The lower half of the Fairfax High School auditorium was full, as just over 400 delegates from the various districts met. The population of the county is over a million, and votes +20D, but that is no excuse for failure to participate, especially for State-wide contests.
Proceedings opened just ahead of 0930 with prayer and parliamentary flourishes. Springfield Supervisor Herrity gave a keynote; County Chairman candidates spoke, including incumbent Katie Gorka (husband Sebastian present also). Voting was orderly. Various other local and State candidates, including November hopefuls. We heard from Senatorial primary candidates:
The reason for my presence (not having had bandwidth for the Fairfax GOP since the Tea Parties (or blogging, for that matter)) came in the form of the second keynote: Virginians for Fair Maps, whose server appears to have been slashdotted at the moment.
Not unlike what happened to Winsome Sears last November in the Gubernatorial race. The victor was someone who, at the risk of hyperbole, seems like she fell out of Revelation Chapter 17.
Finn Lee spoke in lieu of Mike Young against the 21Apr referendum.
Tazwel County submitted a lawsuit. VA Supreme Court allowed both the case and the referendum to continue. Nice double bind: if the measure fails on 21Apr, VA Supreme Court is all “Never mind.” If the measure succeeds, “The people have spoken.” We did speak, in 2020, in favor of a non-partisan commission to do this thing, but Grabby Abby is unconcerned with these pesky details.
RNC has submitted a suit, as well.
Here is their ad:
Here is there 30sec YouTube ad:
Estimated turnout for this referendum, according to Lee, is around 20%. Polls show over half of voters are opposed, but a phone sample does not qualify as a vote.
TPUSA, he continued, is planning on knocking doors. But it’s up to everyone to get the word and the vote out. Finally, Lee cautioned against relying upon USPS to deliver anything. Put your ballot into a box or, better still, feed it into the ballot scanner on 21APR.
I left the meeting intact, which is more than can be said of the IRGC. But the Democratic Party is very much a wounded, cornered animal right now, if not as bad off as their fellow anti-Trump buddies in Iran.
We can expect the Democrats to fight tooth and nail for every last scrap of political power they can retain. 2028 is a vastly important mid-term, conceivably the “most important mid-term of our lifetimes”. Why would I trot out this tired cliche? Because the 120th Congress that gets sworn in next January will be priming the Census Bureau for the decennial census. And if that census is conducted honestly, and illegal aliens (the modern 3/5 Compromise for the Democrats) are omitted, then they stand to lose double digit seats in Congress.
Forward this post and get every Virginian who can legally cast a ballot to participate.
P.S.: Yes, I haven’t been doing much beside gag jokes on X in years. Grabby Abby in general, and this referendum in particular, are some scary stuff. Ron Wilcox pinged me to attend the meeting today. Will have to see if he’s going to do a rally or something.
The percentage of U.S. women in their 30s and 40s who are childless is rising, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau show. Some 15.3% of U.S. women aged 40 to 44 were childless in June 2014, up from 15.1% in 2012. . . .
For women in their late 30s, the rise in childlessness is sharper. Around 18.5% of women 35 to 39 were childless last June, up from 17.2% in 2012.
All told, 47.6% of U.S. women aged 15 to 44 were without children last year, up from 46.5% in 2012.
The data are the latest to show that childlessness is on the rise in the U.S. as more women (and their partners) delay marriage and childbearing.
Because fertility declines significantly for women in their 40s — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define a woman’s child-bearing years as 15 to 44 — demographers carefully watch these women to get a sense of how many children Americans are having, or not. . . .
With more women having their first child in their mid 30s, late 30s and early 40s, American families may be shrinking: The number of women aged 40 to 44 who had only one child roughly doubled between 1976 and 2014, Census said.
A more in-depth Census report on the 2012 numbers shows that, in 1976, 10% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1932-36) were childless, whereas in 2012, 15% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1968-72) were childless. An ethnic breakdown of the 2012 numbers shows important differences:
White (non-Hispanic)
0 …………………. 16.4
1 …………………. 19.2
2 …………………. 36.6
3 or more ……. 27.8
Hispanic
0 …………………. 10.0
1 …………………. 15.5
2 …………………. 28.7
3 or more ……. 44.9
Non-Hispanic white women were 64% more likely to be childless than Hispanic women, whereas Hispanic women were 61% more likely to have at least three children. Notice when you break it down this way:
White (non-Hispanic)
0 or 1 ………….. 35.6
2 or more ……. 64.4
Hispanic
0 or 1 ………….. 25.5
2 or more ……. 73.6
Considering so-called “replacement level” fertility (2 children per woman), we see that Hispanic women are 14% more likely to be at or above this level, whereas non-Hispanic white women are 40% more likely to be below replacement level. And if we look at the Census report’s data comparing U.S.-born women to immigrants, we find these numbers:
So, immigrant women on average had 16% more children, and U.S-born women were 51% more likely to be childless. Now let’s break down the numbers by educational achievement:
Not a high school graduate
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.6
Childless ………………………….. 11.6%
High-school dropouts, on average, had 44% more children than women who had college diplomas. Childlessness was 72% more common for college graduates than for high-school dropouts.
If you’ve studied population demographics, you realize that trends like these generally take decades to develop, and that finding cause-and-effect correlations is difficult. That is to say, people’s beliefs developed in childhood, their behavior as teenagers and the prevailing cultural trends in their young adult years will have an effect on whether they eventually have children. Today’s 40-year-old woman was born in 1975 and turned 18 in 1993, so if she is childless now, this necessarily implicates her choices and behaviors in the 1990s, as well as the belief system with which she was raised in the 1970s and ’80s.
Women’s behaviors are necessarily affected by men’s behaviors. If men are avoiding marriage and fatherhood — as Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike documents — it will be more difficult for women to become wives and mothers. It may also be the case that men who might want to be husbands and fathers lack either the social skills or the financial resources needed to attract wives. Alternately, we may theorize that a general social climate of distrust and hostility between men and women make marriage and parenthood more problematic.
Studying demographic trends involves the complex interaction of multiple variables over time. However, it is important to note this: People make trends and not the other way around. That is to say, the individual is always free to act independently of the larger social trend, to swim against the demographic stream. You can make your own high-fertility subculture within a low-fertility society. My being a father of six is the result of beliefs and choices in the same way that other people become childless as the result of their own beliefs and choices.
People want to “fit in,” to have the approval of their peers and of the societ around them, and so being “conformed to this world” is the usual way of life. There is a prejudice I call “middle-classness,” which encourages young people to believe that they must have the credentials and accoutrements of middle-class life — college education, professional career, new cars, home ownership — or else be considered failures. This kind of concern for social status is perfectly understandable, yet in our striving for status (and encouraging our children to do the same) we can easily succumb to the kind of mentality that has produced the trend toward childlessness manifested in the latest Census Bureau report.
Did all these women decide to be childless? No.
If you could go back to 1993 to interview the 18-year-old who today is a childless 40-year-old, she likely would say she wanted to be a mother “someday,” under certain circumstances. However, those circumstances did not arise and thus “someday” never arrived.
The Contraceptive Culture encourages women (and men) to believe that fertility is entirely a matter of personal choice, but any fertility specialist will tell you this is a myth. The woman who has not become a mother by age 30 will have a significantly higher risk of experiencing infertility if and when she does try to become pregnant. And even if she has no medical problems with her reproductive health, the woman who delays motherhood past 30 will on average have fewer children in comparison to women who have their first child before they are 30.
Fertility delayed is fertility denied. Demographics is ultimately a matter of arithmetic, although the numbers involved represent human lives and the choices we make based on our own beliefs.
“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)
The state of Ohio will lose two congressional seats thanks to the latest U.S. Census figures, and liberal stalwart Dennis Kucinich is worried his seat is on the chopping block.
In an e-mail to supporters Wednesday, the seven-term Democratic congressman and two-time presidential candidate says the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature is likely to eliminate his heavily Democratic Cleveland-area district.
But Kucinich says he’s not just going to stand by while that happens.
“I will not wait until a new Ohio map is produced to begin this crucial discussion of the consequences of congressional redistricting,” writes Kucinich. “I will not wait until the Ohio Legislature produces a new map to start thinking of the options. The question will not be: Who is my opponent? The question will be: Where is my district? Seriously.”
Hey, remember when right-wingers were worried about the Census?
Teen birth rate hits record low
As the nation continued to struggle in the recession in 2009, the rate at which U.S. women are having babies continued to fall, pushing the teen birth rate to a record low, federal officials reported Tuesday. . . .
The overall drop pushed the fertility rate to about 2.01, a 4 percent drop from 2008. That is the largest decline since 1973 and put the total fertility rate below the level needed to sustain the size of the population for the second year after being above the replacement rate in 2006 and 2007 for the first time in 35 years.
That last part explains why this is bad news: The United States is one of the few industrialized democracies in the world that is near “replacement level” fertility (average 2.1 lifetime births per woman). Fertility in the rest of the developed world is deep into a disastrous demographic implosion — Portugal, Spain, Germany, Greece, Italy and Japan are among the nations with total fertility rates below 1.5. This is a long-term trend that has continued so long that, in most of those nations, it is likely irreversible. (Mark Steyn wrote about the economic and geopolitical consequences of this in his book, America Alone.)
The U.S. total fertility rate fell below “replacement level” for the first time in 1972 and reached an all-time low (1.74 births per woman) in 1976. The rate gradually increased from there but did not again reach replacement level until 2006. This demographic recovery was mainly due to a large influx of Hispanic immigrants with higher birth rates — and, most notably, with higher teen birth rates.
The two phenomena are inseparable. Any population group that demonstrates higher overall fertility will also tend to have higher teen birth rates and, by the obverse principle, policies aimed at reducing teen births will suppress overall fertility. Meanwhile, however, the same idiots who think that the record-low teen birth rate is good news are unable to explain why unmarried births are increasing.
The latest Census report is not good news for the Party of Baby-Killing and Barebacking.
“This is about as bad as it could get for Democrats, and as good as it could get for Republicans,” Dave Weigel explains. “The Democratic caucus in the House is about to see internal warfare in the rust belt and northeast, as their members are forced into Thunderdome battle for the diminished number of seats.” Dave lays out the winners and losers of the upcoming House re-apportionment:
WINNERS: Texas +4, Florida +2, Arizona +1, Georgia +1, Nevada +1, South Carolina +1, Utah +1, Washington +1 LOSERS: New York -2, Ohio -2, Illinois -1, Iowa -1, Louisiana -1, Massachusetts -1, Michigan -1, Missouri -1, New Jersey -1, Pennsylvania -1
Read the rest of Dave’s article because he points out that it’s actually worse for Democrats than it looks from numbers alone. In part because of the mid-term wipeout, eight of those states (five winners, three losers) have Republican governors and Republicans in complete control of the legislature, whereas Democrats only exercise such total power in two states (Illinois and Massachusetts), both of which are losers.
This means that the odds of Democrats recapturing the House of Representatives before 2023 are roughly equal to the chances of Andrew Sullivan siring a baby with Ellen DeGeneres. And because lame-duck Democrats couldn’t pass the DREAM Act — under which four semesters at a community college would have made Khalid Sheikh Mohammed eligible for citizenship* — they won’t get any help from their plan to quickly transform illegal aliens into Democratic voters.
* A mild exaggeration.
Of course, because the Electoral College is affected by reapportionment, this is also not good news for Obama’s re-election campaign, which is why he’s handing Republicans a knife and inviting them to cut their own throats:
President Barack Obama told Congressional Hispanic Caucus members Tuesday that he’ll renew his push for comprehensive immigration reform in 2011 — even though such an effort would face even longer odds in a Congress where Republicans control the House.
It’s never safe to underestimate the stupidity of Republicans in Congress, but they would be breaking new frontiers of stupidity if they fall for this one.
UPDATE II: Donald Douglas blogs about the four-seat gain in Texas, where HispanicsLatinosDemocrats are trying to claim that the GOP risks a “backlash” from partisan redistricting. Because I’m fluent in Spanishliberalese, permit me to translate:
“Whatever you do, Republicans, don’t screw us over the way we’d screw you over if we had enough power to screw you over.”
Let’s hope when the GOP legislature in Texas re-draws the district lines, they remember that the Democrats sent Tom DeLay to prison for the crime of trying to help Republicans get elected.
When a Census worker was found dead in Kentucky last year, Rick Ungar proclaimed “Send the Body to Glenn Beck” and Andrew Sullivan suspected “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts.”
A U.S. Census Bureau worker has been shot and killed while working in Baltimore . . .
Baltimore police and Census officials say Spencer Williams was shot several times inside his car on June 7 after he gave a co-worker a ride home. . . .
Police have no suspects or motive in the slaying but say they don’t believe it was related to his work. Census officials say Williams was a team leader in charge of about 10 Census takers.
Census bureau spokesman Stephen Buckner says Williams is the eighth Census employee to have died on the job this year. The other seven were killed in car accidents. Another worker was slain off-duty in a domestic incident.
Did you catch that? Car accidents — not Glenn Beck or Michelle Bachmann — are the leading cause of death for Census workers.
Meanwhile, in a related investigation, authorities are still seeking clues in the death of Andrew Sullivan’s credibility.
Really, these Census questions have become so intrusive . . .
The lady from the Census Bureau stopped by yesterday, thanks to my personal effort to stimulate employment: Don’t fill out the mail-in form, so they have to send an enumerator to the house.
Your tax dollars at work — temporarily, at least.
Despite the concerns of Andrew Sullivan and Rick Ungar about Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck inspiring anti-Census violence, the enumerator was held hostage only long enough to pose for a picture.
Mark Krikorian offers a perfectly legal, sensible, and proper means of answering the Census Bureau’s race question. Say you’re American, if that is what you are.
Racism* is DNA-based decision making. We must oppose it, and also the data gathering that supports and perpetuates it.
