A number of Catholic dioceses and Catholic Universities have sued the Obama administration over religious freedom, although the main stream media is giving it scant coverage. It brings to mind the saying, “when you sup with the devil, bring a long spoon.”

Government is a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51,

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

But over the years the Catholic Church in America has chosen to, rather than keep its distance, get cozy with government, particularly the Democratic Party. Instead of keeping separate and preaching to the laity that being your brother’s keeper is an individual responsibility, not something to be outsourced to government, they chose to support ObamaCare when it first came out and have supported other government programs. After all, it was Jesus who said, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, render unto God that which is God’s.”

Instead the Church has endorsed the growth in government and government programs in the name of “social justice.” Only recently, Cardinal Timothy Dolan and the New York State Catholic Conference called on legislators in Albany to increase the minimum wage. They went further to say, “we don’t pretend to be economists, but we are pastors.” Perhaps if seminaries required a course in Economics 101 they would know that an increase in the minimum wage also raises the first rung on the ladder out of poverty for many people, notably teens, especially minority teens.

As pastors, they should be in the pulpit appealing to the business owners among their flock to look into their hearts to see if they can manage to give their employees a raise, voluntarily, rather than use the iron fist of government to force them to do so. That is their vocation, not lobbying government to compel their flock to act. Conservatives typically give 30% more to charity than liberals and yet the Church has tied itself to liberals who love government to do their charity work for them.

In the view of progressives, we are not endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as the Founders believed in 1776 and conservatives believe to this day. Progressives believe that rights come from the government and if government can give you rights, they can take them away whenever it sees fit. Sadly, it has taken the Catholic Church this long to discover that.

So now the sleeping giant has been awakened and it is grasping for the individual right expressed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” They are finding that progressives don’t believe in the Constitution as written, but as a living, breathing, thing that must change with the times. In other words, it means whatever progressives say it means today, and today it means, to paraphrase the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld, “NO RELIGION FOR YOU!”

If the rest of us don’t wake up like the Catholic church has recently done, at least partially since they still support other programs like the minimum wage, we will face the fate that Martin Niemoller described about German intellectuals during the Nazi reign.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

In November it is time for us to speak and fight to retain those God-given rights, or the progressive movement will roll on like a steam roller and no one will be left to speak of the time we had rights in America.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

As they sit in the warm sun and listen to the celebrity speakers tell them about their bright future a grim reality will set in once the graduation cakes are cut and consumed.

The reality is that, particularly on Long Island, the job outlook is bleak, affordable housing is out of reach, our elected leaders are clueless and whatever opportunity can be found will be found in other parts of the country.

While some of us fight to cut the government leviathan down to size so that is doesn’t suck up the resources that productive people are better suited to employ, those in office are fighting for their own survival and will stop at nothing to hold onto office.

College Loans

As someone paying for their children’s college education, I don’t like paying any more than I have to, but the focus on holding interest rates constant is misguided. College graduates need jobs, not more debt. President Obama and local representatives like Tim Bishop already have piled up enormous debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay back. Making it more affordable to take on more debt is not a winning strategy. Congressman Bishop used to run a local college, Southampton, that had to be bailed out via a purchase by Stony Brook University. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Bishop Touts Highway Bill

On his website Tim Bishop boasts about his support for the two-year transportation bill. While keeping our roads in good repair is important, a closer reading of what Mr. Bishop says is revealing. The highway bill, “would create or sustain 113,300 construction jobs in New York alone: 61,100 in highway construction and 52,200 in mass transit construction, according to the US Department of Transportation.” There it is: “create or sustain.” Well, Congressman, which one is it? How many jobs will be created and how many will be sustained? Any economist, and almost anyone else for that matter, can count a new job. After all, there is a bit of paperwork associated with filling a new job, W-4 forms, I-9 forms, etc. But there isn’t a soul who can count a job sustained.

Created vs. Sustained

Why is that important that we know the difference? Because if you recall with the great stimulus bill, in Tim Bishop’s district, $105 million dollars was spent on school districts to create seven new jobs. In that case the teacher’s union, a big Bishop supporter, got a lot of money and our children and grandchildren got the bill. So how many new jobs will the transportation bill create? We also know that those highway jobs are heavily unionized and the unions back Bishop. Coincidence?

Perhaps another reason Bishop doesn’t want to say how many jobs will be created  is that he could be held accountable. Remember how that pesky promise to keep unemployment below 8% if we gave Obama nearly a trillion dollars blew up in his face?

A Coherent Policy?

On the one hand Bishop is pushing to drive more people into going to college whether they can afford it or not or whether they belong there or not. On the other hand he is pushing spending on construction jobs. How many of our college graduates are going to take those construction jobs? It’s more government spending coming and going. No spending cuts, just more spending, more debt, kick the can down the road.

What we need is less government and more entrepreneurs; less taxes sucking resources out of the economy and more investors putting money where it will generate the most returns; the realization that college isn’t for everyone and we need skilled blue-collar workers who can operate computerized machines in our factories; lower energy costs so that we can afford to actually run factories. We need to unleash the imagination and brainpower of hundreds of millions of Americans in the private sector and not count on bureaucrats picking and choosing winners and losers based on their left-wing ideology.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

President Obama has been on the stump trying to cobble together a coalition that will help keep him in the White House. It matters little what damage his actions might do to America, he has bigger plans and needs more “flexibility” to get them done.

On college campuses he is trying to gin up support by making the interest rate on college loans a campaign issue. The issue is government subsidized Stafford loans. He wants to freeze the current interest rates at 3.4% and he wants the Republicans to fight him on this so that he can create another class warfare wedge issue.

Where have we seen something like this before? Wasn’t the government’s heavy involvement in housing, pushing for everyone to be a homeowner that led to the housing bubble? When that bubble burst, all hell broke loose with it and Obama was able to ride the gush of air into the White House.

Think about the growing debt being accumulated by college students and think about their job prospects in the Obama economy. It is not a pretty picture. What happens if those students upon graduating say, “I can’t find a decent job. I have been duped. I’m not paying back my student loans.” What do you do? Jail them?

Now if interest rates climb, the economic effect will be to curtail borrowing, that is, the old price, supply and demand thing. But if interest rates are kept low, then the demand for more debt will not be curtailed. If the demand for more debt is not curtailed the bubble grows. Four more years of Obama managing the economy will not be a boon to jobs. If we haven’t figured that out yet, we better start studying quickly. There’s a big test coming in November.

I fully appreciate the college financing issue. But the education model is broken. Colleges seem to raise tuition in lock step with increases in government aid, so no progress is made. Colleges also seem to be afraid of not attracting enough students so they fill their course catalogs with nonsense courses that will interest no employer. The amount of debt piling up is frightening, but hey, we have a president to reelect. We’ll fix that later; just like Social Security, Medicare, budget deficits…

The Republicans are right to at least demand cuts in spending elsewhere to pay for this. They know the problem won’t get fixed or even addressed with Obama at the helm. We have to hang on for another six or seven months to cancel Obama’s contract and then prepare to roll up our sleeves and undo the damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

George Demos kicked off his Hail Mary campaign to win the Republican nomination to challenge Congressman Tim Bishop in New York’s first Congressional District. As he did the last time around he boasts that he is the only true conservative in the race. His claims, though, are devoid of any facts to base them upon other than him saying so. His kickoff ad is either downright dishonest, or just sloppy. Either one hardly qualifies him to represent anyone.

Demos uses campaign material from incumbent Tim Bishop, an odd source for a Republican, to attack Randy Altschuler who was the Republican nominee against Bishop in 2010. Demos also ran in the primary that year and lost to Altschuler by a wide margin. In the general election Altschuler lost by a whisker, in the closest Congressional race in the country that year.

The video that Demos chose to use was selectively edited. The issue that both Demos and Bishop are trying to run on is Mr. Altschuler’s founding of a business, Office Tiger, that provided back office services to other companies. Some of the work was done overseas, some in the U.S. The video shows Mr. Altschuler talking about some overseas locations, but where he speaks of talent in the U.S. that is edited from the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9A8v8RdMgA

Neither Bishop nor Demos mention that when Altschuler started Office Tiger in 1999, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 4.2%. That is not an environment with a lot of idle workers standing around. Bishop and Demos want to plant the seed in the minds of voters, who are suffering through the longest period of 8%+ unemployment since the Great Depression, that it is not Obama’s and Bishop’s dismal performance ruining the economy but “outsourcers” who are causing the problem. When Altschuler later sold the company in 2005, the unemployment rate was 5.08%, still rather low. Altschuler then went on to found Cloud Blue, creating more jobs in the U.S., by recycling old technology gear.

So what is Demos’ claim to fame as “the only true conservative?” He has worked as a government lawyer at the SEC. The SEC you may recall could not bring down Bernie Madoff although for ten years an individual named Harry Markopolous practically delivered evidence wrapped up with a bow that Madoff was a fraud. The SEC was also noted for staff that was spending their days looking at pornography on government computers. It was also alleged that Demos had outed a whistleblower at JP Morgan, although the third Judicial District  found an “insufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

So where is all the evidence of Demos’ conservative credentials? Has he created any jobs? Worked for any period of time in the private sector? In these tough economic times what experience does Demos have that indicates he has solutions to our problems? The Republican Party, the Conservative Party, the Independence Party, and many Tea Party groups have endorsed Randy Altschuler.

Demos on the other hand takes a doctored video from a Democrat and uses it to attack a Republican, a direct violation of Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. He calls himself a winner and Altschuler a loser. Replacing one government employee for another hardly sounds like bold thinking, when most of our issues are government created. However, replacing a government backbencher with someone who grew up in a household headed by a single mother, secured a good education, started a couple of companies, is the kind of breath of fresh air we need in Washington.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

A funny thing happened as Congressman Tim Bishop tries to manufacture a campaign issue. The very thing he is fighting about, we learn that the government has been underwriting with taxpayer dollars.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a program to train people in Sri Lanka high-tech IT skills so that they could better compete in the world economy. Needless to say, such competition would come at the expense of American workers. As a free marketer, I don’t have a problem with private enterprises investing their own money any where they want to. I have a big problem with using taxpayer dollars to train foreigners to take away American jobs.

My first problem is with the morality of taking taxpayer dollars to help take away taxpayer jobs. My second problem is that I don’t find a right to do that anywhere in the Constitution. To his credit Tim Bishop in 2010 fought to stop the program.

In 2010, Bishop compelled USAID to abandon a high-tech training program for outsourcing industry workers in Sri Lanka, with the agency committing to “conduct a review to ensure the project will not take any jobs away from Americans.”

Note the year. Tim Bishop has been in Congress since 2002. This program came to light as a result of investigative reporting by Information Week magazine, in August of 2010. What else was happening in the fall of 2010? Tim Bishop was running for reelection against Randy Altschuler who started a business and later sold it that provided business services to companies with employees in the US and overseas. Bishop won by a whisker, but the outsourcing angle is his last, best hope for his rematch with Altschuler.

The problem is that Congress holds the purse strings and this program could not have been funded without Congress’ approval. What did Tim Bishop know and when did he know it? If he argues he was unaware of the program the question becomes, is the federal government that Tim Bishop loathes shrinking, too big for Congress to properly oversee? If Tim Bishop did know about it, why didn’t he stop it earlier or prevent it from being funded in the first place?

I am reminded of that famous scene in the movie Casablanca, where Claude Rains professes to be “shocked, SHOCKED,” that gambling is going on in the back room as member of the club’s staff comes out to hand him his gambling winnings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM_A4Skusro

Now it turns out a new program has been launched by the Obama administration (again USAID) to train people in the Philippines to speak better English to prepare them for better jobs, such as in outsourced call centers. This is what President Obama said at an insourcing summit:

 ”My message to business leaders today is simple. Ask yourself what you can do to bring jobs back to the country that made our success possible. And I’m going to do everything in my power to help you do it.”

Really? But is anyone surprised that this president says one thing while doing the exact opposite? President Obama and Tim Bishop bailed out GM, which then immediately turned around and increased offshore production.

Instead of funding the training of people in other countries to compete for American jobs, perhaps the focus should be on revising our tax code so that the US doesn’t have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which makes it attractive to locate operations overseas in the first place. The tax code also traps profits from those operations overseas so that it makes sense for businesses to expand those operations overseas rather than bring the money back to the US (where it will get taxed more as soon as it arrives) to expand here.

Just more hypocrisy from the big government crowd. They don’t fix problems. They screw the American people coming and going. It’s time for a change.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

I just got my latest e-mail update from Congressman Tim Bishop and one cannot help but just shake his head. He leads off by mentioning his bogus survey, and tells the reader how (surprise!) people are concerned about taxes. Of course that is when Tim Bishop loses his way again.

You see Tim Bishop is a big supporter of the payroll tax cut. He is also a big supporter of big spending and big government. So let’s examine this closely. What is the purpose of the payroll tax? In the structure of the great Ponzi scheme that it is, the payroll tax goes to fund Social Security checks and Medicare. So a payroll tax takes away revenue from these programs. To put it another way, Tim Bishop is saying, “Let’s raid the piggy bank of today’s retirees and hand the bill to our children and grand children.” They will have to pay more than they did before because not only must they support the baby boomers who are now retiring they will have to make up the shortfall from this cut in funding. Tim Bishop is actually bragging about this.

Class Warfare

He then goes into the class warfare riff, about how nobody likes to pay taxes, that Republicans want to balance the budget on the backs of middle class taxpayers, etc. Okay, let’s talk about fairness. How fair is it that 47% of income earners pay no income tax? How politically dangerous would it be if that number increases to greater than 50%, such that the majority of voters pay no taxes, but the minority is demanded to pay more? Is that fair? Is that America?

“That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.” – James Madison, March 29, 1792, Essay on Property

But who do you want to believe? James Madison, the father of the Constitution, or Tim Bishop? It is income taxes, not payroll taxes, that go to the funding of the federal government. Tim Bishop attacks any curtailment of income taxes but makes not a peep about curtailment of runaway spending. No, we need to spend more on Solyndra, on bailouts, on Fannie and Freddie, on the Department of Education! We need to tax, tax, tax, he says.

He then attacks the Ryan budget. This is from a man whose party has not passed a budget, as required by law, in the Senate in nearly three years. This is from a man whose party leader, the president, has seen his budget go down in  a Democrat controlled senate 97-0, and he attacks Paul Ryan’s plan? What’s Tim Bishop’s plan? Oh, that’s right, stop the outsourcing of call centers overseas. That will get the economy humming.

He specifically attacks broadening the tax base.

“Base-broadening” is a Washington term for eliminating some of the credits and deductions that help middle-class families own a home, send their children to college, and afford healthcare.

No, Tim, broadening the tax base means getting more people into the workforce as taxpayers. Get it? Broadening the base, not squeezing more out of it. After squandering nearly a trillion dollars on the stimulus that promised us unemployment would not rise above 8%, it has not been below 8% since then. That is the worst record since the Great Depression, but of course that was all Bush’s fault.

It’s time to realize the hope and change experiment is over. It is time to get back to the principles of the founders which make this country great for over two centuries. It’s time to get rid of the politicians who keep throwing sand in the gears in the form of mountains of regulations. It is time to shrink government back to where it protected our rights and liberties rather than took them away to substitute them with the collective wisdom of politicians like Tim Bishop.

Tim Bishop says we need more spending, more stimulus, more debt, no solutions. I say, no more. 2012, the end of an error.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

It the last few days we have heard President Obama ranting about the Supreme Court. This is not anything new. You may also recall his unprecedented calling out of the Supreme Court as the justices sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech attacking them over the Citizens United v FEC case.

The Great Reconciler has also done this in other venues. After Paul Ryan released his budget last year, President Obama invited him to a speech on the budget and with Ryan sitting there devoted his speech attacking the Ryan plan. Very classy. Is this what we hoped and changed for?

Obama and the Constitution

What is most disturbing to me is what Obama is saying about the Supreme Court’s role with regard to the Constitution. What he is saying is approaching downright ignorance and yet he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. What did he teach his students? Where are these students today? Are they some sort of Manchurian Candidates to be unleashed with their own new-found ignorance upon us as lawyers and judges? Are we watching a bad science fiction movie?

‘I am confident,” announced the president of the United States, “that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” – President Barack Obama, earlier this week.

Unprecedented? What exactly is unprecedented? What is extraordinary? Striking down a law? That capability of the Supreme Court was established by the Marbury v Madison  case in 1803. One hundred fifty-eight acts of Congress have been overturned by the Supreme Court since Marbury. Sounds like a lot of precedent to me.

A strong majority? ObamaCare was passed by a margin of 219 to 212. What would a weak majority be? Actually, since we often hear our liberal friends cry out for bipartisanship, let me point out that there was bipartisan opposition to ObamaCare. Every Republican and thirty-four Democrats voted against it. Only Democrats voted for it.

Passed by a democratically elected Congress? Is there another kind of Congress than a democratically elected one? Also, in order for a review by the Supreme Court, a law by definition has to be passed by Congress. Otherwise it is just a bill and has no effect on anyone. Doesn’t constitutional law professor Barack Obama know any of this? Isn’t he embarrassed to be saying such things? It is clear that most American citizens, sixty-seven percent by some polls, think the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Do they understand the Constitution better than a man who took an oath to preserve, protect and defend it?

I think an effort should be made to find every student who sat in one of Barack Obama’s constitutional law classes. Give them a test on their comprehension of the Constitution. If they fail, force the University of Chicago to refund their tuition for that course and send them to take Hillsdale College’s Constitution 101. It’s a free ten week course and perhaps the students can help out by donating their refunded tuition money to Hillsdale.

We should all be very concerned that this kind of thinking is being taught in our law schools and will one day come back to destroy the Constitution. Some on the left are trying to call any invalidating of ObamaCare as judicial activism on the right. Adhering to the founding principles and the original intent behind the Constitution is not activism, it is the sworn duty of the justices. If you want to know what activism sounds like, go no further than the words of Associate Justice and former chief counsel of the ACLU Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the court should do a “salvage job,” not undertake a “wrecking operation.”

It is judicial activism for the court to try to salvage Congress’ work. It violates the separation of powers. It is the job of the judiciary to interpret the law not make the law. If they interpret the law to be unconstitutional it is not their job to fix it. That’s Congress’ responsibility, but Ginsburg knows full well that the Congress that passed this monstrosity isn’t there any more and will not be there again any time soon. There is a new Congress that was swept in, to a large extent based on the outrage over ObamaCare. Ginsburg is afraid that if the Supreme Court doesn’t salvage it, sending it back to Congress would put the final nail in the coffin. RIP.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

When you try to manufacture a campaign issue it requires some deception and in the more extreme cases outright lies. This is because the truth doesn’t have to be manufactured. It stands tall on its own.

As Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That’s what the left is banking on. So let’s dig a little deeper into the hearings at the center of the controversy.

House Oversight Committee Hearing

Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa, scheduled a hearing on religious liberty in the face of the ObamaCare mandate requiring the purchase of contraceptives by all employers regardless of their own religious beliefs. It is customary for the minority party (Democrats at this time) to choose one witness. The Democrats chose Barry Lynn and Sandra Fluke. Byron York of the Examiner provides some detail.

“The Democrats played games with us the day before [the hearing],” says a Republican committee source.  “After days of asking for a witness, they waited until the last-minute, the afternoon before the hearing.  They asked us to invite Rev. Barry Lynn [head of Americans United for Separation of Church and State] and Ms. Fluke.  We said we’ll invite one, per standard procedure.  We formally invited Rev. Lynn, and the Democrats, at 4:30 pm, changed their mind and said they wanted Fluke.  We said too late.  They told Rev. Lynn not to show up the next day.”

Issa explained that Democrats had requested Barry Lynn, that Lynn was invited, and that Democrats then retracted the Lynn request.  As for Fluke, Issa said Republicans had never heard of the Democrats’ last-minute choice.  “I asked our staff what is her background, what has she done,” Issa said at the hearing.  “They did the usual that we do when we’re not provided the three days and the forms to go with it. They did a Google search. They looked and found that she was, in fact, and is a college student who appears to have become energized over this issue and participated in approximately a 45-minute press conference…I cannot and will not arbitrarily take a majority or minority witness if they do not have the appropriate credentials, both for a hearing at the full committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and if we cannot vet them in a timely fashion.”

Barry Lynn is both a lawyer and holds a degree in theology. He is an author, radio host, frequent television commentator, and he has held senior positions at the national level for the United Church and the ACLU. I would probably agree little with Rev. Lynn, but you can’t argue he has credentials. Who is Sandra Fluke? She is a law student, not a lawyer; she was president of a college club that advocated “reproductive justice.” How does that fit in with a hearing on religious liberty. It doesn’t and the Democrats don’t care.

When the hearing began, the Democrats attacked the Republicans. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked, “Where are the women?” There were two panels that day, which according to my sources is typical when more than four people testifying. The second panel had two women on it. My source also tells me that the witness list was released a week before the hearing so either Rep. Maloney was deceitful or she doesn’t know what is going on in the committee she is a member of.  I am sure if pressed, Rep. Maloney would say, there were no women on the panel in front of me. But it is all part of the big lie, it was done for the cameras and the sound bite.

Since their plan to put on Sandra Fluke failed, they staged their own show.

Steering and Policy Committee

The Steering and Policy Committee is the committee that actually had Sandra Fluke address them on February 23. The purpose of the Steering and Policy Committee is to assign fellow party members to other House committees, and it also advises party leaders on policy. It is chaired by Nancy Pelosi. What does anything that Sandra Fluke has to say have to do with assigning party members to other committees or advising party leaders on policy. Nancy Pelosi policy on ObamaCare was clear, “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in the bill.” She didn’t do any fact-finding then, and she isn’t interested in facts now. It was all a show, and it was all for what is popularly called the “optics”.

Who Is Sandra Fluke?

Sandra Fluke is an attractive, clean-cut, woman who is poised in this setting. She is thirty years old, and she has been a left-wing advocate, so she provides the right look for the ensuing sound bites. She provides the right optics.

Before going to Georgetown Ms. Fluke researched the University’s health care policies and learned that they did not provide contraceptive coverage. She enrolled anyway and started working to overturn that policy. In her opening remarks she confidently states that President Obama’s policy “adjustment” of paying out of the left pocket instead of the right “addresses any potential conflict.” That’s another lie. It does not address large institutions that are also self insured, but that doesn’t matter, the narrative must go on; the campaign issue must be built. Just steamroll any real concerns of the other side.

While trying to defend ObamaCare her opening exposes the major problem with it when she says contraception can cost $3,000 during law school. President Obama and the woman sitting in front of Ms. Fluke, Nancy Pelosi, told us how ObamaCare was going to control costs. A quick check on the internet reveals that contraception can be purchased for about half of what Fluke says, but if someone else is paying for it, why would you bother to check? It was probably unintentional but she blew a hole in the theory that ObamaCare will save money. It won’t.

She scrupulously avoids talking about her personal behavior but talks about other women and friends. That is the trap Rush Limbaugh fell into by characterizing a behavior to her that she didn’t discuss. It was out-of-bounds for him to do so, and the Democrats, ever anxious to keep the discussion away from the real issues have made this a major focus.

Why didn’t she talk about herself? I don’t care about her activities, but everything she said was hearsay. Who were these other women? She didn’t give their names. How can we verify their stories? Do they really exist? Why didn’t they come and testify themselves? Wouldn’t it be more compelling to have a first hand account. Yes, but consider the optics. What if they were not as polished? What if they felt foolish trying to go in front of Congress to discuss a $10 item?

She talked about the financial burden of buying contraceptives, but said nothing about the financial burden of college tuition which is thirty times more. What do you think is causing these students a financial strain, tuition or contraception?

She talked about clinics being unable to meet the “crushing demand” for contraceptives. Why not set up a charity that progressives can contribute to that would provide more funds? If given a choice if they would underwrite what Ms. Fluke is advocating, would they? Nancy Pelosi is a multi-millionaire. Wouldn’t it help her cause if she wrote a big six figure check to kick it off?

She then brought out the campaign theme that any restrictions on what is decided between a woman and her doctor is “policing her body.” She said that 65% of students were “interrogated” about the need for contraceptives for non-birth control purposes. Maybe it’s time for a brief recap. We are talking about a $10-$15 item. One story she relates is about a woman who finds out at the pharmacy counter that her health plan doesn’t cover her contraceptives and has to turn away. Really? How about not having two cups of Starbucks this week so you have contraceptives for a month? For a $10 item you are going to sit through an interrogation? How about giving up your iPhone for a cheaper model? These are law students she is talking about at a prestigious university and they can’t figure out how to come up with $10? How about asking your boyfriend to help? Why not ask mom and dad? Why raise taxes on some poor guy who is not going to Georgetown law to pay for your $10 contraceptive while he is trying to live from paycheck to paycheck and take care of his own family?

There is no free lunch, Sandra. If you don’t pay someone else has to. You can say Georgetown can afford it! Maybe so, but they have to find a way. What do you suggest? Raise tuition? Lay off a maintenance worker or a receptionist? Cut back on scholarships, so that you don’t have to come up with $10 on your climb to the 1% club once you get out of Georgetown.

Fair and Balanced?

Where are the other women, Leader Pelosi, who don’t agree with Sandra Fluke. Why didn’t you ask fellow Georgetown student Angela Morabito testify? Because lies don’t like sunshine and fresh air.

The lie has been crafted. It’s about policing a woman’s body. It is being packaged. It is being taken on the road at The View, she has been on NBC news three times, and she received a phone call from President Obama. Are you going to be taken by the lie?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

After watching my government denying Catholic institutions the ability to act in accordance with religious teachings, I was struck by the irony that is developing.

Rights are discovered in language apparently hidden in the text of the Constitution and which can only be discovered by intellectual elites in robes, you know, like The DaVinci Code.  Meanwhile, rights expressed in plain English in the Constitution are considered null by government fiat. For instance, although few would relish taking on the argument that the poor have no right to a free attorney, there is no language to that effect in the Constitution. The word Miranda is not in the Constitution either. Nor is its thesis, upon which a generation of law enforcement officers have operated under its limitations.  Neither is the word privacy, nor even the concept of privacy explicit in the document.  They were fabricated by robed and bespectacled people, out of the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteeing that no person will be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Therein lies at least one tragic irony: the right of privacy, a word not found in the Constitution, of a pregnant woman guarantees her right to kill the woman in her womb, but the right to life for that unborn woman, which was the explicit language upon which the right to privacy is founded is rendered invisible. Another irony is the theory that a criminal has been denied his rights if he fails to acknowledge that he understand his rights. In other words, it’s our responsibility to teach him his rights before he can be considered fully vested in the franchise.

But this post is fundamentally about the invasion on the free exercise of religion by people who reject lifestyles which have been considered sinful in their religious scriptures, consciousness and preaching for millennia.  Indeed that same belief system formed the very foundation of the values upon which the Founders of this nation acted. The free exercise of religious beliefs has always been a major hallmark of American liberty, yet the practice is suddenly and inconveniently at odds with Obamacare, which requires religious institutions to violate their own teachings in the name of a government program foisted upon them by legislative fiat. This assault on religious liberty is being perpetrated with distressing alacrity by the Obama administration, and the aggression is manifest in the voices of his surrogates and sycophants.

The words of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union Address outlining his “Second Bill of Rights” (rights he invented but those not found in the Constitution), calling for government guaranteed employment, retirement, food, housing, education, health care and more recently free cell phones makes it abundantly clear the agenda at play, and here it is: keep calling these things “rights”, pay for them, and then after a generation or two they become known as “fundamental”, meaning they are just assumed to exist.

In fact it seems any more that rights today are not rights unless the government pays for them.  And remember, if government can give you rights, then government can also take them away.  Why would our society want to empower government with that authority?

What did Ben Franklin say? “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” After all, when the government pays for things they are declaring themselves the guardian of those rights, indeed?  To whom else do we turn as the protector and guarantor of our rights any more, but the government?  If the government is the guarantor, they are the keeper and the arbiter of those rights…right?

Well okay then. I declare that the government has to buy me a gun. I can’t afford one, and it’s in black and white in the Constitution. If you don’t read me my rights, you deny me my rights. If you don’t pay for an abortion you deny my right to have one (for my sex partner of course). If you don’t provide me a job, you are denying my right to work. You are violating my rights if you don’t provide me free food, free housing, free cell phones and a free education. None of these are specifically mentioned in the Constitution. But the right to keep and bear arms is there in glorious black and white. Fine, I’ll take a Smith and Wesson .357 King Cobra with a 6” barrel.  Oh yeah, make that nickel-plated with a contoured grip please.  Rosewood will be fine.  I’m not sure I will be able to understand my rights fully if I only own one firearm, so I’ll let you know if that adequately fulfills my rights or not. I’m not sure my privacy is fully protected if I don’t have a shotgun too.

The Obama administration is single-handedly bringing back manufacturing in America, by facilitating the manufacturing of rights that are not in the Constitution, and confiscating the taxes of working Americans to pay for them, to wit Obamacare. He said he was “proud” of Sandra Fluke. Well this one is a no-brainer, and an ironic one at that.

Sandra Fluke is a Georgetown Law student for whom Nancy Pelosi set up a media event to try to propagate the lie that conservatives want to block women’s access to contraceptives, rather than the truth that this would be forcing American taxpayers to pay for other’s recreational sex. Rush Limbaugh put it in much stronger terms and later apologized for those remarks. Advertisers like Carbonite pulled their advertising from Limbaugh’s radio program and Carbonite’s CEO  David Friend encouraged others to do the same.

My friend Ben Howe goes into more detail here and points out the hypocrisy that the left gets a pass no matter how ugly they get with their discourse. The following is a letter sent to Mr. Friend. If you agree, feel free to tweet, Facebook, copy, to anyone you know who uses Carbonite. If you disagree, feel free to comment below.

March 4, 2012

David Friend

Co-Founder and CEO

Carbonite

177 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02115

 

Dear Mr. Friend,

 

I read about your intention to pull your advertising from the Rush Limbaugh show due to his remarks about Sandra Fluke while lobbying for free contraceptives.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the primary reason for a woman to use contraceptives is so that she can have sex without getting pregnant. To need $3,000 worth of contraceptives would suggest that the individual plans on having a lot of sex. According to the American Heritage Dictionary:

Slut n. 1.a. A woman considered sexually promiscuous.

Was Mr. Limbaugh’s choice of words excessive? I would say so. However the subject was sex and contraception. Could he have used words more artfully to make the same point? I would say yes.

That brings me to another program that you sponsor, The Ed Schultz Show. On Schultz’s show he called conservative commentator Laura Ingraham a right wing slut. Let me quote Mr. Schultz. “But you know what they’re talking about: Like this right wing slut. What’s her name Laura Ingraham? Yeah, she’s a talk slut…”

Where’s the outrage there Mr. Friend? Is it acceptable to you to call a professional woman a slut if it is merely a pejorative? How is it overstepping any reasonable bounds of decency to refer to a woman who is lobbying for free contraceptives, a woman considered sexually promiscuous, but perfectly fine as a smear for someone’s opinion you disagree with?

Why haven’t you pulled your advertising from that cretin’s show? As I am a strong believer in liberty, I say you have a right to purchase advertising time anywhere you wish. Similarly, I can buy whatever products that I wish and when my Carbonite subscription expires, I will not be renewing it if you place on the same playing field a somewhat crude but not inaccurate term to describe one woman with a baseless slur of another.

As you have encouraged your fellow advertisers to withdraw their ads, I will encourage my network of contacts to dump your product “to contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”

 

Sincerely yours,

William R. O’Connell