Townhall 

David Limbaugh

You can't even casually surf the Internet on any given day without numerous reminders of just how radical [Alleged] President Obama is -- and this is during an election year, when it should be in his political interest to mask his radicalism. 

Minding my own business, I happened on an article by Jacob Laksin on FrontPageMag.com, titled "Obama's Pick for World Bank Hates Capitalism." I'd heard a bit about this before but hadn't yet studied it. I'm so used to Obama's extremism that such revelations hardly move me, much less surprise me. I know where he stands; I just wish everyone else did. 

Obama has nominated Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank. In 2000, Kim edited a collection of studies under the title "Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor." 

The "book's radical central premise," writes Laksin, is that "capitalism and economic growth (are) bad for the poor across the world." Kim co-wrote the introduction, which includes the claim that the book shows "that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men." It says that even in those instances in which free trade and free markets have led to economic growth, they've done so without benefiting "those living in 'dire poverty,' one-fourth of the world's population." Can't you just hear Obama himself in those words? 

One thing that helps the plight of the very poor, according to one chapter, is a socialized health care system, such as the one in Communist Cuba. The chapter's author touts that system because of the Cuban government's "commitment not only to health in the narrow sense but to social equality and social justice." As we opponents of Obamacare have said repeatedly, Obamacare is hardly just about making health care more affordable or more accessible, neither of which it will do in the end, but is a stealth vehicle to greatly expand governmental control over limitless aspects of our lives to enable the leftist central planners to effectuate "social equality and social justice" under the innocuous guise of providing health care. 

As with so many of its ideas, the left is wrong about the record of free markets on the poor, notes Laksin, who points to "overwhelming evidence" that economic growth raises income levels and reduces global poverty. But again, leftist ideologues aren't motivated by a desire to improve the lot of the downtrodden, domestically or globally, but by a burning passion for statism. 

This book is right out of Obama's playbook. Can you not see the common thread running through these alleged glories of the Cuban system and Obama's approach to health care and his war on oil, coal and gas, along with his corresponding commitment to green energy and his various stimulus bills, all of which increase our national deficits, debt and unemployment but greatly increase governmental control? 

Obama's nomination of Kim should be no surprise to anyone, considering his consistent record of radical associations and appointments, from Van Jones to transnationalist Harold Koh. For Obama, one's radicalism is not a deterrent to one's resume, but an enhancement. His appointment of Van Jones was not a mistake owing to the administration's failure to vet him as Obama's defenders later claimed once Jones' radicalism was exposed. Obama appointed Jones precisely because his administration was intimately familiar with Jones' views; indeed, the White House carved out a new position -- green energy czar -- specifically tailored for his worldview and then happily placed him in it. 

Tearing myself away from this uplifting article, I next encountered one detailing Obama's ongoing fulfillment of his promise to bankrupt the coal industry -- with his Environmental Protection Agency's issuance of new proposed rules on carbon emissions, which will please the goddess Gaia but won't do much for the production of energy, economic growth, jobs or the poor, for that matter. This was after watching a report on Fox News earlier that morning highlighting Obama's obstruction of oil shale production based on other dubious environmental doom-saying. 

Next, I saw John Fund's piece on National Review Online outlining Obama's background in the sordid community organizing tactics of famed leftist radical Saul Alinsky and Obama's close ties with the now fallen ACORN. According to New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor -- in her new book on Obama -- Obama still thought of himself as a community organizer when he was senator. He still does today, and, Fund warns, conservatives should be prepared for his Alinsky tactics in the 2012 campaign. 

Maybe this all wouldn't be so exasperating if Obama didn't hold himself out as a uniter, but he is the furthest thing from it, as he, if anything, is doubling down on his polarizing radicalism and his unswerving commitment to a statist agenda for America.

Provided courtesy of Tom Hoefling's 'Say NO to Socialism!'

CNS News

Terence P. Jeffrey

During oral arguments in the Supreme Court this week, Justice Stephen Breyer posed and answered the core question at issue in the controversy over the constitutionality of Obamacare’s mandate that individual Americans must buy government-approved health insurance policies: Can Congress order individuals to buy a good or service?

“Yes, of course they could,” said Breyer.

In the history of the nation, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government has never done this.

But Breyer, on Tuesday, stated his belief that the basic power of Congress to do such a thing was settled by the Supreme Court as early as 1819, in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland, in which the court decided Congress had the power to create a Bank of the United States.

Breyer explained his point of view after becoming impatient with the convoluted answers Solicitor General Donald Verrilli had offered up in response to questions from Justices Sam Alito and Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Alito had asked Verrilli if Congress could force young people to buy burial insurance because everyone is going to die someday. Roberts asked Verrilli if Congress could force people to buy cell phones because it would facilitate contacting emergency services in the event of an accident. And Kennedy asked Verrilli: “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it.”

“I'm somewhat uncertain about your answers to, for example, Justice Kennedy,” said Breyer. He “asked, can you, under the Commerce Clause, Congress create commerce where previously none existed.

“Well, yes,” said Breyer, “I thought the answer to that was, since McCulloch versus Maryland, when the Court said Congress could create the Bank of the United States which did not previously exist, which job was to create commerce that did not previously exist, since that time the answer has been, yes.

-----When Breyer was confirmed to the Supreme Court, only 9 Republicans in the Senate voted against him.

Read this story at cnsnews.com ...

In addition to the 15 Catholic bishops scheduled to speak at Nationwide Rally for Religious Freedom locations, countless other influential speakers from all walks of life will also be addressing rallies throughout the country this Friday, March 23.

The speakers at the more than 130 Rally sites represent a wide array of backgrounds and professions, including members of Congress, physicians, college presidents, pastors, radio hosts, law professors, heads of organizations, publishers, religious sisters, pregnancy resource directors, and rabbis.

The New York City Rally will feature several big names, including Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and pastoral associate of Priests for Life; Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Msgr. Philip Reilly, and Mother Mary Agnes Donovan, Superior General of the Sisters of Life.

Continue reading ...

America's Party Endorsed Independent Projects -> Free the First Amendment Committee

HHS tells religious believers to go to hell. The public notices.

Wall Street Journal

The political furor over [Alleged] President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

***In late January the Health and Human Services Department required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and liberals from the likes of Planned Parenthood, amid government promises of compromise.

In the end, Planned Parenthood won. HHS chose to draw the rule's conscience exceptions for "religious employers" so narrowly that they will not be extended to religious charities, universities, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other institutions that oppose contraception as a matter of religious belief.

The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion. What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what "health care" must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions.

To take a small example: The HHS rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration's legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives. Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius's ministry. That may explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed.

Bad call. The decision has roused the Catholic bishops from their health-care naivete, but they've been joined by people of all faiths and even no faith, as it becomes clear that their own deepest moral beliefs may be thrown over eventually. 

Read this story at wsj.com ...

What’s the Matter with Obama’s Kansas Speech?

PJ Media

You can’t say the message of Obama’s December 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, should have been a surprise to anyone. After all, he’s been beating the class warfare drum for much of his administration, and the idea of higher taxes on the rich to promote income redistribution is something he telegraphed as far back as the 2008 campaign, with his impromptu reaction in the famous Joe the Plumber incident. During the 2008 presidential campaign Obama also stated an interest in using the capital gains tax primarily as an instrument of “fairness” — even if a rise in the rate would cause a decline in the amount of tax taken in.

In his Kansas speech Obama repeatedly mentioned this goal of fairness while blurring or ignoring the all-important distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome as a measure of that fairness. Daniel Henninger of the WSJ pointed out that the speech was the sort of thing one could easily hear in Caracas or Buenos Aires, with its populist anti-rich message:

The Kansas speech was built around one concrete policy idea: that the rich and millionaires (officially still defined as families with before-tax income above $250,000) should send him more money so he can “invest” it. This single policy, if we heard correctly, will end high unemployment, raise middle-class incomes, put children through college, make America fair and defeat countries that pollute.

Actually, there were other policy ideas as well: that banks need more regulating or they’ll cheat the middle class and the poor, and that consumers require more protection from the rapaciousness of lenders.

But it was less a speech about concrete policy proposals than one about promoting the vague and protean concept of economic “fairness” as the solution. Obama not only talked repeatedly about wanting to ensure fairness, he also warned us what “they” — his unspecified, unnamed opponents — would like to see instead. We may not know exactly who he’s taking about, but we can safely assume they’re Republicans rather than Democrats:

They want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

I am here to say they are wrong. I’m here in Kansas to reaffirm my deep conviction that we’re greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules.

In the first paragraph, Obama’s use of the phrase “stacked the deck against middle class Americans” implies that “they” have purposely discriminated against the middle class in order to cheat its members out of what is rightly theirs. In the next sentence he goes on to suggest that if “they” had their druthers, pure laissez-faire capitalism would be the order of the day.

Although eliminating all financial regulation is not what Obama’s leading Republican opponents are actually suggesting, it does set up a nice contrast with Obama’s next paragraph, which introduces the concept of fairness that is the heart of his speech. “Everyone gets a fair shot” sounds as though Obama is referring to equality of opportunity, something Republicans and conservatives favor. But “everyone does their [sic] fair share” is more potentially problematic, although it is seamlessly slipped in after the previous phrase and sounds deceptively like it.

But how can doing one’s fair share possibly be determined? Is Obama edging close to the idea of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need?” It’s impossible to say quite what he means, which is no accident. And the same is true of the next phrase about everyone needing to play by the same rules.

From his speech, one would almost think that Obama is moving towards the imposition of a flat tax — after all, that would seem to make the tax rules the same for all levels of income. But of course that’s not what he’s getting at at all. To Obama, what’s “fair” for a poor person is the use of different rules (or at least different tax rates) than those for a rich person, a progressive rather than a flat tax.

By using the word “fair” or “fairness” over and over as though their meanings and the best way to achieve them are self-evident, Obama glosses over the quandary that every consideration of fairness in tax law presents. For example, is progressive taxation, which sets a higher tax rate for the rich, “fairer” because the rich can afford to pay more? And if so, then how progressive is progressive enough to satisfy the requirements of fairness? Also, is it fairer to allow the poorer segment of society to pay no income tax, or is it fairer to have its members pay something?

Or would it actually be “fairer” to have people of all income levels pay a flat tax that is the same percentage of whatever their income might be? And what about exemptions and loopholes? Is it fairer to eliminate them all, or just some, and if so which ones? How about taxing consumption rather than income? Is that too regressive a tax to be fair, even though it’s equal? And what of dividends, which are taxed twice, once at the corporate level and once at the individual level? How fair is that?

In addition, there are the myriad practical considerations that should be factored into any decision about fairness. For example, the tax rate that is set for the last dollar of a person’s taxable income (the marginal tax rate) is not the same as the rate that is actually paid (the effective tax rate), and this difference should be recognized. But later in his speech Obama purposely blurs the two by comparing higher marginal tax rates of the past (up to 90% for the highest brackets during the Eisenhower years) with lower effective tax rates of today — apples to oranges. In so doing, he also ignores the enormous tax shelters that functioned to drastically lower the effective rate during those times of sky-high marginal tax rates and to encourage investment as well.

Any honest discussion of tax rates and fairness is inevitably complex, full of wonky charts and details that make most people’s eyes glaze over, and about which liberal and conservative economists can argue nearly forever. Obama takes the easy way out by pretending that the issues have a simplicity and the answers a clarity that they lack, and that he is telling self-evident truths. But what he’s really doing is pandering to a schoolyard mentality of envy that says, “It’s not fair if other people have more stuff than I do; they must be cheating and they should pay me back” — and that government’s just the one to do it.

Neo-Neocon is a New England-based blogger.