Pro-life campaign speech for Jim Pillen

 

Okay, Jim Pillen, I received your pro-life mailing today and as a result, wrote a campaign speech for you. Feel free to use this speech in all your campaign appearances. Here’s how it goes:

 

You all know how strongly I profess the Christian faith and hold a pro-life position in all matters. Therefore, as governor I will propose the following legislation:

 

(1) Immediately enact a so-called “life tax” to provide for public funding of “life services,” defined as prenatal health care, treatment for medical conditions arising from pregnancy, and care, including medical care, clothing, food, shelter, and both education and special education as needed, for any infant born to a mother who would otherwise have chosen to abort it. Life services would continue until the child is 18 years old.

 

(2) Establish residency requirements, for access to such support, similar to those already established, for example, for tuition at post-secondary institutions.

 

(3) Require DNA testing of mother, infant, and father (when the father can be ascertained) when an infant is born to a mother who would otherwise have aborted it. Costs of such testing would be paid by life tax revenues. If necessary, use test results to identify the father.

 

(4) Require, by law, the father to contribute half of the costs incurred in providing life services to mother and infant, and provide for an 18-year lien on the father’s earnings if necessary, with an extension to such time as the state is re-paid half of the life services costs. Include in this law a provision that the father’s parents are liable for this contribution if the father is a minor.

 

(5) Immediately establish comprehensive sex-education programs in all public schools, the curriculum to include effective contraception. Withhold certification from private schools that do not institute such a curriculum.

 

(6) Immediately provide birth control services for all individuals who want them but are unable to afford them. Pay for these services through the life tax. Services would include oral contraceptives, Plan B, condoms, patches, injections, and all other forms of artificial birth control to individuals over the age of 14. These services would be available in school health centers.

 

(7) In the event that an infant born to a mother who would otherwise have obtained an abortion requires long-term care or services due to a congenital condition, then such care and services would be provided by the state and funded by life tax revenues.

 

(8) In the event that pregnancy results from rape or incest, the mother would receive a lifetime stipend for carrying the fetus to term and the state would fund all services resulting from this birth, including counseling, adoptive services, and treatment of any medical conditions, including mental or emotional ones, resulting from the conception and delivery of this infant. In the case of rape or incest, residency and means requirements do not apply.

 

(9) The overall impact of this program, including life tax and life services, will be reviewed every ten years by qualified consultants from outside the state. Life tax will be adjusted annually to ensure revenues adequate to support life services programs.

 

I, Jim Pillen, am completely convinced that my pro-life Christian Republican colleagues in the legislature will stand firmly behind this legislation. Nebraska will then become a national model for Christian Republican pro-life governance!

Charles Herbster unfit for public office?

 

Comments on the Herbster candidacy:

 Charles Herbster is unfit for public office. The kindest thing that can be said about Mr. Herbster is that he is not smart enough to understand that the former president's willful ignorance about science is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. That means he is not smart enough to hold elective office in a complex, technology-dependent, society.  His mailings proudly display his scientific ignorance relative to COVID-19, a virus that has killed nearly a million Americans, thousands of which can be laid on the desks of elected Republicans, including the former president, their disdain for vaccines and masks, and their delusion that mandates are somehow an attack on American freedom. American science has provided the only weapons even partially successful against this pandemic disease, an enemy “against which political genius and military valor are utterly useless” in the words of historian Hans Zinsser. There is a long list of Republican officials who are either not smart enough to understand that simple biology lesson, or don’t care about the impact this disease has had on families and our health care system. Herbster’s latest mailing flouts Kristi Noem as a model for how responsible officials should handle COVID. South Dakota ranks far ahead of Nebraska in terms cases per capita and has nearly three times the rate of COVID deaths per capita. Anyone running for Nebraska governor should be smart enough to figure that out before bragging about an administration far less successful than that of Lancaster County.

Obviously COVID is only one aspect of an administration’s challenges. But Nebraskans deserve better than someone who is either not smart enough to understand what his advertising is telling us about his scientific illiteracy, or believes we don’t care, even after watching such ignorance play out at the national level. Herbster also flaunts the fact that he is the only candidate endorsed by a former president who has appeared in court 3,500 times and settled multi-million dollar fraud cases in two states, one of which has enjoined him from ever operating a charity again. The public record of those 3,500 cases reveal a person with no sign of the kind of honesty and respect for the law that the vast majority of Nebraskans cherish and exhibit. C’mon, Republicans; you can do better than Charles Herbster, a lot better. I’ve been a registered Republican since 1958 and you do not represent my values, not at all.

 

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2022 CALENDAR

 

The Holmes Lake Calendar – 2022 

Now that the pandemic has evolved into an evolutionary biology lesson, with variants cropping up in various places around the world and mutant, as well as competing, wacko treatment ideas also cropping up, and I’m not only fully vaccinated but also boosted, I figured it was okay to go back to Walgreens, masked, of course, and six feet away from the other people, and have the regular calendar pictures printed. So this year instead of the Samathon type 2021 calendar, you get a real one, although because a couple of you appreciated last year’s comments about the monthly photos, you’ll get a narrative accompaniment to the 2022 edition, too.

Trust me, there is a connection between this year’s calendar and the Chagrin Valley Camera Club whose members live generally south of Cleveland, Ohio. My sister Teresa, who lives in the area, is not only a member of that club, she’s also the newsletter editor, and sometime in the past couple of years, she suggested that I join CVCC because at the time it was free and I seemed to take a lot of pictures. So I did. Well, CVCC has a Monday morning critique and review session, with about a dozen or so hard-core photographers, and like an unsuspecting newbie, I dropped in. To make a long story short, these Monday morning folks are good, and sophisticated, but ultimately helpful. Thus I ended up needing to take some pictures, and Holmes Lake seemed like a logical place to use for that purpose, especially because I have a kayak and on calm days in summer and early fall I sometimes go over there, with, of course, a Canon SX700 in tow (not a major disaster if it falls in the water). But then, needing material for those Monday mornings, I started going over there with all the rest of my equipment and trying to actually take nice pictures. Of course when it comes to photographs, “nice” is a relative term. Oh, and Holmes Lake is only about a mile from our house, which makes it a nice lake.

There’s no guarantee that the calendar pics for 2022 are fine art, but they do represent an attempt to show the various faces of an urban park lake in the upper Great Plains. The park surrounding Holmes Lake has a lot of dramatic native vegetation and the lake has a nice population of waterfowl, sometimes a heron, and in the fall, migrating sandpipers. Some of these images were taken from the kayak, but others from the shore, using my other cameras: Nikon P900, Nikon D610, and Nikon Z7-2, and lenses including the Sigma 150-600mm telephoto. My camera purchase history might be of interest, mainly because it’s a study in causality and awareness, or maybe awareness as causality. When I went on that Searcher whale watch trip to the Gulf of California, in 2004, I borrowed a digital camera from the lab. After watching other folks on that boat use their high-end cameras, I bought a Nikon D70 the day I got back from that trip (my version of “high end” at the time). When we went to Africa in 2013, I borrowed a Canon S3 from the lab, and the day we got back from that trip, I bought a Canon SX50. A day or two after we got back from the 2015 trip to Tanzania, I bought a Nikon D610 because it seemed like I needed a full-frame machine. And eventually I bought the Z7-2 because everyone else seemed to be getting mirrorless cameras with high megapixel sensors. As one of the really astute members of CVCC told everyone one day, on the subject of new cameras (he’d just bought a really high end one): “You’ll still take the same pictures you’ve always taken.” He was correct. So you can think of this year’s calendar as a study in technology.

Eleven of these photos were taken in the months in (on?) which they appear; I didn’t have any from April so I picked one from early May. Ten of the photos were taken in 2021; November and December are from 2020.

(See my monthly Facebook posts for the monthly write-ups and pics.)