WANKERS TO THE RIGHT OF US

In a federal budget that is miserly for nearly everything that doesn't have a war attached to it, El Presidente has asked Congress to fund an increase of $28 million over current funding of $191 million for an "abstinence only" program of sex education for teenagers.

"Abstinence only" sex education has about as much to do with sex education, or with healthcare, as ham has to do with hamburgers.

"In an Oct. 3 report that surveyed abstinence programs in 10 states, the Government Accountability Office concluded that such programs were not proved to work, and at times contained inaccuracies about condoms and AIDS." (Source linked below)

Condoms? Don't say that word around "abstinence educators," for the money in Mr. Bush's budget request mandates that none of it can be used to promote condom or contraceptive use.

Because, evidently, the shortest distance to sexual health for teenagers is total ignorance. And like that's always worked in the past, right?

So governors of some six states have dropped out of the federal program of promoting abstinence only, or plan to drop out soon, because the Bush administration has its own head so far up its own ass as to be a relatively poor teacher of ANYTHING.

ASSESSING THE DAMAGE

April is the cruellest month. Somebody said that already, though he was eat up with regret and thinking about something else.

The damage to this forward Spring is severe. Japanese maples, blasted. Lilacs won't bloom this spring, nor the climbing hydrangea, nor the crabapple, nor the viburnams. I haven't been out to look closely, but the blackened leaves and buds I can see out of all windows is a melancholy sight.

And not at all unique. Not many years ago we had low 20s on May 20th , and all the hostas turned black, along with everything else. They all recovered, eventually, but it was a blighted year.

We'll be a month or more before the leafed trees and shrubs fully recover, and some of the exotics may have been dealt fatal blows, like innocent, dumb tourists shivved on our streets of early April. Poor things.

Notice that our mountain natives have been wiser. No native tree had shown a leaf, and probably won't now until half-way through May. But these fotched on species are always fooled by forward springs, and suffer hard, black death. Pray their roots are clinched in a rictus of determination and that we'll see the green fuse light up again.

TEARING DOWN THE WALL BETWEEN CHURCH & STATE, ONE LAWYER AT A TIME

Pat Robertson's Regent University has a law school. One of the graduates of that law school is Monica Goodling, the 5th-Amendment-hugging and now former top assistant to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Monica, bless her heart, gives every appearance of having been in up over her heavy eyebrows in the politically motivated firing of several U.S. attorneys. She refuses to testify for fear of incriminating herself, and now she's resigned her position at the Department of Justice.

According to this article, there are currently 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's law school serving in the administration of The Godliest President in the History of the Universe. They appear to have them hands in a lot of super-Christian activity, from justifying torture of heathen Moslems to failure to prosecute Civil Rights cases unless Bible-reading's involved.

Pat Robertson's theocratic agenda is and has been very clear: to tear down the wall between church and state in America (a "lie of the left," according to Robertson).

But this infiltration of government by lawyers with Pat Robertson on the brain really hasn't got much to do with religion. It's all about power and Republican Party conservative politics. It's about keeping a certain class of white Protestants and their cultural norms in full control.

And incidentally, former Attorney General and penecostal minister John Ashcroft is now a law professor at Regent University.

ADDENDUM
Boston Globe article today on Regent Univ. School of Law says that the stampede of Regent graduates into high government positions came about this way:

...in 2001, the Bush administration picked the dean of Regent's government school, Kay Coles James , to be the director of the Office of Personnel Management -- essentially the head of human resources for the executive branch.

They went wormy at the top.

NC VOTERS SUPPORT SMOKING BAN

At least, according to this poll.

You coulda knocked me over with a Burley leaf!

The voters also disdain tax deals for huge Google plants (admittedly by a less decisive margin). But still.

A MOUNTAIN THOREAU

Wonderful letter-to-the-editor in Thursday's High Country Press from 80-year-old C. Harry Ross, who talks sense the way Thoreau used to (the Press doesn't have letters up on line, evidently, so you'll have to search your local mercantiles for stray copies). Mr. Ross offers opinions on a wide range of ripe topics:

*Over-lit mega gas stations in rural settings ... he's agin 'em (and we've seen the one in Vilas he's talking about, and he's right)

*N.C.D.O.T. ("heaven almighty you ought to see the mess those boys make")

*Boone developer Phil Templeton ("Son, there's something ain't right in your mind")

*Zero Waste. Makes perfect sense to him. To us too

*Bottled-water guzzling County Commissioners ("either means that they don't think the city water that comes out of the tap is drinkable, or they are too good to drink the tap water")

*Television, which is obviously the source of the need for fancy recreation centers

We sincerely hope Mr. Ross feels led to make further opinions known to us in the future. He has a following out here!

FOXX, REHEARSING HER ABCs

You can decide for yourself about the ineffable educational value of putting Madam Virginia Foxx's brand of partisanship into grade school classrooms, but even a blind hog occasionally finds a chestnut:

Foxx ... said generally Republicans believed people could take better care of their money than the government could.

She knows what she's talking about, having been a part of the government that proved it couldn't take care of budgets nor much of anything else ... except maybe interferring in the death of Terri Schiavo.

So now, instead of "listening tours" among her actual voting constiuents, the Madam is determined to inflict herself on the innocent, who can be depended on not to ask about her actual votes for Veteran's funding.

REMEMBERING AN AMERICAN RADICAL, HENRY DAVID THOREAU

A little bit ago, in searching for a way to criticize the over-intellectualizing practiced by many "progressives," some advice of Thoreau's came floating up to me from high school: "Simplify, simplify."

This led to a brush fire of Googling, as I cross-checked my memory, and then to the delight of finding a whole bunch of Thoreau quotes I had forgotten ... from the pious ("It is never too late to give up our prejudices") to the insightful ("When a dog runs at you, whistle for him") to the downright cantankerous ("We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes").

What a contrarian crank Thoreau was, though he was taught to us in high school as another granite monument to stodginess, a "good" and therefore patriotic American who thought deep American thoughts and lived in a cabin in the woods.

He was pure American, all right, which means he was rebellious down to the marrow, down to his hair follicles -- impudent and irreverent, a radical, a libertarian, a stiff-necked objector to what was "popular," and a sometimes rueful observer of the human condition:

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

That's just plain dark. And so was his view of government, which at that time was allowing the institution of slavery:

"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison."

You can make up your own mind what Thoreau would have thought of George W. Bush, but here's a broad hint:

"What is human warfare but just this: an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party."

He wouldn't have felt much affection either for fellow New Englander John Kerry, which brings us full circle to where we began. Poor Kerry couldn't simplify anything, especially those pronouncements he uttered in 2004 that wrapped their tails twice around their heads and throttled their own windpipes.

Because "progressives" so often see complication growing like a thicket screening every worthwhile goal, they find it difficult to simplify. Can't tell yet if any of the four-and-twenty magpies running for president have the gift of Thoreauvian simplicity, but we can hope.

DESPERATE TO PANDER, IT'S BEST NOT TO LIE

Trying to further remake himself as a hard-as-nails, "I've-been-shooting-bunny-rabbits-since-I-cut-my -teeth-on-a-sawed-off-shotgun," former Mass. Guv Mitt Romney claimed he's "been a hunter pretty much all my life."

That bamboozlement took all of 30 minutes to explode.

One of the exactly TWO times he's been hunting was to shoot quail in a barrel with a bunch of fellow metrosexual suits doing the Iron John routine.

This blunder is on the order of Sen. John McCain's bragging about how safe Baghdad has become, so long as you have a personal posse of 100 armed soldiers, a couple of helicopters, a gunship, and personal body armor.

THE REASON GUILIANI WOULD MAKE THE STRONGEST REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE IS ALSO THE REASON HE CAN'T GET THE NOMINATION

N'est pas? (Which is French for f***ing A!)

Stands by his strong pro-choice position ... that a constitutional right to abortion means "There must be public funding for abortions for poor women."

Meanwhile, Southern Baptist Mullah Richard Land gets a strong case of the vapors.

Inquiring minds want to know: Who does Madam Virginia Foxx, the formerly pro-choice feminist and now staunchly anti-choice extreme conservative, favor for the Republican nomination for president? Has anyone seen any endorsement on her part? Or would you like to speculate?