Liberal Math

Found this by means of Best of the Web. According to the Seattle Public Health Office - and I’m just paraphrasing here, condoms are “at least 90%” effective, while abstinence has “a contraceptive failure rate of 26%”.

While I am only aware of one recorded event of conception without sex, apparently it is more common in the Pacific Northwest. Just so you don’t think I am making it up, here is the full quote:

A 1988 National Survey of Family Growth found abstinence to have a contraceptive failure rate of 26% when not practiced consistently. So, in abstinence, as in condom use, consistency is key.

So their definition of abstinence involves having sex, which really isn’t abstinence at all. But who am I to question their logic? If you recall, this is the same political idealology that had problems defining “sex” and “is”, so you can see the confusion over "abstinence".

Democrats "Win" Again

In absence of any sort of victory over the past 5 years, Democrats have relegated themselves to celebrating defeat:

Democrats on Wednesday celebrated a closer-than-expected loss in a special House of Representatives race in Ohio and called it a warning sign for Republicans entering the 2006 congressional elections.

Jan Schmidt, a former state representative, beat Democrat Paul Hackett by 3,500 votes out of more than 112,000 cast in the conservative and heavily Republican district, where no Democrat in decades had won or even managed 40 percent of the vote.

"Every Republican in Congress should consider himself put on notice," Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said of Tuesday's results.

Emanuel continued, “Because we plan on losing even more elections by potentially smaller margins, and we won’t give up until we have no more elections left to lose.” Even Hackett was quick to congratulate himself on a race well lost:

"Tonight was a victory for democracy," Mr. Hackett, 43, told supporters at a downtown Cincinnati theater. "People had a real choice." Mr. Hackett has said he expects to sign up for another tour of duty in Iraq, possibly next summer.

So true, brother Hackett, so true. People did have a choice, and well...they chose Republican. With continued victories like this, the Democratic Party will be extinct in no time. As expected, the Democrat’s more prominent election losers rallied to his support:

Among those offering congratulations to Hackett were Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee [and loser 0f the 2004 Democratice Primary], and 2004 presidential nominee [and 2004 election loser] John Kerry, who said in a statement that Hackett "talked about the issues that really matter and he wasn't afraid to speak the truth about his experiences in the war in Iraq."

Of course Kerry applauding anyone for telling the truth about their war experiences is like Lil Kim patting Rafael Palmeiro on the back for his great testimony. At least one Democrat is tired of all these “victories”:

Al Gore still holds a $9 million surplus from the 2000 election that is his and his alone. John Kerry holds a healthy un-spent balance (estimated at $25 million) and minor candidates, all Democrats, are now millionaires as a result of their failed runs for the presidency in 2004. It's true and it is a fact of life.

Howard Dean's pleas for bucks are beyond me anymore. He can call himself "Governor", or he can call himself "Doctor", he can even call himself "Chairman"; but in reality he is nothing more than another huckster trying to fleece a sucker. I am like too many other Democrats, tired of being that sucker. Howard Dean needs to understand it and so do the other so called leaders within the Democratic Party.

Our money needs to finally buy an agenda and a victory - any victory! The agenda needs to come first. We are far from that ever happening. Without an agenda, meat the voters can sink their teeth into, we are no better off today than we were in 2002 when the final shoe dropped and we lost the Senate.

Definition: Tartuffery

On my way into work today I noticed a demonstration against America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I thought to myself: that’s interesting - Germans protesting America’s treatment of another culture during World War II.

The ACLU: Making the World a Safer Place for Terrorists

The New York Civil Liberties Union plans to file a lawsuit today challenging the legality of the Police Department's new policy of randomly searching bags and packages in the subway system.

The lawsuit, to be filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that the searches are "virtually certain neither to catch any person trying to carry explosives into the subway nor to deter such an effort." It also says that many riders have been selected in a "discriminatory and arbitrary" manner, creating the potential for racial profiling.

Of course they are right. The problem here is that random searches will not be very effective because cops will be forced to search 12 year-old girls and 80 year-old grandmas in order not to appear racially profiling. “I’m sorry we let the guy with the bomb get through. I know he was wearing a turban, an excessively large and bulging overcoat, and carrying a duffel bag that said ‘Death to American Infidels,’ but he was the 4th passenger, and well, we only check every 5th.”

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said the searches, which began on the evening of July 21, were both effective and legal. Under the search policy, officers are to use an essentially random criterion - stopping every 5th, 12th or 20th passenger carrying a bag or package. Selecting riders on the basis of race or national origin is prohibited.

Let’s not parse words here. Terrorists are Muslim, male, and in their late teens to 30’s. And until there is a white octogenarian suicide bomber, we have no reason to think otherwise. Cops profile all the time. How do you think you they catch bad guys? “We are looking for a suspect. About 5-foot-8. Can’t give you any other information, because that would be unfair to other people of their race and gender. Now go bring him or her in!”

The suit is to be filed on behalf of at least four people, including two men whose bags were searched on July 22, at subway stations in Manhattan and Queens. A third man, a lawyer who works in Midtown, entered the Times Square station on July 26 but then walked out when he saw that officers were searching bags. A fourth man is described in the suit as a "political activist, writer and media critic" who is worried about being harassed if the police notice the political materials he carries.

There’s an old saying – if you throw a rock in a pack of dogs, the only one who barks is the one who gets hit. Ever notice that when a measure is enacted to deter crime (i.e., security cameras, searches, three-strikes laws), it is always the liberals that are worried? Think about it.

We Have No More Bananas, We Have No Bananas Today

I’ve always liked Cat Stevens music. It’s too bad his new religion does not allow him do so any more, because he is one crappy political activist. According to him, the problem with the world is that there is not enough Islam:

Education is crucial. Here in Britain, the education system has been slow, at best, in allowing Islamic teachings to be taught in their full breadth. There is a lack of commitment to the rigors of traditional learning. In the West, where Islam is denigrated and prejudice abounds, where headlines designed to shock and mesmerize dominate people’s minds, the real teachings of the faith are left for people to fall upon by chance. In terms of spiritual and moral nourishment, it has been left to largely irregular and inadequate models of religious education to deliver the goods.

An hour-long mosque sermon, once a week — which most Muslims attend — or a lecture by a visiting scholar who barely speaks English and has little understanding of British and European life, are never likely to deliver the balanced curriculum necessary to build the conscientious believer, one who not only knows his duty to God but also to the society and world he lives in.

The July 7 bombers attended state schools in Britain, not faith-based schools. Some of them, we are told, briefly visited madrasa schools in Pakistan. This may or may not be relevant, but it suggests that they felt they had had insufficient Islamic education in Britain. By going abroad, they laid themselves open to influences outside normal scholastic parameters.

You know more Islam for the kids, just like in this Australian school:

The teacher could not believe what he overheard. The “visiting” imam was launching into a tirade against the Jews and Americans that bordered on the ludicrous.

But then came the clincher, he recalled. “The imam told the students that the Jews were putting poison in the bananas and they should not eat them.”

The imam was told to ease up on the inflammatory language after staff objected.

"Why We are Pathetic Losers": A Frenchman’s Introspective

Don’t consider me anti-Frenchite, because I’m really not. I love the French, their fries, bread, onion soup, kissing, maids… But their Government is, how do you say… “le Crap.” Even they think so:

The President of one of the world's biggest advertising agencies has issued a damning state-of-the-nation assessment that describes France as being in steep decline and his countrymen as "narrowed and stunted".

Maurice Lévy, the head of the media giant Publicis, whose company owns Saatchi and Saatchi and has offices in 100 countries across six continents, said France had failed to get the 2012 Olympics because the world now saw it as a nation of perdants - "losers".

For good measure, he described the 35-hour week as "absurd" and the wails of complaint that followed Paris's loss of the Games to London as "pathetic"…

"What I wrote was hard, but true. France is not in a crisis, it's worse than that. A crisis is usually sudden and short, while we are in an endemic situation," he said. "I've just had enough and wanted to say what I felt."

In the article, Mr Lévy said the French had only themselves to blame for losing the Olympics, and that the country needed a wake-up call. "We have narrowed and stunted ourselves and we paint ourselves as losers, and no one wants to be among the losers. It's time we opened our eyes wide, took an icy shower and looked reality in the face: we are in decline, going down a slippery slope…

"…when it was necessary, alas, to make redundancies, the compensation was set at 90 per cent, therefore allowing those made redundant to earn yet more without working. Why in that case, make any effort to find a job? In doing this, trying to avoid any difficulties for them, we have turned the French into children.

"The final straw has to be the absurd decision to introduce the 35-hour working week when we were told repeatedly that we could work less and earn more. How on earth in this context can we expect the same French people to accept necessary reforms?"

Work less and earn more?! Right. But the real question here is will they smell any better?