Considerettes

Paul Harvey died today at the age of 90.  I’ve been listening to Paul Harvey on and off since high school.  Here was a guy who was entertaining to listen to, even while he was telling me the news.  He made it interesting.  His broadcasts were "visits" rather than "programs", and Saturday was all about human interest stories.

And you gotta’ hand it to him; he at least had the intellectual honesty to call his program "Paul Harvey News and Comment".  These days, comment is passed off as news.  Would that today’s broadcasters held to that same standard and had that same transparency.

My favorite recurring line of his was "Self-government without self-discipline is self-defeating."  This would be the lead-in to some story about a government somewhere either behaving badly or reaping the consequences thereof.  These days, the government of the Palestinians seems to be a daily confirmation of that line, but perhaps the United States today, throwing out fiscal discipline, will also find that to be self-defeating.

I absolutely loved his "The Rest of the Story" feature, even if some of the items were, indeed, urban legends.  Most were not, and they gave us a look at the people and events of the news in a different light, and they always ended with, "And now you know the rest of the story".  In college, during my show on the radio station, I’d read from one of his books that had collections of them.  I even wrote a "Rest of the Story" story of my own.  Once, I recorded a number of his segments off the radio and made my own cassette tape full of them.  And to give you an idea of his tenure, I also did that years later, recording off the Internet and making a CD.  Sometime I read books to my kids, but before the evening’s chapter, I’ll pick up one of those collections and read something from there first.  That is how my children knew Paul Harvey, and why even my thirteen-year-old was a little saddened when he heard of his passing.

My dad introduced me to this fine broadcaster, and my kids knew something of him.  Thus was the staying power of the man, who ended every broadcast with, "Paul Harvey…Good day!"

And now we know the end of the story.

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That was then:

In early October, as the meltdown of the financial industry gained momentum following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 59% of U.S. voters agreed with Ronald Reagan that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

This is now:

Since then, the stock market has fallen roughly 3,000 points, millions of jobs have been lost, nearly a trillion dollars has been spent so far to bail out the financial industry, an additional $787-billion government stimulus package has been approved, and a new president has taken office who has proposed spending billions and billions more.

Despite all that, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows that the basic views of the American people have not change: 59% of voters still agree with Reagan’s inaugural address statement. Only 28% disagree, and 14% are not sure.

As Pejman Yousefzadeh said at RedState, "It may be Barack Obama’s White House. But it is still Ronald Reagan’s America." 

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Last December, the Bush administration granted protection to health care workers who refused to perform certain procedures on moral grounds.  If a hospital, health plan or clinic didn’t accommodate the consciences of their employees, they’d lose federal funding.  Abortion rights activists proceeded to take the low road.

But women’s health advocates, family planning proponents, abortion rights activists and some members of Congress condemned the regulation, saying it will be a major obstacle to providing many health services, including abortion, family planning, infertility treatment, and end-of-life care, as well as possibly a wide range of scientific research.

Never mind moral issues, and never mind that plenty of people who have no problem with performing these procedures exist, there must not even be the slightest impediment to these procedures.  Guess we know where their priorities lie.

As well as the priorities of some Democrats in Congress.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill last month to repeal the rule, said: "We will not allow this rule to stand. It threatens the health and well-being of women and the rights of patients across the country." Similar legislation is pending in the House.

No, it does not threaten anyone’s health or well-being.  Allowing an employee to follow their conscience simply means finding someone who’s ethics aren’t similarly bothered.

In spite of these overwrought pronouncements, the rule was put in place.

That was then, this is now.

Taking another step into the abortion debate, the Obama administration Friday will move to rescind a controversial rule that allows health-care workers to deny abortion counseling or other family-planning services if doing so would violate their moral beliefs, according to administration officials.

The rollback of the "conscience rule" comes just two months after the Bush administration announced it last year in one of its final policy initiatives.

This rule is important, mostly to protect health care workers from losing their jobs over their personal beliefs.  They weren’t supposed to be able to lose it, but that didn’t stop the health care industry.

For more than 30 years, federal law has allowed doctors and nurses to decline to provide abortion services as a matter of conscience, a protection that is not subject to rulemaking.

In promulgating the new rule last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said it was necessary to address discrimination in the medical field.

He criticized "an environment in the health-care field that is intolerant of individual conscience, certain religious beliefs, ethnic and cultural traditions and moral convictions."

Doctors have been successfully sued for not performing procedures they objected to, so the rule is necessary to give this same protection to other, non-abortion-related procedures. 

The Obama administration claims:

Officials said the administration will consider drafting a new rule to clarify what health-care workers can reasonably refuse for patients.

How about we find out what the administration considers "reasonable" before doing away with this valuable protection?  Or is conscience not that big a deal to Barack Obama?  It doesn’t sound like it.

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It’s been a few weeks since we had one of these, and boy are things changing…or not.

"Extraordinary Rendition"?  Keeping the Bush administration policy.

Holding "enemy combatants" without trial?  Obama’s nominee for Solicitor General, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, says yes we can!  (And Obama & Holder second that motion.)

Make Guantanamo Geneva-Convention-compliant?  It already is.

Wiretapping international calls related to terrorists?  The Obama administration continues to protect it.

Continuity we can believe in!

And Nicholas Guariglia says that we should have seen this coming.

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Frugality.  Thriftiness.  These terms are being redefined by the NY Times as "dead weight". 

As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.

Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming ’80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990.

Never mind those government types that encouraged banks to give loans to those who couldn’t afford them.  Never mind the investors who spend too much money on too much risk.  No, you, dear person living within your means, you are the reason we’re in this mess. 

I’m sorry, but this reasoning is utterly upside down.  Instead of trash-talking responsible living, perhaps a recession is what we need to pare back some of the overspending we’ve been doing, personally and federally. 

(In fact, some economists say that we would normally have mini-recessions now and then that would serve to do these corrections little by little if the federal government didn’t manipulate monetary policy to keep them away.  Now, after other poor government decisions have come to a head, they’re all hitting at once.)

One of these excesses is arguably federal pensions.  The world is finding out (again) that a one-size-fits-all social security program means when we fail, we all fail since all our eggs are forced to be in fewer baskets (sometimes just one).  Japan is seeing this.

Japan’s aging population is not helping consumption. Businesses had hoped that baby boomers — the generation that reaped the benefits of Japan’s postwar breakneck economic growth — would splurge their lifetime savings upon retirement, which began en masse in 2007. But that has not happened at the scale that companies had hoped.

Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. That could serve as a warning for the United States, where workers’ 401(k)’s have been ravaged by declining stocks, pensions are disappearing, and the long-term solvency of the Social Security system is in question.

Other countries, like France and Germany, have had to come to terms with this in the past, and now it’s our turn. 

Spending our way out of overspending is not the answer.  Letting the market roll, with its ups and down, would hurt far, far less than the climbs and crashes we’re having to get used to.

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Don Sensing has noted in the past how the environmental movement morphed from a Teddy Roosevelt conservation into Earth worship, to the detriment, in this case, of highly unemployed Latinos.  Rev. Sensing also observes that the increase in this idolatry seems to coincide with its economic decline.

God is not mocked. 

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And it’s blowing away the rage that Democrats would have had if Bush had done this.

The economic stimulus signed by President Barack Obama will spread billions of dollars across the country to spruce up aging roads and bridges. But there’s not a dime specifically dedicated to fixing leftover damage from Hurricane Katrina.

And there’s no outrage about it.

Democrats who routinely criticized President George W. Bush for not sending more money to the Gulf Coast appear to be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in his first major spending initiative. Even the Gulf’s fiercest advocates say they’re happy with the stimulus package, and their states have enough money for now to address their needs.

What a difference an administration makes.

It’s a significant change in tone from the Bush years, when any perceived slight of Katrina victims was met with charges that the Republican president who bungled the initial response to the disaster continued to callously ignore the Gulf’s needs years later.

Just last summer, Democrats accused Bush of putting Iraq before New Orleans when he sought to block Gulf Coast reconstruction money from a $162 billion war spending bill. Bush was pilloried for not mentioning the disaster in back-to-back State of the Union addresses.

Bush couldn’t miss mentioning Katrina let alone sending more money there.  But Obama doesn’t spend a dime in a 3/4 of a trillion dollar spending spree and cue the crickets.

What, does Obama hate black people?  That’s preposterous now, and it was preposterous then.

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John Hinderaker on PowerLine:

If the President is a Republican, it’s fine to call him a "chimp." In fact, it’s morally superior. But if the President is a Democrat, you can’t call a chimpanzee a chimp lest someone think you might have been referring to the President.

It all makes perfect sense.

Indeed, for 8 years calling the President a chimp was so prevalent that there are hundreds if not thousands of images of him specifically morphed into or compared to a chimpanzee

But today, here is the controversial chimp in question:

This was referring to, not just the awful "stimulus" bill (written by Congressmen, not the President), but the chimpanzee that went on a rampage in Stamford, CT that was shot and killed by police.  Just like in the cartoon. 

But Al Sharpton and all manner of bloggers have now confirmed what many of us thought might happen when Obama was elected.  Any criticism of the President (or in this case, the Congress) that can be linked to racism, will. 

Paging Mr. Holder.  Maybe your observation that we’re "essentially a nation of cowards" on racism is because of this sort of reaction from the Left whenever race comes up.  Or, as in this case, even when it doesn’t come up.

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Al Mohler gives an introduction:

In contemporary America, pornography is both a public reality and big business.  Ambient pornography — sexually explicit advertising, entertainment, and merchandising — is all around us.  But pornography is also big business, producing sexually explicit materials in printed, video, and digital formats and making billions of dollars in the process.

The pornography industry has a big stake in defending itself against legal challenges and restrictive laws, and it has been stunningly successful in doing so.  One of the leading legal defenders of pornography has been David Ogden, a lawyer who can only be described as a First Amendment extremist, who has even argued against laws against child pornography.

President Barack Obama has nominated David Ogden as Deputy Attorney General of the United States.  This nomination is both ominous and dangerous.  Given David Ogden’s high visibility in defense of pornography, this nomination sends a clear and unmistakable message.  The pornography business will have a friend in high office in the Department of Justice.

Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation has some other concerns about the Ogden nomination.

In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, Ogden succeeded in convincing a narrowly divided Supreme Court to declare the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional and spare the life of his client, who killed a woman in cold-blood nine months before he turned 18.

Groves says Ogden argued that the high court should look to laws, legal opinions, and decisions of foreign countries and international organizations regarding the death penalty. He notes that in particular, Ogden cited the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) — a 1989 treaty that bars the execution of people who commit crimes while under the age of 18.

Ogden, says Groves, pointed out that the United States is one of only two countries in the world that has not signed onto that treaty.

"[He argued] that doesn’t mean that the U.S. doesn’t have to follow the treaty, [but that] it means the opposite — that the United States must follow the treaty that it has specifically decided not to join," says Groves. "Why? Because [Ogden argued] the rest of the world has joined it — and so therefore it’s some new customary, international norm and the United States must outlaw the juvenile death penalty."

So he wants the United States Supreme Court to use foreign laws for precedent, and to adhere to treaties we’ve never signed.  Regardless of your position on whether or not we should sign the CRC, Ogden wants our courts to decide cases based on laws we have no control over, and to unilaterally implement treaties that our legislature hasn’t agreed to or our President hasn’t signed.

Judicial activism, anyone?  Well, more like judicial usurpation.  And Obama wants this guy as our Deputy AG, fighting for the rights of pornographers to get their stuff in front of as many eyeballs as possible, never mind the age.  (He fought against porn filters in libraries, too.) 

Is this just your basic Democratic "family values" kinda’ guy?

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…for weaker and weaker definitions of "hate", notes Eugene Volokh.

From a UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center study titled Hate Speech on Commercial Talk Radio:

Types of Hate Speech

We identified four types of speech that, through negative statements, create a climate of hate and prejudice: (1) false facts [including "simple falsehoods, exaggerated statements, or decontextualized facts [that] rendered the statements misleading"], (2) flawed argumentation, (3) divisive language, and (4) dehumanizing metaphors (table 1).

What a definition!

The example they give should give you pause.  If "exaggerated statements" will get you thrown in jail, we’ll all be either imprisoned or silenced. 

And note that this particular study only looked at "Commercial Talk Radio".  Obama may have come out against the "Fairness Doctrine", but if we get a back-door version of that, this may be how it happens.

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Some good news from this administration:

President Obama opposes any move to bring back the so-called Fairness Doctrine, a spokesman told FOXNews.com Wednesday.

The statement is the first definitive stance the administration has taken since an aide told an industry publication last summer that Obama opposes the doctrine — a long-abolished policy that would require broadcasters to provide opposing viewpoints on controversial issues.

"As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated," White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told FOXNews.com.

The "Fairness Doctrine" is really just targeted at radio, where conservative voices dominate.  You typically don’t hear those promoting it complaining that there’s too much liberal bias in this newspaper or that TV network; it’s always a complaint about conservative opinions and ideas.  So the idea that this is about "fairness" is just a smokescreen.

Blogger Dan Riehl is skeptical, though.

Instapundit posts word that Obama does not want the Fairness Doctrine back. Great.

That makes him look like quite the moderate. But the actual doctrine was always a stretch. Get back to me in 3-6 months after we see what his FCC does in terms of "localism."

That’s always been the play more likely to get done. Until I hear something from the FCC, the WH release is what I’m growing accustomed to with Obama: just words.

It is possible to have the effect of a "Fairness Doctrine" without the name, so indeed we’ll see.  But it is nice to get the word from the President.  We’ll hold you to that, sir.

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Melanie Phillips in the London Daily Mail observes:

The story of 13-year-old Alfie, who reportedly has become a father by 15-year-old Chantelle, is a fable for our tragically degraded times.

Most of the attention has focused upon Alfie, who looks about eight and doesn’t even understand the word ‘financial’. But while Alfie’s youth is exceptional, this situation is not.

Whether or not Alfie is the father of baby Maisie or whether that honour goes to one of Chantelle’s reputed other boyfriends, the fact is that the length and breadth of this country there are many Chantelles, having sex and often getting pregnant while under age.

Phillips points out what has long been a refrain in societies where liberal programs have taken hold; the unintended consequences of government intervention.

There has been a profound loss of the very notions of self-restraint and boundaries of behaviour, promoted from the top by narcissistic liberals and funded at the bottom by welfare benefits which cushion people from the consequences of their actions.

The liberal intelligentsia pushed the idea that the worst things in the world were stigma and shame. Illegitimacy was accordingly abolished, lone mothers provided with welfare benefits and any talk about the advantages to children from marriage and sexual continence was to be banned as ‘judgmental’.

With all constraints on behaviour vilified as ‘moralising’, sex became treated merely as a pleasurable pastime devoid of any spiritual dimension.

As parents careered through serial sexual partnerships, putting their own short-term desires first and effectively behaving like children, they no longer wanted to be bothered with taking responsibility for their own offspring and so started treating them as if they were grown-up.

This was massively reinforced by the approach to sex education and contraception by schools and public health professionals, who treated children as quasi-adults capable of making their own life choices.

What they actually needed, as all children do, was firm and consistent boundaries which taught them that sex was properly an adult activity.

Instead, they were taught to treat sex a bit like bungee-jumping or paragliding - to have fun doing it, but to take precautions to avoid getting hurt.

And, she notes, the only definition of "hurt" was "getting pregnant".  Never mind the emotional or psychological harm that might be involved.

Read the whole thing.  Seems the more sex education we have and the earlier it starts, the more stories like this that we get.  Phillips’ article is a strong argument for the teaching of responsibility and its consequences rather than covering the world in bubble wrap. 

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Chuck Colson explains that we disregard the past at our own peril.

One of the best exponents of [the role and importance of tradition] was G.K. Chesterton. In his book Orthodoxy, he wrote, “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” And he wrote that “tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

It’s not only respect for tradition that’s involved here—it’s prudence. These institutions and arrangements have helped to preserve the moral order, which is our first duty to maintain. They have been shaped by people who took into account the world as it is—filled with fallen human beings—instead of an imaginary utopia filled with perfectible people.

This respect is why true conservatism is a disposition, not an ideology. It doesn’t seek to reinvent man and his world—its concerns are about what T.S. Eliot called the “permanent things.”

In contrast, perverted modern liberalism, which includes many who call themselves “conservatives,” is about innovation, breaking from the past, upsetting the established order, and maximizing individual autonomy.

Colson is responding to the liberalism that is being taught in our universities, as exemplified in a quote from a Harvard faculty committee.  Read the whole thing.

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Kevin Schmiesing of the Acton Institute considers the bill from another angle.

The ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] makes clear that we have not learned one great moral lesson: You can’t have something for nothing. Or, among economists, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I’m not even sure that anybody is seriously arguing that most of the items contained in this bill constitute “stimulus.” Congress can genuinely stimulate the economy in two ways: decreasing taxes and decreasing regulation. In other words, by putting fewer hindrances in the way of those who wish to produce and consume. Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Government puts money into one person’s hands only by taking it out of someone else’s; or by creating it ex nihilo, which amounts to the same thing (moralists have been condemning the debasement of currency at least since the Late Scholastics).

If the bill has any positive impact, it will be psychological, making people believe that the economy will improve and therefore generating positive economic activity. This possibility seems doubtful at this point. It appears instead that the measure’s most significant effect will be to increase the cynicism with which the American people view their government. I’m undecided yet as to whether that is a favorable development.

Keep an eye on the Acton Institute PowerBlog.  This is a great group and their take on religion and economics are invaluable.  (More PowerBlog entries on this specific topic are found linked from this post.)

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Which means that Hugo Chavez is free to run his country into the ground provided he can continue to finance his programs of "free" services and goods to the voters with oil money.  54% of the country have decided that they prefer the handouts.  It took 2 tries, but Chavez got his wish.

We’ll see if the Venezuelans get theirs.

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