Vox Popoli

Yes, Virginia, you too may have to abandon your home and all your possessions to prevent the government authorities from taking your children away for the crime of not sending them to the local government propaganda mill:

A Utah woman who was ordered by a juvenile court judge to enroll her children in public school or lose custody of them has abandoned her home, furniture and other possessions to escape the order. Denise Mafi, a nine-year veteran of homeschooling, has confirmed to WND she and her children packed up their essentials – clothes and homeschool materials – and fled Utah over the weekend, spending more than 50 hours on a bus trip to another undisclosed part of the country.

There she has obtained an empty home, and is spending the Christmas break trying to find beds for her children and herself, and after the New Year, will involve the children in a local homeschooling process. “We’re shampooing carpets right now. We have no furniture. We have no beds,” she said. “But my kids are not going to public school. They are not going where Jesus isn’t welcome.”

Her home, furniture and other possessions left behind in Utah? “I’m not going back unless the judge removes the threat of arrest,” she said. “I’ll fight for the cause but I’m not going to be a martyr.”

The case erupted for Mafi because of an apparent paperwork glitch that could very well be the fault of her local school district.

Let’s see… her papers were not in ordnung so she was forced to flee to save her children. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Interestingly enough, a nearly identical scenario is playing out in Germany right now, with a number of German families found in violation of a 1938 Nazi school law that is still in effect being forced to take their children and flee to Austria and Switzerland.

The postwar period of relative peace is over. Interesting times are here again. Be aware that this is just the beginning.

Some of you may recall that I was wondering aloud about the unlikely possibility that Giuliani would be out of the picture by the convention a few months ago, and that was completely without seeing the Huckaboom coming in any way, shape or form:

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows the former New York City mayor now tied nationally with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 20% among Republicans nationally, just slightly ahead of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 17% and Arizona Sen. John McCain at 14%.

The significant thing is that Giuliani has lost 47 percent of his support before the votes start getting counted. He may well lose another half of what’s left before Iowa Republicans cast their ballots since his only serious appeal was that he was supposed to be the frontrunner.

Thompson’s all but out already. South Carolina should do for McCain again and Giuliani will probably drop out after Super Tuesday shows that he’s got no real national appeal. The only remaining questions are if Huckabee can win big enough to knock Romney out after Iowa and New Hampshire and what sort of curve Ron Paul’s expected overperformance will have on everything I wrote previously.

Krauthammer is half-sensible, but Kristol is reliably terrible. Ponnuru would be an excellent replacement and would give TIME an genuine conservative columnist for a change:

Two conservative Time magazine columnists are on their way out the door: Neither William Kristol nor longtime contributor Charles Krauthammer will be on contract with the magazine starting next month. Mr. Krauthammer confirmed the news to Off the Record, and a spokeswoman for Time said Mr. Kristol’s contract would not be renewed.

And according to two sources familiar with the discussions, Time is in negotiations with National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru to sign him to a contributor contract. Mr. Ponnuru, who in 2006 published The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, has written twice for the magazine over the past month.

I quite like Ponnuru’s writing, and I hope this works out nicely for him.

The Objectivist and Pagan Santas are pretty good too:

Who’s that coming down the chimney? Nobody — that’s ridiculous. Atheist Santa shows up in a gray Toyota Corolla and knocks on your door. Once you let him in and he has cookies and milk — come on, even atheists love cookies and milk — he will explain to your child that Santa may love all the children of the world, but he has never submitted his claims of flying reindeer and magical present delivery to James Randi, who would gladly pay a million dollars if presented with irrefutable proof of his wild claims. However, as a gesture of goodwill, Atheist Santa will leave your child with a set of wooden periodic-table blocks and a scale model of archaeopteryx.

It’s funny, but let me anticipate PZ Myers and Brent Rasmussen by pointing out that it’s a totally unfair characterization of atheists, who not only love cookies and milk but also have morals and ethics and love their children, (or would, anyhow, if they ever happened to find a woman willing to civil-union them who didn’t later prefer an abortion to giving up her career in applied Women’s Studies), and even celebrate Winterval with various traditions including but not limited to the pagan customs later shamelessly stolen by evil Christians. Because Atheist Santa would never drive a gray Toyota Carolla, he’d drive an old gray diesel Volvo with a pine-scented air freshener.

One down, one to go for the Lizard Queen’s hit squad:

The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Rielle Hunter, a woman linked to Edwards in a cheating scandal earlier this year, is more than six months pregnant – and she’s told a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her baby! The ENQUIRER’s political bombshell comes just weeks after Edwards emphatically denied having an affair with Rielle, who formerly worked on his campaign and told another close pal that she was romantically involved with the married ex-Senator….

In The ENQUIRER’s Oct. 22 issue, we revealed that Edwards, 54, was involved in a mistress scandal and the shocking allegations – if proven true – could devastate the Democratic hopeful’s campaign. At the time, we withheld Rielle’s name, but reported that an insider told The ENQUIRER that she claimed that she began the affair some 18 months earlier. She talked about her relationship in phone calls and e-mails. After our story was published, several political bloggers correctly identified “the other woman” as Rielle, a self-described filmmaker whose company was hired by a pro-Edwards group called One American Committee and paid $114,000 to produce videos for Edwards’ campaign.

The key to understanding the way the system works is realizing that most of the approved candidates are inherently broken. It’s like traffic laws, you’re supposed to be in violation of something at all times so there’s always an excuse to pull you over. Since all the major candidates have an Achilles heel, they can be removed from the process at any time should they start to believe in their own press or if a lesser candidate accidentally turn out to be more popular with the electorate than the anointed one.

But occasionally one can hope to make a small impression on a mind here or there. GM drops a note:

I just wanted to say thanks. I have been a weekly reader of your column in WND, and read with interest your articles on Ron Paul. I started doing my own research, and have come to realize he really is the best candidate. Had it not been for your columns I may not have “discovered” him.

Keep up the good work. Go Ron GO!

I think it might have been Snowdog who wondered what my reaction to Andrew Sullivan’s decision to support Ron Paul, at least on the Republican side. I don’t actually dislike Sullivan, although I am not the biggest fan of him either due to a certain tendency to view every policy issue in terms of how it personally affects Andrew Sullivan. And it is regrettable that he missed so many opportunities to nail Sam Harris to the wall during what passed for their debate earlier this year.

But the entire point of Ron Paul’s campaign is human liberty and his refusal to use government force to impose morality, religion or social justice on anyone. This is why his appeal is so widespread, to the atheist and the evangelical Christian, to the drug user and the teetotaller. Regardless of which way one leans on any particular domestic issue, one knows that Ron Paul will not use the powerful mechanism of government against one’s beliefs… unless, of course, one’s belief entails the use of the powerful mechanism of government against the people.

The ability of feminists to bend themselves in pretzels on any position in defense of some women’s behavior is simply incredible:

Sexless marriages have typically been blamed on frigid wives, since it’s assumed that men want sex all the time. But it turns out that men are just as likely to stop giving it up in the sack when in a longt-erm relationship. And guess what?! Those assholes are still blaming women for their limp dicks.

Except, of course, having an affair, or, to paraphrase Trent Reznor, maintaining a rigorous porn addiction tends to indicate that the equipment is not exactly out of order and the general interest is still there. A lot of women are boring in bed and since many women are forthright about how they view sex as a chore, it should be no surprise that men eventually find this to be a turnoff. (Key word: eventually.) This doesn’t justify breaking marriage vows or trying to complete the Internet set, but it’s not hard to understand why ESPN or WoW might prove more compelling than a woman doing a plausible imitation of a blow-up doll or the always popular impression Dead Fish on a Beach.

Sure, some guys very much like that, but they’re the creepy sort who would also like you to hold your breath, and, if possible, take an ice bath first. Or at least a cold shower.

Men aren’t robots. There’s only so many times you can reasonably expect a man to hear “no” before he loses interest in bothering to ask the question. And if you think this is a problem now, just wait until the game industry and the adult entertainment industry get together. I had a hilarious conversation with a friend who is a Logitech executive a few months ago; they’re not going down this route yet, but there’s little question that they eventually will.

And if you’re too fat to be attractive, as was the reason given in more than a third of the men’s responses, how can it be anyone’s fault but your own? It’s also funny to read the responses insisting that women are just as interested in sex and just as visually-oriented as men… no doubt that’s why the male romance novel industry is so omnipresent. This woman’s comment was probably my favorite: “This is a pretty stupid survey. I do have to say, though, that I can’t say I don’t know any married couples where a few years later the man looks about the same, while the woman has gained a bunch of weight, has a frumpy mom haircut, and nags the shit out of her husband.”

This is why you simply have to love Ron Paul. It’s hilarious, the way he blithely turns the Fox guy into a stammering apologist for Huckabee. It’s not as if the New Testament doesn’t warn of wolves in the pulpits preying upon the unwary sheep in the congregation, after all.

As Jonah Goldberg points out in his new book, America is not only far more fascist than most people understand, one can very reasonably argue that it has already been a genuinely fascist state. Only a fool would believe that the next Fascists will come wearing blackshirts and speaking Italian.

Now, it’s a good thing when people who previously believed otherwise decide that murdering helpless baby humans is evil after all. So, I congratulate Mitt Romney on eventually reaching that understanding; who hasn’t been completely wrong about something in the past. However, having once held such a position should precludes any chance that those who didn’t require intensive cogitatation to reach that conclusion will trust you in a position of appointing Supreme Court justices:

Mitt Romney attended a fund-raising reception for Planned Parenthood in 1994 in conjunction with a $150 donation his wife made to the organization — notwithstanding Romney’s contention that he had “no recollection” of the circumstances under which his wife made gave money to the abortion-rights group…. At the time, Romney, R-Mass., was locked in a tight Senate campaign with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and was touting his support for abortion rights.

The thing is, I don’t get the sense that anyone here, not even the Mormons, supports Romney. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it impossible to take him at all seriously as a potential candidate.

PZ Myers offers another demonstration of why people should stick to their areas of expertise:

Religious values are intrinsically autocratic and irrational, relying on ignorance for their propagation, and are therefore anti-democratic.

Like a medieval philosopher, PZ has no interest in the available empirical evidence, preferring instead to rely on his own contorted logic. The uberdemocratic Swiss are highly religious, meanwhile the Enlightenment secularists of the European Union are not only running roughshod over the democratic will of the British, Dutch and French peoples, but have set up an explicitly anti-democratic and unaccountable ruling oligarchy.