Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

Thomas R. Byrne, United States ambassador to Norway, representing Henry A. Kissinger at the ceremonies for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize (source)

Robert E. Wheatley, "Witnessing the Death of a Nation - The Fall of Saigon" (source)

"I like golf," Clark told HBO's "Real Time" host Bill Maher. "And I'm sorry that Tom DeLay plays golf."

Then the one-time top military man went off the deep end.

"I think that people who are charged with ethics violations in Congress should be prohibited from playing golf," he told Maher.

Why?

"Because if you can't trust them in Congress, how can you trust their score on a golf course?" Clark explained.

Rich celebrities glorify poverty in MTV's latest endeavor.

A new MTV series features Hollywood celebrities praising the developing world's primitive lifestyles as earth-friendly -- despite those poor nations' high infant mortality rates and short life expectancies.

The eco-tourism show, called "Trippin'," premiered on March 28 and was heavily promoted in the runup to Earth Day. The show encourages environmental awareness and lauds traditional tribal lifestyles, which lack running water, electricity and other basic infrastructure.

As video of mud-pounding filled the TV screen, Diaz explained, "They (Nepalese villagers) continue to live in harmony with the world around them. It's a way of living very different than what we are used to. It seems to work."

But MTV viewers were not informed that Nepal has an infant mortality rate of nearly 69 deaths per 1,000 live births, about ten times the infant death rate in the U.S. Nor did they hear that life expectancy in Nepal is 59 years.

I'm not surprised that so many on the social right liked Andrea Dworkin. Like Dworkin, their essential impulse when they see human beings living freely is to try and control or stop them - for their own good. Like Dworkin, they are horrified by male sexuality, and see men as such as a problem to be tamed. Like Dowkin [sic], they believe in the power of the state to censor and coerce sexual feedom. Like Dworkin, they view the enormous new freedom that women and gay people have acquired since the 1960s as a terrible development for human culture. Cathy Young has a great blog item exploring these connections here. Dworkin, of course, was somewhat too frank in her hatred of sexual freedom to achieve any real political power. But the theocons ... well, they're helping frame big government conservatism as we speak.

David Brooks, in another smart column, points out that from the beginning of the 1990s, we have seen a sharp decline in all sorts of anti-social behavior: crime, abortion rates, teen pregnancy, and so on. At the same time, the last fifteen years have been marked by the high watermark of gay visibility and activism. If the assumptions of many social conservatives are true - that there is a direct relationship between culture and society, and that gay visibility is a sign of moral decline - then none of this should have happened.

What many of us are asking for is simply the ability for lay Catholics and indeed priests and theologians to be able to debate respectfully such pressing issues as mandatory celibacy for the priesthood, a less rigid biological understanding of the rights and dignity of women, and a real dialogue with gay Catholics about how we can practically live lives that reflect our human dignity and our profound human need for intimacy and sexual expression.

One protest that was announced was an upcoming zap of Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, the German prelate who was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. He had written a paper for the Vatican in which he said that homosexuality was "intrinsically disordered" and a "moral evil."
[. . . ]
Ratzinger took the podium and began to speak. As soon as he finished his first sentence, a group of about eight people to the left of the crowd leaped to their feet and began chanting "Stop the Inquisition!" They chanted feverishly and loudly, their voices echoing throughout the building. The entire room was fixated on them. Activists suddenly appeared in the back of the church and began giving out fliers explaining the action. Two men on the other side of the room jumped up and, pointing at Ratzinger, began to scream, "Antichrist!" another man jumped up, in one of the first few rows near the prelate, and yelled, "Nazi!" All over the church, angry people began to shout down the protestors who were near them; chaotic yelling matches broke out.

It was electrifying. Chills ran up and down my spine as I watched the protestors and then looked back at Ratzinger. Soon, anger swelled up inside me: This man was the embodiment of all that had oppressed me, all the horrors I had suffered as a child. It was because of his bigotry that my family, my church -- everyone around me -- had alienated me, and it was because of his bigotry that I was called "faggot" in school. Because of his bigotry I was treated like garbage. He was responsible for the hell I'd endured. He and his kind were the people who forced me to live in shame, in the closet. I became livid...

Suddenly, I jumped up on one of the marble platforms and, looking down, I addressed the entire congregation in the loudest voice I could. My voice rang out as if it were amplified. I pointed at Ratzinger and shouted: "He is no man of God!" The shocked faces of the assembled Catholics turned to the back of the room to look at me as I continued: "He is no man of God -- he is the Devil!"

There are gay people who support parents' right to choose their children's educational options, who respect the rights of private creed-based organizations to exclude gays or atheists or whomever from membership, and who accept that people don't have to like each other's ideas, actions, or psychological orientation in order to like each other. Likewise, there are social conservatives who feel the same about getting along with others, who believe that a few or many of the benefits associated with marriage could be extended to other relationships (not just gay ones) without insulting the institution of marriage, and who believe that, at least to some degree, the government has too much of its hand in (nominally) defending cultural values - that some of that "defense" should be assumed wholly by the private sector. These people need to find each other somehow.

One in five teenagers has popped Vicodin, OxyContin or some other prescription painkiller to get high, a shocking new study has revealed.
And, just as disturbing, today's teens can get those drugs almost effortlessly simply by raiding their parents' medicine cabinets, according to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

Well, lo and behold, they tagged a bunch of them and they found a couple of them living in a Kmart sign, the red K in a Kmart sign. Spotted owl! And the Kmart sign, I hate to tell you, is not a tree. I don't know if you can find any Kmart signs anymore, or as many, but these two spotted owls found them. Now, I've been to Hawaii. The idea that there's not enough space in Hawaii for these songbirds to survive and live because of human development is something I just don't accept, just like I don't accept it in this country. But even at that, you know, we've taken this to such extremes, and I want to recycle some old news here.

Dionne hasn't considered the possibility that the votes against Ratzinger could have been motivated largely by a desire for him to continue in his position as enforcer of orthodoxy and befuddler of clueless journalists.

Ten years ago today, the property of a madman suspected of amassing illegal firearms was assaulted, and nobody in Hollywood complained.

A Los Angeles Times news report by Janet Hook is direct: "Gingrich has kept his distance from the violent extremes of the right....But Gingrich has continued to champion the same causes as these extremist groups: criticism of the Waco siege, opposition to gun control and general anti-government themes."

...

In the wake of the Oklahoma City tragedy, we have seen a different side of that confusion--the deliberate conflation of his opponents' words with the deadly deeds of a handful of vicious, isolated individuals. Using tactics that would make Joe McCarthy sit up and take notes, Bill Clinton has sought to intimidate critics of government policy by branding them as terrorists.

Such tactics must not work. Loud voices are not the same as violent deeds. Criticism is not the same as murder. Exposing government violence is not the same as blowing up buildings. It is grossly irresponsible to blur these distinctions. And those who rely on such smear tactics are in no position to lecture the rest of us about toning down rhetoric.

In fact, wide-open debate is the best chance for restraining violent impulses. Contrary to the Los Angeles Times editorialists, hearings on Waco would be a very good idea, especially now. Information is the enemy both of out-of-control government and of paranoia. Vigorous, open dissent is a powerful check on government excesses--and an important, peaceful outlet for citizen grievances.

Declaring those grievances illegitimate, and those citizens the philosophical allies of murderers, may make a weak president feel strong. But it won't make the grievances go away. And it won't make sleazy rhetoric any less sleazy.

The focus of the effort to limit food advertising to children is in Washington, where Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, plans to introduce a bill this month that would allow broad regulation of advertising to children on television, the Internet, and elsewhere -- a power that Congress sharply limited three decades ago, despite allowing continued broad regulation of commercials during programs aimed at adults.

The food industry opposes the measure, arguing that self- regulation would be more effective while also maintaining companies' right to free speech.

Make your patty boxier than usual. Stuff it with maytag blue cheese, and some high-quality butter as well. Then cook it. You can add other touches as well, but that is the basic idea

By Order of King Guz Effective IMMEDIATELY....Each Citizen of Moo Will Pay A 7 Percent TAX!

My dear citizens of Moo, consider what your king does for each and every one of you...food stores, water supply, protected borders...just to name a few! And just imagine how much more he could do with proper remuneration!

The National Black Chamber of Commerce refers to the death tax as the “legacy killer” because that it what it does. It kills the legacy of economic empowerment and independence that can no longer be passed on to one’s son or daughter. The community investment is sucked up to pay for a massive tax that comes due only because the family founder has died. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

The death tax is also a job killer. Small businesses are the backbone of Virginia’s and America’s economy, and the death tax can easily break the back of a small business. When you take thinly capitalized, privately owned businesses that have their assets tied up in real estate or equipment, and you hit their owners with massive one-time death tax bills – after they’ve paid taxes their whole lives, a host of very bad things happen. Instead of the heirs continuing to run the farm or business, more often that not they are forced to sell it to pay the tax bill.

The Trade Justice Movement's support for managed trade, with price supports and quotas, is shown to cause poverty by reducing the world economy's ability to create wealth. The Movement's ideas for controlling world trade are impractical and would lead to the Sovietization of the world economy.

According to Alex Singleton, the report's author: "The Trade Justice Movement thinks the world economy would work better if it were centrally planned. We saw central planning in the Soviet Union and all it produced was poverty. The only trade that has ever lifted countries out of poverty is free trade."

Magouirk of LaGrange, Georgia, is currently being deprived of nutrition and hydration at the request of her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy. Mrs. Magouirk suffered an aortic dissection 2 weeks ago and was hospitalized. Though her doctors have said that she is not terminally ill, Ms. Gaddy declared that she held medical power of attorney for Mae, and had her transferred to the LaGrange Hospice. Later investigation revealed that Ms. Gaddy did not in fact have such power of attorney. Furthermore, Mae's Living Will provides that nutrition and hydration are to be withheld only if she is comatose or vegetative. Mae is in neither condition. Neither is her condition terminal.

MY Aunt Mae is now being nourished and hydrated at UAB medical Center.

HOWEVER, BETH GADDY HAS ISSUED AN ORDER TO THE MEDICAL STAFF AT THE CCU-UNIT of UAB WHICH PREVENTS MAE'S BROTHER (A. B. McLeod) SISTER (Lonnie Ruth Mullinax) and nephews/any of the Alabama relatives FROM VISITING MAE MAGOUIRK IN HER ROOM at the hospital. When we appeared today to visit Mae, we were turned away by hospital staff!

It is ironic that my Mom is on the 7th floor and Mae is located on the 8th floor of UAB but she is prevented from seeing her sister who is suffering from the same heart malady. SO IT GOES.

It is heartbreaking..but we are still overjoyed she is receiving substantial nourishment, fluids and a proactive medical treatment....praise Christ!!

[S]cholarly discussion of medical neglect as a treatment option for a disabled infant...began with a study published in 1973 in the New England Journal of Medicine by Raymond S. Duff and A. G. M. Campbell. These doctors documented 43 cases of withholding care from handicapped infants at Yale-New Haven Hospital, indeed breaking what they termed the "public and professional silence on a major social taboo." (Joseph Fletcher broke the silence in pastoral theology in 1968, by suggesting that Down's syndrome infants be "put away" either in a sanitarium or "in a more responsible lethal sense"; he offered comfort to bereaved parents by saying there is "no reason to feel guilty" because such an infant is "not a person."

...made by muckraking journalist Jack Lait and Dr. Harry J. Haiselden, a surgeon in Chicago's German-American Hospital. Based loosely upon a fictionalized account of the high-profile Baby Bollinger infanticide case attended by Dr. Haiselden, the film begins with a eugenic mismatch, Claude, who has an unidentified inheritable disease:

Despite repeated graphic warnings from Dr. Dickey (played by Haiselden himself), Claude marries his sweetheart, Anne. Their baby is born so severely disabled that it needs immediate surgery to save its life, but Dr. Dickey refuses to perform the operation. Anne is torn by uncertainty until God reveals a lengthy vision of the child's future, filled with pain, madness and crime [he murders Dr. Dickey]. Her doubts are resolved, she accepts Dr. Dickey's judgement, and the baby's soul leaps into the arms of a waiting Jesus.

The film is filled with horrifying pictures of other child and adult "defectives" and contrasts a farmer's quarantine of diseased cattle with a neglected derelict (who represents a danger to society because he is not quarantined).

Dr. Haiselden felt that impaired infants like Baby Bollinger were better off dead than living in state institutions for the incurable or feebleminded. He "secretly permitted many other infants he diagnosed as 'defectives' to die during the decade before 1915...[and] over the next three years he withheld treatment from, or actively speeded the deaths of, at least five more abnormal babies." The Chicago Daily Tribune quoted Haiselden advocating doctors not to tie umbilical cords of 'defectives' newborns and allow them to bleed to death: "Instead of struggling to save deformed children and those marked plainly for insanity and uselessness," the surgeon continued, "physicians should [s]ave only the fit."

The first American educational film for the medical profession on the use of infanticide was Who Shall Survive? produced in 1972 by Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School. In the 25-minute documentary a newborn infant with Down's syndrome was permitted to die by "inattention." The infant had an intestinal blockage (a nearly identical medical case as the Bollinger baby dramatized in The Black Stork), but instead of undergoing corrective surgery (the parents refused consent), the infant was moved to a corner of the nursery. Without nutrition, the child died 15 days later. The film, shown at the Kennedy Center Symposium in 1972, was probably the first large public conference on infanticide in the United States. The documentary presents nobody that objects to the so-called "treatment." Instead, medical inattention is offered as an acceptable example of managing a difficult neonatal problem.

And it is no wonder the Left reviles him in death as in life. His teachings, in essence, stated: Government is not God. Marxism is a failed religion, and economic collectivism is the road to ruin. All members of the human family possess inalienable rights not dependent upon government fiat. All life - even the unattractive, the afflicted, and the invalid - is endued with inherent worth in the site of its Creator and cannot be snuffed out when it becomes inconvenient.