joel's thoughts

I am an American. I am a conservative. I am a Christian. I grew up in the 80s while Ronald Reagan was president, followed by George H.W. Bush, and I was raised with fairly conservative values — honor God, family, and country, respect and support the military, give an honest day’s hard work for honest […]

I tend to have certain Libertarian leanings in my political views, so I was very interested to see Rand Paul win the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Kentucky.  He’s now on the national stage, and the more liberal side thereof has zeroed in on (and is seeking to amplify) his take on the Civil […]

So I just got done reading this fascinating piece on the upcoming Tea Party convention, and I had a bit of an epiphany.  The author kept talking about waiting to see if the movement could be organized into a “political machine” with “influence” while pointing out the inherent challenges in organizing rather disparate groups, some […]

So Edwards got a slightly higher percentage of the vote than Hillary, and is therefore widely being given media attention focusing on his second place showing over Hillary’s third (and what that means for their respective campaigns). End of story for Iowa, except… In a mini-replay of the popular-vote-vs.-electoral-vote difference, this page seems to indicate […]

I’m thinking a Huckabee-McCain ticket would be a pretty powerful thing. Huck carries the conservatives who are concerned with a few of Mac’s social positions, and Mac carries enough foreign policy cred for both of them. It would seem they differ on the current administration’s Iraq policies, but in the heat of political battle that […]

By now I’m sure you’ve probably seen this video. What’s so striking to me is not the production quality of the video mashup, which is very good, but rather how much this furthers the trend begun by blogs, where everyday people suddenly have a voice, and a potentially powerful one at that. This is the […]

On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Diana Butler Bass takes a look at where the politics of abortion stand today (hint: not very far from where they stood thirty years ago), why the church bears some responsibility for that, and what in her view needs to change. A thought-provoking, challenging piece, and well worth […]

Ever since Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court essentially told the government to stay out of the bedroom, there has been speculation that other…shall we say, “non-mainstream” lifestyles would start lining up at the “Be Accepted Now!” window. As the Washington Post reports this morning, polygamists are piping up right on cue. And […]

The UK Telegraph has Part 2 of Christopher Monckton’s take on global warming, in which he addresses proposed and potential responses (i.e., “so what do we do now?”). George Monbiot over at The Guardian has provided an attempted debunking. “Debunking” because he raises several valid points and provides enough information to bring the certainty in […]

The UK Telegraph has quite an interesting article poking some serious holes in the whole global-warming-catastrophe theory. It’s a little thick in places but overall well worth the read, and there’s an accompanying PDF with graphs and data and such. The elevator speech version is that UN climatologists accidentally (or purposely?) screwed up the data […]