What's Your Number?

Everybody, as a famous Mississippi resident noted, has a price.

I've heard my friends for a long time talk about how much more Jim Hood is going to get them paid. He's going to raise teacher pay, and public employee pay, and this, and that. And he'll do it by cutting grocery taxes!

(If you cut grocery taxes, property taxes go up, especially in municipalities, because that's where a lot of their funding comes from. But don't expect Jim or his media enablers to tell you that.)

So my question is: What's your price?

What's the price of being able to defend your home? Jim Hood doesn't want you to be able to do that.

What's the price of being able to defend your business from lawsuits, especially like those that Jack Phillips has had to go through?

What's the price of not giving boards and commissions over to the people who gave us this nickname?

What's the price of only defending Mississippi laws during election years when you need some pro-life cred with the "Bible thumpers?"

What's the price of watching unsolved murders continue to go unsolved just because nobody at the New York or Chicago or LA papers cares about them? Even when the crime occurred 35 miles from Jim Hood's house in Houston?

Bet you thought we forgot about that one, didn't you?

What's the price of giving power over to someone who has no problem using his office to punish his political opponents, or those of his friends?

Oh, you thought we forgot about that one too, didn't you?

So is your raise worth all those things? When you're probably getting a raise anyway, no matter who you're voting for?

Give me your number. Because you've admitted you have one. Just go ahead and say what it is.

You're Not Pro Life Unless You're Pro Big Government or Something

I see this statement a lot (or something like it). I have kind of pondered it over the last few weeks. This is mostly because it's the left's new favorite talking point to shame you into giving them whatever they want, namely expanding the welfare state.

Yeah, I'm pro-life. That doesn't mean that I love the border situation. I'm so pro-life that I don't want them killed, which I think the authors intimate all pro-life people want, though I do want an orderly and lawful immigration system that discourages the risky proposition of travelling clandestinely to the southern border from all points south using less than savory means or people. That's a pro-life position-that the law should not be so haphazardly enforced that they encourage people to risk their life in order to break them.

I'm pro-life. That means that I want an efficient, humane Department of Human Services in my state that doesn't have judges sign blank documents so that kids could be illegally taken from their parents. This is a pro-life position-that the state should not have unlimited power to simply take children from their parents. The corruption of the Kentucky Health and Family Services people did that in the above link; increasing their budget (or that of their counterpart in Mississippi) wouldn't help the issue, simply because they are abusing their power.

(An aside-in a country with a less-government worshiping press, the Kentucky story would have led the front page in every widely read paper the country-and the Clarion-Ledger too-and would have been a top story on the TV news. But alas, I had to learn about it through other means).

I'm pro-life. That means I think that your wacky ideas about vaccines being unhealthy is stupid.  I don't care if you're a hot actress from the 90s or 00's or the son of one of America's leading political families. I don't want them within a mile of a healthy child.

Yeah I'm pro-life. I donate to Crisis Pregnancy Centers in order to help women avoid the trauma of an abortion. I've donated clothing and other items to charity specifically to clothe them. I've encouraged people to adopt for years, after the example of my own family, which has 4 adopted members. Your snarky tweet or shaming article isn't going to make me change any of that behavior.

It's an old talking point on the left-"You only care about children til they're born!" But for the most part it isn't true. If it was true, I guess the opposite is true of the left-you guys only care about people on election day, since that's the only time some of them see you.

Hypocracy, the Media, and You

I've read the CL headlines.  Since Charleston, it's been non-stop.

I'm agnostic on the flag; I've told you all this.  Don't care either way because it really won't affect my life (or yours-and you know it's true in your heart of hearts, CL editorial board) in any discernible way.

("But SYMBOLISM!" cried Former Democrat Operative Sam Hall.  Symbolism being the thing that puts bread on your table, after all.  How's that article damning Steve Holland and Jamie Franks going, by the way?)

But I'm really flummoxed at some of the headlines.

The first that drew my attention was the three days that the CL hyped the "Mississippi Celebrities for Changing the Flag" ad/article/whatever.  If my memory serves, it was the same week that the Center for Medical Progress released their Planned Parenthood videos, which the media seemed to have discovered this week.  Thanks, Carly!

My thoughts went to the Planned Parenthood videos immediately.  How many of these Celebrities would put their name to a letter to defund PP?  Archie Manning, Hugh Freeze...maybe Dan Mullen?  After all, if a flag hurts your feelings, what does a person describing how they cut through a live baby's face to get to the brain FOR MONEY do to you?

(Please save me the "EDITED VIDEO" sermon.  There's nothing out of context about it, and you know it.)

The second was Steve Earle.

You may remember Steve.  Back in the 80s he was a really good, edgy, country artist.  Since about 1990, however, he's slipped into paranoia, activism, and his music has been noted more for being more political than...you know...good.  Johnny Cash warned you about this, Steve.  He even did a song about it.

For those of you under 30, he's probably more well known for CMT documentaries (do they even do those any more, or is it all reality shows? Haven't watched CMT since I discovered YouTube).  Plus a little song he did in 2002 from the perspective John Walker Lindh.  Name ring a bell?

JWL was the original American Islamist.  He'd be at home at the preschool with the non-competitive musical chairs.  Sometime around 2000, he became a member of the Taliban.

So Steve Earle has sympathy for Johnny Taliban.  You, the average American who didn't learn guitar under Townes Van Zandt and make millions from "Copperhead Road?"  No, he doesn't have sympathy for you.  Cause you think the wrong way.

I'd love some justification from the Clarion Ledger as to why anyone who disagrees with Earle is worse than the Taliban, who blew up monuments because they didn't agree with the beliefs of those who disagreed with them.  But that would require them to make a connection I'm certain they don't want to make.

Above His Pay Grade

Though I didn't get a chance to watch the Saddleback Infomercial last night, the Obama answer on abortion was particularly strange coming from the Messiah. The question of when life begins, apparently, is too complex for the Bus-Drivin' Messiah.

After all, this is a man who declared that for the first time, upon his clinching the Democrat nomination for president, that we would feed the poor, give medicine to the sick, heal the planet, and stem the rising tide of the oceans.

A simple moral judgement is above his pay grade? After that load of hooey? After the months-nay, after four years of people telling us how smart he is?

And if he can't make that judgement, isn't the best option, the safest option, to err on the side of the unborn?