QC Examiner

After the 2004 election, when it became known that a voting block known as “values voters”, or the Christian right, had pushed both the GOP and George Bush over the top to victory, the Democrats decided to abandon their long held policy of absolute separation of church and state in order to pluck off a few of the low hanging values voters for themselves.

For the most part, some Democrats and certainly all liberals sneered at and mocked organized religion and religous people (especially evangelicals) as being either bigots or simple-minded knuckle-draggers.

In a fascinating article in The Wall Street Journal called The Rise of the Religious Left Steven Malanga charts how the left has co-opted mainstream churches like the Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists, and their clergy, in order to deliver and promote their message. Or maybe I should say agenda, because the religious left’s “message” marches in lockstep with and is identical to current union policies like “the living wage”, the Employee Free Choice Act, and anti-Wal-Mart sentiment, to name a few.

I guess if hating Wal-Mart is a “value”, anything can be a “value”.

Read the whole article—-it’s quite an eye-opener about a “religion” that has been flying below the radar—- probably because it’s too embarrassing for the press to acknowledge that their favored policies have been turned into a secular fundamentalist religion.

UPDATE: The above link is now behind the WSJ paywall, but here’s a good FREE link.

These are the facts: On March 6, 2007 an employee of the Ohio-based Cintas Corp. was found dead in an industrial dryer.

What happened? What does it mean?

The union’s view.

The workers view.

So what happened? I wasn’t there so I don’t know. I give you two sides to a tragic story—which is the truth? Or is there a truth?

The press we have:

1. Are arrogant @ssholes who sneer at our soldiers, John Kerry-style, with the ‘don’t you know who I am?” idiocy. With no consequences.

2. Who make up stories and tell lies about how our soldiers mocked a disfigured woman, used human skulls as helmets and used their Bradleys to run over dogs—none of which he could or would prove.” With no consequences.

3. Spew racist, bigoted misogynist hate. With no consequences.

4. Spew such unhinged hate toward the military that anyone with a shred of decency would turn away.” With no consequences.

Like the rest of us, these liars, haters and misogynists have a right to lie, hate and be bigoted, but do we really need to give these clowns MORE Constitutional rights and protections that the rest of us enjoy?

From Jason Steck in The Van Der Galien Gazette calling upon voters to hold those who play petty partisan games and use divisive rhetoric accountable and instead demand bipartisan solutions to our nation’s problems:

“Even though frustrated by the confrontational, inflammatory rhetoric of the Bush Administration or MoveOn.org, voters from both liberal and conservative wings need to make a choice—-do they care about gaining the emotional satisfactions of demonizing the other side, or do they care about pragmatic reforms?

They can no longer pretend to want both. Overheated, pejorative flame-terms like “Nazis”, “unpatriotic”, “neocons”, or “surrender monkeys” work to destroy the willingness of the other side to agree even to the minimal areas where there might exist some common ground. The choice to embrace such terms, therefore, is a choice to prioritize selfish emotional pleasure over practical policymaking.”

Amen to that.

A recent study by The Project for Excellence In Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy concerning the way the press covers the POTUS campaign had these shockers:

Stories focused more on fundraising and polls than on where candidates stood on the issues, despite a public demand for more attention to the policies, views and records of the candidates.Democrats, overall, got more coverage—and more positive ink and airtime—than Republicans.

Yeah, shocking news, I know. The press favors Democrats and the easy horse race/who’s up, who’s down, who’s got the most money reporting rather than actually giving us information we can use to make intelligent voting decisions.

No wonder the approval ratings for the press are in the tank.

h/t: Liberty Pundit

From Ann Althouse:

This is my favorite thing about Giuliani: his potential to bring out the social liberal in the Republican Party.By the same token, my favorite thing about Hillary Clinton is her potential to bring hawkishness to the Democratic Party.

Let’s hope it’s true. The Democrat Party needs to be rescued from MoveOn.org just as the Republican Party needs to be rescued from James Dobson.

Give us political parties for the people, not the extremists!

There is a great article today on the front page of The Dispatch about nepotism in Rock Island County.

This article is local civic journalism at it’s finest. My only complaints (you knew I was gonna have some)  with the article were:

1. Not naming the county officials who “preferred not to disclose the names of related employees, some officials (who) said they didn’t know and other officials (who) were unavailable for comment.” I don’t really see any reason these “county officials” couldn’t be identified, and

2. The tiresome “I know I am but what are you?” bit when the reporter included a county official’s view that nepotism was no biggie because everybody does it. Trying to pass off taxpayer financed RICO as “just another business” was a red herring and should not have been included in the story.

But still, this was an excellent example of what good local reporting should be, and I would hope with more sunshine and disinfectant thrown on the RICO Democrats, the GOP will finally find it’s backbone and run some qualified people against these bureaucrats-for-life that populate RICO government.

It would be nice to see what competitive, two-party government looks like again.

Saw Gone Baby Gone last night and I wish I hadn’t “gone”.

This movie has received glowing praise, but still I gotta say:

1. This is a pale and pathetic remake of The Departed. That movie was also set in Boston, featured bad cops and gave the city of Boston a co-starring role.

2. Both Ben Affleck and the star of GBG, his little brother Casey, are from Boston, and in a quest for authenticity, the accents were so thick is was difficult for Midwesterners to figure out what the hell they were saying.

3. Morgan Freeman had top billing, but did very little in this movie—-kinda like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.

4. I’m thinking I may be too literal minded to truly enjoy the escapism of movies. I say this because in one scene, the bad cop (Ed Harris) is shot twice in the back, but still has the energy to grapple with the hero, then flee down the street and walk (run?) up 10 flights of stairs to the top of a building. This scene was ripped from The Departed and though I thank the gods I have never been shot, much less shot twice in the back, I can’t imagine I would think to run up a bunch of stairs in such a wounded condition. You may think this is a trivial point, but this is the sort of thing that really bugs me.

5. Casey Affleck was much better as Bob Ford than he is here as private detective Patrick Kenzie.

6. The pace of the movie was terrible. The story just sort of strolls along until the very end when everything telescopes. I’m still not certain about everything that happened at the end.

My advice is that if you have seen “The Departed” and liked it, avoid GBG—-you’ll be disappointed baby disapppointed.

From Stephen Green:

From here, it looks as if the Republicans have become wrong and corrupt, the Democrats are stupid and corrupt, and the Libertarians have gone plain crazy.

Our first black female Secretary of State, when confronted by an unhinged Code Pink lady with red paint on her hands, shrieking “war criminal” responded with______ZZZZZZZzzzzz.

Condi, you’re my girl.

UPDATE: For whatever reason (ignorance probably) I can’t get the above link to work, so try this.