Blog Changes

I'm making some changes to the blog, with some already done. If things look goofy, hang tight as I try to fix them.

One key change I'll be making is that I'll be turning the comments back on. I turned them off about a year ago when I was just too busy to deal with them, and only recently have things started to slow down a little. I plan to keep them moderated, however, to ensure that stuff like some of the profanity-laced email I get doesn't find its way onto the blog.

I'll also be including more links, tools, etc. on the right-hand side. They'll prove helpful to me as a quick reference, and hopefully for you, as well. I'll also be expanding the news and commentary feeds to show more items at one time before the old stuff falls off the bottom. Some of these feed items show up automatically and some are manually added, so if there's a lot of traffic, old stuff can roll off pretty fast.

There are some new navigational aids, including some links at the bottom of each post so it can be added to some of the main social bookmarking sites with greater ease.

There are also changes in store for the main Dakota Voice website, but those are a little ways down the road yet.

The Cost of Free Health Care

Alan Aker has a good column in the Rapid City Journal today about the mess that is our current health care system.

In it he points out how this mess is caused largely because of government intervention:

As far as liberals know, hospitals and doctors, when confronted with a government price cap, slap their palms on their temples and exclaim, 'Now we get it. We've been charging too much. The government knows better than we do what we should charge, so we'll just save ourselves the trouble of setting our own prices, and use the government-set price for everyone.'

Or maybe liberals think doctors and hospitals say this: 'Hmmm. We'll be getting less money from the government than we've been charging. We could either pay less to our staff, buy less equipment, or... wait a minute... what about that money tree out back? Maybe it's time we used that.'

The liberal's answer would be, of course, MORE government intervention. That's always the liberal answer: when you've dug yourself into a hole, dig faster.

Alan's column has a lot of information about how the whole merry-go-round works with regard to cost shifting.

Read the whole thing here.

Lib Speech Police Think They're on a Roll

Don't tell me your surprised. From WorldNetDaily:

Now that radio talk-show host Don Imus has been banished, it's time to clean up the rest of talk radio, says a partisan media watchdog group headed by David Brock.

Next in the crosshairs for alleged expressions of 'bigotry and hate speech targeting, among other characteristics, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity' are, according to Media Matters for America, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, John Gibson and Michael Smerconish.

I didn't approve of what Imus said, either, but as it's been pointed out, the hypocrisy of those screaming the loudest (Al Sharpton, Je$$ie Jack$on, et al) is disgusting.

Now they think they're on a roll, and would like to shut up anyone that pokes a hole in the blanket liberal voice in the media.

They'll find Limbaugh and some of these others a much tougher target, though. I think they threw Imus under the bus because while he was a liberal, he had too much intellectual integrity. I've heard him on a number of occasions acknowledge the "shortcomings" of John Kerry and some other lame liberals. While Imus has been true to his ideology, he's not afraid to acknowledge instances where it and its representatives come up short. That made him expendable.

In the liberal world, if you're not toeing the line, you're expendable, especially if you cross the race pimps like Sharpton and Jack$on.

Baby Stabbed 135 Times

From Fox News:

STILLWATER, Minn. — A 17-year-old stabbed her newborn baby 135 times and disposed of her body in a garbage can outside her home, authorities alleged Thursday.

Johnson noted that the state's safe harbor law allows mothers to leave infants at any hospital within 72 hours of birth with no legal consequences.

"She could have walked away and the baby would have been adopted by a family that wanted it. Instead she destroys two lives: her own and the baby's," he said.

I thought abortion was going to make every child a wanted child?

Never Wrong to Teach the Right Thing

The Robbinsdale Radical believes I'm having a rough week because it was announced yesterday that a report found students who participated in an abstinence program were just as likely to end up having sex as those who didn't. The gloating is understandable, given our ideological opposition, and initially I won't begrudge the Radical a moment of satisfaction.

Okay, the moment is over.

These results are definitely disappointing to those of us who support teaching young people to be sexually responsible and wait until marriage.

However, as a Fox News report points out, the study only looked at four programs out of hundreds across the country, and they were some of the earliest programs, so who knows if other programs aren't working better?

We also don't know the full background of the children involved, specifically whether the teachings of the program was being reinforced at home and in other areas of their lives. From the Fox report:

"This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccines. You can't expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth's high school career," said Harry Wilson, the commissioner of the Family and Youth Services Bureau at the Administration for Children and Families.

Advocates of sexual responsibility such as myself have always stressed that society should be sending a broad and consistent message of sexual responsibility (starting at home and being reinforced at church, school, in the neighborhoods, and in the media--yes, they should be expected to send a responsible message, too, just as they did back in those "despicable '50s").

The study isn't all good news for sexual anarchists, though. A claim frequently made by condom advocates was also left unsupported by the study:

"I really do think it's a two-part story. First, there is no evidence that the programs increased the rate of sexual abstinence," said Chris Trenholm, a senior researcher at Mathematica who oversaw the study. "However, the second part of the story that I think is equally important is that we find no evidence that the programs increased the rate of unprotected sex."

Ultimately, though it's never wrong to teach the right thing. Opposing efforts to teach young people to be sexually responsible and wait until marriage to have sex is ludicrous.

Saying that because of these findings we shouldn't be teaching abstinence is like saying that because you taught your children not to play in the street, and they ignored you played in the street anyway, that you shouldn't have taught them not to play in the street.