I promise I’m not going to make this into a Ron Paul evangelism zone - everywhere else you go on the internet is covering those bases just fine, and smart, informed people reading this are at least aware of him. But for those of you who are curious as to why I’d align myself with someone considered so kooky…
Well, okay - first, I’ve stated a few times that Jonah Goldberg is hardly my favorite columnist. I find myself thrown by him more than most National Review contributors, even though I think he’s ultimately fighting the good fight. He’s been negative about the Paul campaign - and who can blame him - but he posted an email to NRO this morning that did not come from me, but may as well have:
True, Paul probably won’t win the nomination or the presidency, but think of the evangelical passion of his followers, and consider what that could mean for the future of the conservative movement.
I’m 100% behind Paul, and I will contribute to his campaign, but not because I think he will win. I will do it because he is reviving great ideas that are being planted in the mind of other young conservatives, conservatives who will win elections one day. From my perspective, Ron Paul is the only candidate for the Republican nomination who makes me feel optimistic about the future of conservatism in America.
I don’t have a lot of conservative friends, and the majority of folks who read my other blog(s) are not of my political persuasion. If you’re on the left, while you’re all various forms of horrified by what the Bush administration has accomplished/subjected us to over the last 7 years, there’s one thing you can’t relate to, and that’s the prevalance of neo-conservatism and “compassionate conservatism” within your chosen ideology. Right now, the conservative movement is in such shambles that a) Rudy Giuliani gains front-runner status with his decidedly non-conservative record in New York City, b) Mike Huckabee gains front-runner status by allowing his ministerial roots to mask his absolutely disgusting economic record, and c) Mitt Romney gains front-runner status by introducing and passing a health care bill in Massachusetts that shows next to no difference to anything John Edwards is proposing - oh, and by the way, it’s not working.
Right now, if you’re on the left, as long as you’re not blindedly single-issue about the Iraq War, you have nothing to worry about. The fears of the DLC somehow hijacking the predominantly left-wing party are simply not reflected in the candidates being pushed out there or by what they’re proposing, and, even if the Democrats don’t win the White House, the “liberal soul” of the Party isn’t in any immediate danger. I predictedas muchin 2004, and much of it, unfortunately, came true. Contrast the situation the left/Democrats are in right now - energized, organized, and true to the core that supports them - with the schizophrenia of the right - a Republican Party split due to Iraq (regardless of more recent positive news) and who can’t make a consistent statement on economic issues to the point where a libertarian conservative candidate like Ron Paul is incredibly likely to pull in double-digit numbers in the primaries.
My support of Paul begins and ends with conservative building. No, he’s not perfect, far from it - I’m certainly not convinced we need to go back to the gold standard, for instance - but he’s something. I have an ability to make a difference about something a little bit, and that’s all I’m looking at.
The creators of Sesame Street have released “Sesame Street: Old School” Volumes 1 & 2. But according to the New York Times, the DVDs come with the following warning:
“These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
To be fair, there is a sliver of validity to what they’re claiming. One of the sketches they claim is of concern involves Gordon asking a young girl to come into his apartment to meet his wife and have cookies and milk. It’s probably not a great idea to show kids getting rewarded for accepting invitations to go home with strange men. But some of the other issues they claimed were inappropriate were trivial to the point of laughable.
One of the concerns was that Cookie Monster, in his Monsterpiece Theatre sketch, would hold and then eat a pipe. Apparently the dramatic rise in tobacco pipe smoking among school age children after that sketch was put on the air led the good people at Children’s Television Workshop to stop showing pipes. On the other hand, if that pipe didn’t contain tobacco, it might explain why Cookie Monster always had the munchies.
Also of concern? Oscar the Grouch. Apparently, he was too grouchy. Sesame Street’s executive producer is quoted as saying “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now”.
Were any of us really that influenced by Oscar’s ill temper or Cookie Monster’s terrible diet? We were children and still had sense enough to realize that Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch were not presented as role models for us to follow, but rather as embodiments of what we shouldn’t be. Not people to be reviled or despised, but simply not emulated. Either kids today are borderline retarded, which I doubt, or the parents of kids today are seriously underestimating what children are capable of. Next thing you know we’ll end up with Disney movies with no villain because people might empathize with them instead of the wholesome protagonist.
Many state and local governments began to make information on registered sex offenders available on public Internet sites. These sites were already responsible for the murder of a sex offender in Maine several months ago. Now a man in California is admitting that when he discovered his trailer park neighbor was listed on California’s Megan’s List website, he stabbed the neighbor to death.
The neighbor, Ivan Garcia Oliver, claimed he did it to protect his son, who had been a prior victim of molestation. There is a twist in this story however:
As it turned out, Dodele was not actually a child molester. His records show he sexually assaulted adult women. But a listing on the Megan’s Law Web site could have left Oliver with the impression that he had abused children because of the way that it was written.
A spokesman for the state attorney general said the site described the man’s offenses as “rape by force” and “oral copulation with a person under 14 or by force.”
I don’t have a problem with registries being available at a police station for viewing on presentation of ID that proves residency. But this sort of unfettered access to information over the Internet does nothing to fix the sorts of problems that led to this murder, or the similar murder in Maine several months ago.
There’s no reason for me, as a resident of Massachusetts, to have access to information about sex offenders in the mid-west or the Pacific Northwest. Giving out that sort of information that openly is just an invitation for disgruntled vigilantes to put together a hit list.
Even worse is the fact that this man wasn’t even a threat to the neighborhood children. He was convicted of raping an adult woman! If Oliver had been required to go to a police station to get this information, someone could have pointed out to him that just because the man was a top-level sex offender did not necessarily mean he was a danger to children. Maybe, if someone were familiar with this man’s specific crime, they could have disclosed that to calm Oliver down when he found out.
None of this even approaches the problems I have with rapists who aren’t a threat to children being on sex offender registries in the first place, but that’s a rant for another day. What people should be getting out of this, and the Maine murder as well, is that disclosing sex offender information too widely can be just as dangerous as not disclosing it widely enough. Any time an incident like this occurs, we should ask ourselves what contributed to this incident and what can be done to make it less likely in the future. That’s how we ended up with laws like Megan’s Law in the first place. But it can’t stop there. These sorts of experiments need constant re-evaluation to make sure that we aren’t enabling vigilante murders or putting out horribly misleading information or that the information is even being put to good use. Without that re-evaluation, laws like Megan’s Law run the risk of becoming the vestigial organs of the criminal justice system; a source of more harm than help.
