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?”

View original article.

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, Time contributor and MSNBC analyst Toure asserted that Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain “serves a massive psychological purpose” for the GOP as he offers a “Herman Cain card” that can be used by Republicans when they are accused of racism.

He went on to charge that Cain is “giving comfort to racism.”

Below is a transcript of the relevant exchange from the Wednesday, November 2, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC:

TOURE, TIME CONTRIBUTOR: But this is a major moment for the GOP because Cain is a really important candidate – perhaps more important than any of the other candidates – because he serves a massive psychological purpose because there's a lot of people in the GOP who have been critical of Obama and have been made to feel that they are racist because of their criticism. Some of it has been racist, some of it's been reasonable, some of it's been business-as-usual Republican-Democrat stuff, okay.

Cain comes along offering salvation, liberation: You're not racist if you support Herman Cain. So now they have this Herman Cain card that they can throw at us anytime they are made to feel racist, so this is like a beautiful thing for them. So they need him to succeed as long as they can deal with him so that they can get their Cain card and make it as valuable as possible. But, of course, this whole transaction is a canard.

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: In what way?

TOURE: Well, I mean, Cain is giving comfort to racism the way that he purports himself, as we've discussed before on this show, so, I mean, this is not the person that you can hold up as, well, see, I'm not a racist, I love Herman Cain.

View original article.

Liberals had a dim view of Herman Cain’s character long
before this week. They automatically ascribed bad motives to him
and to his GOP supporters. His political views couldn’t possibly be
sincere, they pronounced. He is clearly pandering to racists.
Democratic strategist Karen Finney summed this attitude up by
saying: “One of the things about Herman Cain is, I think that he
makes that white Republican base of the party feel okay, feel like
they are not racist because they can like this guy. I think he is
giving that base a free pass. And I think they like him because
they think he’s a black man who knows his place.”

This is a rich charge, given that putting black
conservatives in their place is one of the chief preoccupations of
liberals. Holding black conservatives to a higher standard than
others in public life is a form of discrimination liberals have
perfected. They consider it very enlightened to ridicule black
conservatives, call them vicious names, even wish for their speedy
death. “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he
dies early like many black men do of heart disease,” pundit
Julianne Malveaux said about Clarence Thomas in the 1990s. “He is
an absolutely reprehensible person.” Liberals didn’t expel Malveaux
from polite society for this comment that might have even given
David Duke pause. Instead, they feted her in academia. These days
she is a college president at Bennett.

Regulating the blackness of black conservatives is the
divine right of liberals. And so almost anything Cain says or does
is fair game. A white liberal like MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell
feels so empowered by this divine right that he can question the
quality of Cain’s participation in the Civil Rights movement. Why,
he badgered Cain a few weeks back, didn’t you do more to promote
Civil Rights?

The exceedingly smug O’Donnell, however, couldn’t quite
bring himself to demean Cain as “minstrelsy” and musical.
For that task, he needed a black liberal and found one this week in
the single-name fraud Touré, a peddler of quasi-intellectual mumbo
jumbo and cheap shots that he regards as cutting-edge cultural
criticism. Using the pretentious patter of a Henry Louis
Gates, Touré unburdened himself of the deep

insight that “I think that Cain, interestingly, does not exist
without Obama preceding him.” Mortified by having to live under a
smart black man like Obama, conservatives needed to “right the
scales” with the elevation of a “lightweight” like Cain, said
Touré.

Unable to contain his brilliance, Touré continued that
there “is this constant minstrelsy aspect that he keeps bringing
up. This is not something that we’re just making up out of whole
cloth. He is the one who says he wants the Secret Service to call
him Corn Bread. He is the one who says things like ‘oh, shucky
ducky’ when he starts. This is deep black slang that he is using,
that we have not seen on a national public stage before.” This
sounds like a potential doctoral dissertation for Touré under Henry
Gates — the troubling implications of “shucky ducky” in American
politics.

Cain isn’t the first black man to run for the GOP
nomination, though one might think so listening to this nonsense.
In 2000, the Plato-quoting Alan Keyes ran for the GOP nomination.
Where does he fit into Touré’s analysis? Toure didn’t mention him
in his list of “serious intellectuals” who have run for president
even as he numbered Colin Powell, who didn’t run for president, as
one of them: “…Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, the
blacks who are running for president have presented themselves as
serious intellectuals…” Notice, by the way, that
he includes Jesse Jackson on the list. Apparently Cain
lacks the dignity, thoughtfulness, and moral probity of that former
aspirant.

Black conservatives just can’t win. Whether they are
“entertainers” like Cain or philosophers like Keyes, they are
marked down as “wacky,” as Maureen Dowd
described the two this week.

The left’s excitement over the sex harassment charges
dogging Cain can’t be explained by moral philosophy, unless
liberals plan to recant eight years of Clintonian apologetics. The
same people who still whine about the “prurient” Ken Starr are now
clamoring for the release of confidential files from twelve years
back. The less actual sex involved in a scandal, the more
interested liberals become in it, particularly if it taints a
conservative and even better if it taints a black one. Clinton’s
cavortings, fumblings, and passes in the Oval Office itself didn’t
interest them. Those were a “private matter.” But the Cain charges
have the potential to be disqualifying, they say.

Even if one were to put the worst possible construction on
the charges, they would constitute a relatively moral day for
Clinton. Nevertheless, Clinton’s boosters eagerly await the
appearance of Cain’s accusers. They want their Anita Hill. They say
that Cain is besmirching the good names of these women even though
the public doesn’t know their names yet. The press is working hard
to correct this injustice so that the names can be known and
properly besmirched.

Perhaps Cain is lying and he did speak improperly to these
women, though that would still fall well short of the Clinton
standard. Remember, “competence” alone qualifies one for the
presidency; crummy character doesn’t matter. Also, Clinton taught
the nation that “lying ” about sex and alleged sexual harassment
(Paula Jones) is no big deal. The press knew Clinton sexually
harassed his way through Arkansas and didn’t care. A few female
reporters, so grateful to him for protecting their right to
abortion, indicated they wished to be harassed too.

Cain enjoys no such ideological immunity. He is an odious
black conservative who threatens the left’s monopolistic hold on
blacks. Also, he is some kind of pro-lifer, which means he is
anti-woman from the start. Political figures are to be judged by
the content of their ideology, decrees the left. The seriousness of
a charge is determined by the rightness of a public figure’s
political views. A Ted Kennedy was entitled to a mulligan or two
after an unwelcome advance since he had done so much to help women
already.

Not so with Cain. The left can’t rest until black
conservatives are put in their place.

View original post.

There they go again.

The American left, caught in the act of brandishing their
electronic rope for yet another conservative black man, is busy
dodging their long and horrendous history of racism.

Mother Jones
tries to turn attention from the left’s abysmal record on
lynchings — high tech or with a rope — by re-visiting my
criticism of ex-Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. My point back
then, of course, was that Ms. Sherrod cited a Supreme Court case in
which she claimed the Court said her relative was lynched. I read
the case. The words “lynch” or “lynching” appeared exactly nowhere
in the case. Ms. Sherrod, surprise, finally emerged as just another
standard left-winger who, sadly, employs race and state to push a
progressive agenda. That was my criticism and it stands.

But the Sherrod incident highlights exactly why leftist
publications are so wildly excitable on the subject of lynching, as
Media Matters is here
as it foams about (the list is long) Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,
Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Monica Crowley, Peter Johnson Jr., Greg
Gutfeld, Brent Bozell, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit and
yours truly. All of us having in our individual fashion called them
out on their wretched history. (Note to Media Matters: You missed
Mark Levin. Get on the stick over there.)

The American left has a brutal and vivid centuries-long
history on race, as we have previously detailed at length
here and
here. This is a political faith that has historically exhibited
a mind-bending addiction to judging their fellow Americans by skin
color. The point the left didn’t want to go anywhere near in the
Sherrod case is that Sherrod’s relative was beaten to death –
brutally — by the local sheriff, and in 1940s Georgia sheriffs
were part of the Democratic political machinery. And the Supreme
Court case was judged by a lifetime Klan member — Justice Hugo
Black. So whether it was the sheriff on the bottom rung of justice
or the Supreme Court at the top rung, the long hand of the
progressive/racism tie was operating. That tie literally beat a
black man to death — and then sat favorably in judgment of his
killers. Progressives are well on record as having supported
slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan (which actually
ran the 1924 Democratic Convention known to history as the “Klan
Bake”) and every race-based approach to life right on down to
today’s belief in racial quotas and refusing to prosecute the Black
Panther voting rights case in Philadelphia for racial reasons. (See
J. Christian Adams book
Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice
Department.)

To cite one of a gazillion examples, here is the
Republican view of lynching as expressed all the way back in 1924
in its platform of that year:

We urge the Congress to enact at the earliest possible date a
federal anti-lynching law so that the full influence of the federal
government may be wielded to exterminate this hideous crime.

And the Democrats? How did they stand on the lynching issue?

We condemn the efforts of the Republican Party to nationalize
the functions and duties of the states.

Get that? This was the left’s response to the GOP on lynching.
In other words: buzz off. We’re busy lynching black men,
particularly if we catch them associating with white women. Take
your anti-lynching law platform and stuff it.

And, but of course, this anti-anti-lynching plank was
seamlessly tied together with every progressive nostrum of the day,
right down to assailing the GOP for taking campaign funds from
“predatory interests.” The same blather promoted by today’s
progressives in the Citizens United case.

In short?

This is what the left does. Today with Herman Cain,
yesterday with Clarence Thomas, long yesterdays ago with a 1924
platform that essentially issued a coded endorsement of their right
to lynch the uppity black men of their day. And with Shirley
Sherrod’s relative Bobby Hall — who, by the way, was a black man
from Georgia just like Herman Cain.

Nothing has changed this tie between progressives and
racism. The latter is used to drive the policies of the
former.

It was true in 1924. It was true in the 1940s’ Bobby Hall
case. It is true today.

And all you have to do to see the modern version of this
at work is keep your eye on the double-standard being used with the
black Herman Cain and that used to ferociously defend the white
liberal Bill Clinton, the latter accused by three women
successively of rape (Juanita Broaddrick), groping (Kathleen
Willey), and dropping his pants with a request to “kiss it” (Paula
Jones).

What’s unfolding here is a dramatic stripping bare of the
progressive double standard on race and sex. Why? Precisely because
conservatives are fed up with letting these people get away with
the double game. The spotlight is now on.

Make my day: read Mother Jones and Media
Matters.

Where the 21st century version of the sentiments of 1924
progressive/racism ties are carefully updated and skillfully
presented for all to see.

Herman Cain may be President of the United States. He may
never be President of the United States.

But he damn well isn’t going to be lynched for trying to
be President of the United States.

Read original post.

Left-wing actor Sean Penn slimed the Tea Party as motivated by racism, charging on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight on Friday evening that an impediment to President Obama’s success is “what I call the ‘Get the N-word out of the White House party,’ the Tea Party.”

At a time when Herman Cain tops polls of Republican primary voters, Penn proceeded to allege, without citing any evidence, that “there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, ‘can we just lynch him?’” (video below)

 

In between Penn’s two jabs intended to discredit the Tea Party, Piers Morgan helpfully boasted of how actor Morgan Freeman, on his show three weeks ago, “was very passionate about that very subject, saying there are elements of the Tea Party who just, as he said, want to get the black man out of the White House. He said it on this show.”

Audio: MP3 clip which matches the video

Indeed, Piers Morgan’s program has become the place for celebrities to disparage the Tea Party. As recounted by NB’s Noel Sheppard, on the September 23 show, Morgan Freeman asserted the Tea Party’s attitude is “we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.” The night before, actor Alan Cumming of The Good Wife, denounced the Tea Party as driven by “homophobia and racism.”

Of course, Penn is not opposed to all protest movements: “I applaud the spirit of what’s happening now on Wall Street.”

From the pre-recorded interview on the Friday, October 14 Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN:

SEAN PENN: I would love to see Barack Obama be Bulworth. I’d love to see what I’ve always wanted to see, somebody run as a one term President and show me that people aren’t stupid. They do care about each other. And when he does the right things and takes on the controversies, he’s going to win the next election.

And, and there, yet there’s another problem. You have what I call the “Get the ‘N’-word out of the White House party,” the Tea Party, this kind of sensibility, which is much more of a distraction-

PIERS MORGAN: Well, I had Morgan Freeman on, one of your movie colleagues, and he was very passionate about that very subject, saying there are elements of the Tea Party who just, as he said, want to get the black man out of the White House. He said it on this show.

PENN: I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. If you ask a representative of the Tea Party, “okay, Social Security, socialist, get rid of it,” they’re going to get very confused. What the, what they’re — at the end of the day, there’s a big bubble coming out of their heads saying, you know, “can we just lynch him?”

If we just focus on the basics, together, I think this is a country that if it — if it — if we kind of wake up and look at each other in a room, it’s like the light’s off. You turn the light on, people are good….

View source page.

My further thoughts on J. Christian Adams’ book
Injustice, which paints the Obama/Holder Justice
Department and especially the Civil Rights Division as a place of
reckless lawlessness.

View original post.

Radical Islam, black racism, illegal immigration, the anti-war, gay and women’s rights movements are all just useful tools exploited by a much bigger plot against America. Obama is the face on the movement, but al-Mansour is the brains and money behind the movement.

International Saudi powerbroker Dr. Khalid al-Mansour was at the …

Read original page.

Morgan Freeman, in an interview to be aired on CNN Friday evening, says that President Obama has made racism worse in America.

Chatting with Piers Morgan, the Oscar-winning actor also blames the Tea Party saying they’re “going to do whatever [they] can to get this black man outta here” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

---

PIERS MORGAN, HOST: Has Obama helped the process of eradicating racism, or has it in a strange way made it worse.

MORGAN FREEMAN: Made it worse. Made it worse. Look at, look, the Tea Partiers, who are controlling the Republican Party, stated, and what’s this guy’s name, Mitch O’Connell. Is that his, O’Connell?

MORGAN: Yeah, Mitch McConnell, yeah.

FREEMAN: Mitch McConnell. Their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? “Screw the country. We’re going to whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here.”

MORGAN: But is that necessarily a racist thing?

FREEMAN: It is a racist thing.

MORGAN: Is it not Republicans, wouldn’t that say that about any Democrat president?

FREEMAN: No, they would have gotten rid of Bill Clinton if they could have.

MORGAN: They tried.

FREEMAN: They did try, but still. I don’t, they’re not going to get rid of Obama either. I think they’re shooting themselves in the head.

MORGAN: Does it unnerve you that the Tea Party are gaining such traction?

FREEMAN: Yes.

MORGAN: Why?

FREEMAN: Well, it just shows the weak, dark, underside of America. We’re supposed to be better than that. We really are. That’s, that’s why all those people were in tears when Obama was elected president. “Ah, look at what we are. Look at how, this is America.” You know? And then it just sort of started turning because these people surfaced like stirring up muddy water.

Is that what it shows, or does it show that people – not just those in the Tea Party – have lost faith in this President?

Obama’s poll numbers continue to sink. This includes amongst reliably Democratic supporters such as Jews and African-Americans?

Have Jews and African-Americans suddenly become black haters?

The reality is that more and more people – even some in the media, perish the thought – are coming to the conclusion that Barack Obama was totally unqualified for the job as president, and that his performance in the past 32 months proves it.

What folks like Freeman don’t get is that there’s nothing racist about such feelings, and to make such an accusation is, well, racist.

Unfortunately, such accusations are destined to get louder and more frequent as we near Election Day and the chances for a second Obama victory based on nothing but hope, change, and ether continue to diminish.

Then folks like Freeman will really be shouting “racism.”

So much for the election of the first black president bringing our nation together.

And on this I agree with Freeman: Obama has made racism worse.

View source page.

Obama’s presidency lurches from fad to fad — from gays in the

military to “green jobs” to the “Buffett rule.” Hyped as a profound
presidency, it has turned out to be an embarrassingly frivolous
one. Sober historians of the future, not cowed by political
correctness, will no doubt look back and say that Obama fiddled
while America burned, indulging his sophomoric socialism,
environmentalism, and social engineering at a time of terrorism and
economic crisis.

The weighty and thoughtful orator of Democratic mythology
looks more like a glib used car salesman, and in his case most of
the used cars are electric. It is fitting that his hawking of cheap
environmentalist propaganda would lead him into the first major
scandal of his presidency. The Solyndra debacle is exactly what one
would expect from an administration determined to push the politics
of environmentalist conjecture at the expense of the American
taxpayer and economy.

Out of Obama’s implausible ideological insistence that
“green jobs” would bolster the economy, and the political need to
prove that claim, came a hasty loan to a dubious solar panel maker
that promised to create them. Obama leaves the American taxpayer
with a bill of over half a billion dollars for this environmental
lark, and it is only the most recent bill. His “green jobs” loan
guarantee program has been a bust, costing taxpayers tens of
billions for the creation of a pitifully small number of
jobs.

The Solyndra scandal stands as a symbol of the
administration’s reckless and unserious approach to the economy,
undermining job creators while propping up job destroyers. Needing
to divert people’s attention from the greed and irresponsibility on
display in the scandal, Obama now turns back to raw class warfare,
hoping to egg the poor and middle class into an idle hatred of the
rich. The great unifier seeks to set secretary against
boss.

Obama says his gimmicky “Buffett rule” is not class
warfare but simple math. Maybe he means the “new math” taught in
public schools. Senator Charles Schumer of New York must not have
received the “simple math” talking point; he admits openly that
Obama’s proposal is timed to capitalize on potential class
resentments in a bad economy. “When everybody went up, it was a lot
harder to make this argument,” he told the press. “I think the time
is ripe again. And I think the president sensed that.”

Obama’s half-baked Marxist musings with Joe the Plumber
remain his deepest thoughts on the purpose of taxation. He still
feels entitled to seize wealth and “spread” it around. When he says
that the rich aren’t paying their “fair share,” all he is saying is
that their money belongs to the government automatically for
redistribution. But that’s just theft masquerading as taxation. The
true principle of taxation is not the redistribution of wealth but
the financing of legitimate government activity, and under that
principle the rich are paying more than their fair share, as they
carry a disproportionate amount of those costs. Republicans should
resist the Buffett rule not just because it will inhibit job
creation and consumption but because it is a bald act of
theft.

America’s “jobs president” is more like a crooked Robin
Hood. Economic decline is not so much a crisis for him as a policy
and a pretext for ideological opportunism. Given the choice between
liberal ideology and the creation of jobs, he consistently selects
the former. He chooses unions over jobs, environmental regulations
over jobs, and trivial tax-hike gimmicks over jobs.

Obama’s blasé attitude about Solyndra, shrugging off an
enormous loss to taxpayers as no big deal, is part of this
ideological blindness and complacency. No failure ever prompts any
reflection on the wisdom of a liberal scheme; he just moves
forward, trying out new ways to present failed ideas as a boon to
the common good.

A popular slur among liberal pundits is to say that
Republicans oppose Barack Obama’s economic ideas because they want
the economy to stay sluggish before the election. The slur makes no
sense. If that were the Republicans’ crass calculation, they would
be supporting his ideas, as they are sure to make a bad economy
worse.

But it is not enough for Obama to damage the economy. He’s
also proud of shaking up the military. Just as he is making life
harder on businessmen through new taxes and regulations, so he now
makes life harder on generals through social engineering. The
media’s coverage of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell has been
laughably propagandistic, designed to leave the impression that
everyone is thrilled with the change. The reality is that it
creates new headaches for generals who already have too many of
them. And there is no end in sight to the politicized struggles to
come. According to the Washington Post, gay activists have
a new cause to press upon a hidebound military — the “unknown
number of transgender troops serving in uniform without formal
recognition.” Perhaps this cause will dovetail with Obama’s next
likely innovation for the military, a full-blown women in combat
policy.

After all, he owes feminists a favor, having allowed,
according to author Ron Suskind, a “hostile workplace” for women to
fester in the White House. One would have thought Bill Clinton’s
presidency might have triggered that complaint. Instead, “I feel
like a piece of meat”-style complaints comes from Obama’s. Life in
the workplace has grown difficult everywhere under Obama, including
in his.

View original article.

Remember in July when President Obama told a Latino rights group that he wished he could “bypass” Congress in order to get things done? Here’s a refresher:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wD5Y88UWno

Well if you thought that was just an anomaly, or an off-the-cuff remark, you may want to think again.  On Wednesday, Obama repeated the sentiments to another Latino group – the Congressinoal Hispanic Caucus Institute.

“As I mentioned when I was at La Raza a few weeks back, I wish I had a magic wand and could make this all happen on my own,” Obama told the group, according to the Washington Examiner. “There are times where — until Nancy Pelosi is speaker again — I’d like to work my way around Congress.”

But he wasn’t done there, according to the Examiner:

As he continued, Obama conceded that “we’ve got laws on the books that have to be upheld.”  But he quickly added there are different ways to uphold the laws on the books. “You know as well as anyone that…how we enforce those laws is also important,” Obama said.  Last month, the administration made a major, unilateral change in immigration law enforcement when it announced that the government will not initiate deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants unless they have committed serious crimes.  To critics, Obama had indeed worked his way around Congress.  To the Hispanic Caucus, Obama said his new policy will “prioritize criminals who endanger our communities, not students trying to achieve the American dream.”

It brings new meaning to the “Yes you can!” chant after he made the comments the first time.