Fanaticism Is Such A Bore

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by Smitty

Allahpundit:

Having one of the world’s most prominent atheists admit he’s not totally sure is catnip for believers, but all he’s doing is being a conscientious skeptic.

Total certainty, in my humble, is fanaticism. The kind you encounter in sporting explosive fashion.

For all I’m deeply certain that the Jewish carpenter is actually the meaning of life, that is a spiritual conclusion. There is no closed-form, mathematical, intellectual proof of the existence of God. If such proof existed, the amount of wrangling going on would simply not occur. So even us happy little disciples of that long-ago Galilean peasant need to be really clear when we’re speaking intellectually, and Christianity is one religion among many, and when we’re speaking spiritually, and can make claims that may not pass strictly logical muster.

So let’s hear it for intellectual honesty, and follow up with a question to Dawkins about what, if anything, life means. If he’s too poor to offer a meaning for life, then the next question is why he bothers to behave as though there is some meaning. Shouldn’t barking like a dog be equally meaningful to selling books of folly?

Gaily Subverting The Will Of Maryland Voters Like Stacy McCain

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by Smitty

Joel Pollak at Big Government details the long-term strategy for the Ruling Class to subvert the will of Maryland voters:

Last September, in a speech to same-sex marriage activists in Chevy Chase, Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler revealed a plan by Democrat governor Martin O’Malley to stack the state’s highest court with judges who would, Gansler promised, rule against any referendum upholding traditional marriage.

Pack that court like you’re FDR, Marty O! Read the whole Big Government post, replete with September 7, 2011 video, wherein Maryland Attorney General Gansler detailed how any Maryland referendum to make marriage mean legally what it has meant, means, and will continue to mean in the eyes of the Almighty. Oh, wait: that video has become embarrassing to the Postmodern, false-is-the-new-true crowd, and been taken down. BigGovernment.com implies that they made a copy.

The positive rebuttal in favor of reason and meaning is building:

Supporters of traditional marriage are not waiting for state delegates or Gov. Martin O’Malley to approve the gay marriage legislation before preparing for the 2012 referendum. Pro-family advocates are already collecting petition signatures to give voters the final say in the same-sex marriage debate.
Family Research Council Chaplain Rev. Pierre Bynum, who is a Maryland resident, is very optimistic that there will be enough support for a referendum.
“There’s no question that the numbers are there to overturn this,” said Bynum in a statement Monday.

Rounding out this story is New York’s risible Senator Schumer, in The Hill:

Republicans are ginning up a debate over social issues to distract from the improving economy, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) charged Friday.

Republicans aren’t the ones starting these fights; the economy remains parked in the toilet; two bogus assertions only form a correct thought in the mind of a Leftist. Do we need to get Zeeba the Syphilitic Camel’s cousin Abzee to run against Chuck? Maybe so, maybe so.

As an opinion, I don’t care what people do in private. However, I cannot sit idly by while time-honored pillars of societal continuation like manhood, womanhood, the family, and life are variously assaulted by people who have a pattern of attacking reason in favor of corrosive contradictions. I do believe that these attempts to distort the meaning of marriage are false and part of the kulturkampf intended to reduce American Exceptionalism to a memory.

Return to Hell with your Orwellian falsehoods, ye Lefties.

Michigan: Fish Fry Friday

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WALLED LAKE, Michigan
Just popped into McDonald’s to upload a few photos quickly, with less than an hour before Rick Santorum is due to appear at the annual Lenten Fish Fry at St. William’s Church here. Just went to the church and the line of people waiting for fish dinners was out the door. There were a couple of TV satellite trucks already on the scene, and the parking lot was full.

Welcome to Walled Lake! It’s a prosperous-looking town.

The menu for the Fish Fry: $9 for a fish dinner may seem like a lot, but considering that it comes with five loaves of bread and two fish and feeds 5,000 people . . ..

This is Annie Patnaude, communication director for the Michigan chapter of Americans For Prosperity, displaying her baby bump. I stopped by the San Marino Club in Troy, scene of tomorrow’s AFP Michigan event, just to make sure I was on the media credentials list. It’s going to be a big event featuring Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbart, Rick Santorum and . . .

Well, some guy that can’t fill up a room in Detroit. It’s karma, you see. Remember that the next time you give me the bum’s rush.

Fear and Loathing in Romneyland

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Herman Cain tour bus at the American Polish Cultural Center
in Troy, Michigan, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2012

WASHINGTON, Michigan
Shortly after I arrived at Rick Santorum’s Michigan state headquarters in Troy yesterday evening, I was talking to one of his campaign workers, Joe Cella, when a volunteer walked in and said, “Hey, Herman Cain’s doing a thing with Pete Hoekstra tonight at the Polish center. We’re going to go do a lit drop.”

(“Lit drop” = passing out leaflets, etc.)

The mention of Herman Cain’s name got my attention. I inquired when and where this event would be. The American Polish Cultural Center, 2975 East Maple Road, 7 p.m. And so my plans — to the extent that I actually ever have anything worthy of being called “plans” — were instantly changed.

Before I left my sister-in-law’s house in Johnstown, Ohio, Thursday afternoon, I’d obtained three crucial bits of information:

  1. The address of Mitt Romney’s Michigan state headquarters, 33300 Five Mile Road in Livonia.
  2. The address of Rick Santorum’s Michigan state headquarters, 700 E. Big Beaver Road in Troy.
  3. The phone number of Dennis Pedrie, a senior partner in Ali Akbar‘s political consulting firm.

Dennis lives in Michigan and I’d asked Ali to see if Dennis could help find me a sofa to crash on during my trip here. More on that later. My first objective was to reach Romney HQ, and I Tweeted my itinerary as I traveled north:

  • 3:06 p.m.: On the road to Michigan, doing 70 in a 55 mph zone in OH
  • 3:27 p.m.: Just crossed Sandusky River near Bucyrus, OH
  • 4:08 p.m.: Approaching Bowling Green OH
  • 4:27 p.m.: Hello, Toledo. Goodbye, Toledo.
  • 4:54 p.m.: Lake Erie to my right? I must be in Michigan now.

At least, I think it was Lake Erie. My knowledge of Midwestern geography is limited. You’ve seen one Great Lake, you’ve seen ’em all.

Finally, I pulled up in front of the Civic Center Office Plaza in downtown Livonia, site of Romney’s Michigan HQ and, as I was walking toward the entrance, two guys came walking out, each carrying stacks of Romney yard signs. “Is the office still open?” I asked, because it was now after 5 p.m. Yeah, they said, go on in.

The Romney office is on the second floor, and I walked right in. On the wall beside the entrance, there were a number of what looked like children’s drawings — as if a junior high school had a “Draw a Mitt Romney Campaign Poster” contest — and in the foyer was a table with pamphlets, bumper stickers, etc. Turning the corner, I beheld the phone-bank room, with six or seven volunteers working the phones.

A lady at one of the back tables spotted me and came forward to greet me. Just as I shook her hand and started to introduce myself, however, my cell phone began ringing in the pocket of my overcoat.

“Excuse me,” I said to the lady, and looked at the phone to see who was calling: Mike Rogers of Granite Grok.

“I need to take this call,” I told the Romney volunteer lady, and retreated to the foyer area to talk to Mike. He was calling from an airport, about to board a flight back to New Hampshire, and said he’d been reading my campaign-trail blogging. As I was talking to him, however, a couple of young guys came out of a back office in the Romney headquarters, and I overheard one of them mutter the phrase “Santorum blogger.”

Busted.

By the time I got off the phone with Mike, one of the young Romney guys was standing there in a polite-but-serious posture. The dude looked like he might have played linebacker in high school. A brief conversation ensued, which I summarized on Twitter:

5:39 p.m.: Folks at Romney Michigan HQ recognize me, invite me to leave. Must be the hat.

Continue reading Fear and Loathing in Romneyland →

Sarah Palin Placing The Value Of Human Life Above A Book?

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by Smitty

Via Marooned in Marin, we have Sarah Palin, on FaceBook, pointing out that the Afghan Army can apologize for the death of two Americans:

Obama apologizes for the inadvertent Koran burning this week; now the U.S. trained and protected Afghan Army can apologize for killing two of our soldiers yesterday.

Gosh, Sarah, does that mean our President, and, by extension, our country is supposed to be something more than a doormat?

Crazy talk! No wonder that woman is so completely unsuitable for the Presidency.

Jeff Quinton, My Blog Buddy

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Waaaay back when, before such a thing as “blogs” existed, back in the day of 3200-baud dial-up modems, when I was still working at a small-town Georgia newspaper, I became an online acquaintance of Jeff Quinton.

A native South Carolinian, Jeff always had a nose for news and frequently had the inside scoop on the bizarre internecine wrangling of Palmetto State politics. After I moved to D.C., Jeff kept sending me tips by e-mail, and eventually developed his own Web site, Backcountry Conservative, one of the first blogs I ever read — before I even knew what a “blog” was. If you’ve been reading Michelle Malkin’s site a while, you may recognize Jeff’s name, as for example in a August 2004 post:

Jeff Quinton is liveblogging the crash of one Russian airplane south of Moscow and the disappearance of another between Moscow and the Black Sea.

Jeff subsequently moved to Baltimore to attend graduate school, married a Maryland girl, and eventually got a job in D.C. Strange as it may seem, considering that I’ve known Jeff since the mid-1990s, I didn’t actually meet him until 2006. When Donkey Cons was published and I spoke at an event at the Capitol, Jeff attended and afterwards joined my family and me for dinner at Tortilla Coast.

Nowadays, Jeff blogs at The Quinton Report, and yesterday put up a post about some of his recent travails: His wife got laid off from her job; shortly thereafter, they learned she’s pregnant; and just last week, his father was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

What should you do? Go hit Jeff’s tip jar — I did.