The problem with this new wheelchair design is …

… you have to be very spry and have good trunk strength to use it. Oops.

If you are paralyzed, it would be a nightmare to try to transfer into this wheelchair because you have to get your legs to straddle it. Then there’s the problem of no back support or lateral support, so that a paralyzed person would fall out of it, either immediately or when going around a corner.

I like that they tried, though. They seem like smart people and once they involve the people their product is designed for in order to meet their real needs, they could do great things.

Obamacare: The Musical!

Tony Passaro sent the link to this video to me this morning — IT. IS. DEE-LISH!!! You may remember Tony is the man who organized 12 busloads of people from Harford County, Maryland, to attend the 9/12 Tea Party in D.C.

So, if you watch the video, yes, I know “single payer” is a stigmatized term so Obama/Congress have a shell game now where the same result has different names and takes differing amounts of time to accomplish. I’ll have to sort out “Shell Game” chapters for my Obama Prevarication Predictor and my “Obama’s Predictable Playbook.”

Ooh! ooh! Speaking of the Obama Prevarication Predictor! Tomorrow Obama will appear on five of the six Sunday morning news interview shows to apply the lipstick of his rhetorical powers to the pig of Obamacare! Somehow he couldn’t fit Fox’s show into his schedule — such a shame! Jonah Goldberg has figured out the perfect epithet for the phenomenon: more cowbell! (See the video here.)

According to the Obama Prevarication Predictor, which notes that whenever Obama’s plans to destroy the U.S. economy encounter an objection sufficient to derail them, he will go on TV and say he would never, never, NEVER do the objectionable thing (although in weasel language, so he really can), the objectionable thing either is not really there OR is good for you OR is both not there AND good for you PLUS only BAD people object to it and IT IS THEIR FAULT that people will DIE! if Obama does not get his way so HURRY-HURRY-HURRY-NOW-NOW-NOW! Also, he is totally a reasonable man and not really attached to the objectionable thing anyway.

Hah!

A reminder: none of the Obamacare proposals will go into effect before 2013, which is after the next presidential election in November 2012, assuming Obama hasn’t figured out how to name himself president-for-life before then. The purposes of this date are to ensure that the glories of the bait will be extolled from now until the next election and to postpone the experience of the hook until it is too late.

Update, 9/19/09, Sun.: Earlier when I was writing this I wanted to point out that the Kool-Aid has worn off for George Will and now he is mocking Obama, but I couldn’t find the link before I had to leave. I’m back and I’ve found it (Newsweek, published online 9/12/09, for the issue dated 9/21/09). Will’s headline for the piece is enigmatic and coy — “Mitch McConnell Smiled? The President is CPR for the GOP” — but Newsweek’s online headline couldn’t be more straightforward, “Why No One Believes Obama” — be sure and read the whole thing:

On the 233rd day of his presidency, Barack Obama grabbed the country’s lapels for the 263rd time—that was, as of last Wednesday, the count of his speeches, press conferences, town halls, interviews, and other public remarks. His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.

He [Obama] says America’s health-care system is going to wrack and ruin and requires root-and-branch reform—but that if you like your health care (as a large majority of Americans do), nothing will change for you. His slippery new formulation is that nothing in his plan will “require” anyone to change coverage. He used to say, “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” He had to stop saying that because various disinterested analysts agree that his plan will give many employers incentives to stop providing coverage for employees.

He deplores “scare tactics” but says that unless he gets his way, people will die. He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars. He says Medicare is an exemplary program that validates government’s prowess at running health systems. But he also says Medicare is unsustainable and going broke, and that he will pay for much of his reforms by eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in this paragon of a program, and in Medicaid. He says Congress will cut Medicare (it will not) by $500 billion—without affecting benefits.

He says the nation’s economic health depends on controlling health-care costs. Yet so important is the trial bar in financing the Democratic Party, he says not a syllable in significant and specific support of tort reforms that could save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing “defensive medicine” intended to protect not patients from illnesses but doctors from lawyers. He has said he will not add a dime to the deficit when bringing 47 million people into government-guaranteed health care. But Wednesday night, 17 million went missing: “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.” Almost 10 million of the uninsured are not citizens, and most of them are illegal immigrants. Presumably the other 7 million could get insurance but chose not to. Democrats propose fines to eliminate that choice. He suggests health-insurance companies are making excessive profits. But since 1996, profits of the six such companies in the S&P 500 have been below the 500’s average. He says a “public option”—a government insurance program—would not be subsidized to enable it to compete unfairly with private insurers. (The post office and the government’s transportation -“public option,” Amtrak, devour subsidies.) He says the public option is vital for keeping health insurers “honest”—but that it is only a wee “sliver” of reform.

It’s going to be delicious watching Obama tomorrow really exploring the space with his cowbell.

For more, over at The Sundries Shack, Jimmy Bise is predicting, “This train is bound for wreckage, this train ….”

Thank you, Mary Travers, for the hammer, the bell and the song

Mary Travers, of the Sixties singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary, died Sept. 16 of leukemia at the age of 72 — my condolences to her family and loved ones.

I hesitated about posting this yesterday because of the “hammer of justice” line — now that I understand why the Left does not make good on its promises of “social justice,” which is why I could not get the Leftist lesbians at the tippy-top of the disability rights movement to choose wheelchair-accessible venues for the annual meetings of Passages in the 1990’s — although the venues were always advertised as wheelchair-accessible. I’ll be writing more soon on Dr. Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate, which updates the insights of Eric Hoffer and explains why the Left is all about saying one thing and doing another.

But when I decided to check on the lyrics, I found them posted at Arlo Guthrie’s Web site — and thanks to Roger Simon, I learned recently that Arlo has been a Republican for several years now. I believe it’s because he had the integrity to join the party that truly has the values he espoused in his youth and says what it means and does what it says, liberty- and social-justice-wise. So — since we mean it when we sing it, and we could use more songs to sing at our Tea Parties — I am appropriating “If I had a hammer” from the Left for the Right, since we will use it in the spirit in which it was written.

Thank you, Mary, for lifting our hearts.

Tributes on the passing of Norman Borlaug

It may take me awhile to gather up all the links I want to have in this post as a tribute to Norman Borlaug — Iowahawk has the most touching description of Borlaug’s life:

Norman Borlaug died Saturday [9/12/09] at 95, leaving a humanitarian legacy equaled by few in history. By some estimates his life’s work saved over a billion human beings from starvation. That life work was farming, and it took him from a 106 acre spread outside Cresco to grain fields around the planet.

I didn’t know about Dr. Borlaug until he died. But I would like to mark his passing here for a few reasons. First, his accomplishments were noble and opposed by liberal ideologues who called themselves “progressives,” yet collectively oppose progress like the improvements in plant breeding and farming techniques that Dr. Borlaug developed that allowed Third World nations to avert famine and save their economies by becoming self-sufficient in their food production.

Second, because I want to ask if there any research has been done in the U.S. to see what the requirements are for the U.S. to be self-sufficient in food production and have food to export — is there a minimum amount of land, for example, that we need to reserve for food production and protect from development?

Third, the Democratic Congress enacted legislation a few months ago that requires so much testing for plant illnesses from seed sellers that it will run heirloom and small seed companies out of business and wipe out the U.S. as the last great repository of seed diversity in the world. (I have to look up the links for this.)

My interest in this is that my grandparents on both sides were farmers — on my father’s side, Iowa farmers — and I love to grow heirloom tomatoes, patty pans squash and herbs, such as basil, parsley and oregano. Wiping out the small seed companies, non-profits and individuals who are guarding the genetic diversity of our seed supply is a form of cultural suicide.

I will add more tributes as I find them.

Read John Hawkins on the descent of Little Green Footballs

Because I am new to conservatism and blogging, when I first saw Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs attacking dear, brave Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, whom I met at CPAC and came this close to asking her to autograph my … arm — so much do I admire her courage — I did not know what to make of his accusations except that I cannot bring myself to believe evil of her. People who want me to believe evil of her are playing with fire and running with scissors at the same time. However, by the time Charles got to denouncing Stacy McCain of The Other McCain (see below for his recent replies); Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit; and Pajamas Media, the group blog he co-founded with Roger Simon; THEN I knew I was on solid ground in questioning his judgment, and possibly his sanity.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a thoughtful post on “The Descent of Little Green Footballs” today that includes his reactions to Charles Johnson turning on his fellow anti-radical-Islam bloggers, starting with Pamela Geller:

At first, I noticed that Charles Johnson was getting into feuds with the other anti-radical Islam websites. Early on, as far as I could tell, it was all Charles attacking websites like Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Gates of Vienna over these European political parties that they supported because they were anti-radical Islam.

At the time, I didn’t know who was right and was wrong. In fact, I still don’t because Charles’ arguments were all very “Seven [Yo, John! It’s six!] Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Some European political party I had never heard of was terrible because it had a high ranking member that I had never heard of who freely associated with some other people who were REALLY BAD that I never heard of and — all these bloggers were terrible, horrible, awful racists and fascists for liking these political parties.

I was sad when I saw Charles attacking Pamela and I didn’t know enough of the “who struck John” to spring to her defense. It appears I wasn’t alone. And maybe Charles was using the difficulty of checking his work as a cover so his mud would stick.

John continues:

Eventually, the bloggers Charles was picking fights with started firing back at him and I started to notice that Charles had a huge beef with Christians. At one point, I looked over at LGF and noticed that literally half the posts on his front page were edged pieces about creationism. This struck me as extremely odd given that creationism wasn’t a hot topic at the time. You could read through 30-40 blogs, not read one word about creationism, and get to LGF and there were 10 posts about it.

This, I found to be a very troubling sign. There are certainly plenty of atheists and agnostics who are good conservatives. However, inevitably in my experience, when you have someone who has a huge beef with Christians, they turn to the Left. That’s exactly how it happened with Andrew Sullivan and John Cole from Balloon Juice and it’s how it happened with Charles, too.

Now here I have to distinguish my position on Christianity, Creationism and Intelligent Design from Charles’s. First, I am spiritual but not religious. I do not have a problem with Christianity until it intrudes into government and education to appropriate the apparatus of the state to impose its dogmas as the law of the land — in the case of homosexual equality — or as facts — in the case of demanding that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design, which are religious dogmas, be taught in school.

My stake in the homosexual equality discussion is obvious — I support equality for homosexuals.

My stake in the Creationism/Intelligent Design argument is due to the work of my father, Hubert P. Yockey, because he has demonstrated that the orgin of life is unknowable, just as the origin of matter is, and that what should be taught about the origin of life in schools is WHY the origin of life unknowable. The sequence is: [unknowable origin of matter] > matter > [unknowable origin of life] > life. In addition, he has pointed out that objections to Darwin’s theory of evolution based on gaps in the fossil record became obsolete with the discovery of DNA because there are no gaps in the genome from the origin of life to the present and we can now look back through the genome and DNA, so that gaps in the fossil record are irrelevant.

I only want church and state, and church and science, to go to their respective corners.

Charles reports on the intrusions of religion into government in the form of people of various religions getting laws passed to require that Creationism and/or Intelligent Design be taught in schools. So I am keeping Little Green Footballs in my newsfeed. There is a delicious irony in this, though. My father’s work shows that ALL of the accepted theories on the origin of life are wrong since coding theory shows why it is unknowable, now and forever. So I consider Charles’s beliefs on the subject to be as faith-based as those of any Christian, even if the faith is based in dialectical materialism. The belief that it is possible to discover the origin of life in the laws of physics and chemistry — which do not contain sufficient information for the problem — is exactly like believing that if you study the physics and chemistry of ink, or pixels, you will be able to discover the origin of works of literature. Exercise-in-futility-wise, it is the modern-day version of trying to figure out how to turn base metals into gold.

Turning to Charles’s attacks on Stacy McCain, below I link the best of Stacy’s recent thoughts about Charles, who really, really should not have poked the bear:

“Andrew Jackson’s Mother Advises This Response to Charles Johnson:

Contrary to anything Mad King Charles may tell his dwindling pool of yet-to-be-banned readers in their “private” discussions, this engagement began when Johnson attacked my friend Pamela Geller for her attendance at the October 2007 Brussels conference. Though I was not involved in that dispute, as I told Pamela in a brief phone conversation this morning, I now regret that I did not immediately leap to her defense.

(snip)

Say what you will about Pamela Geller, she is not afraid of a fight. And what the conservative movement needs now — far more than we need ideological unity among intellectuals or would-be intellectuals — is people who are not afraid of a fight.

“LGF Boycott HQ” — too funny!:

We know you’re dying to know what’s going on in Lizard Land, so here are recent LGF headlines and summaries:

No Racism at the Tea Party?

Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:59:05 pm PDT

Photos of anti-Obama posters at DC 9/12 rally which proves “racism” because anybody who doesn’t like Obama is racist, just like anybody who hated Bill Clinton was anti-oral sex.

(snip)

In other words, you’re not missing anything at LGF you couldn’t get from Amanda Marcotte or Firedoglake.

“Charles Johnson exposes yet another scary neo-Nazi: CHARLES JOHNSON”

God told an angel I’ll call “Lydia” to send me an e-mail:

After reading about the dust-up, it occurred to me that Charles could be exposed as a hypocrite by using his own methods. CJ uses what I call a “Six Degrees of Extremism” (or Six Degrees of Racism/Euro Fascism, etc) political parlor game.

He condemns Robert Spencer [of Jihad Watch, linked above] for “associations” with “extremists”* and you for “connections” to white supremacists, yet he adds Daily Kos to his blogroll and approvingly links their posts, which contain the exact kind of material and links to people that CJ uses to excoriate his new targets.

Based on his own criteria, CJ himself is now a racist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi fascist. Here’s how: [click here].

I am in Villainous Company again

Cassandra at Villainous Company is the wife of a Marine, so when the Associated Press broke its embed agreement and published its photo of a soldier taken as he was dying in Afghanistan in defiance of his family’s wishes, she felt their pain and voiced her objections, as did Michelle Malkin and others.

However, it appears Donald Douglas of American Power, jumped into the fray on the AP’s side. I believe he was looking for allies in the business of publishing photos and videos that violate the rights of others as he has done purely for personal gain. Recently Cassandra and Attila and I all piled onto Donald for publishing the link to the peeping Tom video taken of a popular female sportscaster while she was showering.

Oh — and Donald has a lot of blah-blah-blah trying to invalidate Cassandra’s objections by casting her as a Left-wing-feminist. Huh! Left wing? Not even. Feminist? Hell, yes!

However, I have another point to make besides letting Cassandra know I’m with her. That’s because I’ve been reading United in Hate: the Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Hate by Jamie Glazov this week. And I just got through the chapter analyzing the Left’s love of the Viet Nam War, which we had effectively won, but in the end lost because of the people at home who broke our will — from Walter Cronkhite’s despairing coverage of the Tet offensive to the anti-war protests.

So I want to point out to Cassandra, and the world, that I believe the objective of the AP editor in publishing the photo of the dying soldier was not simply to illuminate the experience of war — it was to chip away at our will to win.

Update, 9/15/09: And now dear Attila has added her voice.

UPDATEDx2 — Why is Charles Johnson continuing to libel Stacy McCain?

Why is Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs continuing to libel Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain? That is the question that popped into my mind as I was waking up this morning.

Then I had another thought: isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that CJ began his vendetta against Stacy just after Stacy and Dan Riehl succeeded in shutting down the foremost lying liar Leftie bloggers who were the origins of so many lies about Gov. Sarah Palin? Just as Gov. Palin put herself in a position to fight their libels by stepping down — the grounds for libel are different for private citizens — and just as Dan Riehl and Stacy McCain proved that unflattering amounts of sunshine were going to flood down upon the blogs and lives of the lying liar anti-Palin bloggers — suddenly Stacy McCain is under relentless and groundless attack.

Hmmmmm, I thought to myself. Hmmmmmmm.

So I called Stacy to tell him I was planning to write a post asking whether Charles Johnson is being paid to conduct this campaign by Obama’s post-election minions, Organizing for America, and he told me he didn’t think so. He was very generous about Charles Johnson’s motives for trying to destroy him — Charles Johnson used to be king of the blogosphere, and brought down Dan Rather (couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!). Now he’s “Charles who?” Now highly respected bloggers, one-by-one, over the last few months have been announcing their opinion that Charles Johnson is crazy and not someone they respect any more. They are severing their connections and taking Little Green Footballs out of their blogrolls. Stacy had more detail — being Stacy — involving the post 9/11 blogosphere, and the elections in 2004 and 2006.

However, I used to be a reporter, too, and being more recently from the Left, I have a more suspicious nature. I urge bloggers on the Right to figure out that this is a battle where we have to unite with Stacy and fight with him and for him, first because the accusations against him are not true, and second, because we might be the next target.

Right now I think Stacy should be consulting libel attorneys because Charles Johnson is knowingly lying about him to destroy his reputation and career.

Update, 9/13/09: Peter Davis of Shakey Pete’s Shootin’ Shack has some thoughts on CJ’s use of the “ransom note” technique of character assassination (please go read his entire post):

Seems that Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs fame has now called out R.S. McCain as a racist, with short snippets of quotes, quotes when they are put out more fully seem not racist at all. One quote, which seems more problematical, is actually from someone else entirely.

I wish someone would try that with me, in a slightly different way. Why with short snippets of me and longer quotes from other people entirely I could be a well-known math genius, a financial guru and who knows what else. Then with somebody smart to write the speeches I could hit the lecture circuit and be famous!

Dan Riehl of Riehl World View does not esteem CJ’s journalistic powers since he didn’t even do the thing I gave him credit for (bringing Dan Rather down):

Seemingly deranged blogger Charles Johnson employs an ugly and deceptive tactic in an effort to smear Stacy McCain again today. I guess without the Freepers who actually discovered the RatherGate forgeries, Crazy Charley just isn’t very good. Oh, today Crazy Charley has also discovered that the 9/12 Protest logo is of communist design. Yeah, that’s how ugly and nuts he is now.

Update, 9/15/09: Charles is in a hole, yet he continues to dig. Powerline could have quietly dropped him from its blogroll on Sept. 10, but instead felt obligated to announce it and explain. Now Charles has made false accusations against the highly regarded Jim Hoft, aka Gateway Pundit, which are detailed here in Jim’s reply. Founding Bloggers has the story on Charles’s announcement that he has removed from his blogroll Pajamas Media, a group blog he helped found with Roger Simon.

Charles and I have common ground on one issue: both Creationism and Intelligent Design are religious beliefs that should not be taught in schools as science. Little Green Footballs will stay in my newsfeed because Charles is my best source on whatever fresh mischief social conservatives are up to in trying to appropriate the apparatus of the state to have their beliefs taught as facts in order to force their religion on others. This is the mirror image of what liberals do when hijacking textbooks and school curricula to force the worship of big government and political correctness. Both are wrong.

Update, 9/15/09: Somehow I didn’t make it into Stacy’s round-up of bloggers who are standing by him and defending him against Charles’s specious accusations, but I can be included in his trackback list by linking it here. And, I should note, Stacy has been generous with linkage to me this week.

Jimmy Bise at The Sundries Shack has the funniest takedown of Charles, so far — here’s a taste, but be sure to read the whole thing:

Anyhow, Johnson’s on Stacy like a chihuahua on a Great Dane and it’s only because Stacy is a good man and not the vicious rage and hate-filled maniac that Johnson wants us to think he is (wait…Stacy McCain filled with rage? Yelling at co-workers? Seriously? Stacy McCain? Has Charles Johnson ever watched Stacy work a room? The man is the exact opposite of rage.) that he hasn’t turned and bitten the yap dog’s head clean off.

But lots of others have torn into Johnson, as they should have. The very notion that my friend Stacy is a racist is laughable. He might as well accuse Stacy of being a liberal.

Obama's Predictable Playbook — how to write a speech for Obama

Thanks in part to Obama’s open embrace of the rules for radicals of Saul Alinsky, his tactics and strategies are becoming increasingly clear and predictable, as I have noted in my Obama Prevarication Predictor posts, so I am now inaugurating a series of posts on its corollary, “Obama’s Predictable Playbook.”

Rich Lowry, the editor of the National Review Online, has sorted out the chapter on how to write “An Obama Speech in 13 Easy Steps” in Obama’s Predictable Playbook — click here to read the explanations for each item — and if you read it alongside a transcript of Obama’s Sept. 9, 2009, speech on Obamacare to Congress, you will howl at the aptness of each point:

Everyone marvels at Barack Obama’s rhetorical prowess. But don’t be overly bedazzled. With these 13 easy steps, you, too, can give a Barack Obama speech.

1) Create a false center.…

2) Scorn ideology….

3) Talk about your openness to ideas from opponents….

4) Embrace empty symbolic measures as a show of reasonableness….

5)  Make lawyerly distinctions too subtle for most people to notice….

6) Say things just because they sound good….

7) Dissemble as necessary….

8) Make the price right….

9) Never admit any cost or downside to what you are proposing….

10) Couple attacks on your critics as unworthy hacks with calls for civility. If you favor “a civil conversation,” you can better dismiss your opponents for their “bickering” and “games.” ….

11) Be sure to say something like “this is the time.” ….

12) At least once a speech, keep talking over the applause. This is inspiring.

13) Load it up in a teleprompter. And repeat as necessary.

UPDATED: Robert Stacy McCain is a lousy racist and a terrible bigot (NOT!)

My headline would be MUCH better if I could have created urgency to click on this post by leaving out the “(NOT!).” But I know better than to trust the Left, having so recently resided there. I do not want anyone to have an excuse to put my name to a phrase saying Stacy is a racist or a bigot because he is not. The reason I can call him a “lousy racist” and “a terrible bigot” is that he completely and totally sucks at both, again, in the sense that he is neither.

This morning I see that my blog pals Dan Collins and Dan Riehl are springing to the defense of my dear friend and fairy blogfather, Robert Stacy McCain, who goes by “Stacy” and blogs at The Other McCain. I must add my voice to theirs, but with more authority, because Stacy writes in opposition to homosexual equality and I am lesbian and I support the cause of homosexual equality — for example, federal protection from discrimination in access to jobs, housing and public accommodations (e.g., restaurants, stores, sporting events, concerts, parks); same-sex marriage; repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” so that gays and lesbians can be openly gay or lesbian while serving in the military; and adoption.

One of the things I have marveled at and loved about joining the conservative movement is that it embodies the ideal of embracing diversity. My experience of diversity on the Left was that, sure, there’s a rainbow of races and a sort-of rainbow of religions and homosexuals believe they are welcome (which is not the same as actually being welcome), but there was a strict uniformity of beliefs that were imposed top-down and woe betide the useful idiot — like me — who tried to cash in any of those checks, especially if they then went all activist on the asses of the Lefties breaking the promises — again, like me — for passing worthless promises in the belief that that neighborhood of the Left was just ignorant and only needed activism and education so that it would keep the promises it had made of equality, inclusion, yada-yada-yada.

Even after being run out of the lesbian and gay community in the pages of The Washington Blade in 1996 for my advocacy for the rights of people in wheelchairs, including my late life partner, it was not until the spring of 2008 when I found out about Barack Obama’s 20-year allegiance to Rev. Jeremiah Wright that I began to realize that the Left is where the most vicious racism and bigotry now resides in the U.S. Over the last year, with access to a fuller statement of facts from bloggers and online magazines than I ever got from the mainstream media, I have come to see the Left as the modern embodiment of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. My perception now is that the Left espouses ideals to gain followers, but only to gain power over them, seldom, if ever, to deliver on policies in line with their stated ideals. It’s all “say one thing, do another” over there.

In contrast, on the Right, there are a few common principles holding conservatives and Republicans — who are not the same — and libertarians together in common cause — mainly, that there is a tipping point of taxation beyond which people no longer have the means of true liberty; that capitalism is the highest and best economic system to allow individuals to make the most of their lives and create a better world; and that the ideals on which the United States of America was founded are worthy of defending and passing on intact to the next generation.

Beyond those few common principles, I find enormous diversity of belief and opinion in the Right, as well as a diversity of sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, race and what have you. Plus, I find women in positions of power and authority. People on the Right are able to have opposite and mutually exclusive opinions on various matters. Put together, that is real diversity.

So, yes, Stacy and I are at daggers drawn over homosexual equality, especially gay marriage equality. But he states his reasons — and his feelings. I state mine. And we remain staunch and loyal friends.

In addition, Stacy is NOT a racist — there’s just no way.

Stacy has his own pertinent remarks for Charles Johnson as folows:

His attack on me at LGF is a classic “ransom note method” attack — the assembling of this, that and the other to create a collage, like a kidnapper glueing together words clipped from magazines.

No Southerner should ever think he will be allowed to defend his homeland and her people without being insulted for it. If you’re going to defend the South, you must be prepared to defend it down to the last boll weevil on the scraggliest cotton patch in front of the most decrepit tar-paper shack in Mississippi.

So widespread is anti-Southern prejudice, especially among the intellectual elite, that the man who presumes to defend the South might as well begin by foreswearing any further ambition in life. Assume at the outset that you will be denounced and castigated and exiled to outer darkness, and resolve that this daunting prospect will not deter you from your duty.

(Note: the last two paragraphs of this post are rated ROTFLOL.)

(I should mention at this point that I was born in the South and raised in Tennessee, California and Maryland. My mother’s side of the family are Southerners. I take a dim view of stereotyping Southerners.)

All this background on the issue was never reported by the New York Times, and the people who have condemned me as a “neo-Confederate” know nothing about how I gained that descriptor.

Did I write some things that were . . . intemperate? Hey, we’re talking about Stacy McCain here, OK? When I go to fight, I go to war, and it’s war to the knife, knife to the hilt.

I love Stacy McCain. He is my friend, a valued mentor, and he is in no way, shape or form a bigot or racist.

P.S.

I believe this is only the first or second time since I started my blog that I have used the word “bigot.” I do not find it helpful in discussions aimed at illuminating how society and groups within it should set boundaries.

The link to Charles Johnson’s blog, Little Green Footballs, is in my newsfeed so I can keep an eye on him. I support Charles in his fight against Creationism, and its re-branded version, Intelligent Design, which came into being using deliberately distorted points from my father’s work. (I have the correspondence!) I do this because my father is Hubert P. Yockey and he has published a number of papers and two books from Cambridge University Press on the origin of life and evolution. Both my father and I oppose Creationism and Intelligent Design. My father’s work demonstrates that what we should be teaching in schools about the origin of life is that it unknowable by any current or future method, and why. (Dad supports the theory of evolution, in case anyone is wondering.)

By the way, I do not necessarily agree with all the bloggers who are in my newsfeed. It is a selection of people whose blogs I read, except for Shakey Pete’s Shootin’ Shack — I can’t get Peter’s RSS feed to work with my newsfeed.

Update, 9/13/09: Stogie at Saberpoint also came to Stacy’s defense today — please go read his entire post because it has additional important information (emphasis mine):

Stacy and I were involved in online discussions (aka “the great listserv debates”) with a large group of interested people and, of course, the issue of race and race relations came up and was hotly debated. Should blacks, Jews and others be allowed into our fold? Stacy, I and others said, “absolutely!” There were some bigots in the group who wanted to add a racial component to our movement but Stacy (and I and others) strenuously opposed it. Stacy was an outspoken leader of the non-racist faction; he denounced racism as dishonorable and wrong. We fought the bigots together and took a lot of heat for our stand. Nevertheless, a New York Press reporter named Michaelangelo Signorile misattributed another’s comments on interracial marriage to McCain. These errors were subsequently picked up by other bloggers (as well as the SPLC) and spread. Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs is the most recent purveyor of these falsehoods.

In addition, Prof. William Jacobson picked up the cudgel on Stacy’s behalf today and also noted that how false accusations of racism are now used to damage enemies in the search engines:

Fourth, the LGF attack appeared to be payback for McCain’s defense of Pam Geller when LGF attacked her. Payback attacks always are suspicious.

… being tagged a racist is about as damaging a tag as exists because the damage is caused once the accusation is made.And that is the point. If you want to ruin someone’s reputation, just keep posting the words “racist” in close proximity to their name on the internet so that web search engines associate the person and the accusation. That is what some people tried to do to Glenn Beck recently by making accusations of past criminal conduct in the form of a question for the very purpose of influencing Google and other search engines.

The false accusation of racism is a despicable tactic. It damages the person against whom it is made and the victims of true racism.

And that is why I felt it necessary to speak up this time.

Carol of Carol’s Closet calls for “Truth in Labeling: Stacy McCain is NOT a Racist but Charles Johnson is an Asshole“:

Stacy McCain is not a racist. He is a proud son of the South and as an adopted southerner myself, I believe there is much to be proud of. Mr. Johnson dilutes the word “racist” by using it as a stick to swing at his latest intended target (apparently Johnson is one of those people who is always targeting someone).