Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Freedom?

What’s new Today

Our #1 story explains how the birth control mandate in Obamacare is not simply an assault on the Catholic Church by on liberty itself.  #2 tells us of how the MSM reacted to the Komen Planned Parenthood story vs the Obamacare and the Catholic Church story.  No doubt who is in the bag for whom.  #3 looks at the Progressive movement and how they are undermining the essential things we need for happiness.  #4 looks at fairness in the tax system.  #5 explains the Sarah Palin story in Newsweek. 



1.  Obamacare exposed

The political furor over President Obama's birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn't be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty….

… What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what "health care" must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions….


So “Catholic” politician Nancy Pelosi finally gets to see what’s in the bill that she so adroitly told here troops that they needed to pass in order to find out what’s in it.  This is an assault on freedom and individual liberty.  It’s not just the mandate that violates the Constitution.  Obama has rewritten the First Amendment with Obamacare.  It cannot be allowed to stand and I think this decision by the Obama Administration may give SCOTUS pause when they consider the mandate this term.  I look for it to the entire law to be struck down. 





2.  MSM in the tank for the left

When the abortion giant's funding was in jeopardy, the media provided 24/7 coverage with a decidedly liberal slant. When the feds assaulted First Amendment religious freedom, you could hear the crickets chirp.

Secular progressive bias in the media was never more evident than in the past few weeks with the difference in coverage of two major news stories — the temporary cutoff of funds from the Susan G. Komen Foundation to Planned Parenthood and the ultimatum from the Obama administration that the Catholic Church and its institutions had a year to find a way to violate their consciences and beliefs and provide contraceptive services as mandated by ObamaCare.

A study by the Media Research Center (MRC) shows that in the first 60 hours after the Feb. 1 announcement that Komen was cutting off funding to Planned Parenthood, no fewer than 13 major stories appeared on CBS, NBC and ABC morning and evening news shows with 35 clips and quotes coming from supporters or representatives of Planned Parenthood and only 11 from Komen representatives or supporters.

By contrast, MRC notes, when the Obama administration announced on Jan. 20 that it was giving religious institutions one year to comply with a mandate for coverage of sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs and contraception in their health plans without a co-pay, it took CBS 10 days to air one news brief on the controversy while NBC and ABC said nothing for two weeks.


Nothing surprising here, but the statistics are damning for the MSM. 







3.  Coming Apart:  How Progressives are destroying America

…And Coming Apart shows, if anything can, how Barack Obama is a poster boy for everything that's wrong with America -- everything that got it started Obam-ing apart.

About a century ago and more, the educated elite decided that America needed to be governed by people like them: clever, educated, creative, and expert. Progressives, they called themselves. The rest of America wasn't so smart, so it needed to be supervised by this educated elite. The result, a century later, is that life is great for the educated top 20 percent, liberal and conservative -- living ordered, fulfilling lives in SuperZip enclaves -- while life for the bottom 30 percent is falling apart.

Why? Well, it couldn't possibly be that when people don't have to work, don't get married, don't engage in civic groups, and don't attend church, they end up miserable, could it? Of course not -- not when liberals are running things in accordance with the strict principles of progressive politics. What could go wrong?

Everything. There are four things wrong in the lower-class enclaves of America, according to Charles Murray. No work, as men hang around sleeping and watching TV. No marriage, as women give up on the arduous task of civilizing lower-class men and take easy money from the state instead. There's no civic engagement, as people bowl alone. And there's a collapse of religion.

The core of Murray's book is that if you want to be happy, in the full sense of "eudaimonia" in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics -- that is, full human flourishing over a lifetime doing the right things in the right way at the right time -- you need to check in on four basic qualities. You need satisfying work, you need to be married, you need to engage in civil society, and you need to attend church once a week. Look at a community without the Big Four, and you will likely find only 10 percent of people "very happy." Look at folks with all four, and you will find almost 80 percent of people reporting themselves "very happy." Call it the American project: family, vocation, faith, and community. Rush Limbaugh talks about it every day: American exceptionalism.


It really isn’t rocket science.  We know what you need to be happy and fulfilled in life, but it seems the left has other ideas.  Ann Coulter said it well when she said, “the history of liberalism consists of replacing things that work with things that sounded good on paper.”



4.  Obama, the Democrats and Fairness

…In fact, the very rich pay far more in taxes than the relatively low nominal numbers they report on their tax returns. Many very wealthy people obtain most of their income from dividends, capital gains and interest on tax-free state and municipal bonds. The actual tax rate Mitt Romney, Warren Buffet and most other wealthy people pay on dividends, when correctly calculated, is about 52 percent, as reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes the federal and state corporate-level-profits tax burden, plus federal and state taxes on dividends. ... Just about every industrial country provides relief for the double taxation of corporate equity, either by having a lower personal rate on dividends, a personal tax credit for dividends or a lower corporate-level tax. Despite the 2003 dividend tax cut, the overall U.S. rate of dividends ... is still the fourth-highest among the 34 high-income nations of the OECD. Mr. Obama seems to think it is "fair" to tax the same income multiple times, at a total effective rate of more than 50 percent…

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/30/obamas-odd-sense-of-fairness/

Progressive love to imitate all things European except when it would cut taxes.









5.  Palin publishes in Newsweek

After tweeting angrily about how Newsweek had run an article about "dumb" critics of Barack Obama by Andrew Sullivan,  a "Trig Truther," Sarah Palin has published her own piece in the same magazine about her special-needs son.

It is a juxtaposition that is not quite as ironic as some people think. Sullivan's conspiracy theory, that Palin did not actually give birth to her own son, should have caused him not to be taken seriously about anything by any serious media outlet. Newsweek was making amends by running Palin's article about the joys and challenges of raising a child with Down syndrome. What was Palin supposed to do? Refuse the offer to publish?

Palin's article would not be considered controversial except for the fact everything she does or says causes the heads of certain people to explode. Her story is touching and sometimes sad. It humanizes a woman who has become, in her own way, the most powerful female politician in the world, beloved by many, reviled by some….

…The irony is not Palin has published an article in a magazine she had recently condemned. It is that a woman whose merest word can shake the corridors of power and spill gallons of ink and untold bandwidth is, in the end, also a mom who loves her children, just like any other in this world.

http://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-writes-her-son-newsweek-heads-explode-183500543.html

I like Sarah Palin.  I think she’s real and she’s actually got principles.  And I think it is these two factors that drive the left nuts. Not aborting a handicapped child to the left is unfathomable.    




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