Jan 24 2009

www.MoralAccountability.com

Category: abortion,Obamaharmonicminer @ 6:13 pm

I have written earlier about the failure to deal with evidence that characterizes those who fancy themselves “pro-life” or “pro-family” yet still voted for Obama in what can only be characterized as a spasm of wishful thinking.  Here is a new website offered by people hoping to bring some clarity to the discussion about what it is appropriate for Christians to support in the political sphere.  Along the way, they hope to  reopen dialog with Catholics and Evangelicals who voted for Obama, with the intent of moving past good intentions, and continuing to seek true alliance with Christians who want to resist immoral public policy. (much more at the link)

The Moral Accountability Project trusts that those self-identified pro-life and pro-marriage Catholics and Evangelicals who helped to put Barack Obama into a position to accomplish his goals were sincere in their admiration for him. We are willing to believe that they genuinely hope that he will go back on his pledges to attack pro-life laws and repeal pro-marriage policies. Still, actions have consequences, and the actions of these intellectuals and activists will have consequences that are all too easy to predict. With each assault of the Obama administration on laws and policies upholding the sanctity of human life and the dignity of marriage, we will ask all Catholics and Evangelicals, including those who supported Obama, to join us in resisting these assaults. That is what we will do at www.moralaccountability.com.

Our project is offered in a constructive spirit, not one of vilification. Our goal is to help ensure that never again will good intentions conspire with shoddy reasoning and wishful thinking to compromise the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable members of our community and to undermine the institution of marriage. And so in a sincere spirit of friendship, we invite those Catholics and Evangelicals who joined with Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and similar organizations in supporting Obama to join us now in repelling the attacks that will be launched against life and marriage in this administration.

It’s time for some moments of clarity.  I join with MoralAccountability in keeping attention on the policies of the Obama administration as they affect life and marriage issues, and in calling for all Christians (and anyone else, for that matter) to assess his policies with wisdom and discernment.

But Obama has already kept an anti-life campaign promise.

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Jan 23 2009

The Promises

Category: Obama,politicsharmonicminer @ 10:36 am

This is interesting:

PolitiFact | The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama’s Campaign Promises

PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.

Just click the link and you can keep track as time goes on. And, of course, you can always pray that he won’t keep some of his promises.

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Jan 23 2009

It begins

Category: abortion,Obamaharmonicminer @ 9:36 am

This is only the beginning.

Obama to reverse abortion policy

President Barack Obama plans to sign an executive order ending the ban on federal funds for international groups that promote or perform abortions, officials told The Associated Press on Friday.

The move, long expected in the Democratic president’s first week in office, will be welcomed by liberals and criticized by abortion rights foes.

The policy bans U.S. taxpayer money, usually in the form of U.S. Agency for International Development funds, from going to international family planning groups that either offer abortions or provide information, counseling or referrals about abortion. It is also known as the “global gag rule,” because it prohibits taxpayer funding for groups that even talk about abortion if there is an unplanned pregnancy.

Also known as the “Mexico City policy,” it has been reinstated and then reversed by Republican and Democratic presidents since GOP President Ronald Reagan established it in 1984. President Bill Clinton ended the ban in 1993, but President George W. Bush re-instituted it in 2001 as one of his first acts in office.

Wait until Congress passes the Freedom of Choice Act, and at a stroke of Obama’s pen, ALL state laws restricting any aspect of abortion whatsoever, and providing conscience protection for medical providers, are obliterated.

For those of you who style yourselves as “Christian moderates” and voted for Obama, even though you see yourself personally as “pro-life,” because “there are other critical issues,” I hope you’re going to be sleeping well over the next few years. Or maybe I don’t.

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Jan 19 2009

Get ready to be sued by your shoes

Category: government,Obama,societyharmonicminer @ 9:53 am

In Iraq, it is a mark of great disrespect to hurl your shoes at someone, as George Bush learned first hand in a news conference.  In the brave new world of the “apostle of change” that we’ve just elected, you may get sued by the family members of your shoes for desecration of a corpse, as President Obama’s appointment of Cass Sunstein to “regulatory czar” will usher in a bright new day of animal rights. Here’s his opinion:

“[A]nimals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law … Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf.”

This guy is nutty as a fruitcake, and a professor at Harvard Law School, two things that often go together. He wants to outlaw hunting, make us all vegans, ban the use of leather products, end medical animal testing that saves human lives, etc. I wish this was an exaggeration, but a short perusal of his book, Animal Rights, suggests otherwise.  Here’s a choice phrase from one of his gushing reviewers:  “a remarkably fresh collection of essays exploring our relationship–moral, legal, social, and epistemological–to nonhuman
animals.”  I guess that makes you just a “human animal.”  I don’t know about you, but to me anyone who even uses the phrase seems incompetent to have an opinion on the matter.  I don’t have an epistemological relationship with my dentist, let alone my daughter’s fish.

I guess when you talk to the animals enough, you start to think you are one.  I suppose that makes sense…  I have a dog who thinks she’s human.

More background here.

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Jan 17 2009

Non-peace with dishonor

Category: Afghanistan,Islam,left,national security,Obamaharmonicminer @ 10:18 am

At Daily Kos, pressure on Obama’s left flank to declare defeat in Afghanistan and run. You have to read the whole thing to get a flavor of just how wrong headed they are.

An ad hoc group of bloggers has come together for the purpose of opposing a U.S.-led escalation in Afghanistan that is slated to double the number of American troops there.

Sure. Let’s let the Taliban take over Afghanistan again. Let’s go back to the situation that created the 9/11 attack, and supported its training and operational phases. After all, surely they’ve learned not to mess with the USA, don’t you think?

I wish we could send the entire Daily Kos crowd on a little vacation to Waziristan. Maybe a nice bus ride in the mountains, a chance to make new friends, show them that all Americans aren’t war-mongering degenerates, you know? We could equip them with satellite phones and live video feeds, just in case they need to call us or something.

On second thought, I’m hoping this is Obama’s left flank…. if he has one.

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Jan 08 2009

John Ziegler’s interview with Sarah Palin for his new film

Category: election 2008,media,Obama,Palin,politicsharmonicminer @ 10:11 am

I’ve mentioned John Ziegler’s efforts before to correct the record about How Obama Got Elected. As part of making his new movie, “Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Smeared” he has interviewed Sarah Palin. Some of his comments on that interview are here. (you may need to scroll down)

the most important part of my visit to the Palin house is that there is a big difference between thinking that something is true and knowing for sure that it is. I now know that Sarah Palin is who I thought she was.

I also know now, with moral certitude, that the media assassination of her, her character and her family was one of the greatest public injustices of our time and I am totally justified in devoting my life to correcting the historical record in my forthcoming film “Media Malpractice…How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Smeared”

I’ll keep linking to developments on this, but I think this is going to be a gangbuster’s film, with so much content in making its case that no one, no matter how avid a media consumer, has seen it all, and many people are going to be surprised at the strength of the case Ziegler makes.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  Early rumblings in the main-stream media about the Palin interview are here, including Palin pointing out the obvious disparity in the treatment of Caroline Kennedy’s candidacy for the Senate as opposed to Palin’s for the veep slot, even though Kennedy is angling for an appointment and won’t even be vetted by the voters til 2010, while Palin would at least have to have been elected to start with.

UPDATE:  Of course, in the coverage linked here, John Ziegler is a “conservative film maker,” not merely a “documentary film maker.”  I wonder if the makers of anti-Bush films in the last 8 years are usually referred to as “liberal film makers”?   How about all the anti-war stinkeroos that have died in the box office in the last few years?  In the reviews, are their writers, producers and directors referred to as “liberal filmmakers”?  The double standards here are so obvious that pointing them out is like shooting fish in a barrel with a howitzer…  but I suspect Ziegler is going to be the target of a great deal of ad hominem attack and attempts to label him out of relevance.

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Jan 05 2009

Cut from what?

Category: economy,media,Obama,taxesharmonicminer @ 10:37 am

Doing its usually spectacularly incompetent job of reporting comprehensible information, the AP says that Obama supports $300B tax cut plan

President-elect Barack Obama, commencing face to face consultations with congressional leaders Monday, is embracing an unexpectedly large tax cut of up to $300 billion. Obama said the country faces an “extraordinary economic challenge.”

Besides $500 tax cuts for most workers and $1,000 for couples, the Obama proposal includes more than $100 billion for businesses, an Obama transition official said. The total value of the tax cuts would be significantly higher than had been signaled earlier.

The huge question, completely unaddressed by the AP in its report: what is the “starting line” from which the tax cuts will be calculated?

Is the tax cut going to take the current situation, with the Bush tax cuts still in place till 2010 or so, as the starting line from which to do further tax cutting?  Or are the tax cuts only to be calculated from the state of play after the Bush tax cuts expire?

Keep in mind that it is the Democrats who have always called it a “cut” in spending when the actual increase in spending is simply reduced from what had been planned.  Only in Washington DC Democrat-speak can you call it a “cut” when you’re increasing spending by 2% instead of 4%.

Is this really going to be a tax “cut”?  Or is this Dem-speak for less of a tax increase than they had planned?  And is it going to be calculated from the lower tax rates in force under Bush?  Does this mean the Bush tax cuts are going to be extended, with new cuts in addition?  The AP may be forgiven for not having answers to these questions, but to pretend the questions aren’t there by ignoring them is risible.

Of course, to report on this would require reporters who actually understand the subject, and who want us to know what’s going on, and aren’t just shilling for Obama during the honeymoon.  Obama had better move fast:  the honeymoon isn’t going to last forever

UPDATE:  This report from the Wall Street Journal is more comprehensive but still does not mention the fate of the Bush tax cuts when their current authorization expires in a year or so.

UPDATE: One of my more cynical emailers suggests that there will be NO real tax cuts of any duration (maybe very short term only), because he expects that the Democrats will let the Bush tax cuts expire shortly, so that they can take credit for “cutting” taxes that would stay lower if Democrats simply made the Bush cuts permanent.  This seems possible to me, given the nature of Washington doublespeak.

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Dec 29 2008

We don’t need another FDR, and can’t afford one

Category: economy,Obamaharmonicminer @ 10:00 am

In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes makes it clear that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies did not reduce the Great Depression’s unemployment rate, despite FDR’s success at convincing the public that he had made their lives better, master of politico-speak that he was.  Quite the reverse is true; the more the government intervened, the worse things got, and there seemed a direct connection between trade-strangling tariffs, high taxes, the diversion of economic power out of market driven activity into government programs, and unemployment.  Now, Thomas Sowell makes similar points, with a nice concise statement about the history of unemployment rates after the 1929 stock market crash, and asks if we’re headed for Another Great Depression. The entire article is worth reading, and it’s a quick read. The key graphs:

The rise in unemployment after the stock market crash of 1929 was a blip on the screen compared to the soaring unemployment rates reached later, after a series of government interventions.

For nearly three consecutive years, beginning in February 1932, the unemployment rate never fell below 20 percent for any month before January 1935, when it fell to 19.3 percent, according to the Vedder and Gallaway statistics.

In other words, the evidence suggests that it was not the “problem” of the financial crisis in 1929 that caused massive unemployment but politicians’ attempted “solutions.” Is that the history that we seem to be ready to repeat?

The stock market crash, which has been blamed for the widespread suffering during the Great Depression of the 1930s, created no unemployment rate that was even half of what was created in the wake of the government interventions of Hoover and FDR. [emphasis mine]

Politically, however, Franklin D. Roosevelt could not have been more successful. After all, he was the only President of the United States elected four times in a row. He was a master of political rhetoric.

If Barack Obama wants political success, following in the footsteps of FDR looks like the way to go. But people who are concerned about the economy need to take a closer look at history. We deserve something better than repeating the 1930s disasters.

There is yet another factor that provides a parallel to what happened during the Great Depression. No matter how much worse things got after government intervention under Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, the party line was that he had to “do something” to get us out of the disaster created by the failure of the unregulated market and Hoover’s “do nothing” policies.

Today, increasing numbers of scholars recognize that FDR’s own policies were a further extension of interventions begun under Hoover. Moreover, the temporary rise in unemployment after the stock market crash was nowhere near the massive and long-lasting unemployment after government interventions.

Barack Obama already has his Herbert Hoover to blame for any and all disasters that his policies create: George W. Bush.

The take away:  the unemployment rate did not take off UNTIL the government programs designed to create employment using market interventions of various kinds.  We are now in the same “zone” as the economy a year after the 1929 crash, with very similar unemployment rates.  If the government tries to use sledgehammer economic interventions to “fix” it, things are likely to get worse, not better.

The American public seems to be looking for an economic savior, having lost faith in itself and in markets (as if the current crisis was caused by markets, rather than government meddling in them). If President-elect Obama continues to position himself as another FDR, and acts like it in his policies after he’s in office, better tighten your belt. We’ll be in for a hard, long slog.

Will the decades distant result be another entitlement program started with good intentions, based on economic assumptions that no longer apply (if they ever did), and now requiring larger and larger slices of the GDP?  (Think Social Security.)

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Dec 28 2008

What will Obama do to forestall a nuclear Iran?

Category: Iran,national security,Obamaharmonicminer @ 10:43 am

A couple years ago there were speculations in many quarters that George Bush would not allow a nuclear Iran. I read more than one column suggesting that he would take military action against Iran’s nuclear program, sometime before the end of his presidency, especially if a Democrat was elected. That seems less and less likely, based on any reasonable reading of the tea leaves. If he still plans such a thing, it is the best kept secret of his administration.

So, what will Obama do to stop Iran from getting the bomb? Make no mistake: if Iran has the bomb, the world is changed, hugely. When Iran has the bomb, we won’t know which terrorist organization has been given the bomb. We won’t know when or if Iran plans to destroy Israel, even at the price of the enormous retaliation that would follow. Iran will surely shake its nuclear stick at Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, et. al., and Iran probably has, or will have soon, missiles capable of reaching large parts of Europe.  Within 10-20 years, it is likely to have missiles that can reach the USA.

Even more concerning, if terrorists got a nuke from Iran and destroyed a US city, how would we prove the origin of the nuke? Would our response be paralyzed?

Continue reading “What will Obama do to forestall a nuclear Iran?”

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Dec 23 2008

Time to get RADICAL?

Category: economy,energy,environment,global warming,Obamaharmonicminer @ 10:49 am

The last time I looked, Thomas Friedman is neither a climate scientist, meterologist, physicist, or economist.  His academic training is in “Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies”. He’s a journalist. That’s it. So I hope Obama is not taking seriously this advice from Friedman to him, which presupposes Friedman’s ability to make scientific and economic judgments:

[Friedman] insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.

“We can do it if our next president, who I have great hopes for, is ready to be as radical as the moment we are in,” Friedman, whose previous bestseller was “The World is Flat”, told a lunch hosted by The Asia Society.

“Our next president is going to be called on to be more radical — I am talking crazy, wild-hair, paint-on-your-face, ring-in-your-nose radical — in what he does, than any president since FDR,” he said, referring to Franklin D Roosevelt, US president during the 1930s depression and the Second World War.

Continue reading “Time to get RADICAL?”

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