Thursday, May 21, 2009

Funny and Serious

Kathleen linked to Polk's second "hastily made Cleveland Tourism video" here. (BTW, it seems that Eminem is Detroit's LeBron James.)



I know this is several weeks old, but I thought about it yesterday when my Real Estate agent gave me some hard numbers. The population of the City of Cleveland is down to about 350,000. There are enough housing units for 1 million. Conclusion? Not the best place to invest in rental property. This city is basically dying.

Of course people are moving to the suburbs, West, East and South. One of my favorite letters to Cleveland Magazine was from someone with whom I worked for a time, you can read it here.

I am writing in response to your Slavic Village article (“Can Anyone Save Slavic Village?” November 2007). My parents raised us in Erie, Pa., to believe that Cleveland is the greatest city (and Pittsburgh sucks, of course). So, when I graduated from college two years ago, I moved here. I still love Cleveland, but I have a lot of questions for the mayor. How does sticking a $425,000 price tag on a condo in Ohio City get rid of crime in the area? How can construction crews put up a new interstate in one night, but Euclid Avenue has been a mess for two years? Why do we feel that we have to move to the suburbs? And my biggest problem —where are all the 20-somethings? They all moved. This city could easily be great, but the politics seem so backward. Maybe we need more stories like the Slavic Village one to get the message across that action needs to be taken, or, in 30 years, nobody will be left here except the people who can’t get out.

This young lady is not some type of raging ideologue of any kind. She's what I would consider a very normal, average, young professional who works for a big company with a local office. The answer to all her questions is a word in her letter, about smack in the middle, and it is "crime".

Ann Coulter's Modest Proposal

Speaking of Laura Ingraham, I remember when I used to listen to her show almost every day she'd often ask abortion supporters, "If there is a right to abortion then why don't we celebrate it like our other rights? For example, Bill Clinton said abortion should be 'safe, legal and rare'. We don't want free speech to be a right rarely exercised, so why abortion?"

The answer is obvious. Abortion is so horrible that even it's defenders have to euphemize the act with phrases like "reproductive rights" and "the right to choose" and scurry away from any direct talk about the actual thing. It's no wonder that both Pew and Gallup are now reporting that the public is becoming even more disenchanted with this "right". My speculation is that it might be an effect of President Obama overplaying his radical abortion cards. After all, a lot of people "in the middle" voted for Obama and they want him to be "in the middle" on this issue. And he is most decidedly not, as can be demonstrated by his policy decisions.

Anyway, enter Ann Coulter with her new sarcastic column where, as usual, she takes the rhetoric about 5 or 6 notches up the incendiary scale:

How about for next year's graduation ceremony Notre Dame have an abortionist perform an abortion live on stage? They could have a partial-birth abortion for the advanced degrees.

According to liberals, the right to kill babies was enshrined by the Founding Fathers in our Constitution -- and other constitutional rights are celebrated in public.

The right to bear arms is honored in 21-gun salutes, turkey shoots, Civil War re-enactments, firearms demonstrations and, occasionally, at Phil Spector's house.

Ouch.

The right to petition the government for redress of grievances is celebrated at political rallies, tea parties, marches, protests and whenever Keith Olbermann has a fight with his cat.

The free exercise clause is observed in church services, missionary work, peyote-smoking Indian rituals, and for a few days after every time Bill Clinton gets caught having an extramarital affair.

Viva Viagra, I guess.

So instead of inviting a constitutional lawyer to yammer on about this purported constitutional right, why not show it being practiced?

How about a 21-vacuum hose (D&C) salute? Maybe have the Notre Dame marching band form a giant skull-piercing fork? How about having the president throw out the ceremonial first fetus, like on opening day in baseball? I'm just brainstorming here, folks -- none of this is written in stone.

Being such a prestigious institution, Notre Dame could probably get famed partial-birth abortion practitioner George Tiller to do the demonstration at next year's graduation. Obama could help -- inasmuch as Tiller the abortionist is a close friend of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

This is a "constitutional right" like no other.

This might be a little rough to hear for the pro-abortion crowd or for those with sensitive souls, or stomachs, but the original Modest Proposal is read by modern-day high-school students. So try to give it some time to lose its shock value.

She goes on:

Even its supporters are embarrassed by the exercise of this right. They won't practice the right in public -- they won't even call abortion by its name, preferring to use a string of constantly changing euphemisms, such as "reproductive health" and "choice."

It would be as if gun owners refused to use the word "gun" and the NRA's motto were, "Let's all work together to keep hunting safe, legal and rare."


Liberals were awestruck by Obama's statesmanlike speech at Notre Dame, but whatever he says about abortion is frothy nonsense because we're not allowed to vote on abortion policy in America. If it's a "constitutional right," we can no more vote on abortion than we could vote on free speech.

With Roe v. Wade, abortion supporters ripped the issue out of the democratic process -- limb from limb, you might say -- and declared their desired outcome a "constitutional right." They have hysterically defended that lawless decision for the last quarter-century.

All of Obama's soothing words about joining hands and not demonizing one another are just blather as long as that legal monstrosity remains the law of the land.

Yeah, I'm getting a little bit tired of being told I'm not allowed to be passionate about opposing smashing babies skulls and sucking out their brains. If that is part of a "tired, worn out rhetoric" as Obama is always claiming then maybe "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty I'm free at last!" is getting a little stale as well. Obviously, neither is out-of-date because truth is timeless.

Showing his open-mindedness, Obama asked, "How does each of us remain firm in our principles ... without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?" (What do I have to do to get you murderers and you non-murderers to shake hands and be friends?)

A good start would be letting us vote.

Liberals can be all sweet reason as long as their preference for abortion on demand is lyingly called a "constitutional right," immutable to the tiniest alteration by the voters.

In the minuscule areas where abortion policy can be affected, Obama has shown his passion for compromise by always taking the most extreme pro-abortion position.

On his third day in office, Obama overturned the "Mexico City Policy," which prohibited U.S. taxpayer money from being spent on overseas organizations that perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.

Obama has filled his administration with Planned Parenthood veterans and friends of partial-birth abortionists.

Voting on this issue at a state level has got to me the scariest nightmare imaginable to the pro-aborts. To me, this is the essence of modern American liberalism: going on about "coming together" and having an agreement at all costs while with your actions you disrespect absolutely everything about the opposing view. In reality, all the president's speechifying is worthless to explain his radical stubbornness on the abortion issue. Obama knows abortion is indefensible, so he should really just go back to his old standby: "I won." And continue to suppress voting in any way possible.

As an Illinois state senator in 2002-2003, Obama repeatedly blocked and voted against the "Born Alive Act," which would have allowed doctors to give medical care to babies who somehow survived abortions and remained alive, wholly apart from their mothers.

Even the extremist National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League declined to take a position on the bill. The same bill in the U.S. Senate passed unanimously--and that means that abortion-happy nutcake Barbara Boxer voted for it.

But Obama apparently thought it was important to affirm a woman's critical right to fourth-trimester abortions.

For you bachelors out there, there are only three trimesters to each human pregnancy.

Here's my idea for how we can "live together as one human family," as Obama proposed at Notre Dame: Go ahead, demonize pro-lifers, Obama--call us "right-wing ideologues." But just once, support one little policy that will save a single unborn child.

I suppose that when Barack Obama uses the word "family" he means it in the sense of a Sicilian Mafia family since they knock off other members who get in their way.