Del.icio.us Links

links for 2010-08-14

  • So what do you really want to ask Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer — and her Republican challenger, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina?

    Here's your chance to weigh in for the first primetime televised debate in the California U.S. Senate race.

    "U.S. Senate Faceoff: the Boxer-Fiorina Debate" is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 1 at St. Mary's College in Moraga — hour-long and commercial-free.

    And now, the debate sponsors — KTVU Channel 2 News, the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED are looking for questions from California voters.

    If yours is a good one, KTVU will film you — and you can pose the question yourself to the candidates. Wanna know where they stand on the economy, immigration policy, war funding, even hair? Here's your chance.
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    Go for it…

  • Continuing my slow march through responses to my gay marriage column, I want to take up two somewhat-related critiques of my argument for holding up lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a distinctive legal and cultural ideal: First, that this ideal is too essentialist, and second, that it’s too complicated.
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    Read it all
    (tags: gay_marriage)
  • So what are gay marriage’s opponents really defending, if not some universal, biologically inevitable institution? It’s a particular vision of marriage, rooted in a particular tradition, that establishes a particular sexual ideal.

    This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.
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    Read it all

    (tags: gay_marriage)
  • This is revealing: the ultimate destination of multiculturalism is platitudinous stupidity. All religions, Obama tells us, are really the same, and can be summed up in the Golden Rule. Actually, there is no religion that can be reduced to the Golden Rule, least of all Islam. Islam does not enjoin believers to do unto infidels as you would have infidels do unto you. On the contrary! Islam tells its followers to subdue infidels; to kill them; to, at best, reduce them to dhimmitude. The Golden Rule is antithetical to Islam. Here is a thought experiment: compare HADITH Sahih Bukhari [4:52:176] with the parable of the good Samaritan.

    Multiculturalism, in short, reduces its adherents (like President Obama) to a low intellectual plane. If you really think that all religions are the same, and they all exemplify the Golden Rule, then you won't understand the point of Cordoba House.
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    Read it all…..

    (tags: barack_obama)
  • The Socialist Party of America announced in their October 2009 newsletter that 70 Congressional democrats currently belong to their caucus.
    This admission was recently posted on Scribd.com:

    American Socialist Voter–
    Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA?
    A: Seventy

    Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?
    A: Eleven: John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez,
    Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez [there are 23 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of which eleven, almost half, are now members of the DSA].
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    America first?

  • President Obama is under fire after jumping into the middle of a cultural clash Friday night in favor of building a mosque near ground zero, a stance that has elevated the contentious issue to the presidential level ahead of a difficult election season for Democrats.

    Some victims' advocates and Republicans have strongly condemned Obama's support for the mosque, which would be part of a $100 million Islamic community center two blocks from where nearly 3,000 people perished when hijacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
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    A critical error in judgment

    (tags: barack_obama)
  • With tremendous uncertainty surrounding both these avenues, another strategy is emerging that would give the GOP an opportunity to deliver a more immediate blow to the health care law. Should Republicans regain control of Congress, they could theoretically use their new power of the purse to deny Obama the funding needed to administer his signature accomplishment. This prospect is already gaining steam among opponents of the law. The new group DeFundit.org has gotten more than 90 candidates and current members of Congress to sign a pledge supporting stripping ObamaCare of money.

    There are a lot of scenarios for how a defunding push could play out, especially based on whether Republicans gain control of one or both chambers of Congress. But in the end, such a strategy could result in a replay of late 1995, when a budgetary standoff led to a government shutdown.
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    Read it all.

    This will be the undoing of ObamaCare

    (tags: Obamacare)