WUI (Writing under the influence)

As it happened before, somebody I didn't know called me after my guest column was published to thank me for saying what he had thought for a long time. We talked briefly, then exchanged some e-mails. We may even start attending the monthly meetings of the Washington County Republicans.

Just after my column was published I started noticing similar columns popping up so I started saving them. This is the first batch.

The first column is not really about America haters but about haters of Christianity. However, there can't be America and the West without Christianity so I think the column is appropriate.

We live in an age when modernists regard religion with something approaching panic. It is like the Devil’s attitude to Holy Water. There was a comic example of Christianophobia in The Sunday Times yesterday. Michael Portillo, who used himself to be seen in Brompton Oratory, was hyperventilating at the idea of David Cameron going to church. “I worry,” he wrote, “because men of power who take instruction from unseen forces are essentially fanatics . . . I would be more reassured to hear that the Tory leader goes to church because that is what it takes to get a child into the best of state schools, not because he is a believer.”

This editorial from WSJ is a good example of free-market haters. There can't be America without free markets and that include free markets of ideas and association.

The House of Representatives has scheduled a vote as early as today on a bill that strips 140 million U.S. workers of the right to decide in private whether to unionize. Naturally, it's called the Employee Free Choice Act.

Big Labor has been agitating to ease union-formation requirements for more than a decade. And prior to last year's election, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME and their allies made it clear to Democrats that this vote would be the most important return they expected on their investment in a Nancy Pelosi Speakership. This is payback day.

The union claim is that employers are engaging in rampant unfair labor practices to prevent employees from exercising their right to organize. But data from the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, show no rise in such activities. The reality is that union membership has been in decline for decades, and labor leaders are desperate to rig the rules in order to reverse the trend. In the 1950s, 35% of private-sector workers were unionized. By the early 1980s the number had fallen to 20%, and today it stands at just 7.4%.

The reason for this decline isn't illegal management meddling in organizing efforts. The problem is that unions haven't been able to persuade the workers themselves. Our own, longstanding position is that when a company is organized it is almost always the company's fault. But workers of all classes and skills can also read the news and understand that unions no longer provide job security, if they ever did. The most heavily unionized industries--such as airlines and Detroit carmakers--are typically those that are financially beleaguered and shedding jobs. Workers know that unions often provide short-term wage gains at the cost of longer-term job insecurity.

Next, is this editorial from WSJ that shows the hate toward our brave men in armed forces. There can't be America without brave men.

Amid the mad jumble that makes the news in our time, the White House on Monday held a ceremony for a Medal of Honor recipient. His name is Bruce Crandall. Mr. Crandall is 74 now, and earned his medal as a major, flying a Huey helicopter in 1965 in the Vietnam War.

The Medal of Honor is conferred only for bravery in combat. It is a military medal, and it is still generally regarded as the highest public tribute this nation can bestow. It is also very rare.

Still, the Medal of Honor does not occupy the place in the nation's cultural life that it once did. This has much to do with the ambivalent place of the military in our angry politics.

In the House debate just ended on a "non-binding" resolution to thwart the sending of more troops to Iraq, its most noted element was the Democratic formulation to "support the troops" but oppose the war. We will hear more of this when the members of the Senate debate their own symbolic resolution.

It's one thing to believe that the thread from islamo-fascists is overblown. It is quite another to support them.

The turmoil began Wednesday when a column by Mike S. Adams on conservative townhall.com, Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, was posted on the Drudge Report, a collection of news stories from throughout the world.

``All we want is to get Allah's pleasure,'' the jihadist Web site reads. ``We will write `Jihad' across our foreheads, and the stars. The angels will carry our message through the world.''

Adams accused Pino of ``drawing a paycheck from the people of the State of Ohio while trying to launch a jihad against people like me.''

One recent posting on the Web site was, Crusaders Can't Take Anymore in Afghanistan, Adams said.

Pino is a specialist in Latin America and has a doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles.

He joined Kent State in 1992 and a few years ago received tenure -- in essence, lifetime employment -- for his research and writings. At Kent, he has taught courses such as The '60s + A Third-World View and Comparative Third-World Revolutions.

He is no stranger to controversy.

Last year he was the target of an Internet petition that labeled him a ``walking, talking time bomb'' and sought to get him fired with comments like, ``Remove this traitor from our educational system'' and ``Get this murderer out of the country!''

In a 2005 letter to the student-run Kent Stater, Pino responded to students who questioned why Muslims were burning American flags.

``You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of drugs, gambling, the sex trade, spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past, such as AIDS, and turns women into commodities for sale,'' he wrote.

``The ill done to the Muslim nations must be requited. The Muslim child does not cry alone; the Muslim woman does not cry alone; and the Muslim man is already at your gates.''

In fact, lefty university professors are a special category of America haters. With one or two notable examples in our own Pacific University here in Forest Grove.
Al Gore is in a special category of capitalism haters in name of the man-made global warming religion.
Al Gore is also a representative of another America hating group. These are the people who in name of fairness want to squash the free market of ideas by re-introducing so called fairness doctrine. The following is but a small part of his infamous speech at the Media Conference in October 2005:

As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free."

As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.

So just when the market of ideas becomes bigger and embraces the ideas of the majority of Americans, Al Gore calls them hate-mongers. Maybe he meant people who hate America haters. In that case, he was right.

That's it for now. Unfortunately for this great country there is more to come.