Author: VD

Michael Cannon writes on NRO: The reason behind Clinton’s shift in strategy is hidden to all but the most ardent supporters and opponents of socialized medicine. The recently enacted Medicare prescription-drug law contains a deceptively small provision allowing personal, tax-free health-savings accounts. Health-savings accounts mark a fundamental shift federal health-care policy. Health-savings accounts treat an individual’s medical expenditures and savings on a par with tax-free employer expenditures. As a result, they empower individuals to become stewards of their own health-care dollars rather than force people to depend on their employer to spend those dollars wisely…For the first time, advocates of socialized medicine are on the run. This ought to be good.

I’m not sure that this will be a big deal or not, but anything that staves off the dual menace of the Lizard Queen and her socialized health care plan is desirable. Visit a hospital in Canada or Britain if you feel even the slightest urge to buy into that disastrous notion. You won’t for long.

The Baseball Savant writes:Vox is my boy, but I got to agree with the soccer comment. Only “funny” guys play the sport. However, I will say that most of the girls that I’ve ever met said the hottest athletes have always been baseball players. I mean, Josh Beckett is dating LeAnn Tweeden and Carl Pavano is dating Alyssa Milano! Derek Jeter did go out with Mariah Carey. In Vox’s defense though, most girls say that soccer players are the next best to baseball players.

Only someone who has never followed European soccer could ever say that. Mariah Carey and Alyssa Milano? (deep Schwarzenegger voice) You make me lafff, tee-hee-hee.(/voice) If you watch any top team – Milan, Manchester United, Real Madrid – play, you’ll see numerous women recognizable from various magazines and catalogs sitting in the stands. None of the three that BS mentioned could possibly hold the padded bra strap of Adriena Karembou, and remember, every single top model in the world passes through Milano, home of Milan and Inter, at one time or another. There’s even a popular show in the UK entitled Footballer’s Wives. Not even close.

Nathan asks:did you make the Space Bunny game for your wife, or did you give your wife a nick- name from a game?

Actually, we were attending a gaming industry trade show in LA, and one of the publishers was pushing a game called “Space Bunnies Must Die”. It was a lousy 3D shooter, so I have no idea why they were devoting so much marketing money towards it, but anyhow, there were numerous booth babes dressed up as Alison – the girl on the cover – who was apparently supposed to be their sci-fi answer to Lara Croft.

We both found this amusing, as SB looked far more like Alison than any of the booth babes who represented her. A few moments later, I was getting our registration IDs, and they had a system that allowed you to type in whatever name you wanted. So, for hers, I typed in Space Bunny and she laughed when I gave it to her. She put it on and neither of us thought any more of it for years. But, when I needed a nickname for her, it was the first thing that sprang to mind.

Like her, it’s cute, vaguely offensive to feminists and has a certain light-hearted mystique. And yes, Space Bunny is quite aware of my regard for Miss Coulter. She and David Spade are the two people with whom she has politely forbidden me to leave the house. My friend Firestarter may be in that elite group as well now, I’m not quite sure….

MM asks: What the heck is Jabberwocky? I’m an AD&D geek, but I have not a clue. I wasn’t going to comment on Vox’s geekiness, though I was sorely tempted. How hot can Space Bunny REALLY be if she’s into a guy that:

Likes soccer

Drinks girly drinks

was an AD&D geek

Wears fu-fu Italian shoes

I guess bench presses and martial arts training negates some of that, but REALLY!!!

First, Bally isn’t Italian, it’s Swiss. Second, I wasn’t an AD&D geek. The vorpal blade was the weapon with which the beamish boy from the Lewis Carroll poem did slay the Jabberwock, and also appeared in the computer game Wizardry. I did defeat Werdna, so yes, there’s a few geek points there. TILTOWAIT!

And hot women always like the pretty boys. It is a law of the universe. See Grant, Hugh, Pitt, Brad and Beckham, David for details. Granted, I’m more Fight Club than Notting Hill, but the principle remains the same. As for Space Bunny, just imagine Sandra Bullock’s younger, blonder, smarter sister working as a fitness model and you’re pretty much there.

But conservative policy experts and a number of former Bush administration officials say there are more systemic reasons for the policy sclerosis. For three years, the president pushed policies conceived during his 2000 campaign for the White House, but with most of those ideas either enacted or stalled, policymaking has run out of steam, they said.

I’m pretty happy if the Bush administration is running out of policy ideas. Considering how much they’ve been trying to out-Dem the Democrats, a respite is in order. Now, if they need some fresh ideas, I’d be more than pleased to supply a few. I’d just make sure that the president had a Mont Blanc or two for all the executive orders he’d be signing.

After a cappucino or two, we’d get rocking. Department of Education – gone! Housing and Urban Development – gone! Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidies – gone! Break for lunch. National Endowment for the Arts – gone! Federal gun laws – gone! UN ambassador – fired! UN membership – paper shredder, paper strips burnt and ashes flushed down the toilet. Set up a meeting with Alan Greenspan for tomorrow morning and call it a day. A frabjous day, indeed!

The historic Christ Church in Alexandria, which draws 800 to 1,200 people on Sunday mornings, lost a $900,000 donation to a building fund because of the Robinson consecration. In recent months, 10 families have left the church, 104 persons have not renewed their annual financial pledge and two parishioners say they have been told giving is down 20 percent. The Rev. Pierce Klemmt, rector of Christ Church, said people are giving less because they fear “the future” on sexuality. “Homosexuality is not a sin,” he said. “It is a gift from God, and I see this issue on the same issue as civil rights. Our brothers and sisters with the homosexual orientation should be supported and celebrated as any person should be.”

Civil rights is, by definition, not a Christian matter. And homosexuality is not a “gift* from God”, children are. Furthermore, a future based on homosexuality is a sterile one indeed. I don’t know which pagan god Mr. Klemmt worships, but it isn’t the Christian God of the Bible. Christianity is not about tolerance, it is precisely the opposite. Jesus preached parable after parable talking about exclusion, separation and division.

Christians are told not to judge non-Christians – that is for God alone – but have a duty to judge and discipline fellow Christians. As for the wolves in sheep’s clothing, it’s getting easier and easier to spot them. There are two choices. Kick them out, or allow them to destroy the church. Any other response is simply dithering.

* it is remotely possible, albeit unlikely, that Mr. Klemmt, whose name does sound suspiciously Teutonic, was playing with the unsuspecting reporter by making a bilingual pun, as “gift” in German translates as “poison”.

I read EXPANDED UNIVERSE over the last week, Robert Heinlein’s collection of short stories, essays and personal anecdotes collected over a long and distinguished writing career. The thing that struck me most was how, subsequent to WWII, this champion of individual responsibility for a time became a slavish champion of global dictatorship.

One thing that people who came of age in the nuclear age cannot understand is the extreme level of fear that nuclear weapons and radiation instilled in adults who had never known them. For a while, Heinlein seriously believed that the survival of all humanity depended solely on the immediate establishment of a one-world totalitarian government and wrote several short stories and essays calling for it.

This is the spirit in which the United Nations was formed, and I believe it provides the reason for the messianic attitude which the organization and its cheerleaders project. It is a spirit of fear, which, as every reader of Paul’s letters knows, is not given to us by God. It is also important to understand that this belief in the supreme importance of the UN is so strong, so emotionally-tied to the functioning of the globalist faithful, that literally any means justifies another step towards the end of world dictatorship imposing world peace by force.

Perhaps we are unwise to prefer to put our trust in the belief that mutually-assured destruction is better than totalitarian slavery. But even if we are, the technological imperative, as predicted by Carroll Quigley, ensures that the UN vision is untenable anyhow. Increasingly miniaturized weapons will only make the individual more and more powerful and dangerous; this will tend to weaken government institutions at all levels, even at the global level.

As always, those who sacrifice liberty for security will find that they have neither.

“All over the country there are offices that look like newsrooms and there are people in those offices that look for all the world just like journalists, but they are not practicing journalism,” he said. “They regard the audience with a cold cynicism. They are practicing something I call a pseudo-journalism, and they view their audience as something to be manipulated.” In a scathing critique of Fox News and some talk show hosts, such as Bill O’Reilly, Carroll said they were a “different breed of journalists” who misled their audience while claiming to inform them. He said they did not fit into the long legacy of journalists who got their facts right and respected and cared for their audiences.

One thing you can always count on is for the mainstream media to blame absolutely everyone and everything else for their declining quality and popularity except themselves. Not one journalist in a hundred has any serious respect for his audience. One editor at a major newspaper even came right out and told my syndicate that my column wouldn’t work in his paper because it would go over the head of his readership. Please. I wonder if that’s the message the paper’s sales staff is giving its advertisers?

Minneapolis City Council members plan to introduce a proposal Friday to ban smoking in all bars and restaurants in the city. Council Member Gary Schiff said Sunday that the proposal already has six sponsors, meaning only one more vote is needed to reach the seven required for passage. At least one other council member is leaning in that direction.

This is the sort of hunger for attention to which I referred in today’s column. I can guarantee that Minneapolis and St. Paul would NEVER be going for something abjectly stupid like this if it hadn’t already been done in New York. The Council members are probably arguing that if the Twin Cities have a smoking ban, it will make them a major first-tier city, just like New York.

Nothing annoys a big fish in a small pond like being reminded that he swims in a small pond.

From the Star Tribune: [Lutheran Reverend] Erdahl continues to favor ordaining gays and lesbians but recognizes that there are legitimate arguments on both sides. “We have room in the church for biblical literalists, and no one has kicked them out,” he said. “Can’t we also have room for those who say the Bible is more poetic or symbolic? I think we need room on this issue, too. We need to find a way through this. The real problem is legalism and those who say there is no room for anyone but people with my view. I hope we don’t go down the road the Methodists have gone down.”

Clearly he’d prefer the Episcopalian road of self-destruction. If people were hungry for literary criticism, they’d attend pretentious poetry seminars, not church. Can’t we have room for Christians who don’t believe the Bible? Can’t we have room for Christians who don’t believe in Jesus Christ? Can’t we have room for Christians who aren’t Christians at all?

The answer is no. That’s not legalism, that’s reality. Clearly Erdahl would have a major problem with anyone who would be so intolerant to say that his way is the only way. Who ordained this joker?