timeimmortal

This is another HDR image, and I think it shows off well the rich colour ranges that become possible in such compositions. Previously, it would have required a lot of tweaking in Photoshop to get the image to anywhere near this level of tonal range.

I am in basic agreement with Ken about the whole controversy surrounding Palin and her daughter.

I guess the ‘liberals’* would have a problem with teenage parents getting married — sounds so…50’s. But, I thought that they were pro-choice WHICH INCLUDES THE CHOICE TO CARRY THE CHILD TO TERM, and that they would support decisions which are in line with empirical research that children living with their biological parents have better outcomes in general than children of single parents or those raised by at least one non-biological parent. (This is not to denigrate the work of many industrious single parents or adoptive parents, but only to say that mom and dad tend to do the best (if partly due to selfish genetic reasons operating on a subconscious level)) Thus the decision is the right one, one that even pro-choicers (as they call themselves) must say they support or else they are nothing but abortion advocates, and is ordered toward what will be the best outcomes for the child. Ohh, and has not Obama been preaching, several times recently, that young African-American males should take greater responsibility in the lives of their ‘baby-mamas’? Has he not been telling them to do what the Palin’s and the Johnston’s have encouraged their children to do?

The abortion analysis is also compelling — if teenage pregnancy is a secularist sin, then Bristol is not guilty of any more than several other “ticket children” except that she was ‘caught’.

Also, if Bill’s adultery is not something that ought to be scrutinized (only his honesty about it publicly) why is Palin’s daughter’s indiscretion seen as damning for McCain? As long as Palin is honest, what is the big deal?

Wait…her desire for abstinence education over ‘comprehensive’ education indicates her failure as a mother despite Bristol a) being exposed to a culture through friends that is more lenient on sexual mores, b) being of age for several years according to ‘liberals’ for deciding her sexual life and obtaining ‘remedies’ for ‘problems’ without parental involvement according to those same ‘liberals’ and c) having free will.

If a class refuses to answer questions on a government exam (worth the majority of the students’ mark) but routinely does excellent on class assignments of comparable difficulty to the exam, does that mean the teacher is a bad teacher or that the students chose not to write answers?

Also, I have before me a chart of the smartest cities in Canada and the three cities which routinely elect left of centre politicians are 18th (Toronto), 21st (Vancouver) and 34th (Montreal) while the cities that regularly elect right of centre politicians are 3rd (Calgary), 8th (Edmonton), 12th (Saskatoon) and 17th (Regina). However, the latter are usually derided as being “redneck” and not “sophisticated” like the former, but the latter also have higher percentages who spend money on the arts (ranked 1, 8, 10, 9 respectively) than the former (22, 15, 28 respectively). While economic prowess may be a factor, this certainly makes it look like the ‘liberals’ have some explaining to do. How can the ‘dumb, backwards’ cities have smarter and more cultured populations? Sure the measures are imprecise, but the clear seperation of the groups would indicate something is being captured.

* I have some issues with using that term to designate “left of centre” policies/people since it can denote some “right of centre” values too, such as its close cousin libertarianism

To which Kathy asks: Do I have to start watching this stupid show now?

To which I reply: Unless the very fact that the backdrop outside the few windows that appear is a starry one rather than a city will be a source of insurmountable frustration and disgust, I rather suspect the Furious One might just like Battlestar Galactica (the new version).

Get it on DVD — that way, you can always chapter-skip the more tedious parts of the Lee Adama/Starbuck “affair.”

Update: Welcome, TotalFark readers!

Why am I reminded of the videos for school warning one not to anger the primates as they would throw feces at you if you did?

A question would be whether the radical Islam the prisoners hold dear does not give them the courage or sense of decorum not to behave in such ways (such as the courage and decorum [John McCain] displayed in his time as a POW as related at the Saddleback forum with Rick Warren), or whether it engenders such behaviour towards blasphemers, or whether the prisoners are subjugated to such conditions, psychologically, that they are reduced to such a state.

That they get menu choice and exercise equipment would seem to indicate the third option is of low probability.

And if the U.S. was committing the crimes some of the critics of Gitmo claim they are, why would giving such things enter their minds? Or maybe the torture has ended with recent court rulings and they now enjoy the good life of many criminals here in Canada, such as those who are guilty of major crimes receiving house arrest or minimum security jail like the recent escapees from Regina.

But I would like to expand on a point made in reply to another article. As prisoners, regardless of classification, they may not (and should not) receive the right, say, to demand particular diets. But demanding they eat certain foods on a standard menu is different than intentionally making all their food defiled by exposing it to, say, bacon grease. Depending on their adherence to the rules relating to diet, the latter can kill them by starvation, the former need not. And, don’t we want living prisoners, in this case, from whom we can gain intelligence?

And this consideration is more important in cases where the ‘victim’ of ‘diet defilement’ is not yet found to be guilty of a crime, although accused “guests” of the state need not have rights to demand certain diets, either. After all, if they are actually innocent, then such behaviour could rightly be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” or some other such legal concept and the focus of a lawsuit which, given the general body of rulings given by the courts these days, would likely expand the rights inmates, both accused and guilty, would enjoy.

My parents bought us a crib, and delivered it to the apartment on Monday. Grace and I assembled it last night…and because I’m a bit of a photo nerd, I decided to time-lapse the thing.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

And…uhm…to set it to music. Because I can. And because What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong was exactly long enough based on how I cut the video (a fortunate coincidence!).

Every so often, something I write gets wildly misinterpreted. NH provides us with a decent example of what I mean when I say this, in his (?) response to my recent article concerning Bristol Palin, the daughter of presidential candidate John McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin. For those who have been living under a rock since last week, Bristol is, at age 17, pregnant. She will be keeping the baby, and will be marrying the father. Moreover, she will be doing both with the full love and support of her family, as has been pledged in a public statement by the Palins.

Not the most ideal of situations (teen pregnancy never is), but certainly not the worst of circumstances either.

So you’d rather she NOT get married and go on welfare?

You Obama nuts kill me.

You’re willing to support some dangerous racist fringe candidate and attack a woman who’s kid did something she had little control over.

Shame on you all.

It would seem I am being mistaken for a supporter of Barrack Hussein Obama, an allegation which even a cursory search of this site should dispel. Perhaps it would be beneficial to re-state some of that which I wrote previously.

Firstly, the point of my writing was to note a disagreement I had with the opinion of another blogger, albeit one with whom I usually agree. I noted, correctly I think, that there was a moral argument to be made in the case of Bristol’s pregnancy: pregnancy out of wedlock is not something which should be encouraged, and is (in fact) wrong. That she is pregnant does, in fact, indicate that Bristol Palin has made some poor choices in her life. I think we’re within our rights to note as much.

But that’s also where our rights end, in that regard. At the end of the day, what has happened? A teenager made the choice to sleep with her boyfriend, and she got pregnant because of it. This is her mother’s fault…how? Yes, her mother is ardently pro-life, to the point of putting her money where her mouth is and choosing to carry a child with Down’s to term. Yes, her mother is pro-abstinence, and supports teaching abstinence as a part of sex-ed in schools. And yes, legally speaking, Bristol Palin is still the responsibility of her parents, and will be for another year.

She’s still her own person, and she made a bad choice. I don’t see how her bad choices reflect poorly on her mother. Some have speculated that Sarah and Todd Palin have been lax in their duties as parents to impart good sex-ed to their children. Maybe they have been lax — we cannot and do not know — but even if they were, their daughter still had a choice to make between right and wrong, and chose “wrong.” And as to the matter of the possibility of the Palins having been lax in teaching their daughter about sex…well, I come back to the observation that she is still her own person.

As my wife noted previously, one of her sisters is pregnant (indeed, at the time of this writing, I may already be an uncle) out of wedlock — this despite being raised by devout Catholic parents, and despite receiving (I am told) education about sexuality and sexual morality within that framework. The best a parent can hope for is that the lessons imparted to children will, somehow, stick. But there is no way to know for sure, and sometimes even those children raised in the most optimal, moral fashion will choose to go astray. That’s. Life.

And given her situation, I do think Bristol Palin is making the best choices she can. She will not be seeking an abortion¹, she will be getting married to the father of the child, and she will be doing so with the full love and support of her family. She’ll have a tough life ahead, at least initially, but she stands a better chance of making it work than the welfare mamas that Kathy decried in the post that I was responding to. And while it’s still not good that Bristol is pregnant at this early age, and then out of wedlock, it is good that she is making the right decisions now.

And no, I don’t think it would be better for Bristol to remain unmarried and go on welfare.

I didn’t say that explicitly, but I did note that Kathy is exactly right that we should want “people better than ‘tacky and low class’ in the White House.” But really, given the respective examples of Sarah Palin and Barrack Obama — the latter of whom defended his stance on abortion by stating his desire to protect his daughters from being “punished with a baby” if they should happen to make a bit of a mistake in the sex department — who is the one who is really tacky and low class? Sarah and Todd Palin, with their messages of accepting responsibility, reminders of just how difficult the road ahead will be for their daughter, and emphasis on the importance of the love and support of family in such times? Or Obama’s “screw now, abort later” attitude?

Who really has the Hamilton ghetto attitude?

Kathy notes that she is happy that Bristol has chosen not to seek an abortion, less happy that she has chosen to wed. I don’t share this view: I think both are positive steps, and I think she will grow up quite a lot thanks to both of them. Bristol Palin will indeed have a tough road ahead. But she will have the loving support of her family, she will have a child to nurture and love, and she will have a husband who may just turn out to be a decent sort who will love and care for her “till death do they part.” Stranger things have happened, and as fates go that one is not so terrible at all. Bristol is unlikely to become another welfare baby mama…and that is a good thing.

And in the end, I don’t think Bristol’s pregnancy will be detrimental to the McCain/Palin (or, as George Jonas suggests, Palin/McCain (can’t we flip the ticket?)) campaign. If anything, it will increase the already broad appeal that Palin has with the Heartland voters. Even many liberals are noting the brilliance of Palin’s selection:

“We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling,” said Camille Paglia, the cultural critic. “That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. Palin is as tough as nails.”

…

“Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism,” said Paglia. “It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans.”

At the same time, Palin’s appeal on the “traditional values” scale couldn’t be higher, I don’t think. She hunts and is a member of the NRA. She has five kids, all with the same husband, to whom she has been happily married for 20 years. She’s a former teen beauty queen runner-up, he’s an oilpatch roughneck and commercial fisherman. They’re both active churchgoers. My goodness…John Mellencamp could not contrive a more “All American” couple on his best day. And here’s the best part: it’s not uncommon to find her youngest two children in her office as governor of Alaska — Trig, the youngest, even has his own crib therein, a point David Warren did not miss:

To the people who work hard for a living; who pay taxes instead of collecting food stamps and subsidies; who face the vagaries of life with gratitude for existence, and take their lumps and setbacks in their stride; who raise multiple children instead of perhaps one designer child; who go to church on Sunday, and believe on Jesus; who volunteer for civic tasks, donate money to real charities, help each other materially in distress; who otherwise mind their own private business and expect others to mind theirs; and who, among other quaint customs, love the fresh air, and indulge such pleasures as hunting and fishing, through which they acquire a sense of stewardship over the land — Sarah Palin is the bee’s knees.

…

That she could wind up as President, inspires a gulp — with a Down’s syndrome kid in a playpen by the executive desk in the Oval Office. If God were to contrive a pro-life statement, it might look like that.

And let us not forget to mention the whole “Margaret Thatcher of the Frozen North” vibe that even a cursory glimpse at Palin’s record in office makes plain. She took on the corruption of her own party, even to the point of resigning from a six-figure-salary position when adequate action was not taken. She then ran for election against a popular incumbent and won, despite the fact that elements of her own party actually held fundraisers for the other guy. And she has consistently shown no tolerance whatsoever for corruption or money-wasting projects. Yes, she supports drilling in the wildlife reserves in Alaska…but by the same token, she is no friend of big oil either: she signed into law a massive “windfall tax” levied against oil developers in the state.

1) Ace remarks upon something interesting about Bristol’s pregnancy, balancing it against the statistics for unexpected pregnancies in the general population, and against the general pool of children of other presidential candidates (and those of their running mates).

Although it would be unnecessarily cruel and invasive to wonder about which specific daughters of previous presidential and vice presidential candidates may have had an “invisible pregnancy” — that is, one terminated by abortion — it’s less invasive to simply take the cohort as a group and play the percentages game.

Saletan here, for reasons I would call “mystifying” but are anything but, restricts the possible candidates to those between ages 17 and 30 when their fathers stood for election, rather than stood for election and then served, which is an utterly contrived parameter designed specifically to exclude Chelsea Clinton (who was of course dating during her dad’s term, and was 16 when he ran for re-election) from consideration. Note how they yet bend over backwards to refrain from smearing a child whose parents they like.

Nevertheless, that’s a minor quibble, and if Saletan had to do that to get his piece published and/or not send liberals screaming blue murder, fine, we’ll work with his transparently contrived parameters. There’s no particular reason we need Chelsea Clinton in the cohort.

Doesn’t matter. Might be even better if we didn’t name any particular names listed at all (just ages) and just dealt with the presidential daughters as pure actuarial abstractions, anyhow. We don’t care which of the presidential and vice presidential daughters may have become pregnant; that’s their business.

We only care about the likelihoods that one or several of them have been pregnant, “invisibly,” at some point, whomever they might be.

An unintended pregnancy rate of 6 to 7 percent, in a population of 37 women, means two to three pregnancies per year. Even if you discount the rate further, on the grounds that these are the wealthiest and best-educated families, the notion that none of these young women got knocked up before their parents’ nominations or elections is—pardon the term—almost inconceivable….

Most unintended pregnancies in the higher income and education brackets end in abortion.

Remember that before you judge or poke fun at Sarah Palin. She’s not the candidate whose daughter messed up. She’s the candidate who didn’t get rid of the mess.

Have all the presidential and vice presidential daughters really all been either abstinent, infertile, or extraordinarily well-disciplined in using birth control properly, even during those fumbling and reckless late teenaged years? Extraordinarily doubtful.

Bristol Palin is an anomaly, and is a first, and is noteworthy. And she is, I suppose, therefore worthy of media commentary, but not for the reason they insist–

She’s the only one who decided to have her baby rather than abort it.

Ace goes on to note that if we don’t just restrict the sample population, above, to daughters, the numbers only become more damning when weighed against the statistics.

We’re getting closer and closer to the due date, and I trust the Reader will be happy to know that Grace is still doing very well with this, her first pregnancy. And doesn’t she just look beautiful?

And hey, why not one more shot? Though it’s a tad blurry, her million-dollar smile shines through.

I love my wife. As in: I really love my wife.

This particular issue is very near and dear to my heart. I agree with Ken that Kathy is very hasty to jump to the conclusion that the Palin family is looking trashy and lower class.

Perhaps if Kathy had a sister in this same situation, she would not feel that way. Because that is the way we have to think about issues of the world; apply them to our own lives, as if we lived in their shoes. Having to adjust to a similar situation as this in my own family, I have found that it is not a desire to condemn that I feel, but a sense that I should offer what support I can to my sister so she can live a life of self-actualization and fulfillment. See, I used to be on the outside saying, “This won’t happen to our family,” and constructed my own views about how I would feel if it did. Let me tell you, I feel very differently than I thought I would; I thought I would really struggle, but the truth is I love my sister and her unborn child even more.

If we are truly Christ-like, we will not judge, but bear all siutations with great love.

I leave this as a question to ponder. Why did God choose a virgin teenager who was not married to carry his son? Why not a Jewish woman who was recently married and living according to the law?

One last note: we should not judge the lower class; some people have no choice but to live that life and there is nothing wrong with making less money than someone else. I think we could all lose our distain for such a class, becoming more Christ-like.

This is a sunrise I captured from the parking lot at work. I tried out a few new Lightroom presets on it, placing the focus of the edits on enhancing the sky. That’s always tricky, because it seems to be the case that in the Canon EOS 350D, digital noise is most prominent in the blue colour channel.

What a mouthful, eh? But that’s the name of a process outlined in a 2004 Stanford University paper: synthetic aperture confocal imaging.

Basically, it’s an attempt to adapt confocal microscopy methods (which are used to produce 3D images of specimens) to the task of taking images of objects through “partially occluded environments”. Or, to put that into slightly more normal-sounding terms, it’s using a synthetically shallow depth of field, combined with variant lighting, to allow for images to be taken of objects that are partially obstructed from the camera’s view.

In other words: something only a Photography nerd could love.

The man who sold a thousand movies with his rich, deep baritone voiceovers has passed away.

I just got an email from Dr. Denis O. Lamoureux, my principal Theology professor during my years of university education. I did some contract Photoshop work for him a while back, related to some illustrations for a book (a demonstration of evolutionary mutations in chicken wings was one of them, and another had to do with how the ancient Babylonians imagined the world was shaped — this is relevant to interpreting Isaiah’s mention of “the circle of the earth”).

As you can imagine, O Reader, the book deals with the philosophy of evolutionary creationism, which I think affords us the most accurate understanding of just how God went about creating the world and all that lives upon it.

That book — Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution — has finally been published, and I should be getting my copy in the next day or so. And I encourage the good Reader to order a copy as well, as it is a must-read; an excellent analysis of how and why Christian theology and the discoveries of evolutionary biology are compatible and complementary, and not at all in conflict with one another.

And fortunately, just above is a link to Amazon.com, which has the book for sale.

Too cool!

Some leftist protesters at the Republical National Committee attacked a bus full of Cub Scouts on the way to said convention. Evidently, the bus was pelted with things, rocked back and forth, dented, and otherwise assaulted — presumably to the abject terror of the Cub Scouts inside it.

Now, one can’t expect much from people who think that ripping the unborn out of the womb is all that and a bag of chips. But still: real classy, people. Way to advance your cause.

I don’t often disagree with the Shaidle, but I think I have to in this case. But first, let me say this much: I wasn’t thrilled to hear that Bristol Palin, the 17-year old daughter of John McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin, was pregnant. I agree with Kathy on (some of) these points:

Sex is where babies come from. It doesn’t matter that you “didn’t mean to get pregnant” and only wanted the fun parts. An extreme skateboarder doesn’t “mean” to break a leg in eight places, but guess what?

I’m glad she’s not getting an abortion. I’m less thrilled that she’s getting married, but she probably isn’t thrilled either. If it works out, great. It’s been known to happen. But she should have planned her life better. It really isn’t that hard to do. Call it “delayed gratification.” Just control your damn self.

But I don’t agree as much with this:

This makes the Palins look really really tacky and low class.

We should want people better than “tacky and low class” in the White House. I left Hamilton to get away from tacky, low class people and their pregnant teenagers. Now they’re all over my damn television.

We criticized Bill Clinton for helping kids think “oral sex wasn’t real sex.” But we’re all cool with this? Kids will say, “So? Whatsername’s pregnant.”

When it’s “one of us” we’re all suddenly “compassionate” and “forgiving” and “oh but that’s different”?

I think the main point that Kathy misses here is that we criticized Bill Clinton, because of the (admittedly poor!) decisions he made with Monica Lewinski and others. We can criticize Bristol Palin for the same reasons, because she has made some poor choices indeed…but I’m not sure we can really fault her parents for it to any real extent. Obviously, teen pregnancy is an ongoing social problem, and there is certainly real potential that impressionable teenage girls will take this revelation as a sort of tacit “hey, it’s cool” message where getting pregnant themselves is concerned.

But at the end of the day: a teenager made the choice to sleep with her boyfriend, and she got pregnant because of it. This is her mother’s fault…how? Yes, her mother is ardently pro-life, to the point of putting her money where her mouth is and choosing to carry a child with Down’s to term. Yes, her mother is pro-abstinence, and supports teaching abstinence as a part of sex-ed in schools. And yes, legally speaking, Bristol Palin is still the responsibility of her parents, and will be for another year.

She’s still her own person, and she made a bad choice. I don’t see how her bad choices reflect poorly on her mother. Some have speculated that Sarah and Todd Palin have been lax in their duties as parents to impart good sex-ed to their children. Maybe they have been lax — we cannot and do not know — but even if they were, their daughter still had a choice to make between right and wrong, and chose “wrong.”

In my own life, I’ve known parents who have imparted very good lessons about sexuality and Christian sexual morality to their children. Sometimes those lessons have taken, but sometimes they haven’t. Some people listen to good teaching, and some people don’t; Jay Currie speaks truthfully when he notes that “telling young ladies to ‘keep their legs closed’ tends to be less effective than the Pill, condoms or, Hell, even the rhythm method.”

Actually, my thoughts mirror Jay’s on one other point as well:

Does this make Mrs. Palin unfit to be Vice President. Hell no. It makes her far better able to understand the realities which are faced by families all over the world. It makes her capable of at least having the chance to rethink a rule against sex education in school because, let’s face it, she did not get the job done at home.

The fact that the Palin’s have a daughter who is now pregnant at 17 does not make them “look really really tacky and low class.” What could have made them look that way was their response to the issue, but their response was very tactful and honest:

Mrs Palin and her husband Todd said in a statement: “Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realise very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family.”

There is a world of difference between the man and woman making the above statement and the Hamilton baby mamas that Kathy decries in her blog post, not the least of which is the understanding that the first act of the family — their duty in Christ — must be love and compassion. And it’s clear that Bristol Palin will have that from her family.

At the same time, a second Christian mandate is also discernable in what has been said: the Palin’s know that Bristol is in the wrong here, and I would bet that that they have told her as much. They’re exactly correct: the road ahead for Bristol and her now-fiancé, Levi Johnston will be difficult, but it’s a road they will have to walk down. Unfortunately, he sounds like a bit of a piece of work, but then, he could have just skipped town. That he didn’t says something, perhaps. That, or he didn’t want to mess with governor Palin who, let’s face it, is probably pretty intimidating: she’s a passionate NRA member and hunts moose. That’s not some mother you want to cross.

Predictably, the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) are having a field day with the whole affair*, and in particular seem to be interested in attempting to nail Sarah Palin to the wall over her support for abstinence-based sex education using Bristol as their example. The Anchoress enumerates many of the hypocrisies that are inherent in such a move (with additional commentary here):

The party that has claimed that pre-marital sex is groovy and doesn’t matter, and — quite rightly — that one’s worth should not be judged by one’s sex life, is apparently all-of-a-doo-dah because of some scintillating rumors, good for whispering behind the hands, like a bunch of puritanical washerwomen. Puritans indeed. When they finished fainting, they apparently decided to start sewing the scarlet A, for Mrs. Palin. A-for-ADULTERER (cackle, cackle!)

No one should ever be judged, except Christians. If they have sex and don’t abort, they’re fair for ridicule, smears and sport. And a woman’s choice should always be respected; unless she’s the wrong sort of woman, the kind with an R after her name.

Apparently, since the left can’t really go after Palin on her experience (Obama has equal or less, and he’s running for the TOP job, not the bottom) or her record, which seems very appealing to a reform-minded electorate, the left has settled on the uterine comings-and-goings of not just Sarah Palin but of one of her “witchy-named” daughters, too.

Some of the more detestable commentators on the Left are even suggesting that Trig Palin, the Down’s baby that Palin carried to term, is actually Bristol’s first child. The lowest scumbags have even suggested that Todd Palin is, incestuously, the father of Trig, by Bristol. Vox Day takes both theories to the woodshed:

It’s hard to decide which is the more ridiculous idea: (a) That the governor of Alaska successfully faked a pregnancy and is passing off her grandson as her son, or (b) that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy somehow demonstrates the inefficacy of abstinence-based education.

Both notions require brain damage, an IQ at least 35 points below the norm, or willful ideological blinders for anyone who spends more than five seconds thinking about the matter to adhere to them. Palin’s pregnancy has been sufficiently attested to that it needs no further explication here. As for the abstinence argument, consider the following facts:

1. In 2001, the federal and state governments together spent $4,403,000 in Alaska on contraceptive services and supplies for 141,000 women of childbearing age.
2. Almost all U.S. schoolchildren receive sex education by eighth grade, most begin receiving sex education in fifth grade. This sex education may include abstinence programs, but it is almost never limited to them.
3. Bristol Palin was not homeschooled for most of her education and her fiance is a hockey player at a public school.

Therefore, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is much more reasonably viewed as a failure of comprehensive sex education because that is the form of sex education she and her fiance almost certainly received, rather than a failure of the abstinence-only program that her mother favors and which she did not receive. One would have to be extraordinarily logically handicapped to indict a program that cannot be held responsible for a situation while trying to claim that the program that actually was involved in the situation would have prevented it.

Furthermore, abstinence programs are superior to other forms of sex education, at least when measured in terms of reduced STD contraction. This is what I noted in analyzing Sam Harris’s statistically tortured attempt to attack abstinence programs: “What he neglected to mention was that while the study showed that 4.6 percent of the abstinence-pledged teens contracted an STD, this was 35 percent less than the 7 percent of non-pledged teens who also acquired one.” - TIA p. 127

But let’s come back to where we started, for just a moment. Jay Currie notes one other important distinction between how Sarah Palin has handled the actual news of her daughter being pregnant versus how Obama responded to a hypothetical question about teen pregnancy, using one of his daughters as an example:

Obama stated - and I can’t be arsed to get the link - that if one of his daughters was knocked up he would not “want her punished with a baby”. Mrs. Palin has said:

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support,” the Palins said. ann althouse

Kathy is exactly right that we should want “people better than ‘tacky and low class’ in the White House.” But really, given the example above, who is the one who is really tacky and low class? Sarah and Todd Palin, with their messages of accepting responsibility, reminders of just how difficult the road ahead will be for their daughter, and emphasis on the importance of the love and support of family in such times? Or Obama’s “screw now, abort later” attitude?

Who really has the Hamilton ghetto attitude?

Kathy notes that she is happy that Bristol has chosen not to seek an abortion, less happy that she has chosen to wed. I don’t share this view: I think both are positive steps, and I think she will grow up quite a lot thanks to both of them. Bristol Palin will indeed have a tough road ahead. But she will have the loving support of her family, she will have a child to nurture and love, and she will have a husband who may just turn out to be a decent sort who will love and care for her “till death do they part.” Stranger things have happened, and as fates go that one is not so terrible at all. Bristol is unlikely to become another welfare baby mama.

Update: Peter Sean Bradley nails one out of the park:

If only John Edwards was the father…

…the media would have buried the Bristol Palin pregancy story.

Oh, and where were the thoughtful discussion on the need for sex education when Rielle Hunter got knocked up?

Hypocrites.

* The hypocrisy of the Left on this issue is actually quite staggering, as has been pointed out, both at SDA and at Protein Wisdom “for your delectation“.

Watch the whole thing:

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Amazingly, the reporter — Sara Hassan — seems oblivious to the fact that the exhortations to ritualized murder are quite in line with Islamic teachings and the sayings of Muhammad. And yet there it is, plain as day…and this at one of the most prominent mosques in Britain.

If someone converts away from Islam? “We kill him…kill him, kill, kill… You have to kill him, you understand?”

If someone is an adulterer? They have to be stoned to death.

If someone is a homosexual or tranvestite? “…the punishment is kill, kill them, throw them from the highest place.”

The religion of peace…or, perhaps more accurately, pieces.