(I always feel like I should apologize for political rants, since I don’t think that’s what people come here for, but you’re getting one today.  Sorry.)

If Dick Durbin were a Republican or a radio talk-show host, he’d be apologizing and trying to hold onto his job today.  During a debate over allowing the District of Columbia to use tax money to fund abortions, someone pointed out that 41% of pregnancies in D.C. are already aborted, and wondered if maybe that isn’t enough.  After all, Democrats are always saying it should be safe, legal, and rare.  Forty-one percent isn’t rare, it’s normal.  Our senator from Illinois responded by saying it’s high in D.C. because it has a large percentage of African Americans, who have a higher rate of abortion.  That’s true, but it’s the sort of thing you’re not even supposed to notice today, let alone say out loud on the Senate floor.  And he seems fine with it, and even with paying to increase it.

I understand the reasons why people want abortion to be legal.  I disagree with them, but I can understand them.

What I don’t understand is why one of our two major political parties is so incredibly gung-ho about it.  Since President Obama took office, there has been a steady stream of executive orders and legislation to fund or expand access to abortion.  One of his first acts was to rescind the ban on using foreign aid for abortion.  Democrats fight the slightest limits, like states requiring the same parental notification for minors that would apply to any other medical procedure.  The latest version of the health care bill allows Medicaid to pay for abortions, which will probably cause the US Catholic bishops—who would have enthusiastically supported socialized health care otherwise—to come out against it.  Obamacare could have sailed through Congress if they hadn’t dragged abortion into it, but they just couldn’t resist.  And here Senator Durbin and company can’t even wait for that in D.C.; they’re trying to ease restrictions on funding there with special legislation.  They’re spending more political capital on this one issue than on anything else: the economy, our foreign wars, anything.

The Republicans are for private gun ownership, right?  Ok, imagine that a Republican president’s first act was to sign an executive order allowing the NRA to use foreign aid for firearms purchases and training in other countries.  Then every week or so, there would be new legislation floated or inserted into another bill, pushing to make bazookas or machine guns legal, or to say parents have no say in whether their kids own guns, or to provide federal funding to give guns to poor people who can’t afford to buy their own.  Say they passed laws to override city and county ordinances that prohibit the carrying of guns.  Say no Supreme Court nominee could be appoved unless he declared his unwavering dedication to making sure all Americans have easy and affordable access to guns.

That’d be insane, right?  It’d be political suicide to press so hard on one very divisive issue.  Yet that’s exactly what the Democrats are doing.  There are a ton of voters out there who would vote Democrat in a second (especially millions of Catholics who don’t already) if the Dems would just stop pushing abortion.  They wouldn’t even have to become a pro-life party: just stop making it their dealbreaker issue.  Dick Durbin, like many Democrats, was anti-abortion when he was in local politics, but when he went national and wanted to gain prominence in the party so he could chair committees and the like, he switched completely.  A Democrat at that level can be pro-gun, pro-war, even pro-tax cuts.  He can oppose his party’s platform on anything else, but they’re absolutists on this one issue.

I just don’t get it.

Good quote from the Quincy Tea Party site today:

When the QTP is successful in altering the budget, removing the water / sewer increases, and ending the Quincy Raise-a-Palooza Festival, we vow not to celebrate by convoying city vehicles to Westview for a round of golf.

Read more »

(On conservative forums this morning, there’s the usual doom-and-gloom, we’re-so-screwed hand-wringing going on, just as there was on the Left after the last two elections.  Bush didn’t crown himself King, suspend elections, and poison his enemies with arsenic, and Obama probably won’t either.  This is my response to one of the more hysterical ones.)

I think it’s a little soon to consign America to the satanic dustbin of history.  The worse candidate of two bad ones got a little over 50% of the vote.  That’s all.  It’s happened before; it’ll probably happen again.  I know it seems like the country loves this guy, because the media does.  (Including most of the loudest people on the Internet.  Watching Twitter’s #votereport channel yesterday, you would have thought Obama was winning 99-1.)

But the numbers don’t bear that out, and it’s clear that average Americans were not excited about voting for Obama.  The Democrats came into this election with every advantage.  All elections are a referendum on the last guy, especially when he’s had the full eight years, and people were very unhappy with Bush.  McCain insisted on running as “Bush II: Older and Angrier,” which only reinforced that idea.  The press was firmly in Obama’s camp, even more than they normally are for the Democrat.  Our spiritual leaders in Hollywood supported him overwhelmingly.  He outspent McCain 3-1 in battleground states, 20-1 in some of them.  High levels of immigration, legal and illegal, continue to push more states to the welfare party.  (Remember when California was a Republican state?)  The economy helped out, with decades-long trends in the stock market and investment industries coming to a head in the last couple months so they could be blamed on Bush.  Even Obama’s grandmother (God rest her soul) brought in some sympathy votes by dying two nights before the election.

Despite all that, it was a pretty close race that came down to a handful of states late at night.  I take that as a good sign that Americans are wary of Obama’s radicalism (what they’ve been allowed to see of it).  They just didn’t feel like they had much of a choice.  When a party’s slogan boils down to, “Yeah, we know our guy sucks, but the other guy is really dangerous,” that doesn’t inspire anyone.  A good candidate would have beaten Obama.  Even McCain would have, if he’d had the stones to go after Obama’s radical leftism head-on; but he couldn’t do that because it’s completely tied up with race, as Obama explains in his memoirs.

So there’s the silver lining: Americans, outside the newsrooms and universities, are not on board for the specifics of Obama’s agenda.  If he overreaches, he’ll get slapped down the way Bill Clinton did in 1994.  I think there’s a very good chance of that, because Obama seems to have less political savvy than Clinton.  He gives a very good speech, and his campaign did a good job of restricting him to scripted, TV-friendly appearances.  But when he ad-libs, as he did with Joe the Plumber or that talk in San Francisco where he accused Americans in fly-over country of “clinging” to religion and guns, he puts his foot in it pretty readily.  If he really keeps his promises—makes abortion cheap and un-challengable, raises the top tax rates over 50%, gives unions greater power to control their members, tries to stifle talk-radio, raises taxes on coal plants (he promised to bankrupt them if they tried to expand), and pulls troops from Iraq only to send them to some backwater like Darfur—people are going to get tired of that real quick.

Of course, he could do a lot of damage in two years before the electorate puts the brakes on, but hey, we asked for it.  At least we have some time between elections and inaugurations, so we can prepare.  If you think you might want to buy a gun in the next few years, get it now.  If you’ve always wanted to stand outside an abortion clinic offering to counsel undecided pregnant women, do it before Jan. 20th.  Start learning to live more frugally; find ways to maintain your quality of life on less income.  If you can drop down one tax bracket, that’s going to be more important under Obama than ever.  Raise a backyard garden; barter for things.  If you were thinking of expanding your business, invest in making it more efficient instead.

We’ll survive this—those of us who have already been born, anyway.  To quote a line from one of my favorite books, “Joy is in the ears that hear.”  It’s hard to hear any joy this morning, but it’s there if you listen hard enough.  This failure can be a learning opportunity: a chance for people to re-learn what socialism really means, and a chance for Republicans (or some third party) to rediscover traditional conservatism.  We’ve got lemons, so we might as well start making lemonade.

Voting is so discouraging.  People talk about how voting gives them a sense of satisfaction, a feeling of doing their duty and national unity.  I don’t get that at all.  If anything, I feel a sense of futility, as in, “What are the odds that made any difference?”  We don’t even get to do anything as substantial as punching chads; just fill in ovals and feed it into a machine, which told me this morning that my vote was worth just as much as 516 before me and who knows how many to come after. Whee.  At least that’s better odds than a lottery ticket.  And how many fraudulent votes will be cast?  Certainly more than enough to outnumber little ol’ me.

I suppose it’s partly because I don’t think I’ve ever voted in a close election.  This time was worse than usual.  For president, Illinois has been a lost cause for twenty years now.  Likewise with our senatorial race: even though Durbin is the epitome of a corrupt lifetime politician and has evolved into sort of a blathering, partisan mud-thrower during the Bush years, he has the seniority to bring lots of pork to the state, so his challengers are just going through the motions.

With the rest of the races, no one even put up token resistance, leaving the incumbents unopposed.  With economic chaos in the quasi-governmental investment industries, gas prices jumping all over the place, and Congress’s approval rating in the toilet, you’d think incumbents might be in trouble.  Not where I live; here no one even runs against them.

Then there were a bunch of judge affirmations, where as long as the judge doesn’t get a certain percentage of nay votes, he keeps the job.  I voted yea for the judge whose jury I served on, since he seemed to do a good job, but I didn’t have any reason to vote to throw the others out except cussedness.

The only enjoyable part was the referendum votes: I got to vote against a state constitutional convention (yeah, letting all the special interest groups in the state get together and remake the constitution in their own image sounds like a wonderful idea) and yet another property tax increase for the schools.  We should be getting kids out of those institutions and cutting their funding accordingly, not feeding the beast.

That was small payoff, though, for walking eight blocks.  At least there were no lines, so it went quickly.  I’m always slightly amused when I walk in and see three identical-looking elderly ladies behind the desk, and try to guess which ones are the Democrats and which are Republicans.  They have to be split as evenly as possible, and I always wonder if there’s any gamesmanship between them, and how much they keep an eye on each other to prevent cheating.  When the lady handed me my ballot and told me to make sure I filled in the ovals completely, she was pointing at the Nader oval, so maybe she’s a big Green Party supporter?  These are the things that go through my mind when I’m bored.

Oh well, it’s better than most of the alternatives, although constitutional monarchy has things to recommend it.  Whoever wins today (and I suspect it’s closer than the pollsters keep saying) it won’t be anything to celebrate, but we’ll probably survive them despite ourselves.

I don’t normally post about politics here, because I figure there are already eleventy billion other people doing that, and the odds of changing anyone’s mind are pretty remote anyway. I’ve gotten involved before in long, intense political discussions on Usenet, writing enough words to fill a novel. Other than a way to vent, there’s not much point in it. But, since Jason talked a little about voting, I thought I’d say a few things about my thinking heading into this election.

First of all, I’m no John McCain fan.  I would have been happier with almost any of the other Republican candidates, and I still don’t know how we ended up with a guy who was rumored to be considering running as an independent or Democrat in past elections.  He’s never seen an immigrant—preferably an illegal one—that he didn’t want to give a job and government benefits to.  He’s no real friend to conservatives, voting with us most of the time, but always willing to shaft us if it gets him attention in the press.  His main constituency is the media, which has always (until now, of course) showered him with affection whenever he bad-mouthed his own party.  He’s a bad candidate, and if the Democrats had put up a halfway moderate person, say someone like Bill Clinton without the sex addiction, this choice might take more than half a second.

But they put up Barack Obama, the most radical left-wing member of the Senate (he gets better ratings from left-wing organizations than Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist), and a product of the corrupt Chicago machine to boot.  Except for the ability to give a good speech, there’s nothing good to say about his candidacy, and plenty of bad.

I’ll start with abortion.  Now, maybe you, dear reader, consider yourself pro-choice.  That’s fine, I’m not looking to argue that here.  But you should know that Obama is not pro-choice, if that term means anything; he’s as pro-abortion as it’s possible to be without actually performing them yourself.  He’s even more in favor of abortion than NARAL, which did not oppose the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, while Obama voted against the Illinois version.  He has promised to make his first priority in office the Freedom of Choice Act, which would remove all restrictions on abortion nationwide, all the way through the entire nine months of pregnancy.

So no more restrictions on partial-birth abortion, which 80-90% of Americans oppose.  No parental notification; the school nurse can take your 14-year-old daughter for an abortion without your knowledge.  He promises new federal funding for abortion, even paying for them with Medicare.  He wants to make abortion a civil right, which could mean hospitals and doctors would be forced to provide abortions.  Pregnancy counselors could be in the same boat.  The RICO act could be used to stop all anti-abortion protests, and even take away the tax-exempt status of organizations that preach against it.

Now, like I said, maybe you normally vote Democrat because you’re pro-choice, in the sense that you don’t like the idea of a woman being trapped by pregnancy, especially in cases of abuse or health dangers.  That may be understandable, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.  (And that’s what we’d continue to have under McCain; he’s no pro-life warrior.)  We’re talking about making abortion as routine as possible, shutting down all opposition to it at every level from federal to local, letting abortionists use any method they want even if it means killing the baby well after birth, and making sure nothing slows the decision process down long enough for a woman to have second thoughts.  Is that really what you want when you say you’re pro-choice?  A president who makes that his number-one priority?  I don’t think that’s what it means for most people.

On the economy, Obama is also something we haven’t seen in a viable presidential candidate in a long time, if ever: an outright Marxist.  He talks openly about redistributing wealth, something most politicians dress up in language about punishing the rich.  Obama’s so convinced he’s right, though, that he forgets to hide what he means sometimes, like when he famously told Joe the Plumber how he should be glad the government is going to take more of Joe’s money and spread it around.  Hanging with guys like Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers just confirms what comes through his speeches and his books: he’s going to tax the heck out of us for our own good.

Of course, he promises middle-class tax relief; they always do.  It’s a lie (as it is when McCain says it).  It’s very simple: the middle class has most of the money and produces most of the stuff.  If the government wants to hand out goodies—and Obama’s promising goodies left and right—it has to get the money from the middle class, by hook or by crook.  Even if he doesn’t technically raise tax rates on us, we here in Illinois know there are other ways to squeeze us for it.  Our governor, Rod Blagojevich another corrupt product of the Chicago machine who will probably spend part of his retirement in prison like most of our former governors, also got elected by promising not to raise taxes.  Surprisingly, he kept that promise, but he made up for it by raising every fee he could find and increasing state-run gambling, which is a tax on the innumerate.  One way or another, Obama will make us pay.

Many people think we need to elect Obama to keep us out of foreign wars.  Apparently they weren’t listening when he promised to send more troops to Afghanistan, and suggested that he’d like to get involved in Darfur and other hot spots where the US has even less national interest than Iraq.  In places where he doesn’t suggest sending troops outright, he wants to send big piles of money to support the UN or other nations’ troops.  In short, he’s just as enthusiastic about projecting American power around the globe as Bush or McCain; he’d just like to do it in different places in different ways and let other countries boss us around more in the process.

Those are the big issues, but on pretty much every issue, you can assume an Obama presidency will mean more government control.  Do you homeschool, or think people should be allowed to?  Don’t be surprised if some new regulations come down the pike on that; teachers’ unions are the biggest supporter of the Democratic Party.  Own any guns?  If any gun-control laws come across Obama’s desk (which is likely, since we’re going to have a strong Democratic majority in Congress for at least two years), he’ll sign them.  Expect new attempts to tax the Internet, and to control what people can use it for.  Prepare for new bi-lingual efforts, more rights and benefits given to illegal immigrants, and less effort at controlling the borders (which is already a weak effort as it is).  We could even get the 55-mph speed limit back.

If you’re one of those people who thinks he’ll bring blacks and whites together….sorry, I don’t want to be insulting, but you’re naive.  Read his books.  From the way he talked about his “racist” white grandmother, to the way he idolized his bigamist deadbeat-dad and looked down on his mother, to the church and pastor he selected when he moved to Chicago, to the way he talks in his speeches about black “anger” and white “resentment,” he’s made it clear that he’s not another Tiger Woods, equally comfortable with all sides of his heritage.  He chose sides a long time ago, and if he’s elected, he’ll appoint judges and lawyers from the racial grievance industry who will only make the racial divide in this country worse.  Again, read his books; it’s all in there.

So, there are a few reasons I won’t be voting for Obama.  Since I live in Illinois, which leans hard to the left, voting for McCain wouldn’t do any good here.  The only way McCain would win Illinois would be if he won about 40 other states, and then my vote wouldn’t matter either.  So I’ll be voting for the Constitution Party, to help it get attention and funding next time around, in hopes that maybe one of these times we won’t have to choose between bad and much, much worse.

Were I in a contested state like Ohio, though, I’d proudly hold my nose and vote for McCain.  I might even take a page from the Democratic playbook and vote a few times, and volunteer to drive illegal aliens to the polls to vote in the names of felons and dead people.  Viva le democracie!