I believe in the right to own a gun.  As a conservative, I believe in a right to be able to defend myself and my home, and I believe that right is all the more necessary in today’s America.  As a skeptic, I doubt that an outright ban on firearms would accomplish much more than to disarm the law abiding people who we don’t have to worry about in the first place.  And as a freedom loving person, while I certainly don’t believe in armed insurrection, I do confess discomfort with the idea of a world where the government controls all the weapons.

            But I can’t avoid how I feel right now in the wake of the slaughter in Connecticut.  I feel angry.  I don’t remember feeling this way after Columbine, or Virginia Tech, or the Aurora Colorado movie theatre shootings.  I remember being sad and dejected, but not angry.

            When tragedies happen, it’s natural to look to somebody to blame, and groups like the N.R.A. are always the first and easiest targets.  I’ve defended them in the past.  After all, you don’t see N.R.A. members committing massacres. That’s because, in addition to being obsessed about guns, they’re also obsessed with gun safety and education to ensure that guns are used in a responsible way, so that the right to own them is not compromised.

            But in their seemingly reflexive opposition to even the most reasonable and common sense regulations, they fail to consider that maybe America as a whole is simply not capable of responsible gun ownership within the framework of the current regulatory scheme.  Or perhaps I should say, “no longer capable.”

            Conservatives receive a lot of criticism for wanting to “take us back to the 1950′s.” That might not be a bad idea. I’m not talking about rolling back civil rights, or technological advances. I’m simply stating the obvious, which is that a lot of the problems we have today didn’t exist back then.  Families were intact.  Drug use was comparatively rare.  Cities were livable.  Violent crime was a fraction of what it is today.  Schools didn’t get shot up.

            But then we rejected everything that was right about America. We rejected the God-fearing, hard working, family-oriented social mores of the older generation as being at best hopelessly anachronistic, and at worst outright oppressive.  We traded God for secularism.  We traded love for sex.  We traded sobriety for drugs.  We traded order for chaos.  We traded discipline for indulgence.  We traded modesty for promiscuity.  We traded parents for absentee fathers and baby mommas.  We traded children for abortions.  We traded moderation for excess.  We traded home life for careers.  We traded role models for celebrities. We traded solidarity for grievances.  We traded music for death rock and gangsta rap.  We traded wholesome entertainment for violent and pornographic movies, television, and videogames.  We traded a culture which had made us great for a self-indulgent counterculture designed to destroy.  We traded everything that was right and good and holy for everything that is wrong and evil and depraved.

            See, the problem in America is not the occasional mass shooting.  That’s just a symptom, the most salient manifestation of a culture that has become entirely debauched.  We don’t treat each other humanely because we don’t see each other as humans, our selfish, sex and violence-obsessed culture having conditioned us to see others as nothing more than targets of, and obstacles to our own gratification.

            I don’t like the idea of trading liberty for safety.  I don’t want to empower the government to regulate speech in the name of sanitizing the media, or to tap my phone, or read my email, or effect any other kind of warrantless searches in the name of keeping us safe.  And I don’t want to forfeit my right to own a gun.  I’m not advocating that we do any of that.  But if we don’t address our comprehensive cultural decay and do so now, and demonstrate that as a nation we will not abuse the freedoms that we have been given, then all of those liberties will be in jeopardy.  We saw an inkling of this impetus after 9-11.  We’ll see more of it soon.  Unless, that is, we begin to recognize where we went wrong and work to rebuild what we were once so eager to destroy.  And if we do that, we’ll not only preserve our liberties, we’ll solve a lot of other problems along the way.

In another sign that the liberal half of our government has gone completely off the deep end, a federal judge in Massachusetts has ruled that taxpayers must pay for the sex change operation of an incarcerated murderer.

The plaintiff in this action, Robert Kosilek, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1990, convinced Judge Mark Wolf that for the Department of Corrections not to pay for his procedure would be a violation of the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Ah yes.  This recalls the famous constitutional conflict between founding fathers James Madison and George Mason, debating the provisions of the proposed Bill of Rights, and ultimately determining that, yes, in fact, they intended their new American Experiment to include a government entitlement to taxpayer funded, elective, sexual mutilations for prisoners.  How could we have missed that all these years?  Life, liberty, and a right to subsidized sexual degeneracy for murderers.

That’s right folks.  You probably thought it was bad enough you have to finance $3000 annually for contraceptives for women like activist Sandra Fluke (pronounced “fluck”) who just can’t keep their knees together.  Now we have a new constitutional right to $20,000 sex change operations for criminals who can’t deal with the reality of their reproductive organ.

You know, sometimes I think liberals go out of their way to make their arguments as inane as possible, as though to overwhelm their opponents with a tidal wave of ridiculousness that makes it almost impossible for a challenger to know where to begin.

Well, let’s try starting with the mundane.

For one thing, the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments,” not “cruel orunusual punishments.” So to be constitutionally prohibited, the protested policy must be both.  But it is not “unusual” for the State not to pay for someone else’s sex change operation, much less that of an inmate.  Judge Wolf’s ruling is believed to be the first of its kind, meaning that, if anything, it’s his ruling, and the new entitlement that it provides, that are “unusual.”

Secondly, one of the basic canons of statutory interpretations instructs judgesnot to interpret a law in such a way as to reach an absurd result.  Wolf’s holding violates that principal many, many times over, most obviously because since the Eighth Amendment is specific to prisoners, Wolf grants a government entitlement to criminals that the Constitution does not provide to law abiding citizens.  A careless oversight on James Madison’s part, no doubt.

But we won’t have to wait long for a remedy!  Already, a US Tax Court in (where else?) Massachusetts has determined that sex change operations are tax deductible because they are “medically necessary.” And if they’re medically necessary, the next logical step is for the government to require insurance companies to provide them, resulting in the rest of us paying for them through higher premiums.  In fact, that’s precisely what Sandra Fluke argued for in a paper in 2011, complaining as she did that “Transgender persons wishing to undergo the gender reassignment process frequently face heterosexist employer health insurance policies” which do not cover such procedures.

That’s right, “heterosexist.” Not “homophobic,” which, along with “racist,” has been so overused as to have been stripped of any meaning.  Now, because liberals need an even more ambiguous slander with more tread on the tires, we’re all “heterosexist.”

And if you’re asking yourself “What the Fluke does heterosexist mean?”, you’re not alone.

I guess it means that rational people are not allowed to point out the obvious — the charge of bigotry rendering logical discussion not only moot, but irredeemably hateful — which is that gender identity disorder is not, in any real sense, a life-threatening condition.  It’s a lifestyle condition, and private citizens should pay for their own lifestyle choices.  Heck, prisoners shouldn’t even have lifestyles!

Judge Wolf disagrees, and that’s no surprise.  He says the condition is life-threatening because “the anguish alone constitutes a serious medical need.  It also places [the prisoner] at high risk of killing himself if his major mental illness is not adequately treated.”

Of course, if Kosilek’s really suicidal (a highly suspect proposition considering he has been able to not kill himself for the twelve years that this lawsuit had been kicking around the courts), then the prison should do what is done with every other “suicidal” prisoner, and put him on a suicide watch.  Wrap him in a straight jacket if you have to.  Lock him in a padded cell.

But no, that’s so yesterday, so unenlightened, that only heterosexist backwater rubes who go to church could think that way.  Modernity demands the belief that the State is committing cruel and unusual punishment when a prisoner chooses to kill himself because he is displeased with his anatomy.  Therefore, it logically follows that the Constitution must also require us to pay for breast implants for criminals with body dysmorphic disorders, and penile implants for inmates with sexual inadequacy complexes, rather than provide the obvious mental health treatment that these seriously disturbed people clearly require and which would be in their best interests.

The murderer, seemingly taking a page from Fluke’s paper, argues that a sex change operation (or if you prefer the less heterosexist term, “gender re-assignment therapy”) is different than cosmetic surgery.  He says “People in the prisons who have bad hearts, hips or knees have surgery to repair those things.  My medical needs are no less important or more important than the person in the cell next to me.” But his case isn’t analogous to that.  There is an obvious difference between needing a surgery because of a defective organ, and wanting an unnecessary surgery because of defective thinking.

And this brings us to the most operative question this imbecilic holding raises, one that often gets avoided when discussing sex change “therapy.” Judge Wolf, in a moment of careless heterosexism, called gender identity disorder a “major mental illness.” There can be no serious doubt that it is.  But why, if it’s a mental illness, are we treating the organ between the patient’s legs and not the organ between his ears?

Granted, it’s not politically correct to suggest such a thing, but we have a bad habit in this country of rushing toward answers without establishing what the real problem is, in part because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.  But we’re not helping anyone by avoiding this conversation, nor by ignoring the obvious inconsistencies in the arguments of the Left regarding the efficacy of mental health treatment for sexual degeneracies.  When it comes to pedophiles, the Left says that they’re actually victims of their own condition.  And because they’re victims they shouldn’t be punished, or even stigmatized, but instead treated with mental health counseling, and then released without any kind of monitoring by law enforcement.  But when it comes to someone wanting to emasculate himself to become a member of the opposite sex, the Left says mental health counseling is ineffective, and it’s implied that it’s also hateful even to suggest.

In other words, the Left’s only consistency in these matters is, in all circumstances, to accommodate the degeneracy in hopes of normalizing the conduct.

It’s not just about criminals, or private adults, either.  Parents are having sex change operations for children as young as 8.  Forget whether taxpayers will eventually have to pay for that.  What kind of lives are these kids going to live with their reproductive organ destroyed, their gender identity altered, and the underlying cause unaddressed?  What kind of society have we created that we now have parents who would victimize their own children in such a way?

This is the world that political correctness creates.  Parents used to correct children.  Now they have them fixed.

A “therapy,” by definition, cures a disease or disorder.  A sex change operation, or gender reassignment therapy, or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t cure any condition, it only accommodates and normalizes it.  And the very notion that such a procedure is not only medically necessary, but a human entitlement, demonstrates an even greater mental condition that afflicts more Americans every day.  It’s called “liberalism,” and it is characterized by a deep decline into the absurd, and the consequential victimization of those it purports to help at the expense of everyone else.

]]> http://www.redstate.com/jordanrickards/2012/09/13/taxpayer-funded-sex-change-operations-for-prisoners-and-other-fluke-ing-crazy-ideas/feed/ 0 http://www.redstate.com/jordanrickards/2012/06/10/barack-obamas-20-most-impossibly-self-absorbed-moments/ http://www.redstate.com/jordanrickards/2012/06/10/barack-obamas-20-most-impossibly-self-absorbed-moments/#comments Mon, 11 Jun 2012 01:20:36 +0000 jordanrickards (Diary) http://www.redstate.com/jordanrickards/?p=68 Read More »]]> An editorial, by Jordan B. Rickards, www.RickardsReview.com

SOLIPSISM [sol-ip-siz-uhm] (noun): 1) Philosophy: the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist. 2) Extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one’s feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption. 3) Barack Obama.

President Obama is undoubtedly many things to many people.  Liberals see him as a genius, conservatives see him as a meddlesome dilettante. Liberals fawn over his rhetorical skills, conservatives say the credit goes to his teleprompter. Liberals think he knows it all, conservatives think he’s a know-it-all.

Fine.

But if there’s an attribute central to Barack Hussein Obama which all objective, reasonable people should be able to recognize, it has to be his historic self-absorption.  Indeed, not since Maximilien Robespierre created and placed himself atop of the “Cult of the Supreme Being” has the world seen such an insufferable ego.

In light of that, what follows is a compilation of his twenty most impossibly self-absorbed moments, listed in reverse order.  Frankly, this is well overdue.  Note that originally this list was going to be limited to ten, and then fifteen examples, but there was simply too much material.

20 & 19.  Obama writes two memoirs, the first at age 35. 

Arguably, these two entries could rank higher, but it seems appropriate that this list should begin where the nation’s introduction to Obama’s narcissism began.

Obama first appeared in the public eye in 1990 when he was the selected as the first ever African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review, and also probably the first editor never to have actually written any articles.  He had, however, published two god-awful poems as a student at Occidental College, one of which, called “Underground,” reads as follows:

Under water grottos, caverns

Filled with apes

That eat figs.

Stepping on the figs

That the apes

Eat, they crunch.

The apes howl, bare

Their fangs, dance

Tumble in the

Rushing water,

Musty, wet pelts

Glistening in the blue.

Uh, yeah. Apes that eat figs. Right.

With such an advanced mastery of the English language, it was no surprise that Simon and Schuster advanced the heretofore unknown 33-year-old somewhere in the neighborhood of $150,000 to write a book on race relations. After a good deal of procrastinating and deadline missing by Obama, prompting Simon and Schuster to cancel his contract, Obama received a second contract from Times Books, and finally wrote (or, depending on who you believe, maybe had Bill Ayers write) “Dreams from My Father,” a personal memoir completely devoid of anything resembling scholarship.

After selling so few books over the next decade that “Dreams” went out of print, then-Senator Obama burst back onto the national scene in 2004 with his speech to the Democratic National Convention.  The title of this speech (yes, he gives his speeches titles) was “The Audacity of Hope,” a phrase he took from a sermon given by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the racist, anti-American pastor who was the first person Obama thanked upon winning election to the Senate, and who Obama would have us believe had no influence on him.  This speech was popular among Democrats, which was predictable considering that Obama’s  ”Audacity of Hope” speech was basically a rip-off of Bill Clinton’s popular (and equally banal) “A Place Called Hope” speech to the 1992 Democratic National Convention.  Senator Obama then turned this speech into a full-length book about (what else?) himself, because, after all, what man in his mid-forties doesn’t have two personal memoirs?

18.  “The election’s over, John.”

There are polite ways to disagree.  There are diplomatic ways to disagree.  And then there’s Barack Obama’s way of disagreeing with Sen. John McCain during a summit on healthcare reform.

Obama had invited Republican leaders from both houses of Congress, ostensibly for the purpose of incorporating a bi-partisan approach, but really, as it turned out, to belittle his opposition.  During an exchange that is rather uncomfortable to watch, Sen. McCain had the temerity to point out that any reform should “remove all the special interests and special deals for a favored few, and treat all Americans the same.” This outrageous suggestion prompted a clearly perturbed Obama, evidently not used to receiving any resistance, to reassert his supremacy by sniping: “Let me just make this point, John, because we’re not campaigning anymore. The election’s over.”

In other words: “I won. I’m what matters. Fall into line.”

17. “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it.”

From The Obamas, by Jodi Kantor: “When David Plouffe, [Obama's] campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning. ‘I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it.’ … Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. ‘I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.’”

Unfortunately, this hubris did not end when the campaign ended, but carried through in full force to the presidency, leading to…

16.  “It would be easier if I could do this entirely on my own.”

During the height of the most recent debt crisis last summer, when those stubborn Republicans refused (temporarily) to raise the debt ceiling, the message from Obama was clear: he can fix this problem, if everyone else gets out of the way.

Yes, the same man who has never run so much as a vending machine believes he is singularly qualified to run the largest and most dynamic market economy in the history of the world.

First he told a told a gathering at a town hall “It would be easier if I could do this entirely on my own,” before quickly adding the disclaimer that our democracy does not work that way, which everyone knows.  Three days later, he told the illegal alien anarchy group La Raza “The idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. I promise you, not just on immigration reform.” Then, within a few weeks, Obama’s spokesman bemoaned to reporters how “unfortunate” it is that Obama “does not control all levers of government.”

Actually, what’s unfortunate is that for two years Obama did control all levers of government, and instead of creating jobs, or reducing the deficit, or, heaven forbid, reigning in spending, he focused on his vainglorious Obamacare, which will destroy jobs, raise the deficit, and is perhaps the greatest power-grab overreach since FDR’s “Pack the Court” plan.

15.  American soldiers fight for Barack Obama

Most of our brave men and women in the armed forces enlisted believing they would be serving God and Country on behalf of the American people, advancing democracy, liberty, and the American way.  Little did they know they were actually fighting for Barack Obama, who on occasion likes to reflect on “those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf.”

14. Obama as the standard of divine law

For millennia, theologians have struggled with the concept of sin. Usually, though, the question focused on how one finds redemption from sin, or what constitutes a sin, not who gets to decide what a sin is.  It seemed a given that sin, by its very nature, is a transgression against God’s values.  What those values are is subject to debate, of course, but the debate is always in the context of divine law and divine will.

Except to Barack Obama.  When asked to define “sin,” he stated that sin is “being out of alignment with my values,” whatever those are.  So take that, St. Augustine!

13. Announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden

Perhaps the only time the nation has truly been united under President Obama was when he delivered the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. And why let a great opportunity for self-aggrandizement go wasted?

Just as he had felt compelled to include himself in the report of the Navy snipers who killed the Somali pirates who had hijacked an American tanker in 2009, telling us that he had heroically “given the order” to shoot, in his relatively brief announcement about the Bin Laden killing Obama referenced himself fifteen times, speaking at length of his minimal role: “I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda… I was briefed on a possible lead… I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden… I determined that we had enough intelligence…and authorized an operation.”

Oddly, never once during this speech did he mention the Navy SEALs who actually carried out the operation.  But that was a minor detail.

12. The State of My Union

Fifteen personal references may seem like a lot (especially when one really didn’t contribute much to the effort spoken about), but that was actually an exercise of restraint for Obama.  Consider that in Obama’s four State of the Union addresses, he has said the word “I” 80, 102, 62, and 72 times respectively.  In his most recent address, he also used the word “my” 18 times, “I’m” 14 times, “me” 13 times, and “I’ve” 5 times, meaning that in a speech that was supposed to be about the health and wellbeing of our nation, Obama managed to reference himself a whopping 122 times, averaging roughly once every 30 seconds!

To put that in perspective, in the first State of the Union Address ever given by an American President, George Washington used the word “I” 11 times.  Thomas Jefferson used it 17 times in his first such address.  In 1864, during the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln used the word “I” 22 times.  Ronald Reagan used it an average of 39 times during his State of the Unions, with a high of 48. George W. Bush averaged 35, with a high of 46.

If nothing else, at least we know that the state of our President’s ego is still strong.

11.  It’s his country.  We’re just living in it.

In November, 2007, when the presidential primaries were just taking off in full force, ABC News followed Senator Obama as he tried to connect with voters in Iowa (with whom he has so much in common).  If Obama seemed a little overconfident, well he was, telling his interviewer of his chances: “Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama’s been there.”

You know a politician has had too heavy a dose of himself once he begins to speak of himself in the third person like General MacArthur.

In any event, Obama wound up winning the Iowa / Obama Country caucus with a whopping 37% of the vote, barely edging out one of the top-10 most hated men in America, as well as Bill Clinton’s wife.

(Speaking of Bill Clinton’s wife, while I doubt anyone could ever surpass Obama in terms of self-absorption, she gives it a heck of a good effort in this video, where she flips out on a black college student for asking her what her husband thinks about something).

10.  “You’re going to destroy my presidency”

Back in July, 2009, the country was just beginning to shift its attention from stimulus packages and bail outs, and started to focus on what Obamacare was really about.  Right around then, Obama, becoming increasingly frustrated with some independently-minded Democrats in Congress who were less than eager to nationalize our healthcare system, admonished them as best he could, angrily pleading “You’re going to destroy my presidency.” Because that’s what’s really important.

Ironically, it was the passage of the bill that led to the historic Republican gains in the next congressional election, which effectively turned Obama into a lame duck halfway through his first term, effectively destroying his presidency.

9.  Republican Scott Brown’s victory proves voters still love Obama. Wait, what?

The moment was already strange enough.  Ted Kennedy, the leading proponent in the Senate for the passage of Obamacare, had died after a yearlong battle with a brain tumor, and a special election was to be held to replace him.  This was critical because the Democrats needed to retain 60 seats in the Senate in order to avoid a filibuster blocking a vote on Obamacare.  Still, nobody thought a Republican would have much of a chance to take a Senate seat in reliably liberal Massachusetts, much less Ted Kennedy’s seat.

What the pundit class forgot to factor in, however, was that Massachusetts had enacted an Obamacare clone a few years previous and, having suffered through it already, the people of Massachusetts wanted to make sure that Obama did not do nationally what had happened to them at the state level. To that end, they elected a relatively unknown moderate Republican named Scott Brown, who ran a single issue campaign wherein he promised little more other than to oppose Obamacare.

When it became clear that Brown might win, Obama traveled to Massachusetts to campaign in person for Brown’s hapless opponent, Martha Coakley.  But the President’s efforts were of no avail, and Brown’s victory imperiled Obama’s signature piece of legislation. Yet, even with this stinging defeat, Obama declared victory, saying that the Republican win actually demonstrated that people were still mad at Republicans over the Bush years, and that sending Brown to Washington was not a rejection of Obama’s agenda, but was actually an affirmation of the same movement that brought Obama to power.

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country,” Obama said. “The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry, and they’re frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

8. Killing Osama Bin Laden, The Sequel

As if taking all the credit for killing Bin Laden while excluding the Navy SEALs was not bad enough, a year later the same President who lectured us against “spiking the football” was trying to convince us of his supposedly Sergeant York-like heroics during the Bin Laden raid.  This time it was in the form of a 90 second add about the killing, where Obama had Bill Clinton extol the courage — not of the Navy SEALs who risked death, imprisonment, and torture — but of Obama for doing what every other American would have done by giving the order to go ahead with the mission; in other words, basically pointing at a picture of Bin Laden and saying “kill that.”

In the video, Clinton, speaking of the political risks Obama took in making such a decision, says “Suppose the Navy SEALs had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him.”

Oh, and yeah, it also would have been pretty rough for the SEALs who would have been captured, tortured, and beheaded by maniacs screaming “Allahu Akbar.” And their families probably would have taken it pretty hard too.  But let that not distract from the courage Obama displayed, making an obvious decision in the face of the possibility of a minor and brief drop in his approval ratings, the result of which could have been a slightly increased possibility of (gasp!) losing an election.

7.  Death be not proud… except of me.

We’ve all heard jokes about voter fraud and dead people voting for Democrats.  But rarely do the dead endorse a candidate so explicitly and enthusiastically.

During the debate on Obamacare, our President took to the teleprompter frequently.  In what had to be his most bizarre speech, Obama spoke passionately about a former campaign volunteer who had recently died of breast cancer.  He told about how she didn’t have the money for insurance, and the cancer was discovered too late because she hadn’t been able to afford the exams necessary to detect the disease, and she fought the good fight for four years, and struggled, and still contributed heavily to Obama’s campaign, only to die shortly afterward.  It was indeed a sad story, the kind that tugs on the heart strings of even the most battle-hardened and cynical among us.

Of course, our President couldn’t leave it at that.  Because the conversation had by then strayed too far from the topic of himself, he quickly added to the end of the story, with a completely straight face, that the dead woman “insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.”

And if right now you find yourself aghast, staring straight ahead with mouth agape, then you have a lot in common with the audience members who heard him say it live.

She matters more because of her faith in him.

Good grief! Does everything have to be about this guy? Had she been wearing a “Palin” shirt would her life be less valuable?

Anyway, it turns out that she did have health insurance, she just didn’t want to pay the deductible because she had just dropped $30,000 into a new business.

Click here to read the top six at The Rickards Review.

By Jordan B. Rickards, www.RickardsReview.com

The best politicians are part con artist and part magician. Con artists fool their victims by exploiting their desire to believe something. Magicians fool their audiences through sleight-of-hand. Great politicians do both at the same time.

Consider the never ending class warfare rhetoric that has been intensifying of late from the dark nether regions of liberal America. There is a certain inevitability to this.  After all, this is an election year, this is tax season, and these are liberals of which we speak, who, no matter the economic climate, can conceive of no fiscal policy more advanced and nuanced than that the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes. When the economy’s going well, the rich should be paying more because they can afford it. When the economy’s going south, the problem is that the rich are not paying enough. Either way, the rich are the problem.

This is the con.

The proffered evidence comes in two forms.  First, we are inundated with media images of the rich enjoying a good life (yachting, drinking from chalices, haughtily wearing cardigans, etc.) juxtaposed against scenes of the less fortunate (or industrious) struggling to pay the mortgage on the home they just bought (that they may or may not have been able to afford in the first place). Secondly, we are repeatedly subjected to false comparisons of the tax rates paid by wealthier individuals (Warren Buffet, President Obama, Mitt Romney) to the tax bracket of an average American (usually a secretary, for some reason), which, of course, is only one of many factors which determine tax liability.

But never mind that.

Never mind that President Obama’s secretary, to whom he likes to compare his tax liability, makes $95,000 per year, placing her among the wealthiest 7% of Americans.

Never mind that the top 10% of taxpayers pay 70% of the taxes (while making 40% of the income), and at the bottom 50% pay nothing.

Never mind that the top 10% of American taxpayers carry a higher burden than the top 10% in any other industrialized nation, including socialist paradises France, Italy, and Sweden.

Never mind that the top 1% of American taxpayers pay more than the bottom 95% combined!

No, what’s important is not the truth, what’s important is the narrative, because the narrative that the rich are not paying their fair share is more useful. Politicians know that each of us desire to believe that someone else is the cause of our problems, and it follows that if someone else has more than us, it’s because that person has what belongs to us. So we Americans allow ourselves to be fooled into believing that the people paying the most are the ones not paying enough, not because we’re incapable of reading the contradictory data, but because we want to believe that whatever is wrong in life is the result of someone who has more not doing their part.

The con is used to make people desirous of a solution.  In this case, it’s to elect politicians who favor the President’s economic policy, highlighted by his proposed “Buffett Rule,” named after the previously mentioned Warren Buffet, the billionaire who himself believes he does not pay enough in taxes. (Apparently the IRS agrees, as Buffett allegedly owes over $1 billion in back taxes).  The Buffett Rule, in conjunction with Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2013 budget, promises to ensure that Americans who make at least $2 million pay at least a 30% rate, phasing in higher rates for those earning over $1 million, while reducing the amount of money Americans can exclude as non-taxable income.  This is accomplished by severely limiting the deductibility of charitable contributions.

Here’s where the sleight-of-hand comes into play.

Understand that the primary reason Obama’s and Romney’s personal tax rates are as low as they are (20% and 15.4%, respectively) is largely because both give inordinate amounts of money to charity.  Obama gave $177,000 (22% of his income) to charity in 2011, while Romney gave away $4 million (19% of his income).  These donations served to reduce their taxable liabilities substantially, because money donated to IRS approved charities is not taxable.

Generally, one can deduct up to 50% of his income if donated to charity. Obama’s plan, however,would limit charitable giving to no more than 28% of one’s income. While this might not sound like a significant change, the President predicts that this small measure alone will result in an increase in average revenues of roughly $58.4 billion per year.  But an increase in revenue for the government is a decrease in revenue for the private sector; and in this case, the sub-sector that suffers the most will be the Church.

This result is precisely what the sleight-of-hand is designed to conceal. Focus on the big picture, ignore the details. Watch as we tax the rich. You’re not supposed to notice who else gets hurt.

The problem this policy presents for the Church should be self-evident. When charitable donations reach a point that they are no longer deductible, the incentive to make donation curtails sharply because the lack of deductibility makes the donation considerably more expensive.  Further, the generally increased tax burden encourages Americans to hold onto more of their money, as more is needed to pay the higher taxes. This effectively means that the new money being brought in by the government is at the expense of the old money that used to be brought in by the Church and other charities.

Now consider that roughly one-third of all charitable contributions made by Americans each year go to churches.  $58.4 billion in new annual taxes on charitable giving would mean that $19 billion is reflective of taxes on donations to churches (i.e., one-third).  Because churches report approximately $100 billion per year in donations, this means that churches would find 19% of their annual revenue imperiled by Obama’s new tax plan.  Even if donations only drop by half that amount, it would represent a substantial attack on the financial well-being of churches, many of which — in particular black and Hispanic churches in the inner-cities — already struggle to keep their doors open.

There are other negative effects of the policy, of course. The mandatory 30% tax rate would mean that investment in dividend yielding stocks would become pointless, as previously the advantage to owning those stocks was that dividends were taxed at only 15%. This would result in a drop in the value of those stocks and the retirement accounts of anyone who owns them, as well as a sharp decrease in the other investments and activities that the tax code was designed to incentivize with its various credits, deductions, exemptions, and exceptions that would be nullified by a guaranteed minimum tax rate.

But the attack on the Church is arguably the most alarming aspect of Obama’s economic plan, and not just because it reaffirms liberalism’s longstanding antipathy for organized religion.  It’s because by taxing churches and other charities, liberals tax the very organizations that exist for the specific purpose of helping those people who need it the most.

The “Buffet Plan,” indeed, Obama’s entire economic model, makes for great demagoguery, but little else. The new taxes on productivity, investment, and charity can only serve to decrease each.  The rich will see a higher tax burden, the middleclass will see a drop in the value of their portfolios, and the poor will have access to fewer charitable services.  And this is typical of liberalism, attempting to lift politicians up by bringing everyone else down.

By Jordan B. Rickards

www.RickardsReview.com

Now that President Obama’s policies have proven to be a massive failure in every sense of the word, the liberal spin machine has been kicked into overdrive.  But because liberalism can never be the problem, the latest leftist apologetic dogma holds that the real cause of the President’s unpopularity and ineffectualness is that the President is too far above the political fray, too analytical, and frankly too good-natured to engage in the political pugilism necessary to get anything done in Washington.  We simply do not deserve a man as good as he, neither is our system designed to accommodate one.  By way of example, Richard Cohen, writing for the Washington Post, notes that President Obama has a “loathing for the pornography of politics,” and New York Times editorialist Maureen Dowd complains that “Obama’s assumption that you can rise above ascribing villainous motives has caused him to waste huge chunks of his first term seeking bipartisanship from Republicans who were playing him for a dupe.” See, the policies are not the problem.  The problem is that evil Republicans are taking advantage of our innocent, selfless, beneficent President.

What nonsense.  Barack Obama seeking bipartisanship?  Rising above villainous motives?  Please.  It’s one thing to rewrite history, but at least let the ink dry first.

After all, it was not that long ago that this President, who apparently loathes the ugliness of politics, said of Republicans: “They bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”  He told his followers to approach their neighbors and “argue with them and get in their faces.” His administration applauded and encouraged the union rioting in Wisconsin. Rather than try to pacify public anger, he said “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!”  Speaking about Republican ideas for fixing the economy, he said “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.” Instead, he dismissively told Republicans if they want to come along for the ride, they had to ride in the back seat.  Then he told a group of Latino supporters that Republicans are “our enemies” and exhorted his followers to “punish” them.  And in the days leading up to the 2010 elections, he told supporters that a Republican victory would mean “hand to hand combat.”

If by saying that Obama is “above the fray” one means that he’s arrogant and solipsistic, then yes, that would be right.  But to suggest that he is somehow incapable of the baser tactics and instincts of the average politician is plainly ludicrous.  He is the personification of everything that is wrong in politics.  He has shown himself to be a thuggish and dismissive partisan, one whose narcissism works overtime to hide deep-seeded resentments and insecurities.  For years the left has tried to convince us that he is an entirely cerebral creature, his motives unimpeachable, and his capacity to reason unparalleled.  In truth, he is little more than a cheap Chicago-style rabble-rouser.  This is no philosopher king.  This is a nicely-groomed carnival barker well-versed in clichés, community agitation, and little else.

Perhaps his biggest problem is that he has bought into the myth of his own infallibility.  Since he can never blame himself or his policies, he instead blames us for not understanding him.  When public backlash followed his indefensible statement that Israel should return to its 1967 borders, he took to a podium just a few days later to say that we misunderstood his remarks and blamed the press, but refused to take back anything he had said or offer any convincing clarification.  Regarding the building of a Mosque near the World Trade Center site, he told a gathering of applauding Muslims that he believes Muslims have the right “to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan.” But when polls demonstrated that most Americans opposed the project, he scolded the rest of us for misinterpreting his applause line, saying, “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there.” In that same vein, he said the reason Obamacare is so unpopular is not because most Americans have principled objection to it, but rather because of his failure to explain it more clearly to us.  In other words, if only we understood what he understands, if only we were capable of thinking on his level, if only we possessed a similar capacity to reason, then we would not be so misguided.  In Obama’s mind, since he is unerring, and his policies unquestionably righteous, there can be no room for reasonable people to disagree.  This is so typical of a liberal: when you can’t win a dispute, declare the issue beyond dispute.

He believes that if he has made any mistake, is was assuming that if he focused on policy decisions, the American people would understand the reasoning behind them.  “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” Obama said. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on… if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”  So if the President is to blame for anything, it is only that he overestimated our capacity to be rational.  He thought he could talk to us like adults, when really, we need everything explained to us like children, perhaps with finger puppets and illustrations, and even then we won’t get it, so why don’t we all just shut up and get out of his way, since obviously we’ll never understand.

But the problem this President has is not that we don’t understand.  It’s that we understand all too well.

by Jordan B. Rickards, www.RickardsReview.com

Can it really get much worse than this?

The stock market is becoming increasingly volatile.  State insolvencies seem ever more inevitable.  The housing market is nearing collapse.  Gas prices are hovering around $4 per gallon, and we refuse to drill.  Inflation is at five percent.  47 million Americans are on food stamps.  True unemployment is around 16%,which is nearly Depression-level.  Our bond rating has been downgraded for the first time in history.  Consumer confidence is at the lowest it has been since the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a name we hear all too frequently these days. And to top it off, we have $61 trillion in outstanding debt and unfunded liabilities, a sum so large it represents more money than there is in the entire world.

Well, what did you think was going to happen?  This is not an accident, this is the predictable result of electing the most openly hostile, anti-business, anti-capitalist, anti-private sector President in American history.  What other President would openly advocate for a cap on income, saying “at a certain point you’ve made enough money“? He has referred to bondholders as “speculators” who are “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else.” He has railed against the “arrogance and greed” of Wall Street for having the temerity to give out bonuses, as though it is somehow harmful to the economy for people to earn more money.  He likes to refer to bankers as “fat cats.” As early as 2007 he indicated that he believes in keeping gas prices high to discourage gas usage.  He wants to impose energy taxes on Americans that he admits will make their electric bill skyrocket, and will bankrupt the coal industry, to go along with the private health insurance industry he’s also trying to destroy.

Then, when it became obvious in the weeks before the 2010 elections that the country was about to serve him with a stiff rebuke, he retaliated by blaming his plummeting poll numbers on the Chamber of Commerce, accusing them of some kind of undefined election fraud conspiracy.  And he has personally threatened CEOs for paying high salaries, saying he is the only thing standing between them and an angry population brandishing pitchforks.   Frankly, I’d rather face the pitchforks.

More philosophically, he has denounced what he calls the “ownership society,” where people can keep their money and buy and hold property, saying “it won’t work. It ignores our history.”  He says that “Belief in Capitalism is blind faith, this philosophy of letting people fend for themselves has failed.” In place of that, he has said the economy works best when “We spread the wealth around.” So he advocates for what he calls “redistributive change,” saying that he considers the taking of one person’s earnings to give to another to be “neighborliness.”  Never mind that in the four years before becoming a United States senator he never gave more than 2% of his income to charities.

If this guy wasn’t the President of the Untied States, he would be the faculty advisor for some undergraduate Marxist student organization!  But according to him, none of this economic mess is his fault.  So far he’s blamed the Bush Administration, greedy banks, and Wall Street.  When that act got tired, he blamed the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.  Then he blamed Greece for falling into bankruptcy… by establishing the same welfare entitlement system that our President seeks to establish.  He blamed state and local governments for having too few employees, but then made the bizarre statement that “public sector job losses are evidence that the stimulus worked.”  He even blamed ATMs, complaining that they take away jobs from bank tellers, just as all machines do work that could otherwise be done by humans with far more effort and cost.

Listening to him attempting to explain the mechanics of economics is a lot like listening to a child give a report on a book he hasn’t read, groping for answers in front of the class, hoping that something comes out of his mouth that might make some semblance of sense, or failing that, that the teacher would just have mercy on him and allow him to resume his seat.

Sadly, governing isn’t that easy.

Of course, he hasn’t said a thing about the ineffectualness and waste of his stimulus package, he hasn’t blamed himself for turning the United States Treasury into the largest counterfeiting operation in the world, he hasn’t blamed his commandeering of the one-seventh of the economy that is (or was) the healthcare industry.  Instead, he divorces himself from reality and tries to create a new one simply by fiat, as his administration insists that food stamps create jobs, and more incredibly, so do unemployment checks!

No wonder only 26% of Americans approve of how Obama’s handling the economy, though it does make one want to know who the heck those 26% are.

In response, the President has promised finally to deliver an economic plan in the upcoming weeks.  But you don’t need to be Adam Smith to see why no plan this President puts forward will ever work.  The great contradiction in the Obama economic doctrine is that he seeks to create a prosperous economy that is devoid of prosperity.  He sees private wealth as, at best, a necessary evil, but evil nonetheless, so all of his plans are based on minimizing the role of private money in the economy.  He has an almost cartoonish faith in volunteerism (see here also), as though any monetary system could be based around not working for money.  He discourages young people from working in corporate America, instead exhorting them to take public sector jobs that cost, rather than create wealth.  He tries to guilt trip businesses into profitability, saying “businesses have a responsibility to America.” But businesses only have one responsibility, and that is to their shareholders.  Businesses are not community property.  Still, he begs them, saying “Now is the time to invest in America,” reminiscent of when Nelson Mandela begged American businesses to invest in his impoverished nation.

It’s one thing for the leader of a third world nation with no economic structure to beg for American business investment, but when an American president begs his country’s own businesses to produce, it demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how and why businesses operate.  Obama cannot comprehend, or perhaps simply does not want to, that money is its own motivator, that production will follow where profit will lead, and that there is no greater economic force than that which is unleashed when economic freedom is maximized, and individuals are permitted to pursue their own interests for personal gain.  When you base an economy on “sharing the wealth,” however, you soon find that there is none.

So, the real question we should be facing as a nation should not be “what is the economic plan,” but rather “who should do the planning for who?” And the answer must be crystal clear: it is not the government, but rather each individual American who knows best how to maximize his or her individual productive potential and thereby drive the economy.

In Ayn Rand’s magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, Rand imagines a dystopian America where government controls and taxes overwhelm the private sector.  In protest, an industrialist named John Galt organizes a strike of society’s most productive members, causing the economy and society to grind to a halt.  But though Rand had the right idea about capitalism and the deleterious effects of an overbearing government, she missed the most basic point.  In reality, the economy does not suffer because productive members have an organized pout in reaction to policies they despise.  The market economy is itself the organizing factor, not any one person or group of cohorts, and negative changes to the economic climate will automatically have negative results.  In other words, in reality there would never be a John Galt leading a strike.  We are John Galt, and to look at America today is to know what it looks like when Atlas shrugs.

Learning of the death of Osama bin Laden was one of those rare moments in life, the kind that cause us to realize instantly that we will always remember where we were when it happened. Like many Americans, the last time I had experienced such a moment was a related event, when almost ten years previous when I had returned to my law school apartment from a morning class to find one of the Twin Towers already burning, and before long, an explosion at the second one. For all intents and purposes, that day ended this past Sunday with the glorious news that Osama bin Laden had finally met a pleasingly gory demise. Never had I been so thankful (by which I mean “at all thankful”) to hear President Obama speak, and when he took to the lectern and finally confirmed the media reports, I applauded him, grinning from ear to ear.

Yes, the President’s brief speech was somewhat vainglorious. Yes, he aggrandized his minimal role while glossing over (and in the case of President Bush, outright ignoring) the contributions of others, resulting in a speech bereft of operational (i.e. significant) details. But that was to be expected, considering he had done the same thing just over two years ago when he bragged that he “gave the order” for snipers to kill the Somalia pirates who had taken Americans hostage, as though to convince us that he had somehow contributed more than the expert marksmen and military planners, and therefore deserved the bulk of the praise for the mission’s success.

Still, harsh critic though I am, this time I chose to allow the President this minor indulgence. He is, after all, the President, and being President comes with certain privileges, not the least of which is an entitlement to some degree of latitude when it comes to taking more credit than deserved for moments of national achievement and historic import. Besides, the news he delivered was not just extraordinary, it was transcendent. It brought with it a sense of national unity. At that moment, I was not a conservative and he was not a liberal. None of us were. We were just Americans, joined, albeit temporarily, in a common thankfulness for a happy ending to a rather dark chapter in our history. It’s a shame, really, that we are most unified, perhaps only truly unified, in moments born of tragedy, but at least we are unified then, rather than never at all.

Yet, though the news itself was momentous, its effect did not seem to be. For example, the forty-thousand or so people watching the Mets take on the Phillies in Philadelphia (the only national sports broadcast on the air at that late hour) began a “U-S-A” chant as the news spread throughout the stadium. But at least from what could be heard on the ESPN broadcast and replays, the chant was tepid, broken, and intermittent. Anyone expecting a highly-charged emotional scene, reminiscent of George W. Bush throwing out the first pitch in front of an ebullient Yankee Stadium shortly after Nine-Eleven, would have been thoroughly disappointed.

Meanwhile, crowds gathered outside the White House and at Times Square, but they did not seem to be particularly large crowds, especially as measured against those we see so frequently clogging the streets of whichever Middle Eastern capital happens to be burning in turmoil on a given week. And rather than euphoria the kind of which one expects to accompany the end of a long national war or project, the celebrations in D.C. and New York seemed more akin to those seen when a local college or professional team wins a championship. It’s a nice moment, but it lacks substance and it’s fleeting.

Indeed, one had to wonder whether the many college-aged young adults gathered in front of the White House, a few holding Obama’s often derided “Change You Can Believe In” signs, were really cheering the death of bin Laden, or whether many were simply using the news as an opportunity to gloatingly rejoice in a political victory for their favorite Presidential candidate. Was this a spontaneous national celebration (strangely localized in only two cities and pockets of one ballpark), or a makeshift campaign rally?

Nationally, there seemed to be no widespread catharsis. Sure, we were all happy about the news, but bin Laden was yesterday’s news. Though it had taken nearly a decade to kill him, we hadn’t been waiting all that time. We waited for months, and we waited for a few years — the capture of Saddam Hussein gave us renewed hope and interest — but then we grew tired of waiting and life went on. We didn’t build bomb shelters. We didn’t do air raid drills. We didn’t have a draft. The sun continued to rise, our hearts continued to beat, the terrorists didn’t strike — content as they seemed to be fighting our soldiers overseas — the economy struggled, a new President was elected, and somewhere along the way Nine-Eleven just became a memory.

And who could expect otherwise? The networks hardly even cover Afghanistan or Iraq these days. Heck, they hardly even cover Libya, and that war just started a few weeks ago. Part of the reason is that the media does not want to call attention to conflicts that made President Bush so unpopular, lest The Chosen One suffer the same fate as his predecessor. And part of the reason is that, yes, our collective attention span is short, especially for news that comes to us from countries most of us cannot locate on a map, involving people far different than our own, whose names we cannot pronounce, whose language we cannot speak, and whose culture we do not understand, nor do we care to.

But more than that, the reason we don’t focus on global terrorism anymore is that for the vast majority of Americans, it simply does not affect our everyday lives. Terrorism is distant to us. And that’s a good thing. It means we’re winning. The success of the War on Terror was never meant to be measured by how many bad guys we killed, because there will always be more bad guys to kill. Instead, success in this sort of war is measured by the ability of the average American to get on with his life, and to be able to focus on the things most important to him or her, without interference from and preoccupation with fear of terrorists. By that measure, we are succeeding to an incredible extent.

So, by all means, thank President Obama and give him the credit he deserves for killing Osama bin Laden. But thank President Bush, too. He’s the one who took the fight to the enemy overseas, containing the War on Terror to battlefields far away from our homeland and our national consciousness. He’s the reason our lives seem normal today. And he’s the reason the death of our most feared enemy brought relatively moderate applause, instead of a profoundly felt sigh of relief.

May God bless and guide both men.

This past week, a shutdown of the federal government was narrowly avoided when Republicans and Democrats reconciled their differences and, cognizant of the massive, unsustainable deficits we are running, heroically cut a whopping one percent out of a budget that has nearly doubled since Bill Clinton left office.  The hang-up, however, was not so much on the amount to be cut, but where to cut, and central to this was whether the private abortion industry giant Planned Parenthood would continue to receive $363 million annually in taxpayer money.  Predictably, Republicans caved on the issue, fearful as they were of a government shutdown, and along with it, the possibility that once the federal government ceased operations, everyone would realize how little we actually need it.

Planned Parenthood and its supporters argue that this money is required to provide non-abortion services in the form of free mammograms, free condoms, and free pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease testing.  But as has been recently revealed, Planned Parenthood does not provide mammograms, and simply uses that argument as a ruse to distract away from their entirely sex-centered business.

The remaining justifications — free condoms, free pregnancy tests, and free STD tests — boil down to nothing more than another welfare program.  Worse, it’s an entirely unnecessary welfare program, because nobody needs to engage in sexual activity, unless we define “need” so expansively as to mean “anything that requires any amount of discipline to resist.” As it is, we already have programs that pay for other people’s housing, food, school, education, medical care, cell phones, cable television, and in the case of addicts, drug needles.  Now we’re being asked to pay for someone else’s sex life, in so doing tacitly we’re acknowledging a new government entitlement to promiscuity.

Even if one accepts, for the sake of argument, that taxpayers should finance sexual welfare (shall we call it “sex-fare?”), what remains unanswered is why this funding must be given to Planned Parenthood, and not to real hospitals which are actually regulated.  The obvious answer is that Planned Parenthood uses its vast wealth to support pro-abortion politicians, so pro-abortion politicians give Planned Parenthood more of our money in order that Planned Parenthood will have more to give back to them.

This thinly veiled public money laundering aside, one is hard-pressed to think of a less worthy organization to be entrusted with the healthcare of women and young girls.  Consider that according to their own publication, Planned Parenthood, the wealthiest corporation in the abortion industry, “opposes laws that make it a crime for people not to tell sexual partners they have HIV” because this interferes with “a larger right to sexual pleasure.” They also oppose laws that require them to notify parents before their children have an abortion, because heaven forbid the parent actually put a stop to it. They oppose informed consent laws that compel them to provide a sonogram of the fetus about to be aborted to a woman or young girl considering the procedure, so that the woman or young girl can make an informed decision whether to proceed.

And they oppose laws that require them to report when a young girl has been raped.  Time and again, they have even been shown to be willing to aid sex traffickers, because they’ll do just about anything to maximize the number of potential abortions.  At their core, they’re no different than any other business.  All they care about is the bottom line.

Make no mistake about it, abortion is big business.  Planned Parenthood is a global corporation whose United States branch alone reports approximately $1 billion in assets, and another $1 billion in annual revenues.  That doesn’t including assets and income from the over one hundred international Planned Parenthood affiliates.

And by far and away, their greatest source of income is abortions.  They perform over 300,000 per year in America alone, accounting for an estimated $400 million in revenue.  It should come as no surprise then that, according to their own report, they perform 340 abortions for every one adoption referral, and 47 abortions for every one prenatal care client.  So don’t let them fool you into thinking they’re a balanced source of client care and can be trusted to give objective advice to their clients.  Just like crack dealers push crack, Planned Parenthood pushes abortions.  Consequences be damned.

If you want to know what’s really going on here, ask yourself why Planned Parenthood wants government money in the first place.  If all of it is going to be used for charitable purposes, and none for abortions, what does Planned Parenthood have to gain by it?  The answer is two-fold.  First, that money adds to general revenue, offsetting the cost of their operations so that they have more money to advertise and perform abortions, and to lobby and buy politicians who fight against pro-life policies.

Just as importantly, they get a new clientele which becomes accustomed to visiting Planned Parenthood clinics for all things health-related, thereby maximizing the number of women and young girls who walk through their doors, and who would then be more inclined to return when it’s time for Planned Parenthood’s principal moneymaker, abortion.

The irony is that Planned Parenthood fancies (or at least markets) itself as a champion of women’s rights.  In truth, it is a champion at nothing more than exploiting women and young girls for profit.  It’s Planned Parenthood which preys on women and young girls when they are at their weakest and most desperate.  It’s Planned Parenthood which tries to separate young girls from their parents and the value structures of their homes, all in the name of making a buck.  It’s Planned Parenthood which claims to stand for a woman’s right to choose, but only if that choice is for an abortion.  It’s Planned Parenthood which claims to believe in a woman’s right to her body, but also seeks to destroy as many of those bodies as possible at the very beginning of their existence.

Amazingly, many on the left argue that refusing this money to Planned Parenthood would actually increase the number of abortions, because fewer free condoms would result in more unwanted pregnancies, and more unwanted pregnancies would result in more abortions.  Nonsense.  Planned Parenthood performs an abortion every 90 seconds.  Don’t tell me the best way to reduce abortions is to subsidize their largest provider.  If that would reduce abortions, Planned Parenthood would have nothing to do with it.

Giving taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood to provide “health services” for women is like giving money to the tobacco industry for anti-smoking initiatives, or to Anheuser Busch representatives to teach alcoholics anonymous classes. It makes no sense to give people money to solve a problem, when they have a vested interest in aggravating that same problem.

But to the pro-abortion crowd, this debate is not about making sense.  It’s about making dollars and cents.

www.RickardsReview.com

As American military operations continue in Libya at a cost of $100 million per day, the President finally saw fit this past Monday to address the American people on the matter, after nine days of combat and not a word from our Commander in Chief since its inception.

The President began his twenty-minute speech by saying he wanted “to update the American people” on Libya, as though he had been speaking regularly on the subject, and his bizarre silence was simply a figment of our collective imagination.  He then went into his case in chief against Gaddafi, reminding us that the Libyan dictator “has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world – including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents.”

Of course, what the President left out is that Gaddafi’s awful history did not prevent the President from meeting with him, shaking his hand and eating pasta with him in July of 2009, during one of the President’s apologize-for-America-and-appease-global-dictators tours.  Denis McDonough, a White House official at the time, said before the meal that Obama “doesn’t intend to choose which leaders he’ll shake hands with and which he won’t: he’ll be very happy to greet everyone he meets.” Even, apparently, murderous terrorists. 

In any event, after setting out the case against Gaddafi, the President then attempted to persuade the American people that this mission was somehow in America’s interests, even though his own Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, had just the day before admitted that Libya “was not a vital national interest to the United States,” and did not “pose an actual or imminent threat.” But the closest the President came to contradicting Gates and identifying any concrete American interest(s) was to say that had we not intervened, thousands of Libyans would have been driven “across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful – yet fragile – transitions in Egypt and Tunisia.” This is an awfully ironic justification, considering the President does not seem too concerned about the millions of people streaming across the Mexican-American border, placing enormous strains on the fragile American economy and social structure.  But, if nothing else, it is encouraging to see the President is suddenly thinking about border security and illegal immigration, albeit in the wrong part of the world. 

The President’s second, and impossibly even more tenuous justification, was that had we not acted, “The U.N. Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling its future credibility to uphold global peace and security.” But the illegitimacy and emptiness of the Security Council has already been well-established, in part because the same Gaddafi that the Security Council today condemns actually had a seat on the Security Council as recently as 2009! 

Still, time and again, the President assured us that we need not fret because, after all, we are not in this conflict alone, but are joined by a “broad coalition” of “international partners.” What he neglected to mention is that these international partners include, amazingly, al Qaeda.  Indeed, the Libyan rebel commander, one Mr. al-Hasidi, has said unequivocally that his movement has ties to al Qaeda, he has admitted fighting against American forces in Afghanistan, and had actually been detained by the United States as an enemy combatant until his release in 2008.

Of course, there’s nothing new about America rotating battlefield loyalties. The United States supported Saddam Hussein in the mid-eighties, before ultimately deposing him.  The United States fought alongside the Soviet Union in World War II, before engaging the Soviets in a decades long cold war.  And, of course, we fought two wars against Great Britain, one for our independence and one shortly after, before allying with them in two World Wars and a long-standing NATO alliance.  Global interests constantly evolve. 

But this is probably the first time in recorded history a country has decided to fight for and alongside its enemy in one war, while still fighting against that same enemy in the original, unfinished war.  Oddly, the President’s speech made no mention of this, and barely mentioned al Qaeda at all, except to reassure us that “We are going after al Qaeda around the globe… wherever they seek a foothold.” Except, that is, in Libya, where we are helping them establish that very foothold.

Amazingly, this is perhaps not even the most perplexing element of Obama’s Libyan policy.  Rather, most befuddling is the great contradiction of the new Obama Doctrine that posits that we should, on the one hand, go to war against a dictator, seek to “hold him accountable for his crimes,” and demand that he “step down from power,” while simultaneously agreeing to leave him in power.  To that end, Obama has said we won’t kill Gaddafi even though we’re at war against him, largely because to kill him would alter the mission to one of regime change, and the President does not want this to become another Iraq.  But by leaving Gaddafi in power, we are following exactly the same road we took in Iraq when we left Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, only to have him snub his nose at the international community almost immediately after, thereby crippling the credibility of Obama’s precious United Nations, and ensuring years more of the same sort of human rights violations that we now witness in Libya.

Sadly, as is often the case, the President’s speech left more questions than answers.  If the mission is humanitarian, why Libya, and not Syria, the Sudan, or the Ivory Coast?  If Gaddafi has $33 billion in assets that we’re freezing, why aren’t we using that money to reimburse ourselves for the cost of this mission? And why isn’t House Majority Leader John Boehner on every news network demanding that the President explain what constitutional authority he has to send our troops into battle without congressional approval?

In his speech, the President noted that he had “consulted the bipartisan leadership of Congress,” though not Congress itself, and the only sound heard from Boehner so far has been from his spokesman, who has said simply that the President needs to provide more “clarity” on the issue.  Perhaps we’ve not heard from Boehner because he’s too busy crying over his own life story once again, or criticizing the Tea Party for demanding that congressional Republicans actually act like Republicans, or tinkering with his plan to save Social Security by simply refusing to allow some Americans to collect.  Whatever the case, at a time such as this, when our representatives need to be asking tough questions of a President who is acting without congressional or constitutional authority, who refuses to give coherent, serious answers, and who is ceding America’s autonomy to international forces, John Boehner remains silent, proving once again that “Republican leadership” is a contradiction in terms. 

Indeed, there has only been one strong opposition voice to the President’s actions, and it has not been from a Republican, but from a Harvard-educated constitutional scholar who said, very bluntly, “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

The name of that constitutional scholar was Candidate Barack Obama, December, 2007.

“There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.” — Oscar Wilde

The guerilla journalist James O’Keefe strikes again.  The man who exposed Planned Parenthood accepting donations for race-based population control, and ACORN employees eager to aid in child prostitution and sex trafficking, set his sights most recently on liberal bulwark NPR.  As has been widely reported by now, O’Keefe’s associates taped NPR executives enthusiastic to receive a $5 million donation from the Muslim Brotherhood, and in so doing characterized Tea Partiers and evangelical Christians as “racist.”

But Brian Todd, who interviewed O’Keefe for CNN (which might very well stand for Condescending News Network), tried to turn the story away from NPR and onto O’Keefe, accusatorily asking “What do you say to those who say to you that this was sleazy, that you set those people up in an underhanded way, that it’s not journalism?” This was not the first time O’Keefe had been forced to defend himself from an ad hominem assault from a journalist, as George Stephanopoulos had already done that in an “interview” that read more like a criminal interrogation, wherein the former political operative accused O’Keefe of being a political operative.  O’Keefe, therefore, should have anticipated Todd’s personal attack, yet he did not respond tactfully.  O’Keefe, whose preferred medium is visual presentation and is yet untrained in the art of rhetoric, countered defensively by saying “ABC’s Primetime live used to do frankly far sleazier things when they went into supermarkets, and got jobs at supermarkets, and they set up private citizens.”

That was a rather regrettable response.  By saying that another group is “sleazier,” O’Keefe unwittingly conceded his critic’s point, which is that what he does is itself sleazy.  This is, of course, nonsense.  O’Keefe should have responded by pointing out that his methodology is no different than what narcotics officers do when they bust drug dealers by engaging in undercover buys.  This sort of tactic is made necessary because, as O’Keefe realizes while CNN pretends not to, the only way to observe honest behavior from a dishonest person is to trick him into thinking he’s not being observed by anyone he would hope to deceive.  The more relevant question then, the question O’Keefe should have shot back at Todd, is why does James O’Keefe have to do the main stream media’s work for them?

The answer is that the self-impressed media elite seem more concerned these days with selling books, touring the lecture circuit, and making sure they attend the right cocktail parties, than in actually performing any investigative work beyond checking the Drudge Report every fifteen minutes for updates on Charlie Sheen or Lindsey Lohan.  The talking heads we see on today’s ubiquitous 24/7 news cycle may fashion themselves as modern incarnations of Walter Cronkite, even occasionally tackling hard news, but really they are a breed of their own: a new class of journo-pundit, an incomparably smug group which demonstrates on a nightly basis that to be included in their class you do not have to be intelligent, only opinionated.  To members of this group, they need not look past their reflections for the news, because in their minds they are the news.  While O’Keefe’s lens points at the event, their lenses point at themselves. 

True, a conservative like Sarah Palin comes on the scene and reporters descend on Alaska like locusts, swarming about for anything that could discredit her.  Conservative nominees to the Supreme Court are hyper-scrutinized for anything that might reveal a character defect, or at least lend itself to such an inference.  And we all remember the lengths to which the media went to demonstrate that George Bush had either not served, or served dishonorably in the National Guard.

 But such vigilance is exclusively reserved for right-of-center targets.  Liberal Supreme Court nominees like Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan never had their discarded trash rummaged through, or video stores in their hometowns interviewed for the names of movies they may have rented, as happened to Robert Bork.  We know every intimate detail of Palin’s life, and George Bush’s academic woes are legend, but we have neither a birth certificate nor college records for our commander in chief, nor any major news outlet making any effort to discover either.  And while the investigation into Bush’s National Guard service culminated with Dan Rather’s resignation after the discovery (by a blogger) that he had based his reports on fake documents, almost no media attention was paid when Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor, stole and destroyed real, classified documents from the National Archives in order to hide them from the 9/11 Commission. 

Journalists often brag that they write the first draft of history.  But historians, being a more cynical, sagacious, and erudite group, are often keen to recite William Durant’s caution that history is mostly guessing, and the rest prejudice.  Indeed, in modern American media there is only one objective source that can be trusted to write the first draft of history without conjecture or bias, and it is not CNN, or NBC, or FoxNews. 

It is James O’Keefe’s camera.  May its battery never die.