Bringin' Home the Bacon - UPDATE: Vic Bernson Votes 'No!"

According to the Annapolis Kapital editorial board Maryland State Senators must vote in favor of installing Sen. Mike Miller as President of the Senate for yet another term. If they vote No or if they Abstain or vote Absent, their district risks losing whatever largess, commonly referred to as 'the bacon' the State can afford to dole out.

I also learned that all but three (3) Republican Senators voted in favor of not risking their share of 'the bacon.' Andy Harris, Alex Mooney and Ed Reilly all voted 'Absent' and I am in rare complete agreement with the Kapital that this is a 'cop-out.' The Kapital singled out Sen. Reilly for the lack of fortitude displayed in his non-vote because, I assume, he will be facing District 33 GOP voters this summer.

All three Senators will be getting a request from me to explain their 'cop-outs' and the Senate GOP Caucus will get a chance to explain why the GOP finds it necessary to vote along with the Democrats on who gets to be the Senate President. I am SURE there is a perfectly honorable, non-bacon-related, reason for doing so. Stay tuned for updates....

One of the more interesting tid-bits in this three-paragraph editorial is that the liberals on the Kapital editorial board think the 'cop-out' votes are "... intended to appeal to conservative voters..." Why would the liberals think that cop-outs in Maryland are appealing to conservatives?

To those MD GOP senators or those aspiring to keep or ascend to that office: This conservative does NOT find cop-out votes appealing in any way, shape or form. Below are the place-holder responses from the three senator cop-outs and from the GOP senate caucus:

1. Andy Harris - chirp....chirp
2. Alex Mooney - Zzzzzzzzz...Zzzzzzz
3. Ed Reilly - Still Trying...I think
4. GOP Caucus - "What's a blog?"

1-27-2010 -- District 33 senate hopeful Vic Bernson e-mailed me last night to express his frustration with the GOP caucus vote on Miller:

"Mike, like most of your readers, I am very disappointed in Ed Reilly's vote regarding Mike Miller. The vote was not a hard call. A true leader committed to conservative principles wouldn't have blinked twice before voting a resounding "No." And while I do not understand why the majority of the GOP caucus voted 'Yes,' I hope it is not, as the Capital editorial implies, merely to ensure their districts are not punished legislatively.

Mr. Bernson, currently serving on the Anne Arundel County School Board, is challenging Ed Reilly for the District 33 seat he was appointed to hold for the remainder of retiring Janet Greenip's term. Mr. Reilly has not responded yet to questions about his vote. (Full disclosure: I am advising the Bernson campaign on matters related to web and social media).

Mr. Bernson concluded his statement with a call for a little more spine out of Sen. Reilly and the rest the senate GOP:

The people of District 33 deserve a leader who is ready and willing to oppose the out-of-control, arrogant Maryland government and its constant, irresponsible spending and job-killing taxes. Voting to abstain from such a simple vote speaks volumes about the conviction and political courage of the man refusing to participate. Maybe such a tactic worked well in recent years for Mr. Obama, but I sure hope it's not a model Mr. Reilly is seeking to emulate now. We need real leadership - someone prepared to take a stand for what he truly believes. Regrettably, that is not what we received from Mr. Reilly. Truly disappointing."

Political Language

Ah, election season is upon us once again. That means the air will be filled with "grow the economy," "foe-wards," "choice," "living in the shadows, " "green-house gases," hyphenated Americans and fifty different ways of referring to sexual deviants.

I have posted here before on what I have called the liberal lexicon. This is the language of liberals (now called "progressives" elsewhere) mainly in academia, the popular culture, the media and, yes, politics. It's a lexicon that encompasses virtually every aspect of modern human activity that previously were described with other, perfectly good words and phrases.

The lexicon was a code, at first, used by liberals to distinguish themselves as members of the club who really cared about the "issues." Once they were able to identify each other, they could form groups, go to the right parties, read the right papers and magazines, learn to laugh or gasp at the right time. In short, the new language allowed them to develop a sub-class or pseudo-society.

This new language started with the feminist "movement" when practically everything that had passed before was suddenly anti-woman. English words such as "man" quickly became unacceptable and marked anyone who used them as unenlightened or provocative political opponents. Those who considered themselves a part of this liberal sub-class dominated Western society's academic and cultural sectors and thus were able to perpetuate their lexicon in the language of subsequent generations of school children, voters and politicians.

The only distinction between the sexes permissible in the English language were biological or clinical. Out were the once ubiquitous references such as spokesman and businessman. Actress and stewardess are now verboten. Mrs. and Miss, honorifics that were used to distinguish a married woman from one who was single and presumably available, were replaced with "Ms" which means nothing.

The funny thing is that language in the European culture, against which all aspects of American culture is measured by the liberals, continue to make the distinction between married and unmarried women in the use of honorifics. Most of the surviving Romance languages in fact, separate certain nouns and articles by gender! The brand of feminism practiced here would be a complete failure in Europe.

One of the sadder side effects of trying to socially re-engineer languages is illustrated in one of the more famous political scuffles of the Obama administration. The President's nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court uttered this redundancy: "A wise Latina woman..." at one point in her career. I think only one Senator noticed that "Latina" is the feminine form of the noun referring to person of Latin or Hispanic ethnicity. So a Latina is a woman and a Latino is a man. A Latina woman is an ignoramus or a political opportunist trying to score points with the liberal cultural elite.

And so liberals replace perfectly good words that have been used in thousands of years of human history with meaningless gibberish. Soon the great works of literature will be as alien to future generations as Cuneiform tablets and Egyptian hieroglyphics are today. Or they'll have been re-written to conform with whatever code is deemed acceptable by modern day liberals leaving scholars to bicker about what was the actual motto of the greatest democracy mankind is likely ever to have known.

Conservatives can only hope, in this election season, to hear their candidates reviving the classical language of our heritage in open defiance of the liberals who control most of what we see and read each day and all of what our children are taught.

No, I am NOT advocating that we return to common use words and phrases that are nothing more than crude disparagement of ethnic and racial minorities. Continual use of such vile references should constitute an embarrassing ignorance of our nation's history of slavery and repression of blacks and other racial minorities. There are good reasons why certain words leave and enter the language, political expediency real or imagined is not one of them.

And I do not, as the liberals do, presume to hold myself up as the arbiter of correct versus politically correct speech. I think you all know the difference and, I hope, you do not presume in your political correctness, to believe that you are exercising your free will and are speaking the way you want to speak. You are speaking the way THEY want you to speak. Who are they? They are your political, social, and moral opposites (or so you would have us believe). Do you hear them emulating YOUR way of doing things? No. Then why, I ask you, why do you insist on doing and saying the politically correct things? Check all that apply:

1. You think it makes you more appealing to liberal voters
2. You think it makes you appear more enlightened
3. You think it sounds more sophisticated and intelligent
4. You actually think there is nothing politically correct about your choice of words

Global Warming & Population Explosion

A match made in Hell. Surely there's a link between Global Warming and Alar-poisoned apples or DDT. Hmmmm? Well, I am sure the devotees of the mass murderess Rachel Carson are feverishly trying to establish this connection.

Until then, Paul Ehrlich, call your agent. I smell a lucrative lecture circuit in your future. The Stanford University biologist, you see, published his theories that by the end of the 1970's we would all be starving or fighting for food (not oil) or suffering a depletion in the world's supply of....oxygen (not oil). In the Population Bomb, Prof. Ehrlich argued that the world's population of people would outstrip the world's supply of food to eat, places to live, air to breath, etc.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the world's population is suffering from obesity, diabetes and, yes, longevity all resulting from the supply of too much food in those parts of the world where people are generally free to pursue happiness. Well a Canadian paper has picked up the 40-year-old trail, conveniently leaving out the 40-year-old history of over-population predictions and has ginned-up a new theory on which to base the now-dubious "science" of man-made global warming. There are too many people, you see. And do you know what people do? Breath! They breath in oxygen and exhale.....pollution!

But wait, there's more! All is not lost because the Chinese have hit upon a solution. The one-child policy. That's right. Chi-Com families are punished in ways that would make Kim jong-Il blush for being over-reproductive, and our Canadian brethren are just amazed that the civilized world has been slow to adopt this policy. To make matters worse, this issue has "crossed the radar screen" of CNN's Jack Cafferty who brought it to the Situation Room late last week.

Do we look like fools or what? Here we sit with egg-foo-yung on our faces while the Chinese population in 40 years drops by two-thirds! They will voluntarily kill off two-thirds of their population just save the polar bears! Here all this time we thought they were monsters just for running their own people down with tanks and infantry. And all we do is complain that they are not stopping the use of oil and coal and not spending billions to grow ethanol, erect wind-turbines. Oh, wait, only the conservative Republicans are complaining. For the rest of the world, it is enough that the Chi-Coms are conducting forced-sterilization and infanticide to enforce the one-child policy and ...save the polar bears!

But I think the one-child policy will have drastic consequences for the U.S. of A. If the Chinese population drops by two-thirds, who will buy our Treasuries? Where will we get all of our cheap electronics and Happy Meal toys?

Sarah Palin; Why Not?

I've been wanting to write about Sarah Palin for a long time. Why? Well because there are many in the conservative yak-o-sphere who seem to be clinging to one issue as a rock-solid reason for opposing her further adventures in politics: stepping down as Governor of Alaska.

Now there is a template being employed here if one listens or reads carefully and it defines why this is a rock-solid reason for her disqualification. Since I have not been convinced by this template I am compelled to debunk it.

1. The reason for her stepping down is "still unexplained." This is the premise that should embarrass anyone employing this template. The only thing "still unexplained" about this issue is who developed the template. Less puzzling though still entertaining is why otherwise intelligent conservatives continue to employ it.

Unless I saw a different press conference where she announced her decision and, get this, explained why she was stepping down, it seems to me that she explained her compelling reasons for her decision:

a) It was costing the taxpayers of Alaska way too much money to answer the endless parade of nuisance queries, requests for information, legal motions, etc., that she as duly elected Governor was required to answer;
b) These nuisances were distracting her and her administration from performing the job that Alaskans elected her to do and that she was compelled to do under the state's constitution.
c) Finally these distractions were not serving the interests of Alaska or its citizens but were a hold-over from a twisted Republican presidential campaign that continues to define the liberal-conservative animus.

2. She is a quitter. If the reasons (written in plain English above) make Sarah Palin a "quitter" then I suppose that George Washington was also a quitter for resigning his commission after the Revolution when, at a point in America's infancy, an iconic personality and leader of the only legitimate armed forces, Washington could very well have assumed power and ruled as a dictator. Instead, Washington acted in what he rightly saw as America's best interests, placing the future of the new Republic above that of his own career.

3. She quit just so she could make a gazillion bucks on the lecture circuit. This from "conservatives"! Why any so-called conservative would begrudge someone, even a liberal, the chance to make a better life for themselves and their family, without hurting anyone or breaking any laws, is beyond me. Perhaps one of you "conservatives" out there can 'splain it to me, real slow and using small words.

And this is the template used by the still-hinged, the reasonable thinkers and writers. This week the National Journal published its latest "Insider" polls in which the staff ask a gaggle of supposed insiders of each party a handful of "If-you-could-be-any-animal..." type questions and come up with...something to publish. One of the questions was who in your party would you most like to see muted.

Two of the four top vote-getters were Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. Others these insiders would mute include Rep. Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck! Of the 85 people named as the Republican "political insiders" I have heard of maybe five. By comparison, I have heard of more of the Democratic political insiders. And I think I have found the source of the still-unexplained- reason-for-Sarah-Palin's-resignation-as-Governor talking points.

Apologies to the FCRCC

I have never been happier to announce to the world that I was wrong. My sources now tell me that the Frederick County Republican Central Committee has not indicated that it was favoring one candidate over another to complete the term of Delegate Weldon who is expected to retire.

The cellphone connection, noise on the MARC train and quite possibly my readiness to believe the worst of the GOP following the NY-23 debacle, led me to the conclusion I posted last weekend.

And while I don't live in either New York's 23rd district nor Maryland's 3b, the activities of the local GOP in both places concern me and should concern all Republicans. Local politics is becoming less and less local anymore as elected officials are considering more legislation that affects an ever broadening constituency.

It is indeed unfortunate that we cannot sit by and let local politics play out. We all have a stake in MD-3b, now, as we do in all state legislative and congressional districts. So I hope that the Frederick County GOP selects the conservative candidate to represent Frederick County and all of Maryland in the General Assembly.