Pro-Constitution, Anti-Globalist, Anti-Socialist, Anti-Communist, and usually with an attempt at historical and economic context ************************13th Year ----- 2009-2021*****
At The Daley Gator, there are three
short videos of Mark Levin’s comments on the oral arguments about Obamacare in
the Supreme Court. He has an excellent analysis.
Also, Rush Limbaugh has posted a video
version of the first hour of his March 28 program in which he discusses the
leftist tyranny hanging over our country, exemplified by the Obamacare case and
the fact that what the administration really wants is single-payer insurance.
Our freedom and prosperity are severely threatened by this and other leftist
policies. I wonder, along with Rush, how Obama has any chance of winning the
election, but he does have a chance. For the sake of liberty and our economy,
the incumbent president should be decisively defeated and the Democratic Party
voted out of power.
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is currently in
damage-control mode even though he won handily in the Illinois primary. One of his top advisers, Eric Fehrnstrom, appearing
on CNN, answered an interviewer’s question about whether Romney's conservative
positions might be so far to the right as to hurt him with moderate voters,
by saying that the general election campaign will be a new start, “almost like
an Etch-a-Sketch.”
Romney, already carrying a reputation as a flip-flopper, has
a significant, if perhaps temporary, problem. His GOP opponents are seizing on
the comment as strong evidence that Romney is indeed a flip-flopper, and Tea
Party conservatives cannot count on him not to sell them out for political
advantage. Presumably, once in office, Romney could shake the Etch-a-Sketch yet
again, depending on how the political winds are blowing.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum emphasized his own
unchanging and principled conservative positions on campaign issues, and
assured voters that he will not be changing to appeal to some different
audience or some change in trends. This kind of consistency is reassuring, and Romney
doesn’t provide it. The question is whether Romney is a man of core-belief
conservatism or a pragmatic candidate who speaks what he thinks his audience
wants to hear.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s response, according to
an Associated Pressarticle by Philip Elliott:
“My children had Etch A Sketches, they were great for car
rides,” rival Newt Gingrich, badly trailing Romney in the polls, said in Lake Charles, La.
“But you'll notice that their pictures aren't permanent, their pictures aren't
locked down. You can redo it any time you want. That's the problem.”
“Here's Gov. Romney's staff, they don't even have the
decency to wait until they get the nomination to explain to us how they'll sell
us out,” Gingrich added. “And I think having an Etch A Sketch as your campaign
model raises every doubt about where we're going.”
Romney said that he is not an Etch-a-Sketch but a
conservative who can be relied upon to maintain conservative positions as
promised.
From the same AP article:
“The issues I'm running on will be exactly the same,"
Romney said. "I'm running as a conservative Republican. I was a
conservative governor. I will be running as a conservative Republican nominee —
hopefully, nominee at that point. The policies and the positions are the same.”
If he turns out to be the nominee, I hope that will prove
true. Meanwhile, his adviser has given Santorum, Gingrich, Obama, (and Ron
Paul, if he cares to use it) a new, or at least more direct, avenue of attack
regarding Romney’s flip-flopping tendencies.
The liberal establishment has embarked on a phony campaign
about a made-up issue, the so-called GOP War on Women. Only those Rush calls
feminazis, i.e. the feminists who want to assure that as many abortions as
possible are performed, (and now want every woman to get “free” birth control
pills, courtesy of the insurance companies, Catholic institutions, etc.),
really think there’s any such “war.” This whole dreary mess has been drummed up
to conceal President Obama’s colossal failure on the economy, failure which threatens to
make most other political issues moot.
When the next collapse hits, and it will unless things are
reversed soon, there will be more widespread financial failure, which will be much
more difficult to remedy than it would be to fix these things now. But what
does Obama propose? More spending and higher taxes. That’s his answer for the
economy. Don’t bother with the Keystone XL pipeline, or opening up more
drilling, ANWR, deep water, fracking, or anything else, other than heavy
subsidies and guarantees for Chevy Volt and the Solyndras of our country and
other Obama cronies, and more crippling regulations for everyone else. There is no way this qualifies as anything
better than bad judgment. Obama’s economic policies are indefensible, no matter
what the Administration says.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu says they’re trying to get gas
prices down now, instead of up to European levels as Chu
recommended in 2008. Maybe that’s true, until after the election. As Rush Limbaugh says this in his program transcript
for 03/13/2012:
So in 2008, Chu said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to
boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
That's what he said in 2008. He was reminded of that comment today during
his congressional testimony, and he backed away from it. “I no longer share
that view,” said Chu to Senator Mike Lee, Republican, Utah. Chu said, “When I became
Secretary of Energy, I represented the United States government, and I
think right now in this economic very slow return these prices could very well
affect the comeback of our economy.” It sounds like he's not sure that gasoline
prices might have a deleterious effect on the economy.
So Chu is now saying his
previous statements are no longer operational. That's how the Democrats
characterize their gaffes.
This just in – Rush Limbaugh site headline 03/15/2012: “Report: Obama to Release Oil from Strategic
Reserve in Response to National Emergency of His Falling Poll Numbers.”
Mitt Romney has a great point about what we might receive
from a re-elected Obama with no constraining concern about re-election. Of
course, the global warming alarmists still want gas prices to increase so as to
“force” development of “green” energy. (How’s that going lately? Hmm, Chevy
Volt, Solyndra, and more recently, the Massachusetts
state-aided -- by millions of dollars-- Evergreen Solar, which moved its
manufacturing operations to China,
and is now in federal bankruptcy court, as described by John Hayward at HumanEvents.)
Obama said that because the United States accounts for 20
percent of the world's consumption of oil but has only 2 percent of its petroleum
reserves, “we're not going to be able to just drill our way out of the problem
of high gas prices. Anybody who tells you otherwise either doesn't know what
they're talking about or they aren't telling you the truth.”
Conservatives beg to differ. Just check Newt.org for an
opposing view. Newt’s policy for getting gasoline to $2.50 per gallon or lower
is certainly possible.
What Obama is saying is that he (Obama) is not going to be
doing anything about it because in his view, nothing can be done. So don’t
bother him with complaints about it.
Meanwhile, liberals are aghast at his drop in the polls,
which can primarily be explained by the price of gasoline and the continuing
high unemployment rate – about which nothing can be done either, apparently,
other than vast increases in government spending, and stretching out
unemployment payments even further.
According to Michael Barone, the president’s sinking numbers
should not be surprising in spite of a temporary boost from the anti-Rush
Limbaugh comments, etc.:
But the economic news has not been all that striking. We had
a quarter in which economic growth reached 2.8%. We've had two months with job
growth of better than 200,000.
Peachy. But in 1983, the year before Ronald Reagan's
re-election, the gross domestic product rose 8.9% not just for one quarter but
over the whole year. There were two months when job growth was 729,000 and
660,000.
That's the kind of economic recovery that enables an
incumbent president's campaign to run a credible "Morning in America"
ad. If the Obama campaign ran one now, it would be fodder for "Saturday
Night Live" and Jon Stewart.
But as bad as the gas prices and unemployment numbers are,
there’s an even bigger threat to our economy: the massive and increasing debt.
In February, the government posted its highest monthly deficit in history, $229 billion, according to the
Congressional Budget Office.
We are on track for another trillion-dollar-plus deficit
this year, with no letup in sight. Our national debt now substantially exceeds
our GDP. This cannot be sustained, and unless decisive and large measures are
taken soon to correct it, we will face economic consequences which would be
hard to believe. Many things would be at risk: national security, the dollar,
and freedom, let alone Social Security and any general prosperity. Four more
years of Obama would bring us to the very edge of the cliff, and most likely
over it.
This is not intended to create fear, but simply to call
attention to current realities that urgently need correction. When failing
companies, banks, states, or countries are bailed out, it means debt is taken
on by the government (i.e., taxpayers), debt which should have been liquidated
through bankruptcy. Let failing entities fail, and the resources they
misapplied can be reallocated to something more useful. When private businesses
are subsidized by the government because they can’t make it in the marketplace,
a serious error takes place. Everything the government subsidizes is a money-losing
operation headed for failure unless the government continues to bail it out,
throwing good money after bad. It’s like betting on a racehorse that has a bad
leg. It’s unlikely to win no matter what you do.
Greece
gives us something of an economic example in miniature. But there is no one to
bail out the United States.
Not Europe, Russia, China, India
or Brazil.
We need not experience the worst-case version of this, but we seriously need to
stop all bailouts and government subsidies and stop this foolish spending. Only
Republicans speak with any seriousness about cutting spending. With Democrats,
it’s a little talk and no action. Any “cuts” they speak of are just slowing
down the rate of growth, and even that never happens.
Until our fiscal house is in order, and some control is
exercised over monetary policy, we should not expect great growth. Four more
years of Obama practically guarantees more and worse economic decline.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) addresses the debt problem in this
brief video from his CNN appearance prior to CPAC 2012:
His CPAC speech is here.
Ryan’s budget proposal is perhaps the only serious attempt to address the
problem. The Democrats are offering nothing but more debt.
After Rush’s “controversial” comments about Sandra Fluke, and her weird testimony before Congress, the radical left has orchestrated a campaign to silence Rush by intimidating his sponsors. The main thing wrong with Rush’s comment was that he appeared to go after the person instead of the issue. His apology should be sufficient.
As Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator (h/t The Daley Gator) points out, the radical leftists are engaged in a coordinated effort to silence conservatives. They have been successful in getting Lou Dobbs off CNN, Glenn Beck off Fox News, Pat Buchanan off MSNBC, and now they’re intensifying their efforts to go after Rush.
One sponsor who has been with Rush’s show for a long time, Carbonite, is a special case, as Lord points out. CEO David Friend is closely associated with Soros-affiliated groups, Media Matters, MoveOn.org and the like, and has a history of supporting radical leftist entities.
If you are interested in standing up for Rush Limbaugh, or at least finding out that there is more to the story than simple indignation by these sponsors, who are behaving in a cowardly fashion, you should read Lord’s article in full. It’s eight pages long and filled with substantial information, not some conspiracy-theory nonsense.
This is another example of how the left is attacking free speech in America. Note that even the president got involved. He’s one of those who wants Rush to go away. Fluke, meanwhile, Lord points out, has stopped a pro-life speech at Cornell by protest, and she was also a guest on the Ed Schultz show after the Limbaugh comments. Schultz once called talk-radio star Laura Ingraham a “slut,” but I suppose Fluke was OK with that. Bill Maher called Sarah Palin worse than that, but certainly the left has no problem with it.
The CEO of Carbonite hypocritically says he hopes their withdrawal of sponsorship will help lead to more “civil discourse.” I purchased Carbonite’s service because of Rush’s ads, and found it to be quite good, but I won’t be renewing next time.
An article by Jonah Goldberg (“The Pro-life, Pro-Infanticide Consensus”)* at National Review Online alerted me to an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics (“After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”) that claims that killing newborn babies, whatever their condition, can be justified, since newborns are “morally irrelevant” and “have no moral right to life.” He cites an article (“Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say”) in the Telegraph (U.K.) that quotes and links to the journal article. The so-called “ethicists” who wrote the article are Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.
The journal article abstract reads as follows:
Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.
The authors call this kind of murder “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide.”
They “show” the moral irrelevance of newborns mainly by stating it. You can read the article to see that they do not support it with any argument that would convince anyone other than the most hardened abortion advocates. Yet to get this kind of drivel out there in a supposedly respected journal opens the door to wider consideration by people of borderline morality.
Goldberg says, “Now, my hunch is that for the vast majority of the civilized — and, frankly, uncivilized — world, the only thing these authors have demonstrated is their own ‘moral irrelevance.’”
This kind of thing could find a ready audience among Nazi war criminals, but if it achieves any level of acceptance in the “civilized” world, it is a disturbing and frightening development. Yet in the culture of death preferred by leftists, it should be shocking even if not surprising. Most people would object to killing a puppy, let alone a newborn baby.
The “slippery slope” of abortion which Goldberg mentions, indeed leads to infanticide as anti-abortion advocates warned, and as liberals said it wouldn’t.
We are on that slippery slope, and the sliding is starting to accelerate. Infanticide is a fact of life in many hospitals today, generally passive, and with attempted justification by some terrible condition of the infant. This paper recommends a further step by not considering the health of the infant.
It might be claimed that someone is harmed because she is prevented from becoming a person capable of appreciating her own being alive. Thus, for example, one might say that we would have been harmed if our mothers had chosen to have an abortion while they were pregnant with us or if they had killed us as soon as we were born. However, whereas you can benefit someone by bringing her into existence (if her life is worth living), it makes no sense to say that someone is harmed by being prevented from becoming an actual person. The reason is that, by virtue of our definition of the concept of ‘harm’ in the previous section, in order for a harm to occur, it is necessary that someone is in the condition of experiencing that harm.
If a potential person, like a fetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all. So, if you ask one of us if we would have been harmed, had our parents decided to kill us when we were fetuses or newborns, our answer is ‘no’, because they would have harmed someone who does not exist (the ‘us’ whom you are asking the question), which means no one. And if no one is harmed, then no harm occurred. [Emphasis added]
This so-called argument assumes that killing a newborn (or a fetus) does them no harm, nor does it do anyone else any harm. It is hard to imagine a more false argument. Fetuses and newborns definitely feel pain. They are harmed by their loss of life, as any murder victim would be. They are persons, like it or not. The parent who authorizes such a murder then incurs serious guilt which is not easily dealt with. All this, not to mention the horrifying spiritual consequences. But in one’s ivory-tower office, perhaps it’s easy to imagine oneself playing God.
Leftism in the West has become a secular religion, one that demands human sacrifices. Many millions of abortions, of which a very small percentage involved rape, incest, or life of the mother, have been performed, depriving the world of people we’ll never know.
Abortion is the cultural cancer eating away at civilization and spreading into other forms of death: “voluntary” euthanasia that soon progresses to murder, devaluation of little life that leads in due course to child abuse, sexualization of children and other evils. What next? “Ethicists” recommending cannibalism?
In ancient days, the Israelites had as neighbors some tribes that sacrificed their children by fire to the idol Molech. The Israelites were sternly warned to have nothing to do with those people, but some got involved with this evil practice.
Leftism involves the strong denunciation of Judeo-Christian morality, which we see happening increasingly in American society. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, when people give up believing in God, they won’t simply believe in nothing; far worse, they’ll believe in anything.
If a newborn’s life (or a fetus’s) is so inconsequential that it may be destroyed at will, where is the boundary? Wherever it is, it is soon to fall if these “ethicists’” thinking is given acceptance. May God help us to restore sanity and order to our civilization.
* * *
*Goldberg notes that while pro-life and pro-infanticide views are polar opposites, they agree that killing a fetus is morally like killing a baby.
Media personality Andrew Breitbart gives a speech in Pasadena,
California in a political rally against Proposition 1A on May Day,
photographed by Shal Farley.
I never met Andrew Breitbart. I began to notice his work after the famous ACORN sting that showed the moral bankruptcy of some of that organization. From all accounts, he was a tireless and fearless warrior who went full-blast constantly. He is said to have had a history of heart issues, but his sudden death was unexpected. At age 43, he was just entering his prime.
He worked for The Huffington Post and later for the Drudge Report. Growing up among leftist liberals, he began to question the self-contradictory and false premises of liberalism and came to a kind of intellectual breakthrough that led him to conservatism. He, it is said, was very respectful and courteous, even to his political opponents, but his effectiveness gained him some enemies among the liberals.
At his websites, Breitbart.com and others, his brief obituary states that he died of natural causes, shortly after midnight March 1 in Los Angeles. He is survived by his wife and four young children. It is truly a tragic loss for his family, for the conservative movement, and for America.
Some liberals have rejoiced over his death, expressing their contemptible communications via Twitter and other social media. These people have only shown their true colors. The conservative world mourns the loss of a true hero.
His website quotes a new conclusion he recently wrote for his book Righteous Indignation:
I love my job. I love fighting for what I believe in. I love having fun while doing it. I love reporting stories that the Complex refuses to report. I love fighting back, I love finding allies, and—famously—I enjoy making enemies.
Three years ago, I was mostly a behind-the-scenes guy who linked to stuff on a very popular website. I always wondered what it would be like to enter the public realm to fight for what I believe in. I’ve lost friends, perhaps dozens. But I’ve gained hundreds, thousands—who knows?—of allies. At the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror, and I sleep very well at night.
Some of the responses to news of his death may be seen at Breitbart.com. Here is his speech at CPAC 2012.
Rest in peace, Mr. Brietbart. God comfort and bless his family. May others carry on his work.
