One more calamity to freak out about now, it seems, is an impending “pandemic” of the Asian Bird Flu virus known as H5N1.  Every day we read about five billion more chickens or turkeys or geese in China or Romania or some other country being infected and killed.

A batch of folks in Vietnam have died of it, and the scare stories mount about how any day now, the virus will mutate, enabling not just bird-to-human infection but human-to-human.  Then, the stories claim, the pandemic is on.

There are some protective measures you might consider to shield yourself from a H5N1 pandemic should it occur.  I don’t want to be dispensing medical advice, so I’ll just say that this is what I am doing myself.

It was Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas who identified the Liberal Democrat compulsion to “blame America first.” In any confrontation between America and any other country or disaffected group, liberals could be trusted to say it was their own country’s fault.

This compulsion seems to be a defining characteristic of liberals to this day, from Baghdad Jim McDermott (D-WA) to Dick Turban Durbin (D-IL) to Howard Dean and Teddy Kennedy. What’s not widely recognized is how this compulsion has infected the brains of certain conservatives.

A case in point is how Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative magazine are swooning, along with the New York Times and the Liberal Media, over a new book - Dying to Win -- by a goofy University of Chicago professor named Robert Pape.

 
New Gallup polling shows that bringing abortion back into the national debate may not be a bad political call for Republicans.

Whereas public opinion has moved in recent years against the conservative position opposing same-sex marriage, the opposite is true on abortion. On abortion, Americans have become decidedly more pro-life, moving in the direction of conservatives.

A just released Gallup poll shows that 50 percent now identify as "pro-life" compared to 41 percent as "pro-choice." This is a complete reversal from 16 years ago in the mid-90s when 56 percent were "pro-choice" and 38 percent "pro-life."

In fact, the Gallup headline for the poll results is:  "Pro-Choice Americans At Record Low."

The Kabuki Dance now underway between Soon-To-Be Justice Alito and Senate Democrats makes me think of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The Democrats (and pro-abortion Republicans like Arlen Specter) will be desperately trying to get Alito to forswear any overthrow of sacred SCOTUS “precedents” such as Roe v. Wade, while Alito will genuflect before the precedent shrine and mellifluously commit to nothing.

Both sides will assiduously avoid any discussion of how these precedents were established in the first place – by overthrowing previous ones – what justified their establishment, and what would justify replacing them with new ones today.

Instead, there will be monotonous droning on about the legal concept of stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by that which is decided”), and how it makes Roe v. Wade set in unquestionable stone.

Last week was the 13th birthday of my youngest son, Jackson. One evening a few days before, I was engrossed in writing on the computer when my wife reminded me it was Jackson’s bedtime. He was in bed reading, waiting for me to kiss him goodnight.

As I walked down the hall towards his room, my brain was filled with thoughts about the article I was working on. I was on autopilot and all I could think about was what I would write when I got back on the computer. For some reason, I stopped and stood still. Somehow, an extraneous thought had popped into my consciousness from nowhere.

It seemed just a moment ago when he was a little boy. Now, in just a few days, Jackson would become a teen-ager. The time was not far off when he will be too big a kid for me to kiss him goodnight. The time was not far off when he will not be down the hall at all.