Grasping for Anything They Stoop to Slander

The Washington Post is generally acknowledged to be a liberal newspaper.  They will undoubtedly endorse President Obama for a second term.  Yet their bias is not so perverse that it forces them to turn a blind eye to the blatant lies of the Obama campaign.  They have a Fact Checker, and after looking at the Mitt Romney tenure at Bain Capital repeatedly, they have concluded that the assertions of the Obama campaign simply do not cut muster.  Kathleen Parker sums it all up in today's opinion piece.

Enjoy the Victory Lap While It Lasts!

At first I was disappointed with the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare.  Then I realized that Chief Justice Roberts has actually done something very smart indeed.  He gave the liberals a Pyrrhic victory.  And he saved the Court from being accused by the left of being too partisan.

Krauthammer has a thoughtful analysis saying, basically, that Roberts has been true both to is own judicial philosophy and to the preserving the institutional dignity of the Court:

Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the Commerce Clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the Commerce Clause fig leaf.
Law upheld, Supreme Court's reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce Clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.
That's not how I would have ruled. I think the "mandate is merely a tax" argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The "tax" is obviously punitive, regulatory and intended to compel.) Perhaps that's not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice, and not the chief. But that's how he did rule.
ObamaCare is now essentially upheld. There's only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress. That's undoubtedly what Roberts is saying: Your job, not mine. I won't make it easy for you.

See also the blog Universal Christian.

Albert Einstein and the Catholic Church

Albert Einstein once wrote about his attitude to the Catholic Church:

Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks….

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Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.

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- Albert Einstein, Time magazine, 23rd December, 1940 p. 38

See also the blog Universal Christian.

"unaffordable ratchet effect"

Not a new article, but insightful, in my opinion is the idea in this article that welfare states need to be able to dial back their benefits during hard economic times.  Instead, benefits are ratcheted up  in fat times but not scaled back in lean times.   In fact, the we should learn from the Pharaoh's dream in the story of Joseph in the bible.  Here the Pharaoh had a dream about 7 fat cows and 7 lean cows and asked Joseph to interpret these for him.  Joseph said that the 7 fat cows symbolized 7 years of plenty, while the 7 lean cows represented 7 lean years that were coming.  Thus, he advised the Pharaoh to store up grain during the fat years to be doled out in the lean years.

Our governments never seem to learn this lesson.  We tend to spend like prosperity is going to last forever.
See also the blog Universal Christian.

Leftism's Legacy

Leftism has been around for a while.  The French Revolution and the teachings of Marx did much to place its nonsense to world scene.  But in America it really didn't take off until the 1960s.  Here the ideological old guard found a spoiled generation of thrill seekers hungering for some meaning in their lives and they were all too eager and ready to provide them with an Ersatz religion.  The 1950s saw unprecedented prosperity  and the rise of materialism with its attendant softening of spiritual discipline.

The youth of the 1960s were thus hungering for a deeper spiritual meaning in life to counter the emptiness of materialistic suburbia.  They sought to acquire this meaning with all too easy means.  Drugs, for example, especially LSD and Marijuana, gave them a small taste of momentary euphoria.  Sexual license, aka "free love," promised to give young people the ecstasy of intimacy without the burden of commitment.

Having rebelled against the sexual mores of their parents and rightfully rebelling against their parent's crass materialism left the 1960s youth as easy pray for the ideological left.  They sought to channel the rebellion into their socialist causes.  They made heroes of the likes of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh and they enlisted in the ranks of the Democratic Party which veered ever more left away from the center.

Great social welfare programs were conceived, Medicare, Medicaid, LBJ's War on Poverty, etc.

But the animus for much of this was really based on feelings.  It feels good to care for the poor and the sick.  It also felt good to have sex and use drugs.  And so a whole generation began to subscribe more or less to the motto that was shouted from the rooftops at the time:  "If it feels good, do it!"

It is natural that a philosophy of life based on feelings should fill the spiritual void left by the abandonment of more traditional systems of values such as that based on the Judeo-Christian laws enshrined in the 10 commandments.  Nature abhors a vacuum.

I have to credit Dennis Prager with having first made me aware of this fact that leftism is really a religion that is based on feelings.   But, being dependent upon your feelings to tell if something is right or not does not prove effective in cultivating certain virtues such as fortitude or bravery.  Fortitude is developed by sticking to your sound principles in the face of opposition.  Feelings are not sound in this way, because it often doesn't feel good to stick to principles.  It is far easier to just shrug one's shoulder and mutter something about "to each his own," live and let live, and simply turn one's back when manifest evil appears.  Thus, the left preaches tolerance above all else, but when you ask them if intolerance should be tolerated you get nothing but blank stares and silence.  They embrace subjective relativism and don't want to be judgmental.  Judging other's behavior makes us uncomfortable, it doesn't feel good.  And so we seek refuge in a cowardly philosophy that pretends that all values and beliefs are somehow equal and therefore to be tolerated.

I wrote about a man today who lived around 500 years ago and knew precisely what it meant to stand his ground on principle, even at the cost of his life:  Thomas More.  He was truly a man for all seasons who spoke truth to power and said no to political correctness even though it cost him his life.

Such fortitude and bravery is very rare nowadays.  Instead we are surrounded by cowards who always seem to seek the easy way out.  Take our hapless president, Barack Obama.  Instead of trying to do the hard work of reaching across the aisle and finding sound bipartisan solutions to the most pressing economic problems of 2009 and 2010, nameless the problem of unemployment, he chose instead the easy partisan route of working with his Democratic compatriots to foist on the rest of America a mammoth health care overhaul involving one sixth of the economy.  That was the easy thing to do because he had a Democratic majority in the Senate and House.  He could run rough shod over all the GOP opposition.  Piece of cake.

In contrast to Thomas More, Barack Obama is a manifest coward.  But he is the perfect expression of the mindset that grew out of the sixties. He gamed the system with affirmative action and like a silver tongued devil talked his way into office without any qualifications or any real experience as a leader or even as a worker.  All talk, no substance.  A consummate phony, our Charlatan-in-Chief.  And, of course, he has a large cadre of cowardly leftists at his disposal in the media who will gladly and giddily embrace "hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" and look the other way as this charlatan tramples on the US Constitution.
See also the blog Universal Christian.

Federal Spending on Poverty

In a book called The Dependency Agenda (Encounter Broadsides), Kevin Williamson describes what happens to all federal spending on poverty. If you take all of the money that the federal government spends on poverty programs and divide that amount by the number of poor families in America, you get average spending of $65,000 per poor family.  The national income average is only $50,000!   So where is all this spending on poverty programs going? It turns out that it is going to folks who have vested interest in "caring about poverty" but never really doing anything to solve the problem.

James Delong discusses this in a recent article.
See also the blog Universal Christian.

The Victim-in-Chief Admits Failure

Besides being Charlatan-in-Chief, our current president is a quintessentially liberal in the sense that he cannot own up to any mistakes, but must always see himself and the Democrats as victims.  They are unsuccessful because they are victims.  Here in this article on Newsbusters, he is back to blaming Bush for everything.  To be sure, he is speaking with an audience that already believes that the failings of the underclass minorities is always about victimization. 

But his analogy of the restaurant with the GOP running up a tab and running out just as he gets to the table, leaving him the tab, is tantamount to admitting that his presidency is, in economic terms, a complete failure.  He just wants to make sure that someone else is to blame.
See also the blog Universal Christian.