SelwynDuke.com

Fat in America: Taxing Us to Death in the Name of Taxing Us to Health

First they came for the tobacco, and I did not speak out because I was not a smoker. Then they came for the alcohol, and I did not speak out because I was not a drinker. Then they came for my food, and there was no one left to speak out for me because misery loves company.

By Selwyn Duke

We've all heard about driving while black. Now we have eating while fat. But, unlike the former, size profiling is more reality than rhetoric. As to this, and coming on the heels of the recent story about a mother arrested for having an obese son, is more folderol from the fatism front: a proposal by the Urban Institute to tax "fattening" foods to fight obesity. In other words, if you're overweight, you're guilty until proven innocent and thus fair game for the most onerous "corrective" action.

Reporting on this in the Los Angeles Times, Melissa Healy writes: "'Facing the serious consequences of an uncontrolled obesity epidemic, America's state and federal policy makers may need to consider interventions every bit as forceful as those that succeeded in cutting adult tobacco use by more than 50%,' the Urban Institute report says."

Read the rest here.

India Throws Monkey Wrench into West's Global Warming Agenda

By Selwyn Duke

In bold defiance of the global-warming agenda, India is making it known that it rejects the science underpinning anthropogenic (human caused) climate-change theory.

The bearer of this news is Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, who just last week had informed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that it was unfair for the United States to expect a developing nation such as India to curtail its CO2 emissions. Yet, while balking at such expectations is common, overtly rejecting the actual science behind them is not. MacedoniaOnline.eu reports on the environment minister's position, writing, "Jairam Ramesh ... accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers. He dismissed scientists’ predictions that Himalayan glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming. 'We have to get out of the preconceived notion, which is based on western media, and invest our scientific research and other capacities to study Himalayan atmosphere,' he said."

Read the rest here.

Why I Must Defend Barbara Boxer

By Selwyn Duke

We’ve all heard about the little dust-up between Black Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Harry Alford and Democrat senator Barbara Boxer during an Environment & Public Works (EPW) hearing on “green” jobs. Boxer, the chairman of the EPW committee, was trying to refute a report commissioned by Alford’s organization stating that the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act — which I’ll call “cap-and-sap” — would actually cause a net reduction in jobs. So, marshalling her arguments, she cited many sources that support cap-and-sap — among them the NAACP and the leader of 100 Black Men of America.

Reader Email: Turn Back the Rahmulans! (A Satire by a Nerd)

After their sweeping Proconsul victory of the “Cap and Trade” bill, led by Chief Proconsul Nazi Pelosi, at the urging of Rahmulan Emanuel, it appears the Rahmulans and Prater Obama have been turned back and have been forced to their side of the neutral zone — for a time.  The Rahmulans started their incursion into the neutral zone back on January 20^th, with the inauguration of their figurehead Prater Obama.  Cloaked in ambiguity, platitudes and faux-altruism, the Rahmulans struck fast, knowing that their numbers and intellect were far inferior to the Vulconservatives.  Although hardly a victory for the Vulconservatives, the most recent Rahmulan assault on the Universe, via Universal Health Care has been turned back, even at the urge to forge ahead by Rahmulan himself.  The Vulconservatives first goal is to expose the Rahmulan cloaking devices, so they can be seen for what they are; tyrants and villains.  Also part of the Vulconservative plan is once the cloak starts to weaken, assault the enemy with logic, reason and Truth.  Such an assault will surely unite the Federation and insure victory. 

Britannia Ruled by Knaves: Savage Banned to Fill White Man Quota

By Selwyn Duke

When I first heard that radio host Michael Savage had been banned from traveling to England along with an assortment of Moslem terrorists and other miscreants, my first thought was that the public relations arm of the politically correct thought police had struck again.  It only made sense.  Given how Britain is now bedeviled by Islamic jihadists, it had a legitimate reason to keep their most zealous fellows from the nation’s increasingly volatile Moslem masses.  Yet the spineless Neville Chamberlain bureaucrats charged with this task — whose motto seems to be “peace through capitulation” — would never want to be seen as singling out Moslems.  So they traded a man’s reputation for peace in our time. 

Another Minimum Wage Hike: But Will It Help?

By Selwyn Duke

In another example of turning lemonade into lemons in economically troubled times, the federal minimum wage increased yesterday from $6.55 an hour to $7.25 an hour. It's certainly a fashionable measure, but will it actually improve the lot of low-income workers?

Let's first discuss what the minimum wage is not. It's not something that's constitutional for the federal government to set; such power rightly resides with the states, depending on each state's constitution. It's also not, contrary to the usual narrative, something on which many millions of Americans must support families. In fact, only about three percent of the workforce earns minimum wage; moreover, a majority of this population comprises the very young and those who are not primary breadwinners. For example, the Heritage Foundation tells us, "Over half (53 percent) are teenagers or young adults under the age of 23. More than half (54 percent) of these young workers live in families with incomes two or more times the official poverty level for their family size and 18 percent live in poor families.... Less than 21 percent of minimum wage workers are the sole breadwinners of their families and less than 5 percent are sole breadwinners that work full-time year-round. Less than 5 percent of minimum wage workers are poor single mothers over 18 years old."

Read the rest here.

Guest Commentary: And That’s The Way it Wasn’t – Walter Cronkite

By Bruce Walker

By all accounts, Walter Cronkite was a kindly, almost avuncular figure.  Many members of the journalist community have written eulogies of his decency and humility.  He had a long, happy marriage.  These things should count to us conservatives, who yearn for human life to be more about how it is lived than in the personal politics of each individual. We ought to respect, for example, the genuine marital love that Barack has for Michelle or, for that matter, the love that Jimmy Carter has for Roselyn.  If we fail to honor those good aspects of our political opponents, then we run the grave risk of becoming that hideous creation of the Left, homo politicus.

Obama Regulatory Pick's Pro-animal Rights and Anti-First Amendment Activism

By Selwyn Duke

It's not surprising that Harvard man Barack Obama wouldn't share late writer William F. Buckley's sentiment that "I would rather be governed by 400 people out of the phone book than the whole faculty of Harvard." In fact, although he won't manage to fill the Congress with the staff of his alma mater, he certainly is making sure his administration is replete with its members.

And Obama is now making another addition to his many Harvard-honed underlings with the nomination of Cass Sunstein to be head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB, a position commonly known as the "regulatory czar."

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Mom Arrested for Having Fat Son

By Selwyn Duke

While America may not have anything resembling Saudi Arabia's religious police, called "The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice," we do have our own strange version of vice squads. Only, the trespasses they root out today are less likely to involve heroin and harlots than Twinkies and trans-fats. And their latest move is the arrest of a mother and the seizure of her child. Her crime? Her son is too fat.

Tracy Miller at the Daily News reports on the story, writing, "A 555-pound teenager in South Carolina is at the center of the latest legal case to consider whether child obesity is a form of child abuse."

Read the rest here.

Monday's Savage Nation Radio Appearance: The Prejudice of Atheists

The Prejudice of Atheists-7/20/09