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.......The Lewis and Clark expedition was filled with men who were exactly what McCunn was not: men who, like Drouilliard, didn't blink in the face of extreme danger. These frontiersmen could not only survive, but thrive, in an environment which was almost inconceivably dangerous to urbanized Americans today with our risk-phobic, pantywaist frappuccino culture. Drouilliard was the kind of guy you could drop in the middle of a remote jungle with nothing but a pocketknife, and return five years later to find that he had become emperor of his own mini-state, and taken several native wives. Drouilliard and the rest...

ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2012) — Previous research has shown that personality traits such as impulsivity or compulsiveness are indicators of an increased risk of addiction. Now, new research from the University of Cambridge suggests that these impulsive and compulsive personality traits are also associated with a traumatic upbringing during childhood. The study was published August 31, in the journal American Journal *************************************** This is what I have been saying for several years now, and Science is coming around to the same point of view. I discuss this as well as the cure in my book "Up From Down" which is...

..........The British have never been especially keen on enthusiasm, either in its modern sense, or in the older meaning of ‘seized by religious fervour’. Americans – ideological descendants, in many ways, of those regicides – differ from us perhaps more in this than in any other regard. .....One after another, friends and colleagues of Mitt Romney lined up to tell us about the many acts of kindness which he had performed unremarked. Parents choked back their tears as they recalled the time he had spent with their dying children. Former employees spoke of his humility, his industriousness, his quiet charity....

Clint Eastwood got one thing right during his senior moment at the Republican convention: Hollywood isn’t all liberal. The first time Clint gained serious press attention in national politics was 1972, when he was invited by President Richard Nixon to attend his nominating convention in Miami. Nixon was a movie buff who understood the power of Hollywood. In 72, he wanted to use specific celebrity endorsements to shape the way that the public understood him. He wanted Democrats like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr to show that he was a centrist and he wanted Old Hollywood to evoke nostalgia...

MSNBC's Touré Neblett Reacts to Ryan's Speech: For Women and Minorities, 'Our Rights Do Not Come From God or Nature' Near the end of his Wednesday night speech at the Republican National Convention, vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan told his audience and the nation that "sometimes, even presidents need reminding, that our rights come from nature and God, not from government." John Hayward at Human Events noted that MSNBC's Touré Neblett did not handle Ryan's self-evident assertion very well. In fact, Thursday morning, Toure went into a bit of a tirade: “He loves this line of ‘our rights come from God...

I want my country back Ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ingrid Carlqvist and I was born in Sweden in 1960, when the Social Democrats were gonna rule forever and ever and our country was the nicest and safest and most progressed in the world. Now I live in Absurdistan – a country that has the highest figure of reported rapes in the world, hundreds of so called “exclusion areas� where people live outside the Swedish society and with newspapers that hide all these horrible facts to the people. I feel just like Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz...

A Massachusetts resident is protesting his town's decision not to fly American flags from utility poles on Sept. 11 this year, part of a policy to recognize the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people with the flags only every five years. MassLive.com reports that the flags in Amherst were flown last year to mark the 10th anniversary of the attack and will be flown again in 2016. The board had voted to fly small flags on the light posts downtown on only six holidays every year. Resident Larry Kelley thinks 9/11 should become the seventh. Tony...

Determined to neuter the grassroots and head off future insurgencies like those of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Ron Paul, Republican party bosses have pulled off an audacious coup, high-handedly turning the GOP into a much more top-down, centralized party. Boehner with gavel Yesterday, the Republican National Committee in Tampa adopted some rules changes that shift power from the state parties and the grassroots to the RNC and the GOP presidential nominee. Former Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire touted the new rules as providing “a strong governing framework” for the party over the next four years. But in fact...

What I would like to talk about today is two themes that come together. The first is what is wrong with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the second is what’s wrong with Independence Institute President Jon Caldara. Michael Bloomberg has created a faux grassroots organization called “Mayors Against Illegal Guns.” Financially, it is by far the economic center of the gun prohibition movement in this country today. It is very wealthy and employs lots and lots of lobbyists in DC and in state capitals around the country. George Soros put some money in it as well; they’ve got...

Surprise! I’m the first to admit that Mitt Romney wasn’t my first choice for president. I think the majority of the Republican Party was with me on this one. I was on the Rick Perry train, which turned out t be an epic failure. However, the primaries are over and Mitt came out on top. However, given that a lot of conservatives may still be suspicious of Romney’s shoddy conservative credentials, it doesn’t help that the RNC goodie bag contains a copy of his book No Apologies, which endorses his decision, as Governor of Massachusetts, to institute an individual mandate...

(CBS News) In an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, Mitt Romney said his views on abortion rights are more lenient than those put forward in the Republican party platform. "My position has been clear throughout this campaign," Romney said. "I'm in favor of abortion being legal in the case of rape and incest, and the health and life of the mother." The Republican Party is gathering in Tampa, Fla., this week for its national convention, where in addition to nominating Romney for president, the party will officially adopt its national platform. Last week, the party added language...

A well-known Catholic priest who hosts a weekly religious television show said in an interview this week that child sex abusers are often seduced by teenage boys and should not go to jail on a first offense. But the comments were removed by the website that published them and replaced by an apology from the priest and the site's editors.

If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, you might say that James Taranto became solidly conservative when his free speech was mugged by liberals. Taranto is the author of the inimitable Best of the Web Today column at the online edition of the Wall Street Journal. In a wide-ranging interview with NewsBusters at the RNC yesterday, Taranto—asked how he became a conservative—described his experience as a college student-newspaper editor. He had written a column defending the free speech rights of a college journalist at another university who had been suspended for published a politically-incorrect cartoon regarding affirmative...

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Conservatives cannot talk about "food stamps" because it's code for some evil racist message. In a refreshing, much-needed moment, Newt Gingrich smacked that one down quite nicely. Conservatives cannot talk about "Chicago" because that's also racist. Conservatives must not say the word "angry" when referring to the president, because, well, by now we all know where this leads....racism! Conservatives cannot talk about the president and "golf." Because, apparently, when you think about Obama and golf you think about Tiger Woods and sordid sex and it's all very demeaning and, well, you know the rest. Who would have guessed? There are...

...Protecting the middle class might be the theme of Obama's campaign ads, but the defining movement of this campaign came when Obama belittled the efforts of Main Street America when he stated that "you didn't build that." Those sneering words about smart, hardworking people revealed the ugly side of Obama's redistributionalist ideology. As in 2008, most of the media accept all the carefully scripted images of Obama as Gospel truth while they busy themselves trying to either hide or spin away all those extemporaneous words and deeds that display Obama's true beliefs and character as being either out of context...

Oh Really Mr. Reptilian Republican? By Karl Denninger (8/30/2012) Last night was a spooge-fest at the RNC; one of the more-common lies was Ryan's: “Before the math and the momentum overwhelm us all, we are going to solve this nation’s economic problems,” Ryan said. “And I’m going to level with you. We don’t have that much time. But if we are serious, and smart, and we lead, we can do this.” Oh really Paul? Paul Ryan, for those who have been living in a cave for the last couple of years, has put forward two separate "budgets" that are nothing...

Dr. Paul A. Ibbetson on KRMR The Patriot 105.7FM interviews Robert Nowland of the Kansas Family Policy Council about the Salina Kansas petition to place an ordinance alteration on the ballot for repeal by voters. The homosexual agenda is dicussed at length

Ted Lieu said he designed the bill to deny parental rights. SACRAMENTO, August 30, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) - A first-of-its-kind state measure banning voluntary therapy for same-sex attraction for minors has passed California’s Assembly, moving it a step closer to law, pending the reconciliation of the bill’s versions this week. The latest version of the bill states that California has a compelling interest in protecting minors against “exposure to serious harms caused by sexual orientation change efforts,� and prohibits any mental health professional from providing sexual orientation therapy to individuals under 18 years old.  The measure passed by a 51-21 vote...

Though I cannot demonstrate it statistically, I believe the US is inching toward coercive, state-directed thought control. On such “controversial” topics as immigration and race, it is increasingly risky to say anything that violates the reigning PC orthodoxy. .. The idea of tolerance back then was central. As understood by John Locke (1632-1704) and others, it was a tripartite concept. There were things that one liked, things one abhorred, and in the middle was tolerance—what one could put up with, neither liking it nor finding it unbearable.

The media madhouse insists that a half-black man who went from the Illinois State Senate to the White House in 5 years is proof that we are a racist country and that Southern Europeans whose ancestors moved to this continent are an oppressed racial minority. Arguing with this insanity is a sure way to get called a racist. Ignoring this insanity means being charged with privilege. Privilege being the ungodly power to ignore someone else's assertion that privilege through victimization should begin and end every single discussion on every topic, up to and including the moon landing. The Democratic Party...

MICHIGAN, August 28, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney told an interviewer this week that he supports legal abortion in cases that threaten either life or health of mother, as well as rape and incest. The former Massachusetts governor emphasized his differences with the GOP platform position on abortion, which embraces a pro-life position without exceptions, during a CBS interview at a campaign stop in Michigan. “The platform as written at this convention for the Republicans does not allow for exceptions on abortion with regard to the health of the mother or rape or incest. Is that where...

WASHINGTON -- Now begins the final phase of this cognitive dissonance campaign. America’s 57th presidential election is the first devoted to calling the nation’s bluff. When Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan, Republicans undertook the perilous but commendable project of forcing voters to face that they hold flatly incompatible beliefs. Twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservative as liberal. Nov. 6 we will know if they mean it. This is the problem for uneasy Republicans. The Democrats’ problem is worse because they are not uneasy about their dissonance, being blissfully unaware of it. In “Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of...

The Republican National Convention opened by smacking President Obama with the theme “We Built it.” To pound that message, Republicans turned to a Delaware businesswoman, Sher Valenzuela, who is also a candidate for lieutenant governor. Valenzuela and her husband built an upholstery business that now employs dozens of workers. Valenzuela presumably was picked to speak so that she could thunder at Obama for disdaining capitalism. Oops. It turns out that Valenzuela relied not only on her entrepreneurial skills but also on — yes, government help. Media Matters for America, a liberal watchdog group, documented $2 million in loans from the...

Diocese posts two banners at St. Peter Church that will be visible during Sept. 3-6 convention CHARLOTTE — Mere steps away from the site of the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte has posted two larger-than-life messages about the sanctity of life, marriage and religious liberty – proclaiming the teaching of the universal Church to the thousands of party delegates, visitors and the national media who will descend on Charlotte.The diocese has suspended two banners on property at St. Peter Catholic Church on South Tryon Street: one on St. Peter's administrative building and another on...

An article titledUtah Mayor Looking to Become First Black GOP Congresswoman Gives Impassioned Breakout Speech at RNC is where the video of The Honorable Mia Love's Speech at the GOP Convention can be viewed and heard. Here is the speech I heard and transcribed. Praise, in support for Mitt Romney. Let me tell you about the America I know. My parents immigrated to this country with ten dollars in their pocket, and the hope … that the America that they had heard about … really did exist. When tough times came, they didn’t look to Washington, they looked within....

The University of California (UC) – Berkeley student healthcare plan includes coverage of up to $75,000 for students who wish to undergo a sex-change operation, a trove of documents obtained on Monday by Campus Reform reveals. According to the 2012-13 UC Berkeley Student Health Insurance Plan Benefits Booklet, the public university will fund 90 percent of the controversial operation or up to $75,000. UC Berkeley’s healthcare plan covers up to $75,000 for students who would like to undergo a sex-change operation. The school will also fund “hormone therapy” and “gender confirmation (reassignment) surgery” as well as well as “certain travel...

Hannah Smith, Senior Counsel for the Becket Fund. Washington D.C., Aug 28, 2012 / 03:58 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A slight revision of the federal contraception mandate offers some additional protection for certain religious employers but is not sufficient to ease religious freedom concerns, said a lawyer who is working to challenge the mandate in court. Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told CNA on Aug. 27 that the Obama administration is governing by “sloppy executive fiat� and is failing to address the underlying problem with the controversial mandate. She explained that for the third...

Igor Panarin, dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry School for future diplomats, believes that President Obama will announce martial law by the end of 2012. He explains: “There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur.” In 2009, Panarin lectured at the Diplomatic Academy where he said that he believes that the US will begin to collapse in 2010. He compared America to Nazi Germany and blamed the US for the global financial crisis that destroyed the Russian economy. Panarin said that American society is in decline, referencing school shootings like Columbine. Combined with the banker bailouts in 2008...

Scientist and children’s television personality Bill Nye, in a newly released online video, panned biblical creationism and implored American parents who reject the scientific theory of evolution not to teach their beliefs to their youngsters. “I say to the grownups, ’If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we’ve observed in the universe that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it,’” said Nye, best known as host of the educational TV series “Bill Nye the Science Guy.” The video, titled “Creationism Is Not Appropriate for Children,” was posted on Thursday by...

A poll claims that Romney will receive zero percent of the black vote. Well, if the poll proves correct, it means that a vast majority of black voters are ignorant of the truth...or else they're racist. Black Christians who vote for Obama knowing his crimes against Christianity and biblical principles have chosen to worship the idol of racial loyalty over their discipleship to Jesus Christ. Pure and simple. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."-Exodus20:3 Incredibly, some blacks have completely forsaken their Christianity for Obama. A fellow PK(preacher's kid) said her parents recently changed their stance on same-sex marriage...

Pop quiz, no cheating allowed: if you had to guess, would you say that HIV and AIDS rates among gay men in the United States are A) declining, B) remaining stable, or C) rising? The correct answer is C) rising, at an alarming 8% per year . HIV incidence -- that is, the proportion of a population infected -- among gay men in the United States rises by that amount every year since at least 2001. Overall, this incidence, at 15.4% cumulatively, is just slightly lower than the incidence among gay men in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The city's current panhandling ordinance is rarely, if ever, enforced, according to police and attorneys who spoke recently to city council. Atlanta's anti-panhandling ordinance is "effectively, a worthless piece of paper" and might have to be scrapped or extensively rewritten to make it enforceable, said Michael J. Bond, chair of the City Council's public safety committee. Atlanta has been trying to push back against panhandling for years, partly to appease downtown residents and partly to protect the city's lucrative tourism and convention industries, which bring in hundreds of thousands of visitors and millions in spending and taxes. And then there...

Can entrepreneurs combat the narrow-minded ideologies on our campuses? Nineteenth-century liberals believed that: An economic system consisting of property rights, rule of law, and freedom of contract led to "the wealth of nations" and was a sound foundation for peace between nations as well. Personal virtues such as hard work, perseverance, ingenuity, initiative, self-discipline, personal responsibility, good manners, and wholesome living could put any individual on the path to a life in which he or she could become "healthy, wealthy, and wise,” or at least relatively prosperous. While each proposition represented mainstream thought in the United States and Britain in...

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club. But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The...

Your humble correspondent is so fascinated by his own navel that he spends hours each day just staring at it. In fact, I am so absorbed by that body part that I am planning on writing a biography about it called "Belly Button: A New Biography." Should you think that I am over the top in narcissistic self-absorbtion, that is nothing compared to the book that former Al Gore "alpha male" consultant, Naomi Wolf, has written. I shall put the title of her about to be released book under the fold to give you the opportunity to put your coffee...

A university study shows that girls as young as six are being conditioned by the media to think of themselves as sex objects. While past studies have found that teens and young women increasingly see themselves in such terms, the study, published last month in the journal Sex Roles, is the first to identify self-sexualization in early elementary-school-aged girls. The study was conducted by psychologists at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, who used paper dolls to determine the level of “self-sexualization” in girls ages six to nine. A total of 60 girls were shown two dolls, one dressed in tight...

Monday 2:00 p.m. Chairman of the RNC Reince Priebus Call to Order/Start Debt Clocks 2:10 p.m. Announcement of Recess Tuesday 2:00 p.m. Chairman of the RNC Reince Priebus [SNIP] Roll Call for Nomination of President of the United States Roll Call for Nomination of Vice President of the United States [SNIP] Remarks by Speaker John Boehner [SNIP] Remarks by former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum Remarks by Host, U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers 8:00 p.m. Remarks by U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte (NH), accompanied by Jack Gilchrist Remarks by Governor John Kasich (OH) Remarks by Governor Mary Fallin (OK) Remarks by Governor...

The same Mormon-owned Utah station that refused to carry NBC’s The Playboy Club last season is now giving a thumbs down to the net’s new comedy The New Normal.The CEO of KSL-TV’s parent company told the Salt Lake Tribune that “from time to time we may struggle with content� and that the dialogue may be “excessively rude.� The comedy from Glee creator Ryan Murphy is about a gay couple who relies on a surrogate to have a baby.“For our brand, this program feels inappropriate on several dimensions, especially during family viewing time,� said Jeff Simpson of Bonneville International.NBC issued...

Mitt Romney is invoking his Massachusetts healthcare law in the lead-up to the Republican convention, alarming conservatives who argue it’s a losing issue for his campaign. Romney's new willingness to talk about the issue could be a sign that he thinks the Massachusetts law could help him in November. "My healthcare plan I put in place in my state has everyone insured," Romney told a CBS reporter on Thursday. In a second interview, he called the law an "important accomplishment" that is "working, by and large, pretty well."  [.....] "I will be able to show that I have a passionate...

Republican Todd Akin is standing firm. He has refused to bow to pressure to withdraw his candidacy for the U.S. Senate after he made a comment that Gary Bauer of The Campaign for Working Families called, "a gift to our political enemies." When the Missouri Congressman was asked by a St. Louis TV station to state his views regarding possible exceptions for abortion, he responded, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." He added: "But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something. You know I think there...

Some highly respected doctors seemed to validate our suspicions about quack doctors when they declared after the Sikh shootings in Wisconsin, that gun violence is a social disease! I think the quack doctors are actually the carriers of social disease. I would like to know if I had to shoot an intruder in my home at night would these doctors support my plea that I am not responsible since I am diseased? It might be a safer defense than “stand your ground.” The white-coated “experts” say that the disease pattern spreads “much like an infectious disease circulates.” The surprise is...

Ayn Rand, the Russian-born writer and self-styled philosopher who died three decades ago, is back in the news as a favorite author of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. In recent years, the passionately individualist, pro-capitalist Rand has been embraced as a champion of freedom by many conservatives and libertarians, and denounced as a prophet of greed and narcissism by many liberals. Yet, if Rand admirers tend to ignore the flaws of her vision, her detractors reduce her to grotesque caricature—and invoke her popularity as proof of right-wing nuttiness. One major misconception is that Rand worshipped the rich and saw...

<p>In what is rapidly becoming the norm for Mitt Romney, he opened his mouth and something stupid popped out. This time, it is a comment that references the birtherism ridiculousness (and if you don't think it's ridiculous, you're a f**king dumb**s. Go read another blog.) Speaking at a rally in Michigan, Romney said, "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate."</p>

Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (Washington, DC)Photo by Shubert Ciencia Catholics are a major voting block, and one that can’t be pigeonholed by Republicans or Democrats. A recent NPR segment compared Vice President Joe Biden with the presumptive Vice Presidential nominee, Congressman Paul Ryan. Both are Catholics, but their worldview is not the same.Stephen Schneck, a political scientist at Catholic University, said that Biden comes from a more traditional generation of Catholics. “This is the Catholicism of our old ethnic neighborhoods, and our union halls, and St. Christopher medals on the dashboard sort of thing,�...

Timothy Cardinal Dolan will deliver the benediction at the Republican Party convention but, in a slight to Catholics, pro-abortion President Barack Obama rejected Cardinal Dolan’s similar offer of a prayer at the Democratic convention.Dolan told Democrats he would be “grateful” to deliver a blessing in Charlotte, according to the New York Post, but Obama turned him down.Dolan — considered the top Catholic official in the nation, as head of the Archdiocese of New York and president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops — tipped off Democrats a few weeks ago that he had agreed to deliver the prime-time benediction at...

Liberal television networks and newspapers won’t tell you this, but the election is gradually slipping away from President Obama. As the latest Gallup poll reports this week, Republican challenger Mitt Romney has pulled ahead nationally by 2 points. According to the Associated Press, Mitt is ahead with the all-important independent voter by a sizable margin of 41 percent to 30 percent. In a year when the election is all about the economy, stupid, support for the president’s economic policies and handling of deficits is in the 30s. With high unemployment and the economy going nowhere, it would be historically unprecedented...

Romney spokeswoman Sarah Pompei said Saturday that the candidate “applauds” Ryan’s ideas, but intends to issue his own blueprint for reshaping the federal budget. After Romney’s speech introducing Ryan, advisers said the former Massachusetts governor has no intention of being handcuffed to all the specifics of Ryan’s plans — though he has said in the past that he’d sign Ryan’s budget if passed by Congress. “He has said it moves us in the right direction. He has said that if it’s sent to him, he would sign it. And he has said that he will put forward his own plan,”...

A group that opposes the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay members is using presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to help make its case. Romney’s campaign restated his position that gay people should be allowed to join the Boy Scouts of America in an Associated Press story published on Saturday. Romney first declared his support for gay scouts and leaders in 1994 -- when he was a member of the organization’s executive board -- during an unsuccessful run for US Senate. In a debate that year, Romney said, “I support the right of the Boy Scouts of America...

Worse still, as a state senator in Illinois, Obama opposed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act and in his defense said something that should put a chill up every mother's spine: There wasn't any question about what was happening. The abortions were going wrong. The babies weren't cooperating. They wouldn't die as planned. Or, as Illinois state senator Barack Obama so touchingly put it, there was "movement or some indication that, in fact, they're not just coming out limp and dead." No, Senator. They wouldn't go along with the program. They wouldn't just come out limp and dead. They were coming...