Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is joining you this Thursday to write about a hot-button topic for the Men’s Club. Indeed, he can’t remember the last time a truly serious and polarizing issue was the topic for the Men and Divas.

This week we discuss the rights of fathers. Specifically, does the biological father of an unborn child have a legal right to block an abortion? Furthermore, can a woman who has aborted a child without notification of the father be subject to “damages” should the father want to pursue a civil action?

You see now that your Maximum Leader wasn’t joking when he said this was a hot-button issue.

The very terms used in the framing of this post can inflame people. Unborn Child versus Fetus is the most glaring example of how the terms of the debate can influence the direction of the debate.

Your Maximum Leader has made no secret of his position that human life begins at the point of a fertilized egg. Furthermore he has said that he is against unnatural termination of pregnancy. (He says unnatural because there are many “normal” yet tragic circumstances under which a pregnancy may terminate - or miss-carry.)

Now, having reminded his readers of this point allow him to say that he understands the many objections to his position. In a number of cases the arguments against his position are thoughtful and valid - if you accept a few basic premises. Unfortunately, most of these premises have to focus on the viability of a child/fetus. Thanks to modern science a child/fetus that was not viable in 1972, or 1982, or 1992 or even 2002 may well be a viable life today. Viability is a moving target. It is conceivable that in your Maximum Leader’s lifetime there will be artificial wombs into which fertilized eggs may be implanted and grow to full-term. Recognizing the futility of using viability as a criterion for life your Maximum Leader uses fertilization. At which point the genetic code of a human being exists.

So any argument your Maximum Leader might put forth on this topic is, naturally, informed by his belief in when life begins.

So… To address the first issue, should a biological father have the right to prevent a woman from aborting her unborn child? In your Maximum Leader’s view a father should have the ability to prevent an abortion.

A father should have this right because, if one views the unborn child as a person with rights; the parents have equal custodial rights to the child. (In this your Maximum Leader will assume that a court hasn’t already intervened in some fashion to abrogate the rights of one or the other party.)

Now, having stated this point, your Maximum Leader will continue. If a man were to exercise this right to prevent an abortion a number of other positions naturally seem to follow from the decision. By choosing an abortion, the woman has made clear her intention to not want to be a parent to te child. The man, by exercising his right, has made clear his intention to want to be the sole parent to the child. The trade-off in this situation would appear to be that the woman would have the baby, but then would have no further obligations to the child. All responsibility for the child would fall upon the father. Furthermore this situation should never be allowed to change. The woman should not be allowed to change her mind years later and sue for joint custody. Nor should the man be allowed to sue for support down the road.

Having a child should be a considered decision entered into jointly by a man and a woman who want to be parents. Unfortunately this is not the case in modern society. One would hope that the process leading to parenting would be 1)find a spouse; 2) establish a stabile home; 3) have children. The recent studies by the Brookings Institution showed that among poor women the process is essentially reversed with children coming first, then the spouse, then the stabile home. Some women, no doubt, realize upon getting pregnant that they aren’t ready to be a parent. This realization leads to abortions in many cases. But the tragedy is that birth control is widely available and could prevent the situation from ever arising.

But your Maximum Leader digresses…

So your Maximum Leader does believe that a father should be able to exercise paternal rights to intervene to save the life of his unborn child?

What happens if he’s not told that he was, before the abortion, going to be a father? What if a man hears that a former fling/girlfriend/wife had an abortion - and he figures the child could be his? This is a very tricky question.

Your Maximum Leader will say that, if there was a way that paternity could be established between a man and the unborn child; then some form of damages might be awarded to the man should he take the matter to a civil court. But that is a big if… How exactly would one do that? Your Maximum Leader isn’t sure.

Now, your Maximum Leader will admit that through sheer laziness he is not touching on many issues that could and probably should be mentioned at least in passing in this post. Well… Sheer laziness is not precisely true. This has been a challenging week at the Villainschloss. He hopes that next week will allow more time to create bloggy goodness.

For other views on this topic check out the Men: Phin, Stiggy, That One Guy and Jamesy.

For the ladies check out: Kathy, Silk, Phoenix, and Sadie.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that the Chicago White Sox have just won their first World Series since 1917.

Congratulations. The Chi Sox beat a formidable Houston team.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has just completed a brief note that he will mail tomorrow to the Acidman. Your Maximum Leader hopes that he will find the help he is looking for and that the help will take. So to speak…

In the meanwhile, he’s been reading Gut Grumbles every day - as is his wont.

And he just has to point out this story from Queenie. She says its from her archives, but your Maximum Leader doesn’t remember it. Frankly he doesn’t remember why Queenie isn’t blogrolled… A problem that will be soon remedied.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s Grand Jury deliberated and left for the day without making any indictments. The Grand Jury is only empaneled for another 3 days (although they may be extended). Will all of political Washington have to wait another day, or two, or even THREE before we know if Rove and/or Libby will be indicted for their roles in the Plame affair? How much more buildup by the media can we take?

The world wonders.

Carry on.

Julius Caesar You scored 51 Wisdom, 73 Tactics, 49 Guts, and 42 Ruthlessness!

Roman military and political leader. He was instrumental in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. His conquest of Gallia Comata extended the Roman world all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, introducing Roman influence into what has become modern France, an accomplishment of which direct consequences are visible to this day. In 55 BC Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. Caesar fought and won a civil war which left him undisputed master of the Roman world, and began extensive reforms of Roman society and government. He was proclaimed dictator for life, and heavily centralized the already faltering government of the weak Republic. Caesar’s friend Marcus Brutus conspired with others to assassinate Caesar in hopes of saving the Republic. The dramatic assassination on the Ides of March was the catalyst for a second set of civil wars, which marked the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire under Caesar’s grand-nephew and adopted son Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus. Caesar’s military campaigns are known in detail from his own written Commentaries (Commentarii), and many details of his life are recorded by later historians such as Suetonius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio.

Credo.

I feel that I must respond to the scurrilous libel being slung by the Maximum Leader.

I am sure that loyal minions of Naked Villainy have come to see how very proper and cultured their beloved Smallholder is.

And they knew instinctively that the phrase “Would you like to test fly the button fly?” would never cross these proper and cultured lips.

The Maximum Leader must be maliciously conflating me with one of his drunken carousing college buddies.

And in that drunken carousing buddy’s defense, it wasn’t his fault.

Said drunken carousing buddy was verily provoked by his roommate and his roommate’s girlfriend who demanded that he try to find, um, company after midnight.

Said drunken carousing buddy replied testily, “What am I supposed to say? ‘Hey baby, would you like to test fly the button fly?”

This sent the roommate and the roommate’s girlfriend into fits of hysterical laughter. They then looked up and dialed the number of a girl with whom the drunken carousing buddy occasionally danced.

Drunken carousing buddy, succumbing to the iniquitous double-dog dare, took the phone and uttered perhaps the worst pick-up line in history, assuming the girl would laugh and tell him to go take a long walk off a short pier.

Imagine the drunken carousing buddy’s shock when the girl replied that she would be right over.

Said drunken buddy, thinking the night’s festivities were all in fun, was mightily chagrined when dancing girl began sending him love poetry. He felt like a heel.

So you see, it wasn’t really the drunken carousing buddy’s fault.

Plus, he felt bad.

Perhaps unfairly.

I mean, really.

Was he supposed to be rude?

Hang up the phone?

Turn the girl away when she knocked on the door?

And, seriously, this drinking buddy was only nineteen. He hadn’t yet fully developed his moral compass.

Nevertheless, I am shocked - yes, shocked! - to see that the Maximum Leader has tried to pin this sordid episode on his Minister of Agriculture.

But I am sure that my proper and cultured reputation will result in this slur boomeranging back on Mike. Our loyal minions are surely asking themselves, “seles, why are we the loyal minions of a despot who once associated with depraved, drunken carousers? A leader who tries to smear the reputation of a good and decent man?”

Shame on you, Mike.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bill’s Sermon.

His points are very interesting, and as an Episcopalian I have no problem with him straying off the theological reservation (The Nineteen Articles: It’s all good!).

He does lose me on the Christian persecution bit. I tend to think of persecution as when they come and shoot you for following your beliefs. If I ever get up the gumption, I’ll issue a concurring opinion elaborating our theological similarities and our glaring divides.

But go read. Really. It is good stuff.

Glory be!

One of my favorite sparring partners (oh how I wish she would post more regularly, but suspect this is the pot calling the kettle black) has written something with which I am in complete concurrence.

Go see Ally.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader shouldn’t have to remind you that the poor agrarian Smallholder has trouble connecting to the internet from home. So your Maximum Leader decided to take some quizzes on his behalf and share the results with you…

Which historical general is the Smallholder?

George MacClellan You scored 31 Wisdom, 73 Tactics, 27 Guts, and 16 Ruthlessness!

Like General McClellan, you’re smart enough to know what tactical decisions to make. However, the problem with McClellan is that he could never sprout the balls to act on his information, and in the end, that’s why Geoge McClellan is only a sidenote in the history books. After graduating from West Point, he served with distinction in the Mexican War and later worked on various engineering projects, notably on the survey (1853-54) for a Northern Pacific RR route across the Cascade Range. Resigning from the army in 1857, he was a railroad official until the outbreak of the Civil War. In May, 1861, McClellan was made commander of the Dept. of the Ohio and a major general in the regular army. He cleared the western part of Virginia of Confederates (June-July, 1861) and consequently, after the Union defeat in the first battle of Bull Run, was given command of the troops in and around Washington. In November he became general in chief. The administration, reflecting public opinion, pressed for an early offensive, but McClellan insisted on adequate training and equipment for his army. In Mar., 1862, he was relieved of his supreme command, but he retained command of the Army of the Potomac, with which in Apr., 1862, he initiated the Peninsular campaign . The collapse of this campaign after the Seven Days battles was charged by many to his overcaution. In Aug., 1862, most of McClellan’s troops were reassigned to the Army of Virginia under John Pope . After Pope’s defeat at the second battle of Bull Run, McClellan again reorganized the Union forces, and in the Antietam campaign he checked RobertE. Lee’s first invasion of the North. He was slow, however, to follow Lee across the Potomac and in Nov., 1862, was removed from his command.

Hey… At least he’s not a hippie.

And in other news the Smallholder is…

Which Food Network chef are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Your Maximum Leader suspected as much… But Rachael Ray is much better looking than is the Smallholder. But the Smallholder might beat out Rachael Ray in the boobie department… Might…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t know what to write. He is almost at a complete loss for words…

Why? He just finished reading about a professional computer game player making over $40k a year.

Your Maximum Leader has heard of (and have even known a few) computer professionals who do game testing and design. They play lots of computer games - because they create and program and test them. But the fellow in the post article is just a playa. He enters tournaments and plays games for money…

He wins a lot… He drives a BMW and has a (long distance) girlfriend.

Damn.

At least your Maximum Leader doesn’t live in his parents basement…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader would like to point out to his mnions that today is Saint Crispin’s Day. If you are a member of the Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tradition, and particularly devoted, you should remember Saint Crispin in your prayers and obligations today. For those of you unfamiliar with Saint Crispin you should clicky here to learn more about Crispin. He is the patron of shoemakers, leather workers, and cobblers (among others).

But then again, if you are a history geek Anglophile (like your Maximum Leader), you may recall that on this day in 1415 the Battle of Agincourt was fought. Wanna learn more about Agincourt? Clicky here, here, or here.

And if you have ever read/seen/heard any of the plays of William Shakespeare you may be familiar with the famous St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. As the speech is one of the most famous passages ever delivered on the stage your Maximum Leader will reproduce it for you here:

WESTMORELAND
O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING HENRY V
What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

So, your Maximum Leader hopes that with a little bit of reading here all is minions have gentle’d their condition by educating themselves a little about Agincourt. Perhaps if your Maximum Leader has time today he’ll write more about Henry V and how his reign held so much promise, but was cut short.

Carry on.
(more…)

Have I been in Europe too long?

A Hippiebr> You scored 68 Wisdom, 54 Tactics, 54 Guts, and 34 Ruthlessness!

You know nothing about tactics or war. You are docile and cowardly and the mere thought of violence is enough to make you wet yourself. Hate to break it to you, but chances are very good that you’re not General material…. not even BAD General material. Hell you’re probably not even a productive member of society. Why are you even here? Don’t you have a peace pipe to smoke, or a war to protest or something? So here’s to you and to whatever naive country that lets you vote…. Leaders who share your beliefs include: Jaques Chirac and Gerard Schroeder

Bill Frist would like to win the Presidency in 2008. This is not going to happen.

Bill Frist has garroted his own presidential hopes with his stupid lies about his stock transactions, his shameful duplicity in the Terri Schiavo affair, and his Machiavellian poll-driven machinations on stem cell research.

I have been toying with pasting old Bill with Terri and medical research for some time, but until today I didn’t think there was much meat to the whole HCA stock issue. After all, most Senators are rich fellows and the appearance of a conflict of interest doesn’t necessarily mean that voting on any particular issue is profit-driven.

Let me be very clear from the outset. I haven’t seen any evidence that even begins to support a conspiracy to inflate personal wealth through legislative fiat.

But…

The Senator from Tennessee made the front page of the Washington Post today. It seems that, taking a page from Bill Clinton’s playbook, he wagged his Monica finger and claimed that he did not know about his hospital stock. Set aside the lying for a moment - I can already here our conservative readers ginning up their “it was an honest mistake, and doesn’t really matter” talking points. Lying, whether it really matters or not, on something so easily tracked by reporters, using documents generated by your own people, is monumentally stupid.

Many folks are willing to tolerate duplicitous public officials - witness the left’s ontinuing love affair with Bill Clinton. They ought to have been troubled by the President’s distant relationship with the truth. But they should have been troubled to a much greater extent by what it revealed about his judgment. The guy with access to the launch codes is going to risk his political career on whether a childish intern will keep her mouth shut when grilled by a seasoned prosecutor? Republicans alarmed by Clinton’s judgment should be, if they are honest, just as alarmed by Frist.

From the Washington Post:

In January 2003, after winning election as majority leader, Frist was asked on CNBC whether his HCA holdings made it difficult for him to push for changes in Medicare, a federal health program for seniors that added to the hospital company’s revenue.

“I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust,” Frist replied. “So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock.” He added that the trust was “totally blind. I have no control.”

Notice that this statement has two parts. He first says that he does not know whether there is any HCA stock. The second is that he has no control - the stock is “totally blind.” Both are parts are demonstrably untrue.

One suspects that the Elephant Echo chamber is begining to look for weasel room here. “Look!” shout the kool-aid drinkers, “he said ‘as far as I know.” They are right. There is a bit of vagueness here. But the fair-minded are asking themselves, “selves, why would he feel the need to add that weaselly language if he wasn’t lying?”

Because he knew that he was lying and in true Clintonesque manner, was already planning on parsing grammar if he got caught. The problem is, he can’t hold a candle to the master of weasel words. Bill’s weasel words, while ultimately futile, at least were hard to nail down. Frist was passing out hammers. To negate the weasel words, you would only have to produce a document showing that he did indeed know something about it.

Preferably a recent document.

Let’s go to the Washington Post, shall we?

Two weeks before that interview, M. Kirk Scobey Jr., a Frist trustee, informed the senator in writing that one of his trusts had received HCA stock valued at between $15,000 and $50,000.

Doh! Well, say the apologists, Frist probably deals with a lot of letters from his trustees on a daily basis. He probably just forgot the part about HCA. To which I reply: He doesn’t take special notice of the company founded by his father? The company that made him a multi-millionaire? And there is still the problem with the “totally blind” trust. If he gets “lots of letters” from trustees, the trust ain’t that blind, is it? Heck, if he gets just one notification - say the one that the Washington Post has revealed, the trust, at the very least, is not “totally” blind.

I don’t envy Frist’s spokesman. When your man is caught in a bald-faced lie, what do you do?

Shovel bullshit to the Washington Post, that’s what!

“He [Frist] could have been more exact in his comments,” said Bob Stevenson, spokesman for Frist. Stevenson added that Frist might better have said he did not know to what extent he owned HCA shares.

And Bill Clinton, rather than saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” might “better have said,” “I tapped that intern ass. I had her every which way but Sunday. Hell, who am I kidding? I had her Sunday too!”

Come on, Bob! Your boy Frist wasn’t equivocal about his knowledge of shareholding. He said that he was unaware that he owned any. And to admit that he had some knowledge defeats the second part of his statement about the trust being totally blind.

I’m not the only person who noticed this:

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said she was surprised that Frist had ever claimed before this summer’s liquidation that he might have owned no HCA stok. “Did he say that? What was he thinking of?” she asked. “How did he know to tell the trustee to sell it [his HCA stake] if he didn’t know that he had it in the first place?”

When Bill Clinton’s supporters finally had to abandon their hero’s grammatical gamesmanship, their next line of defense was that the lie didn’t matter - lying about Monica was a private matter. This line of defense is not available to Frist partisans. Frist was talking about the matter in the first place because even he realized that presiding over legislation giving higher payments to hospitals was a conflict of interest.

Frist’s partisans might argue that the notification of $15,000 worth of shares was too small to indicate a conflict of interest and beneath Frist’s notice, even if it was his family’s company. $15,000 is chump change to a fellow like Bill. The problem with this line of argument is that it is standing on the railroad tracks and the document train is coming through. That trustee letter that was sent to Frist just two weeks before Frist went on CNBC and lied to the American public was just the tip of the iceberg. I’ll grant you that he probably didn’t pay much attention to the $15,000 - but only because he owned MILLIONS more worth of shares:

Disclosures by the trustees to the Senate and to Frist indicate that Frist and his family probably owned a great deal of HCA stock at the time. When Frist’s federal trusts were created in late 2000, the trustees disclosed that one trust alone contained between $5 million and $25 million in HCA shares and that each of seven other trusts held more than $1 million of the stock.

The last resort of a politician caught with his hand in the cookie jar is to seize the moral high ground:

Frist said last week he was not required to set up a blind trust after he went to the Senate, but he wanted to “apply the highest ethical standards I possibly could. I thought, why not raise the bar, why not do a good deed . . . and avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Oops! Frist just opened up the senate-rules-can-of-worms:

Senate rules prohibit any lawmaker with a blind trust from contacting his trustees unless the ownership of an asset poses a potential conflict of interest “due to the subsequent assumption of duties” by the lawmaker. The lawmaker can then ask the trustees to dispose of the asset.

Frist did not take on any new duties this year. But a Frist adviser said the senator had been thinking about selling his HCA stake from the time he was elected majority leader in 2002. Frist had not known that he could sell his shares until this spring, the adviser asserted, and so went ahead with the sale based on his nearly three-year-old wish.

So he did know he owned the stock (note that the aide is saying that Frist has been wanting to sell for three years - more info from his own camp that he lied in the CNBC interview), but didn’t know he could sell it? Cynical moonbats might question whether he held on long enough to take the gains generated by the new Medicare rules. I won’t go down that road - that would be a remarkably hard thing to prove and I am a believer in Hanson’s corollary to Occam’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

Maybe Frist didn’t know about Senate rules for selling stock. But he did know he owned stock and he did know that his trusts were not blind. And he was dumb enough to think that his own paper trail would sink him.

Bill Frist is too dumb to be President.

Part II: Schiavo and Part III: Stem Cells will be forthcoming

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is in a quiz mood it seems. Here is one courtesy of Lysander.

Your Maximum Leader is:

Julius Caesar You scored 53 Wisdom, 73 Tactics, 58 Guts, and 44 Ruthlessness!

Roman military and political leader. He was instrumental in the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. His conquest of Gallia Comata extended the Roman world all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, introducing Roman influence into what has become modern France, an accomplishment of which direct consequences are visible to this day. In 55 BC Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain. Caesar fought and won a civil war which left him undisputed master of the Roman world, and began extensive reforms of Roman society and government. He was proclaimed dictator for life, and heavily centralized the already faltering government of the weak Republic. Caesar’s friend Marcus Brutus conspired with others to assassinate Caesar in hopes of saving the Republic. The dramatic assassination on the Ides of March was the catalyst for a second set of civil wars, which marked the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire under Caesar’s grand-nephew and adopted son Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus. Caesar’s military campaigns are known in detail from his own written Commentaries (Commentarii), and many details of his life are recorded by later historians such as Suetonius, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader sees that his results on this quiz are the same as JohnL of Texas Best Grok. That is a good think as best he can tell.

Which Food Network chef are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Your Maximum Leader is glad he didn’t come up as Rachael Ray or Giadia DeLaurentiis. Although he is fond of both Rachael Ray and Giadia DeLaurentiis. At some point in the past he (or was it Brian) imagined being in a Rachael Ray/Giadia DeLaurentiis sandwich…

Hummm…. Sandwich…

Carry on.