Scott,
Novak knows this support is still shallow an untested as he goes on to ask; “But what if the support holds?”

By far the most troubling quote is from Gary Bauer;
“If [Giuliani] is nominated,” Bauer told me, “the leaders of the values voters movement need to sit down and do everything possible to avoid a split that would guarantee a disaster for social, economic and foreign policy conservatism. It would require some serious discussions.”

Good luck Gary on that sit-down.

“But why should we believe that the national media is going to be interested in giving us such a platform?”

Are you kidding? The media will pound home the story of GOP division, if only to facilitate Hilary’s ascension. Frankly, I expect you to receive major face time on the networks!

I suspect that we are going to find that too many values
voters are not so much aganst abortion as merely
squeamish about it.

I do not know if you watched Olbermann today (a guilty
pleasure for me), but he told of the latest ad for
SCHIP about a two year old named Bethany who, as they
said, if it wasn’t for SCHIP would not be alive today.

Well, according to Olbermann (and how I wish he had got
it wrong - but I fear he did not), the comment around
conservative circles was that if the parents could not
afford insurance, she should not have been born. They
meant, of course, she should not have been conceived,
but it is only a short step from there to say “if they
could not afford her, they should have aborted”.

The fact is that for too many conservatives babies are
a cause or a means to energize the electorate, but not
young people who are going to need help to make it to
adulthood, and that some help sometimes may come from
them. They do not really see them. They only see what
they cost, and they are furious as to having to
contribute in any way. People should only have children
if they can afford them. And if not, let’s get rid of
them.

We have to pay more attention to the way our economic
system punishes childbearing and childraising, and then
decide whether or not we are going to get serious as to
what a pro-natalist policy should be.

Adriana,
Stop watching the freaks on cable. The surest way to reduce real human beings to mere abstractions is to let the hate-mongers on TV into our lives.

Having said that, I agree on your point; we should work for a just social order that restores the family wage, fosters personal responsibility, the rearing of children within two-parent families and rewards the stay at home mom.

I think Adriana is dead on as well, except for Overbearmann. That said, I don’t hold out much hope for what Kevin proposes when the Guvernator today signed a law creating transgendered bathrooms for 6th graders, and lays the groundwork for imminent ban on use of the words “mother” “father” “husband” and “wife” in California public schools.

We are a sick, sick culture and Rudolfo is the manifestation of this sickness unto death. Hell, how many Catholics take communion without going to confession first? How many are addicted to “Desperate Housewives.” Those numbers will tell you a whole lot about whether Rudolfo’s numbers are shallow.

Well, at least the transgendered thing may create an opening for Frderick of Hollywood or McCain to ask him which bathroom he would have picked as akid, givewn Mayor Adultriani’s penchant for dressing up as Mae West.

@ Adriana, “We have to pay more attention to the way our economic
system punishes childbearing and childraising, and then
decide whether or not we are going to get serious as to
what a pro-natalist policy should be.”

Yep, another reason why “fusionism” between conservatives and libertarian cultists is doomed.  Setting aside abortion, the Libertarian axiom of “thou shalt not aggress” doesn’t offer the slightest protection for children against passive neglect, and most of all I mean neglect by their own parents.  In the sophomoric fairy-tale world of Libertarianism it’s dandy-as-candy to imagine a utopia where everyone is responsible for himself, but contrary to what Rousseau said, man is not “born free” but born in a condition of abject and long lasting impotence and absolute dependence.

Virgil,
“We are a sick, sick culture and Rudolfo is the manifestation of this sickness unto death.”

Couldn’t agree more. As the state of affairs grows more absurd and untenable so too will the opposition grow and solidify.

It will be a relatively small victory, but defeating the Cross-Dresser in 2008 will be a victory, nonetheless. We can then set our sights on thwarting Hillary for 4 years and building a party worthy of our membership and mission.

@kevin

I said it was a guilty pleasure. Like gorging on
chocolate. Not good for me, but so much fun…

To create a more child-friendly society through government action as Adriana seems to advocate. It is exactly government action through programs like Social Security that foster a anti-family environment. Considering that human beings react to incentives, the main incentive to have children (besides the pleasurable part of starting the process), is their purpose of taking care of you in old age as protector, provider, and care-giver. This provides the incentive to see that little Johnny learnes in school, so as to be able to better take care of you, this is why he is being taught to respect the elderly, especially his parents, since they want to be treated decent when they are older and helpless, this is why the parents look for little Johnny to get a good wife that knows how to take care of older and thus more often sick people, and this is why they not only stress the values that the church teaches, but also the tribal notion that “blood is thicker than water”. All these incentives are taken away, when the security and caregiver role is taken over by an anonymous government, and the fruits of this “labor of love” of raising a child are forcibly distributed by the government through taxes to all subjects in the governments reach, even the ones that we are not related by blood to. Just witness the absolutely normal, but politically incorrect hostility to extend welfare benefits to “new and especially the ethnically different” arrivals in the country.
That those, who make a living on the public trough, oppose the traditional reasons to have children is not surprising. Their wellbeing depends on destroying the independence that the traditional family structure provides to the individual. An individual without the selfsufficiency that a family can provide will have to turn to government as the guarantor of this security. And since those in government itself cannot provide it, they will indenture the able bodied ones to provide for everyone, thus socializing the fruits of labor of those, who invested in child-rearing.

@David

You forget to factor some elements of the equation.

Having children is a long time investment. Very long
time, and in the meantime it is costly.

We have an economy that depends on consumption, of quite
useless baubles in too many cases. Listen to comments
about “consumer confidence” which means, are people
buying enough stuff they may not need to keep the
economy going?

(First the pundits bemoan the lack of savings, then the
lack of consumer confidence, as if there was an infinite
number of money to be spent in both).

Since raising children is an expensive undertaking, it
is an incentive to save, not spend - which is bad for the
economy.

Then, rasiing children is a drain on the energy and
effort which could be put towards more “productive”
endeavors.

Having children: Good for the long run, ruinous for the
short.

Society likes the end result of properly raised childrne,
i.e. productive adults, but shrinks at the idea of
sharing costs during the pre-productive years.

Think about it. Think how an economy that discourages
saving will discourage any endeavor that takes time.
Think how long it takes to raise a child properly.

I did not recall advocating any Government effort to
solve it, but you know, when no other solution offers
itself, the Government is the problem solver of last
resort. Better than nothing.

Actually saving money is not necessarily bad for the economy. I would point you to Walter Block’s book ‘Defending the Undefendable’ and the chapter on ‘The Miser’. It is Keynesian hooey that savings are bad for the economy.

@adriana
As an economist and father of five children I can assure you that it is the availability of a government provided security blanket that encourages to spend on “baubles” and not to invest long-term in children.
People invest in order to be secured against the unforeseen. In an unsecure world, children that are prepared for survival in such an environment are the best investment. Savings and other property investments or holdings can be wiped out in an instant as the German people found out twice during the last century. However, those that had invested in well prepared children, were the ones enjoying a modicum of security.
Government action socialized this investment through schemes like social security, welfare, or the draft, which is just another form of taking your investment (child) to provide security from dispossession or physical harm from outsiders free of charge to everyone. In any case, these government actions or programs diminish the incentive to use this form of investment (children).
While we like to think of our motives with respect to childrearing as being purely altruistic, a lot of selfish interests influence our decisions.

Rudolofo just got endorsed today by the “pro-life” Governor of Texas today. The fix is in.

Yeats was a problematic chap from a religious standpoint, but he has our time naile in his poetic riposte to the Jesuit Hopkins.  It seems to me that now more than any time I can recall “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Even more certain are the visions of two rough beasts slouching towards Washington to be born.

@Martin, I don’t think Adriana said that saving wasn’t good for the economy. She said that the economy discourages saving.

Guido Giuliano is just one in a long line of cookie-cutter candidate spit out by <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nast-Tammany.jpg"">urban Catholic political machines</a>.  We’ve had these clods foisted on us since at least the 1880s.  Why is this a shock now?

@DAve

Thanks for the frightening glimpse onto the mind
of Homo economicus, for whom other people are just commodities.

Children exist as Social Security. And of course, being investments you can divest yourself of them when the situation calls for it: i.e. selling your daughters to a brothel for a good price. Or putting your children to work at six years of age. You can also, without compunction let any newborn die if you think that you have enough assets, and this new one will not be worth the investment you need to make on it.

Too bad that Government decides to intererfere with your freedom and put you in jail if you kill your children or sell them. Even worse, it demands that you educated them, when they could be out there earning money for you!!!!

Intolerable.

Unfortunately, I think he’s correct, unless Huckabee keeps gaining ground, and Huckabee is just as bad, especially on immigration.

There’s a rumor going around (don’t know the veracity of it - it’s a rumor after all) that Rick Perry is on Guiliani’s short list for VP. 

This is off topic, but these last rounds of immigration debates in the Senate over the past year have really made me come to dislike Robert Novak.  He has gone out of his way to condemn any critic of immigration as insane.  I don’t know why people confuse him as a paleoconservative.  At best, he’s a globalist critical of the war in Iraq, but a globalist nonetheless.

Scott,
Add this gem to the Giuliani Journal;

“Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani hired a Catholic priest to work in his consulting firm months after the priest was accused of sexually molesting two former students and an altar boy and told by the church to stop performing his priestly duties.”
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3753385&page=1