The Legacy of Racist Eugenics in North Carolina under the Democratic Party

Reading The Wall Street Journal this morning during a visit to an American friend, I came across an article by Valerie Bauerlein with the headline “North Carolina Atones For Its Sterilizations” (behind the paywall, so you likely won’t be able to read it unless you are a subscriber). The upshot of it is, while most states suspended their eugenics programs in the 1940s after the Nazis discredited the eugenics movement, North Carolina actually ramped up its forced sterilization program after WWII, and continued sterilizing citizens through the 1960s before finally ending the program in 1974. While blacks made up 25% of North Carolina’s population, over 60% of those sterilized were blacks.

So me being me, I announced to my wife and friend, “I’ll bet you North Carolina was run by Democrats”. Immediately, the friend, a political “moderate”, said “you don’t know that, I’ll bet you are wrong”, the pop culture propaganda pinning racist rule on Republicans being that strong. So, I headed to Google. And lo and behold, what did I find: North Carolina was run by Democrat governors from 1901 until 1973. Yes, in the first year of a Republican governor after 73 years of Democrat rule, the forced sterilization program of largely black citizens was ended.

“OK, that’s the governors. But the legislature really runs the state. Which party was in charge of the legislature?”

Google once again: the North Carolina legislature switched from Democrat to Republican control in 2011, after more than 100 years of Democrat rule.

Further proof that pop culture propaganda usually trumps truth, that monstrous anti-human policies almost always come from the left, and that the left has always found a welcome home in the Democratic party.

UPDATE: I have been informed by the husband of the friend, a Democrat, of the following: the Democrats used to be racists, but they switched to being the not-racists when the racist Republicans took over as the racist party. Oh, the tortured logic you’re forced to believe on the left!

Canada’s Death Panels In Action: Nationalized Health Care Exposed

When Sarah Palin used rhetorical flourish to warn Americans of “Obama’s Death Panel” back in August of 2009, she was mocked and derided by liberals, and sniped at by jealous establishment conservatives. Well, fast-forward to March 2011 in Canada – land of Obama’s dream of nationalized health care – and the debate over the use of the drug Herceptin in the treatment of breast cancer in young women. When 34-year-old mother of two Jill Anzarut went to the press and Facebook to advocate for the drug, which is being denied to her by the Ontario Ministry of Health, our (Liberal) Health Minister chose to respond with jaw-dropping honesty:

“We cannot have a health system where the stories that land on the front page of the paper determine our health-care policy. It would be unfair to those who do not get their stories on the front page if we were to give priority to those who do.”

With these 49 words, Deb Matthews exposes what Palin was so presciently warning about: that nationalized health care ends up becoming about turf-protection, central control, dehumanization of individuals, and a monopoly on health service rationing to a clique of “masters of the universe” who end up thinking their number-crunching degrees in epidemiology give them moral license to determine who deserves to live and die.

Not convinced? Want to give Matthews benefit of the doubt, or deny the truth of what she said? OK, don’t take her word for it. Let’s go straight to the words of Diane McArthur, Assistant Deputy Minister and executive officer, Ontario Public Drug Programs, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, as published in her own words as a letter to the editor in today’s National Post:

“I would like to clarify the Ontario Public Drug Program review process in response to Matt Gurney’s recent article. The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s process for evaluating new and expensive cancer drugs is based on the best scientific evidence. The Ontario Public Drug Program relies on a thorough assessment of scientific data and clinical evidence by its expert advisory committee, the Committee to Evaluate Drugs (CED) and the CED/Cancer Care Ontario sub-committee, which includes cancer experts, to develop funding recommendations for all cancer drugs.
As a result, the Ontario Public Drug program is one of the most generous drug benefit programs in Canada.
Ontario’s Compassionate Access Program component of the Exceptional Access Program provides an opportunity for me, as the executive officer of the Ontario Public Drug Program, to consider requests for drugs or indications where the Committee to Evaluate Drugs has not reviewed a drug or where there are rare clinical circumstances in immediately life-, limb-or organ-threatening conditions. This program is not a mechanism to provide an exemption from the evidencebased criteria. The Exceptional Access Program Compassionate Review Policy is available on the Ministry’s website.
The ministry will continue to make funding decisions on drug products based on the advice of experts. We regularly review our criteria as new evidence is brought forward and/or standards of practice change. It is our responsibility to ensure that in addition to providing the best coverage we can, all funding decisions are made on the best available clinical and scientific evidence.”

Trying to put a positive spin on the government monopoly on drug rationing, MacArthur confirms what Palin, and the Health Minister herself, made clear:

1) Initial decisions on drug coverage are made by an “expert advisory committee”. 

2) Ontario’s committee is a smiley-happy-face-committee that is most generous to the little peoples!!!

3) If you’re not satisfied that Ontario’s committee is smiley and happy and generous to the little peoples, you can apply to another smiley happy committee – the committee of ME!!! DIANE MACARTHUR!!! BEARER OF GOVERNMENT GIFTS!!! And my SUPERPOWERS as head of the EXCEPTIONAL ACCESS PROGRAM!!!!

4) But if I, DIANE MARCARTHUR, BEARER OF GOVERNMENT GIFTS decide to quell the PR nightmare my administration is experiencing by granting you, suffering nameless victim who doesn’t fit into the expert panel’s number-crunching criteria yet insists on advocating for your own life, the drug that you want, I’ll find a way to cover my ass with another expert report (commissioned by me to give me the answer I need to provide cover to make it look like our system consists of something other than the government exercising a monopoly on the arbitrary rationing of health care services.)

Put it in your pipe and smoke it, Palin-haters of the right and left! (And you too, brainwashed Canucks…)

UPDATE: The bureaucrats announce, to no one’s surprise, that they will fund the patient’s treatment after all. The death panel comes through for Ms. Anzarut, and the minister announces what a wonderful world it is!

Don Cherry & Rob Ford: A Right that Fights is a Right that Wins

When the left gets challenged, it rarely engages on the issue. Instead, it resorts to whining about “civility”, calling for “unity”, and, when that fails to silence its critics, cries “racist-sexist-homophobe-islamophobe”.

When the right figures out that they can walk right through this veneer, and fight back fearlessly, they can win. That’s why this is such a heartening development: Toronto’s new Mayor, Rob Ford, inviting Canada’s greatest bombthrower, Don Cherry, to introduce him at his inauguration, and letting him give this speech:

Both Cherry and Ford have been unapologetic to the “outraged” leftists on council. If this is any indication of what is to come to Toronto City Council, the next four years will be a delight. Viva Ford!

When the Left exiled Life: Nat Hentoff on Abortion, Jesse Jackson and the Village Voice

Nat Hentoff, c.1958

In this world turned upside down, the “compassionate”, the “caring”, the “good guys” on the left of the political spectrum have succeeded in twisting the abortion issue, and exiling all dissenting opinion from pro-abortion orthodoxy. In this fascinating piece from 1992 I came across today (thank you to a mysterious MIT-based web site for keeping it alive), Manhattan-born atheist-Jew Jazz-loving left-leaning civil libertarian and legendary Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff reminds us, among other things, that both Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton were once staunchly pro-life. A taste from “Pro-Choice Bigots: a View from the Pro-Life Left”:

Not too long ago, (Jesse Jackson) was a pro-lifer. He wrote and spoke about the right to life and attacked advocates of abortion rights. “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life,” he would say. “That was the premise to slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation, because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned.” He told the story of how he himself had almost been aborted. A physician had advised his mother to let him go, but she wouldn’t. Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being, he warned: “That’s how the whites dehumanized us, by calling us niggers. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do–and not even feel like they’d done anything wrong.”

…

Yet being without theology isn’t the slightest hindrance to being pro-life. As any obstetrics manual–Williams Obstetrics, for example–points out, there are two patients involved, and the one not yet born “should be given the same meticulous care by the physician that we long have given the pregnant woman.” Nor, biologically, does it make any sense to draw life-or-death lines at viability. Once implantation takes place, this being has all the genetic information within that makes each human being unique. And he or she embodies continually developing human life from that point on. It missses a crucial point to say that the extermination can take place because the brain has not yet functioned or because that thing is not yet a “person.” Whether the life is cut off in the fourth week or the fourteenth, the victim is one of our species, and has been from the start.

Yet rational arguments like these are met with undiluted hostility by otherwise clear-thinking liberals.

A very smart man. And, oh yeah – he’s got Obama pegged, too.

The Cost of Liberal Tribalism: Iranian Freedom Marchers Hung Out to Dry

Much has been said about the situation in Iran over the past couple of weeks. The images of peaceful opposition demonstrators, and the thuggery displayed by the Islamic Revolutionary rulers of Iran, speak for themselves. It was absolutely clear: the demonstrations were not about vote-counting fraud, or about the non-reformist “reformer” Mousavi. The demonstrations were about freedom. Handed an opening by Mousavi and his brave wife (who seemed to be the one pushing her husband far beyond where he ever expected to go in his opposition to the Mullahs), hundreds of thousands of fed up Iranians took to the streets and shouted “Down with the Dictator”. While many in the west took this as opposition to the psychopathic lackey Ahmadinejad, Iranians know this was a chant not against the apocalyptic holocaust denier, but against the Ayatolla and the regime itself. The vast majority of Iranians are fed up with Islamic revolutionary rule. The vast majority of Iranians want a new revolution.

Now, what Western liberal wouldn’t stand with freedom-yearning demonstrators against a tyrannical theocracy? Ten years ago, you probably couldn’t find one. And yet liberals throughout the Western world followed their new messiah, Barack Obama, off an amoral cliff, ignored their own instincts, and worked overtime to justify the US administration’s official policy: do not show any support for the Iranian opposition. “Don’t meddle”…”if we speak up, they will blame us”…”we don’t want to encourage them, in case they get slaughtered”…”we still have shame because of some 1953 coup”. 

The cowardice displayed by most liberals over the past two weeks is the cost of the liberal tribalism of the past decade. Lefties everywhere spent eight years following orders: oppose, mock, and deride George W. Bush without hesitation. If it’s Republican, it’s wrong. If you’re part of the liberal tribe, you fall in line, and accept the new marching orders. Mockery of Bush’s freedom agenda, which aimed to support democracy and freedom anywhere and everywhere – a bipartisan agenda if there ever was one – was labeled “neo-con” and thus unacceptable. A principled position became Bush-bashing fodder for Democrat operatives and late-night television idealogues. Millions of Iraqis celebrating free and open elections joyously in the streets were ignored almost completely by the mainstream culture. A generation’s Berlin Wall moment was treated like it never even happened.

Liberal tribalism of this most heinous kind got Barack Obama elected. Unfortunately, it seems that the President not only accepts the anti-freedom-agenda as a tribal position, he takes it seriously. His absoulte abandonment of the young freedom protestors in the streets of Tehran led to the slaughter of many, the arresting of thousands, and the snuffing out of freedom at the hands of Islamo-fascist thugs. Would the crackdown have occurred anyway? Perhaps. But the message would have been sent: the free world supports freedom for all, and stands against thuggery everywhere. Now, we cannot say this, which is a travesty.

Now that the inconvenient little uprising is more-or-less over, Obama can return to negotiating with that “unclenched fist”. Hopefully, some of Obama’s tribal acolytes will have had their eyes opened, and understand that what has happened is an absolute moral tragedy that must never happen again. This shame cannot be washed off.

Did anyone vote for this? Separatist-Opportunist-Socialist Coalition wants to run Canada

Is this a dream, or a nightmare? Just weeks after a Federal Election that returned a strengthened Conservative Minority Parliament to Canada, the three losing parties have joined together in an attempt to govern the country. To cut through the bull, here is what is happening, in a nutshell: the lefties in all three parties, inspired by the Barack and Bailout mania sweeping through the USA, want to join the party here North of the border. When Harper refused to join the Keynsian/New Deal redux to disaster, the socialists freaked.

Now, it’s up to them to convince ordinary Canadians – who, I would guess, are about 75% against this nonsense – that they are a legitimate government. Constitutional, maybe. Legitimate to the voters? Good luck with that one.

More soon.

UPDATE: Are you buying the “economic crisis in Canada” rhetoric of the three pinheads? Buried (purposely) by the media today: Canada’s GDP Rises in Q3. That means: no recession, folks. And, from first-hand experience as the proprietor of a consumer-discretionary-goods retail business – Canada is in much better shape, relatively speaking, than the US right now.

Liberal Party of Canada: When it comes to the public trough, there’s no compromise!

They will write books some day analyzing the political genius of Stephen Harper. This move was audacious, stunning, bold, and absolutely right from a small-c conservative point of view: through his Finance Minister’s economic update, he has announced the end of the outrageous system of public financing of Canada’s political parties imposed by the Chretien Liberals. Read about it in Kelly MacParland’s fine column. Quite simply: a system in which the Bloc Quebecois receives over 80% of its operating funds from the very Federal Government it wishes to dismantle, is a system that must go. Grabbing this post-election opportunity in which the official opposition is at its weakest to scrap the system is the type of hardball politics that conservatives usually end up on the butt-end of! Finally, we have hardball players on our side.

What makes this incredibly entertaining is the bluster and sabre-rattling of the opposition parties. Both NDP leader Jack Layton, and Liberal leader-in-waiting Bob Rae, have called the move “undemocratic” – an Orwellian inversion if there ever was one. All opposition parties are threatening to vote against the measure, which would trigger a snap election. Check out these quotes from Joan Bryden’s evening report:

Ignatieff: “I’m utterly unintimidated and undeterred by this stuff and the caucus is in the same mood . . . . (Harper) has misread the mood if he thinks that the Liberal caucus is going to cave on this matter. No way. No way.”

Similarly, Rae said the Tories are “deliberately creating a political crisis in order to avoid dealing with an economic crisis.” He said there’s “no public policy benefit at all” to the move to scrap public subsidies for parties.

“It’s just absolute bloody-minded meanness that’s motivating them and it can’t be allowed to stand.”

So, after two years of abstaining on every key issue put forward by the Conservatives – from war, to justice, to taxes, to economics – we now know where the line in the sand is drawn for Liberals. Deny these pigs their seat at the public trough, and it’s war!

Dignity, thy name ‘aint Lib.

A blow to liberal fascism in Canada: Moon recommends repeal of 13

November 25, 2008 was a momentous day for opponents of Canada’s creeping march towards liberal fascism. A week after administrators at one of our most prestigious post-secondary institutions, Queens University, sent a gang of thought police out to campus cafeterias and lounges to eavesdrop on private conversations, the long-awaited Moon Report on the future of the Canada Human Rights Commission was released to the public (read the full report here). Despite the fact that the Commission’s own leader hand-picked the report’s left-leaning law professor writer, and paid him handsomely with Commission funds, Prof. Richard Moon made explicit in no uncertain terms in his report: the now world-famous Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act must be repealed! (More details in op-eds from Ezra Levant and the National Post Editorial Board).

Amazingly, the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s chairwoman Jennifer Lynch, seems ready to throw the report down the memory hole, and start again in her attempt to whitewash the fascism of Section 13 and preserve the legal activist community’s make-work racket. In this context, it’s not hard to understand why Canada’s “official Jews” (a term coined by Levant that I have gratefully adopted) continue to wage battle against those who wish to strip the Human Rights Act of its most heavy-handed powers of summary execution. Here’s the official response of Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress – an organization that clearly has the interests of lawyers and leftists, rather than Jews as a whole, at heart. Typical response of liberals to failure – double-down on the rejected policy, and blame the problems on “poor implementation” (reminiscent of Barack Obama’s upcoming return to the New Deal in America).

Farber may be the most egregious proponent of Section 13, but he’s not alone. Leo Adler, head of the Canadian branch of Rabbi Marvin Hier’s excellent L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, has tarnished his organization through vocal support. The B’nai Brith, a Jewish community and charitable organization to which I belong, has also supported the draconian speech code law. I’ll be following Levant, and doing what I can to hit these organizations in the pocketbook. I will be doing my best to participate in his “Jews against book burning” campaign, and ensure that no donated funds of mine will go to the CJC or Friends of Simon Wiesenthal (who is probably turning in his grave at Adler’s antics) until their policies change.

In the meantime, I look forward to the law’s repeal in Parliament. Get it on the agenda, Mr. Harper!

Praying for McCain/Palin

Tonight I’m prayin’ for McCain and Palin. Even though I’ve never been a fan of John McCain, I know he’ll govern as a moderate, and preserve what has made America the greatest nation the world has ever known. Canada thrives as America’s peaceful next-door neighbour and top trading partner; a weakened America is of absolutely no benefit to Canada.

There’s no doubt in my mind, Barack Obama would weaken America economically, militarily, and morally. Stanley Kurtz, the National Review journalist who has singlehandedly done more investigative reporting on Obama than the rest of the American media combined, has him pegged with his final pre-election column: his heart is with the revolution; his tactics are pure Alinsky; and his actions show a patient, pragmatic radical leftist, ready to implement a hard-core agenda one step at a time.

I have no doubt that Obama will sell out Israel. Blogger Omri Ceren shows us why Obama-supporting Jews are delusional. On the flip-side, I have no doubt McCain and Palin will support Israel with force, if necessary.

As a business owner who owes his livelihood to the middle-American market, I worry that the economy will only get worse under Obama. Plenty has been written about the stock market’s reaction to an Obama lead in the polls as election day has approached; his tax plans, big-government ideology, redistributionist philosophy, and his would-be supermajority with leftist Democratic congressional leadership, are a big reason why the market has stayed down on the mat, and consumer discretional spending has ground to a halt – people are holding tight to their wallets as they wait to see if Uncle Barry will be reaching in for a little wealth-spreading in the coming months. Mark my words: there will be a massive relief rally in both the stock market, and in consumer confidence, if McCain wins the election. In an Obama-Pelosi-Reid America, I worry about my livelihood.

On moral issues, there’s simply nothing to be said, other than: Sarah Palin gets it, and America will be spiritually rewarded with her as VP. In the days before John McCain made his VP pick, all he would say to the press was, “my pick will be someone who shares my values.” The pick of Governor Palin gives me great faith in John McCain’s values. Barack Obama can’t even bring himself to support laws protecting live-born babies who survive botched abortions.

In 2000, I barely followed politics at all. In 2004, I followed the election closely, and was confident right to the end that Bush would beat Kerry. My logic four years ago was: America couldn’t possibly elect a Northeastern pseudo-intellectual snob as its president. My logic today is: America couldn’t possibly elect a Hyde Park radical, pseudo-intellectual socialist as its president. Prediction: McCain wins Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the White House, with approximately 285 electoral votes.

At least, I’m prayin’.

Calm down! The American economy is not collapsing.

Everywhere I go, there’s someone saying: America’s economy is collapsing. As media hysteria continues to ride roughshod over any sense of perspective (and as wishful-thinking in some quarters drives otherwise sensible people into lip-smacking meltdown), some sensible analysts are still talking sense. The National Post’s Terrence Corcoran brings us back to earth with this front-page column, “The D Word Going Cheap” :

The Great Depression, massive in scale and scope, dug a deep trench through U. S. economic statistics of the 1930s, numbers so big that today’s comparisons have little meaning or relevance. Industrial production fell 50% between 1929 and 1932; prices fell 20%; real incomes of Americans fell 35%; the stock market plunged 75%.

Nothing remotely near this kind of meltdown is on the horizon. The United States, which actually grew 3.3% in the second quarter that ended two months ago, has yet to show meaningful signs of recession. None of the standard indicators of economic slowdown — unemployment, payroll employment, civilian employment, industrial production — point to serious recession, let alone something worse.

…

What recent events suggest, however, is that by the time the new president is sworn in next January, the worst should be over. Yesterday’s U. S. stock market drop, while the largest Dow correction since 9/11, was remarkably orderly. By letting Lehman Brothers slide into Chapter 11, the U. S. government appears to have put an end to its attempts to bail out failing institutions. This can only hasten restructuring along market lines and based on actual values.

That Bank of America appears to have the financial clout to take up Merrill Lynch, creating a new global powerhouse in banking and finance, is a sign that the U. S. economy is doing what the U. S. economy has always done best, which is to overcome a succession of economic hurricanes and emerge as powerful and efficient as it has been in the past. The curse of other nations– Japan, Europe — has been their reluctance to make the adjustments and move on, letting failures fail.

That, in fact, is the greatest story in U. S. economic history. Since the Great Depression, it has never come close to having another great depression.

Now why would the left want to make things out to be worse than they actually are? Alright, I’ll spell it out: lefty politicians like Obama and Dion want to break you down so you lose faith in free-market capitalism, elected them, and give them the moral authority to enact widespread wealth redistribution and social engineering schemes – exactly the schemes that have stood in the way of further progress and success for a century now.