Archive for the ‘The Good of the Order’ Category

Many good potential Republican candidates for the 2012 presidential election are beginning to attract attention. Some of my favorites are, in alphabetical order:

Mike Huckabee, making his second run for president, has experience as a Minister, Educator, Author of several best selling books, televangelist, television station owner and producer, and was a conservative Lieutenant Governor and Governor of Arkansas, a highly Democratic state, is an ABC Radio Commentator, and hosts a talk news show on Fox News Channel. He has very strong conservative stands on economic and social issues, respects the Constitution, and is deeply patriotic.

Jon Huntsman, Jr. is the son of a billionaire industrialist and philanthropist. He served as CEO of the Huntsman Corporation, a successful businessman and philanthropist, served in three Republican presidential administrations, as Governor of Utah, and is currently the US Ambassador to China. He has very strong conservative stands, respects the Constitution, and is deeply patriotic.

Sarah Palin, candidate for vice president in the last election and a cultural icon, TV reporter, author, business woman, commercial fisherman, served as city council and mayor, Governor of Alaska, and has starred in a documentary TV series on Alaska. She tackled corruption in state government, and even within her own party. Young, brash, quick on her feet, she has gained a strong following as well as many detractors. She is conservative both socially and economically, respects the Constitution, and is deeply patriotic.

Mitt Romney, making his second run for president, is the son of the multi-term Governor of Michigan, has served as a lay minister, is a highly successful business man, and was brought in as chairman of the US Olympics to salvage them from scandal and financial ruin, served as conservative Governor of highly Democrat Massachusetts. He has very strong conservative stands on economic and social issues, respects the Constitution, and is a deeply patriotic American.

Allen West, currently a freshman congressman from Florida, is a Career US Army Officer, who grew up in Atlanta Georgia in a military family. His father served in WW2 and made a career of the military, his mother was a civilian employee of the Marine Corps, and his brother, also career military, served in Viet Nam. He is recipient of valorous and meritorious service decorations including a bronze star. He has taught high school history and college ROTC. He is a social and fiscal conservative, and is passionately patriotic.

There are other good people out there, but these are the ones that I favor. In this post I will begin evaluating candidates and end up with a ranking of most favored to least, starting with the two candidates from the 2008 primary:

Huckabee vs. Romney. On issues, these two are almost identical, so either one of them would be a good choice for conservative voters. While I like Huckabee’s stand on issues, I have doubts about his character. I was very disappointed at his attacks on Romney’s religion during their presidential run.

Huckabee is trying to make an issue of the Massachusetts Healthcare bill. Health care is not a federal responsibility. Whether a state will provide healthcare and how they will choose to do is a state issue, and if the citizens of a state want to create a program, it is their prerogative to do so.

I have been put off by Huckabee’s apparently deceitful use of statistics to attack Romney on healthcare. First he notes that Massachusetts has the highest health care premiums in the country since Romney signed health care into law as Governor; this is not a lie, but it is deceitful, because that state already had the highest premiums of any state before the law was passed. Second he used statistics in to show that state health care costs had increased from 16 percent to 35 percent after the law was passed; again technically not a lie, but the law was passed in 2006 and the 16 percent figure is from 1990 – the cost of national health care rose nearly 300% during that period, yet Massachusetts increase was only 220%, so was considerably less than the national increase during that period. He sources this from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Association, yet that organization says the costs “have been relatively modest and well within initial projections… the health care costs are not a problem” and the program is “a great success.”

Beyond the mudslinging approach that Huckabee has chosen, I give Romney the edge on meaningful leadership experience. While both have been governor, Massachusetts has double the population of Arkansas. Romney won two elections there running on a ticket of fiscal conservatism because the tax burden and state budget were in a state of near disaster. He turned the state around reducing programs, eliminating waste, balancing the budget, and initiating private insurance based healthcare without increasing taxes.

On the matter of electability, consider some more differences between the two states. While both states are majority-Democrat states, Massachusetts Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1 and are among the most liberal of states – For the last dozen or so elections they have gone Democrat; whereas Arkansas has voted Republican in the last three presidential elections. The voters in Arkansas are conservatives, both socially and fiscally. Romney based on his fiscal performance was reelected to a second term in a state that a conservative should not have a chance.  He was elected based on performance.  He has proven he is highly electable. So my rating so far:

1. Romney
2. Huckabee

In my next post, I will compare Huntsman, Palin, and West with Romney and Huckabee.

For decades Americans have gotten vaccinations, now this practice is being challenged. It all began when an English surgeon, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, publishing a paper in The Lancet, the world’s leading peer-reviewed medical Journal. He claimed in a clinical study of twelve autistic children that their condition was caused by inoculation of MMR (the combined vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella), asserting that it would be safer to give this as three separate vaccines administered at different times.

When it came out that Dr. Wakefield had, 1) falsified his findings to support his hypothesis, and 2) had developed and was marketing his own measles vaccine and stood to profit substantially by a ban on MMR, The Lancet conducted a deep peer review of Dr. Wakefield’s paper and renounced his claims and retracted his paper.

The UK National Health Service investigated and found that there was no evidence of a link between MMR and autism. In the United States, the National Academy of Sciences conducted their own investigation and said there was no evidence that MMR had anything to do with autism in children. Finally the General Medical Council, the medical licensing agency of the United Kingdom, conducted an investigation, and found a long list of violations including unethical medical practice on children, falsifying medical records, and that he had acted with dishonesty and irresponsibly. He no longer works at the Royal Free Hospital.

In a fever of sensational media reporting Wakefield became a celebrity in England. Eerily similar to the way the media propagandized global warming, they did the same with anti-vaccine disinformation from Wakefield. The myth spread around the world, becoming an actual movement which is growing in the United States.

One of the things you can find repeated by anti-vaccine websites and bloggers is that vaccines have done nothing to reduce disease, that while disease, as well as death by disease, has diminished over the last century it would have happened anyway. They attempt to prove this by statistics showing the trend for reduction of disease has gone down at the same rate before vaccines as after. This is simply not true.

First we should expect a decrease in the spread of disease, the severity, and the death rate as a natural consequence of better medical understand, increased sanitation, and improved patient treatment. For example, prior to the first measles vaccine, most of the deaths from that disease were actually from bronchial-pneumonia; becoming better at avoiding and treating that side effect of measles, reduced the death rate.

As early as the American Revolution soldiers were given a crude vaccination from recovering victims when the doctor would scrape some of the blisters of small pox and work the fluids into cuts on the arms of uninfected soldiers, giving them a mild case of the disease and leaving them immune in the future. These and other early vaccines, while not as effective as modern, still greatly reduced spread of disease and severity of new cases.

In addition to these early attempts at vaccination and improvement of medical knowledge and practice, early vaccines have contributed to all but eliminating measles and other common childhood disease. Some of the anti-vaccine people will tell you there was no vaccination before 1950, however:
• In 1920 a measles serum was made from the blood of patients recovering from measles. It provided some resistance to the disease for inoculated children, though it was not completely effective. In those that did contract the disease it reduced the severity.
• As girls were vaccinated and later as women nursed their children, the children received increased resistance to the disease.
• The first actual measles vaccine was invented in 1950. These early vaccinations contributed to the reduction in disease through those decades.
• In 1963 the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine came into usage.

Prior to 1963 the US experienced between 3 and 4 million cases of measles per year. By 1983 the number of cases per year had dropped to 1,497. During the middle eighties people began to resist vaccinations and between 1989 and 1991 an epidemic spread in the US in which there were over 55,000 cases and 123 deaths; one half of these cases and one half of the deaths were children under the age of five. In 2008 there were 140 cases, largest number since 1996, and of these, 127 had not been vaccinated.

The anti-vaccine movement has taken hold in the United States, based on false information and flawed science. Since the advent of vaccines for childhood disease the lives that have been saved number in the millions; the severity of childhood disease has been greatly reduced. It is a grave mistake to deny your child this protection. It is a great disservice to your community as well.

I saw a political cartoon today that has Patrick Henry saying, “Give me liberty or give me civility.” The apparent point being that civility is a limit on liberty. There is a saying that people in the old west tended to be rather polite, because everybody was armed; to the degree that is true, people voluntarily limited the offensiveness of their speech as a matter of prudence. The reality is that anything that governs any action is a limit on liberty, which is why the Founding Fathers held the idea of limited government as a basic tenet of the foundation of our republic.

There is a balance that should be maintained between complete freedom to say and behave in any way a person chooses and in civility and polite behavior. Politeness and civility come from a person’s upbringing and the social culture of society.

When I was a child, in the 1950’s, society was considerably more polite than it is today, not only in speech, but in grooming, dress, and general behavior. Men were careful of their personal appearance, were chivalrous, tipping their hats (everyone wore a hat), stepping aside to allow others to pass on the sidewalk, holding doors for women, children, and the elderly, and watching their language in public.

The big change to this came from the younger members of my generation in the late sixties and seventies. Inspired by left-leaning professors, it started with college students who refused to honor the draft, developed into opposition to the Viet Nam war; running counter to traditional patriotic support of our soldiers during time of war. This bloomed into the hippy era, drug culture, free love, abortion rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, and a general anti-establishment philosophy. They rose up in a mass rebellion against pretty much every social and moral more of the time.

From the close of World War II, the Soviet Union was very actively working to foment this type of unrest through agents and contacts in the American Communist Party, the Socialist Party, labor unions, the universities, and the media. These have elevated extremism to mainstream politics via left wing groups from followers of Alinsky, SDS, Acorn, and various other “community organizations” and radical groups.

The McCarthy hearings of the early fifties identified some of this activity, but concentrated most on the film industry, where they were fairly successful in disarming that propaganda effort. The irony of the Soviet success in placing socialist plants and creating civil unrest was that, while they ended up succeeding beyond their original hope, it did not cause a push for Soviet style communism, but instead a push toward greater liberty; almost, but not quite, an anarchy type of freedom.

There were some very good things that came from all this. Freedom of speech and expression were given a greater emphasis than ever before. Women gained equality in the workplace and a greater say in the political and civic arena. Citizens became openly hostile toward public corruption and cronyism. Industrial pollution and toxic waste has been reduced by probably 90%.

Business has been changed from the type X labor/management conflict model to a more win/win approach. Families have switched from a rigid patriarchal style, to more of a partnership with greater parental involvement with children. All these are examples of the good that came out of this period of unrest.

However, there were almost an equal number of bad things that came from this period; it was a sort of a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” situation. The polite civility of our parent’s generation didn’t completely disappear, but it was badly damaged and greatly reduced.

The use of slang, poor grammar, and of aggressive, offensive, and threatening language greatly increased. Self-discipline and personal accountability have been replaced with selfish hedonism and victimization. The concept of earning respect was replaced with deserving respect. Our children have been raised to believe that competing is bad, and winning isn’t important; everybody deserves the same reward regardless of personal effort and performance.

Political correctness has created a society unable to address differences between cultures, races, or other social distinctions, while at the same time destroying the concept of the American social “melting pot.” We now have Afro-, Hispano-, Asian-, etc. Americans who believe the culture and values of their homeland or racial group is more important than their identity as Americans. We have inadvertently created a new type of segregation.

So in addition to the many good things, the history of the Baby Boomers and their children has created all kinds of bad fall-out. Examples are extremely high rates of birth out of wedlock, huge numbers of abortions, huge numbers of single parent families, widespread use of drugs, illogical environmental and social laws, great loss of heavy industry, tremendous growth in government and the taxes required to support it, and a less civil, more crude society.

A second irony is the left accusing the right of using violent rhetoric when the use of extreme aggressive violent language, hyperbole, rhetoric , and imagery has been an invention and mainstay of the left; they are now accusing a much more mild right, in particular the Tea Party and talk radio, of abusing freedom of speech with excessive use of violent language. For any liberal to make such an accusation is not only ironic, but also hypocritical.

Personally, I would like for people on all sides of the political spectrum to avoid aggressive language and instead endeavor to express their ideas and opposition with more accuracy and less emotion. I don’t think this will really happen, because the left is steeped in the concept of using every crisis to drive an emotional following to a loud attack on their opposition.

I recently stated that I dislike seeing the Republicans “playing nice” with the Democrats; and I definitely feel that way. I think the Republicans need to respect the right of the Democrats to their opinions, but I also think Republicans need to strongly counter those damaging and anti-American ideas.

Modern politics is more clearly than ever aligned between not just conservative and liberal, but right and wrong. The conservatives are simply right, and the liberals are simply wrong, and there is nothing in that to compromise. I would rather see congress unable to ever pass another law than to pass one more law that will hurt our country.

An example of left-wing civility

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU? – IT MEANS INFLATION…. EVERYTHING THAT YOU BUY IS MORE EXPENSIVE.

You can prepare now – To Save Money on Gas
!.) First of all, ignore the rumor that filling up early in the morning is a good idea. The minuscule amount of extra gas in your car is basically immeasurable. There are many better tips out there to save on fuel costs.

2.) One of the easier ways to save on gas is to SLOW DOWN!!! Once a vehicle reaches a speed of 60 miles per hour on the highway, it is estimated that every 10 miles per hour over this speed, you can lose 2 – 3 miles per gallon (this is even worse in SUVs ad large trucks that are less aero-dynamic). Driving 60 instead of 70 may not seem like much, but on a lengthy commute, saving 2 – 3 miles per gallon can really add up. Especially if you drive this commute every day.

3.) Also, in relation to speed, acceleration can play a big part. Every time you put the petal to the metal, you are wasting gas. Slowing down when accelerating is a huge key to saving money, especially in city driving. Also, if you think you are getting to your destination faster by flooring it and passing one or two cars, you are wrong. All you are doing is endangering yourself and others, and wasting gas.

4.) Another tip I can give to save money on gas is to plan ahead to limit your trips. If you know you are running out of groceries, like milk, do not drive home and then go to the store. Try and stop on your way home to buy the essentials. Even if you have to pay an extra 50 cents for a gallon of milk, the money you would spend to drive home, then drive again to the grocery store, plus wear and tear on your vehicle, costs you much more.

5.) If public transportation is available for you to take to and from work, take it. The small amount of money you pay to ride public transportation is much less than what you would spend driving your own vehicle, wear and tear, gas, etc. Also, carpooling is never a bad idea if it is feasible for you.