My article today.  The first one in quite some time.  I plan to write more, now that my professional situation permits it.

The firestorm of controversy over the January 20th HHS mandate requiring Catholic and other religious organizations to pay for contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs for their employees shows no sign of abating. This is notwithstanding the Obama administration's "accommodation," announced last Friday, that will permit insurance companies to pass the cost of contraception, sterilization and abortifacient drugs along to Catholic and other religious employers - as long as they do so surreptitiously, of course.

Catholics bishops and countless others have characterized this regulation as direct government interference with the free exercise of religion and thus unconstitutional. In this, they are correct.

Where many critics and commentators lapse, however, is in viewing this recent power grab by Obama as an aberration, a surprise, or a betrayal. It is no such thing.

It is not merely that Obama is disdainful of religious faith - though he clearly is, save when he can appeal to it as a call for higher taxes. He is not singling out Catholics, or Christians generally, or even the First Amendment. It is that he has no respect for any of the rights in the U.S. Constitution. Or, to put it more specifically, he has no respect for the structure of the United States Constitution, nor any intention of acknowledging the limits to government deliberately drafted into it; limits that are a function of the rights the Constitution expressly identifies as inherent in human beings generally and vested (at least by virtue of this document) in American citizens in particular.

Obama has made this clear from his earliest forays into public office. I warned of this in 2008, before he won the presidential election, but perhaps with three-plus years’ worth of hindsight, it is worth reviewing. In a Chicago public radio interview in 2001, then-Illinois State Senator Obama expressed his discontent with the limits of the Constitution, complaining that is only “a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.” He went further, stating that the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren was not “that radical” because it “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution…” and expressing his opinion that neither “redistribution of wealth” nor “major redistributive change” was likely to come through the court system; leaving only the option of legislation, or administrative fiat.

Thus it should come as no surprise that he treats the rights enshrined in the First Amendment as inconveniences to be dispensed with when they conflict with one of his deeply-desired policy objectives.

And if we were speculating in 2008, in 2012 we now know that that is, indeed, the way he views things. The New York Times reported last week that, with respect to the HHS mandate, "In the end, it was Mr. Obama himself who made the decision … calculating that at the end of the day, the issue of public health access outweighed the concerns of the religious institutions."

This is a statement that is both telling and breathtaking in its arrogance. The “free exercise” of religion is expressly written into the Constitution. "Public health" is not. No matter.

Freedom of speech is likewise dispensable. In what should be viewed as a chilling precursor of events to come, Catholic chaplains in the U.S. Army were forbidden to read the letter from the Catholic Church's military archbishop in which he criticized the HHS ruling.

These are not isolated instances, nor is the First Amendment the only impediment to the President’s personal objectives. The Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are under congressional investigation for the "Fast and Furious" covert operation whereby arms were deliberately sold to Mexican drug dealers. Memos obtained in late 2011 show ATF's intent to use those same gun sales to support erosion of Second Amendment rights and imposition of more gun control legislation.

On January 4th of this year, President Obama named Richard Cordray to head up his new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and three other individuals to vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board, without U.S. Senate confirmation, and without the Senate being in recess, in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. According to numerous news outlets and sources within the White House, the President declared that he, and not the United States Senate would decide when the Senate was, in fact, in recess.

During the 2009 bailouts of U.S. automakers GM and Chrysler, the President ran roughshod over contract and even bankruptcy law, subordinating the prior contract rights of senior bondholders to unionized employees, in a political payback for the millions of dollars unions had contributed to Obama's presidential campaign. (To make matters worse, and in what we now know is his typical fashion, Obama castigated those attempting to assert their legal rights as "profiteers.")

And then there is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act itself. Critics raise at least two primary objections. The first is that nowhere does the Constitution give Congress the power to compel American citizens to engage in any commercial transaction, such as buying insurance. Second – and more insidiously – we argue that the Act by its very structure creates incentives and methods for impermissible overreach into what must be the most sacrosanct, private decisions in people’s lives; those which must be free from government coercion.

With the HHS mandate, Obama has handed the opponents of Obamacare one of the best weapons in favor of repeal. No longer are we speculating about what infringements of liberty Obamacare will produce. No longer are we hypothesizing about how Obama’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution will manifest itself. Now we know.

This conflict will not be resolved anytime soon. Many of the Catholics who voted for Obama did so in fidelity to a Catholic tradition of supporting civil rights. Indeed, the President Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, Father Theodore Hesburgh, is often featured in a famous photo, hand-in-hand with Martin Luther King, singing “We Shall Overcome.”

No wonder Catholics were proud, years later, to support America’s first African-American President.

No wonder they are shocked to discover that it is now his policies they must overcome.

Mark Steyn at his best.  Again.

... so, would you like to reconsider that decision to renounce your American citizenship now?  Maybe you could be a Navy SEAL?

Peggy Noonan has a powerful column up.  I think Dinesh D'Souza has said something comparable, which is that some aspects of American culture are profoundly offensive to other countries.  (Hell, some aspects of American culture are profoundly offensive to Americans!)

Food for thought.

Great story here about a Chicago school that forbids students to bring lunches from home.  A couple of salient quotes:

"Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district's food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch."

and

"At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both."

There are a couple of lessons here, Fernando.  Learn them well:

1.  Any government MANDATE purportedly "for your own good" will always take your rights away, and;
2.  Beware government/corporate partnerships - especially when they are part of a government mandate.

Obamacare, anyone?

(This article originally appeared in Townhall.com on November 15, 2010.)

Much has been made of President Obama’s reaction to the spanking American voters delivered in the November 2nd elections. Pundits argue alternatively that Obama doesn’t “get it,” that he is “in denial,” or that he is “too detached” to understand the message that the voters have clearly sent.

Not for the first time, I have found myself thinking, if only this guy had some business experience. Not only because he doesn’t seem to have a clue how businesses create jobs – although that experience would certainly help in an economy with 10% unemployment – but because he doesn’t have a clue how a business becomes a business in the first place.

Anyone who has worked with entrepreneurs knows that they often come up with clever ideas, nifty inventions, or cutting-edge technologies – ideas, inventions and technologies that fall completely flat in the marketplace because no one wants them, or understands what they do, or feels that they are enough of an improvement over the products the public has become accustomed to purchasing.

There is a reason that potential investors ask entrepreneurs, “What is the market pain?” “Pain” is the metaphor used to convey the intensity of motivation that must be present for people to change their behavior. An entrepreneur has to meet a serious unmet need, tap into a deeply felt want, or develop something that is otherwise extremely appealing.

In entrepreneurship education, we teach aspiring innovators to “beta-test” a new product with what have come to be called “earlyvangelists” – a select group of people who will use the product and give honest and critical feedback about what they like and what they don’t. Any entrepreneur who wants to be successful will go back to the drawing board and tweak the idea, fine-tune the invention, or modify the technology to satisfy the customer’s demands and avoid the mistakes that could otherwise doom his or her business. (And for the record, having beaucoup bucks to throw at a bad idea won’t save it, either. “New Coke,” anyone?)

In short, the customer drives the business, and not the other way around.

But Obama and his fellow travelers on the Left routinely display a really appalling ignorance of all aspects of entrepreneurship and commerce. They believe that the public’s demands don’t determine what businesses produce. In their view, business (especially clever marketing, which Leftists equate with deceit) creates public demand, and consumers are not shrewd – or at least rationally self-interested – people who are capable of deciding what they want and what they don’t; they are mindless cattle to be manipulated.

This same ignorance has spilled over to the President’s and the Pravda press’ assessment of the elections. And so it should not surprise anyone when Obama’s response to the voter backlash is to claim that he just didn’t market his policies well enough, or when writers at the Huffington Post shriek that voters are ignorant, stupid, or ill-informed.

Those who voted against Obamacare, against Keynesian spending orgies, against Congressional malpractice and deceit, against skyrocketing deficits, and above all against the sneering condescension displayed by our elected officials knew exactly what they were being sold and they rejected it out of hand. To use a tired but true venture capital expression, “the dogs won’t eat the dog food.”

If Obama had any experience developing a product, cultivating a customer base, or competing for market share, he would already know this. In the “real world,” where a businessman has to persuade potential customers to part with their hard-earned money in exchange for what he’s peddling, arrogance is fatal; an entrepreneur who thinks he is smarter than his customers won’t be in business long. But in government, where your money is extracted from you by threats of imprisonment, fines, or force, where not only is there no return on your money, but even the worst failed policy initiative riddled with waste produces calls for more money, and where taxpayer demands for accountability are castigated as “greed,” “racism,” and “temper tantrums,” deeply held convictions in discredited theories are the ideologue’s substitute for a business plan.

Perhaps the President thought his ideas were “too big to fail.” In public office, as in the private sector, reality has shown otherwise.

(This article originally appeared on November 1, 2010.  Just updating my blog...)

Way back in 2008, a number of us warned voters about Obama's ideological background, and what this portended for the country. (Thank very much to Stanley Kurtz, whose new book, Radical-in-Chief, proves us right.)

Even before Kurtz' book was written, the American public should have been able to discern Obama's predispositions, just by reading what he himself wrote, and listening to what he said. Too many were not paying attention, or they were swayed by the romantic notion of electing the country's first black president, without regard to what the man stood for.

They are tuned in now. Two years into his presidency, there is little doubt about Obama's attitudes and his agenda, or the fact that Obama deceived large swaths of the electorate.

He painted himself as a healer, post-partisan, post-racial, inspired by his faith. Instead, he has proven to be a race-baiting ideologue, profoundly partisan and deliberately divisive.

He is ambivalent about Christians and Christianity, announcing to the world, “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation,” and deleting references to God even when he quotes from the foundational documents of this country that mention God explicitly. But he is inexplicably solicitous of Muslims, bowing to their kings, defending the decision to build a mosque at Ground Zero, and sending forth the head of NASA to make Muslims feel good about their contributions to space exploration. All of this is supposed to make Islamic terrorists suspend their passion for “man-caused disasters.” Meanwhile, they try to detonate bombs in SUVs, their underwear, and just days ago, in cargo planes.

Unlike Democrats of earlier decades who represented the interests of working class voters, or Ronald Reagan who appealed to their values, Obama displays nothing but disdain for the middle class, whom he views as dumb cows to be led into pens by the unaccountable elites he appoints. He has referred to police officers as “acting stupidly,” criticized rural Americans as “bitter” bigots who “cling to” their guns, and tried to characterize everyone who opposed his agenda as a part of a mindless, panicked mob, “hardwired not to think clearly.”

Most recently, Obama attempted to pit Hispanic Americans against all those who would enforce existing immigration laws, exhorting them to “punish their enemies.” (Has any other president referred to his countrymen as enemies, or asked Americans to view other Americans that way?)

Obama also views himself as above the Constitution (which he has called a “flawed” document) and the rule of law, taking over GM, firing its CEO, and running roughshod over secured creditors, bankruptcy and contract law in the government’s dealings with the car companies.

But Obama's most obvious loathing is for the free market, as evidenced by the frequency with which he and his appointees like Health and Human Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar denounce the business community as greedy, and bludgeon them with threats.

We cannot vote Obama out of office this year. But we can thwart his crippling agenda if we remove his minions. Democrats (save a handful) are running away from the President, his actions, his attitude, and his record. They are promising their constituents that if elected, they'll stand up to Nancy Pelosi and the President.

Anyone who believes that is in complete denial.

In an article published last week in the Wall Street Journal, the editors stated, “The irony is that the Democrats most likely to lose next week are the centrists and Blue Dogs in the most competitive election districts.”

There is nothing ironic here at all, and in fact a valuable lesson to remember as we head into the elections on Tuesday. And the lesson is this: Congress, which should have been acting as a check on executive power and representing the will of the people, utterly abdicated its responsibilities in the past two years.

The “blue dogs” who ran in 2008 as “independent.” “moderate” or “conservative” Democrats were all steamrolled and arm-twisted into voting for everything that Nancy Pelosi wanted. Even a demonstrably, consistently pro-life Democrat like Michigan congressman Bart Stupak sold his soul for a meaningless Executive Order, and voted for the 2000+ page health care leviathan.

In addition, Stupak and every other Democrat committed professional malpractice by voting for legislation that they had never read. And a disturbing number of them were willing to go along with Nancy Pelosi's “deem and pass” scheme, which prompted Newt Gingrich's quip: “We've gone from passing bills without reading them to passing bills without voting on them.”

These candidates have amply demonstrated that they are not worthy of the public trust, any more than those RINO Republicans who have been stripped of the candidacy in the primaries by many conservative, libertarian, and independent voters who grumbled in 2006, yelled in 2008, and who are saying now, this time, we mean it.

Every Democrat currently in Congress supported the health care bill, the steal-from-us bill, and/or cap-and-trade, and none has shown himself or herself capable of standing up to this president or his cronies in Congress.

So fence-sitters and last-minute-deciders need to consider that a vote for any Democrat candidate for Congress is a vote for Obama's deceitful, divisive, and destructive agenda.

A vote for any Democrat is a vote in support of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, their irresponsible and profligate spending binged, and their unconstitutional manipulation of the legislative process.

A vote for any Democrat is a vote for a government autocracy that holds most Americans in complete contempt, and which will use unaccountable administrative bureaucrats and federal judges to run roughshod over the will of the American people.

As is so often the case, success for conservative candidates will depends upon turnout. If every American who opposes Barack Obama's agenda, Harry Reid's lies, and Nancy Pelosi's manipulation of congressional power VOTES tomorrow, every Democrat running can be defeated.

Every vote counts. Every single one. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you have going on November 2nd, make certain that you vote in this election, and make certain that everyone you know votes as well.

In the dope-addled 1960's, the slogan “Turn on, turn in, drop out” became a popular mantra. Shelby Steele wrote last week that Barack Obama is the personifcation of the 1960's attitude, final come to power. So it's appropriate that the American voters get to bastardize Timothy Leary's infamous exhortation when they tune in, turnout, and turnover the existing Congress.

Go vote.

"Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it."

What about those who refuse to learn it?  "Take the profit out of health care?"  Really?  Hey, man - ever heard of being able to pay your bills, with something left over?  Where do you think those new drugs, those nifty surgical procedures, all those cutting-edge therapies come from?  The come from the extra dollars.  And when there isn't any more "profit" left in health care, you will not only kiss innovation goodbye, but basic care, too, as government bureacrats decide what treatments are available and which are not.

Oh, it will suck alright.  But that will be OK with you, won't it?  America was once a nation of "I don't mind if someone gets rich, as long as it means I could, too."  Now we have too many people like this guy, whose attitude seems to be more along the lines of, "I don't care if I can't get it, as long as no one else can get it, either."

Why Great Britain would even let this crap get a toehold in a country once famed for the finest education in the world, is beyond me.  Soon they'll be stoning "adulteresses" in the streets, the Archbishop of Canterbury will tut-tut some nonsense about cultural tolerance, and the bobbies won't lift a nightstick.

I was reminded of this song which I heard for the first time last week as the backdrop of the new Burberry line for this winter.  (Yes, I know how old it is.)  I hated it.  What a crappy message for British fashion.  But, wait!  Fashion?  Burqas in English schools?  "Olde England is dying"? 

Maybe they're on to something after all.

In 2010, anything is possible.  Even beating Barney Frank.  Just suggesting it should be enough to motivate Massachusetts voters to do it.

It's an odd, odd election when a Democrat senator runs this hard from Obama's agenda, and invokes Moses to do it.

Ugh.  What a self-centered little jerk.

Victor Davis Hanson does a great job poking holes in the current lib strategy of calling anyone who disagrees with them an idiot.  And no, people who are arguing against handouts aren't the ones who are "spoiled brats."

Readable.  Accessible.  Surprisingly engaging.  Sorta like Beck himself.  Kudos to the author, Mark Leibovich.  It was not a fluff piece, not a hit piece.  It was comprehensive, thorough, (dare I say it???) balanced.

If the New York Times had more writers like Leibovich, they'd have no financial trouble.

Read the whole thing here.

If your services are so wonderful, why do you have to lie about them?