Some thoughts on the news . . .

GM

My first thought upon hearing that the United Auto Workers union is going to end up owning 55% of GM and 39% of Chrysler, with Barack Obama essentially owning most of the rest, was this question:

What happens the next time Ford goes to sit down at the bargaining table with the UAW when the union has a huge vested interest in the success of Ford’s competitors? Does anybody think the union is going to bargain in good faith?

The tragic irony is that the U.S. auto makers primary problem has been the strangling kudzu of union contracts and work rules that make adaptation, efficiency and innovation impossible. It’s sort of like the Swine Flu Virus being given controlling interest in the Centers for Disease Control.

Arlen Specter

Off you go, Senator. All the best with that clinging-to-power-for-power’s-sake thing. Principles are overrated.

Specter’s about to discover that those mean conservatives who vote in Republican primaries are cuddly beanie babies compared to lefty zealots that populate Democrat primaries. He hasn’t seen real viciousness. But he’s about to. Good luck with that, too.

It was quite a weekend. Female Offspring Unit #3, a 9th-grader, was in a big musical production at school. Seussical the Musical was a boffo success but now comes the big anti-climactic, post-event letdown. Now it’s back to school-as-usual. What’s worse, we’re in those final focus-challenged weeks before school lets out for summer.

F.O.U. #2, our Senior, got back from Kenya a few weeks ago after a couple of weeks in and around Nairobi working with AIDS orphans, blind orphans, and leading worship at an African pastors conference . Now the child is saying she wants to go back and work for a year before entering college. This is the thanks you get for teaching your kids to take the Bible seriously. They end up wanting to go off to some scary, dusty place and love on unloved people instead of joining a sorority and heading for the mall. Ingrates.

F.O.U. #1 and I are talking about co-writing a book together–something for teen girls. The unexpected Paul Harvey book project put those plans on hold for a bit, but now that the book is off to the publisher, we can resume. Speaking of the book . . .

Dan Rather backed out of writing the foreword after reading the manuscript. I wasn’t surprised. Paul Harvey was pretty outspoken about liberal bias in the media and the book reflects that criticism. My co-author found a willing replacement, however. Some guy named Hannity.

We also have endorsement blurbs from Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, Mike Gallagher, and Jim Bohannon.

Here’s your Paul Harvey quote for the day:

“Americans, there’s an election going on—every day the devil votes against you, God votes for you, and you cast the deciding vote.”

Flying out to Atlanta this afternoon–right in the midst of this swine flu stuff. Part of me wonders if I should buy a surgical mask to wear in the international airport hubs of DFW and Atlanta. I won’t, of course. Praying for protection is a more reliable strategy, anyway.

But speaking of the talk of potential pandemic . . . How does it make you feel to know that your President and his teleprompter haven’t gotten around to filling the following government positions?

• Secretary of Health and Human Services
• 19 other key posts at HHS
• Head of the Centers for Disease Control
• Surgeon General

Read all about it here. And have a great day!

Up to this point I must confess I’ve had difficulty perceiving the big, tragic problem with holding jihadi terrorists in Guantanamo. But this news report has opened my eyes:

Grenade accident kills Yemen Gitmo detainee’s sons

SAN’A, Yemen (AP) — The two young sons of a Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo died when a grenade they were playing with accidentally detonated inside their home, a human rights lawyer and the detainee’s brother said Thursday.

The two boys were the sons of Guantanamo prisoner #1463, Abdelsalam al-Hilah, a businessman who was captured in Cairo in 2002 and sent to Guantanamo on charges of terrorism, said Ahmed Irman of the Hood Organization for Defending Human Rights, an organization that advocates for Guantanamo detainees in Yemen.

The children, Youssef, 11, and Omar, 10, were playing unsupervised with the grenade in a room in the house when it exploded. It is unclear why the grenade was in the house.

I see now. If this “businessman” hadn’t been held in Guantanamo, he would have been there to instruct his boys in the proper handling of hand-grenades and other high explosives. What kind of system have we created in which young Yemeni men are left to learn bomb-making on their own?

How are pizza parlors in Tel Aviv, fruit markets in Baghdad, and girls schools in Kabul going to be become scenes of Allah-pleasing carnage if we keep mentors like Mr. Al-Hilah locked up?

We must think about the children.

Today is William Shakespeare’s birthday. To mark the day I thought I’d mention something I linked to several years ago, but recent discoverers of this happy blog may have missed.

It is not widely appreciated that Shakespeare was a world class insulter. His plays contain some of the finest put downs and disses ever composed by the dark human heart. Don Rickles and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog are mere hackers compared to Bill.

A few years ago, some enterprising English Lit major decided to assemble all of the insults from Shakespeare’s works and put them in a random generating database. Thus was born . . .  the Shakespearean Insult Generator.

My brief visit there this morning produced:

Thou saucy dismal-dreaming hugger-mugger!

Thou artless ill-breeding flap-dragon!

Thou rank hasty-witted giglet!

Get over there and try it in honor of the bard before I get cranky and call you a “clouted fen-sucked death-token.” Which I would probably later regret.

I give you: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Enjoy

Here you have the suppositions and values of environmental activitsts taken to their logical endpoint. Their assumption: We humans don’t belong here and the sooner we disappear the better.

Not coincidentally, the History Channel has been re-running its “Life After People” specials the last few days. In it you see CGI depictions of what the earth would be like 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 years after a day in which all humans disappeared.

It’s basically p0rn0graphy for Greenpeace activists.

Of course, if humans did disappear tomorrow, the Earth’s well-established cycles of climate change would continue, invariably causes wide-spread habitat destruction and extinctions. As in the ancient past, natural disasters would continue to occur resulting in periodic massive-scale extinctions like the Late Devonian  extinction which wiped out 70% of all species on earth and the Permian-Triassic extinction which destroyed 96% of marine species.

Of course, in the environmentalist fantasy, none of that matters as long as no human would be around to feel guilty about existing.

Ross Douthat has some interesting thoughts over at the Atlantic blog about a discussion on what will serve as America’s unifying “civil religion” in a secular age.

Read “Theology Has Consequences.”

In researching the forthcoming book on Paul Harvey, I was deeply impressed by the writing Mr. Harvey did back in the 1950s. Here are two examples that we cite in the book. First, on the Income Tax:

But you know it was for us, the American people, to become the first in recorded history voluntarily to surrender our rights to private property? Oh, yes we did. With an innocent sounding constitutional amendment, the 16th, which says that “Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.”

And we forgot to put any limits on the extent to which we could tax ourselves. Conceivably, we could be taxed out of all private property . . . we could awaken one morning and find that the government owns the farm and the house and car and has a mortgage on the church—legally!

Historically, whenever any nation has taxed its people more than 25 percent of their national income, initiative was destroyed and that nation was headed for economic eclipse.

And here’s Paul Harvey warning us about the runaway growth of government:

At first there appears to be nothing wrong asking government to perform some extra service for you . . . but . . . if you ask government for extra services, government, in order to perform its increasing function, has to get bigger . . . right?

And as government gets bigger, in order to support its increasing size, it has to . . . what? Tax the individual more. So the individual gets littler.
And to collect the increased taxes requires more tax collectors so the government gets bigger and in order to pay the additional tax collectors it has to tax the individual more and the government gets bigger and the individual gets littler. And the government gets bigger. And the individual gets littler.

Until the government is all-powerful and the individual is hardly anything at all.

Until the government is all-powerful . . . and the people are . . . cattle.

At the risk of appearing self-serving, I must tell you there is a great deal in this book that American’s need to be reminded of at this moment in history.

The criminalization of conservatism has begun.

Michelle Malkin has the details:

Yesterday, Roger Hedgecock and the Liberty Papers posted an unclassified DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis report titled:

Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.

The “report” (PDF file here) was one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS. I couldn’t believe it was real.

More here.

Peter Kirsanow has a revealing little post about the Congressional Black Caucus’ fawning over Fidel Castro:

Useful Idiots Caucus

Excerpt:

Next time they visit the island gulag, they might notice the contrast between the number of blacks in positions of political power and the number of blacks confined in Castro’s political prisons. Should they need any explanation for the contrast, they should consider consulting Oscar Elías Biscet, the heroic black physician and winner of the 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom who has been rotting in one of Castro’s dungeons because of his tireless advocacy for basic freedoms for all Cubans.

Does Amazon’s new Kindle II herald the end of publishing as we know it?  Probably not. But Jacob Weisberg has some thoughts: Book End: How the Kindle will change the world.