Abortion

Spectator on Obama: “America, What Have you Done?”

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I was referred to a very concisely and well written article by Melanie Phillips, in the Spectator, recently on Obama’s utter lack of bringing hope or change to Washington. Take the time to read it and click through…

President Obama has had, by general consent, a torrid First Fortnight. To put it another way, it has taken precisely two weeks for the illusion that brought him to power to be exposed for the nonsense that it so obviously was. The transformational candidate who was going to sweep away pork-barrel politics, lobbyists and corruption has been up to his neck in sleaze, as eviscerated here by Charles Krauthammer. Despite the fact that he came to power promising to ‘ban all earmarks’, his ‘stimulus’ bill represents billions of dollars of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections — which have nothing to do with kick-starting the economy and everything to do with favouring pet Democrat causes.

He has been appointing one tax dodger, lobbyist and wheeler-dealer after another. After appointing one official,Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had unaccountably forgotten to pay his taxes, he then watched his designated Health Secretary Tom Daschle fall on his sword because he too had taken a tax holiday. Daschle was furthermore a prominent actor in the world of lobbying and influence-peddling. Leon Panetta, Obama’s nominee for Director of the CIA has also, according to the Wall Street Journal, consulted for prominent companies and sat on the board of a public affairs firm that lobbies Congress. The Weekly Standard reports that Secretary of Labour nominee Hilda Solis was not only involved with a private organization lobbying her fellow legislators on a bill that she helped sponsor, but she apparently kept her involvement secret and failed to reveal a clear conflict of interest.

In foreign policy, Obama has started by trashing his own country through grossly misrepresenting its history and grovelling to America’s enemies such as Iran, which has flicked him aside with undiluted contempt.  He has gratuitously upset America’s ally India by suggesting that America should muscle in and resolve the Kashmir question.

His right hand doesn’t seem to know what his left hand is doing. He reportedly asked retired Marine General Anthony Zinni to be US ambassador to Iraq, but then abruptly withdrew the appointment without explanation after it had been confirmed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And the precise role he is offering Dennis Ross – special envoy to Iran? Special adviser to Hillary? Special adviser to other special advisers? – remains mired in confusion.

I have argued before however that, given Obama’s radical roots in the neo-Marxist, nihilist politics of Saul Alinsky, it is the undermining of America’s fundamental values that is likely to be this President’s most strategically important goal. I have also suggested that, since this agenda is promoted through stealth politics which gull the credulous middle-classes while destroying the ground upon which they are standing, his second-tier appointments should be closely scrutinised.

And here’s a humdinger. Obama has picked a man called David Ogden to be deputy Attorney-General. Ogden has made his legal career from representing pornographers, trying to defeat child protection legislation and undermining family values.  As FoxNews reported this week, he once represented a group of library directors arguing against the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which ordered libraries and schools receiving funding for the Internet to restrict access to obscene sites. And on behalf of several media groups, he successfully argued against a child pornography law that required publishers to verify and document the age of their models, which would have ensured these models were at least 18.

The Family Research Council has more examples of his contribution to upholding American and western values. In one such case, he expressed the view that abortion was less damaging to a woman than having children:

In sum, it is grossly misleading to tell a woman that abortion imposes possible detrimental psychological effects when the risks are negligible in most cases, when the evidence shows that she is more likely to experience feelings of relief and happiness, and when child-birth and child-rearing or adoption may pose concomitant (if not greater) risks or adverse psychological effects …

In another, co-authored brief, he argued that it was an unconstitutional burden on 14-year old girls seeking an abortion for their parents to be notified — because there was no difference between adults and mid-teens in their ability to grasp all the implications of such a decision:

There is no question that the right to secure an abortion is fundamental. By any objective standard, therefore, the decision to abort is one that a reasonable person, including a reasonable adolescent, could make. [E]mpirical studies have found few differences between minors aged 14-18 and adults in their understanding of information and their ability to think of options and consequences when asked to consider treatment-related decisions. These unvarying and highly significant findings indicate that with respect to the capacity to understand and reason logically, there is no qualitative or quantitative difference between minors in mid-adolescence, i.e., about 14-15 years of age, and adults.

And how did the 44th President react to the growing public dismay over the mess he was making? He threw his toys out of the pram — or perhaps that should read, he got into the pram. For he fled the scene of the disaster and sought the company of seven year-olds instead. As the Telegraph reported:

‘We were just tired of being in the White House,’ he told a group of excited seven-year-olds before discussing Batman and reading them a book.

Tired of being President – after two weeks!

Tax cheats, pork-barrel politics, ancillary child abuse, incompetence, chaos, treachery and infantilism. America – what have you done?!

Amen.

How is Murtha not in jail?!?

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Seriously, blood started to spurt out of my eyes as I read this article.

My favorite part:

Good government groups have long criticized Murtha’s cozy relationship with a handful of lobbyists and defense firms, ties that see millions of dollars in government spending go out from Murtha’s office, and hundreds of thousands in campaign donations come in. Murtha has said his earmarking has helped revive his economically depressed district.

He does the Democrats proud.

WSJ: Obama’s ‘Redistribution’ Constitution

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The left will own the courts. This is why we need to own guns against a government that hates us. The future is very bleak for American under Hussein, Surrender Poodle (Pelosi), and Mormon in Name Only (Reid).

The Wall Street Journal published a piece online today about the ability Obama will have of restocking the courts against the values and wishes of more than half of America’s sleeping conservative population who don’t seem to be interested enough to vote this year (you deserve what you get, but I don’t so go to the trouble of voting against Obama).

One of the great unappreciated stories of the past eight years is how thoroughly Senate Democrats thwarted efforts by President Bush to appoint judges to the lower federal courts.

Consider the most important lower federal court in the country: the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his two terms as president, Ronald Reagan appointed eight judges, an average of one a year, to this court. They included Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Kenneth Starr, Larry Silberman, Stephen Williams, James Buckley, Douglas Ginsburg and David Sentelle. In his two terms, George W. Bush was able to name only four: John Roberts, Janice Rogers Brown, Thomas Griffith and Brett Kavanaugh.

Although two seats on this court are vacant, Bush nominee Peter Keisler has been denied even a committee vote for two years. If Barack Obama wins the presidency, he will almost certainly fill those two vacant seats, the seats of two older Clinton appointees who will retire, and most likely the seats of four older Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointees who may retire as well.

The net result is that the legal left will once again have a majority on the nation’s most important regulatory court of appeals.

The balance will shift as well on almost all of the 12 other federal appeals courts. Nine of the 13 will probably swing to the left if Mr. Obama is elected (not counting the Ninth Circuit, which the left solidly controls today). Circuit majorities are likely at stake in this presidential election for the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeal. That includes the federal appeals courts for New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and virtually every other major center of finance in the country.

On the Supreme Court, six of the current nine justices will be 70 years old or older on January 20, 2009. There is a widespread expectation that the next president could make four appointments in just his first term, with maybe two more in a second term. Here too we are poised for heavy change.

These numbers ought to raise serious concern because of Mr. Obama’s extreme left-wing views about the role of judges. He believes — and he is quite open about this — that judges ought to decide cases in light of the empathy they ought to feel for the little guy in any lawsuit.

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: “[W]e need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”

On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

In a Sept. 6, 2001, interview with Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ-FM, Mr. Obama noted that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society,” and “to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.”

He also noted that the Court “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted.” That is to say, he noted that the U.S. Constitution as written is only a guarantee of negative liberties from government — and not an entitlement to a right to welfare or economic justice.

This raises the question of whether Mr. Obama can in good faith take the presidential oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” as he must do if he is to take office. Does Mr. Obama support the Constitution as it is written, or does he support amendments to guarantee welfare? Is his provision of a “tax cut” to millions of Americans who currently pay no taxes merely a foreshadowing of constitutional rights to welfare, health care, Social Security, vacation time and the redistribution of wealth? Perhaps the candidate ought to be asked to answer these questions before the election rather than after.

Every new federal judge has been required by federal law to take an oath of office in which he swears that he will “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” Mr. Obama’s emphasis on empathy in essence requires the appointment of judges committed in advance to violating this oath. To the traditional view of justice as a blindfolded person weighing legal claims fairly on a scale, he wants to tear the blindfold off, so the judge can rule for the party he empathizes with most.

The legal left wants Americans to imagine that the federal courts are very right-wing now, and that Mr. Obama will merely stem some great right-wing federal judicial tide. The reality is completely different. The federal courts hang in the balance, and it is the left which is poised to capture them.

A whole generation of Americans has come of age since the nation experienced the bad judicial appointments and foolish economic and regulatory policy of the Johnson and Carter administrations. If Mr. Obama wins we could possibly see any or all of the following: a federal constitutional right to welfare; a federal constitutional mandate of affirmative action wherever there are racial disparities, without regard to proof of discriminatory intent; a right for government-financed abortions through the third trimester of pregnancy; the abolition of capital punishment and the mass freeing of criminal defendants; ruinous shareholder suits against corporate officers and directors; and approval of huge punitive damage awards, like those imposed against tobacco companies, against many legitimate businesses such as those selling fattening food.

Nothing less than the very idea of liberty and the rule of law are at stake in this election. We should not let Mr. Obama replace justice with empathy in our nation’s courtrooms.

Mr. Calabresi is a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor of law at Northwestern University.

READ IT HERE

OBAMA MUST BE STOPPED!

Video: Escaped The Plantation, Voting McCain

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Perhaps the best speech given during this entire campaign cycle.

The O-Team
More genius by ZO. See more great clips here

Reasons To Vote Democrat: A Quick List

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There’s another email going around that contains some very valuable truths…

WHY I’VE DECIDED TO VOTE DEMOCRAT

I’m voting Democrat because I believe the government will do a better job of spending the money I earn than I would.

I’m voting Democrat because freedom of speech is fine as long as nobody is offended by it.

I’m voting Democrat because when we pull out of Iraq I trust that the bad guys will stop what they’re doing because they now think we’re good people.

I’m voting Democrat because I believe that people who can’t tell us if it will rain on Friday can tell us that the polar ice caps will melt away in ten years if I don’t start driving a Prius.

I’m voting Democrat because I’m not concerned about the slaughter of millions of babies so long as we keep all death row inmates alive.

I’m voting Democrat because I believe that business should not be allowed to make profits for themselves. They need to break even and give the rest away to the government for redistribution as the Democrats see fit.

I’m voting Democrat because I believe three or four pointy headed elitist liberals need to rewrite the Constitution every few days to suit some fringe kooks who would never get their agendas past the voters.

I’m voting Democrat because I believe that when the terrorists don’t have to hide from us over there, they’ll come over here, and I don’t want to have any guns in the house to shoot them with.

(I’m so Democrat that I have a big sign on the door of my house: There are no guns in this home! That, I am quite sure, will deter criminals. I think all Democrats should be required to display this sign on their home.)

I’m voting Democrat because I believe oil companies’ profits of 4% on a gallon of gas are obscene but the government taxing the same gallon of gas at 15% isn’t.

I’m voting Democrat because I love the fact that I can now marry whatever I want. I’ve decided to marry my horse.

I really wonder why anyone would ever vote Republican.

Obama, Abortion Extremist

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Scary review of Obama’s abortion views based no on what he claims, but what he does on the record. A portion of the article follows but please follow the link after to read the entire article. It’s surprisingly sad how little regard these people have to human life.

Asked by Pastor Rick Warren when a baby gets rights, Obama said, “I’m absolutely convinced that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue.” This is a crashing banality couched as thoughtfulness. If Obama is so sensitive to the moral element of the issue, why does he want to eliminate any existing restrictions on the procedure?

In 2007, Obama told the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that the Freedom of Choice Act would be the first piece of legislation that he would sign as president. The act would not only codify Roe v. Wade, but wipe out all current federal, state and local restrictions on abortion that pass muster under Roe, including the Hyde Amendment prohibiting federal funding of abortion. This is not the legislative priority of a man keenly attuned to the moral implications of abortion.

At Saddleback, Obama said determining when a baby gets rights is “above his pay grade.” Leave aside that presidents usually have an opinion about who deserves legal rights. If Obama is willing to permit any abortions in any circumstances, he’d better possess an absolute certainty about the absolute moral nullity of the fetus.

He told Warren that he favors “limits on late-term abortions, if there is an exception for the mother’s health.” But the exception he wants is so broad it makes the restriction meaningless. Obama opposed the partial-birth bill that passed the House and the Senate, 281-142 and 64-34 respectively, and has criticized the Supreme Court for upholding the law.

It’s not just partial-birth abortion where Obama is outside the mainstream, but on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act — the occasion for his televised accusation of lying.

In 2000, Congress took up legislation to make it clear that infants born alive after abortions are persons under the law. The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League opposed the bill as an assault on Roe, but it passed the House 380-15. Back in the Illinois state Senate in 2001, Obama spoke out against and voted “present” — effectively “no” — on a similar bill, aligning himself with the tiny pro-abortion rump of 15 congressmen.

READ IT HERE

McCain Proves Superior At Saddleback

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I hope everyone had a chance  watch the forum with McCain and Barry Oblivious. If not, please do so below. While Obama was struggling to begin half of his responses with uhhh, ummm, I, I, I think…, McCain had clear ideas with conviction in them and his whole presence was much more impressive than I expected. It’s good to see the relatively unscripted side of these two (though of course they both have somewhat memorized positions on all of these issues).

Obama

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

McCain

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5

Related articles…

Barack Obama, Abortion Extremist by Rich Lowry

Obama’s Religious Roots Raise Questions

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Obama speaking of his mother’s beliefs in The Pompous Agent of Fiction, er, The Audacity of Hope…

“For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness. “This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.

“In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.”

It was clearly a moral-relativist upbringing. A “working knowledge of the world’s great religions”? Not sure how religion could get a serious shake, or any sort of moral compass instilled, in a home of two atheist parents. Speaking for myself, had I grown up in such moral flexibility/ambiguity, and political confusion, would likely lead me to join a religion only for the society of it, or perhaps for the ability of that organization to get me where I want to go. That established, it’s not a stretch to believe that Obama chose Christianity with calculation because it might get him the farthest politically with, first, other black Christians in Chicago and then (should he dare to dream) rising to various levels of power within the most Christian country in the world.

Scary to think he might have planned this; that he might have methodically picked a religion like a country club to get gain in the world, but being a believer myself I will refrain from measuring another’s faith as much as possible. I just mention the circumstances as food for thought.

Another interesting quote…

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy demands is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

There’s so much round talking on the Left that one can hardly question whether we’re playing children’s games with conversation. Broken down to the core message, without the spin and lack of resolution, Barack Oblivious is saying “you can’t just use the Bible justify being anti-abortion, you have to use a reason that everyone will agree with” (based on what set of morals he’s thinking I don’t know, but I’ll bite. How about using the secular B.S. he espouses not far before this passage (bold added)…

And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice.

Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.

Wouldn’t his secular mother then have instilled in him the “reverence for life” that would conflict with the convenience of liberal abortion? He seems to have difficulty reaching obvious conclusions when they conflict with the liberal voting block.

He continues…

In a sense, my dilemma… mirrors the broader dilemma that liberalism has faced in answering the religious right. Liberalism teaches us to be tolerant of other people’s religious beliefs [does it?], so long as those beliefs don’t cause anyone harm [like a defenseless unborn baby?] or impinge on another’s right to believe differently. To the extent that religious communities are content to keep to themselves and faith is neatly confined as a matter of individual conscience, such tolerance is not tested.

But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least, is a very public affair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to actively evangelize wherever they can. They may feel that a secular state promotes values that directly offend their beliefs. They may want the larger society to validate and reinforce their views.

And when the religiously motivated assert themselves politically to achieve these aims, liberals get nervous.

I would be glad to keep specific religion out of the public square (mostly because I wouldn’t have the patience to listen to Mulsims and VooDoo practitioners trying to get equal time) but certainly in all cases my belief that a person who believes in any brand of monotheism is a good thing. Cards on the table, anyone who thinks we’re an accident, or that there is nothing/no one behind all of this, gets no respect from me (and frankly they should be granted a pair of spectacles and a quiet place to think until the obivous occurs to them).

So that said, I will clarify that I don’t want religion systematically installed in the public square for the above reasons, but conversely it should not be forcibly withheld from the public square either. The desires (not rights) of the godless (12% of the U.S. population) should certainly not have the power to silence and suppress the desires of the many (85% of the U.S. claims Christianity).

Evangelism is a good thing. If any of us has found an eternal truth, the greatest thing we can do is share it with our fellowmen. I have a very clear set of beliefs of which I’m certain and confident, yet I see the evangelical efforts of those with different beliefs as a positive thing. My thinking is that anything that causes a man to believe in God is a good thing. Even if the belief system doesn’t mesh with mine, at least that person is now thinking about spiritual things and the importance, purpose, and meaning of this life a little more. That kind of thinking leads to prayer. Prayer leads to more personal revelation about eternal truth and the cycle continues. It’s a beautiful thing.

So no, I think we should all preach to each other always, and not be offended at the differences but take those things that touch the heart and soul and add them to our beliefs. Having the faithless keep me from exercising mine in public is against everything this country should and did stand for. The atheist activists can go pound sand for all I care. The arrogance of believing everything’s an accident is where my Christian patience ends. But I love them anyway, as best I can, and hope for their comas to end. Perhaps we should shake them harder.