Clearly the left are Aliceites. They are aficionados of Alice viewing the world through the looking glass. They want a world of nonsense, a world devoid of meaning so that everything can be molded and morphed at will into anything that appeals to temporary desires. It is called situational ethics, which are, of course, no ethics at all.

Today we have two examples of this, one in America and one in England. We’ll focus on England first.

The UK Telegraph is reporting about the new it, the new thing assuming a status of “personhood,” a genderless human. That’s right the Telegraph is purporting that a British citizen is “officially” a genderless human, neither male nor female.

Norrie May-Welby, we are told, was born a man but had a sex change operation in 1990. For a time this “person” lived as a woman. But now she-he-it has decided that, “The concepts of man or woman don’t fit me. The simplest solution is not to have any sex identification.”

And so, the Aliceites in British government decided to comply and make May-Welby an “official” person of “no specific gender.”

Just as the Brits claimed to have the first man to have a baby back in 2008, now the Brits claim to have the first genderless person. But true to their Aliceite tendencies, neither is true and both “would be what it isn’t.”

You see, the “first man to have a baby” was never a man — born a woman, period — and the first “genderless person” was born a man and is still despite the cosmetic veneer carved into his flesh.

My second story is in Washington D.C. where President Obama and his minions in Congress are trying to pass a bill that no one has voted for using the so-called process of “deeming” and the “Slaughter rule.”

Democrats can’t get enough votes for their socialist takeover of America’s healthcare system so, instead of applying the centuries old process of campaigning for a law, writing a law, and then seeing that law voted up or down by our duly elected representatives, the Democrats are peering through the looking glass to find the Aliceite way to pass a bill into law without anyone voting at all.

Just like the left in the west is making murderous Islam a protected class, just as it imagines it can create an economy by stifling business, just as these illogical nits imagine that they can destroy all history and make the world new merely by saying so, they’ve created a world where “nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.”

As the Wall Street Journal says, “We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are.” But the WSJ is only focused on U.S. politics. A wider view would find that we are all Aliceites now.

Never mind that all the other nations have their flags proudly flying above their military relief installations in Haiti. Even Croatia has its coat of arms flying outside its base. Yet not the U.S. Army. No U.S. flag flies anywhere despite that we are far and away the largest force and have supplied the most relief supplies and money to the earthquake recovery effort.

According to USAID, as of January 19, 2010 the U.S. had spent $130,864,571 on aid to the Haitian people to help them recover from the devastating earthquake. By Jan. 25 that number had already increased to $179,883,065. It is only going up from there.

So why did the Obama administration forbid flying our own flag in Haiti?

“We are not here as an occupation force, but as an international partner committed to supporting the government of Haiti on the road to recovery,” the U.S. government’s Haiti Joint Information Center said in response to a query about the flag.

If it is so important to be seen as just another member of that international force, then why are all the other nations still flying their flags? Oh, I remember now… unlike the U.S. they don’t have a president that is more comfortable apologizing for his country than being proud of it, even when it is engaged in saving lives through relief work.

As far as Obama is concerned, we should be ashamed of our nation even when we are digging children and the aged out of mounds of crumbled ruins, even when we are feeding the hungry, and administering life saving medicines — all for free mind you. Even those efforts aren’t good enough for us to be proud to fly our flag above them, apparently.

The NavyTimes.com report reveals a craven attempt by the Obama Administration to pin this no-flag decision on our troops, too. Obama’s Army flak, Colonel Billy Buckner, spokesman for Joint Task Force-Haiti — “a group representing various Obama administration agency heads” the NavyTimes.com report tells us — says that our commanders are “smart” not to fly the flag.

“Our commanders are smart and intuitively understand their mission here in Haiti, and clearly the sensitivities that come with supporting the mission,” Buckner said. A U.S. flag went up at a temporary consular station set up in the first few days on the airport tarmac, according to Charles Luoma-Overstreet, a State Department spokesman in Haiti.

“Apparently, the prime minister (Jean-Max Bellerive) saw this” and thought it appeared as if the United States were taking over the airport, Luoma-Overstreet said.

He said Bellerive said something to U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten, who agreed that flying the flag wasn’t a good idea and told the consular officials to take it down.

Notice how it went from “the commanders” being “smart” enough to understand the situation to Obama’s Ambassador to Haiti ordering the flag be removed? In other words, despite the Colonel trying to make it seem as if the commanders on the ground are all for this dearth of Old Glory, it really ends up being a political decision by Obama and his cohorts who are ashamed of America and willing to let anyone denigrate her.

Does anyone really think that PM Bellerive would have persisted in his loose observation that the U.S. was an “occupying force” amidst all the aid flowing into his country? And even if he did, so what? The aid we were supplying is obviously far more important than a cheap political maneuver by Bellerive.

Still, this shows the lack of spine Obama has when standing up to foreign criticism. Even this offhanded comment from Bellerive was enough for Obama to slight his own army and his own countrymen by removing Old Glory from sight in Haiti.

If Obama is this much of a linguini-spined sort of a leader, what will happen to us if he faces a real foreign crisis?

So, what is it all, anyway? To answer that I chatted with Glenn Reynolds and we talked about all things Tea Party. Coming down from the stomach flu as he was, we still had a lively talk.

I asked Glenn what sort of future he saw for the tea parties and he said that he was an early booster of the movement even when folks like Roger Simon thought it was all a flash in the pan and would go nowhere. “I think it is the most genuine outbreak of popular grassroots political activism in my lifetime,” Reynolds said, “and so that’s a pretty big deal and I think it’s coming to a crucial time for the country as well.”

Reynolds told me that PJTV wanted to cover the Tea Party movement because the Old Media was doing its best to ignore the whole thing. He praised PJTV as being one of the few to “put eyes on what is the biggest thing politically that’s been going on” in the nation.

One of my worries about the Tea Party movement is that it just might suffer from being too widely diffused. I asked Glenn if he thought it might suffer from not having a few central figures that can be focused upon.

Reynolds:The thing I’ve learned from the internet is that you can accomplish a huge amount with searches of popular entries and you can get more from the Internet in a period of a few weeks to a few months with people who just sort of drop whatever they’re doing and get involved than you can do in years or decades of professional organization, but I’ve also learned if you want somebody to stick on something and keep plugging, it helps to have somebody who’s paid to deliver it. And that obviously is something you won’t going to have in a grassroots organization very much.

Keeping with the question of long-term effectiveness, I asked Reynolds how long he felt the movement would remain potent?

Reynolds:I think that it’s going to last through the next election and probably through the election after and what’s going to happen after that is, you know, a lot of the grassroots enthusiasm will fade but it’s going fade and some people just find something else to do which maybe political or not. And on the other side of it, it’s going – people are going to leave the Tea Party movement and they’re going to run for office themselves, become cabinets themselves, become precinct chairman or county chairman or members of the state or national party committees and things like that. And you know, that’s what normally happens with grassroots movement if they’re successful which is that they become part of the mainstream.

But what of the supposed extremists in the Tea Party movement, I asked. Won’t that just introduce the wackos, as the left and the Old Media claims?

Reynolds: The New Left took the Democrats further away from the mainstream of the American public, its true. But I think the Tea Party is moving the Republicans more in line with the mainstream to the American Public, so it more likely to have productive effects.

There is no political movement that doesn’t fringes, but compared to the new Black Panther Party which is getting kissy face from Eric Holder, compared with Bill Ayers, compared with Bernadine Dohrn, compared with Van Jones these are people at the core of the administration Democratic party today, the Tea Party has got no fringe at all.

I pointed out that the Old Media focuses on what they portray as the Tea Party extremists, but it ignores all the extremists always in attendance at the left’s protests. There are actual communists, anarchists, radical abortionists, even animal rights and enviro terrorists but you never see these whack-jobs in the news.

Reynolds: Well, when we had the anti-war protest in 2003, 2004 with the almost sole exception of David Korn at the nation, nobody was willing to point out that those movements were organized by people who are literally, not pejoratively, literally communists. David Korn was we talked about Answer and the Workers World Party and the people who are providing the organizational infrastructure for those big marches on Washington and he wrote about in the nation and in L.A. weekly but places like Washington Post and the New York Times pretended that these are just ordinary mom-and-pop types of middle America coming down. When they don’t give that kind of a treatment to the Tea Party, but that is because they are fundamentally dishonest in their reporting.

I brought up another one of my worries for the candidates that try to rely on Tea Party groups and that is money. The sad fact is that politics means spending money. I asked Glenn if he thought that the Tea Party groups could raise the money necessary to help a candidate they are supporting win an election?

Reynolds: There are three angles to the money front. Angle number one is that in many ways Tea Party activism is the substitute for cash that is to say you don’t have to pay people to go out and do yourself because Tea Party people will do it for free.

I read over 6000 people traveled in from out of state to work as volunteers for Scott Brown and you know, and so that’s as good as money and indeed a lot of the publicity, a lot of the support of the Tea Party people produce is far more valuable than paid political ads.

The second thing is that yes they do raise money as you’ve seen, for example, in the Scott Brown money bombs and for that matter with some of the other fundraising efforts.

The third part is that the real impact of the Tea Party rule on money has in some sense been a dog who didn’t bark which is say since 2005, 2006 Republicans have had a hard time raising money from the grassroots. And those are, I think, the same Tea Party people who decided to quit giving to the Republican Party when they felt it wasn’t living up to it’s principles.

My next question was about candidates claiming to be “the Tea Party candidate.” I think it is a mistake for a candidate to claim this mantle because there are so many groups, no national organization, and therefore it is a bit disingenuous for a candidate to say “I am the Tea Party candidate.” Plus it seems that this could actually work cross-ways and make Tea Party groups mad at the candidate that makes the claim without really having the solid support to back it up.

Reynolds: Well, the problem with that is there is no Tea Party to give you the nomination. The Tea Party is a movement it’s not party. If you support Tea Party principles and Tea Party people back here, then you are Tea Party candidate but you can’t become one by calling yourself one and I suspect people really pretty good at spotting the phony.

Well, it was a very good interview and I was glad Mr. Reynolds took the time with me. I asked him if he had anything to close with about PJTV Tea Party TV and here is what he said…

Reynolds: I think the Tea Party is going to be fun. Dana Loesch has come on board to Spearhead and she’s terrific for a number of reasons, one is she’s just terrific. She’s a really smart, savvy person. She’s very good on radio and TV, and you know does a fair amount of it. I mean she was one of the real movers and shakers in the St. Louis Tea Party movement which is one of the more successful Tea Party movements around the country. So she’s really a great person to have involved and the goal is going to be to really get out there and put the spotlight on people who are actually doing stuff. You know, the stars of Tea Party TV will be the Tea Party activists who are out there doing things and that something I’ve done to some degree to my own show on PJTV and will continue to do. But Tea Party TV is just a way of throwing more focus on that and more organized in the same way.

So, once again, thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the time. Please do check out Tea Party TV, folks.

So, since they seem to want us to believe that they hate “astroturf,” will the left-wing press get all upset that this “coffee party” effort really IS Astroturf? Will the Old Media explode in calls of “astroturf” as it did during the early phases of the tea party movement? Or will they pretend that this coffee party business is real grass roots and report on the effort based on that false assumption. Already it seems as though the coffee party effort is not meeting any real scrutiny and I just got an email that proves the essential “top-down” style upon which this effort is built.

Of course, we know the charge that the tea party movement is astroturf is untrue. While groups like Dick Armey’s Freedom Works, Americans for Prosperity, and a few others did rush to add their voices to the tea party events held all across the county last year (and continue to today) they neither originated the movement, nor did they invent the scope of events, nor did they control the message in any way. In fact they had to scramble to have any part in it at all. Even the big group’s efforts were ad hoc early on.

I know this because I was there in Chicago as the whole thing began and I saw when, where and how the larger national organizations arrived on the scene and it was later not earlier that it happened. I have, for instance, known Eric Odom, one of the early organizers of a large Chicago tea party event, since 2006. I watched as he staged the first big Chicago tea party and helped him build the effort in my own small way. (Odom now runs American Liberty Alliance.) I also have ties to AFP and Americans for Tax Reform and others and watched as they all began to line up behind the tea party movement. The big groups were late comers, for sure.

But all that aside, we can also discount this “astroturf” accusation by looking at the tea party groups today. Even still there is no national tea party group and the various local tea parties are not united as one. Each group across the land is autonomous and operate at various levels of effectiveness and organization. Some are deeply involved in their local politics, others are barely hanging together as a web-based communication tool.

Now comes this coffee party USA group claiming to be non-partisan. Frank Ross of BigGovernment.com did a great job proving that the creator of this “coffee party” business was really a big Obama operative. No thanks to the Old Media we quickly found out that Annabel Park, the coffee party originator, is an Obama operative and works for The New York Times as a “strategy analyst.” So, it was created by an Obama operative and member of the Old Media, but this was conveniently absent from early reporting on the coffee party phenomenon.

And now comes the first nationwide effort of this coffee party thingamajig and, surprise, surprise, it is also run by perpetual out-of-towners. Here in Chicago the coffee party is not being run by anyone here meaning it is being floated by outsiders, astroturfers, not grass roots locals like the tea party groups are.

Today I received this email alerting me to a “coffee party” kick-off event being held in Chicago where a local Chicagoan that stumbled upon the thing even admits openly that it isn’t being run by anyone local. In his personal email meant to drum up local support for this astroturf effort, the emailer (whose name I will not release) says, “Clearly, this organization is not led by someone from Chicago.” Why? Because the first event was planned to be held during the Chicago St. Patrick’s Day Parade one of City’s biggest local party days. As the emailer scoffs, “Otherwise they would know that we’d all be at a huge parade on this day and instead of drinking coffee we’d be drinking green beer.”

As the emailer says, it is plain that no one from Chicago is actually part of this faux grass roots “coffee party” business or they’d have chosen a different day to try to kick-off their thingamajig. Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade is one of the biggest city wide party days of the year and no one will be much interested in politics that day, for sure!

In all this is a classic example of outsiders, a perfect example of astroturf. Will the Old Media take notice?

Text of the email:

From: XXX XXX
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 01:43 PM
To: ‘XXX XXX’
Subject: Coffee Party USA Kick-Off – Saturday, March 13

Friends and Colleagues (some of you may receive this email twice – my apologies),

I hope you all can join me at the Coffee Party USA kick-off on Saturday, March 13 at Charmers Cafe, 1500 W. Jarvis in Rogers Park – 10:30 AM. Clearly, this organization is not led by someone from Chicago. Otherwise they would know that we’d all be at a huge parade on this day and instead of drinking coffee we’d be drinking green beer.

So, let’s compromise… after a cup of coffee and civil dialogue on the important political issues in our communities we will go next door for one of those beers at the Poitin Stil – a quaint Irish Bar.

If you can’t make the coffee party at Charmers Cafe, join us for beers at xxxxxxxx.(ed: I excise this bit so as not to help them advertise their coffee party event)

The Mission of Coffee Party USA is to give voice to Americans who want cooperation in government and bring civility and open discussion to the national political debates that are dividing our communities and our country.

I have attached the press release and poster for this event. Below is an excerpt from the press release:

The Coffee Party movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government, and welcomes everyone to the table. “We are purely grassroots movement, independent of any party, corporation, or lobbying organization. That is our strength and we plan to use it to facilitate a collaborative process that would encourage people to come together as a community, checking party affiliation at the door,” said Annabel Park, the founder of Coffee Party USA.

Call if you have questions:
(xxx) xxx.xxx

Yep, classic astroturf.

(H/T Chicago News Bench)

But those? Well, those are all low class affairs done without an entire orchestra to back them up.

Now we have the brilliance of School children in Illinois, Comrade Obama’s home turf, to add to the din of young musicians enslaved to efforts to exalt Dear Leader. And this tops them all in production values — or at least in scope — for the Midwest Young Artists organization, a group dedicated to “inspiration through music,” has taken upon itself to give the Obammessiah the full orchestral treatment along with a choir and a spoken word segment to round out the production. Uncle Joe couldn’t have created a better display of fealty to Dear Leader. Kim Jong Il is likely red with envy.

Like a good little soldier for the cause Gary Fry, the Choral Program Director and Voices Rising Director for MYA, sat himself down to try his hand at composing a Wagnerian masterpiece, one of which any dictator would be proud. And boy does he deliver. (The original source may be found at the WMYA.fm page) After he was done with his Wagnerian moment, Mr. Fry had his piece performed on February 21, 2010 at Pick-Staiger Auditorium in Evanston, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. And he enlisted the service of an entire auditorium of Chicago area school children for his paean to Dear Leader.

Now if you can excuse the miscues of these young artists, after all they are only in middle school, if you can set aside your need for technical perfection from the performers for just a minute, if you can look past the occasionally off-key squawk of a horn here, or a missed cue there, you really should watch this thing. Watch this video and listen to the grand scope of what Gary “Nietzsche cum Wagner” Fry was aiming for and it is sure to send a thrill down your leg and satisfy your need to stand up and salute your glorious leader in the White House. Long live Obama, long live Obama…

Perhaps you are as disgusted by this as I am? These orgiastic examples of propaganda for Obama are sickening we all know. In fact, not only are they sickening, entirely un-American, and even dangerous, they are hypocritical. After all, the same drooling, Obamagobsmacked pseudo intellectuals that created these bits of PR puffery would have been apoplectic if so many schools would have sang songs extolling the virtues of George W. Bush… or any other Republican for that matter. Call it a brainwashing tool, call it agitprop, indoctrination, or what ever you like. But at least when we’ve had celebrations of president in schools in the past the president in question at least had the decency to have already left office or even died — or at the very least was in attendance at the performance to politely applaud the little kiddie’s efforts.

These various efforts at Obamaganda were un-burdened by any rationale but to inculcate praises for dear leader in the young, impressionable minds of our school children.

Yep, it’s pretty disgusting, alright.

Well, it’s nice we can sing praises to something in our schools now, I suppose. After all, the ACLU and the Democrats have summarily eliminated anything that might be reasonably construed as a reference to Christianity. So, Dear Leader has replaced all that “God” stuff with himself in our schools. All praise Obama. He’s The One. May he reign as our ruler forever. So says, Gary “Nietzsche cum Wagner” Fry, so say we all.

Descriptions of the four clips linked above:

#1- A fascist-styled paramilitary youth corps video made by a teacher at the Urban Community Leadership Academy in Kansas City, Mo.

#2- The parents of a private school in Venice, California forced their kids to sing praises to Dear Leader while their Hollyweird pals made a nice, slick production out of the affair.

#3- This video was made by “Mr. B” and the kids from “room 8″ in what I think is a public grade school in Georgia.

#4- Of course, we all remember this clip whose tag line is “Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm,” made famous by the kiddies from B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington Township, NJ. The songs were written by Ms. Charisse Carney-Nunes, a children’s author.

In a story about Representative Sue Myrick (R, NC) and her association with The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools as juxtaposed with her condemnation of radical Islam, Wardle sees no difference between a radical Islamist that might blow himself up with a suicide vest or cut off the head of a helpless captive and a Christian American that wants to use properly constituted law to have the Holy Bible used in the classroom.

Certainly you can disagree with having the Bible used as a text in the classroom, but to say that a person that does want the Bible in the classroom is no better than a terrorist is, well, just plain stupid. It is also intellectually vapid. Unfortunately, Mr. Wardle is all too representative of the vapidity of the left that so often comes to this intellectually dishonest conclusion.

Wardle reveals his hatred of all things Christian in his IndyWeek piece titled, “For Rep. Sue Myrick, Islamic moderates are extreme, Christian extremists are moderate,” wherein he equates Rep. Myrick to a religious extremist.

Wardle start his piece straight on with an attack on Rep. Myrick:

Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) is one of North Carolina’s staunchest defenders from Islamic extremism. When it comes to Christian extremism, though, the record is more mixed.

Wardle says that Myrick’s “defense against Islamic extremism” itself borders on the extreme.

Those are pretty serious charges, of course. So what does Wardle show as his proof to bear out the finger wagging at Myrick? One of the first of Wardle’s accusations would take an Olympic gymnast’s back-bending performance to agree with. In short it is weak as heck.

However, Myrick’s concern over religious extremism seems relegated to practitioners of one religion. At the forum, she pointedly avoided applying the label of “terrorist” to Joseph Stack, the 53-year-old Texan who flew his airplane into an IRS building in Austin in February.

Whether Stack should have been termed a terrorist by Myrick or not is one question, but what it has to do with the subject of religion is anyone’s guess. Austin IRS building attacker Joe Stack had no connection to any religion whatever. He did not perpetrate his act of terror in the name of religion so Wardle’s usage of Stack as his religious foil for Myrick is insensible. But such is Wardle’s hatred for both Myrick and Christianity that any stretch is excused, apparently.

Then Wardle goes on the attack against The NCBCPS, a “right-wing evangelical group” in Wardle’s terminology. Wardle reports that the NCBCPS’ goal is to “bring a state certified (sic) Bible course (elective) into the public high schools nationwide.” He says that the group claims that it has gotten its curriculum in 532 schools in 38 states.

Wardle counters that success by revealing that this group’s school texts have been criticized as containing “shoddy research, factual errors and plagiarism.” Wardle also lays out all the other groups and Media outlets that have attacked the veracity of the NCBCPS’ offerings.

But one thing is completely missing from Wardle’s piece. Any actual “extremism.” Apparently just the fact that the NCBCPS wants to get its curriculum in a school is enough to be classified just as extreme as al Qaieda to one such as Wardle

But implicit in the whole discussion (but only implied because Wardle does not say it) is the fact that if the NCBCPS did get its curriculum in schools in 38 states it must have done so through the legitimate process of appealing to school boards and having those schools agree to accept the program. In other words, the NCBCPS followed the same legal procedure that every other education advocate has followed.

Notice how the NCBCPS didn’t win over those schools by cutting off administrator’s heads, bombing public buildings, or killing students thereby using intimidation and violence to get its way. So, while this Christian group is certainly seriously active, to act as if they are somehow just as extreme as Islamic Radicals is idiotic.

But this is the empty logic that befalls the far left in this country. Any religion, all religion is classified as “extreme” to these people. No logic need apply.

At the Boca Raton campus Mr. Schackleford determined that his school needed a chapter of YAF, a 40-year-old conservative student organization, and so gathered a few like-minded students to meet with YAF State Director Daniel P. Diaz to discuss how they should proceed on organizing a chapter in the school.

As the few gathered were meeting, university administrator *David Blank burst into the room and demanded that they cease their meeting and vacate the room. According to the YAF press release, Mr. Schackleford asked for an additional 15 minutes to finish and Blank acquiesced to the request. But the 15-minute grant was short lived.

Upon hearing Diaz address the liberal bias on the FAU campus, Blank stopped the meeting again and boorishly ordered the students to vacate the meeting room. Blank the shut off the room lights, tore down the group’s promotional posters, and called the campus police.

It didn’t end there. According to YAF, the campus police arrived and began to harass the students and Mr. Diaz outside as they were in the process of leaving the campus. The police demanded to see student IDs and then menacingly followed YAF rep. Diaz to his car.

Police told Diaz that they were investigating a “possible trespassing charge,” and then loudly joked that Diaz “probably had tea bags hanging out the back of his car” as Diaz prepared to leave.

Diaz says that the whole incident is proof positive of why a conservative group is needed at Florida Atlantic University.

“If we were a Marxist, Socialist or Liberal group they would have let us finish our meeting, but the university officials and police harassed us because we are conservatives. This was the exact liberal bias on campus that I was discussing in the meeting that these future YAFers experienced firsthand. The university is no longer a place of open discussion and freedom of expression, but a breeding ground of intolerance for conservative beliefs.”

One question immediately comes to mind over this incident: did student organizer Schackleford and YAF representative Diaz officially reserve a room at FAU for their informal meeting? I asked Diaz this very question.

Diaz told me that since it was an informal meeting that should have been over rather quickly, Mr. Schackleford did not think that he needed to officially reserve a room through the university staff. In fact, according to Diaz, himself a former FAU student, such unscheduled meetings occur all the time.

No we did not reserve a room. When I was a student at the university when a room wasn’t being occupied one could go in and meet or study, and as long they left before the next scheduled group arrived they would be ok. After asking around that is how it still is.

In retrospect it was an obvious lapse in judgment not to officially reserve a room. Or perhaps they should have met off campus.

However, that small lapse in judgment does not absolve this oppressive, over-the-top reaction that university administrator David Blank exhibited. After all, not long ago Florida Atlantic University hosted a whole slew of Islamic terror supporters on campus. In 2006, for instance, the Muslim students group at FAU hosted an event at which appeared Hamas and Hezbollah supporter, Al-Haaj Ghazi Khankan; alleged Neo-Nazi, William Baker; and potential co-conspirator of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Siraj Wahhaj.

Apparently it’s perfectly O.K., as far as the FAU administration is concerned, to have Islamofascist terror given full-throated support on its campus but it is a serious no-no to talk about organizing a patriotic American conservative student’s organization there.

Perhaps Mr. Diaz is right in his contention that a YAF chapter is sorely needed at Florida Atlantic University?

*David Blank appears to be the Event Planning Specialist for the Student Union at FAU. He can be reached at dblank@fau.edu.

SB 3613, the Presumed Donor bill, amends the Illinois Anatomical Gift Act to define all Illinois patients as “presumed donors” unless they specifically avail themselves of the opt out clause. In other words, unless you tell the government that in the case of your presumed brain death you don’t want your body parts cut out and donated to other patients, they will be cut out and given to others.

As the law stands now a potential donor has to opt in to the organ donor program in order to allow the government to authorize usage of organs in case of brain death. One must inform the state ahead of time that one will agree to donate his organs. This bill would reverse that process of consent. If SB 3613 passes all patients will be assumed to be fodder for transplants unless they’ve specifically told the state that they do not want their body parts to be parceled out to other people.

As the synopsis of the bill states: This bill, “Provides that, on and after July 1, 2012, each resident of Illinois who is of sound mind and who has attained the age of 18 years is presumed, by operation of law, to have given all of his or her body for any organ donation purposes.”

Proponents of this bill say that it will help alleviate the desperate need for donor organs and will help hundreds of patients live that might otherwise die due to their disease and lack of donor organs.

It does sound like a great idea until one begins to look at it all with a bit more logical eye. Laws like a “presumed donor” law could easily cause doctors to care less for the injured when looking to harvest organs for patients waiting transplants. And since the criteria for a transplant includes the donor’s “brain death” one is struck with abuse that such a designation could lead to.

Medical science is replete with cases of patients that were called brain dead and given up as a lost cause but who woke up, healed, and became sentient, active people once again despite the doctor’s negative expectations. Unfortunately, medical science is not always right with its determination of when an injured patient is permanently bran dead.

That being the case, to assume that every patient that is determined to be brain dead is a candidate for organ harvesting could easily put the life of that patient in danger of being given less importance when weighed against people waiting on an organ donor list.

Injured patients have to trust that a doctor has their best interest in mind and must hope that a doctor’s zeal to harvest organs takes a back seat to the welfare of the potential donor. This law, however, would upset that delicate balance and place the need for organs at a higher level of importance than the life of the potential donor.

This all tends to make the human body more of a commodity than a sacred vessel. Doctors could easily begin to see severely injured patients as temporarily breathing organ banks instead of living humans that need their utmost skill to heal them.

If you stand against this bill and want to see Illinois organ donor law stay as an opt in law instead of one of “presumed consent” you have a chance to voice your disapproval of the law by supplying written testimony to Senator Risinger via email at senatorrisinger@yahoo.com. Unfortunately I am only finding out about this now as a public hearing was held on Tuesday, March 2.

Please do email Senator Risinger that you oppose this bill.

Amazingly, Kristof spent over 800 words telling the world of this monstrous practice, even saying, “Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.” But in all those words, in all that castigation of such “societies” Kristof somehow forgot to mention that these practices are endemic in Islamic cultures. Not one time did the word Islam or Muslim show up among these 800 some words.

The book, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced,” tells the tale of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl that was in her Islamic homeland forced into a marriage with an abusive deliveryman in his 30s. Once in third grade, this poor child was yanked from school — a married woman, they told her, should not go to school — and forced into to bed of this stranger who as much as purchased her like meat from her parents.

The story has a happy ending, however. The plucky Nujood had enough good sense about herself to understand that Yemeni law might grant her a divorce for the abuse she suffered at the hands of her “husband.” So she went to a local court and demanded to be heard. She was heard in court and was granted a needed divorce.

That isn’t all. Nujood also helped write the book about her experiences that Kristof reviewed, a book that has helped other young Muslim girls out of the predicament they face, a book that also sheds light on this barbaric practice from which so many young children suffer.

Unfortunately, Nujood is poorly served by Nicholas Kristof and The New York Times. Her case is presented as if it is some strange anomaly untethered to any time or culture, unconnected to any particular society, or religion. The reader is left with only a partial story and is forced to read between the lines to answer the key questions of how, why, and where this happens.

Kristof does leave clues. He tells us that Nujood is from Yemen, he mentions that another young girl that has made news for a similar plight is from Saudi Arabia, and also quotes Nujood as being excited to see her book translated into Arabic, “her own native language.” He also says that her book may help in the fight against terrorism.

But what culture produces this terrorism, what culture has endemic abuse and suppression of its women, what culture routinely marries off children to old men? Reading between the lines evokes the mysteriously absent word “Islam” which answers to those questions.

If Nicholas Kristof had the courage to speak clearly instead of hiding behind rhetorical tricks, the reader would have come away with a more direct understanding of the evils that young Nujood faced. Kristof could have used his piece also to help westerners better understand the culture that has cast itself as the west’s enemy. Kristof could have served to better explain why western society is superior to these debased, oppressive Muslim practices. But he didn’t. He left it all unsaid. Islam is the elephant in the room that too many in the west don’t have the backbone to face head on.

And more’s the shame for it because this weak-willed inability to stand up for our own culture in the face of such barbarities will only give power to the barbarians at our gates.

Well now with Congressman Eric Massa from New York we have a Democrat also accused of sexual misconduct with a male staffer and we similarly find out that the Democratic leadership knew all about it. Will the Old Media make as much about Dem. Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer’s knowledge of Massa’s sexual misconduct as it did about the Republican leadership’s supposed knowledge of Foley’s?

Here is a small sampling of the treatment of the story by The New York Times as an example:

Back in 2006 The New York Times had a field day with Foley’s disgusting behavior. Even a year after the incident the Times was still indulging outrage over the “shameful cover-up in the halls of Congress” that was the Foley scandal.

As Dennis Hastert lost his Speakership in Nov. of 2006, The Times pinned it all to his “role in the Mark Foley scandal” because it “became a Democratic talking point and severely limited his effectiveness as an advocate for House candidates.”

The Times even took a break from moralizing about those evil Republicans to poke some fun with a story about a satirical online game about Foley’s actions. The game was described as an, “online game in which Mr. Foley’s head is maneuvered through a Pac-Man-like maze as it tries to outrun Congressional pages.”

The Times wasn’t the only one, of course. Just for a few examples: ABCNews was on the case; so was the Chicago Sun-Times; and CNN also hit the story up for months on end. Any web search of Hastert and Foley’s names linked together will search out hours of reading.

And the left was happy to add to the din. The lefty website Think Progress, for instance, was virtually salivating over the Foley situation and quickly posted an extensive “Foley Coverup Timeline.”

Mary Katherine Ham did a great post tracing the emergence of the story back in 2006 to reveal its race through the Old Media. Patterico also had a good post talking about how the left and Old Media began to beat the Hastert-knew-it-all drum before any facts were ascertained.

In any case, the story was a mainstay in the OId Media for months and has occasionally been brought up in the years since.

Now on March 3 comes the story that first-term Congressman Eric Massa, Democrat from New York, is retiring. He claims it is for health reasons but it looks more like he’s trying to get out ahead of charges that he sexually harassed a male Congressional staffer. Facts are a bit scarce yet, though, so there is no way to judge if the accusations seem plausible. Not that a lack of facts prevented the Old Media from launching a full court press for Foley, mind you.

To add to the news of Massa’s retirement and possible sex scandal, we are also told that Democrat House Majority Leader Stenny Hoyer knew of the accusations against Massa at least as far back as February 8, almost a month ago. Will we see rabid calls of what did Hoyer know it and when did he know it from the press?

Is this any sort of defense of Mark Foley? Certainly not. But as the Massa story develops and we learn more about what charges against him are true, and what aren’t let us pause to judge whether the Old Media rakes Democrat Eric Massa over the coals in the same way it did Republican Mark Foley.