Note: I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long and I’ve missed my dear gentle readers. I think I have my health issues sorted out now and will explain more about that, soon. Now that I am well enough to work, I am finally able to create a career that will generate the income required to pay off the debts and taxes for my father and me that accumulated as a result of my health challenges. I don’t entirely know yet exactly how I will do that. But I’m starting to see my way and this blog is part of my plan, so I can write again without worrying that I am blogging instead of making a financially self-sufficient life for myself. I also want to thank one of my faithful subscribers for his donation yesterday. I promised him in my thank-you e-mail that I would write a post. I’m several hours late, but I’m here.
Sorting through the current embarrassment of riches, scandal-wise, dear Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection was the first to point out that Democrats are going be able to pass their illegal immigrant amnesty bill, aka “immigration reform,” because Republicans won’t focus on the one menace they actually could stop in its tracks with enough phone calls, e-mails and letters to Congress. (I can’t find the link so I used a more recent one!)
Ann Coulter made an eloquent speech at CPAC in which she pointed out that research shows Republicans are not going to win the Latino vote with amnesty because the majority of Latinos embrace the welfare state. Click here to see Ann’s interview with John Phillips on PJ Media’s Next Generation TV. (Sorry, there’s no code to allow me to embed it here.) About three-quarters of the way through, Phillips says something I’ve pointed out for years: Mexico, our chief supplier of illegal immigrants, is an oil-rich nation with lots of other natural resources and it ought to be a prosperous country.
Who convinced Republicans that Hispanic wages aren’t low enough and what they really need is an influx of low-wage workers competing for their jobs?
Maybe the greedy businessmen now running the Republican Party should talk with their Hispanic maids sometime. Ask Juanita if she’d like to have seven new immigrants competing with her for the opportunity to clean other people’s houses, so that her wages can be dropped from $20 an hour to $10 an hour.
A wise Latina, A.J. Delgado, recently explained on Mediaite.com why amnesty won’t win Republicans the Hispanic vote — even if they get credit for it. Her very first argument was: “Latinos will resent the added competition for jobs.”
But rich businessmen don’t care. Big Republican donors — and their campaign consultants — just want to make money. They don’t care about Hispanics, and they certainly don’t care what happens to the country. If the country is hurt, I don’t care, as long as I am doing better! This is the very definition of treason.
Hispanic voters are a small portion of the electorate. They don’t want amnesty, and they’re hopeless Democrats. So Republicans have decided the path to victory is to flood the country with lots more of them!
I think Ann is correct that the Republicans pushing for amnesty are driven either by greed for cheap labor, or greed for votes, or both. But I think there’s another factor no one else is mentioning that is wearing down the resistance to amnesty, which is the idea that is would be an enormous, expensive hassle and really, really mean. However, I have a cheap solution that will make illegal immigrants not only want to leave the U.S. immediately but also pay their own freaking way home. To wit, if property confiscation is a good enough weapon for the war on drugs, then it should be employed to secure our borders, too. How? By passing a law that whistleblowers who turn in illegal immigrants get to keep 60 percent of the value of their confiscated assets with the balance going to local law enforcement. Bank robbers do not get to keep their ill-gotten gains if they get a certain distance from the bank before they are apprehended. There’s no reason for illegals to get to keep theirs, either.
UPDATE, 6/28/13, Fri.: The Senate passed its immigration reform bill yesterday and at HotAir.com, Gang of Eight member Sen. John McCain finally got on Allahpundit’s last nerve with his 1,001st trashing of his own party (the links to polling expert Sean Trende indicated in the text below are clickable in the original and very much worth reading):
And that’s not the worst part [i.e., that McCain trashes the GOP]. The worst part is that he [McCain] continues to peddle the self-serving double-barreled lie that (a) the Latino vote sunk Republicans in the last two elections (it did not) and (b) that immigration is an insuperable obstacle to being more competitive among Latinos. The man you want to read on that is Sean Trende, who’s had three indispensable pieces about it published over the week or so. First, he reveals the real culprits in why Romney lost last year, namely, economic-populist white voters who supported Perot and now stay home because the GOP no longer really talks to them. Second, he reminds the GOP that immigration reform isn’t as simple as winning Latinos, it’s winning Latinos at the expense of losing some white — and black — voters who might otherwise consider the party. Has McCain, Graham, Rubio, or anyone else on the amnesty spirit squad ever once been asked to address the prospect of losing some votes too in passing this bill? Do they have the faintest idea of whether they’d lose more white/black votes than they’d gain among Latinos? Do they care? If we’re going to pass a terrible bill purely in the interests of helping ourselves electorally, it’d be nice to have some idea of whether passing it really will help us electorally.
Friday afternoon at CPAC I had a pleasant conversation with National Review Online fellow, Betsy Woodruff, who was trying to, as the headline says, sort out what it is like this year being gay at CPAC for a post at The Corner at NRO. I won’t keep you in suspense. It is a joy. I am re-connecting with blogger friends and others whom I love and respect. I’m in love with CPAC, just as I’ve been since my first one in 2009 when I had barely sat down at the very first panel I attended and panelist Andrew Klavan opined that conservatives really ought to do more outreach to gays and I astonished him by popping up and thanking him.
Chatting with Betsy, I talked a mile a minute and laid out a comprehensive analysis of why there are gays in the conservative movement, the Constitutional reasons why gays have an unalienable right to equality and why the progressive approach of advocating for gay equality by demanding people change their religious beliefs and emotions is wrong. Respectively:
There are gays in the conservative movement because discrimination by our own families, religion and government forces gays to cope by becoming entrepreneurs in large numbers, to be self-reliant and also work together to create the businesses, services, organizations and charities the gay community needs. In other words, the gay community embodies fiscal conservatism in action. To exist, the gay community needs free enterprise and a small government that lets us keep the lion’s share of the fruits of our labors. That’s why there are gay conservatives and over a third of gays vote Republican.
Unalienable rights, as Ted Olson points out, are not subject to majority rule, so federalism does not apply to them. The Constitutional protections of equality for gays are due process, equal protection, the Establishment clause, the right to free exercise of religion and the full faith and credit clause. To assert that the best path to equality for gays is any form of majority rule is identical to asserting that gays are subhuman, not created equal or endowed with unalienable rights. It also is identical to saying that religions are entitled to define various groups as unworthy of equality and then use civil law to disadvantage or even destroy them.
Progressives are wrong to demand tolerance and denounce rhymes-with-late. People advocating for the liberty to love must also protect the liberty to rhymes-with-late and leave others be regarding their beliefs and emotions. The correct approach is the conservative one, which is concerned with limiting the coercive powers of government. This means that social conservatism has no business coveting the coercive powers of government to impose religious beliefs in civil law. It means that in a nation founded on the protection of religious liberty, social conservatives must be content with what they can accomplish in the marketplace of ideas using only the powers of persuasion. In the marketplace of ideas, they can believe anything and be as rhymes-with-lateful as they want.
I also told Betsy that our national political conversation now is one of dueling totalisms: the progressive serfdom of the all-controlling nanny state vs. the social conservatives’ ideal of an all-controlling theocracy. This explains the political homelessness of the fiscal conservative/social liberal, whose would-be leaders are barred from rising in either political party.
Oh, and I called social conservatives the architects of the Left because so many of its constituent groups are natural fiscal conservatives but social conservatives purged them on theocratic grounds. Progressives welcomed these groups but do not serve them unless they are useful in destroying free enterprise. Gays depend on free enterprise, which is why progressives use gays primarily as worker bees and cash cows and the only other places where gays are welcome on the Left is at the back of the bus or under it.
That is how I tore into social conservatives when I spoke with Betsy. But I did it entirely in conservative terms. I can’t stand the thought that conservatives reading her column will assume that I used progressive ideas to critique social conservatives. I did not. Ick.
However, regarding conservative gays being treated courteously by conservatives, I do say there is no such thing as a courteous way to tell gays they are unworthy of equality. It is indeed an intrinsically offensive statement to make and position to hold. (It’s worth noting I first said this to Mark Steyn when he was standing in for Rush Limbaugh in 2010 and he invited gay conservatives to call in and discuss how we were being treated by the tea party. I told him I’ve been treated very well by the tea party — except for that.)
This brings me to Betsy’s encapsulating the gay experience at CPAC 2013 as a place so genuinely inclusive of diversity that Rick Santorum and Cynthia Yockey are both there and greet one another pleasantly. Genius. It’s true. That is how CPAC and the conservative movement do diversity.
Technically, on Friday Sen. Santorum and I were only metaphorically face-to-face since he was about 15 feet away from where Betsy and I were sitting. I didn’t see him coming because I was facing Betsy and turned away from former Sen. Santorum as he walked past us with his entourage. Betsy kindly pointed him out, perhaps expecting an explosion since Sen. Santorum is the great Satan of gay progressives. Instead, I remained serene. That’s because the only limit I want imposed on Sen. Santorum concerns his ability to impose his religion on me through the coercive powers of the state.
(I actually have met Sen. Santorum because he had the wits and class to visit the Bloggers’ Lounge at CPAC 2010 or 2011 and my friend Stacy McCain introduced us, including the name of my blog. Sen. Santorum was pleasant and courteous and so was I.)
So, what is it like being gay at CPAC? More than ever, it’s a joy. The only true friends gays have are conservatives. We can settle our differences in Constitutional terms, which will be articulated by conservative attorney Ted Olson before the Supreme Court when he argues for marriage equality in the Prop 8 and Defense of Marriage Act cases before it on March 26 and 27.
As I told the gay Left in October 2011, equality for gays will come from the Right. The watershed moment for gay equality at CPAC came together in an organic way in the “Rainbow on the Right” seminar this year, thanks to ACU board member and Competitive Enterprise Institute founder, Fred L. Smith, Jr., who just thought it was the right thing to do.
This is my fifth CPAC and my fourth as an official CPAC blogger. I can attend CPAC thanks to generous donations of my dear conservative gentle readers. In fact, I’ve been able to haul myself back from the brink of death and have just recovered my health thanks to the donations of my dear conservative gentle readers. I fell in love with CPAC in 2009 and I am even more deeply in love with CPAC now. For me, that is what it is like being gay at CPAC.
On Thursday evening at CPAC, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is a sponsor of CPAC, held a panel called Rainbow on the Right, which featured only conservatives who favor equality for gays. (!!!!!!!111!!!!111!!!) CEI founder, Fred L. Smith, Jr., told me in a phone conversation a few days ago that he sits on the American Conservative Union’s board and he was surprised this year that GOProud had not applied to be a sponsor. Since sponsors are allowed to have seminars on the topics of their own choosing with panel members of their own choosing, the idea just naturally came up at CEI that they ought to dedicate one of their seminars to the subject of gay equality and include GOProud co-founder Jimmy LaSalvia. The rest of the panel was comprised of Fred, Republican campaign strategist Liz Mair, Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, author and CNN political contributor Margaret Hoover and author, Fox News commentator and National Review Online editor-at-large, Jonah Goldberg.
I was very happy with all the speakers and the fact that most of the audience gave them enthusiastic applause. (I think the ones that didn’t were a mix of wary social conservatives and even warier progressives, mostly the latter, since there were plenty of progressive journalists attending, including two I recognized immediately, Mike Signorile and Sally Kohn.) The room wasn’t just standing room only, it was packed and I heard later that a number of people who wanted into the room just could not squeeze in.
So none of my dear gentle readers will be surprised that in the question and answer period I made several points that I make here frequently, which obviously astonished the progressive gay journalists (and probably some of the panel members). But I had learned something amazing and vitally important, which is that most of the arguments I’m making for gay equality are original and unique. That is, I’m the only one making them. There was really only one overlap of my ideas with Margaret Hoover’s and it’s because we both lifted it from conservative attorney, Ted Olson, who will be arguing in the Supreme Court March 26 and 27 respectively for the repeal of California’s Prop 8, which repealed marriage equality in that state, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act. (DOMA was passed to thwart federalism and the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution, thus revealing the reverence with which social conservatives observe federalism and the Constitution — you should totally read Elizabeth Birch’s takedown of Bill Clinton’s recent self-flattering revision of the history of why he signed it into law).
So the point that Margaret and I both lifted from Ted Olson is his research into decisions of the Supreme Court on marriage starting from 1888 include 14 ruling that marriage is a right. Unalienable rights are not subject to majority rule, therefore they are not delegated to the states. Neither fiscal nor social conservative commentators have bothered to read up on this, so it is going to be a bolt from the blue for them. Well, that and the tsunami of amicus briefs countering every objection to gay equality ever raised in gay equality cases.
But the most important thing I learned is that I am making unique arguments for gay equality. Without going into specifics, if I step lively before March 30, I can pull together a book proposal and have a shot at getting a literary agent. So I will put up as many posts as I can manage with the equipment I have during CPAC and the day after (Sunday), then I’m going to concentrate on that. While I’m doing that I will blog here as often as I can manage on the topic of overcoming blockers to one’s progress toward an objective, and of course, I doubt I’ll be able to resist commenting on the coverage of the Prop 8/DOMA cases.
P.S.
Props to Mike Signorile on interviewing me for his Sirius radio show after the panel and being reasonably fair. He said he would read this blog. I hope this opens up a dialog. The biggest problem that gay progressives have in arguing for equality is that they don’t know they don’t understand the principles and constituencies of the conservative movement with the result that they never address our concerns in ways we find persuasive. As an ex-liberal, I speak both Left and Right. I’d like a shot at explaining these things to him (after I’ve written the book proposal).
Also, Jimmy LaSalvia told me that GOProud did ask unofficially whether they would be allowed to sponsor CPAC this year and, although Jimmy didn’t say it quite this way, they were given to understand that GOProud was welcome to sponsor CPAC as soon as hell froze over, but not until. So they never officially applied. Instead they went about minding their own business. It’s 4:40 am now and I have to get up at 6 am, so as soon as I can, I’ll pick up the story of how the GOProud/CPAC story blew up in an entirely organic way, beginning with an opinion piece and a tweet.
Thanks to my dear generous readers and donors, I’m at CPAC! The first person I recognized when I walked in was DaTechGuy, dear Peter Ingemi, and the second was Jonah Freaking Goldberg (!), who was registering at the media desk as I walked up. I got to tell him his work in 2008 was instrumental in my transformation into a fiscal conservative and thank him. Then he remembered that I (@conservativelez) occasionally josh him (@JonahNRO) on Twitter.
Next I found my way to the media area in the main ballroom. There’s plenty of room, but not many electrical outlets. I have a netbook (don’t mock, scroll down for my PayPal button and hit the tip jar!) and its battery only lasts about an hour, so I’m using my iPhone to post.
I thought it was extravagant to have an iPhone, too, until last May when I forgot I was making ghee and got involved in the computer until I smelled smoke. I bought the iPhone on the way home from the Johns Hopkins Burn Center while I was still on morphine. With the iPhone, I can work and stay near the stove and it has timer and reminder features I need that the netbook doesn’t have. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Where was I? OK, back in the ballroom, I waved to Chris “Smitty” Smith of The Other McCain as I was looking for a place to sit. I found a nice spot on the aisle and soon dear Moe Lane came up to say hello and we went to the back of the room to chat. On the way back to my seat, I tripped and fell flat on my face, and when I was finally able to get up, there was dear Jimmy Bise of The Sundries Shack, who kindly let me cling to him for easily 10 minutes until I stopped shaking. (I’m fine now, I took some Bach Rescue Remedy, which I keep in my briefcase, and it cleared the shock in a few minutes.)
Oh, and, for new gentle readers, I really do love anyone I call “dear.”
My next stop is the National Blogger Club’s press briefing, then the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s panel, “Rainbow on the Right,” which includes dear Liz Mair, GOProud’s (YES!) dear Jimmy LaSalvia and dear Jonah Goldberg. Then it’s on to BlogBash!
Because conservative donors sent me to CPAC 2012 in February, in this photo (and elsewhere, a video), I am standing with Andrew Breitbart, spoiling the Leftist narrative of gadfly, Liz Glover, who was accusing Andrew of being homophobic while he had his arm around Cynthia Yockey, A Conservative Lesbian.
I started this blog on January 12, 2009, after becoming a fiscal conservative during the presidential campaign of 2008 and changing my voter registration from Democrat to Republican that December. I am a writer and was a newspaper reporter for a couple of years in my well-spent youth, and conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin educated me about what conservatism really is, so it was a natural evolution. My mission is to speak to the Right about gay equality, to the Left about fiscal conservatism and the Second Amendment and to everyone about health.
The biggest reason that I ran out of the Left like it was a house on fire was that I finally realized that liberalism/Progressivism/socialism are about destroying what I was counting on as my lifeline — capitalism, or as I now know it, free enterprise. That’s because to survive now, let alone after my almost 97-year-old father passes on, I have to be able to create my own business.
And why is that? Because I have floundered since my late teens with sleep disorders, although I didn’t find out they were killing me until March of 2003 when I Googled “depression daytime sleeping,” and every result came up “obstructive sleep apnea.” When I was diagnosed the next month, my doctor said my condition was so advanced that I was dying. My apneas were very long and I was close to that tipping point where the blood oxygen/CO2 feedback mechanism tells the brain to stop sending the signals to breathe. My weight had climbed to 217 pounds — sleep apnea gives you ferocious cravings for sugar and salt. My body felt like lead and my joints and muscles were wracked with pain. I had headaches almost every day. My resting heart rate was in the 120’s, irregular, and just walking from one room to another made it jump to the 160’s and 170’s. The road to recovery looked so very long and shrouded in darkness. I felt hopeless and frightened out of my wits. But my life partner, my parents and my cats all needed me. I could not shirk that duty. So I clawed my way back to life and gave my life partner and my mother excellent care until they died in December 2004 and April 2006, respectively.
However, in February 2004, despite using my CPAP respirator whenever I slept, I was still being overpowered by daytime sleepiness and needed long naps every day. My sleep doctor had me do a sleep study followed by a multiple sleep latency test and diagnosed me with idiopathic hypersomnia. I was unable to tolerate the medications for this condition. With no cure or treatment I could stand, I realized I had a disability and would have to adapt my life to cope with it. I knew my overwhelming sleepiness would get me fired from practically any job, and my resumé of caregiving and computer consulting wasn’t competitive, so I resolved to create my own job as a writer so I could work around the naps. But I was unable to pull this off because of another symptom of idiopathic hypersomnia: you never feel like you are really awake. This was costly because I bought courses to learn how to make money creating information products to sell online, but I didn’t have the energy and clarity to put all the pieces together.
In October 2006 I moved back home to live with my father, who will be 97 next month, to care for him and give him, as he says, a very happy old age. I first saved my dad’s life in the fall of 1997 by getting him away from the doctor who failed to diagnose his ostentatiously obvious case of idiopathic congestive heart failure and into the care of a cardiologist who hospitalized him immediately. He has been caring for Dad ever since (after giving him a year to live at age 81). I saved my dad’s life again in July of 2003 when I got him to a sleep doctor, who diagnosed his very severe obstructive sleep apnea. (Idiopathic congestive heart failure hasn’t really been “idiopathic” since 1996, when the first research was published pointing to obstructive sleep apnea as the cause of idiopathic congestive heart failure.) I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve saved Dad’s life since I moved back home. Fortunately, he’s been mostly stable since getting a pacemaker-defibrillator implanted in December 2008. That’s why I was able to start this blog the next month and redouble my efforts to save my own life and create a career for myself.
Since I have had this blog, when circumstances have forced me to ask for help, it is the kindness and generosity of other bloggers, especially dear Instapundit and dear Stacy McCain, and conservative readers, that have given me the resources that I needed to save my life.
Since I was diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia, I’ve done everything I could think of to cure it or cope with it. To regain my health I gardened, started playing the bassoon again, exercised, went on 5K morning walks, improved my sleep habits, improved my diet and took off over 60 pounds. I wanted so much to be able to blog my triumphant progress in recovering my health and beating an incurable, rare disease. But by June of 2012, I had to acknowledge that while I was healthier, idiopathic hypersomnia was still making it impossible for me to function well enough to have any hope of supporting myself. It was killing me. So I decided that I would have to blog about that.
That decision saved my life.
Idiopathic hypersomnia is a horrible way to die. Because it makes you fail at practically everything, it destroys your soul because it makes you despair and lose your belief in yourself. You seem lazy and unmotivated because you are never really alert. More vigorous people who wish they could take a nap in the daytime don’t realize you aren’t taking a nap as much as you have involuntarily lost consciousness. Instead of getting the help and understanding that other people with terminal conditions receive, you get abused and abandoned to death.
To be able to explain this to my dear gentle readers, I began to look online for research about how idiopathic hypersomnia kills. Luckily, instead, last July I found ONE study on TWO persons that SAVED MY LIFE: “Successful treatment with levothyroxine for idiopathic hypersomnia patients with subclinical hypothyroidism.” It’s looking to me now like ALL patients with idiopathic hypersomnia are hypothyroid despite having fairly normal blood test results. We are outliers who need higher doses of thyroid hormone than most other people do in order to be able to have refreshing sleep, be alert and free of daytime sleepiness/napping.
I e-mailed the study to my doctor and asked for an experimental 12 microgram bump in my levothyoxine dose. He agreed immediately, which made me suspicious and I requested my recent blood test results. But the new dose threw me for a loop for most of August and I didn’t wind up looking at the results until November, just before a follow-up appointment with my doctor.
When I looked at my blood test, I found out that for the last 10 years, the doctors who were supposed to be monitoring my TSH levels to ensure I was on the correct dose of levothyoxine had ignored them and failed to make sense of what should have been obvious symptoms of a common thyroid disorder, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis: fatigue, dullness and sleepiness.
What had happened started in 2003 when I was taking 100 micrograms of levothyroxine in the morning and four 5 microgram tablets of Cytomel (the T3 thyroid hormone) spaced every few hours throughout the day. (This is the equivalent of 180 mcg of levothyroxine.) However, my rapid, irregular heart rate made the endocrinologist I was seeing as part of a longitudinal study at the National Institutes of Health drop the Cytomel to see if it was causing the problem. It was not. But at the same time, I started CPAP therapy, which did cure my heart rate problems by stopping the apneas that had been putting an enormous strain on my heart. However, since two variables had changed at the same time, it was not possible to discern what had helped. And when the Cytomel was stopped, it was like a light went out in my head but I was not able to tell what had gone wrong to fix it. Plus, my life partner was in the last year of her life. I had a lot going on. So from the spring of 2003 to August 8, 2012, I was only taking 100 mcg of levothyroxine a day when I really needed 180 mcg.
I lost my home near NIH to foreclosure in 2002 because my sleep apnea was so bad I couldn’t work, so my life partner and I had been forced to move 60 miles north and live near my parents. I didn’t have the alertness and stamina to make the drive to Bethesda, so I dropped out of the study in the spring of 2003. If I’d stayed in the study with the same doctor, probably she would have increased my levothyoxine dose or put me back on Cytomel over the course of the next year. But, as I wrote above, none of the doctors I had for the last 10 years connected my symptoms with my TSH level and an insufficient thyroid dose.
I’ve been putting the puzzle together, piece by piece, since last July after reading the study I cited above. Since November, my doctor has continued increasing my levothyroxine dose in 12 to 25 mcg steps. It takes about a month to adapt to a new dose of thyroid medicine and until I found what my old dose was a couple of weeks ago, we weren’t certain where my dose would end up. When I got to 162 mcg a couple of weeks ago, I finally felt the light go back on in my head. In two more weeks, I will go to 175 mcg of levothyroxine, which I think will be the correct dose. My idiopathic hypersomnia is almost completely cured. I sleep well and wake up refreshed. If I’ve had a full night’s sleep, I feel alert all day and don’t need a nap.
Now that it looks like I have my health back, my next campaign is to create a career for myself, get on my feet financially and pay off my father’s debts and back taxes, which were racked up in his efforts to save my life. The very next step to do that is for me to attend CPAC, which starts tomorrow. Attending CPAC allows me to meet other bloggers and undemonize myself with people who don’t believe there can be such a thing as a conservative lesbian. Last year, dear Instapundit’s generous readers’ donations sent me to CPAC and put me at Andrew Breitbart’s side at the moment when he was paradoxically being attacked as a homophobe and/or gay. And my being there gave Steven Crowder and Chris Loesch the ammunition to fight the HuffPo/Gawker/Mediaite accusations the rap song they debuted there was racist because they used a photo of me to prove their point — Steven and Chris were able to call them for mocking a conservative lesbian.
This year Stacy McCain kindly asked his readers to donate, so I am able to cover someone to care for my father tomorrow. (And congratulations to Stacy, who was named editor-in-chief of ViralRead.com today!) However, I still need to raise $300 to pay the caregiver for Friday, plus my gas, parking, tolls and food for Friday and Saturday. (For people who wonder why I don’t get a job — besides my health, it’s the cost of the caregiver to look after my father while I’m out of the house. But not to worry, I really am busy creating a career that will support me.)
I am grateful to everyone who donates, or sends prayers or kind thoughts. Please be patient with me regarding “thank you” e-mails — the next few days will be very long, with at least a 90-minute commute each way — I will send them Sunday after CPAC. In fact, I’ll be sending a “thank you” e-mail to everyone who has ever donated to this blog because I want them to know their generosity played a role in saving my life and that I am grateful. My plan is that once I’ve gotten all my “thank you” notes sent, I will post a few times a week while I’m finishing a writing project and then when that’s done, I will start posting regularly. I’m so glad to be back!
Conservative bloggers Stacy McCain and Ali Akbar report today that progressive activists/terrorists Brett Kimberlin and Neal Rauhauser have been working for weeks to derail Blog Bash, which was inaugurated in 2010 as a party for conservative bloggers and is held during CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. At Blog Bash, bloggers meet, network and present awards recognizing the achievements of outstanding conservative bloggers.
In 2012, I joined dozens of top conservative bloggers to stand as a united front against Kimberlin and Rauhauser because they had successfully been destroying the lives of conservative bloggers who were shining a light on Kimberlin’s criminal past as part of their investigations of his progressive activist organization, Velvet Revolution. Kimberlin was using Velvet Revolution to destroy James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles for their video exposés of ACORN. Instead of working to build a life that would show he had put his violent past behind him, Kimberlin leveraged his past as a bomber to intimidate the employers of Aaron Walker and his wife, causing them to be fired, as well as the employer of Stacy McCain’s wife, forcing him to move. Team Kimberlin is now leveraging Kimberlin’s bomber street cred against the owners of the venue hosting Blog Bash to frighten them into cancelling the event.
Dear Stacy is gathering all the news on this story, so please go to The Other McCain for the full scoop.
Stacy also is kindly sending his readers here urging them to donate the money I need to attend CPAC. My father will be 97 next month and I only leave him unattended a few hours at a time to do errands and go to the gym. To attend CPAC, I have to hire someone to care for my father while I am away, plus cover gas, tolls and meals. Dear Stacy’s readers already have donated about a quarter of the funds required, but I need $570 more to attend the whole conference. I am very grateful for every donation and every kind thought and prayer. In my next post I’ll finally explain why my blogging has been so spotty since November 2010 — I’ve been fighting for my life and I didn’t want to discuss it because I wasn’t winning. But thanks to all the donors to this blog, I think I’ve found the cure for the incurable condition that was killing me.
Now that it looks like I’ve overcome my health challenges, I’m finally able to tackle the career and financial challenges that developed as a result. Being able to attend CPAC is a vital part of my ability to build my new career as a blogger, author and speaker. I became a fiscal conservative in the fall of 2008 during the Obama/McCain presidential campaign. I started this blog on Jan. 12, 2009 and attended CPAC about six weeks later, thanks to an invitation to coffee by dear Joy McCann, aka Little Miss Attila, who introduced me there to Stacy McCain.
I was only in my first seminar at CPAC 2009 about 10 minutes when Andrew Klavan opined the conservative movement ought to do more outreach to gays and I astonished him by thanking him for the welcome. (GOProud hadn’t been founded then.) At that CPAC I also met PJ Media’s Roger L. Simon, Melissa Clouthier (Blog Bash co-founder), Pamela Geller (I went total fan girl on her and wept), Fausta (an authority on Central and South America), Instapundit and many others. I fell in love at CPAC. As a consequence of making friends with Stacy, shortly after CPAC he made sure I was invited to a reception where I met and chatted with Andrew Breitbart (the progressive blog, Sadly No, made my photo with him viral). I also met Moe Lane and Jimmy Bise and soon was being invited to events by Matthew Vadum, the leading authority on ACORN.
Since then I’ve moved heaven and earth to get to CPAC because meeting other bloggers and prominent people in the conservative movement is the best way to undemonize myself and build rapport and trust. My career depends on being there and doing that.
While CPAC has had its issues with GOProud, they have consistently been very good to me and have given me official CPAC blogger credentials every year since I first applied for them in 2010. This worked out very well for the conservative movement last year because my arm was around dear Andrew Breitbart for a photo when a progressive gadfly reporter attacked him as a homophobe for his departure from GOProud’s Advisory Board (the video was posted on Mediaite, the story is quoted and linked by libertarian Bruce Majors–and includes the reporter’s remark that he likes me after meeting me at CPAC in 2009). With Breitbart’s arm around me, the gadfly reporter couldn’t frame him as a homophobe. Also last year, HuffPo used a photo of me dancing to a rap song that Steven Crowder and Chris Loesch debuted at the blogger awards meeting in an attempt to ridicule conservatives as racists and bigots. It went viral on Gawker and Mediaite (I have the links in a post I wrote last year, if you’re curious). Steven and Chris were able to point out the lefties were mocking A Conservative Lesbian and because he recognized me from CPAC, Warner Todd Huston made their attacks on the three of us a laughingstock.
I don’t know what contribution I will make at CPAC this year, I just know I will go intending to make one. I am grateful in advance for everyone who sends a donation or kind thought or prayer. Thank you.
Today was a turning point day. I only have a small stack of papers left to clear in my de-cluttering campaign. For the first time, I had a sense of an orderly sequence of projects that I needed to accomplish. For the first time, I was free of feelings of pain, confusion and mental and emotional pressure that being surrounded by the clutter of bills and notes and flyers gave me when I sat down to work. For the first time, I was enthusiastic and happy about sitting down to work at my computer.
And after handling several chores, I was easily able to clear another blocker that had been frustrating and frightening me. To take this blog where I want it to go in the next few months, I have to upgrade to the current versions of WordPress and the Thesis framework. I was nervous about upgrading WordPress because a couple of years ago I upgraded it without backing up my blog first and it corrupted my database. So the first step was to ensure I had back-ups from my back-up service and my web host (i.e., belt and suspenders). The next time I do this it will take no more than half an hour, but it took a couple of hours today to find my way through the process and sort out some little snafus that it was very lucky I discovered and resolved in time.
My success in upgrading WordPress made me brave enough to upload Thesis 2.0 and get most of the way through the process of copying the settings I have to move by hand. Thesis 2.0 handles the settings for a blog’s design very differently than the 1.x versions. So it may take a few days for me to get that figured out. But once I do, I’ll be free to make the additions I’m planning, which will be a dream come true.
What am I up to? These upgrades and transformations of my blog will make it possible for me to create a mastermind group of my dear gentle readers. The purpose of the group will be to demonstrate success in our own personal lives, cheer one another on and share our success stories in a way that demonstrates to progressives how conservative principles generate prosperity.
Hubert P. Yockey (farthest left in the last row, wearing a sweater), with Berkeley Radiation Lab Director Ernest Lawrence (front row, center, sitting on railroad tie) and Associate Director Donald Cooksey (on Lawrence's left), at the site where Berkeley's 184-inch cyclotron was being built in 1942.
I’m finishing my clutter clearing and just came across a note I made in March 2008. My father, Hubert P. Yockey, became an experimental nuclear physicist at the University of California at Berkeley during World War II, studying under Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence. (My parents met in Tennessee working on the Manhattan Project.)
Dad doesn’t tell a lot of stories about that time because the work was classified, but I think we were watching a documentary on Oppenheimer discussing his involvement with the Communist Party. This reminded Dad that one of Oppenheimer’s students was a fervent Communist. It wasn’t a crime, so he couldn’t be jailed. But his loyalties were in question and the fate of the world was hanging in the balance. It wouldn’t have taken much mischief in that program to tip the scales disastrously for the U.S. and the Allies.
So what did they do?
Dad said the local draft board solved the problem brilliantly. They drafted the student Communist in the Rad Lab and sent him to boot camp. When he completed boot camp, the Army flunked him and made him take it again, and again, and again, and so on, until the end of the war. As Dad said, “It was as good as prison.”
Hit the tip jar, please! Your donations will help me to get back on my feet and to pay an arborist to take down a tree that is threatening two neighbors’ houses. Thank you!
My tree of Damocles, a tulip poplar broken at its base, which is being held up, for now, by a lightning-damaged oak tree.
I apologize for the long lapse in posting. I wanted to post every day in 2013 on clearing blockers, which for the first five days of the year I did, although fairly close to midnight. So on January 6, around 11:40 pm, I tried to log in to write my daily post and discovered my web host was down. Well played, universe.
Instead of just picking up with my posting the next day, I adopted a “Screw it” attitude, which is a blocker. But I also buckled down on clearing the clutter in my work environment and finances. With some luck and a good night’s sleep, I’ll finish tomorrow. Then I have to put my father’s and my finances for 2012 into Quicken, write thank-you e-mails to everyone who has ever sent me a donation and do the Objective Process exercises recommended by Stuart Lichtman.
I’m also gathering the tools and creating the materials to create a conservative mastermind club for my dear gentle readers. If you can hit the tip jar, I would appreciate it and you will be helping it come into being faster. Thank you.
Turning blockers into boosters, day 5: This morning I was enthusiastic about clearing clutter from the living room and den but had an instant change in my priorities when I found a flea on our cat, Polar Bear. One of my perennial blockers is the experience of an emergency, illness or even death of a loved one happening at exactly the time when I was happily about to do something for my own progress: so very, very “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where James Stewart has to deal with a crisis just as he was about to fulfill one of his own dreams. (By the way, I am aware that my loved ones do not die on purpose to thwart me or steal focus.)
Luckily, I remembered that in the extensive Q&A forum available to me as a graduate of Stuart Lichtman’s Super Achievement Coaching Program,* one of the questions was posed by a man having the same experience: something seemed to come out of the blue to torpedo his plans so often he was practically suicidal. Stuart walked him through using a process he describes in his e-book called the Base Reframe. So that was the process I should have reviewed and done today, but, um, the cats have been scatttering and tearing up those papers so the little table and work area I dedicated to that will take at least an hour to get organized and orderly again. That’s part of the de-cluttering I have planned for the next few days. The “torpedo out of the blue” blocker does make me despair, so I’m at least glad to know I have tools I can use to clear that pattern. It beats feeling helpless and hapless.
In the meantime, I was off the to vet for some Frontline. I cared for my father and did chores in the afternoon. In the evening when I finally got back to my de-cluttering project, I needed to clear a space on the bookshelves in my father’s office and found a stack of folders of old financial records. So I spent the evening trying to listen to a Downton Abbey marathon over the sound of a shredder. As I destroyed the documents with the intention of letting go of the past, I had the sense of shredding the sadness in them, and of clearing the way for achievements and prosperity.
I hope as I continue this project that I will be able to gather a group of dear gentle readers to be a mastermind group, sharing experiences and encouraging one another. I haven’t quite sorted out how to do that and would welcome reactions and suggestions.
*If the SACP is too pricey, I’ve also taken the Dream Achiever Program and it is excellent.
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