Right now, in the form of a BBC commenter:

Television pundit Virginia Ironside prompted outrage yesterday after saying she would suffocate a child to end its suffering.

Shocked BBC viewers complained after the agony aunt said she would hold a pillow over the face of a child in pain.

Minutes earlier the controversial writer said ‘a loving mother’ would abort an unwanted or disabled baby, and praised abortion as ‘a moral and unselfish act’…

Hatred of children is a prime mark of the diabolical – Chesterton pointed this out long ago in his “The Everlasting Man”; asking us to understand that the ancient frenzy against witches was impelled by a belief they were preventing the birth of children. Ms. Ironside is doing no more (and no less) than advocating the sacrifice of children on the altar of our new Moloch – the false god, “Choice”. She is our modern witch, telling us that children are a curse and life is an unbearable weight.

Despair as a worldview is a terrible thing, and we can see that it leads to a woman seriously saying that it is an act of love to kill a child. Orwell in his worst nightmares never thought of this – Peace may be War, but even in his terrible vision, Murder was never Love.

Our world is an ailing place – sick at heart and unwilling to live. Christ came that we might have life and have it more abundantly, the modern secular materialist demands that we have no life, unless it is deemed worthwhile by detached, rich false intellectuals.

It will be a long road back to morality and rationality – but as people like Ms. Ironsides plumb the depths of depravity, the path out of the nightmare becomes ever more clear, and I do believe we will take it…and one day people like this will be as forgotten as the ancient priests of Baal or the Aztec murderers are today.

This has got to be disturbing news for our Democrats – from the LA Times:

A new Gallup Poll this morning finds his approval rating for September was 45%, almost the same as August’s 44%. Obama’s not exceeded the crucial 50% level in a single month so far this year…

…Democrats (79%) and liberals (75%) still like Obama a lot.

But after that, his approval percentage goes to the deep south. Support among even young people is down: 57%. Hispanics: 55%. Moderates: 54%. Unmarrieds: 53%. Easterners: 52%. Women: 47%. Midwesterners and Westerners: 45%.

Men: 43%. Southerners: 41%. Independents: 40%. Marrieds: 39%. Seniors: 38%. Whites: 36%. Conservatives: 23%.

Amazingly, among Republicans Obama still manages to hold the support of 12%…

Which indicates to me that its an over-weighted for Democrats poll. Can’t see more than 1 or 2% of GOPers accidentally – while drunk, or something – being in favor of Obama.

Bottom line, though, is that this is a disastrous poll for Obama and his Democrats – the only demographic group which is still absolutely behind Obama is black Americans, and even their support has slipped a little bit. As the linked article notes, a President with this sort of approval rating before the mid-terms tends to suffer some pretty significant losses.

Whether this will work out to a big GOP majority in the House remains to be seen – clearly, the GOP will do well, but politics is a strange thing. Better, of course, to be the party running ahead before the election – and the GOP clearly is that.

So much for manufacturing leading us out of the recession – from the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. factory orders dropped more than expected in August, marking the third decline in the last four months…

…U.S. manufactured goods orders decreased by 0.5% to $408.94 billion, the Commerce Department said Monday.

So, when does the stimulus kick in? The Recovery Summer doesn’t seem to have worked out – will it be the Recovery Next Spring Or So? How about the truth: we won’t recover until we start creating wealth, and we can’t create wealth with an albatross of debt, funny money and high taxes ’round our necks?

Expressed by Shannon Love at Chicago Boys:

Glenn Reynolds doesn’t come out and say it, but in his “The Tea Party Dominance Was Inevitable” editorial he skirts the idea, so I will just say it: The American left needs its own Tea Party movement. Ordinary Americans with leftist values need to launch an insurgency against the Democratic establishment just as the Tea Party has launched one against the Republican establishment.

The Founders well knew that the primary political dynamic in any free society was never faction against faction but the people versus the state. We have forgotten this essential insight at the heart of American governance. Distracted by the struggle of left versus right, we have let a political class form that serves no faction but itself. It is The Combine…

Which is all very true. Of course, I doubt that the full blown, leftist program would sell well even if presented by people on the left who were actually fighting against the Ruling Class – but the basic idea here is correct: Americans mistrust government, and are especially dismayed with the government we currently have. Anyone who in any way, shape or form is identified with the current Powers That Be is doomed.

On the other hand, a rational left would both be valuable as well as having a chance at winning from time to time. To become rational, the left will have to purge itself of the pro-abortion fanatics and roundly turn on everyone who seeks to use the courts to impose new laws. But much hay could be made by such a purged left in a campaign to continue to spend large amounts on social programs – though it would also be wise for any such leftist desire to insist that local people should actually control where the money for such spending goes.

It is quite a circle to square for the left – but a liberal TEA Party would be healthy for American politics and I hope it happens.

…if she just keeps this theme going:

Debra Saunders notes an amazingly absurd case out of California:

On Oct. 28, 1980, Albert Greenwood Brown snatched Susan Jordan, 15, raped and strangled her to death with her own shoelace. Brown, who was on parole after raping a 14-year-old girl, then spent the night tormenting the dead girl’s parents over the phone, telling them that they would never see their daughter again and where to find the girl’s half-nude corpse and belongings. A jury sentenced him to death for that crime.

Last Wednesday, almost 30 years later, Brown was scheduled to be executed.

Of course, it didn’t happen. Various judges intervened, the state’s meager supply of lethal-injection drugs was about to expire — and so California’s death penalty is on hold until 2011…

On and on it goes – as the article goes on to say, anti-death penalty zealots use taxpayer money to continually thwart the will of the people of California and, indeed, the cause of justice. Endlessly delayed sentence is, after all, an injustice. There has to come to an end to all things – including appeals of the death penalty.

As long-time readers know, I am opposed to the death penalty. But I am also opposed to making a mockery out of our justice system. A man who was convicted of a crime 30 years ago is a man who should be beyond recall of the courts. Dead or imprisoned for life, we should not be hearing from him any longer…his sentence should be decided and acted upon. Keeping things astir this long after the deed and the conviction is horrific – to the family of the victim and, indeed, to the criminal who still hopes, by hook or crook, to dodge the full measure of punishment for his crime, thus preventing any real possibility of his repentance.

There is a great deal of absurdity in all of this. One thing I noted when watching a documentary about the death penalty is how they have a pillow on the death bed. What the heck for? To make the condemned comfortable? At the crux of this latest appeal is the assertion that the condemned might feel pain. Of course he’s going to feel pain – he’s going to die. But this is entertained as a serious reason to not kill him. We don’t execute to inflict pain – but pain is part of what is happening when we decide that someone has so far removed themselves from decency that death is the only answer.

In my view, if we’re going to have executions, they should be public and should be by hanging…and without a long drop (“by the neck until dead” would take on a bit of reality largely lacking in our current justice system). But we’re too cowardly – too cowardly to come up with alternatives to the death penalty (and I have those – and the prisoners would, at least initially, wish they were dead if placed under the regime I have in mind); too cowardly to kill in a swift and sure manner, either. Too cowardly to tell the judiciary to knock it off with their games; too cowardly to pull the financial plug on the tax-payer funded criminal appeals system. All we get for this is horrific criminals laughing at us…they are still alive, decades after their victims are buried while we go round and round with them, to no purpose.

In matters of criminal justice, there are only two things we need: to find out what happened, and to assign appropriate punishment to those who did wrong. This is not that difficult a thing to do, but we’ve managed to take a simple operation and make it in to a mad house. It speaks volumes about modern America that we can send a drone to Pakistan to kill a Taliban, but can’t execute a rapist-murderer in less than 30 years, nor devise a prison regime which would be a sterner punishment than even death. All the human power in the world is in our hands, and we can’t even ensure that basic justice is done here at home.

In case you wonder why I call myself a revolutionary, here is a good part of your answer.

From Bloomberg:

The jobless rate probably rose in September for a second month as the year-old U.S. recovery failed to generate enough jobs to keep up with a growing labor force, economists said before a report this week.

Unemployment climbed to 9.7 percent from 9.6 percent in August, according to the median estimate of 62 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News ahead of an Oct. 8 report from the Labor Department…

There is the possibility that this bit of negativity is being put out in order to downplay expectations, and thus if the numbers come out a little better (say, 9.5% unemployment), the MSM and the Democrats can go on about how we’ve “turned the corner”. But I tend to think that what we’re really seeing here is people starting to admit that we’re heading back in to recession (with the understanding that statistics aside, I don’t think we ever really left it).

Bottom line, Obama’s economic policies have failed. He asserted, quite stoutly, that without his program, we’d have unemployment above 8%. Clearly, things have not worked out as well as he hoped – and after-the-fact “they could have been worse” claims ring hollow.

Back to a free market is where we must go – it is the only way to create the wealth which will allow us to dig out of this mess.

From The Hill:

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) argued in an op-ed that the Tea Party is divisive, driven by anger and doesn’t like America “the way we are.”

Writing in Monday’s USA Today, Brown said that liberals should be proud to run on healthcare and Wall Street reform and discuss the accomplishments “in specific, understandable terms.”

“The John Birch Society of 1965 has bequeathed its fervor and extremism to the Tea Party of 2010,” Brown wrote. “History tells us that rage on the right should not be confused with populism.”…

Oh, please – pretty please! – run on ObamaCare. Throw in cap and trade, too. For good measure, also run against extending the Bush tax cuts. And be sure to keep hurling insults at the TEA Party movement…be sure to call our grandmothers’ a bunch of racist hate-mongers…can you do that in national television advertising?

If you decide to do that, is there any place we can donate to help pay for it?

Once again, a group of liberals gets together in DC and the result is a huge, disgusting mess all over the place. Big Journalism has all the pictures.

Now, given that there were vastly fewer people at this rally than at Beck’s (at most, the liberals got about 85,000 there…and it was probably much less than that) and given that the conservatives left the place spotless, do any of you liberals out there want to explain why you’re such disgusting slobs?

Have you no respect for the United States of America? Does our hallowed ground mean nothing to you? Is our great nation just a refuse tip for you to dump all over?

Please explain this to us, we’d really like to know.

Some people seem determined to be jerks:

A Florida man has asked a city council to end a Pee Wee football game’s pregame prayer tradition, claiming that the four-year-old custom violates his and his son’s First Amendment rights because the games are played on public land…

This is not what America is all about – this is not what the Establishment clause is for. You don’t have a right to have the public square scrubbed clean of all religious references.

But that is what some want. Some people, besotted by Pride, are determined that no references be made in public to anything larger than themselves. Dreadfully afraid of the future, they want to plug their ears against the truth – and grow angry at any event which might in some way, shape or form remind them of their depravity.

We need a religious liberty restoration act – something which will instruct the courts that as long as government isn’t enforcing religious belief, its ok…even if it happens on the court house steps.