I’ve moved my blogging to a new location: From the Rust Belt. Hope you’ll all stop by.

From the Gouverneur Times:

The computerized voting machines used by many voters in the 23rd district had a computer virus – tainting the results, not just from those machines known to have been infected, but casting doubt on the accuracy of counts retrieved from any of the machines.

Cathleen Rogers, the Democratic Elections Commissioner in Hamilton County stated that they discovered a problem with their voting machines the week prior to the election and that the “virus” was fixed by a Technical Support representatives from Dominion, the manufacturer. . . . None of the machines (from the same manufacturer) used in the other counties within the 23rd district were looked at nor were they recertified after the “reprogramming” that occurred in Hamilton County.

As is pointed out in the article, this virus debacle calls into question all of the NY-23 election results. It is simply unbelievable that a virus was found in Hamilton County voting machines one week before the special election and none of the other machines in the district were examined. Who really won in NY-23, and did the virus tamper with the vote count?

Last and most pertinent question: Where did the virus come from? Were there any, erm, community organizers near the voting machines prior to the election?

Cross-posted to RedState.

Just a few absurd news stories I thought I would share with my fellow college undergrads this beautiful, yet chilly Friday morning…

First up is news that the New York Times, clearly desperate for readers, is offering any college professor who makes the Times required reading in his or her syllabus a free subscription. In case the implications aren’t abundantly clear — I know it’s early — let me spell it out for you. The Times is going to let professors have a subscription to their newspaper for free if they make you pay for it. I would call for a student boycott of the New York Times, but clearly none of us are reading it anyway or they wouldn’t have hatched this scheme.

Next up is news out of Pittsburgh that is sure to boil your morning oatmeal. Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl is proposing a “Fair Share Tax” that would levy a 1% tax on college tuition (h/t Instapundit). In his not-so-humble opinion, students just aren’t paying their fair share for city services. Mary Hines, president of the Pittsburgh Council on Higher Education and president of Carlow University, disagrees. She points out that students already pay income and property taxes in Pittsburgh. But of course that’s not enough for Ravenstahl. When are there really enough taxes for any liberal?

If this “Fair Share Tax” passes muster in Pittsburgh, look for it to come to a college town near you. I’m sure the corruptocrats in the Athens County Democratic Party will be chomping at the bit to levy a similar tax once they hear the news. Just remember, my fellow matriculants: You do have options. Republicans are for lower taxes and, unless they’re RINOs, aren’t likely to tax your tuition. These folks who want to levy taxes on your tuition are counting on you to keep voting for hopeandchange (TM) at the ballot box.

Last but certainly not least, in this edition of What Were They Smoking and Where Can I Find Some?, we explore what kind of hard drugs University of California regents must have been on when they thought they would quietly get away with increasing tuition by 32%. Are they familiar with the long tradition of student protest at California colleges and universities? But UC students aren’t going quietly into that good night; they’re raging, raging against the dying of their bank accounts. And good for them. But guys, don’t just blame the regents. Your far left state government and its budget mismanagement, that’s the real culprit.

All of this begs the question: Leftist assault on higher education, or just putting the liberal in the liberal arts?

Cross-posted to RedState.

If Democrats don’t want gays and lesbians to stay home in 2010 and 2012 (they don’t), they will pass at least a partial repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) sometime next year. President Obama explicitly promised to repeal DOMA during the 2008 campaign, and the Democratic leadership in Congress has also expressed support for repeal. Republicans can and must get out in front of this issue and pressure Democrats into a bipartisan agreement that would still protect the essential spirit of DOMA.

We can do that by supporting a libertarian, populist revision of DOMA — by introducing a Let the People Decide Act of 2010.

Here’s how it would work. The full faith and credit clause that prevents same-sex marriages from being forcibly exported to other states would be left completely intact. The clause that excludes same-sex marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships from federal rights and benefits would be repealed if and only if voters within a state approve some version of same-sex unions through ballot issues.

More beneath the fold…

Sarah Palin is making news everywhere over the past few days, promoting her new book Going Rogue: An American Life through a series of interviews and a national book tour. Many are looking to her most recent interviews to examine whether or not she is in fact qualified to run for president in 2012. She has made a number of eloquent, red meat policy statements in these interviews and there is a lot to examine. I’ll leave that to others.

While finding out where Palin stands on policy is important, I think there are other ways one can discern whether or not she is qualified to lead our nation. Over a year ago, Palin gave her speech at the Republican National Convention as the GOP vice presidential candidate. I think now is the appropriate time to look back on that speech and see just how prescient Palin’s claims about the future of America under an Obama administration have turned out to be.

More beneath the fold…

It’s a beautiful Thursday morning here in Southeastern Ohio. Actually, I think every Thursday morning is beautiful because it’s the last day of classes for me for the week. To celebrate this auspicious occasion, I thought we should play a game called Name That Democratic President. I’ll provide you with two clues, then you can take a guess and peek underneath the fold to see if you’re right. Don’t visit the links before you guess though; that’s cheating. Here goes!

Clue #1: In the run-up to her inevitable endorsement of NY-23’s lying leftist Bill Owens, Dede Scozzafava was told by text message that this Democratic president was trying to get in touch with her. Dede declined to return his calls.

Clue #2: Following the passage of PelosiCare by just five votes in the House of Representatives, this Democratic president went to the Senate and told Democratic senators that attacks by so-called “teabaggers” (a derogatory term for conservative Tea Party activists) meant that the Democratic majority was actually winning. He urged Senate Democrats to make history and pass PelosiCare right away.

Find out just who this Democratic president is beneath the fold…

National Organization for Women (NOW) President Terry O’Neill is ticked off about the Stupak amendment, according to ABC News (h/t Hot Air). But here’s the really interesting part:

“The president has handed us a bill that reverses Roe v. Wade,” she told ABC News, condemning the amendment originally drafted by Stupak and Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Penn. “Stupak-Pitts is such a sweeping denial of insurance coverage of abortion for women that it in fact in essence makes abortion unavailable to women. In Roe v Wade the court said the government may not restrict women from exercising their choice to have an abortion and Stupak-Pitts clearly stops women from doing that.”

During the Democratic primaries, the campaign of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, suggested that Obama would not fight for abortion rights as would Clinton. O’Neill sees this current action in that light.

“There’s no question that Hillary Clinton would have fought for our rights,” she says. . . .

All emphasis mine. Three things:

1. Is O’Neill aware that the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is a woman and that it was she — not Obama — who allowed the vote and passed the bill with the Stupak amendment? It’s amazing how she avoids all mention of Pelosi and passes all the blame to Obama.

2. Do I detect a little buyer’s remorse here? Maybe not entirely satisfied with President Obama? Wishing instead for Hillary Clinton? Just a teensy bit?

3. Is anyone happy with the monstrosity that is health care reform these days?

Don’t let them tell you that Barack Obama wasn’t watching the election returns last Tuesday. From a sickeningly sappy interview with Dede Scozzafava in the Washington Post, we glean this little gem:

Scozzafava’s black Nokia phone vibrated nonstop. She rarely picked it up, except for family or close friends. She called the publisher of the Watertown Daily Times to convey her private support for Owens. She received a text informing her that former president Bill Clinton was trying to reach her, but she wasn’t returning any messages.

The emphasis is mine. Leaving aside the unbelievable notion that Scozzafava wouldn’t have returned a message from a former president, take that in for a minute. Bill Clinton was trying to reach her.

The former president of the United States, former leader of the free world, Democratic superstar, almost First Gentleman Bill Clinton was reaching out to Scozzafava for an Owens endorsement.

Could it be that the Obamacrats knew they were going to lose in Virginia, feared they were going to lose in New Jersey, and were desperate for some face-saving victory? Fearing that if they lost all three elections the media might turn on them, Democrats dispatched a former president for an assemblywoman’s endorsement so the media would cling to the meme that Republicans were killing the party by pushing out “moderates” when we couldn’t win with conservatives.

We can never prove that President Obama was concerned about last Tuesday’s election. What Scozzafava has revealed is that at least one Democratic president was concerned. Don’t let them tell you that last Tuesday didn’t matter, and don’t let them tell you that their desperate grab for NY-23 means a conservative defeat. Hoffman and his supporters made Bill Clinton beg for an endorsement from a woman who wouldn’t even return his calls. If that kind of humiliation of a former Democratic president is their “victory,” let them have it.

Cross-posted to RedState.

Today is the 234th birthday of the Marine Corps, and it has me thinking about a friend of mine who comes from a Marine Corps family. I met him shortly after I came to the Ohio University campus in 2007 and we became pretty good friends throughout that school year. I got the chance to meet his dad, who served in the Marine Corps, during a Memorial Day Weekend camping trip with his family in 2008.

He was a big guy with a somewhat intimidating presence, the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley (or a bright alley, for that matter) if you had somehow ended up on his bad side. He also struck me as a no-nonsense kind of guy. No excuses. You succeed or you fail, and if you fail you pick yourself up again — but you don’t make excuses. You own your life, your triumphs and your mistakes, and you either work to better it or you don’t.

But it was also pretty clear that he was a good guy, a man with a deep sense of loyalty. That sense of loyalty was obvious by the way he interacted with his family and by the way they interacted with him. Here was a real father in an age when real fatherhood is rare, when men are so often inclined to cede their responsibilities to the mothers of their children, to the public educational system, and to other government programs. Not this guy. With him, you got the impression that he would be just as willing to die for his family as he was willing to die for his country as a Marine.

More beneath the fold…

Leftists have created their own abortion nightmare. They can whine all they want to about the eeeeevil pro-life movement and those aaaaawful conservatives, but the truth is that the Stupak amendment was only made possible by the liberal obsession with government-run health care. Consider this, Planned Parenthood and NARAL: Under any of the various Republican health care proposals, decisions about abortion coverage would have been left to the free market law of supply and demand.

Translation: You hate Republicans so much, but GOP health care proposals are the only ones that offer 100% protection of abortion choice.

This is not to suggest that the GOP has any great love affair with the pro-choice movement; as we all know, quite the opposite is true. What it does suggest is that pro-choicers have either been incredibly naive or outrageously hypocritical. Under government-run health care, with a government-run option and government subsidies for private insurance, there was always going to be greater governmental control over health care decisions. Either pro-choicers didn’t think this through in terms of abortion rights, or they thought the rules wouldn’t apply to them. Maybe they thought, for some reason, they would be exempt from government control over their health care choices.

Sorry gals, but in this brave new world that we call ObamaCare/PelosiCare, no one is exempt from government control over their health care choices. This week Bart Stupak is making decisions about your perceived right to an abortion. Next a panel of experts will be making a decision about whether breast cancer patients really need breast-conserving surgery. Mastectomy, after all, could be deemed more cost-effective. You see, when you want government-run health care, that kind of implies that you want the government to, well, run health care.

Now, if the Stupak amendment has made you think twice about having politicians accountable to public opinion managing your care versus a market driven by consumer demand, you do have options. You can join House Minority Leader John Boehner in calling on Congress to “scrap the whole bill and start over.” But I won’t hold my breath. We all know that this is about a radical leftist ideological agenda of which your movement is an integral part. It’s not really about women’s health, and I don’t doubt for a minute that you’ll prove us right again.

Cross-posted to RedState.