Matt Labash has to be one of my favorite authors. When the Weekly Standard features one of his pieces, I actually set aside my OCD method of reading magazines from cover to cover and I go straight to his piece to read it first.

His latest feature was no exception, and is funnier than ever. Entitled, “Living Like a Liberal“, he describes in detail how he decides to live life according to liberal guru Justin Krebs, whose new book, 538 Ways to Live Work and Play Like a Liberal, is out now.

I encourage anyone looking for a funny read to check it out in full at the link above, but here are some of my favorite excerpts:

As Krebs writes, Drinking Liberally “has never been about drinking .  .  . it’s about progressive politics in a social setting.” It’s about all of us being “in this together.” It’s not just about “how you vote on Election Day.” It’s about “how you vote with your wallet every day.” It’s not just about “what you chant at a rally, but what you laugh at or rock out to on your iPod.” It’s about saying “it’s about” a lot, and then saying something real meaningful afterwards. Like this: “Living like a liberal is never just about making politics personal, but about making personal politics public.” It’s about alliteration.

…unlike the so-called “sandwich artists” at Subway, with their functional uniforms and plastic gloves, the Maryland Food Collective posts staff photos. Here, workers often use the co-op “as a platform for politics and creative expression.” They look it, too. They don’t appear overly clean. The creative expressionists aren’t wearing gloves. There’s lots of facial hair and flannel and piercings. Their staff guide says they have to “wear sleeves that cover their armpits”—not very reassuring. Most look like they’re on sandwich-making work release from a prison-hospital’s heroin treatment program. I think, sandwiches-wise, I’ll go locavore and stick with the nearby Subway.

At first, I am intimidated, as any rookie would be standing in front of the vast selection of sea salts at Whole Foods. But as I fill my cart, I quickly get my sea-salt legs beneath me by realizing the principle upon which liberal grocery-shopping turns. Liberals don’t just need their food to come comestible or tasty or biodynamic or free-range or locally grown. They—rather, we—need it to come with a philosophy and a parable. We need our food to tell a story. Why else would I pay 17 bucks for 32 ounces of McLure’s Pure Dark Amber Maple Syrup? Easy. Because it makes me feel better about my purchase to hear the story of how five generations of Granite State McLures have been overcharging for syrup that doesn’t taste as good as Aunt Jemima’s. In other words, our food should have the same affectations as the people eating it.

So as much time as I spend filling up my cart with blueberry muesli and tomato-basil artisan foccacia and gluten-free organic red quinoa, I spend even more time taking notes on the histories, core values, and Samarian proverbs on the labels, which, like my Tazo Brambleberry Herbal Infusion juice, promise “an enticing source of wonder, inspiration and antioxidants.”

By the time I get home with my liberal bounty, I feel more like I’ve been shopping at Holy Foods. I tried to be mindful of Krebs’s admonition to “think of plant-based foods—beans, grains, fruits, veggies, nuts—as your own personal source of solar power.” Sounds more like a source of wind power, if you know what I’m saying, but I feel good nonetheless. I feel clean surrounded by my Rosemary & Olive Oil Asiago and my Pomegranate Green Tea.

While, like Krebs, I am grateful that the federal and local governments protect large tracts of land from rapacious developers, I’m less enthusiastic about how park-ranger types seem to protect glorious nature from actual nature-lovers. I try to cultivate an appreciation of natural wonders in my children, but as I often tell them, “God gave us the rivers, Parks & Recreation didn’t.”

I’ve had my share of problems at the Jug Bay sanctuary. It seems to be open for a few hours a couple days a week, and I never seem to correctly guess when those hours are. Over the years, I’ve been asked to leave for walking through the park offhours. I’ve been asked to leave for bringing my dog. I’ve been chased down by a truck while riding my bike to an old railroad bridge pier to fish. After the park employee caught up with me, I was, surprise, asked to leave (the irony being lost on the employee that he pursued me in a vehicle to tell me not to disrupt the delicate ecology of the park by riding my bike in truck tracks).

Should I start worrying about myself?  After all, for the second time in just 4 months I am actually agreeing with an issue PETA has raised! (See my post on Ringling Bros. Circus Abuse for the first such occasion.)

Now, PETA has come out very strongly against a video on YouTube showing what is apparently a specialty of certain Chinese chefs who have come up with a way to keep a fish alive while deep frying it. In the video you can actually witness the fish lying in a platter of sauce, attempting to breathe, while diners begin picking chunks out of it to eat.

The Daily Telegraph reports that PETA called it “disgusting” and that a PETA spokesperson said that “every decent person should be shocked when anyone mocks or abuses a helpless dying animal”.

I couldn’t agree more. I may differ with PETA when it comes to eating meat (as long as the animal is killed for food, not sport, and killed as quickly and painlessly as possible), but watching this video shocked and sickened me to my core. The suffering that they are obviously putting that creature through is unspeakable.

Obviously, the Chinese don’t believe in karma.

For those of you with a strong stomach (seriously), here is the video. I strongly caution anyone with a combination of a strong conscience and a weak stomach not to watch this, as you quite possibly will have nightmares.

No, I am not kidding. Lebanon’s Daily Star is reporting on the latest threat to Lebanon from Israel: “Zionist cows” that venture across the blue line and apparently drink Lebanese water. This threat is so serious that a fence is being built to keep the “Zionist cows” out of Lebanon. (Should we start protesting this new “apartheid wall”?)

The story would just be funny if it didn’t have an infuriating and ironic twist. Guess who is actually building the wall? No, not the Lebanese. We are! Yes, that’s right, our disproportionately-U.S.-funded United Nations (specifically, UNIFIL) has actually taken on the task of building this bovine barrier for those pitiful Lebanese.

The cherry on top of this is a certain cow cadaver over which Lebanon is making quite a stink, claiming that it’s a “Zionist cow” that died on it’s side of the line and should be sent back to Israel, therefore Lebanon is refusing to bury it; meanwhile, Israel has just been ignoring the whole ridiculous matter.

What a bunch of idiots.

If I needed a pickup truck, I think I would actually go all the way out to Missouri just to give this principled, intelligent guy, Mark Muller, and his company, Max Motors, my business (as well as to shake his hand and give him some respect for not letting CNN step all over him):

In a sickening sign of the times, Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, a nurse at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, was coerced into aiding an abortion, despite her stated religious objection to it. This flies in the face of the federal “conscience clause” that protects medical workers in exactly such cases by requiring institutions receiving federal funding to prove that they respect this right of their employees.

Bush was famous for his strong support of this clause and his tough enforcement of it. Obama, on the other hand, is famous for his enmity toward this right, and his desire to do away with this clause is no big secret. That notwithstanding, it still remains in effect, and the Department of Health and Human Services asserted in an April report that “providers will continue to be protected . . . by existing conscience-clause statutes.”

However, as this case illustrates, it’s apparent that in these times with Obama now at the helm, the institutions don’t feel as pressured to follow the law and respect such rights, much to the horror of persecuted workers like Cenzon-DeCarlo.

I use the word “horror” intentionally, as this was her own choice of word as well. As the New York Post reports:

“It felt like a horror film unfolding,” said Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, 35, who claims she has had gruesome nightmares and hasn’t been able to sleep since the May 24 incident.

The married mother of a year-old baby was 30 minutes into her early-morning shift when she realized she had been assigned to an abortion. She begged her supervisor to find a replacement nurse for the procedure. . .

Her pleas were rejected, and instead she was threatened with career-ending charges of insubordination and patient abandonment, according to the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court.

Feeling threatened, Cenzon-DeCarlo assisted in the procedure. . .

“I felt violated and betrayed,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that this could happen.”

A native of the Philippines, Cenzon-DeCarlo moved to New York in 2001 and started at Mount Sinai on the East Side as an operating-room nurse in 2004. During her job interview, an administrator asked Cenzon-DeCarlo whether she’d be willing to participate in abortions. She flatly said no.

The nurse said she put her beliefs in writing.

The day after the procedure, Cenzon-DeCarlo filed a grievance with her union. Later that week, she was cornered by two supervisors who told her if she wanted any more overtime shifts, she would have to sign a statement agreeing to participate in abortions, the suit says.

The next month, Cenzon-DeCarlo was assigned to one overtime shift, rather than the eight or nine she usually received, the suit claims.

I’m ordinarily that last person to promote anything that PETA does, but for once, I’m on their side of an argument. The undercover video of Ringling Bros. Circus animals being abused for no reason goes entirely beyond the pale and shows behavior that is disgusting and reprehensible. Quite frankly, it makes me want to boycott circuses from now on, as I refuse to give any money to support such inhumane behavior.

In this video, you can clearly see the pain inflicted on the animals, as the huge elephants flinch and bellow with the blows of the bull hook. You can also clearly see that some of this is done for absolutely no apparent reason and, even worse, is sometimes apparently done entirely out of sheer malice (accompanied by vulgar insults).

It’s really sad to see and makes me really question the whole idea of a circus and makes me really wonder what kind of activities go into making so many otherwise-wild animals ‘trained’ and ‘domesticated’.

This ad showcasing Canada’s pathetic state of health care has got to be the most powerful and effective ad yet in denouncing nationalized health care and showing the ugly truth about it to the bamboozled public (who, incidentally, are starting to pull the wool off from their eyes, as the polls are showing a steady loss of support for this initiative to the point where a majority of Americans no longer support it!):

A tip of the hat to my cousin, Mike, for bringing this to my attention!

David Boies today in the Wall Street Journal writes about his decision to sue to overturn California’s Proposition 8. In his piece he rebuts several outdated arguments that almost no one is making anymore (“there is no longer any credible contention that depriving gays and lesbians of basic rights will cause them to change their sexual orientation”), while failing to adequately explain the basic premise of why homosexual marriage is a “right” and failing to address some of the more common arguments opponents of gay marriage make today.

For one thing, Boies talks about how the Supreme Court “has repeatedly held that the right to marry the person you love is so fundamental that states cannot abridge it.” What he doesn’t mention, though, is that the Supreme Court’s definition of marriage, as implied by every case they were writing about (including the cases Boies references), is the union between a man and a woman. Nowhere does the Supreme Court extend the concept of marriage to any other type of union. Boies’s hijacking of the Supreme Court’s sentiments and his re-interpretation of them for use as “proof” of this “right” is disingenuous.

One specific popular argument that he doesn’t address is quintessential “slippery slope” argument. Opponents of gay marriage want to know why a proponent would stop at gay marriage; if marriage to someone you love is such a fundamental “right”, why prohibit incestuous marriage? Why prohibit polygamy or plural marriage?

In fact, based on the points he makes (the “right” to marry the one you love, the separation between religious stigma and basic rights, etc.), he actually makes a good case for why the “slippery slope” argument has merit, because all his points supporting gay marriage can easily be applied to all the other “slippery slope” cases! In fact, I’d be most curious to know if he’d be equally as active in fighting for the “right” of a man to marry his daughter, or the “right” of five people in love to all marry each other.

In short, his piece is far from convincing and conveniently ignores the most common arguments of his opponents in this debate, while attempting to re-interpret Supreme Court decisions to apply to cases to which they were never intended to apply.

John McCormack, the deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard, had a great tweet yesterday, referencing the liberal TNR blog’s dig at Nixon which was entitled “Nixon: Abort Interracial Babies”.

The blog quotes Nixon musing about the availability of abortion being necessary for seemingly unintended babies of interracial sex, slamming him for “aborting interracial babies”.

McCormack’s tweet was a gem:

New rule: abortions approved by Left kill ‘fetuses’; abortions done [because] of racism kill ‘babies’.

A friend of mine recently pointed me to what turned out to be by far one of the best essays on the subject of gay marriage that I’ve ever read—including many highly persuasive “slippery slope perspective” ones.

This essay should definitely give food for thought to both proponents and opponents of gay marriage and I encourage everyone to read it. Its lessons are applicable to situations and decisions far beyond just the scope of gay marriage.

Read Jane Galt’s unique libertarian approach to gay marriage.