1. I don’t recall Major League Baseball doing this for Bush

2. Sarah Palin and the Scum of the Earth

3. Meet the Green Czar, Who Is A Red

4. Does Obama have to serve a penalty for lying to the Pope?

5. What is this obsession Democrats have with transforming their heroes into religious icons?

6. Burning the Fig Leaf

7. Silvestre Reyes, A Profile in Mendacity

8. ‘Tobacco Ban’ Discussion Demonstrates Administration’s Lack of Seriousness on Military Affairs

Editorial Note: Erick Erickson, RedState’s Editor, will be on Hannity tonight at 9:30 p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel.

1. I don’t recall Major League Baseball doing this for Bush

Yes, yes, Presidents get to throw out first pitches even when they throw slow girlish balls like Obama instead of the steady, fast pitches of men like George Bush.

But one thing George Bush did not get that Barack Obama is getting from Major League Baseball is a platform to espouse his policy positions. Some of us would like a few areas in life where politics, like the Mets, get shut out. This should be one of them.

More absurd, you’d think Bush would have a leg up on MLB sucking up to him considering he had been an owner and Obama has to poll test which team to support.

Perhaps Major League Baseball wants a bailout.

As Dan McLaughlin notes, the relevant point is that George Bush showed up for a ball game and never showed up to talk policy.

Worth also noting that Bud Selig is a big Democrat and contributed to Joe Biden.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. Sarah Palin and the Scum of the Earth

If there is a lesson to be learned from Sarah Palin’s withdrawal from public office, it is this: if you want to take out a female politician, you go after her children.

There is likely no one and single reason for Palin’s withdrawal, and she cited a bunch of them in her disorganized “you won’t have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore” speech. But two things seem to explain most logically Palin’s behavior: she was ground down by the unusually vitriolic campaign waged against her, and the aspect of that campaign that did the most damage was the attacks on her children.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. Meet the Green Czar, Who Is A Red

Consistent with Barack Obama’s leftist ideology and affinity for communists — remember the man he identified as his father figure growing up was a communist who took Obama to communist party meetings, the administration has chosen a man from San Francisco to be Obama’s “green czar.”

It is probably a good thing for the green czar, Van Jones, that he won’t have to go through Senate confirmation. It turns out he’s a member of the communist party with an arrest record.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

4. Does Obama have to serve a penalty for lying to the Pope?

ast week during his visit with Pope Benedict XVI, Barack Obama made the ludicrous claim that he “wants fewer abortions” and “would work to limit how many abortions take place each year in the United States”. Now I suppose that the Pope doesn’t spend a lot of time paying attention to United States politics or he would have realized that Obama was telling a bald-faced lie, and Benedict would have whacked him with the papal scepter or pronounced anathema upon him. As a card-carrying Calvinist Presbyterian myself, I’m not really sure how the Catholics deal with such things (and since Obama claims to be a Protestant himself, I suppose Catholic doctrine doesn’t apply to him anyway). But at minimum, the Pope should have immediately called him on his lie.

Barack Obama is not only pro-abortion, but he has repeatedly proven himself to be an abortion extremist, and any claims that he wants “fewer abortions” are plainly disproven by his extensive track record that clearly demonstrates his fondness for pro-abortion policies.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

5. What is this obsession Democrats have with transforming their heroes into religious icons?

First it was the messianic depictions of Obama’s head surrounded by a halo or pasted onto pictures of Jesus or depicted in a white, glowing robe…a quick search of “Obama Jesus” on Google Images finds numerous examples of this (of course some of these are mocking the messianic complex the Left has about their hero). Now a prominent Democrat has decided that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor deserves the same treatment.

Felix Sanchez, the Chief Executive Officer of TerraCom, a government and public relations firm in Washington, DC and Chairman of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts has decided that Sotomayor is the second coming of the Virgin Mary. Sanchez has updated his Twitter feed (screencap here, in case it disappears from Twitter) to use a Photoshopped image of Mary with Sotomayor’s face.

I’m pretty sure that the Catholics and several other churches would have a serious problem with someone defacing an icon of the mother of Jesus Christ.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

6. Burning the Fig Leaf

For years, the plight of the ardent pro-lifer has been fully understood by precious few political analysts and policymakers. Unlike other policy questions that touch on matters of the pocketbook or matters of liberty, abortion is a policy question that strikes at a much more basic and fundamental issue: when and under what circumstances human beings are entitled to protection from being killed from their government. Other than the death penalty, no other policy question touches this issue as squarely as abortion. And it is perhaps not well understood by many that the end consequence of modern American abortion policy is that, from the perspective of the pro-lifer, the United States Government intentionally allows over 1 million humans to be killed every year, with no attempts at prevention, intervention, or punishment visited upon their killers.

Compounding this problem is the fact that abortion policy has been almost completely removed from the Democratic process.

For almost three decades, the lone fig leaf that has covered the conscience of the committed pro-lifer has been the notion that abortion, while a moral evil, is at base a failure of the government to act properly, rather than a positive act committed by or on behalf of the government. This is especially important in a democracy, where action committed by the government is properly seen as an extension, however, remote, of action by the people. There is, after all, a sense in which the individual citizen in a democracy participates in all actions taken by the government, if not by the exercise of voting, then by the exercise of paying taxes which go toward the funding of said government action. Thus did the Hyde Amendment allow staunch pro-lifers to rest satisfied that, at the very least, they were not participating positively in what they considered to be a great moral evil. Yet now our President seeks to rend that fig leaf asunder and burn it thoroughly to ashes in the name of “healthcare reform”.

His “reform” will insist on government funded abortion on demand, in addition to his existing repeal of the Mexico City regulations.

These measures clearly constitute a concerted attempt by the Obama administration to overrule the Hyde Amendment - the one significant effect pro-lifers have had on abortion policy, an effect that was enacted through the legislative process - sub nom. These efforts are offensive in one sense because they are primarily being enacted through backdoor channels that seek to circumvent the legislative process as much as possible in favor of unilateral action by executive branch actors. However, they are also offensive in a more fundamental sense, in that they have been enacted in total disregard for the moral compunctions of an increasingly large plurality of this society. Through a series of underhanded maneuvers, the Obama Administration will once again place a fundamental question of morality and human life beyond the reach of the ordinary legislative process.

Please click here for the rest of the post.

7. Silvestre Reyes, A Profile in Mendacity

Now we’re entering the second week of the contretemps over whether or not the CIA wrongfully concealed a program from the Congress.

What began as a slanging match between the CIA and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) now has the CIA teetering on the brink of open warfare with its long time allies, Congressional Democrats.

The genesis of this was a baldfaced attempt by Pelosi’s creature, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), to extract Pelosi from her unenviable position as a laughingstock and notorious liar.

This is by no means a new position for Pelosi but the latest manifestation occurred when her rather casual disregard for the truth was revealed by accusing the CIA of not briefing her on the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on al-Qaeda prisoners and she was called on her mendacity by numerous colleagues as well as the CIA. Techniques, by the way, which saved lives, prevented attacks, disrupted al-Qaeda networks, and resulted in the capture of some high ranking members of al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. And as a result of being captured and interrogated the average prisoner has gained 20 pounds.

On July 7, some staffer from Reyes’s office, probably wearing a brown paper bag over his head, slipped a letter from Reyes under the door of ranking member Pete Hoekstra, after work hours, (I am not making this up) claiming the CIA had lied to the committee on some unspecified matter and stating he intended to investigate the CIA’s reporting procedures. Hoekstra has rightfully referred to that incident as “one of the most bizarre episodes in politics that I’ve seen in my time here in Washington.”

Please click here for the rest of the post.

8. ‘Tobacco Ban’ Discussion Demonstrates Administration’s Lack of Seriousness on Military Affairs

The Pentagon’s office of clinical and program policy is recommending a “phased-in ban” of tobacco product use in the military over the next twenty years, according to USA Today. The recommendation comes after a study by the anti-tobacco activist organization Institute of Medicine (IOM) found that the negative health effects of tobacco use “cost the Pentagon $846 million a year in medical care and lost productivity.” The report, which the DOD commissioned, also claimed “the Department of Veterans Affairs spends up to $6 billion in treatments for tobacco-related illnesses,” and says:

“Given the critical need for a strong and healthy military, the harmful effects of tobacco use on military readiness, and the short- and long-term health and financial burden of tobacco use on military personnel, retirees, families, and veterans, the time has come for DoD and VA to assign high priority to tobacco control.”

Though she did not comment on the proposal to outright ban tobacco use by the military, Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith told USA Today that “the [DOD] supports a smoke-free military and believes it is achievable.”

This is unwise — and borderline ridiculous — for a number of reasons.

Please click here for the rest of the post.