Seeking cooperation in a polarized climate, President Barack Obama called on Congress Tuesday to act quickly on bipartisan measures that would extend tax breaks for small businesses and help startup companies raise money. He said he would sign the legislation “right away.”

Obama plans to include a series of business measures that have been percolating in Congress in his 2013 budget proposal later this month to flesh out a year-old initiative to give entrepreneurs incentives to expand their businesses or start new ones.

Obama made his remarks during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. He noted that for the first time, the head of the Small Business Administration, Karen Mills, was participating as a full member of the Cabinet.

“It is a symbol of how important it is for us to spur entrepreneurship, to help startups, to move aggressively so that we can assure more companies that create the most jobs in our economy are getting a leg up from various programs that we have in our government,” Obama said.

The White House legislative agenda for small businesses includes permanently eliminating tax rates on capital gains for investments in small businesses and a one-year extension on the ability of all businesses to immediately deduct all of the costs of equipment and software purchases.

The Obama administration also is seeking a new 10 percent tax credit for small businesses that add jobs or increase wages in 2012. In addition, the legislation would make it easier for new startup companies to raise money and to go public. It also would expand a government small business investment program from $3 billion to $4 billion.

“The president has made small businesses and particularly startups a key aspect of his economic growth agenda because he understands how much the newest and fastest-growing small businesses drive job growth in our economy,” said Gene Sperling, director of the White House National Economic Council.

Obama said the Department of Homeland Security also is seeking ways to change the visa process to attract foreign-born entrepreneurs and high-skilled immigrants to invest in the United States or start new businesses.

The measures are modest by comparison to Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus or to last year’s jobs bill. But they borrow from past Obama initiatives and from bipartisan legislation that has either already passed in the House or is being proposed in the Senate.

Obama’s package includes proposals offered in the Senate by Democrat Chris Coons of Delaware and Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, and another plan by Republican Jerry Moran of Kansas and Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia.

White House officials would not disclose the total cost of the president’s package, but Sperling said it would be more than covered by proposals to reduce tax expenditures and by closed loopholes the administration will call for in its 2013 budget.

With the presidential election set to become the main political preoccupation of 2012, the White House initiative is designed to take advantage of cooperative attempts by Republicans and Democrats to find modest remedies to spur the economy. Most of those efforts have been overshadowed by congressional bickering, the Republican presidential primary and Obama’s growing attention to his re-election.

The proposals come a year after the administration launched a consolidated effort to spur new startup businesses with a high-profile White House event featuring scores of entrepreneurs, some of whom offered testimonials to the job creation possibilities that new businesses can bring to the economy.

Besides the tax breaks, a central element of the Obama package is to assist new entrepreneurs by making it easier for them to raise money, reducing taxes on their startup expenses and removing securities barriers for new companies that have gone public.

“Our small business agenda has a specific focus on removing the barriers that have for too long blocked startups and entrepreneurs from getting the financing they need to accelerate their growth and hiring,” Sperling said.

One of the Obama provisions would increase the amount of money that can be raised through small public offerings that don’t require companies to undergo an extensive Securities and Exchange Commission registration process. The limit for such “mini public offerings” would increase from $5 million a year to $50 million. The House passed similar legislation last year.

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Remember Obama’s two-year salary freeze he imposed on federal workers?  Well, as part of his FY 2013 budget, Obama plans to end the pay freeze and offer salary increases to federal workers.  It is in this context that CBO published a report showing that federal workers still earn more than their counterparts in the private sector.

While it is clear that many federal workers (but not all) work hard for their money, it is also clear that they should not be earning more than those who pay their salaries.  It is simply unsustainable for government workers to be earning more than their counterparts in the private sector.

Yesterday, CBO published a report showing that on average, government workers are paid more than those in the private sector with similar jobs and qualifications.  Here are the pertinent findings of the report:

• Overall, federal civilian employees receive total compensation 16% higher than their private-sector counterparts;
• Federal civilian employees receive 2% more in cash wages than private-sector employees;
• The most significant advantage comes in the form of benefits, where federal civilian employees enjoy a 48% advantage over their private-sector counterparts.  Also, workers with no more than a high school education enjoyed the largest advantage over their private-sector counterparts.  The only workers who fare better in the private sector are those with post-graduate degrees.  Obviously, even with the generous benefits package for government workers, there is a limit to how much one can make.  That inherent limit affects the most educated workers.

This is something lost on those who opposed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s public sector compensation reforms.  Walker’s major reforms included requiring teachers to contribute 5.8% into their pensions (instead of 0%) and all public employees to pay 12.6% of their health-care premiums.  The average private-sector worker with similar education, qualifications, experience, and salary, would walk over glass for those benefits.  Yet, the union goons blew up Madison for a month because their benefit package wasn’t 100% free.

The same thing holds true on a federal level.  Average benefits were 72% higher for federal employees with no more than a high school education than for their private-sector counterparts.  We are slated to spend over $1 trillion just on civilian federal workers’ pensions over the next 10 years.  It is these unlimited benefits for federal workers that are more costly and unpredictable than higher wages.  CBO notes that they are hard to quantify and predict in the long run.

How in the world can the taxpayers, many of whom receive no pension, support such a scheme?  The federal workforce needs to transition from a defined-benefit retirement system to a defined-contribution system.  The private-sector might serve as a good example for such reforms.

n November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.

Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.

The 1932 Democratic platform, largely written by the party’s 1924 nominee, John W. Davis, was a clear statement of conservative, Jeffersonian principles, but FDR abandoned this platform during his first hundred days in office. So radical were the changes that by 1935, conservatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed with Davis when he wrote, “If the structure of this Government is to be preserved, the courts must do it.”

As conservatives looked in desperation to the judiciary for relief, Davis was their logical leader. A highly esteemed former solicitor general under President Wilson, former ambassador to Great Britain, former president of the American Bar Association, and senior partner at one of New York’s premier law firms, Davis commanded respect from all quarters of the political and legal spectrum. As a founder of the bipartisan, anti–New Deal Liberty League in 1934, Davis repeatedly wrote to his supporters, “I believe in the Constitution of the United States; I believe in the division of powers that it makes. I believe in the right of private property, the sanctity and binding power of contracts; the duty of self-help. I am opposed to confiscatory taxation, wasteful expenditure, socialized industry, and a planned economy controlled and directed by government functionaries. I believe these things to be inimical to human liberty and destructive of American ideals.”

Sensing the gravity of the crisis, Davis seized every opportunity and expertly wielded every legal weapon at his disposal to thwart the New Deal. Publicly labeling the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) “a bribe to farmers,” he signed the amicus curiaebrief and successfully led the fight that ultimately resulted in the court’s 6–3 ruling that the AAA was unconstitutional. He successfully opposed the Public Utility Holding Act in the lower courts and led the fight against it within the American Bar Association. Davis personally argued the unconstitutionality of the Frazier-Lemke Bankruptcy Act and the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act before the Supreme Court.

When Roosevelt responded to these courtroom defeats by setting forth his infamous court-packing scheme in 1937, it was Davis who advised the New Deal’s congressional opponents in defeating the measure. By the late 1930s, he had earned the New Dealers’ enduring enmity, and he wore with pride their sobriquet, “Public Enemy Number One.”

During the course of these battles, Davis repeatedly warned that “paternalism fastens its grasp upon the country, and, little by little, the practice of local self-government fades away. Baptize a scheme, even the most fantastic, with a high-sounding and attractive title, and it will elicit the public support.” Of the failure to limit government, he admonished, “Nothing but mischief, to my way of thinking, can come from any government attempting tasks which lie beyond its power to accomplish.” Ever clear about the indivisibility of property rights from human rights, Davis contended, “The two are not antagonistic. History furnishes no instance where the right of man to acquire and hold property has been taken away without the complete destruction of liberty in all its forms.”

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At the end of Sunday mass at the church this writer attends in Washington, D.C., the pastor asked the congregation to remain for a few minutes.

Then, on the instructions of Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the pastor proceeded to read a letter.

In the letter, the Church denounced the Obama administration for ordering all Catholic schools, hospitals and social services to provide, in their health insurance coverage for employees, free contraceptives, free sterilizations and free “morning-after” pills.

Parishioners were urged to contact their representatives in Congress to bring about a reversal of President Obama’s new policy.

Now, not only is this a battle the Church must fight, it is a battle the Church can win if it has the moral stamina to stay the course.

In forcing the Church to violate its own principles, Obama has committed an act of federal aggression, crossing the line between church and state to appease his ACLU and feminist allies, while humiliating the Catholic bishops.

Should the Church submit, its moral authority in America would disappear.

Now, undeniably, the church milquetoast of past decades that refused to discipline pro-abortion Catholics allowed the impression to form that while the hierarchy may protest, eventually it will go along to get along with a Democratic Party that was once home to most Catholics.

Obama’s problem today is that not only is he forcing the Church to violate her conscience; he dissed the highest prelate in America.

In November, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, held what he describes as an “extraordinarily friendly” meeting with Obama at the White House.

The president assured the archbishop of his respect for the Church, and the archbishop came away persuaded Obama would never force the Church to adopt any policy that would violate her principles.

Ten days ago, Obama sandbagged the archbishop.

He informed Cardinal-designate Dolan by phone that, with the sole concession of the Church being given an extra year, to August 2013, to comply, the new policy, as set down by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, will be imposed. All social and educational institutions of the Catholic church will offer health insurance covering birth control, or face fines.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Archbishop Dolan, who went on:

“To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable. … This represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

Where do Obama and Sebelius get the power to do this?

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, the colloquial name for which is “Obamacare.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America is celebrating the new policy. Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, calls it a “health-care issue … based on what’s best for women’s health.” Others have argued that many Catholic women practice birth control.

But that Catholics choose to ignore doctrine does not justify the U.S. government imposing on Catholic institutions a policy that violates Catholic teaching.

Even Washington Post liberal E.J. Dionne, in a Jan. 30 column titled “Obama’s Breach of Faith,” charges that the president “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus. …

“Speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government … the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings.”

Why did Obama do it?

Facing a close race for a second term, Obama chose not to antagonize his left. Yet he must have known that siding with them meant leaving Archbishop Dolan with egg all over his face. Obama, calculatedly, came down on the side of those he believes to be more crucial to his re-election.

This affront should tell the Catholic hierarchy, if they did not already know, where they stand in the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebilius. And where they sit – in the back of the bus.

Yet if the bishops will look upon this crisis of conscience, this insult, as an opportunity, they can effect its reversal and recapture a measure of the moral authority they have lately lost.

Not only should the bishops file suit in federal court against the president and Sebelius for violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, they should inform the White House that no bishop will give an invocation at the Democratic Convention.

Then, they should inform the White House that in the last two weeks of the 2012 campaign, priests in every parish will read from the pulpit at Sunday mass a letter denouncing Obama as anti-Catholic for denying the Church its right to live according to its beliefs.

If Obama loses the Catholic vote, he loses the election.

The White House will come around, fast. Rely upon it.

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As the implementation of Obamacare rolls into high gear, we’ve been given insight into how it will be implemented in general. On January 20, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would not exempt health plans provided by non-profit religious employers from the requirement to provide “contraceptive services.”

… Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA -approved forms of contraception. Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services.

The cateory of “all FDA-approved forms of contraception” includes the abortifacients like the “morning after pill.” At the same time I couldn’t help but note that the group of health plans provided by “non-profit religious employers” who do not support contraception winnows the field down rather quickly to those provided by either the Catholic Church or one of its social service or medical subsidiaries.

The best is yet to come.

By way of full disclosure, I’m Roman Catholic. I’m a convert who became Catholic with eyes wide open rather than a “cradle Catholic” who was born into the religion. As such I’ve never ceased to be amazed at the antics of many of our Church leadership. I write it off to equal parts cognitive dissonance and a pathological desire to be popular.

The Democrat party has been anti-Catholic in its political positions since George McGovern ran for president yet the priesthood and heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in America tend to hail from Democrat constituencies. So on the one hand the Magesterium is teaching very traditional social values while on the other it is embracing without even a hint of credulity every lefty scheme that comes down the pike.

For instance, in 1983, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops declared nuclear weapons to be immoral and weren’t terribly fond of deterrence either. By 1988 they had decided SDI was destabliizing as was the US linking a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan to future arms treaties. When communist terrorists were trying to create a people’s paradise in El Salvador, many of our bishops ignored what was happening to personal libery under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as they stumbled over themselves to create the “sanctuary movment”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_movement

Without putting too fine a point on it but there was no daylight between the position of the Magesterium and that of the Kremlin on these issues.

Not that they are all commies or anything. But there were MOVEMENTS out there that had freakin Pete Seeger singing protest songs and James Earl Jones and Ed Asner at their rallies. How could you not be in favor of these things?

Similar stampedes took place on global warming and immigration.

This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. When given the choice between seeming to endorse a religious conservative for office and seeming to endorse a heterodox leftist there is no limit to the contortions a large share of our bishops won’t put themselves through to help the lefty. To wit: by the black letter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church supporting abortion is forbidden. If a public figure does so this failure is compounded by “scandal”, that is, an action that could cause others to question their faith. The fact that there are very few bishops in the nation who have taken steps to discipline pro-abort advocates and politicians especially when they proclaim themselves to be devout.

The second strain is the want to be liked. For most of American history, Catholics were THE OTHER. It was a foreign religion practiced by all manner of foreigners who either couldn’t speak English (Italians, Poles, etc.) or who could barely speak it (the Irish, it goes without saying). What other religion still has amendments to state constitutions directly aimed at its religious schools?

Just when things were going well with JFK (another devout Catholic) in the White House, he gets killed and the whole counter culture begins. If there was anything less cool in the 1960s than being in ROTC it was being a Catholic who believed in monogamy and abstinence until marriage not to mention avowing any religion that did not use mind altering drugs. Being cool is still important and despite his views on abortion Obama, that epitome of coolness, was invited to give a commencement address at a Catholic university.

This mindset was most egregiously on display during the 2008 election. The Catholic heirarchy — and I have to digress here for a moment to emphasize that we have many traditional bishops in this country who have fought the good fight for decades — wanted to catch the Hope-and-Change wave and had a problem: Barrack Obama loves him some abortion. Not just plain vanilla abortion. He is in favor of partial birth aboriton. He is in favor of killing a kid who happens to survive the abortion procedure.

Demonstrating again a contortionist skill that would gain them employment at any county fair in the country the bishops issued a document called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.”

As first blush it looks like a strong statement in favor of life which would not have helped Obama, or any other elected Democrat for that matter, until one reads deeper.

34. Catholics often face dificult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

In other words if you feel like the opposition to the war in Iraq or midnight basketball or furthering the ends of labor unions or any other pet peeve are “morally grave reasons” you can vote for the pro-abort. And they got what they wanted: American Catholics gave a majority of their votes to Obama.

Then came Obamacare which gave the bishops a real taste of what happens when you create a moral equivalence between universal health care and abortion. You get them both.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was heartbroken and gobsmacked, or gobsmacked and heartbroken, when they got the bad news about the elimination of an exemption for religious conscience in health plans.

President Obama telephoned Archbishop Dolan on Friday morning to tell him of the decision, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The pair had discussed the issue during a November meeting, during which the archbishop “got the message that they could work together,” said the spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh.

The issue was likely to form the “backdrop to future relations,” she said. “It’s too big to ignore… the elephant is tramping around in the sanctuary.”

An administration official on Tuesday confirmed the call was made on Friday and reiterated comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the administration is committed to its partnerships with faith-based groups.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), a Catholic who supports abortion rights and access to contraception, said she thought the White House had handled the decision “very well” by being open to listening to religious leaders. “Contraception is about preventing unintended pregnancy,” she said. “I think that they did what they needed to do.”

So up until November Archbishop Dolan was being led to believe that he and the Obama Administration could work together and there would be a conscience exemption in the health care reform regulations and then he gets a call telling him that he’s been played for a chump.

It is really difficult to understate the cultural significance of this decision. If Congress doesn’t intervene and we end up with a pro-abort in the White House, which seems virtually certain regardless of how Obama fares in November, it is hard to see how this precedent will not be applied first to euthanasia, which seems to be the next big thing, and then to abortion. If left as it is, it really marks the end of independent churches in the United States.

The decision even managed to concern the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, another of the “smells and bells” Catholics on the left, or Catholycs as my friend Tom Crowe terms them, whose collective ass gets tired when confronted with the whole issue of morality.

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.

His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

Reading all of this I was reminded of one of my favorite jokes, involving a guy in a bar and leprechaun. I won’t retell it here because this is a family website but I will link to one of the many variations here.

And I’d like to ask Archbishop Dolan and a lot of other members of our heirarchy, “You’re how old? And you still believe in leprechauns?”

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When Pliny the Younger was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire, he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan asking whether he should execute Christians who refused to burn incense in worship of the emperor. Pliny, in keeping with the customs of the empire, did not care about forcing Christians to believe that the emperor was a god. But in public they had to behave as if they did. Thus, the Christians were in the dock not so much because of their faith in a risen Christ as over their willful refusal to declare themselves part of the reigning social order.

I thought of Pliny when I read that the Obama administration, in creating specific rules to implement Obamacare, will require all employers (with a very narrow exemption discussed below) to offer their employees health insurance that provides FDA-approved contraception, female sterilization, and other “reproductive” services free of charge — even if the employer is a religious organization and doing so violates its doctrine. I also recalled the times that President Obama and other members of his administration have supported “freedom of worship.” However, as in Pliny’s time, “freedom of worship” is not the same thing as “freedom of religion.” The former means that one may believe whatever one wants and worship privately without interference, whereas the latter allows one freedom to live in the world at large consistent with one’s faith tenets, even if they are not endorsed by the state.

Because the administration is knowingly forcing (primarily Catholic) religious organizations to pay for medical services to which they are theologically opposed, the new rules represent a frontal assault on freedom of religion at an institutional level. This is no small matter. To date, public controversies over “conscience” in health care have mostly involved individuals — e.g., doctors, nurses, pharmacists — whose personal morality or religious convictions conflicted with the provision of certain medical procedures or substances. For example, pharmacies in Washington State and Illinois have litigated over the right of owners to refuse to dispense contraception on religious grounds. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the pharmacies and in favor of a state regulation (since withdrawn for reconsideration) requiring them to dispense legally prescribed medications. An Illinois state court took the opposite view in a similar case.

But the free-birth-control rule goes much further than creating a potential conflict between the general law and individual religious beliefs. Rather, the rule targets the right of religious organizations to conduct their public activities consistently with their religious dogma and moral values — except within the narrow confines of an actual church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or monastery.

This isn’t an accident. The preliminary rule, which will remain unchanged in the final version, created a very narrowly tailored religious exemption (page 46,623 of the Federal Register). To qualify for exemption as a “religious employer,” an organization must meet four criteria:

1. The “inculcation of religious values” is “its purpose.”

2. It “primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets.”

3. “It primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.”

4. It is a non-profit organization under sections of the code that “refer to churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”

Lest there be any doubt of the limited nature of the exemption, the proposed rule states, “Specifically, the Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions.”

Thus, the group health insurance covering nuns in a Catholic religious order would probably not have to cover contraception. But insurance provided by the same order’s elementary school probably would. Ditto a hospital established by the nuns.

Even more telling: Despite much screaming from opponents, the Department of Health and Human Services has refused to broaden the religious exemption in the final rule — forcing religiously founded organizations to violate their parent church’s teachings, a frontal assault on the freedom of faiths to operate institutional outreach organizations consistent with their beliefs. If this rule stands, it won’t end there. If Catholic organizations can be compelled by federal diktat to violate their religious tenets, so can other religious organizations in different contexts.

Some have argued that a recent 9–0 Supreme Court ruling allowing a Lutheran church to fire a minister who in a secular organization would have been protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act provides shelter against the free-birth-control rule. I think not. That case was not about “freedom of religion,” as I have defined it here, but “freedom of worship” — the Court ruled that churches are free to decide on the criteria for appointing and releasing their own ministers and individual leaders without interference. But the free-birth-control rule isn’t about the “ministerial exception.” Rather, it imposes a legal duty on faith organizations to comply with the values of the state whenever they engage in public action or charitable enterprise among the general society.

In fact, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that the Obama administration intends not only to force churches to do what the state directs, but even to speak as the state directs. From Sebelius’s official statement about the promulgation of the new rule:

We intend to require employers that do not offer coverage of contraceptive services to provide notice to employees, which will also state that contraceptive services are available at sites such as community health centers, public clinics, and hospitals with income-based support.

Thus, the Obama administration is attacking even freedom of worship by forcing exempt organizations to tell their employees where and how they can violate church teaching.

The birth-control rule is the latest and most egregious example of government forcing religious organizations to conform their operations to reigning secular moral values. In this sense, faith organizations are being compelled to participate in a metaphorical Caesar worship. As in the Roman Empire, the government will allow religious organizations general freedom of worship, but, increasingly, not freedom of religion. Pliny would approve.

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Back in November, I spotlighted Obama’s half-billion-dollar crony drug deal involving a no-bid contract with politically-connected SIGA.

Refresher course here.

In November, Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill — chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting and Oversight and up for re-election in less than a year — asked HHS to review the contract.

Last week, the NYPost reported that SIGA execs dumped stock when they learned the contract would be far less than they anticipated last spring.

Today, GOP Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina asked the HHS Inspector General to investigate:

“Yesterday afternoon I submitted my second letter to the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services regarding apparent gross impropriety on behalf of the Obama Administration.”

“The more I investigate this deal, the more shocked I become at the potential corruption and insider influence taking place at the highest levels of our government. I cannot help but see the similarities between this case and the Solyndra scandal, since both involve rewarding companies tied to Obama donors, billions in taxpayer dollars, and insider dealing.”

“The decisions made by HHS have caused a legitimate small business in North Carolina to be denied a level playing field to provide smallpox treatments in the event of a national emergency. I will be very interested to see how the Administration explains their actions in awarding a billion-dollar corporation such a substantial contract when it falsely claimed to be a small business.”

Federal law requires that a certain amount of grants for this research and production be set aside for small businesses. In turn, small businesses will compete for these contracts and “grant awards” while convincing the government that their products will provide the most effective treatment and protections, at the lowest cost to the American taxpayer.

The two companies at the center of this – SIGA and Chimerix – competed for this award and submitted their own proposals for drugs to combat smallpox. SIGA’s small business status was challenged and the SBA ruled twice that they were “Other Than Small,” and therefore ineligible for a small business set-aside contract. But rather than acknowledging SBA’s decision, HHS pulled the small business set-aside and reissued the contract as a sole-source, non-compete to SIGA Corp. for $2.8 billion.

MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc. is a corporation wholly owned by Ronald Perelman, and TransTech Pharma, Inc. (a privately-held drug discovery company controlled by MacAndrews & Forbes). In November 2003, Perelman announced he would invest $10 million through MacAndrews and Forbes into SIGA Technologies – at the time a tiny biotech company that was developing oral drugs to prevent and treat diseases, including smallpox and anthrax.

Scandals? What scandals?

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By: Susan Jones

(CNSNews.com) – Witnesses told a House panel on Wednesday that the Obama administration’s definition of a “religious employer” under Obamacare must change immediately, or else Catholic and other

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I missed the Occupation of Europe by a few years so I’m
delighted to have an opportunity to Occupy America. Hey, it’s a
start. Today America, tomorrow China!

Critics of Occupy Wall Street (also Boston, Denver,
Oakland, Dubuque, etc.) claim that the protesters have no stated
goal, which could not be further from the truth. The current
movement is a major advance in protests — the first all-purpose
grassroots protest in American history, which very neatly serves
everyone’s purposes — mine anyway.

Former protest marches, sit-ins, love-ins and the like
were much too narrowly focused for me on specific outrages –
segregation, women’s inequality, anti-Vietnam war, that sort of
thing. Good causes, I’m sure, but not enough to get me really fired
up. I was never able to take part in any of them, for one reason or
another (inclement weather, a dental appointment, something always
came up), but the Occupiers have come up with a brilliant catch-all
solution that allows everyone to get anything bugging them off
their chest immediately.

This is a far more efficient way to protest major
problems, and I commend the organizers for coming up with such a
perfect tactic that suits every trouble — one size fits all. Can’t
get a home mortgage loan? Credit card interests rates too high?
Boss not appreciating you? Grocery prices going through the roof?
Spouse refuses to listen to you? Cost of movies and sports events
out of sight? The kids ignoring your advice? Wait time to see a
podiatrist too long? Leaf-blowers and plastic shrink-wrap driving
you nuts?

Folks, if any of those things are bothering you, it’s time
to grab your tent and get yourself down to your neighborhood
Occupiers location. There is one near you. If not, it isn’t too
late to begin your own protest site. Go to Occupiersunited.com to
find out more. Be the first on your block to establish an official
protest area and get on local TV. Learn to become a community
organizer, which could put you on the path to the White House.
Become a talented on-site cook. Perfect your outdoor survival
skills under blizzard conditions. Find new markets for T-shirts,
posters, coffee mugs, and trinkets. Yes, people, great career
opportunities await you!

In the past, as I say, I tended to sit out political
demonstrations of every kind (though I did once put a “Ban the DH”
sticker on my bumper), but the Occupy Whatever people showed me
that even I, a lifelong non-protester, could be roused into action
by taking a stand against whatever riled me — and, to my delight,
I found that not necessarily just one cause, but several, could be
taken care of in one fell swoop. Talk about catharsis.

So I made a list of stuff that’s been bugging me lately
and was surprised how long it was — 136 matters in all, starting
with noisy TV commercials. When I contacted officials at Occupy
Main Street (a wholly owned subsidiary of Occupy Wall Street), they
said that there was a limit of a dozen issues per month that one
person could protest against. “Otherwise, this thing could really
get out of hand,” they emailed me.

“We prefer major issues,” they said, “but whatever’s
troubling you may be included. The more the merrier. We have a
fairly lax policy here.” They said it wasn’t necessary for me to
run my issues past them. “Just show up and hand out fliers. Hey, it
gets you out of the house, and of course, like in the ’60s, it’s a
great way to meet girls.”

“That’s a good enough provocation right there,” I
said.

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At the Heritage Foundation last week, House Budget Committee
Chairman Paul Ryan demonstrated why he doesn’t need to be running
for President to be framing the debate for 2012. He delivered there
on October 26 a breathtakingly beautiful speech on Saving the
American Idea, which defines the Spirit of 2012.

He began, “The mission of the Heritage Foundation is to
promote the principles of free enterprise, limited government,
individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong
national defense. These are the principles that define the American
idea. And this mission has never been timelier, because these
principles are very much under threat from policies here in
Washington.”

Ryan, a disciple of and former staffer for the late Jack
Kemp, then explained, “What makes America exceptional — what gives
life to the American Idea — is our dedication to the self-evident
truth that we are all created equal, giving us equal rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that means
opportunity.”

Since the early 1700s, America has been the land of
opportunity, offering world leading prosperity, stemming from world
leading freedom. And millions and millions of the dispossessed, the
homeless tempest tossed, and their progeny now totaling hundreds of
millions altogether, have voted for that American Dream with their
feet, crossing oceans, deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges to get
here. As I discuss in my recent book, America’s Ticking
Bankruptcy Bomb:

Which leaves the question, why did they come? And why do they
still come?…. Well, it’s not for the Food Stamps, or the public
housing, or even Social Security and Medicare. America’s world
leading prosperity dates all the way back to the early
18th century. The roots of that prosperity can be seen in the
Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God-given right
of each man and woman to the pursuit of happiness. That is why
they came. They came because America has always been the land of
freedom and prosperity and opportunity. They came because of the
American Dream, that in this nation every man and woman enjoys the
freedom and opportunity to rise to achieve their dreams, regardless
of family background, class, race, or religion.

Ryan frames the question now facing us in 2012: “Have
those periods of unprecedented prosperity in America’s past been
the product of our Founding principles? Or, as some would argue,
have we made it this far only in spite of our outdated values? Are
we still an exceptional nation? Should we even seek to be unique?
Or should we become more like the rest of the world — more
bureaucratic, less hopeful, and less free?”

Or as I write in my book regarding America’s heritage of
world leading prosperity:

Is that over now? Is America just another nation now, like
Greece, as President Obama has suggested? In fact, just like
Greece? Is the American Dream done? Is that what is meant by the
“New Normal”? Or is that just a phrase to provide political cover
for the realities of a new socialism, where everyone as Churchill
explained shares equally in the curses of misery, rather than
unequally in the blessings of capitalism?

Ryan then discussed at Heritage how Obama is answering these
questions for 2012:

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of
division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my
disappointment — especially those who were filled with great hope
a few years ago, when then Senator Obama announced his
candidacy….Do you remember what he said? He said that what’s
stopped us from meeting our greatest challenges is, “the failure of
leadership, the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we
are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance
of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political
points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working
consensus to tackle big problems.

Imagine if Obama had been true to his political rhetoric
from 2008. Suppose he had been true to his promise that his
economic program would involve a “net spending cut,” several
trillion dollars of wasted unnecessary spending ago. Suppose he had
truly been a non-partisan President working with both parties to
enact a truly effective economic recovery program, like Reagan,
lifting up the poorest of Americans with booming economic
prosperity. Suppose like Ryan, Obama had adopted the inclusive,
pro-growth, prosperity vision of Jack Kemp.

Contrary to the abusive rhetoric of left-wing-extremist
know nothings in media and entertainment, some of them literally
clowns, Obama would be so universally beloved that we would be
clearing space for him on Mt. Rushmore right now. Instead Obama
played us with rhetoric promising prosperity and recovery, when all
along he planned to deliver dependency on his political machine
instead.

Ryan explained his disappointment with Obama in
devastating detail:

Nearly three years into his presidency, look at where we
are now:

Petty and trivial? Just last week, the President told a
crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of quote
‘dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health
insurance.’ Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere
disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health
care?

Chronic avoidance of tough decisions? The President still
has not put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of
ever-rising spending and debt, and it’s been over 900 days since
his party passed a budget in the Senate.

A preference for scoring cheap political points instead of
consensus-building? This is the same President who is currently
campaigning against a do-nothing Congress, when in fact, the House
of Representatives has passed over a dozen bills to help get the
economy moving and deal with the debt, only to see the President’s
party kill those bills in the do-nothing Senate.

Note that you never saw President Reagan attacking his opponents
this way. He engineered a truly revolutionary rollback of decades
of runaway liberalism on a bipartisan basis with the House of
Representatives controlled by liberal Democrat majorities for his
entire Presidency.

Obama is so divorced from the reality of America and his
own policies, that he calls essential relief from the regulatory
tsunami he has unleashed on America being for “dirtier air, dirtier
water, and fewer Americans with health insurance.” Do you see yet
why booming economic recovery is now two years overdue, and nowhere
in sight?

The President, indeed, is now denouncing what he calls
“the Republican Congress.” Maybe it is true his Democrat base is so
out of the loop they don’t know that the Democrats have continued
to control the U.S. Senate for going on six years now. But the
President is going to be sorely schooled on Election Day to find
that the great majority of the American people are, in fact, not
that stupid, and cannot be so easily misled by rhetoric that is so
dishonest that it can only be described as dishonorable.

Ryan noted that the House already not only proposed but
passed a 2012 budget this year that would have put the budget on a
path to balance and the economy on the path to prosperity. “But
instead of working together where we agree, the President has opted
for divisive rhetoric and the broken politics of the past. He is
going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans,
setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually
lazy arguments, as he tries to build support for punitive tax hikes
on job creators.”

Exhibit A: between Republicans and moderate Democrats,
there are strong majorities in both houses of Congress for
individual and corporate tax reform exactly as proposed in Ryan’s
House budget. That involves a top 25 percent income tax rate for
families earning over $100,000 a year, with a 10 percent rate below
that, and generous personal exemptions of $10,000 per family
member. And it involves an internationally competitive corporate
tax rate of 25 percent, closer to the rates in Communist China, the
European Union and our neighbor to the north, Canada. These
policies would provide the tax framework for booming economic
growth.

But Obama has done nothing to work on that, even though
his own Simpson-Bowles Commission proposed quite similar reforms.
That Commission was another sham for Obama to pose as a deficit and
spending cutter, when his intentions all along have been just the
opposite. That was yet another example of what I have called
Obama’s calculated deception, taking advantage of what he is sure a
majority at least doesn’t know and won’t find out.

Instead, “The tax increases proposed by Senate Democrats
and endorsed by the President — when combined with the new taxes
in the health care law, and the President’s other tax preferences
– would push the top federal tax rate to roughly 50 percent in
just 14 months, while doing nothing to promote job creation. This
tax increase on so-called millionaires and billionaires would
actually constitute a huge tax hike on the nation’s most successful
small businesses.”

Ryan finally cuts to the heart of the President’s economic
fallacies in saying:

The President has talked a lot about math lately. He’s been
saying that, ‘If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done
extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit…the math
says…we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the
poor.’ This is really a stunning assertion from the President. When
you look at the actual math, you quickly realize that the way out
of this mess is to combine economic growth with reasonable spending
restraint. Yet neither of these things factors into the President’s
zero-sum logic.

Ryan here is actually counterproductively polite. In 2007,
before Obama was even elected President, after nearly 40 years of
Reagan Republican tax policy, the top 1 percent of income earners
paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent of
income earners combined. The bottom 40 percent of income
earners as a group on net paid exactly zero percent of federal
income taxes. Yet President Obama is running around the country
telling us that Republicans want to put the entire tax burden on
the middle class and the poor.

This rhetoric is far worse than just wrong, or in error.
It is dishonorable calculated deception. It is so divorced from
reality that no other conclusion can be drawn.

Paul Ryan didn’t say the following, but I will. What
understanding Ryan’s speech reveals is that while Barack Obama was
born in Hawaii half a century ago, he is not culturally an
American. Raised during his formative years in the Indonesian
public schools, where he learned to appreciate the beauty of the
Islamic call to prayer, he was kept isolated from mainstream
America the rest of his life. That is why he doesn’t understand the
meaning and beauty of traditional American prosperity, and has no
clue as to how to restore it.

Worse, his model for political machine domination of
America is based not on restoring prosperity, but on fostering
dependency on government. That is why he is not and never has been
on track to restoring booming economic growth, which on the
historical record of America is now long, long overdue. Rush
Limbaugh has been right all along.

Worse still, traditional American prosperity is actually
morally embarrassing to Obama. These are the reasons why it is not
coming back until he and his co-conspirators are removed from
power.

That alienation you feel is because America is under
foreign occupation right now, by the hopelessly outdated
intellectual forces of Marxism rooted in the Eastern Europe of over
100 years ago. America doesn’t need to be transformed. America
needs to be restored. This is a Paul Revere moment, and every one
of you needs to be deputized to bring the word to everyone you
know, so that 2012 may be the year of the Rebirth of
America.

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