The long-running political satire podcast that I was a contributor to and that I’ve recently been hosting has come to an end. The creator of the show, who goes by the pseudonym Tom Paine, is a journalist by trade, and he’d had a deal with his employer that he could do SNN as an outlet for his political views. Those views had taken a lurch to the right after 9/11. However, his employer has altered the deal and now says that "Tom" can’t do SNN, pseudonym or not.

So it’s with great sadness that SNN ends its run. But for the final show, we brought together current contributors as well as those from the past for a big windup. We hope you like it.

Podcast Goes Out in a Blaze Of Glory

The breast cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, has guidelines as to who it will fund with its money. There were some recent changes, the results of which caused a political firestorm.

Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation. The House oversight and investigations subcommittee announced in the fall an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s funding.

Planned Parenthood has been at the center of a lot of heated political battles lately. Most center on whether the group, as an abortion provider, should receive government funds for other services it provides, such as offering contraceptives and preventive screenings.

For the Left , Planned Parenthood, and abortion in general, is a serious political hot potato that must not be curtailed in the least. So when judging whether or not any action against PP, by Komen or anyone, is reasonable, the first question they ask is…well, they don’t ask questions. It’s just wrong by definition. And also by definition, it’s politically motivated.

Never mind what people or organizations actually say, or that they’re in line with previously enacted guidelines. Nope, doesn’t matter at all. It’s always political.

Rick Santorum and his wife went through the tragedy of a stillborn baby. Normally, pundits on the Left would be silent or respectful. Don Surber points this out.

JACQUELINE Kennedy suffered the three worst outcomes of a pregnancy.

She suffered a miscarriage in 1955. Her daughter, Arabella, was stillborn in 1956. And in 1963, her son, Patrick, died two days after his birth.

I don’t remember a newspaper columnist or television commentator making light of her personal tragedies.

That was then, this is now.

Nearly 50 years after the death of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, some liberal commentators made political use of the death of Gabriel Santorum, who died within two hours of his birth.

As his mother, Karen, wrote in 1998 in her book, “Letters to Gabriel,” she and her husband brought him home before his burial. She had to explain to two young children the death of the baby brother they had expected.

His father is a Republican who now is running for president.

After Rick Santorum won the Iowa primary, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Alan Colmes of Fox News decided to make fun of how the Santorums handled this death.

“He’s not a little weird, it’s that he’s really weird,” Robinson said of Santorum.

“And some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird, um, that I think that some Republicans are gonna be off-put.

“Um, not everybody is going to, going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the, the, the stillborn ah, ah, child, ah, um, whose body they took home to, to kind of sleep with it, introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.”

Peter Wehner, writing at Commentary, finds this rather unwierd.

On these comments I have three observations to make, the first of which is that spending time with a stillborn child (or one who died shortly after birth, as in the Santorum case) is commonly recommended. The matter of taking the child home for a few hours is less common, but they did it so that their other children could also spend a little time with the deceased child, and that is definitely recommended.

Wehner cites recommendations from the American Pregnancy Association. Going back to Don Surber, he notes one particular circumstance why taking the stillborn child home to the family might not be done.

Charles Lane, editorial writer for the Washington Post, responded to the Santorum controversy by recalling his family’s loss of a son whose heart stopped two hours before birth.

“I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time,” Lane wrote.

“When I told him what had happened, his first question was, “Well, where is the baby?”

“I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory — too abstract.

“In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.”

Perfectly understandable, but to go ahead and do it is most certainly not "weird".

So what’s the difference between then and now? Back to Wehner:

The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum​; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.

We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.

The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the times.

Some of this may be attributable to "the times" in general, to be sure. But I would like to note the blatant hypocrisy of liberals who claim to care more than their conservative brethren. This from the ideology that, as Wehner so aptly puts it, "champion[s] abortion, even partial-birth abortion". That is a culture of death, one that does not value life or give it the proper reverence, especially for the least of these.

I always find the term "Christian Liberal" as something of an oxymoron. I understand why Christians might be drawn to some of the Left’s rhetoric and positions, but this sort of behavior belies much of what goes on beneath, and it’s not something I could bear to support. I can still love my fellow man, give to good charities, and care for the poor without having to support a political party where this sort of attitude is barely beneath the surface.

Whenever I try to give credit to Ronald Reagan for participating in the fall of the Soviet Union, I often hear that its fall was an inevitability, and it just so happened to occur on Reagan’s watch. I have to point out to them that Reagan was the first President to come along with an intent to defeat communism, not just contain it. And then to have the Soviet Union defeated "on his watch", with nary a nuke dropped, is one of those "coincidences" you don’t often see in politics; where the effect so closely mirrors the cause.

Interestingly, some of those who say the fall of communism was inevitable weren’t around when it happened. I was. And so was Lech Walesa.

Lech Walesa said that there would not be a free Poland without Ronald Reagan, during the unveiling of a statue in Warsaw of the late American president on Monday.

The former Solidarity leader said that “as a participant in these events,” it was “inconceivable” that such changes would have come about without the last American president during the post-1945 cold-war era.

Walesa added that thirty years ago, it seemed that the fall of the communist system would not be possible without a nuclear war.

Reagan stood strongly, and very publicly, with Poland against the Soviets. This was not an appeasing President. The Soviet Union was wrong and evil, and Reagan was not afraid to call it that, to the consternation of so many American liberals. (Just ask if, after Reagan walked out of the Reykjavik summit, if they thought nuclear war was a distinct possibility.) Lech Walesa agreed, and understood that history could just as easily played out very differently, if Reagan had not believed that victory was possible.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. Poland certainly is.

Starting with Occupy Wall Street:

• If the Tea Party had been shown to have done just a few of these things, if would have run on the nightly news for days. (Just recall how unsubstantiated accusations of racism were reported), and they would have been (rightly) castigated. When OWS does it, the press is mute.
• Richmond charged the Tea Partiers $10,000 to have a rally. OWS, nothing. The Tea Party is going to ask for their money back on the grounds that the government is playing favorites.
• It looks like even those who oppose the fat cats on Wall St. can act just like them. For a group upset at how the wealth has been spread around, they don’t do such a good job at spreading it themselves.
• When Lech Walesa, Poland’s former President, said he support OWS, the AP was all over it. But when he got more details about what was really going on and what the demands were (such as they were), he decided not to support it, saying "American is sliding towards socialism."  All of a sudden, the AP website didn’t seem to think that Walesa existed. Oh, that liberal media.
• Vagrants started to take advantage of the free food at the OWS protests, and all of a sudden the 99% started acting like the 1%. One protestor was quoted as saying, “It’s turning into us against them. They come in here and they’re looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don’t bring anything to the table at all.” It got so bad, the folks manning the kitchen staged their own protest against providing food for free to those who weren’t there to support the cause, aka freeloaders.
• Take a look at these headlines. If they described Tea Partiers, you just know they’d be the top story on the nightly news. OWS gets a pass. A lot of passes, actually.

Folks who support assisted-suicide claim they just want to stop suffering. Today’s slippery slope defines "suffering" as "loneliness" and financial troubles.

James Taranto starts out by describing what sounds like the housing bubble. But he’s not. What other bubble is out there, inflating as we speak, and is ready to burst?

With a Democrat in the White House, the "no blood for oil" chant has gone on hiatus. Imagine if Dubya had gone into Libya.

And finally, speaking of OWS, here’s a graphic to help the media tell Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party apart. (Click for a bigger image.)

And the Supreme Court case hasn’t even started. No, this unraveling is happening all on its own. From the AP:

At stake is the CLASS Act, a major new program intended to provide affordable long-term care insurance. Last Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the administration would not proceed with the plan because she has been unable to find a way to make the program financially solvent.

Even before ObamaCare goes into full effect, it’s clear that it was not the money-saving bill it was sold as.

Officials said they discovered they could not make CLASS both affordable and financially solvent while keeping it a voluntary program open to virtually all workers, as the law required. The law mandated that the administration certify CLASS would remain financially solvent for 75 years before putting it into place.

The only way to pay for socialized health care is to mandate it, juwst lke the (in my opinion) unconstitutional individual mandate it. The road to tyranny is paved with good intentions.

Megan McArdle lets us know that this is not, or shouldn’t be, a surprise, and wonders what other "good intentions" are still buried in the bill.

It is of course, great news that the administration has not actually gone forward and implemented an unsustainable program that would have had disastrous effects on the federal budget.  But it’s not great news that HHS has found that the program was just as disastrous as conservatives said it was . . . yet a Democratic Congress, deep in the passion of their historic moment, passed the damn thing anyway.  It’s in fact deeply troubling.  The problems with CLASS were known from day one, but no one listened, because it gave them good numbers to sell their program politically.

Now it turns out that ObamaCare reduces the deficit over ten years by about $70 billion instead of $140 billion.  Only . . . what about all the other stuff that had problems, like the reimbursement cuts that both Medicare’s chief actuary and the head of the CBO warned might very likely prove too deep to sustain medically or politically?  Can we assume that Democrats exercised the same thought and foresight about the other parts of ObamaCare that they did with the CLASS Act?  How come all of those liberal health care wonks that Kevin [Drum] cites were unable to identify the problems with this program before it passed?

This is going to be very, very messy. It needs to be repealed, the sooner the better.

Let me get this straight: The government tells banks who they must lend to. Banks comply, and in doing so, very nearly go under. (Oversimplification, I know.) Obama propped up his friends in the banking industry by bailing them out. And the "Occupy Wall Street" folks are upset at the bankers? No, not just them; they’re upset at capitalism in general. Here’s a list of proposed demands that should make you squirm. Yes, it’s just a proposal from a forum post, but the promoted it to the front page of the site. And it gets general approval from the liberal commenters. "Universal single payer healthcare", "Guaranteed living wage regardless of employment" (emphasis mine), "Free college education", etc. The taxes required for all of this make the current unsustainable spending look like chump change. This certainly does not represent "the other 99%", as they claim.

Democrats insist that the Tea Party is run by the Koch brothers, on the idea that since the Kochs support it and give money to it, that they therefore control it. Wrong, but let’s go with that. How, then, to explain the big Soros, union, and other astroturfing money coming in to support OWS? (Additionally, if the Tea Party is racist for not having some requisite number of minorities among them, will those same people level that charge against OWS? Yeah, right. It’s not applied in the same way, depending on your political persuasion, so, in truth, it’s just a political bludgeon.)

And let me ask you this; if hundreds of Tea Partiers were being arrested around America, don’t you think the liberal pundits would be all over it? But when it happens at OWS, little if anything. In fact, the differences in how the media cover these two movements is and will be a very instructive lesson in media bias.

Getting away from OWS, when  you quote Ronald Reagan, you don’t think a little context might be in order?

Crony capitalism for Republicans? Bad. Crony capitalism for Democrats? Oh look, a squirrel!

And finally, if you’re going to protest, place the blame where it really belongs. (Click for a larger image.)

The mantra is always that the rich should pay their "fair share". Roseanne Barr recently said that anyone with personal wealth over $100 million should send the excess to the government (and if they won’t, she deadpanned that we should send them to reeducation camps or behead them (civility watch!)). President Obama said that you don’t have any inherent right to a certain amount of profit.

Now that’s an interesting juxtaposition; Roseanne Barr has more courage of her convictions, such that she should have a more concrete dollar value than Obama’s "certain amount".

What I would like to find out is, if there are liberals who would go on the record saying exactly (or even closely) what these values should be.

• How much is the rich’s "fair share"? The only answer we’ve ever had is "more than they’re paying now".
• Should the government put a limit on how much private citizens are allowed to earn, or a limit on total wealth? If so, how much?
• Should the government put a limit on the profit a private company is allowed to make, as either a percentage or an absolute annual amount? If so, how much?

Herman Cain has his "999" plan. Rep. John Linder started a Flat Tax proposal. You know where these guys stand. But how about the Left coming out and telling us how much is too much? What’s the target they’re shooting at?

Planned Parenthood keeps breaking all its previous records in abortions performed.

Chavez is running out of people/things to blame for socialism’s failure. "[I]n a remarkable volte-face, for the first time this week Hugo Chávez admitted that the government was, after all, largely to blame for the electricity shortages and rationing that are hampering the economy, having previously tried to blame it on a drought, which dried up Venezuela’s hydroelectric reservoirs. That argument didn’t work so well this year, with torrential rains flooding much of the country."

Down’s Syndrome death panels are getting setup.

The debt crisis in Europe threatens to tear apart the EU. That’s not some conservative think tank talking, it’s the EU itself.

"If you love me, pass this bill!" Apparently, Mr. Obama has lost a lot of love in his own party, as Dems pick apart his jobs bill.

We spend more and more on public schools — in absolute dollars and per student — and yet SAT scores continue to fall. There are proven ways to deal with this, but Democrats are against all of them (predictably).

If poverty leads to crime, why is the crime rate falling during this recession (and the decade before it)? Is it because, perhaps, we’re actually keeping criminals behind bars?

Talk about over-regulation, here’s a CEO who was fined for hiring too many people and required to stop hiring altogether. When government calls the shots, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing (or even that there is a right hand).

Palin Derangement Syndrome: Joe McGinniss wrote an expose on Sarah Palin that was essentially (according to the publisher) filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

The new 2011 version of the New International Version of the Bible strives for gender-inclusivity. Mary Kassian gives her 10 reasons why this is bad for women.

And finally, never mind abortion, Michelle Obama thinks you should have parental consent before getting French Fries. (Click for a larger version.)

The Republican legislators in the Pennsylvania state government are pushing a bill that would relatively proportion their presidential electoral votes based on the results of the individual congressional district presidential votes. The (Republican) governor says he would sign such a bill. This is a bad idea.

The suggestion came up in Colorado and California in years past, and failed in both cases. The Electoral College is actually a very good way of apportioning votes, ensuring that a President has both a sufficient number of votes and also a diverse support base; broad support favored over the most support in close races. I posted a number of reasons why the Electoral College is a good idea here, with a link to the history of the EC.

As a side note, Markos Moulitsas, the "Daily Kos" himself, split his support over the Colorado and California efforts. One of them he called a "bad horror movie" and an attempt to "game the system". The other he called "brilliant" and suggested that "every state should allocate EVs in this manner". Why the difference in tone? As you can probably guess, it’s all about politics over principle. When Colorado wanted to do it, it would benefit Democrats, so he was all-in. When California wanted to do it, he had nothing but disparaging comments for anyone who even considered it. This clearly points out a pundit who a) has no appreciation for, not just history, but the status quo, and b) makes every decision based, not on what’s best for everyone, but what’s best for his political kindred.

Consider this when reading opinions. I will note that I’m always against this sort of thing, including in the guise of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Inform yourself.