With the Supreme Court hearing the Obamacare case this spring, it’s unlikely we’ll see the administration admitting that swaths of the law were not thought through very well. However, we will see attempts to make the public think the administration is willing to compromise on certain aspects of the law’s implementation. These give-and-takes are carefully calculated so they result in… the exact same law being implemented. But as far as concessions go, even the most merciful and caring administration in history has to draw the line somewhere.

From Fox News:

Despite renewed statements of concern by Catholic leaders, the Obama administration is done negotiating and will finalize its plan requiring insurance companies to provide free contraception to women working and studying at religious institutions, President Obama’s chief of staff said Sunday.

Jacob Lew told “Fox News Sunday” that the compromise offered last week to address objections by the Catholic Church is clear and consistent with the president’s “very deep belief that a woman has a right to all forms of preventive health care, including contraception.”

“We have set out our policy,” Lew said. “We are going to finalize it in the final rules, but I think what the president announced on Friday is a balanced approach that meets the concerns raised both in terms of access to health care and in terms of protecting religious liberties, and we think that’s the right approach.”

Lost in the mix here seems to be the point that the administration doesn’t have the authority to do any of this in the first place, which is why it’s important reject the entire premise and not validate the effort by accepting any “revised compromise.” Assume somebody says they’re going to take four of my cookies, and I say they have no right to do that. Then they say they’re willing to compromise and only take two cookies, and I reluctantly agree. Either way I’ve admitted that they have a right to reach into my cookie jar, so before I know it there won’t be any cookies left… at which point I’ll be told it was for my own good because I needed to lose a few pounds anyway.

Obama telegraphed where he’d be coming from on this (and related) issues in a 2008 speech making it clear which side must come out on top in a dispute between the State and the Church in order for society as a whole to be better off:

Background: Obama’s fraudulent abortion mandate accommodation

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Scott Walker: Big Labor won’t break me.

Bobby Jindal: Louisiana won’t forget Obama’s jackboot-ism.

Sarah Palin: I know you want me.

***

Yesterday: CPAC speeches in 20 words.

The State Department’s previous warning from last April advised against travel to all or part of ten states in Mexico. In the new warning, the number of states has increased by four:

Americans should avoid all but essential travel to all or parts of 14 Mexican states, the U.S. State Department warns as violence has spread.

Shootouts, kidnappings and carjackings have climbed, as have cartels, also known as transnational criminal organizations (TCO), the State Department said this week in a broadened travel warning.

While millions of U.S. citizens safely visit Mexico every year, the country’s ongoing violence and security concerns pose risks for U.S. citizens, and travelers should take precautions, the State Department advises.

No matter where you’re traveling in Mexico, the State Department recommends that you “lower your profile and avoid displaying any evidence of wealth that might draw attention.” It’s the same advice State gives to Wall Street millionaires planning on walking through “Occupy” encampments.

This map really puts the scope of the problem in perspective (h/t Tammy Bruce and Gretawire):

If you’re not good at reading maps, just remember that it’s like choosing which wine to have with fish: Avoid the red.

Doug Ross:

Say, I’ve got an idea! Let’s have the ATF deliver thousands of weapons to the Mexican drug cartels. Maybe that will help!

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The “global warming will cause a chocolate shortage” scare tactic isn’t entirely new, but apparently spreading the rumor that a Whitman’s Sampler will cost as much as a Chevy Volt within a decade if developed countries don’t give trillions of dollars to the United Nations wasn’t causing sufficient truffle panic among the general public. Now, a slightly altered tactic: Do it Al Gore’s way or Valentine’s Day as we know it might cease to exist:

A new mini-report from the environmental group Climate Nexus points out that climate change is poised to wreck Valentine’s Day, or at least change it significantly, by threatening chocolate production.

That’s right. Global warming is very bad for chocolate.

As reported by The Times, research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture found last year that as temperatures rise, the principal growing regions for cocoa could shrink, especially in Ghana and Ivory Coast, the sources of half the world’s supply. Production could fall off dramatically by 2050, making cocoa less available and more expensive.

Cupid’s lament.

The story doesn’t say this, but if you notice your chocolates starting to melt, take them to the Himalayas — there’s still plenty of ice there.

Isn’t chocolate high in calories and fat? If anything, global warming should be endorsed by the “Let’s Move” campaign and everybody should be encouraged to fire up their SUVs and gas powered leaf blowers to help win the battle against obesity.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Some of you might be familiar with Cassy Fiano, a writer/blogger I’ve gotten to know over the years. Cassy’s husband is in the US Marine Corps and is currently serving in Afghanistan. It’s through them that I became aware of, and have taken part in, the Project Valour-IT fundraisers (which Michelle has also been involved with).

Recently Cassy and her husband got some troubling news: Their unborn son has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. Cassy has written about it in her latest column, Choosing Life and Beating the Odds: Accepting Down Syndrome.

My wife and I have friends who have a similar story. Their son was born a couple of years ago and all I can say is they’ve never once regretted their decision (like Cassy, the alternative was never an option for them), and they can’t imagine their lives without him.

If a society is indeed judged by how it treats its most helpless, people like Cassy, her husband, friends of my family and countless others out there who choose life are reasons to remain optimistic about our future.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Mitt Romney: I am not a liberal.

Rick Santorum: I am not Mitt/Newt.

Ron Paul: I am not at CPAC.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is underway in Washington, DC. Naturally, OWS protesters are there to greet conference-goers and to roll out a welcome mat made of astroturf.

Michelle Fields from the Daily Caller caught up with a demonstrator who claims he’s being paid. Not only does the guy in the video below say that a union local is paying him $60 a day to “Occupy” CPAC, but he also claims everybody in his group is being paid.

Some are clueless as to what it is they’re protesting (note: if the video below isn’t loading try this link):

Does $60 a day meet or exceed Occupy’s “living wage” demand?

If you’re in need of a little cheap afternoon entertainment, check out Jim Treacher’s Occupy CPAC Hippiecam.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

With its unconstitutional, coercive, discriminatory Obamacare abortion mandate under fire, the White House announced…nothing today. A supposed “accommodation” to the policy will result in no compromise in the impact of the HHS edict forcing religiously affiliated health care providers and employers to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives, abortifacients, and related services that violate the religious principles and freedom of the mandate’s targets.

In fact, close observers say today’s announcement will make things worse.

The deets:

With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups. The move, based on state models, will almost certainly not satisfy bishops and other religious leaders since it will preserve the goal of women employees having their birth control fully covered by health insurance.

Sources say it will be respectful of religious beliefs but will not back off from that goal, which many religious leaders oppose since birth control is in violation of their religious beliefs.

White House officials are likening it to the so-called Hawaii compromise.

Phony baloney, say Catholic bishops:

It’s difficult to know what people may mean by the “Hawaii compromise.” But a central feature of the Hawaii law is that every religious organization that is eligible for the exemption has to instruct all employees in how they can access all methods of contraception and sterilization locally “in an expeditious manner.”

Just a few days ago the White House was saying that this is just about coverage, that no one has to be involved in getting people to the actual services they object to. It would be no improvement to say: “Sure, you don’t have to include the coverage, you just have to send all your lay employees and women religious to the local Planned Parenthood clinic.” The Administration’s press release of January 20 hinted at such a requirement.

That would not be a compromise. In some ways it would be worse.

As usual, this defiant administration keeps digging itself deeper.

***

The Hill calls Obama’s announcement a “retreat.”

The White House will announce a retreat from its controversial rule requiring religious organizations like charities and hospitals to include contraception in their healthcare plans.

President Obama has come under heavy criticism from the Catholic Church and other religious organizations, Republicans and even some Democrats over the issue, and Vice President Biden has suggested a compromise could be worked out.

A White House official on Friday confirmed an announcement on changing the rule would be made Friday. The White House is referring to the change as an accommodation.

It’s not a retreat. It’s a re-trick.

It’s not an accommodation. It’s an abomination.

***

Update 11am Weekly Standard reporter John McCormak is on a conference call with White House officials providing background on the policy head fake.

He tweets…

Sr. admin off.: “the insurance company, not the hospital, not the charity will be required to reach out” to women to provide contraception

To clarify, religious groups have to contract with INSURERS who do offer the pills, then the insurers offers free pills to women.

Update 12:26pm EST – From his brief press conference, Obama attacks “cynical” opponents of abortion mandate. He says “principle” of “access to free preventative care including contraceptive services” will stand.

“Religious liberty will be protected.” Translation: You’re still screwed.

***

Update: On Fox News, Kathleen The Shredder Sebelius attempts to defend the policy as a “no-cost strategy” by citing “actuaries” who claim that contraceptive coverage will actually “save money.”

You know who she’s citing? The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

She repeatedly invokes “women’s health” to defend the edict.

Sanger’s grim reapers have the rhetoric down pat.

***

More from Steven Ertelt at Life News: Pro-Life Advocates Blast Revised Obama Pro-Abortion Mandate:

Jonathan Imbody, Vice President for Government Relations for the Christian Medical Association, called the revisions “offering a distinction without a difference to mute opposition.”

He said the revision fits a pattern of contempt for conscience that includes how Obama “has gutted the only federal regulation protecting the exercise of conscience in health care, denied of federal grant funds for aiding human trafficking victims because a faith-based organization refused to participate in abortion; lobbied the Supreme Court to restrict faith-based organizations’ hiring rights; and issued a coercive contraceptive mandate that imposes the government’s abortion ideology on every American.”

‘To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit’
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

If you aren’t creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren’t listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up.

When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of “increased access” to “reproductive services” for “poor” women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling.

As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 “to stop the multiplication of the unfit.” This, she boasted, would be “the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.” While she oversaw the mass murder of black babies, Sanger cynically recruited minority activists to front her death racket. She conspired with eugenics financier and businessman Clarence Gamble to “hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities” to sell their genocidal policies as community health and welfare services.

Outright murder wouldn’t sell. But wrapping it under the egalitarian cloak of “women’s health” — and adorning it with the moral authority of black churches — would. Sanger and Gamble called their deadly campaign “The Negro Project.”

In other writings, historian Mike Perry found, Sanger attacked programs that provided “medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers” because they “facilitate the function of maternity” when “the absolute necessity is to discourage it.” In an essay included in her writing collection held by the Library of Congress, Sanger urged her abortion clinic colleagues to “breed a race of thoroughbreds.” Nationwide “birth control bureaus” would propagate the proper “science of breeding” to stop impoverished, non-white women from “breeding like weeds.”

Speaking with CBS veteran journalist Mike Wallace in 1957, long after her racist views had supposedly mellowed, Sanger again revealed her true colors: “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world — that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit.”

Sanger also elaborated on her anti-Catholic animus, telling one of Wallace’s reporters that New York Catholics had no right to protest the use of their tax dollars for birth city birth-control programs: “(I)t’s not only wrong, it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control — even among its own members.” When Wallace pressed her (“In other words, you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs in a certain sense?”), Sanger laughed nervously and disavowed the remarks.

Fast forward: Five decades and 16 million aborted black babies later, Planned Parenthood’s insidious agenda has migrated from inner-city “birth control bureaus” to public school-based health clinics to the White House — forcibly funded with taxpayer dollars just as Sanger championed.

Several undercover stings by Live Action, pro-life documentarians, have exposed Planned Parenthood staff accepting donations over the years from callers posing as eugenics cheerleaders who wanted to earmark their contributions for the cause of aborting minority babies. “We can definitely designate it for an African-American,” a Tulsa, Okla., Planned Parenthood employee eagerly promised.

What has cheap, easy and unmonitored “choice” for poor women in inner cities wrought? Nightmares like the Philadelphia Horror, where serial baby-killer Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic death squad oversaw the systematic execution of hundreds of healthy, living, breathing, squirming, viable black and Hispanic babies over 4 decades — along with several minority mothers who may have lost their lives in his grimy birth control bureau.

City and state authorities looked the other way while jars of baby parts and reports of botched abortions and infanticides piled up. Beltway Democrats who now bray about their concern for “women’s health” were silent about the Gosnell massacre and countless others like it in America’s ghettos. Why?

The Obama administration is crawling with the modern-day heirs of the eugenics movement, from Planned Parenthood golden girl Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services to the president’s prestigious science czar John Holdren — an outspoken proponent of forced abortions and mass sterilizations and a self-proclaimed protege of eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.

Brown envisioned a government regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.” He urged readers to “reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”

Listen carefully as this White House dresses its Obamacare abortion mandate in the white lab coat of “reproductive services” for all. The language of “access to birth control” is the duplicitous code of Sanger’s ideological grim reapers.

In the past few months and years, President Obama has castigated Super PACs. Obama has said “you can’t be against Super PACs one day and for them the next,” and he’s referred to 527s as a “threat to democracy.”

Fortunately, Nancy Pelosi is here to help explain why these same threats to democracy, when reluctantly utilized by the pure of heart in emergency situations, can also be used to help preserve democracy.

Here’s a brief transcript of Pelosi’s explanation by way of The Right Scoop:

The president made a decision which I think was a wise one that he was not going to unilaterally disarm and leave the field to the Koch brothers to decide who would be POTUS and who would control the Congress.

Maybe Pelosi’s right — it’s straight from Sun Tzu: “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.” Of course, they didn’t have Super PACs in Sun Tzu’s day, which might explain why the book isn’t called “The Art of Hypocrisy”:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

If you outlaw throwing footballs on the beach, only outlaws will throw footballs on the beach:

The Board of Supervisors this week agreed to raise fines to up to $1,000 for anyone who throws a football or a Frisbee on any beach in Los Angeles County.

In passing the 37-page ordinance (PDF) on Tuesday, officials sought to outline responsibilities for law enforcement and other public agencies while also providing clarification on beach-goer activities that could potentially disrupt or even injure the public.

The updated rules now prohibit “any person to cast, toss, throw, kick or roll” any object other than a beach ball or volleyball “upon or over any beach” between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

My guess is that the Board of Supervisors, in an abundance of concern for the health of all beach-goers, is worried that overly active people throwing footballs and frisbees could eventually lead to an innocent bystander spilling his container of complimentary City of Los Angeles heroin needles all over the sand, where an illegal alien might then step on one — and that’s a risk that can’t be taken. Goodbye frisbees and footballs!

Digging holes in the sand over 18 inches deep is also prohibited — unless you’re filming a movie or TV show of course:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

The Right twittersphere has been buzzing for the past week about planned ambushes of CPAC 2012, the annual gathering of conservatives in D.C., by the Occupier mob. The conference kicks off today and every major Republican speaker has a giant target on his/her back — because every fame-seeker, troll, Michael Moore wannabe, and glitter-bomber will be looking to claim their 15 minutes of infamy.

Lachlan Markay at Heritage reported on the saboteurs’ schemes earlier this week:

During a Thursday meeting at McPherson Square, until Saturday the epicenter of the protests, Occupiers brainstormed tactics for shutting down or disrupting the conference, according to a source who was present at the meeting.

The protesters suggested pulling fire alarms in the hotel where the conference will take place, screaming “fire” during conference activities, “glitter-bombing” participants, cutting electrical power, and barricading entrances to the hotel, according to the source, who requested anonymity.

“Speakers will be physically assaulted, not just verbally confronted,” the source told Scribe in an email. Two Occupiers, who the source also identified as members of the New Black Panther Party, “said they would be disappointed if they didn’t get arrested and planned to ‘make it count.’”

The source quoted another protester as saying, “Mitt [Romney] has Secret Service now, but [Newt] Gingrich and [Andrew] Breitbart don’t,” seemingly suggesting that the latter two would not be as heavily guarded.

Protesters planned to conduct most of these activities on Saturday, the last day of the conference, so as not to overlap with the recently announced protests by labor groups on Thursday and Friday.

Labor Union Report has details of the Big Labor goons’ plans:

According to the AFL-CIO’s Washington DC Metro Council website, “Actions are currently being planned for noontime andafter work on Friday, February 10.”

Apparently, the unions plans to attempt to disrupt the conference with rats, puppets, and more:

WE’VE HEARD ENOUGH FROM THE 1%! Join the rally featuring tents, an inflatable fat cat, puppets, “candidate Walmart,” and more to LET THE VOICES OF THE 99% BE HEARD!

There is also a Facebook page for Occupy CPAC, posted by Change to Win staffer, Trina Tocco. It is important to note that Change to Win is the SEIU-led federation that broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005—which means both union federations are involved in planning the attacks on CPAC.

Alas, for a mountain of family obligations and other reasons, I won’t be at CPAC this year. But I’ve been there and done that with the ambushers. And my advice is simple:

Mockery is the best medicine.

If they bring the glitter, you bring the silly string.

When they scream and spit, spray Lysol.

When they make a mess, bar the door and don’t let them leave ’til they clean it up.

Then soldier on!

***

Flashback: The conservative bloggers who attended BlogCon in Denver earlier this year ably dispatched the Occupier mob with hilarious wit and political jujitsu.

***

Commenter squeaker1: A “Super-Soaker” filled with lightly perfumed water would work well on smelly protesters.

What’s a week without more suspicious Solyndra news? This should be enough to get us by until the inevitable almost weekly document dump that could come tomorrow.

From the Washington Times:

Fast running out of money, solar-panel maker Solyndra LLC last summer sold off nearly $60 million worth of inventory for less than $20 million in cash to a newly formed corporate entity closely tied to the company’s biggest investors, records show.

Backed by $535 million in federal loan guarantees but burning through the little cash it had left, Solyndra made its first sale in late July to a corporate entity that had been formed just a day earlier. Three more transactions followed over the next few weeks with the same buyer, Solyndra Solar II.
[...]
Todd Zywicki, bankruptcy professor at the George Mason University School of Law, said it’s not unusual for troubled companies to sell off assets to improve liquidity. But he said the inventory sales figure cited by Solyndra — $58.1 million in inventory for $17.5 million in cash — seems unusual.

“The test under the bankruptcy code is whether the sale was for reasonably equivalent value and selling inventory at such a huge discount raises real concerns,” he said. “If Solyndra Solar II is owned or controlled by any insiders or anything like that, then it becomes even more suspicious.”

No word on how much the whistling robots were re-sold for.

Would the aforementioned bankruptcy professor consider these to be “insiders”?

Solyndra Solar II was formed in Delaware by affiliates of Solyndra’s debtor in possession lender — investors Argonaut Private Equity and Madrone Capital Partners — as well as other debt holders, bankruptcy and government records show. Another special-purpose entity, Solyndra Solar LLC, was formed to purchase the company’s accounts receivable.

Argonaut is the investment arm of a foundation headed by billionaire Oklahoma businessman George Kaiser. Madrone Partners has ties to Wal-Mart’s Walton family.

The real test is to wait and see if Solyndra Solar II (Electric Boondoggleoo) sells that inventory for which they paid $17.5 million back to the government for ten times that amount so the Department of Energy can offer it to the next clean energy upstart taxpayers will be on the hook for and thus complete the “green jobs circle of life.”

Obviously glass tubes used in solar panels must have not been in demand during the resale process. Your tax dollars at work:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

I’m reserving any sense of closure on this craziness until convinced the 9th Circuit isn’t going to jump in at some point and not only reverse this decision, but make SeaWorld pay the orcas reparations.

From Fox News:

An effort to free whales from SeaWorld by claiming they were enslaved made a splash in the news but flopped in court Wednesday.

A federal judge in San Diego dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit seeking to grant constitutional protection against slavery to a group of orcas that perform at SeaWorld parks, saying the 13th amendment applies only to humans.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller stopped the case from proceeding two days after he became the first judge in U.S. history to listen to arguments in court over the possibility of granting constitutional rights for members of an animal species.

Here’s some news video. I predict that the final lawsuit revolving around this story has yet to be filed, and it will probably come from The Onion, which has a legitimate complaint for copyright infringement:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

I’ll give him this much: with or without a budget, they manage to find ways to spend almost equally irresponsibly, so maybe he’s onto something:

At a briefing with journalists on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Hoyer was asked, “Mr. Hoyer, around the same time of the State of the Union [on Jan. 24], I think it was the same day, Republicans were trying to hit Senate Democrats for 1,000 days without passing a budget, and then you talk about this milestone today, 400 days without a jobs bill in the Republican House. But then on Friday [Democratic Senator Harry] Reid said that he didn’t think they needed to bring a budget to the floor this year [and that] the Budget Control Act can serve as a guideline.”

Hoyer said: “What does the budget do? The budget does one thing and really only one thing: It sets the parameters of spending and discretionary caps. Other than that, the Appropriations committee are not bound by the Budget committee’s priorities.”

He continued: “The fact is, you don’t need a budget. We can adopt appropriations bills. We can adopt authorization policies without a budget. We already have an agreed-upon cap on spending.”

They don’t need a budget, and it shows:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe