Times and the Left is concerned, for the liberals to openly impose their version of morality on the rest of us. Typical liberal Democrat hypocrisy. You see they really have no problem legislating morality….just as long as the morality in question is duly endorsed by the high priests of ACLU and high priestesses of NOW.

 

Nonetheless what New Jersey’s governor and legislature did, as troubling as it is, is only natural in a representative democracy. Notwithstanding the shrill commentaries of hypocrite editors, reporters, and liberals, the fact is that we as a society impose our collective morality on ourselves EVERYDAY. Sanctions against drug use, murder, theft, and rape are nothing but legislations of morality since our Judeao-Chrsitian heritage prohibits such wanton conduct.  Where standards or norms of morality differ in degree, or even in kind, between the several states, our federal system reserves the right to the states to legislate in accordance with the prevailing moral standards of the state..which is exactly what New Jersey did. So liberals, please don’t look even more intellectually bereft than you already are, by screaming the logical fallacy of “don’t legislate morality”.  

Our 'ally' general, the biggest Asian consumer of American taxpayers' aid largess, has an interview in today's New York Times where, among other gems, he admonishes America for being too 'obsessed with human rights, democracy, and civil liberties'. Funny that General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's tyrant president should choose this day, December 16, for making that outrageous, ungrateful pronouncement, so wont of dictators. For exactly 36 years ago, on December 16 1971, Musharraf's Pakistan was cut into two precisely because of that kind of attitude backed by brute military force. Nine months of gencodie, mass rape, and wanton destruction of infrastructure between March and December of 1971 did not save Pakistan's army from having to surrender the erstwhile Eastern Province of Pakstan which was to become the free Republic of Bangladesh.

General Musharraf and the Pakistan Army that he draws his power from, needs an attitude adjustment, if for no other reason than keeping what's left of Pakistan intact.

I received an important piece of news today that prompts me to make a second entry to the blog in one day. It is good news relayed to me a little while ago by senior staffers on Capitol Hill. Almost an entire year of pest-like lobbying by KsReaganite and many others on military child custody protections is about to bear fruit. An amended version of the Turner Amendment is part of the final 2008 Defense Authorization Bill that the President has indicated he will sign before the end of the year. The measure clarifies the Uniformed Service Member Civil Relief Act to specifically include child custody proceedings and will become law on January 1, 2008 with retroactive effect to October 1, 2007, the beginning of the federal fiscal year. This closes the loophole that radical family court judges, sinister ex-spouses, and disgusting divorce lawyers have used across the country to deprive deployed servicemen of their children as soon as the said servicemen were called up and thus unable to defend themselves. It was a travesty of monumental proportions where, in a bizarre twist of justice, America’s courts punished those who served their country by kidnapping their children.  While this is far from the ideal where men and women are treated equally in the application of the law, it is a small victory for justice for those who only ask that we protect their children as they risk all to protect us.

 What a beautiful Christmas gift to the approximately one hundred thousand deployed servicemen who are either divorced or single parents.

Here's to Corporal Levi Bradley, USMC, whose shoddy treatment at the hands of the Kansas Supreme Court earlier this year prompted me to get into the fight personally. Let us hope that no United States serviceman in the future is rewarded for his service to country by being robbed of his child as happened to Levi Bradley (and countless others) at the behest of judges whose very prerogative to judge emanates from the daily sacrifice of those in uniform.