"Everyone’s going to need healthcare, so Congress can force you to buy it", or so says President Obama in defense of the individual mandate. So my question is: what else is everyone going to need, such that he can force certain choices on you?
I’ll start:
Post yours in the comments.
If celibacy is to blame for the sexual abuse in the Catholic church, how does that explain the continuing abuses in the public schools? (Hint: it doesn’t.)
Here are 4 hard truths of health care reform. (Hint: if they promised something, it’s generally not going to happen.)
"[I]f you come down hard on Limbaugh because he has crossed a line, you must come down hard on Schultz and Maher because they have crossed the same line…." (Hint: Schultz and Maher supporters haven’t.)
New York City Mayor Bloomberg, not content with nannying the well-off on what they can and can’t eat at restaurants, now is denying food to the homeless because it might be too salty. (Hint: That’s not compassion.)
If they had been Republicans, this would have been racist. (Hint: They’re Democrats.)
Is Zionism humanitarianism? (Hint: Yes.)
In Canada, strip searches from possession of a deadly … crayon.
Also from the Great White North, government intrusion into homeschool, saying that Christian parents can’t teach a Biblical view of homosexuality. Freedom of religion is being chipped away slowly enough that most don’t see it.
If Obama is some post-racial president, why is he launching "African Americans for Obama"?
Medical "ethicists" are seriously arguing that post-birth newborns are "not persons" and can ethically be "aborted".
With all the religious implications of Obama’s policies, you’d think he’d have kept around his faith-based council for advice. Nope, they’ve just faded away.
Movie reviewers of the liberal persuasion are all for anti-war, anti-military or pro-environmental message movies, but that idea gets thrown out when they disapprove of the message. Suddenly, it’s "propaganda".
Scofflaw Democrats. "The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 further provides that if, for two years in a row, more than 45% of Medicare funding is coming from general revenues rather than Medicare taxes, the president must submit legislation to Congress to address the Medicare funding crisis. President Bush dutifully followed the law, but President Obama has ignored it for the last three years."
Obama claims that we can’t drill our way out of the energy problem, and then, in the same speech, notes that domestic oil production is at it’s highest level in 8 years. Because we drilled! Can’t have it both ways, Mr. President, but the press will try to let you have it.
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.
Starting with Occupy Wall Street:
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.
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.
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.)
Got to catch up on the wrap-up. The past two weeks have been dizzying.
Warren Buffet said he’d be more than happy to pay more taxes. First of all, if he’d be that happy about it, there is absolutely nothing stopping him from just writing a check to the US Treasury. Second of all, he wouldn’t be fighting the IRS over unpaid taxes. How happy, really, do we think he’d be?
Evan Sayet is getting confused trying to keep track of all the different kinds of beliefs that cause the Left to label you "racist". The list keeps growing. (Note, this is a link to a Facebook post. If you don’t have an account, I don’t know if you’ll be able to see it.)
Another instance of where private, protected, Christian speech will get you suspended. (Note, this is too much even for the ACLU.)
You need an ID to get a job, fly on a plane, or buy liquor. But showing an ID to vote? Why, that’s a poll tax, says Rep. John Lewis (D-GA).
Planned Parenthood styles itself as a "family planning" service (at least, it does that when it’s trying to protect its government funding). But by their own numbers, 97.6% of pregnant women who went to PP in 2009 were sold an abortion. And that’s up from the year before. It’s an abortion mill, plain and simple. Follow the money. On top of that, would you consider "safe" a procedure that caused 28% of its patients to attempt suicide afterwards? Or one where patients had an 81% increase in mental health issues?
When the NY Times calls you liberally biased, you really need some self-examination. And yet this same "news" organization was chosen to moderate the recent Republican debate.
The government gives breaks from taxes and some laws based on religious affiliation. However, that determination seems to be getting rather politicized under Obama. When the National Labor Relations Board can decide if you’re "religious enough" (and claiming it based on specious authority), it’s chipping away at religious liberty.
The Washington Post’s "On Faith" section recently asked its contributors, "After millennia of religious studies, is it time for universities also embrace secular studies?" Richard Land, President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission answers with the obvious, "They already are."
A recent WikiLeaks document dump did not redact the names of informants to the US State Department. Now these people must fear for their lives. Is this what Assange supporters really want from their idol; pronouncing death sentences?
Civility Watch: New web-based video game lets you kill well-known Republicans. If a Republican is shot anytime soon, will the Left allow anyone to blame liberal incivility? (Hint: No.)
James Pethokoukis makes a strong case for the idea that what Obama did made the economy worse, not better.
In Obama’s jobs speech the other night, he claimed that all his spending would be paid for. No, sir, not based on your speech it won’t.
And finally, a thought on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. (Click for a larger picture.)
