National politics

Sotomayor attacked from the abortion left

President Obama has chosen his Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, to replace David Souter. As expected she’s very liberal and she’s not a pro-lifer by any means. But then we couldn’t have expected anything else from the most pro-abortion president ever, and anyway she’s replacing another liberal member of the court and so the conservative-liberal balance remains.

So, it’s interesting to see the abortion-related criticism against Sotomayor coming from’pro-abortion groups. It’s not that she’s too pro-life, there’s certainly no evidence of that. No, it’s that she’s not quite rabidly pro-abortion enough.

In a 2002 case, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration policy of withholding aid from international groups that provide or promote abortion services overseas.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position,” she wrote, “and can do so with public funds.”

In a 2004 case, she largely sided with some anti-abortion protesters who wanted to sue some police officers for allegedly violating their constitutional rights by using excessive force to break up demonstrations at an abortion clinic. Judge Sotomayor said the protesters deserved a day in court.

Judge Sotomayor has also ruled on several immigration cases involving people fighting deportation orders to China on the grounds that its population-control policy of forcible abortions and birth control constituted persecution.

In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

And in a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

In my quick read of these summaries I see only a judge abiding by the law, who doesn’t undermine it just because she might not like the pro-lifers’ position. Did these radical abortion groups want her to rule against the pro-lifers who thought police used excessive force, to deny them their day in court simply because she doesn’t like their politics? I suppose it’s some small— very small—measure of comfort that she’s not one of those judges who rules on a whim. (What does it say for our society that we have such low expectations for our jurists?) Was she supposed to deport the Chinese woman to a country that would subject her to a forced abortion?

I say this reveals a lot about those who support so-called abortion rights in this country, that these groups don’t really care about women having a choice, but that they view pregnancy and childbirth as evil by default.

Meanwhile, the White House, instead of telling the bloodthirsty mob of Moloch-worshippers to back off, has tried to placate them with assurances of Sotomayor’s reliable vote on any abortion-related case that would come before the Court.

But White House officials appeared eager to send a message that abortion rights groups do not need to worry about how she might rule in a challenge to Roe v. Wade.

“He did not specifically ask, as we’ve stated for the past several days,” Gibbs said. “But as I just said, I think he feels — I know he feels — comfortable, generally, with her interpretation of the Constitution being similar to that of his.”

Win one for the blood-red horde.

Photo credit: Official White House photo.

Catholic congressmen take on Clinton over Sanger

This is what a real Catholic congressmen sounds like. US Reps. Chris Smith and Jeff Fortenberry take Hilary Clinton to task for her admiration of the racist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. Here’s what Fortenberry had to say:

Your remarks last month, when you called Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, a person whom you enormously admire, were stunning to me. Margaret Sanger clearly embraced bigotry and racism. She advocated for the elimination of the disabled, the downtrodden and the black child. In one of her writings, she said, “Today eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.” I don’t believe these ideologies have a place in our pluralistic society. And you went on to say that you will use American foreign policy in your position to further reproductive rights, which includes abortion, across the globe.

Madame Secretary, I don’t believe we should use American foreign policy to export abortion. This will undermine, in my view, our foreign relations in many areas throughout the world, including Latin America and Africa and among Muslim peoples. Promoting the international abortion industry is an imposition of our own woundedness upon others. Abortion has caused tremendous grief in this society, and its export I believe will be seen as a form of neocolonialism that is paternalistic and elitist and an assault on the dignity especially of the poor and vulnerable. I believe women deserve better, women throughout the world deserve better.

Awesome!

Clinton’s response?

Well, Congressman, let me say with respect to your comments about Margaret Sanger, you know, I admire Thomas Jefferson. I admire his words and his leadership and I deplore his unrepentant slaveholding. I admire Margaret Sanger being a pioneer in trying to empower women to have some control over their bodies and I deplore statements that you have referenced. That is the way we often are when we look at flawed human beings. There are things that we admire and things we deplore.

Apart from that, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln? In other words, Clinton says that if we ignore the racist, classist, genocidal stuff, Sanger was pretty cool. Unbelievable.

Of course, she might already have practice overlooking such things: “I admire Bill Clinton. I admire his words and his leadership and I deplore his unrepentant philandering.” Sounds like something she might have said.

[Link via Amy Welborn.]

 

Dodd isn’t the only double-talker on AIG bonuses

A friend notes on the Dodd matter covered in the previous post that Sen Chris Dodd wasn’t actually part of the conference committee that prepared the bill that included the language that bonus contracts—such as those paid out by AIG—must be honored. So why is he falling on his sword? Maybe he lobbied for the provision, but who is he protecting?

All you have to do is look at the six Democrat who were signatories to the conference report. (Recall that no Republican voted for this report and that the bonus-contract enforcement provision was snuck into the conference report.): For the House, David Obey, Charlie Rangel, and Henry Waxman. For the Senate, Daniel Inouye, Max Baucus, and Harry Reid. (Download this PDF of the second half of the bill and page all the way to the end for the signatures.)

Which one of these guys did the deed and won’t ‘fess up now?

 

Dodd, White House pushed law for AIG to honor bonuses

Barack Obama was outraged—outraged!—that AIG executives were getting $400 million in bonuses after the US taxpayer bailed out the company with $170 billion—Billion!—and after it posted $60 billion in losses last quarter.

And yet AIG says that it was contractually obligated to pay these bonuses—never mind whether those were ridiculous contracts to begin with because Democrat Sen. Chris Dodd—at the urging of the White House— pushed a law requiring companies receiving bailout money to honor those contracts.

On Tuesday, Dodd denied knowledge of the amendment and then on Wednesday, he backtracked and said he thought it was just “innocent modifications,” blaming the amendment on “staffers” working with Treasury Department officials. And now he claims that even though many of the bonuses were awarded to AIG executives living in his state, he had no idea that AIG would benefit from the amendment and enrich his constituents. At this point, we can’t believe anything he says.

As for Obama, this is just more Hope and Change. As in after Obama’s economic policies are fully enacted, let’s Hope the American taxpayer is left with more than some spare Change.

 

Does Bill Clinton not know basic reproductive biology?

CNN’s medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta—who, let’s remember, was on a shortlist of potential Obama nominees to be surgeon-general—interviews Bill Clinton on embryonic stem cell research and Obama’s policy change to allow federal taxpayer funding.

First, note the slanted, softball question that Gupta proposes: “Is this always going to be as divisive of an issue as it is now? Is this going to be the abortion of the next generation? Or are people going to come around?

Aside from the unintended pun—Yes, this is the abortion of the next generation, i.e. we are aborting the next generation—see how Gupta tries to present embryonic stem cell research as having nothing to do with abortion. You can’t have embryonic stem cells without first aborting an unborn child! But also see how he says pro-lifers need to “come around.” One “comes around” when one wakes up, when one sees reality.

When Clinton responds, he appears to be lacking in knowledge of basic biology. Some have taken that as evidence of ignorance, but I think it’s demonically clever. Clinton says: “If it’s obvious that we’re not taking embryos that can ... that under any conceivable scenario would be used for a process that would allow them to be fertilized and become a little babies ...” Is Bill Clinton really ignorant of the fact that embryos are already fertilized? That they are in fact already little babies in the process of being born? I don’t think so. I think this is yet another cynical attempt at spreading ignorance and trying to convince the general public that embryos are genetically unique and differentiated human beings in the process of development to the point where they can survive outside their mothers’ wombs.

This is not unlike the partial-birth abortion lie perpetuated by pro-choicers who claimed that no more than 1,500 of these horrific procedures were performed in the country each year. In fact, key figures in the abortion industry later admitted that to be a blatant lie that under-counted the procedure by an order of magnitude.

From celebrities to journalists to politicians, we’re told over and over again that we’re just obstructionists who would rather protect a clump of cells out of some misguided principle than help “real” suffering children just waiting for the medical treatments that will come rushing out of medical labs like a torrent once federal funding is assured. And yet, it has been shown again and again that not a single viable treatment has emerged from research on embryonic stem cells, research that has relied on billions of dollars of private funding as well as public funding from states and foreign governments. Meanwhile, adult and cord blood stem cells continue to provide treatments for diseases, yet don’t get nearly the attention or funding.

And now they have resorted to misdirection, obfuscation, and perpetuated ignorance to get the American people on their side and convince, once again, that pro-lifers are benighted medievalists who abhor science and want to enslave the world with unwanted pregnancies and religion.

[Thanks to Kelly Clark for sending the link. She has similar thoughts on this incident.]

Why is Obama trying to kill charities?

The Red State blog also notices that Obama’s reduction of the charitable tax deduction will negatively affect charities in this country and concurs with my supposition of the motive:

With this proposal, President Obama is saying as directly as it can be said that the federal government is better able than private citizens and the charities they support to decide how these donation dollars are best distributed. Conservatives, by contrast, believe in the principle of subsidiarity — which in this instance means that charity is best performed at the most local and immediate level possible, and by “mediating” institutions rather than large, distant, and bureaucratic ones. This is not an abstract doctrine; it is based on the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

My take on this from a couple of days ago.

 

Obama’s charitable deduction reduction hurts us all

As part of his proposed 2010 budget, President Obama trots out the old liberal playbook and takes a few more whacks at the “rich”, i.e. those who make more $250,000 per year. I put that in quotation marks because that category includes a very large proportion of the small business owners in this country, people who pour much of what they earn into their businesses and also into our society through charitable giving. They are not the enemy to be be denuded of property on which we, the “lower classes”, stake a claim out of jealousy and pettiness.

One element of the Obama budget’s attack on the “rich” is the reduction of the deduction for charitable giving. This will have an impact on many people who aren’t the so-called “wealthy” class. That’s because philanthropy by the wealthy is a backbone of charitable giving in this country. Yes, every gift matters, from the widow’s mite on up to the multi-million dollar gifts. But it’s those large gifts, the ones typically given by those in the top tax bracket, that often have the most far-ranging impact. Think of the hospitals whose emergency rooms or surgical centers or pediatric wards were paid for by large single donations. Think of the food pantries who raise support from many folks because a philanthropist offers to match every donation up to the tens of thousands of dollars. Think of the university laboratories researching disease cures, paid for by the generosity of wealthy alumni. Yes, those gifts of $10, $50, $100, or $1,000 given by the vast majority of people make up the bread and butter income of those charities, but it’s the very large gifts that enable the extraordinary actions of charities.

And while I can’t go into detail in this area—because I work for the fundraising office of an archdiocese—let me tell you that every parish, every diocese, every parochial school will likewise be affected by this. What happens to the Church’s presence in the world when generous donors can no longer afford to give?

That’s right, they can’t afford it. If you look at how the wealthy are already penalized for their earnings, you realize that if they want to sustain their legacy through their own companies and their families, if they want what they have built to survive beyond themselves, they rely on provisions within the ever-more byzantine tax code to offer incentives to support those charities.

So why would the liberals want to undermine such charitable giving? It’s not just the fact that so many of the leading Democrat politicians actually don’t give generously of their own wealth—think of the revelations of John Kerry’s minuscule charitable giving before he began looking at running for president or the Clintons’ infamous itemizing of their gifts of underwear and used shower curtains to charity. Or even Barack Obama, who gave much less than the national average to charity before he began his preparation for running for president in 2005. And these are all people whose income puts them among the ranks of the wealthy they so disparage.

No, it goes even deeper into ideology. Such an attitude betrays the big-government mindset of liberals who are convinced that only government funding—and thus oversight and control—can properly fulfill the role that charities have always filled. Even now many charities subsist to a large degree on fat government contracts to provide social services. So why should the wealthy be free to direct their own wealth to the charities for which they have an affinity, or which they believe do the greatest good, or which uphold the values they profess themselves, when the liberals could control all that money through government spending priorities. And when they control the money, they can push forward their efforts to re-engineer society to their own liking and ideology.

The reduction of the charitable giving deduction for the “wealthy” will have negative consequences for all of us, not just the wealthy, just as class warfare based in greed and jealousy will continue to erode society’s bonds and raise more fractures and fault lines.

Photo caption: An illustration of James 1:27 via Wikimedia Commons. Used with permission.

“Gold-plated” solar-powered trash cans: Stimulating the economy?

Barack Obama’s pork-filled so-called stimulus bill is so full of big government waste, you could spend all day documenting it. Here’s one example from Massachusetts. How about nearly $22 million for solar-powered trash-compacting garbage bins for state parks. These modern marvels cost $3,600 each.

How many jobs are going to get “stimulated” by this boondoggle? The Mass.-based company that makes employs 23 people, although they bins are actually assembled in Vermont. Will we double the number of employees? that would be $1 million per job. What a bargain.

Oh, but the state hacks behind this plan claim that we’ll also be saving money.

BigBelly Solar trash compactors are designed to do more than prevent litterbugs, state officials said. A solar-powered battery compacts the rubbish, cutting fuel costs by decreasing how often state workers must pick up the trash.

And how much in gas savings are we expected to believe are going to be realized from having to empty these trash cans half as often? How many years will it take to recoup the cost of buying, installing, and let’s not forget maintaining (fixing broken ones, replacing dead batteries, etc.) $22 million worth of this “shovel-ready” project?

I’m beginning to think “shovel-ready” doesn’t refer to projects ready to spring into action once they’re funded. I think it refers to how much b** has been shoveled to convince us that this stimulus bill was a good idea. Apparently, not enough for some of us.

Photo credit: BigBelly Solar

When the GOP has diversity, it’s cynicism

While the Boston Globe offers the expected simpering praise of President Obama’s speech to Congress last night—for example, the reporter speaks of his 60% approval rating as a strength against Republicans when the rating really has seen a precipitous decline since his inauguration; a Republican would not get the benefit of that doubt—the coverage of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Republican response ended with an astonishingly biased attack on Republicans with no concomitant alternative view. This is how the article ends:

“What makes him so appealing to Republicans is he’s an Indian-American representing a Southern state,” said Louisiana State University professor Robert Mann, who evoked the party’s recent election of its first African-American leader. “A lot of it is the same reason they elected Michael Steele their chair: They’re looking to push out in front any bit of diversity they can dredge up.”

Because, of course, non-white people are just figureheads in our party, pushed forward by those fat cat, white men in backrooms to hide the real ugly bigotry of the GOP. Could you imagine a Republican academic getting away with saying that Obama was dredged up by the Democrats to burnish their claims of being the party of diversity? No, there would at least be another sentence offering a rebuttal from the sympathetic point of view.

We’re 36 days into the official transformation of the Fourth Estate into an arm of the White House press office. And the umpteenth day of the mainstream media being unabashedly biased toward liberalism.

 

Arnold: Drop your principles; embrace mine

The headline says it all here: “Schwarzenegger to Stimulus Opponents: Economy More Important Than Principles”. For some people, perhaps some politicians, so-called “principles” are merely malleable positions espoused for the purpose of scoring political victories, easily jettisoned when the shifting tides of politics dictate. But for the rest of us, principles are closely held beliefs, based on considered cogitation, that define our approach to the world as a reality.

In other words, if they really are principles then they are not in conflict with what we truly believe to be the best way to, in this example, fix the economy. Principles are supposed to be our fundamental approach to the world.

What we can do with less of are political games of one-upmanship designed to elevate the players and score media points. You know, like attacking your supposed fellow-travelers in your party for favorable quotes in the media.

 

The 7-year-old political operative

I remember my first political thought. I was seven years old and it was 1976. We were on the school bus, presumably taking us to 2nd grade, and for some reason we were talking the presidential election. Of course, most children that age are influenced by their parents’ choices, as overheard at home, but we made them our own. Since this was Massachusetts, more kids voiced support for Jimmy Carter than for Gerald Ford, but not me.

No, I had a clear preference that was not the Democratic presidential candidate. It’s not that I was a big Gerry Ford fan. My reasons were much more personal. I warned my classmates that if Carter was elected they would feel the difference in their lunch bags.

I was convinced that, as a peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter would see to it that peanut prices would go up and we’d all see less peanut butter in our PB&J sandwiches in the future.

Okay, so I was a muckraking ideologue back then. I’m much more subtle now.

Photo credit: Richard B. Russel Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia.

$2,000,000,000 for 150 jobs

So what do we get in the stimulus bill? How about a $2 billion boondoggle of a “green” power plant in Illinois, creating 150 jobs. The FutureGen plant was started under the Bush administration as a public-private partnership, the costs ballooned, the technology became obsolete, and the Bush Department of Energy decided to kill it.

Now, like a zero-emission zombie, the FutureGen plant is back, hungrier than ever for a piece of the “porkulus”. A hefty $2-billion piece.

After FutureGen was abandoned, disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich paid Cassidy and Associates, a major Washington, D.C. lobbying firm, $468,000 in public funds to lobby to restart the project. The Illinois delegation in Congress has also been pushing hard for the FutureGen earmark, despite the fact that the Obama administration has been vocal about their opposition to earmarks in the stimulus, and has even specfically said they are oppposed to including funding for FutureGen in the bill.

The Wall Street Journal estimates that the FutureGen would generate about 2,675 new jobs—and only 150 of those are permanent. Congress would be spending just shy of $750,000 per new job.

Sen. Tom Coburn had introduced an amendment to kill the project in President Obama’s home state. I don’t know if the amendment was successful. Anyone?

Regardless of the fate of this particular pork-barrel project, you can be assured that there’s a lot more where that came from hidden among the aid to states and infrastructure spending that makes up a huge chunk of the bill.

And yet, there are still some people out there who think the stimulus is just another check coming in the mail from the U.S. Treasury. Sorry folks, not this time. In Democrat parlance, economic stimulus means stimulating government spending and jobs, rather than cutting costs and letting people keep their own money to invest and spend. (And since when did it become evil to save and invest your money rather than waste it?)

In any case, in the face of the worst economy in 80 years the party of the president who ran on “hope and change” shows that it’s the same old tax-and-spend game.

 

Who is Sarah Palin, really?

Writing in Commentary on “The Meaning of Sarah Palin”, Yuval Levin says that before her elevation to the national stage she wasn’t the “female Reagan” the Right made her out to be nor the “latter-day Jerry Falwell with a little bit of Tammy Faye” the Left made her out to be:

She had been serving as the popular chief executive of a geographically vast, sparsely populated, and economically vital state. She held conventionally conservative Republican views—pro-gun, anti-tax, and pro-life. She had risen to prominence by taking on Alaska’s corrupt and profligate Republican establishment. In running for and winning the governorship in 2006, she had promised (and had begun to deliver) reforms of the state’s relationship with Washington and with the oil companies that dominated its economy.

[…] She was a good-government reformer with social conservative leanings, not the other way around.

[…] Palin was assigned every view and position the Left considered unenlightened, and the response to her brought into the light all manner of implicit liberal assumptions about cultural conservatives. We were told that Palin was opposed to contraception, advocated teaching creationism in schools, and was inclined to ban books she disagreed with. She was described as a religious zealot, an anti-abortion extremist, a blind champion of abstinence-only sex education. She was said to have sought to make rape victims pay for their own medical exams, to have Alaska secede from the Union, and to get Pat Buchanan elected President. She was reported to believe that the Iraq war was mandated by God, that the end-times prophesied in the Book of Revelation were nearing and only Alaska would survive, and that global warming was purely a myth. None of this was true.

We know why the Left, especially the mainstream media, including “Saturday Night Live”, created the image of Palin that they did. So why did conservatives create their image? I would say that it’s because the conservative wing of the Republican party—Reagan Republicans—have been so starved of candidates that even hinted at being as conservative as Palin appeared to be and who had such a compelling personal story and came out of nowhere and was so gosh-darn approachable that she became the candidate who embodied all our hopes and dreams. For the first time in 20 years we finally had a member of the presidential ticket who believed and promoted all those conservative positions we wanted. She wasn’t just a social conservative or a fiscal conservative or a small-government conservative or a supply-side economics conservative, but—in our current assessment—she was all three.

Palin may not have been as right-wing as some would have hoped and others feared, but what does it say about the Republican Party that her appearance on the national stage made her seem that way? What does it say about the conservative candidates we already have to choose from?

And so Sarah Palin outshone the top of the ticket, John McCain, the unpardonable sin of the running mate. The question remains whether a Sarah Palin who must endure the intra-party slings and arrows—not to mention the continuing misrepresentations and attacks of a hostile media establishment— can fare as well in a national primary campaign. Will we see the same Sarah Palin in 2011? More to the point, will we see her in 2012?

Photo credit: Flickr user NewsHour. Used under a Creative Commons license.

 

Mr. President, consider what could have been your own fate

[Video from CatholicVote.]

Campaign promises meet reality

It’s one thing to second-guess the sitting US president from the campaign stump as a candidate—or as an opinionated blogger—but it’s quite another thing to sit at the president’s desk, know what he knows, and make decisions that affect the lives of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. I think Barack Obama is learning that lesson. Obama is now saying that he may have to back off from some campaign promises, including his vow to shut down the military prison at Guantanamo Bay where terrorists and other ne’er-do-wells are held.

He also acknowledged that his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay will be more of a challenge than anticipated.

Obama said that while some evidence against terrorism suspects may be tainted by the tactics used to obtain it, that doesn’t change the fact they are “people who are intent on blowing us up.”

Looks like someone got his presidential national security briefing. Obama now knows what Bush knows, which is a heck of a lot more than the masses of people who have been second-guessing Bush for the last eight years. Obama has had a big heaping helping of reality, which we can hope he will assimilate and respond to responsibly. If not, we’re in for a very rough four years.

Update: And don’t let the latest news headlines fool you. Read the rumors they’re reporting and what you’ll see is that Obama is supposed to be signing an executive order the first week or day in office to begin the process of closing. Which means that someday the prisons will close. Which means that nothing has changed except a symbolic act designed to appease his liberal base.