The Necropolitan Sentinel

This weekend Mitt Romney won in Washington State—but the big news of last week is that he managed to pull out a three-point victory in Michigan (although he only managed an even split with Santorum on delegates—that is, until the GOP in the state decided to play with the rules).

Considering his advantages, a three-point win for Romney in his “home state” isn’t that impressive; one might even call it a Pyrrhic victory, but it sure beats a loss.

Timing is everything: if you had told pundits during New Hampshire that Romney would only win Michigan by three points, and that Santorum would get over 35% of the vote, they would have called you crazy. And Charlie Cook suggests that the “Romney electability” argument has disappeared like smoke.

I’m really interested in seeing the results on Tuesday. Romney is running in yet another home state (Massachusetts), and Gingrich is running in Georgia; I want to see if either of them manage to break 50% in the states that know them best.

Romney also took Arizona, which got very little attention, and Wyoming—which got even less. But attention or no, they are legit wins.

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I’m a big believer in the “two generations rule.” That is, the costs of any given social change are not apparent until two generations have passed; at that point you have a society wherein both the students and the teachers come from the new social norm.

It has been two full generations since Roe v. Wade, and now we see this from “medical ethicists”—

In the Journal of Medical Ethics, two ethicists argue plainly for the killing of babies post birth. They’re not hedging their bets. They’re saying it plain and simple.

Their argument is this:

By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

The editor of the journal has objected to the responses this article has generated, but as Tina Korbe notes:

Savulescu might have a point that some of the responses to the article crossed the line. Of those he quoted, a couple were overtly racist and at least one was an outright death threat to anyone who would willingly perform an “after-birth abortion.” But that he doesn’t see the arguments forwarded by the authors as evidence of “the deep disorder of the modern world” is far more disturbing than comments thoughtlessly dashed off by justifiably outraged opponents of infanticide.

This is your post-Christian society, wherein “personhood” and humanity are two different things. When someone else can determine your personhood, your life is no longer in your hands at all—as any slave who has been considered “property” can tell you—or, for that matter, any Jew in 1940s Europe (and many Jews in Israel today, as they live under constant threat of rocket fire, and face possible wholesale annihilation by their neighbors).

Oh, and for those who posit that “U.S. slaveowners were Christians,” please recall that slavery pre-dated Christianity—but it took Christians such as Wilburforce, and the power of a Christian nation (England) to crack it.

What’s that famous line? “Without God, everything is permitted.” (For some, that’s a feature, not a bug.)

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Ed Morrissey brings up an argument concerning Obamacare that frankly I hadn’t thought of:

If the individual mandate passes muster because duress does not apply when the federal government applies it, then the courts will have given carte blanche to tyranny. Where does that power end? Buying cars certainly implicates interstate commerce; will the government have the power to force us to sign purchase contracts for Chevy Volts? What would be the difference between that and health insurance? Thanks to the bailouts, the government has an enduring stake in GM, and at some point in time every person needs transportation, even if they are perfectly satisfied with riding a bike or hailing a cab now.

I’m reminded of a line from that spectacular British series, I, Claudius: “If you give me power, I’ll use it.”

If you give the government power, don’t be surprised if it decides to use that power.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the Masterpiece Theatre version of I, Claudius you need to. Derek Jacobi was spectacular in it. . . .

So was Patrick Stewart . . .

And John Hurt . . .

And John Rhys-Davies (Sallah from Indiana Jones, and Gimli from Lord of the Rings).

It’s amazing how many really significant actors were in that series.

It occurs to me that one of the greatest crimes against acting ever, was Derick Jacobi only playing the Master for less that six minutes on Doctor Who—before regenerating.

Don’t get me wrong: John Sim makes a great Master, but Jacobi—in under six minutes—literally owned that part. A full season with him in that role would have been incredible.

And that’s the closest I’m allowed to Dr. Who during Lent.

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James Delingpole gives us the single best explanation of what the Global Warming Hoax is actually about:

As I note in Watermelons, the global warming scare—the biggest and most expensive outbreak of mass hysteria in history—has enabled some very bad people to do some very wrong things in the name of “saving the planet for future generations.”

Ed Driscoll has, however, discovered one medical symptom that might be connected to global warming—Amnesia:

Jennifer Granholm, the Democrat former governor of Michigan from 2003 through the end of 2010, now hiding out in the witness protection program that is Al Gore’s Current TV, claims that “blaming the president for high gas prices is like blaming Rudy Giuliani for 9/11.” A curious turn of the phrase considering that both President Obama’s former “Green” “Jobs” “Czar” and 35 percent of Granholm’s fellow Democrats likely happen to blame Giuliani for 9/11. And even more curious, as Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, because Granholm regularly attacked President Bush over high gas prices — and stumped for Obama’s energy policy, which promised rising gas prices and [the] bankrupting [of] the coal industry.

In the Internet Age you are going to get called out on stuff like this.

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Babalu blog reports that Ireland is planning a monument to Ché Guevara. The Irish businessman and political leader Declan Ganley is not impressed:

“We would not build a monument in Galway to Stalin, or to Pol Pot, or to Idi Amin, or to Oliver Cromwell.

Che Guevara was just as violent, just as brutal, and just as insane as any of them. We would never dream of honouring them, and we should not dream of honouring him, either,” Mr Ganley said in a statement yesterday.

Mr Ganley claimed that the proposal was “nothing more than the pet project of a small number of extremists in the Labour Party.”

“If the people of Galway knew the truth about this man, they would never allow it to be built,” he said.

One of the left’s dirty little secrets is that plenty of people want a monument to Che because they do know the truth. Barbarians and murderers don’t exist in a vacuum; they are enabled and supported.

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The Massachusetts Twin City Tea Party met at a new location this week: Cornerstones Restaurant, on Rte 12. We had to do this because the Border Grille has closed. The owner may move to a different location, but is now in the final stages of opening a new restaurant called Happy Jack’s near the Fitchburg-Leominster line.

The Border was my favorite restaurant bar none, so I’m going through serious withdrawal.

At the meeting John Weston made the following joke: “For the first time in the country’s history, we successfully closed a Border.” It would be funnier if I didn’t miss the place so much.

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I’ve saved the least for last. The MSM and a lot of blogs spent a lot of time attacking Rush Limbaugh for calling a 30-year-old activist (who had been portrayed as a typical 23-year old law student) a “slut” for wanting Georgetown University to pay for her contraceptives, to the tune of $1000 a year.

Like Sandra Fluke herself, the entire argument was phony, and existed solely for the purpose of distraction. That’s why the MSM went “all in” on it, and continues to do so. As I pointed out at my own site:

I think all of this is a sign of what I was talking about yesterday: the Democrats and the media know that President Obama and the Democrats only win if they are not talking about their record.

This is yet another manifestation of this, and if we fall for it, the more fool us.

I think the left has overplayed this. Rush’s phrasing was ungentlemanly, but women aren’t dopes. They might not like what Rush said, but they know what $83 a month for birth control means, and voters in general are even less likely to be in favor of paying that $83 a month per woman.

Which, I suspect, is what Rush wanted to happen.

I’ll see you in later in the week.