Last week, I posted a Planned Parenthood of San Francisco video that was so extreme and biased, I raised the possibility that it was a fake, intended to discredit PP.  The inestimable Zombie, bless his (or her) heart, did the leg work for me and discovered that it is the real deal.  Here are the links Zombie sent me establishing that fact:

The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Character

Dionysus, God of Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood’s Most Recent Gaffe

Inside Planned Parenthood Golden Gate’s Building Design

Double Standard : There’s The Left, And Then There’s The Rest Of Us

I mentioned in an earlier post the interesting fact that, on my Facebook page, it is my straight friends, not my gay friends, who are the most enthusiastic supporters of gay marriage.  This is not to say that my gay friends are slacking in their support.  They just lack the enthusiasm.  For every one pro-gay marriage Facebook post from a gay friend, there seem to be two from a straight friend.  As I said, I find this enthusiasm a little surprising.  Usually, when people don’t have a dog in the fight, while they may be passively interested in the outcome, they don’t normally become actively engaged in promoting the fight.

While I was mulling this curiosity over in my mind, one of my Facebook friends (a straight one, of course) posted this image:

That sentiment is true, of course, but it also obscures the difference between supporting gay rights and animals rights.  Animals can’t speak for themselves.  If we don’t act as their spokesmen, no one will speak on their behalf.  The same is not true for members of the LGBT community.

Help me out here, please.  I am not seeking comments about the validity of the various causes within the gay rights movement.  Instead, I’m just wondering (a) why members of the LGBT movement are now being analogized to mute animals and (b) why the fever is higher in the audience (so to speak) than amongst the players themselves.

How many times have I said “Yet another good week at the Watcher’s Council?”  Amazingly enough, every time I say that, I am stating nothing more than the truth.  Last week, for example, was indeed another good week:

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 2/3 votes! Joshuapundit – The New Egypt – Bankrupt And Sinking Fast
• Second place with 2 2/3 votes – Bookworm Room- ObamaCare, the Catholic Church, and mandatory abortion payments
• Third place with 2 1/3 votes – The Razor-The Twisted Memory of Newt Gingrich
• Fourth Place with 1 2/3 votes – New Zeal-Russia Today Hires WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange- Will the Kremlin Be Pleased?
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Colossus Of Rhodey-If you didn’t know this was coming by now, you’re living in a cave
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD -The Saudi Persian War
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Right Planet -GOP: On Whose Side?
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Noisy Room – Tantrum on the Tarmac
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – The Political Commentator –In a debate would John King ask Obama about this…? (Video)
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote – VA Right! –Senator Janet Howell ‘Rectal Avenger’
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Mellow Jihadi – Parading Vets: St Louis Vs. New York
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Rhymes With Right – Presidents Are Not Kings; Americans No Obliged To Appear When He Beckons

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! – Alisineh.Org- What Is My Identity? submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes – Smithsonian.com – Revisiting the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich submitted by The Colossus Of Rhodey
  
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –Caroline Glick The Zionist Imperative submitted by The Political Commentator
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –The Reserve Officer New Defense Strategy submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Second place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –Bob Owens/PJ MediaNew Emails Suggest Eric Holder Perjured Himself submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Third place with 1 1/3 votes -Frontloading HQ –I’ll see your white knight and raise you a filing deadline. Why It’s Too Late for Entry in the Republican Nomination Race submitted by Rhymes With Right
• Fourth place with 1 vote - Investors Business Daily – Media Act As Though Only Republicans Misbehave submitted by VA Right!
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -American Thinker –Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis submitted by The Right Planet
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote - Michelle Malkin –For Santorum submitted by The Noisy Room
  
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Terry Glavin –It’s Not Funny Anymore submitted by Simply Jews
  
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote -Blogbat –The Moon Is Made of Cheese, You Know submitted by Right Truth
  
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Via Meadia –Beyond Blue Part One: The Crisis of the American Dream submitted by The Razor
  
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -The Kitchen Dispatch –Aloha, Sarge Charlie. Until We Meet Again submitted by The Mellow Jihadi
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote -Bill Whittle –The Vote Pump submitted by Bookworm Room

I always like Michael Ramirez’s political cartoons.  I often love Michael Ramirez’s political cartoons.  But what’s the word for how one feels about a political cartoon that so perfectly summarizes a complex issue that no further words are needed?  This is one of the best of the best.

The Washington Free Beacon is a new online paper with an interesting premise:  unlike MSM papers, which treat liberalism as the norm, and conservativism as a headline grabbing abnormality, this publication gives the big scare headlines to the Left.  In other words, it’s not just that it reports the stories, but that it reports them so as to highlight Progressive malfeasance.

I like the idea.  This site gets a bookmark on my Firefox.

UPDATE:  Matthew Continetti explains what “combat journalism” is and why two can and should play at this, to date, one-sided game.

Simple language and documented facts create a powerful indictment of Obama’s presidency.

I’m not commenting on the merits of the decision, which I haven’t read, or on the merits of Prop. 8, which we’ve already hashed over at this blog.  I am commenting, however, on my utter lack of surprise with this ruling from the 9th Circuit, affirming the district court decision finding Prop. 8 unconstitutional.  Of course, the 9th Circuit is the most overruled appellate court in America, so advocates of gay marriage might want to hold off on getting too excited.

One other thing:  I have a lot of gay friends on Facebook, since I grew up and lived in the Bay Area.  Intriguingly, though, the ones who are most aggressive in their support for gay marriage are my straight friends.  What’s up with that?  Is this the “straight guilt” equivalent of the “white guilt” that transformed the Civil Rights movement from a Constitutional equality issue into a racism industry?

Back at the end of the 16th century, Thomas Hobson ran a livery stable (which, in pre-auto times, was the equivalent of a car rental place).  Unlike other livery stables, he refused to allow his customers free pick of horses.  Instead, they were told that they could take the horse in the stall nearest the stable door . . . or they could take no horse at all.  And so a phrase was born:  A Hobson’s Choice is a situation in which the appearance of a choice is illusory, since the only alternative to the offered “choice” is nothing at all.

Centuries later, when Henry Ford started his assembly line, he is reputed to have given his customers the same choice Hobson did:  “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

It’s clear that the Obama administration has been studying the Hobson and Ford playbook.  The headline in the New York Times copy of an Reuters report reads “White House Open to Compromise Over Contraception: Adviser.“  That sounds heartening, doesn’t it?  Except, as always, the devil is in the details:

Signaling possible room for compromise on the issue, David Axelrod said such religious institutions have a grace period to find a way to include health insurance coverage for contraception as part of the U.S. healthcare overhaul without going against Catholic Church doctrine.

“We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedom so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both guarantees women that basic preventive care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama’s re-election team, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Think about that for a minute:  Under this so-called compromise, churches will still be required to pay for women’s contraceptives and abortifacients, but the Obama administration is kindly offering them the chance to figure out a way to subsidize these pills and treatments without offending their core doctrinal opposition to contraceptives and abortifacients.  Sounds like a choice to me — a Hobson’s choice.

The Obama administration is not naive.  It knows as well as we do that some things cannot be the subject of compromise.  Just as one cannot be “a little bit pregnant,” there is no way to fund a repugnant practice without being a participant in that practice.  These are binary issues.  And this alleged offer to compromise is no compromise at all.  One may as well ask the condemned man if he wants to be hanged from a gallows or a gibbet — he’s still dead at the end, and the Church is still being forced to bow down to government mandate on doctrinal issues.

Special troops are, by definition, small in number.  If everyone could do what they do, they would be special.  They are made up of men with unusual mental and physical strength.  Again, by definition this is a subset of all men.  (No disrespect meant to the majority of men who aren’t unusual in both their mental and physical strength.)  Once these men are selected, they are subject to rigorous training, training that would be impossible to give to large groups.  Special forces go beyond “the few, the proud.”  They also fall into the class of “rare and few in number.”

Given their numeric limitations, it makes sense to use special forces sparingly.  Once lost (God forbid), each member of a special forces team is very, very hard to replace.  Someone needs to tell that to the President, who, flush with SEAL Team Six’s exquisite raid on Osama (a raid that subsequently resulted in the vengeance-driven loss of many members of that same team), is tasking those guys with responsibility for Afghanistan — all of Afghanistan.  As Max Boot says:

The kinds of direct-action strikes that these units carry out are an integral part of any comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy–but they cannot substitute for the absence of such a strategy. That was the mistake we made in Iraq from 2003 to 2007 and in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2009. Now it seems Obama is making that mistake again, to judge from news reports the White House is planning to lean heavily on the Special Operations Forces as they withdraw regular troops from Afghanistan. This is not a way to defeat the Taliban, the Haqqanis, and other dangerous terrorists on the cheap–it is a way to lose the war while pretending you are doing something to win it.

To which I would add that it’s also a war to squander a special breed by placing them at unreasonable risk, so that they might no longer be there when we really need them.

Sorry for the light blogging today.  This has been one of those days that has seen a lot of people in need of my services, and I’m not done yet.  I’ll try to write more but, in case I don’t, and if you have something you want to share here, go for it!