politics

The Obama Administration grossly miscalculated the reaction that American Catholics would have to the new Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate requiring Catholic institutions such as schools, hospitals, and charities, to purchase health insurance that covers contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs–all of which are immoral according to Catholic teaching.

Stories in the Huffington Post and others covering the controversy are quick to point out that 98% percent of sexually active Catholic women have used birth control; whether these women are all actively practicing Catholics is not discussed.  Regardless, the point is moot.  The Catholic Church is a 2,000 year-old global institution; its orthodoxy is not governed by polling in the United States.  Further, the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  There is no stipulation saying, “unless Congress determines that some followers of that religion do not strictly adhere to all of that religion’s tenets.”  Many Jews do not keep kosher, so can Congress pass a law prohibiting those who do from continuing?

Catholics may disagree with the rules of the Church, as children at times disagree with the rules of their parents, but it does not mean that Catholics do not respect or love the Church just as a rebellious child still respects and loves his parents.  The Obama Administration gambled that Catholics would choose Obama over the Church.  The sheer arrogance is mind-blowing. As Peggy Noonan wrote in her WSJ column, “there was nothing for the president to gain, except, perhaps, the pleasure of making a great church bow to him.”

Even some Catholic liberals like the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne have spoken out against the mandate.  When E.J. Dionne and I are in agreement, there is something incredibly wrong in the world.  The pressure on the Administration is growing and will be unrelenting.  The Catholic vote matters to Obama and eventually, I believe, the Administration will capitulate.  If it isn’t soon, the damage to his image with Catholics could be irreparable.

This past weekend, Catholic bishops around the country wrote letters, to be read at Sunday Masses, condemning the attack on religious freedom.  Among these bishops was Bishop Olmsted of Phoenix and Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the Archbishop of Military Services who wrote that the HHS rule was, “a blow to the freedom that you have fought to defend and for which you have seen your buddies fall in battle.”

As National Review reports, the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains actually tried to prevent Catholic chaplains from reading Archbishop Broglio’s letter from the pulpit.  The Executive Branch tramples on freedom of religion and then tries to silence those who object–these are not the actions of a man who respects our free society.  Obama views the First Amendment, heck the entire Constitution, as optional.

He must be stopped.

Just to prove that politics is interesting, Rick Santorum has risen from the ashes and swept three primary/caucus contests yesterday in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

From a delegate count standpoint, it is a pretty meaningless day – but now the supposed two-man race between Romney and Gingrich has shifted to Romney and Santorum.

As I wrote after the South Carolina primary, Romney shouldn’t panic.  With Michigan and Arizona coming up at the end of the month, Romney should be riding the momentum of two solid wins going into Super Tuesday.

The best news coming out of last night is the crushing defeats for Gingrich in Minnesota and Colorado (he wasn’t on the ballot in Missouri).  Gingrich is done.

Congratulations to Santorum.  He now gets a chance to prove whether he can translate wins into a real campaign.

In the current society we live in, this piece by Glenn Harlan Reynolds is too good to excerpt. Read it.

It’s takers versus makers and these days the takers are winning

“Fifty thousand for what you didn’t plant, for what didn’t grow. That’s modern farming — reap what you don’t sow.”

That’s a line from a song about farm subsidies, “Farming The Government,” by the Nebraska Guitar Militia.

But these days it applies to more and more of the U.S. economy, as Charles Sykes points out in his new book, A Nation Of Moochers: America’s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing.

The problem, Sykes points out, is that you can’t run an economy like that. If you tried to hold a series of potluck dinners where a majority brought nothing to the table, but felt entitled to eat their fill, it would probably work out badly. Yet that’s essentially what we’re doing.

 In today’s America, government benefits flow to large numbers of people who are encouraged to vote for politicians who’ll keep them coming. The benefits are paid for by other people who, being less numerous, can’t muster enough votes to put this to a stop.

Over time, this causes the economy to do worse, pushing more people into the moocher class and further strengthening the politicians whose position depends on robbing Peter to pay Paul. Because, as they say, if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can be pretty sure of getting Paul’s vote.

 But the damage goes deeper. Sykes writes, “In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.

“We continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens. But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time.” 

And, after a while, people who pay their bills on time start to feel like suckers. I think we’ve reached that point now:

* People who pay their mortgages – often at considerable personal sacrifice – see others who didn’t bother get special assistance.
* People who took jobs they didn’t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn’t getting extended unemployment benefits.
* People who took risks to build their businesses and succeeded see others, who failed, getting bailouts. It rankles at all levels.

 And an important point of Sykes’ book is that moocher-culture isn’t limited to farmers or welfare queens. The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn’t between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.

Plenty of the wealthy are doing the latter, and that has its own consequences, which are often worse than those stemming from goodies for the poor. 

In a world of bailouts and crony capitalism – which is to say, in the world we live in today – a rational businessperson has to compare the return on investment between improving a product or service, or lobbying the government for goodies.

Frequently, the latter looks better: If you spend $1 million on lobbying, and get a $1 billion subsidy from the government, that’s a thousand-fold return on your money.

It’s hard to do one-hundredth as well through actual capitalism. So why bother to improve your products at all? Just hire more lobbyists.

Of course, the government can provide such rewards only because it has vast resources of coercive power, and vast stocks of other people’s money.

Deploying those resources for self-serving political purposes is nothing new, but – as Sykes points out in considerable detail – things are much worse now than they were during previous periods of excess. 

So what’s next? Well, as Margaret Thatcher once said, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. That’s a special case of Herb Stein’s observation that something that can’t go on forever, won’t. 

With federal borrowing at unsustainable levels, with the bailed-out auto companies and banks not looking particularly healthy, and with the steady drip-drip of financial scandals moving toward the point that even an Obama-friendly media will have to cover them, we appear to be approaching a crisis point.

America is not yet Greece, Spain, or Portugal, but those are the natural endpoints of a moocher-based political system.

When the crisis comes, and it will, we should relearn the lesson that the Framers of our Constitution knew and tried to embody: The bigger and more powerful the national government is, the more prone it is to corruption and interest-group domination.

A federal government that actually operated within the limits intended by the Framers would be much smaller, much less capable of creating economic distortion, and much less attractive to moochers and the politicians they enable. The bigger the pot of honey, the more flies it attracts.

Undoing what Richard Epstein calls “the mistakes of 1937,” in which most of those limits on federal power were removed by the Supreme Court, would go far toward fixing the problem.

That, of course, would require a Supreme Court with a more traditional view of the Constitution’s limits on federal power. Which would require a president interested in appointing justices with such views.

Something to keep in mind, between now and November.

This is a must-see ad from Americans for Prosperity.

(picture courtesy of Dr. Fred Vidal)

[This is a modified post from 2010]

Today Ronald Reagan would have turned 101. If there was ever a time we needed another Reagan, it is now.

Reagan embodied a concept of America very different than our current President. In his final address to the nation from the Oval office he spoke of the success of America as an example of freedom.

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

Happy birthday President Reagan. We miss you, we need you.

Romney thumped Newt Gingrich in Nevada and rather than do an election night rally, Gingrich decided to do a press conference instead, which was obviously to convince the press that he really, really was going to stay in the race, really.

The more Gingrich says, “We will go to Tampa,” the more I think he is trying to convince himself.  He compared himself to Reagan in the 1976 GOP nomination, I’m not sure anyone sees it the same way, and that was the year Reagan lost.

Gingrich is a smart and visionary guy, but he is his own worst enemy.  It is also clear that he truly despises Mitt Romney, and that could create a real poisonous atmosphere as Gingrich gets more desperate to be relevant.  Going on about Romney being “substantially dishonest” is not going to make the unity effort any easier later on.

Remember this line from my blog back on January 19^th?

Seriously, how ironic is it that the guy everyone is trying to show as the alternative to the “weird Mormon guy” is the one who has actually tried to practice plural marriage?

Now we read that Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor hits the same theme last weekend at the Alfalfa Club Dinner as reported in the Washington Post.

But according to two accounts, O’Connor waded into the Republican presidential campaign with a joke about Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich that drew a lot of laughter.

According to ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser, who was at the Capital Hilton for the dinner, O’Connor said that of the two leading Republican candidates, “one is a practicing polygamist, and he’s not even the Mormon.”

Romney is a Mormon, and often points out that he and his wife, Ann, have been married for 42 years. Gingrich’s three marriages have been much discussed in the campaign. The Reliable Source column in The Washington Post had a similar account.

I guess imitation is the greatest form of flattery, so Justice O’Connor can continue to read my blog and steal my stuff anytime!

Senator Orrin Hatch went to the Senate floor to express his disappointment in President Obama for politicizing his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday.

Here is how The Hill reports it:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on Thursday evening said President Obama needs a reminder that he is not Jesus Christ.

“In 2008, the president declared that his nomination was the world historical moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Hatch said in a speech from the Senate floor. 

“Someone needs to remind the president that there was only one person who walked on water and he did not occupy the Oval Office.”

Hatch skewered the president for a remark he made at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday morning, during which he suggested Jesus might support his plan to raise taxes on wealthy Americans.

“For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto to whom much is given, much shall be required,’” Obama said at the breakfast.

Hatch, who is a devout Mormon, suggested Obama was trying to “assume the role of theologian in chief” and said he ought to stick to public policy.

“[Obama] suggested to the attendees that Jesus would have supported his latest tax-the-rich schemes,” Hatch said. “With due respect to the president, he ought to stick to public policy. I think most Americans would agree that the gospels are concerned with weightier matters than effective tax rates.”

You can see Hatch’s on C-SPAN here.

The Democratic primary for the newly drawn CD-09 in Arizona will be one of the most interesting races in the nation to watch this year.

Kristen Sinema is an unapologetic liberal who will have a field day with positions that Andrei Cherny took during his run against Republican Doug Ducey during the Arizona State Treasurer’s race in 2010.  Cherny, who is much more liberal than his campaign positions of 2010 would suggest, is likely to spend most of the campaign explaining why he said some of the things he did.

And in politics, as the saying goes: if you are explaining, you’re losing.

Sinema will almost certainly get early support from EMILY’s List and other left wing interest groups because of her national profile during her time in the Arizona Legislature, when she was the only openly bisexual office holder.  She took a lead role in pushing for Obama’s health care bill and has been a happy and effective warrior for all things left of center.

I predict that she will outraise the one-time wunderkind Cherny and that she will beat him soundly in the CD 9 primary.  The real question is why Cherny allowed his ego to propel him to what will be almost certainly be a humiliating loss.  Proof that ambition has real consequences.