Back to Basics

Police in Prince William County, VA just released a list of the most dangerous intersections and I discovered that on a single trip to Chantilly I managed to drive through the most dangerous intersection in Manassas, the most hazardous in Manassas Park and the third most threatening in the rest of the county.

This is because I live in the land of “you can’t get there from here.” Northern Virginia residents have only a very limited number of through streets and major thoroughfares. Drivers are forced to crowd into a handful of routes when they want to go east or west and even fewer when they want to go north. Any tourist ever stuck on I–95 knows what I’m talking about.

There is no way to plan a route avoiding dangerous, packed intersections because there are no alternatives. Much of this can be blamed on what I call the Stonewall Jackson school of traffic engineering: “Why Stonewall whipped the Yankee’s behind using this very road network. There is no need to improve on perfection.”

In effect this means replacing a one–lane corduroy road with a winding two–lane asphalt design is viewed as a technological breakthrough rivaling that of the flush toilet.

And it’s not going to get any better where I live.

County planners are in the process of approving a 22–acre mixed use development that will have 360 apartments, two hotels and an office building. And oh yes, there will be only a single exit from the development linking it to neighboring roads.

Once more state and local government succeeds where national government and Richard Branson failed. The county and the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) have managed to monetize space. The right to drive into or out of a parcel of land makes it extremely valuable, because curb cuts are rationed tighter than ethics at a GSA convention. Gaining permission for that vital absence of concrete curbing often requires a lobbyist.

I’m sure the thinking here was you can drain a bathtub with a single exit, why not a real estate development? Yet the same planners would not approve a movie theatre with one exit and they wouldn’t approve a shopping mall interior with a single exit either. Maybe we should give the fire marshal authority to approve road and development design. Installing a sprinkler system in your car would be a small price to pay for more efficient transportation.

Fortunately, due to cul–de–sac laden, backward road design theory, most of the crashes here are low speed encounters. According to a press release from TomTom, the GPS people, the Washington, DC area has the most congested traffic and slowest average speeds in the nation.

Many drivers serve a positively organic role in the Capitol’s traffic circulatory system, functioning as automotive plaque that clogs the artery and slows us down.

I recently returned from a trip to Dallas and traffic there was a revelation. At 4 PM on Friday I was driving down LBJ Freeway and Central Expressway, two major thoroughfares that are packed daily with rush hour traffic. Auto density was the same as on I–95, but guess what? I was moving at speeds in excess of 40 mph! I felt like a Swiss neutron racing the speed of light.

It’s not often I agree with Sen. John McCain (R–Ego), but his description of Obama’s Osama commercial is apt. “No one disputes that the president deserves credit for ordering the raid, but to politicize it in this way is the height of hypocrisy,” McCain said. “This is the same president who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn’t ‘spike the ball’ after the touchdown. And now Barack Obama is… doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get re-elected.”

Even the Post Twins: Washington & Huffington find the ad distasteful, with Dana Milbank describing it and the campaign so far as, “sleazy.”

Even judging the ad strictly on content and message finds it deeply flawed.

Start with Bill Clinton as narrator. When the late, credibility–challenged Richard Nixon was running for office, Democrats used to ask, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” But when it comes to Bill Clinton, I wouldn’t buy a used car or date a used girlfriend.

Clinton is single handedly responsible for two of the biggest pre–9/11 failures. First he botched a chance to capture Osama bin Laden before 9/11. Second was his appointment of Jamie Gorelick to the Justice Department where her trademark “wall of separation” prevented the FBI and the CIA from connecting the dots and possibly preventing 9/11 in the first place.

The only raid I can recall Bill Clinton and his administration mounting was on a ramshackle compound in Waco, TX. But wait, that must be it! Religious fanatics holed up in a poorly–constructed dump located in the hinterland of some God–forsaken wilderness without a Starbucks. The symmetry is perfect! Call Clinton’s people and see if he’s available.

What’s next, an ad on the fight against sex trafficking by the Cartagena 12?

The ad’s message problem is the complete lack of a sense of proportion. Let’s begin by addressing the operations side. SEAL Team 6’s performance was characterized by skill, daring and professionalism. These anonymous warriors penetrated deep into hostile territory and successfully eliminated America’s Public Enemy #1, without the loss of a single man. Each risked his life in the service of his country and their families faced the potential loss of a husband, father and/or son. So for them individually the scale of the operation involved their entire world.

But for the nation as a whole the scale is much different, in spite of the risible efforts of the parade of pantywaists in the White House who are attempting to conflate a small–scale incursion into “the most audacious plan” in 500 years.

Getting Osama was simply a raid: A short–term intrusion into enemy territory to eliminate a high value target. It was not D–Day. It was not dropping the atomic bomb. It was not the Inchon landing. It’s not even Lincoln facing the election of 1864 wondering if Gen. William T. Sherman would fail in his march on Atlanta and doom the war effort.

The big deal these acolytes — most of whom have never served a day in uniform — make about Obama ordering the mission is simply ludicrous. In the commercial a lonely Obama stares out an Oval Office window into a threatening, overcast sky with the weight of a nation on his noble shoulders as he ponders the decision.

Even a property–rights conservative must admit it’s always an ominous sign when a prospective neighbor decides to give his soon–to–be–constructed house a name. There’s nothing that screams “Arriviste!” like a billboard in the front yard trumpeting the fact that your new home is so large it merits a title and will be petitioning for a Zip Code.

So it came as something of a shock to unsuspecting neighbors in the Hidden Springs community of Great Falls when Mrs. Young Yi installed a sign announcing construction of “Le Chateau De Lumiere,” when their own homes had been anonymous lo these many years.

I must confess we’ve privately called our modest shelter the “Fisher–Price House” because the siding was once bright yellow with equally arresting blue shutters. But we didn’t hang banners off the eaves announcing the fact or stock the front yard with random infants.

I believe the title of Mrs. Yi’s abode means “mansion of light” much like a bullfighter’s garish getup is called the “suit of lights.” But what the name lacks in modesty is more than compensated for by its addition of “diversity” to the blandly wealthy neighborhood.

According to the Washington Post, the 25,425 sq. foot behemoth is modeled on Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles. This asteroid, is ten times larger than the average square footage of a house built these days for lesser mortals. And it’s almost twice the size of the Virginia governor’s mansion, which comes in at a paltry 14,000 sq. ft.

Mrs. Yi’s plans call for European landscaping and, much like an airport runway, the manse will also boast a lavish underground lighting system, hence the “Lumiere.” She will also enjoy a pool, pool house, wine cellar, exercise room, billiard room, sauna, card room, rec room, gallery and a theater with a “concession space,” which may be how she plans to offset the mortgage payment. No word as yet on valet parking.

There’s something about Versailles that’s a magnet for pretension. Back in 2000 Michael Saylor, who was briefly a dot.com billionaire, unsuccessfully planned to build a mega–edifice in Great Falls also modeled on Versailles. His was to have a football field, although if he was really serious about the Versailles connection it should have been a soccer pitch.

Continuing to mix architectural metaphors Saylor declared, “I want it to be like the White House.” Saylorville was projected to cost as much as $50 million and he described it as, “part house, part embassy, part ceremonial” and all hey–look–at–me!

It’s somewhat ironic the house causing restless nights for the neighbors is being built by the owner of 1st Class Sleep Diagnostics Center, a chain with six locations in Virginia that treats apnea, snoring, insomnia and obsessing about construction plans.

The NIMBYs, I mean neighbors, are using time–worn objections that have been employed to prevent construction of everything from bike paths to nuclear reactors: It’s an eyesore, it’s too big, trees will die, it interferes with my view, it will lower property values(!) and it makes my house look small.

It’s difficult to muster much sympathy for either side.

Virginia just avoided a state–sized version of the popular “government shutdown” crisis. Democrats had twice defeated the budget in Senate votes and it looked like the usual hostages — children, teachers, social workers, grief counselors, underwater mortgage holders, illegals, addicts, the lame, the halt and the blind — were going to be bussed in to Richmond and threatened with self–sufficiency until stingy Republicans came up with a few more billions.

Then it all went away, like an Obama campaign promise, when a single Democrat senator broke ranks and voted ‘yes.’ (So far there are no media reports that praise him for “growing in office.”)

The ostensible reason for the “shutdown” crisis was the potential demise of Phase II of the planned $6 billion railroad to Dulles Airport that would connect with the existing Washington Metro.

There’s something about spending billions on 19th Century transportation solutions that liberals find irresistible. Frankly, I’m fearful that one of our local politicians, famous for his support of a commuter ferry on the Potomac, will learn the steamboat has been invented.

Senate Democrats claimed Dulles rail was threatened by Republican’s refusal to pony up an additional $300 million to subsidize drivers on the Dulles Airport Toll Road, which voters were promised would cover 75 percent of the construction cost of the Silver Line.

This is classic Democrat economics: Use money raised by selling long–term bonds to subsidize a recurring expense. Talk about your fiscal treadmill. Without subsidizing tolls, railroaders fear the cost will be so high that drivers will use nearby free roads. Effectively converting the toll lanes into a long, narrow asphalt preserve for Northern Virginia’s growing deer population and Obama’s golfing motorcades.

In the absence of taxpayer–funded bond money, the cost of a roundtrip toll next year will range between $4.50 and $9.00. By 2018 it is projected to be $13.50. And just thinking about using the toll road will deduct $2.00 from your E–Zpass account.

Naturally this is what you get when a Democrat governor goes legacy shopping. Former Gov. Tim Kaine (D–Flomax) concluded that closing all the rest stops in Virginia might get him in the history books, but not in the way he preferred. Instead, like Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones, Kaine took a moribund plan for a railroad to Dulles and breathed life into it by turning the project over to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA); an inspired choice for a multi–year, multi–billion–dollar operation.

Board appointees made by liberals in D.C. and Maryland vastly outnumber Virginia appointees. Consequently the carpetbaggers are more than happy to spend Virginia dollars for which they will never be held accountable.

While Dulles rail is sold to taxpayers as a mass transit project, the airport board uses it to reward cronies and amass chits for the next election (see: Government Motors bailout). This was done by tying construction contractors and sub–contractors to what is called a “project labor agreement” (PLA).

This means that during Phase I of the project all contractors and subcontractors “voluntarily” agreed to pay union wages, hire union workers and follow union work rules, in spite of the fact Virginia is a right to work state where union membership cannot be required as a condition of employment.

The journalism establishment exemplified, by the MSM (mainstream media), does not believe in American exceptionalism. That’s reserved for the rubes in flyover country. Their admiration is reserved for themselves and the lofty position the “4th Estate” holds in contemporary society. What’s more, members do not respond positively when anyone questions this self–assessment.

An interesting tidbit buried deep in the Associated Press obituary for television journalist Mike Wallace proves this is not a recent phenomenon. Over 26 years ago Wallace and CBS were jointly sued for libel by retired Gen. William C. Westmorland after the broadcast of a documentary entitled “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.”

The program alleged that Westmoreland deceived President Lyndon Johnson and the American public by orchestrating a conspiracy that fraudulently underestimated the size of the North Vietnamese Army.

According to Wallace and CBS, Westmoreland arbitrarily established a maximum estimate of 300,000 NVA troops and during the infiltration prior to the Tet Offensive; he discounted the number of soldiers (estimated as high as 20,000 per month) who were coming south in preparation for the attack.

The goal was to convince the public that progress toward victory was being made and shore up support for continuation of the war.

It was a devastating portrayal of command deception at the expense of the lives of American soldiers in the field. Westmoreland sued in an effort to restore his reputation.

But that’s not the interesting part.

During his career on 60 Minutes Wallace popularized the “ambush interview” where unsuspecting targets were surprised by Wallace and his video crew. The confrontation would occur without warning. Wallace would pepper the totally unprepared victim with questions while the crew taped the interviewee’s obvious discomfort and shock.

What’s interesting is that during the libel trial Wallace found himself the target of questions and accusations regarding his work. Instead of “Mike Wallace crusading investigative journalist,” he was characterized as a liar and unscrupulous propagandist.

For the first time in his life, Wallace was subject to the same kind of unrelenting pressure, accusation and vilification to which he routinely subjected his interview subjects.

And when the kitchen got hot, Wallace couldn’t take the heat.

At the conclusion of the trial he was hospitalized for over a week with “depression.” Or in his words, bringing irony to an entirely new level, “Imagine sitting day after day in the courtroom, hearing yourself called every vile name imaginable.”

Yes, do tell.

For Wallace and the MSM, Westmoreland should not have been surprised when he was targeted. And the same went for businessmen, bankers, conservatives, Republicans and all the rest of the usually suspect bad guys. Benefit of the doubt did not exist for those outside of the media’s list of approved occupations, causes and thought processes.

When the camera’s red light came on you were guilty. But a reporter being criticized in the same way he filleted his victims was simply unheard of in 1985.

So Wallace was completely unprepared when the situation was reversed. I suppose in different circumstances Wallace could have asked Westmoreland what he did to recover his equilibrium after being called a liar on nationwide TV.

Today the MSM still believes it is an exception to the rules governing the rest of us. Recurring controversies surrounding civilian police review boards prove my point.

There’s been a great deal of upheaval involving teacher’s unions over the last year. There was and is great drama in Wisconsin where teacher’s and their Democrat lackeys in the legislature went hands on with Gov. Scott Walker to fight his efforts to reform public employee unions.

But here in Prince William County, VA, where I live, it’s been comedy.

It began in Richmond, where the teacher’s statewide union and Democrat lackeys in the legislature defeated Gov. Bob McDonnell’s effort to reform tenure rules. Encouraged by this victory, local teachers and the Prince William Education Assn. began a ‘work to rule’ campaign to put pressure on the school board to include a raise in next year’s budget. This meant they didn’t stay after school to help students with extra curricular activities unless they were paid extra.

Teachers conducted “grade–ins” at grocery stores and government meetings. They wore buttons to school and made a big solidarity production out of entering the school building together in the morning and leaving en masse in the afternoon.

After writing about the campaign, I discovered area teachers are avid readers, because many of them took time to send me irate email. To recap, in my view the PWC school board has gone out of its way to protect teachers from the economy pounding the taxpaying private sector.

While 300,000 teaching jobs have been lost nationwide, there have been no layoffs in Prince William County. In Loudoun teachers were threatened with unpaid furlough days, but not here in PWC. And although the county government employees took a 5 percent hit to their paycheck to cover costs passed down from the state, teachers didn’t lose a dime.

It was striking to me how many of the hostile teachers complained about dealing with children. It’s like a surgeon griping about cutting people open.

Kids are unruly, there are too many of them, they clutter up the hallways, they turn in papers that need to be graded. According to those emails, working conditions rivaled that of a Chinese iPad assembly line worker. With long hours, oppressive supervision and no noodles for lunch.

Many of the emails were also confused about the practice of journalism and the cushy life reporters lead. Although I currently enjoy a lofty perch in the journalistic pantheon, I started out in this business as a sports director for a TV station in West Texas. After a month the news director informed me I was now the Midland city reporter AND the sports director, effectively doubling my workload with the same pay.

This meant my day could either start at 10 AM or 2 PM but it always ended at 10:30 PM after the last newscast. What’s more, we worked Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s and the Fourth of July, if those dates came during the week. There were no four–day weekends or Easter Break in the news business. And we didn’t get the summer off.

But enough about me. Another correspondent complained that with a master’s degree and nine years experience she “scarcely make(s) over $50,000” a year. If she’s at step nine on the pay scale it means her salary is $58,312 annually.

Neighborhood Watch celebrity George Zimmerman graduated from a high school not too far from where I live in Virginia. I certainly hope he made it to the 10–year reunion of the Osbourn Park Class of 2001, because it doesn’t look like he’s going to be attending many in the future.

Not that Zimmerman is necessarily guilty of anything, but after one has been processed by the MSM’s reputation shredder, the thought of appearing in public and defending yourself for the umpteenth time is not appealing.

Particularly when the President joins the race–baiters and says, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Well, Mr. President, if your mother had married a Mexican instead of a Kenyan you would have looked like George. So what?

If only Zimmerman — a Spanish speaker registered as a Democrat — had been marching in a La Raza protest or a Mexicans Without Borders demonstration. Then national Democrats, including the President, would be happy to claim him as their own. But when George made the mistake of getting a concealed carry permit and dabbled on the fringes of law enforcement, Zimmerman became a “white Hispanic” member of the conspiracy designed to keep the black man down.

Why couldn’t Zimmerman have been like those progressive employees at the Apple store in Bethesda, MD. When they heard a woman screaming in the yoga store next door, they had the decency to mind their own dang business. You didn’t see them barging in on what might have been a private matter. They didn’t even tie up valuable public resources by calling 9–1–1.

Wait, maybe that’s a bad example. Jayna Murray died after being stabbed 330 times.

In Zimmerman’s case, there actually was crime in the area he volunteered to patrol. Police records show there were eight burglaries, nine thefts and one shooting in the prior year. Cynthia Wibker, secretary of the homeowner’s association, observed, “He once caught a thief and an arrest was made. (Zimmerman) helped solve a lot of crimes.”

A rule of thumb to remember in these “white Hispanic” vs. black controversies is the first lawyer to get in front of a TV camera is lying. Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson, the Martin legal brain trust, prove my point.

Begin with the photo of an angelic Trayvon wearing a red shirt. It’s a great picture, but he was 14 when it was taken. Trayvon was 17 when he was shot, almost 6’ 3” tall and weighed about 150 lbs. He also boasted tattoos, a gold mouth grill and went by the Twitter ID of “@NO_LIMIT_NIGGA.”

Martin was in the neighborhood visiting his father because he was serving his third suspension from high school. This time for possession of a marijuana pipe and an empty baggie with traces of drugs. In October, Martin had been found with 12 pieces of women’s jewelry and a “burglary tool,” but was suspended for a graffiti offense.

Once this information came to light, Martin’s mother complained, “They killed my son and now their trying to kill his reputation.” Which means it’s okay to demonize Zimmerman, but Trayvon should remain beyond reproach.

It’s been a busy week on the education front in Virginia. The General Assembly, concerned about academics and discipline, defeated the “Tebow” bill that would have allowed homeschoolers to try out for high school athletic teams.

And Assembly also defeated a tenure reform bill that would have made it easier to fire incompetent teachers mostly because of the fear that educators might be dismissed for personality conflicts with their boss. An outrageous state of affairs as former Washington Redskins defensive lineman Albert Haynesworth can personally attest.

So it was more than a little ironic when the day before local teachers were scheduled to hold a Saturday ‘grade–in’ at Wegmans grocery store to protest a budget that lacks a raise for next year; one of those homeschooled, academically–challenged, discipline problems the General Assembly is so worried about won the county spelling bee.

Lori Anne Madison took the crown at the 34th annual bee by spelling “vaquero,” which is quite an accomplishment for a 6–year–old since the word is not even English.

(It also makes me wonder if spelling bees held in Mexico City ever ask anyone to spell “cowboy?”)

Meanwhile, back at Wegmans, public school teachers were grading papers and preparing lesson plans among the arugula to demonstrate to a cheap, penny–pinching public all the work they do outside the classroom.

As Jim Livingston, a board member of the Prince William Education Assn. said, “The grade–in is designed so that the public can see that there is a lot more in the daily life of a professional educator than just 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., or 7 to 2.”

Livingston had also better hope the public doesn’t do the math, because both of those number sets only add up to a seven–hour work day (including lunch), which is at least an hour shorter than the work day of most taxpayers.

In addition to grading papers by the light reflected off the sneeze guards, county teachers are also “working to rule,” which means they will no longer come in early to help students or stay after school for extracurricular activities unless they are paid for the extra time.

This labor action only serves to prove teacher’s memories are as short as that of their students.

Let’s step outside the ivory tower of academia and examine what’s been going on in what I call Taxpayer World. Nationally unemployment for taxpayers is between 8 and 9 percent, unless you count those who have given up looking for work entirely, which puts the figure in double digits.

During the past four years approximately 300,000 public school employees lost their jobs outside of Prince William County where I live and, according to school board Chairman Milton C. Johns, those jobs are not coming back.

Yet here not one school employee lost their job or was forced to take an unpaid furlough. What’s more, last year when county government employees took a 5 percent hit in their paycheck to cover costs passed down to the local level from the state, teachers did not lose a penny and were even given a small bonus that did not affect their base pay. But somehow being sheltered from a recession that’s hammering taxpayers — no layoffs, no furloughs, no pay cuts and a one–time bonus — equals unhappiness.

There is an underground society in today’s America. These invisible people pay taxes just like the rest of us, but are ostracized because of their background. The promise of America is denied them. Instead they lead a clannish, insular existence, suspicious of the authorities and on the fringes of mainstream life.

Often driving by some remote area, you may catch a glimpse of them playing soccer on dusty, over–used public fields, far away from well–groomed high school athletic facilities.

But in spite of being marginalized by a judgmental, intolerant society, they never lost hope. They believed in working through the system for justice. And finally, there came a chance to emerge from the shadows — a golden opportunity to finally join the rest of America and enjoy the rights of a full–fledged citizen.

But an 8–7 block vote by Democrats in a Virginia Senate committee defeated the “Tebow” bill and again denied homeschooled children the chance to try out for high school football and other athletic teams.

Sen. Harry B. Blevins (R–Virginia Education Association), a former cog in the education–industrial complex, was personally responsible for the tie–breaking vote that meant homeschooled children would be forced to play ballerina ball for yet another season.

Teacher’s association and Virginia sports league officials voiced two primary reasons for opposing the bill and, in keeping with typical Democrat discourse, both reasons were false. But these people will do or say anything to retain the government monopoly on indoctrinating children.

The first was public school students are subject to more stringent academic requirements than the homeschoolers. I know “football,” “stringent” and “academic” are not three words you normally encounter in the same sentence, but be that as it may, the facts are otherwise.

Homeschooled children are tested by the state every year and must meet set achievement levels. In fact, Progress Report 2009 — a study that surveyed 11,739 homeschooled students tested by 15 independent testing services — found that homeschooled students on the average scored 37 percentile points above public school students on standardized achievement tests.

Once they get to college homeschooled students have a better freshman GPA (3.41) than other freshmen (3.12) and graduate at higher rates.

The second objection was homeschooled students might represent potential discipline problems. This, too, is rich. Granted it was a long time ago, but every team I ever played on had a coach and if the coach didn’t like your attitude you were not a member of the team for long.

Democrats who voted against the bill no doubt wondered why Virginia homeschooled children can’t act like those quaint Amish folks: stay out of the limelight, avoid fossil fuels and make sustainable furniture.

The only bright spot in the entire debate was, for possibly the first time in history, a leader of the Democrat party went on record stating the choices people make have consequences with which they must be prepared to live. Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw declared, “Every single parent who chooses to home-school their kid knows what the ground rules are. Parents know that choice, and they know what the ramifications are.”

This will be a real news bulletin to liberal protected groups like Occupy, unwed mothers, illegal aliens, foreclosed homeowners, drug addicts and the homeless.

Virginia Senate Democrats are still complaining about their loss of power after last year’s election resulted in a 20 to 20 tie. This gave control to Republicans since Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling casts the tie–breaking vote.

Even in their reduced circumstances, Democrats can take solace in the fact a vote of the people forced them to relinquish power. Compare that with Virginia’s Republican leadership that has given veto power over controversial legislation to an unelected comedian.

Jon Stewart has never been on a Virginia ballot, yet the host of ‘The Daily Show’ had the power to kill the initial ultrasound bill deader than a “clump of cells” at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

The nefarious ultrasound bill was designed to put a human face, so to speak, on the receiving party of an abortion. The law Stewart vetoed would have required doctors to inform women they had the right to view an ultrasound image of the unborn child prior to terminating its life. This seems only fair. Frequently in capital murder cases the defendant is allowed to make a final plea before judgment is passed. Why not allow an unborn child to make a silent plea for its life before the abortion is carried out?

It was assumed the ultrasound would be the “jelly on the belly” procedure where the nurse spreads a lubricant on the woman’s abdomen and rubs an ultrasound wand over the surface.

If the bill had passed, Virginia would have joined seven other states that avoided attracting the attention of comedians and passed bills requiring an ultrasound before an abortion.

GOP leadership started running for cover when they learned that during the first four to eight weeks of pregnancy jelly–on–belly often doesn’t produce a useable image. Instead what doctor’s refer to as a “transvaginal ultrasound” and Democrats tastefully describe as “state sponsored rape” is required. Without getting into the roto–rooter details, the transvaginal spends a lot more time inside a woman’s plumbing than Republican leaders are comfortable with.

Naturally pro–death Democrats and their media enablers accused Republicans of violating the doctor–patient relationship and the woman’s body. But the fact is 98 percent of early abortions already involve a transvaginal ultrasound ordered by the doctor. Republicans aren’t demanding a second probe, their bill simply gave the woman the right view the image that the abortionist produced to cover himself for malpractice purposes.

For Democrats it’s all a matter of context. Ultrasounds for more efficient abortions are science. But if you want the ultrasound to help preserve the baby, keep your rosaries off my ovaries!

But Democrats in a sexual frenzy are not typically subject to coherent thought. Yesterday, when an amended bill passed that removed any chance the GOP could be blamed for transvaginal ultrasounds that were already taking place, Sen. Louise Lucas (D–Pelvis) thundered, “Women who want to have abortions will go to back alleys. Women will die. They are not going to let you tell them what to do with their bodies!”

That makes perfect sense. Rather than look at an ultrasound that Planned Parenthood is already performing, women are going to opt instead for that nice man with the coat hanger waiting behind the tattoo parlor.

Aren’t Democrats supposed to be the party that encourages civility?