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“When the devil has failed in making a man fall, he puts forward all his energies to create distrust between the penitent and the confessor, and so by little and little he gains his end at last.” — St Philip Neri

Monthly Archives: December 2009

When in the Course of human events…..

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world…..continued….. http://www.unalienable.com/transdec.htm 

Happy Tea Party New Year

….It’s not that our president is dumb: but he is what the good ol’ Soviets used to call “nekulturny”: uncultured in the sense of being willfully ignorant of too many things that make our country what it is.  And hostile to those things he doesn’t appreciate . . . 2009 has been a year of failure, destructive of our national foundations.  President Obama’s agenda has weakened our economy, causing a false recovery that is merely a prelude to a longer and deeper recession.….  
By Jed Babbin, Human Events, Dec. 31, 2009 


Cartoon by Brett Noel
It has been my custom to write a lighthearted year-end column, full of cheerful grumpiness that pokes fun at friend and foe alike. But not this year.

It’s not that 2009 hasn’t provided a wealth of material.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is a constant source of laughable chicanery, but Reid is beyond parody. He was perfectly serious in saying that opposition to the healthcare bill is tantamount to opposing the elimination of slavery. How can any parodist improve on that?

And what better joke to make about our wastrel president than to merely repeat his statement that we can’t continue to treat tax dollars as Monopoly money?  That would be hilarious but for the fact that we are more in debt — by at least $2 trillion — than we were when he took office.

It’s not that our president is dumb: but he is what the good ol’ Soviets used to call “nekulturny”: uncultured in the sense of being willfully ignorant of too many things that make our country what it is.  And hostile to those things he doesn’t appreciate.  

There’s humor in a judicial nominee who proclaims herself a “wise Latina woman” and says her heritage affects the way she chooses facts on which to decide cases. But the fun part was over the moment she was sworn in as a Supreme Court associate justice.

Let’s face it: liberals aren’t humorous: they’re tendentious and dogmatic.  And predictable. Anyone who was surprised that after dropping out of the race Dede Scozzafava then endorsed her Democratic opponent in New York’s 23rd district special election just doesn’t know liberals.  

But liberals are also reckless. When Speaker Pelosi accused the CIA of lying about whether she had been briefed on the waterboarding of terrorist detainees — itself a lie that created the black cloud of distrust that still hangs over our intelligence community — she was unconcerned about damaging our national security. Defense Secretary Gates isn’t unconcerned about national security.  Which makes his slash and burn approach to the defense weapons budget inexplicable, except in liberal political terms.

 
Dennis Goodman, former US economic councilor at the UN, once told me that the third-world bureaucrats who run the UN, “…think the UP.S. Treasury is the common heritage of mankind.”  Mr. Obama apparently agrees with them.  There is no project so expensive, none so aimless or counterproductive that our spendthrift president will not agree to pay for it with funds from the American treasury.  

The Copenhagen global warming conference skidded to a close while Washington suffered a record December blizzard.  No agreement was reached among the Copenhoaxers, despite President Obama glaring icily at the Chinese and Indian representatives. But it didn’t end before our president declared our willingness to provide some of the $100 billion in compensation developing nations demand in return for cooperating in limiting carbon emissions.

This year alone, thanks to President Obama’s spending spree, our deficit has expanded from 41% to 53% of the gross domestic product, from $5.8 to $7.6 trillion.  And now, on Christmas Eve, the Senate has passed the healthcare “reform” bill which won’t cut the costs of healthcare but will increase taxes and limit Americans’ personal freedom.  

President Obama’s insistence on nationalizing healthcare as a way to reduce costs and federal spending is just as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said: “It was a blind call to make history, even if meant making a historic mistake — which is exactly what this bill will be if it’s passed because in the end, this debate isn’t about differences between two parties, it’s about a $2.3 trillion dollar, 2,733-page health care reform bill that does not reform health care and, in fact, makes its price go up.”

2009 has been a year of failure, destructive of our national foundations.  President Obama’s agenda has weakened our economy, causing a false recovery that is merely a prelude to a longer and deeper recession. Our enemies — especially Iran — have been emboldened, slapping away Obama’s “open hand” repeatedly with their clenched fist.

Our president has not led: he has, instead, pronounced one crisis after another, each to be “solved” by the expansion of government, the reduction of personal freedom and the reduction of America’s economic and military might.  He has subcontracted the details to congress, willing to go along with whatever the liberals there propose to remedy the problem, real or imaginary.  Mr. Obama is quite uncomfortable with our superpower standing in the world and has worked determinedly to end it.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not known for straight talk, admitted one of the greatest failures of the Obama presidency when she described the results of the “open-handed” diplomacy with Iran. Clinton said, “I don’t think anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of a positive response from the Iranians.”   Iran is stronger, and bolder, because of that failure.

2010 may be better, but the odds aren’t good.  Whatever the results of the House-Senate conference on the healthcare bill, what isn’t passed this time will be added incrementally on whatever bills may be available.  Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is planning another illegal immigrant amnesty bill, which Democrats shouldn’t dare pass in an election year. But will they?  Some are already telling Obama to back off the “cap and tax” scheme in 2010.

The lesson of 2009 is that the Democratic members of congress are more afraid of the wrath of Obama, Pelosi and Reid than they are of their constituents.  No clearer a message could have been sent by the marvelous Tea Partyers in the August town hall meetings and the marches on Washington in September and December.   But the Democrats chose to ignore them.

About a month ago, I met a gentleman from Iowa, one of the state’s top Republicans. He told me that men are angry but women are furious.  That anger — throughout the nation — can be turned into constructive — i.e., conservative – political energy.

If Republicans adopt a national election strategy next year and reach out to the Tea Party independents, November 2010 can begin the reversal of our fortunes.  The platform — and the slogan — are in three words: roll Obama back.  Run against Obama in every state and district race. Promise to repeal his agenda: end it, don’t mend it.

But Republicans need to realize that such a strategy can only succeed only if it is pursued outside the Washington beltway.   The Democrats know this, which is why they will keep congress in session endlessly, reducing the time Republicans can campaign.     

That, then is the 2010 challenge: can Republicans still fight Obama’s agenda in congress while spending the time at home they need to transform the voters’ anger at Obama into votes for them and against the liberals?  If they can, 2010 will be a very Happy Tea Party New Year.

Mr. Babbin is the editor of Human Events and HumanEvents.com. He served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in President George H.W. Bush’s administration. He is the author of “In the Words of our Enemies“(Regnery,2007) and (with Edward Timperlake) of “Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States” (Regnery, 2006) and “Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think” (Regnery, 2004). E-mail him at jbabbin@eaglepub.com.


http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34989

Quin Hillyer’s Wish List for 2010

By Quin Hillyer, American Spectator, December 31, 2009

• Republican leaders finally actually win a legislative battle important to conservatives, rather than merely finding ways to put up a supposedly noble but failed fight.

• Eric Holder resigns amidst disgrace and scandal. (Eric Holder is a disgrace and a scandal.)

• Members of the New Black Panther Party are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the laws, both civil and criminal, for voter intimidation in Philadelphia.

• Obamacare is defeated in an open vote in Congress. (See item one above.)

• Valerie Jarrett is finally taken to account for her sleazy background.

• Emanuel brothers Rahm and Ezekiel are both forced to leave the administration in disgrace. (Chicago politics and eugenics both deserve to take a fall.)

• Labor bosses lose all their major battles (while workers actually benefit).

• Eastern European nations finally get the missile defense, and the other support, that they need in order to lessen the Russian menace. The Poles, the Czechs, the Latvians, etcetera, represent the new vanguard of freedom, and merit American admiration and diplomatic support.

• Frank-enstein twins Al (Franken) and Barney (Frank) become increasingly the main public face of congressional liberals, in the process sounding so obnoxious and radical that the public reacts by self-identifying as conservatives by ever-larger margins.

• The Reid-Pelosi minions lose their congressional majorities in November, thus helping eliminate the threat they pose to our beloved republic.

• “Yes we can” becomes an ironic buzzword of the right as crowds chant “yes, we can” beat Obamacare, yes we can stop cap-and-trade, yes we can stop “card check” legislation, yes we can stop the climate-change cultists, yes we can protect private property and the Second Amendment, and yes we can most certainly keep the energy of the TEA Party movement and the town hall meetings just as strong as, or even stronger than, it was in 2009.

• Ben Bernanke, up until now a terrible Fed Chairman (as he was a terrible Fed board member), finally gets a clue and makes strengthening and stabilizing the dollar the Fed’s primary focus.

• Liberal “establishment media” outlets lose so much money that finally, out of desperation, a few of them actually stop editorializing within supposedly straight news, start giving conservatives fair shakes in headlines and story placement, and in general become honest organizations rather than knee-jerk mouthpieces for the political and especially cultural left.

• Ice fields in both Antarctica and the Arctic Circle grow so much, so undeniably, that Al Gore admits the inconvenient truth that he was wrong all along — especially when the snows of Kilimanjaro also cover every peak and slope of that mountain.

• Grassley gets his man back in. I mean U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who has been waging a heroic battle to right the wrong done to Gerald Walpin, the former inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service who was fired by the Obamites for the sin of actually doing his job of exposing the corruption and incompetence of Obama allies. Reinstatement of Mr. Walpin would be both a symbolic and a substantive victory for the cause of integrity in government.

• Heroic American servicemen (and women) see their efforts finally come to fruition as Iraq and Afghanistan both stabilize, both as firm American allies.

• The Saints go marching in. The New Orleans Saints, that is, all the way to victory in the Super Bowl. Even more than four years after Hurricane Katrina, a Saints title after 43 years of futility would be such a great “feel-good” story that the whole country (even the fans of whoever loses the Super Bowl, after getting over their disappointment) would applaud. Who dat say dere ain’t no happy endings?

• A whole lot of other items could be added to make a great wish list for 2010, but that will need to do for now. But the overall message of this column can be found, and spelled out, by using the first letter in each item above. Happy New Year!

Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at QHillyer@gmail.com.

Papal Message for January 1, the World Day of Peace

Background: Papal Message for January 1, the World Day of Peace December 31, 2009

On January 1, 2010, the Church commemorates the 43rd World Day of Peace. “If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation” is the theme of Pope Benedict’s message for the day.

 


Babies are God’s MOST Precious Creation!

In his message for the 1st World Day of Peace, Pope Paul VI wrote, “We address Ourself to all men of good will to exhort them to celebrate ‘The Day of Peace,’ throughout the world, on the first day of the year, January 1, 1968. It is Our desire that then, every year, this commemoration be repeated as a hope and as a promise, at the beginning of the calendar which measures and outlines the path of human life in time, that Peace with its just and beneficent equilibrium may dominate the development of events to come.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church discusses Catholic teaching on peace and just war in its treatment of the Fifth Commandment. Between 1914 and 1968, five popes wrote 21 encyclicals on peace. Since 1968, papal teaching on peace has primarily been expressed in the messages for the World Day of Peace.

 Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

Have You Heard of the ‘Lame’ Stream Media? Having Missed the Biggest Stories of the Year Is That Title Appropriate for the MSM?

Nine Big Stories the Mainstream Media Missed in 2009

From radical advisers in the Obama White House to hacked e-mails showing questionable work by climate scientists, 2009 has seen its share of scandals. But if you only followed the mainstream media, you might have missed some of the biggest stories of the year.

 

Here’s a list of the top nine stories the mainstream media ignored in the past year.

Source: Foxnews
http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/politics/2009/12/31/big-stories-mainstream-media-missed

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?

SPIRITUAL BULLETIN BOARD OF LOUISIANA

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“HELPING TO NETWORK LOUISIANA’S ROMAN CATHOLICS TO EVANGELIZE THE NATION AND THE WORLD”

GO TO: http://www.spiritualbulletinboardoflouisiana.com/

Healthcare “Reform” in America Must Be Defeated!

…..Healthcare “reform” is not about uninsured Americans — nor is it mere “socialism.” It is Communism, effectively putting the entire nation’s healthcare system under state control. It must be defeated just as past generations of Americans knew the threat of Communism and devoted the nation’s treasure and even their lives to defeat it….

Quote By Alan Caruba, Renew America, December 27, 2009

(Entire article found below)

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/caruba/091227

It’s Not Socialism, It’s Communism

….Unlike Prof. Hollander, who escaped Hungary following the crushing of the 1956 revolution by Soviet forces, “Western intellectuals who remain attracted to communist ideals never had the disillusioning experience of living in an actual communist or socialist society.” . . . The healthcare “reform” expands “socialism” in America, but it is an example of naked Communism at work….
By Alan Caruba, Renew America, December 27, 2009

 

If you felt a frisson of fear on news that the Senate had passed Obamacare the day before Christmas, then you now know what it was and is like to live in a dictatorship. The voice of the People was ignored in a demonstration of raw political power.

There was a time when Americans took Communism seriously. It challenged us in the form of the Soviet Union and we witnessed its takeover of China.

In Europe, uprisings against Soviet rule were crushed in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland in the 1980s, giving proof that only oppression can sustain this failed economic and political system. President Reagan gave voice to it when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

The McCarthy hearings in the 1950s proved a setback for efforts to learn how thoroughly infiltrated the U.S. government had become by Communists, not because Sen. Joseph McCarthy was wrong, but because he proved a poor spokesperson for the cause. He was easily criticized for his bombast, but the declassification of the Venona papers, secret communications between Soviet spymasters and their agents, revealed he may well have underestimated the threat.

Later, the Russian Federation declassified former Soviet spy agency records that further confirmed that many Americans, dedicated Communists, were working to undermine our government.

The price America paid in part for the Great Depression of the 1930s was the undermining of faith in the Capitalist system among many Americans.

Unions arose, not just in response to worker grievances, but also because their leaders were frequently sympathetic to Communism. The FDR and subsequent administrations introduced Social Security and Medicare, tapping into the fears of those who had experienced the Depression with programs that vastly expanded the federal government, characterizing them as the ultimate “safety net.” Then Congress plundered the trusts that were supposed to fund both programs. Both programs are insolvent.

A recent study by Paul Hollander, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, was published by Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity. It is titled “Reflections on Communism: Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall.”

The celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this year was attended by many world leaders, with the notable exception of President Barack Obama. For a man who has visited more foreign nations in his first year in office than any previous President, the decision to avoid this significant anniversary was taken as one more signal of his true political and economic agenda.

We know that he has been greatly influenced by Marxists or people who viewed Communism sympathetically, not the least of which were his grandparents, who introduced him to a mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA.

Obama wrote that he was drawn to Marxists among his teachers in college. He began his political career in the home of former Weatherman Bill Ayers. These days, he is praised by Communists in Cuba and Venezuela. He sided with a Leftist former president of Honduras who tried to illegally alter its constitution. The Hondurans had the courage to cast him out.

The specter of Communist subversion of the U.S. Constitution is staring us in the eye with the so-called healthcare “reform” of Medicare; it includes all manner of provisions that are unconstitutional and would expand federal government control over one-sixth of the nation’s economy. The bribery and thuggish pressures and threats against Democrat senators and representatives to pass the bill reveal a political leadership more devoted to ideology than the will of the People.

Specifically, President Obama’s drive for a single-payer system is the direct result of the influence of Dr. Quentin Young, a retired physician with a long history of commitment to Communism. In 1995, Dr. Young was among those who met in the Hyde Park home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn to launch Obama’s political career.

As Prof. Hollander points out in his study, “Not only individual intellectuals but entire professional associations have expressed favorable attitudes toward communist systems,” citing the Latin American Studies Association that has “repeatedly taken positions supportive of Castro’s Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua.” In 1990, the Organization of American Historians defeated a motion that expressed regret that the organization “never protested the forced betrayal of the historian’s responsibility to truth imposed upon Soviet and East European historians by their political leaders.”

The recent Climate Change Conference of the UN refused to take notice of the revelations that the data on which the “global warming” theory is based was falsified by a handful of meteorologists and climatologists in an effort to impose a global governing system. The UN’s interim first Secretary General was Alger Hiss, an American and secret Soviet agent.

It did not escape notice that Venezuela’s communist dictator, Hugo Chavez, received a rousing ovation when he spoke at the Climate Change Conference, or that President Obama continues to repeat the lies surrounding the discredited “global warming” fraud.

Virtually the entire agenda of American environmental organizations has been focused on an attack on private property rights and denying Americans access to their vast reserves of energy in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas, thus undermining U.S. growth and prosperity.

Unlike Prof. Hollander, who escaped Hungary following the crushing of the 1956 revolution by Soviet forces, “Western intellectuals who remain attracted to communist ideals never had the disillusioning experience of living in an actual communist or socialist society.”

Among them we must number much of the nation’s media, which has been a party to political and environmental deceptions, and the Hollywood community, has produced many films to influence public opinion about the earlier efforts to address Communist activities and later Green issues with a very Red agenda.

The healthcare “reform” expands “socialism” in America, but it is an example of naked Communism at work. It is a bill put together behind closed doors and is so extensive its control of the lives of Americans literally determines who lives and who dies. It will wreck the best healthcare system in the world, albeit one that has its flaws.

It is authoritarianism at work, the kind we associate with regimes in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and everywhere else Communism has been imposed on captive nations.

Healthcare “reform” is not about uninsured Americans — nor is it mere “socialism.” It is Communism, effectively putting the entire nation’s healthcare system under state control. It must be defeated just as past generations of Americans knew the threat of Communism and devoted the nation’s treasure and even their lives to defeat it.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/caruba/091227

Catholic World News: US Postal Service Honors Mother Teresa With Stamp in 2010

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta will be honored with a United States postal stamp in 2010.
 
Source:  Catholic Culture

Mother Teresa   Katherine Hepburn   Cowboys of the Silver Screen   Negro Leagues Baseball stamps

“With this stamp, the U.S. Postal Service recognizes Mother Teresa, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work,” according to a Postal Service press release. “Noted for her compassion toward the poor and suffering, Mother Teresa, a diminutive Roman Catholic nun and honorary U.S. citizen, served the sick and destitute of India and the world for nearly 50 years. Her humility and compassion, as well as her respect for the innate worth and dignity of humankind, inspired people of all ages and backgrounds to work on behalf of the world’s poorest populations.”

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=5050

Nancy Pelosi, Her Archbishop, and Her Conscience: What Ever Happened to “Thou Shalt Not Kill?”

By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture, December 30, 2009

 In an interview with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a sympathetic Eleanor Clift of Newsweek eventually gets around to the question of Catholicism:

Clift: Is it difficult for you to reconcile your faith with the role you have in public life?

Pelosi: You know, I have five children in six years. The day I brought my fifth baby home, that week my daughter turned 6. So I appreciate and value all that they want to talk about in terms of family and the rest.

Comment: The message here—delivered without much subtlety—is that since Pelosi had several children she must perforce be a good Catholic. When she speaks of “family and the rest,” that dismissive term (“the rest”) refers to human life, which is identified in the Declaration of Independence as an “unalienable right.” You remember Jefferson’s immortal phrase: “liberty, pursuit of happiness, and the rest.”

Pelosi (continuing): When I speak to my archbishop in San Francisco and his role is to try to change my mind on the subject, well then he is exercising his pastoral duty to me as one of his flock. When they call me on the phone here to talk about, or come to see me about an issue, that’s a different story. Then they are advocates, and I am a public official, and I have a different responsibility.
Comment: Nice try. It’s true that a public official has a duty to treat constituents equally. If the archbishop were lobbying for some special consideration—a government contracts for Catholic Charities, say—then his request should weigh no more heavily than that of any other supplicant. But Archbishop Niederauer is—or should be—reminding Pelosi of a moral obligation: “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” It doesn’t matter whether he delivers that message in person or by phone; it’s still a pastoral duty rather than a lobbying effort.
 
If there’s any defense of Pelosi’s argument, it is this: Perhaps she’s so accustomed to having bishops and their representatives approach her in the guise of lobbyists, looking precisely for contracts for Catholic Charities—that she doesn’t recognize them in their primary role. 
 

PROMISES YOU CAN BELIEVE IN!

By Michael Ramirez

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

OVERKILL

By  Lisa Benson
Political Cartoon by Lisa Benson
 

Pauley the Patriot Cartoon

December 28, 2009, PauleyThePatriot.com

Fr. Roger J. Landry: The Solution, Not the Problem

….There are many neo-Malthusian environmentalists who are asserting that the principal menace to the environment is the human being. By this, they do not mean human beings who dump toxic waste into rivers, streams and ground-water supplies. They are not referring to factory owners in China who release pollutants through unfiltered smoke stacks. They are not describing those who carelessly unleash crude oil on the sea or do not prevent nuclear waste from escaping into the environs. They mean human beings who breathe. If you want to see a big polluter, they say, look in the mirror; or to see the worst environmental threats of all, visit a maternity ward…..

Fr. Roger J. Landry, The Anchor, Editorial, December 24, 2009

Each year the joy of Christmas is contextualized by the remembrance of those whom Christian tradition has called the Holy Innocents, the male infants two years old and younger who were slaughtered by Herod’s henchmen as collateral damage in his pursuit to execute the one whom the Magi was calling the “new born king of the Jews.” Herod wanted to cling on to his power so much that he ignored elemental right and wrong. He sought to eliminate what he thought was his competition but who in reality was his savior.

These same Herodian tendencies have been on display recently with regard to two issues that have been capturing the public’s attention: health care reform in Washington and climate change in Copenhagen.

In Washington, we continue to see the sad spectacle of a majority of legislators’ insisting that health care reform requires that our tax dollars be used to pay for others to kill their children in the womb. On December 8, the Senate voted 54-45 to reject the Nelson-Hatch-Casey Amendment, which would have banned government-appropriated funds from paying for abortion. Sixteen Catholic Senators, 15 of them Democrats, voted against the amendment, including Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Paul Kirk. This was a vote in which there was no opportunity to dissimulate about “not imposing one’s morality on others,” “disobeying the Constitution,” “preserving the status quo” on abortion, or even “trying to preserve the hope of universal health care.” This was a vote as to whether our tax dollars and other federal funds should pay for — and therefore promote and cooperate in — abortion. These 16, with 38 others, rejected that amendment so that federal money would now go to underwrite elective abortions. 

The fact that the defeat occurred on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception put their betrayal of Catholic principles into greater relief. We celebrate on this feast how from the first moment of her life, Mary was preserved free from all stain of original sin, which points to the reality that from the first moment of her life, she not only had a human soul (preserved free from all blemish of sin) but was in an intimate relationship with God, who already had in mind for her a great role in the salvation of the world. Every human being is made in God’s image and likeness and exists in relation to him. To destroy the image is in a sense to seek to destroy the exemplar. Why would Catholic Senators, many of whom have received a superb Catholic education, freely choose to subsidize the extermination of both image and exemplar? It appears that their consciences are more attuned to Emily’s List and the infernal influences of the pro-abortion lobby than to the voice of God. It appears that, like Herod, they account the slaughter of holy innocents a small price to pay in their pursuit of other ends.

We have also seen some Herodian paradigms leading up to and flowing out of the Copenhagen summit on climate change. There is obviously a need for the world to come together to protect our environment. Should global warming be scientifically verified — based on hard data rather than dubious computer models and the spin of certain scientists whose ethical violations have recently been exposed — we also need to act, individually and corporately, to seek to remedy and repair the damage. We must make sure, however, that in our hysteria to counteract the threat of global warming, we not repeat Herod’s fatal mistake, by seeking to eliminate the main solution to the problem of global warming, by falsely classifying him as the threat.

There are many neo-Malthusian environmentalists who are asserting that the principal menace to the environment is the human being. By this, they do not mean human beings who dump toxic waste into rivers, streams and ground-water supplies. They are not referring to factory owners in China who release pollutants through unfiltered smoke stacks. They are not describing those who carelessly unleash crude oil on the sea or do not prevent nuclear waste from escaping into the environs. They mean human beings who breathe. If you want to see a big polluter, they say, look in the mirror; or to see the worst environmental threats of all, visit a maternity ward.

That is what is behind a push at the Environmental Protection Agency to redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant and then regulate it by the powers Congress has given the agency through the Clean Air Act. Once carbon dioxide, which human beings exhale, is classified as a pollutant, human beings become categorized as polluters just as much as coal-burning factories; then, just like such factories, human life can be regulated and even criminalized.

This thought probably seems outlandish to most readers, but they need to know that it does not seem outlandish to many environmentalists.

 

http://www.catholicpreaching.com/index.php?content=articles&articles=20091224anchor

Mao Tse-Tung’s (an Adolescent Narcissist) Greed for Mayhem

….(Mao’s) ethical core . . was precisely what the New Left was peddling, in the form of “free love” and the Dionysian frenzies of drug-fueled musical orgies such as Woodstock. But there’s one crucial difference: The New Left (following the gradualist revolutionary tactics of Antonio Gramsci and Saul Alinsky) promoted egoistic hedonism as an acid to eat away bourgeois Christian society — the better to replace it with a Puritanical, egalitarian anthill. It seems that Mao was doing the reverse — creating a nightmarish, dehumanizing dictatorship in service of his own adolescent narcissism. Unwilling to serve Heaven, he excavated a vast Hell on earth so he could reign there.  Mao saw himself as part of a small elite he called “Great Heroes.”….
 
By John Zmirak, Inside Catholic, December 31, 2009
 
 
Not every villain in history can be confined to a single vice. In pointing out, for instance, the Gluttony of François Mitterand, I didn’t mean to clear this polygamous socialist of any suspicion of Lust or Envy. Quite the contrary: As St. Francis de Sales implied when he suggested that giving way to Lust made men effeminate, allowing any capital sin to conquer part of one’s will merely softens up the rest for easier conquest.
 
Think of your moral life as a small, developing country, surrounded by enemies, kept going by a lifeline to a single, benevolent patron (say, your one-time colonial ruler). The more you allow corruption to take hold in business and government, the slower and more inefficient everyone’s work will be, as the vicious cycle of distrust leads even honest folk to get in on the game — till at last you’re actually nostalgic for the sight of the Union Jack. Think of God’s grace as the squadron of British gunboats that steams upriver and restores order in the capital. (Is it possible to find a more politically incorrect simile? If so, I can’t think of one. Enjoy!)
 
Likewise, a will that has compromised left and right with passionate perversities has little defense against the next temptation to come along. As a man deepens in malice, he can learn to take a Luciferian thrill in flouting his conscience, tossing the rules of decency into the outhouse like the Sears Catalog.
 
One truly dark example, whom my research has led me to dub as the most successfully evil man in history, is the late Chinese dictator Mao Tse-Tung. One of the governing passions of Mao’s life seems to have been Greed — for luxury, privilege, and most of all the power of life and death.
 
Now, I cannot hope to do justice to this man in a pithy essay. Indeed, to make a dent would require not so much a book as a series of horror films. Not so obviously demonic as Adolf Hitler (Pope Pius XII told any diplomats who would listen that Hitler was “possessed by Satan”) or thuggish as Uncle Joe Stalin, Mao was portrayed by his propaganda machine as a wise, reflective leader of China’s long-oppressed peasants — a man given to philosophical musings, and short, inscrutable poems. This Oriental stereotype got eaten up like a pint of late-night takeout by a long string of gullible Westerners — from journalists like Edgar Snow, to generals like George Marshall, who forced Chiang Kai-Shek to stop attacking Mao’s guerillas when victory was still possible.
 
At least these people had the excuse of operating before Mao came to power. In the late 1960s, after Mao had already racked up most of his estimated 70 million deaths, Western intellectuals with a taste for utopian tyranny turned from Moscow’s brand of Communism to Mao’s; radicals like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva camped it up for years, calling themselves Maoists — even as Mao’s regime crushed every flicker of independent thought among almost a billion people, starving or working millions of them to death in the process. Mao’s system organized committees to micromanage the public, private, and sexual lives of millions at the point of a bayonet. This won it praise from pampered professors as the “purest form” of socialism.
 
And on this point, they were right. The essence of every form of collectivism boils down to one person’s craving to organize other people’s lives on the model of a termite colony. Few have so spectacularly had the chance to indulge this fantasy as the spoiled little scholar from Hunan.
 
Mao has never gotten the credit he deserves. Vendors sell little statuettes of him in New York’s Chinatown. American college students sometimes sport green hats with Mao’s infernal red star. (Having learned about Mao’s crimes from refugees in Manhattan, I confronted one clueless fellow student about his Mao cap, asking him where he kept his “Hitler hat.” A great way to make friends, I can tell you.) Andy Warhol (see Sloth) made a nice pile of American dollars decorating pictures of this genocidal maniac with garish silkscreened colors — raising none of the questions that might have emerged had he been issuing pictures of Hitler. But then, Mao killed very few Europeans, and those Asians just have a terrible habit of dying like flies, don’t they?
 
Such a tacit, crass assumption is the only way to explain the genial disregard in the West for Mao’s mind-boggling atrocities — which were most fully documented in the devastating biography Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. I pretty much ruined Thanksgiving this year working my way through 801 pages, and six decades, of villainy. From the copious documents and quotations Chang and Halliday cite, what sets Mao apart from obsessed ideologues like Lenin, Hitler, and Pol Pot is his comparative lack of interest in political ideas. His youthful conversion to Marxism seems perfunctory, and his political writings never attained even the theoretical sophistication of Stalin’s. Mao would have been equally at ease adopting Nazi ideas, had they been less parochially German, since his focus from a young age seems to have been less on improving the lot of industrial workers (whom he scorned) or peasants (whom he hated), and more on the following three-point program:
 
  • Avoiding work.
  • Attaining power and privilege.
  • Causing mayhem and destruction, largely to see what would happen.
Mao’s solipsistic egoism emerged early on, as Chang and Halliday document, pointing to his philosophical jottings at age 24:
 
Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core: the self, “I” above everything else. “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s actions has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others. . . . People like me want to . . . satisfy our hearts to the full and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.”
 
Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.”
 
Mao further wrote:
 
“All our actions . . . are driven by impulse, and the conscience that is wise goes along with this in every instance. Sometimes . . . conscience restrains impulses such as overeating or over-indulgence in sex. But conscience is only there to restrain, not oppose. And the restraint is there for better completion of the impulse.”
 
No wonder Mao became so popular in the 1960s. His ethical core — which could have been cribbed from the writings of the Marquis de Sade — was precisely what the New Left was peddling, in the form of “free love” and the Dionysian frenzies of drug-fueled musical orgies such as Woodstock. But there’s one crucial difference: The New Left (following the gradualist revolutionary tactics of Antonio Gramsci and Saul Alinsky) promoted egoistic hedonism as an acid to eat away bourgeois Christian society — the better to replace it with a Puritanical, egalitarian anthill. It seems that Mao was doing the reverse — creating a nightmarish, dehumanizing dictatorship in service of his own adolescent narcissism. Unwilling to serve Heaven, he excavated a vast Hell on earth so he could reign there.
Mao saw himself as part of a small elite he called “Great Heroes.”
 
For this elite, he said:
 
Everything outside their nature, such as restrictions and constraints, must be swept away by the great strength in their nature. . . . When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses, they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible. Their power is like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a sex maniac on heat [sic] and prowling for a lover . . . there is no way to stop them.
 
That’s a picture-perfect description of the capital sin of Greed – the fetishization of animal instincts and simple whims, setting them up with incense on an altar as ends in themselves.
 
Now, a lesser, better man might take from such a credo mere hedonism and follow the path of a wretch such as Hugh Hefner — ending up not as the absolute ruler of 900 million souls but rather as one of those guys you hear about in Viagra ads who end up in emergency wards thanks to “erections that last longer than four hours.”
 
But Mao combined Hefner’s juvenile narcissism with a tectonic will to power. Mao regarded lesser humans (those of us who aren’t “Great Heroes”) the way a bored, sadistic schoolboy might see the ants in a hill he was savaging with fireworks. Mao yawned that “long-lasting peace”
 
is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace. When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another . . . which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity we are bored. . . . Human nature loves sudden swift changes.
 
What model of change did Mao have in mind? According to Chiang and Halliday:
 
When he came to the question “How do we change [China]?” Mao laid the utmost emphasis on destruction: “the country must be . . . destroyed and then re-formed. . . . This applies to the country; to the nation; and to mankind. . . . The destruction of the universe is the same. . . . People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better?”
 
Mao’s attitude didn’t change after his conversion to Communism, although he learned to cloak it in social-justice rhetoric, to frame his banal pronouncements in the pseudo-scientific jargon of Marxism-Leninism, and lard them with pretended concern for peasants and workers. However, it was precisely those “little people” of China — who, despite the vast inequalities of the old imperial system, had in many places built up small savings and larger plots of land — who suffered most directly at Mao’s hands. The first victims were his supporters and the unlucky residents who fell under control of the guerrilla bands Mao came to command in the lawless China of the 1930s, where bandit kings (“warlords”) and Japanese invaders fought the legal government of China, headed by the well-meaning but naïve and nepotistic Chiang Kai-Shek. Regions Mao commanded on behalf of the fledgling Communist Party of China were raped for resources, the peasants stripped of all their savings and often reduced to near-starvation, while the Red cadres themselves endured horrific privations.
 
The worst-off were the Communist soldiers who served under leaders whom Mao envied or feared. Repeatedly, Mao would maneuver entire Red armies commanded by his rivals into hopeless battles or hostile terrain, killing off tens of thousands — but weakening his competitors for leadership. Still other competitors Mao poisoned or framed as “counterrevolutionaries” and had tortured to death — sometimes as he watched and gloated.
 
Mao would continue in these habits once he ruled the country. His fanatical need to wipe clean every trace of independent thought would culminate with the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Mao’s attempt to purge the country of its 2,400-year-old Confucian culture, to destroy all family loyalty, to liquidate most of the educated class (except for industrial and military specialists), and eliminate the last traces of Christianity. Instead, all the philosophical wisdom his citizens would need could be found in Mao’s Little Red Book — a collection of platitudes that was printed by the tens of millions, which Chinese carried everywhere, if they valued their lives.
 
All through his rise to power, Mao insisted on a life more suited to an emperor than a peasant guerrilla. The desperate 1934-1935 retreat across thousands of miles of arid Chinese terrain, which Mao’s publicists dressed up as “the Long March,” did indeed involve a great deal of marching — but none of it by Mao. As Chiang and Halliday record, his feet rarely touched the ground: Mao and other leaders were carried on litters like Manchu aristocrats. Indeed, while the elite consumed wholesome food, dozens of litter-bearers dropped dead from exhaustion or hunger.
 
This hypocrisy set the pattern for the rest of Mao’s career, as he rose in the Party ranks, and especially after Russian intervention and American interference helped bring Mao’s Party to power: Even as ordinary people paid the price for Mao’s irrational, ultra-Marxist policies of collectivizing the land, seizing all surpluses, and working peasants to death by the tens of thousands every year, Mao lived like an emperor, eating multi-course meals — flying in his favorite fish, still alive, across thousands of miles — building elaborate villas, and commandeering gifts from international aid groups for his own use. (During World War II, Mao infamously seized an ambulance funded by donations from tailors in New York’s Chinatown and used it as his personal limousine.)
 
When Mao craved superpower status to rival the Soviet Union, he exported massive quantities of food, cutting the diets of average Chinese to just a few hundred calories a day. To fund his hysterically rushed industrial “Great Leap Forward,” Mao squeezed the farmers even harder, opining: “Half of China may very well have to die.” When he faced possible attack by the United States because of his involvement in the invasion of South Korea, Mao
 
wrote to Krushchev confirming that he would be only too happy for China to fight a nuclear war with America alone. “For our ultimate victory,” he offered, “for the total eradication of the imperialists, we [i.e., the Chinese people, who had not been consulted] are willing to endure the first strike. All it is is a big pile of people dying.”
 
Mao’s attitudes hadn’t changed since his early 20s, when he played at being Raskolnikov. When reports would come to Mao of mass starvation and thousands of suicides, Mao replied that people were
 
“not without food all the year round — only six . . . or four months.” [sic] Senior officials who invoked the traditional concept of conscience (liang-xin) to beg him to go easy found themselves being slapped down with remarks like “You’d better have less conscience. Some of our comrades have too much mercy, not enough brutality, which means they are not so Marxist.” “On this matter,” Mao said, “we indeed have no conscience. Marxism is that brutal.”
 
For once he was telling the truth.
 


John Zmirak is the author, most recently, of the graphic novel
The Grand Inquisitor and is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. He writes weekly for InsideCatholic.com.

http://insidecatholic.com/Joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7438&Itemid=48

FOUNDER’S QUOTE DAILY

Founder's Quote Daily

“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”

–James Madison, Federalist No. 46

http://patriotpost.us/

TODAY’S GOSPEL

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2009
Liturgical Year B
Gospel – Jn 1:1-18


1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.
2. He was with God in the beginning.
3. All things were made through Him, and nothing that was made was made without Him.
4. Life was in Him, and Life was the light of men.
5. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
6. There was a man sent by God, whose name was John.
7. He arrived as a witness to offer testimony about the Light, so that all would believe through him.
8. He was not the Light, but he was to offer testimony about the Light.
9. The true Light, which illuminates every man, was coming into this world.
10. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world did not recognize him.
11. He went to his own, and his own did not accept him.
12. Yet whoever did accept him, those who believed in his name, he gave them the power to become the sons of God.
13. These are born, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14. And the Word became flesh, and he lived among us, and we saw his glory, glory like that of an only-begotten son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
15. John offers testimony about him, and he cries out, saying: “This is the one about whom I said: ‘He who is to come after me, has been placed ahead of me, because he existed before me.’ ”
16. And from his fullness, we all have received, even grace for grace.
17. For the law was given though Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
18. No one ever saw God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he himself has described him.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/utiles/myprint/print.php

ST. SYLVESTER, POPE

CATHOLIC NEWS AGENCY, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2009

Saint Sylvester was born in Rome. When he reached the age to dispose of his fortune, he took pleasure in giving hospitality to Christians passing through the city. He would take them with him, wash their feet, serve them at table, and in sum give them in the name of Christ, all the care that the most sincere charity inspired. One day Timothy of Antioch, an illustrious confessor of the Faith, arrived in Rome. No one dared receive him, but Sylvester considered it an honor. For a year Timothy, preaching Jesus Christ with unflagging zeal, received at Sylvester’s dwelling the most generous hospitality. When this heroic man had won the palm of martyrdom, Sylvester took up his precious remains and buried them during the night. But he himself was soon denounced to the prefect and accused of having hidden the martyr’s treasures. He replied, “Timothy left to me only the heritage of his faith and courage.” The governor threatened him with death and had him imprisoned, but Sylvester said to him, “Senseless one, this very night it is you who will render an account to God.” And the persecutor that evening swallowed a fish bone, and died in fact that night.

Fear of heavenly chastisements softened the guardians, and the brave young man was set at liberty. Sylvester’s courageous acts became known to Saint Melchiad, Pope, who elevated him to the diaconate. He was a young priest when persecution of the Christians grew worse under the tyrant Diocletian. Idols were erected at the street corners, in the market-places, and over the public fountains, so that it was scarcely possible for a Christian to go abroad without being put to the test of offering sacrifice, with the alternative of apostasy or death. During this fiery trial, Sylvester strengthened the confessors and martyrs, and God preserved his life from many dangers. It was indeed he who was destined to succeed the Pope who had recognized his virtues.

His long pontificate of twenty-one years, famous for several reasons, is remembered in particular for the Council of Nicea, the Baptism of Constantine, and the triumph of the Church. Some authors would place Constantine’s Baptism later, but there are numerous and serious testimonies which fix the emperor’s reception into the Church under the reign of Saint Sylvester, and the Roman Breviary confirms that opinion. Constantine, while still pagan and little concerned for the Christians, whose doctrine was entirely unknown to him, was attacked by a kind of leprosy which soon covered his entire body. One night Saint Peter and Saint Paul, shining with light, appeared to him and commanded him to call for Pope Sylvester, who would cure him by giving him Baptism. In effect, the Pope instructed the royal neophyte and baptized him. Thus began the social reign of Jesus Christ: Constantine’s conversion, culminating in the Edict of Milan in 313, had as its happy consequence that of the known world.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/utiles/myprint/print.php

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2009

What is the Future of the Catholic Church?

“From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge a Church that has lost much.  She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.  She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices that she built in prosperity.  As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges.  In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision.  As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.  Undoubtedly she will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession.  In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will be normally provided in this fashion.  Alongside this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly.  But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.  In faith and prayer she will again recognize her true center and experience the sacraments again as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship”. 

– Josef Ratzinger in his book “Faith and the Future” (Pope Benedict XVI)

http://www.sthelenacctx.org/Prod/c352d2e234fa472ba285eda40e561b1f/St-Helena-Home.aspx

Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2009

You know what is really sad? You read the names of the 10 most corrupt politicians in the United States (none will surprise you) and realize how easy it would be to create a list of 25 -or 50- corrupt politicos, and still know you haven’t begun to scratch the surface.
SOURCE:  The Anchoress, First Things, December 29, 2009


Judicial Watch,Washington, DC
President Barack Obama: During his presidential campaign, President Obama promised to run an ethical and transparent administration. However, in his first year in office, the President has delivered corruption and secrecy, bringing Chicago-style political corruption to the White House. Consider just a few Obama administration “lowlights” from year one: Even before President Obama was sworn into office, he was interviewed by the FBI for a criminal investigation of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s scheme to sell the President’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. (Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and slumlord Valerie Jarrett, both from Chicago, are also tangled up in the Blagojevich scandal.) Moreover, the Obama administration made the startling claim that the Privacy Act does not apply to the White House. The Obama White House believes it can violate the privacy rights of American citizens without any legal consequences or accountability. President Obama boldly proclaimed that “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,” but his administration is addicted to secrecy, stonewalling far too many of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests and is refusing to make public White House visitor logs as federal law requires. The Obama administration turned the National Endowment of the Arts (as well as the agency that runs the AmeriCorps program) into propaganda machines, using tax dollars to persuade “artists” to promote the Obama agenda. According to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, the idea emerged as a direct result of the Obama campaign and enjoyed White House approval and participation. President Obama has installed a record number of “czars” in positions of power. Too many of these individuals are leftist radicals who answer to no one but the president. And too many of the czars are not subject to Senate confirmation (which raises serious constitutional questions). Under the President’s bailout schemes, the federal government continues to appropriate or control — through fiat and threats — large sectors of the private economy, prompting conservative columnist George Will to write: “The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.” Government-run healthcare and car companies, White House coercion, uninvestigated ACORN corruption, debasing his office to help Chicago cronies, attacks on conservative media and the private sector, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors – this is Obama’s “ethics” record — and we haven’t even gotten through the first year of his presidency……CONTINUE to read who else is on the 10 most corrupt politicians in the United States Continue reading

Look at What Obama Quietly Did While You Drank Eggnog!

“The New Housing Bubble?”, By Ed Morrissey, December 29, 2009

Over the weekend, I noted the late-Christmas Eve announcement that the Obama administration had lifted the bailout caps on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, attempting to sneak it past Americans while they focused on family, friends, and religious observance.  The obvious conclusion was that Barack Obama wants to use the collapsed GSAs for even more social engineering through the lending markets, and wants an unlimited supply of cash from Treasury to force taxpayers to subsidize the next failure. 

The Washington Examiner has reached the same conclusion:

Obama’s decision is particularly disturbing for two reasons. First, taxpayers have already sunk $111 billion into the Fannie-Freddie bailout in just the last few months. The removal of the $400 billion cap suggests that things are about to worsen considerably. Second, it was precisely such government guarantees that caused the housing bubble and economic collapse in the first place.

In 1999, when Fannie Mae initially began securitizing subprime mortgages in a pilot program, American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison predicted in the pages of the New York Times that a massive bailout would eventually be necessary. Wallison’s warning was ignored by President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress, which together allowed the pilot program to expand year after year. The process continued under President George W. Bush, with loan standards being steadily lowered by Fannie and Freddie in their effort to give 55 percent of their mortgages to families at or below the median income level. The economic carnage of politically motivated mortgages surrounds us now.

Today, Wallison points out that nearly two-thirds of the nation’s subprime and otherwise bad loans were created, securitized, backed by, and/or required by various programs within the United States government, including Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Housing Administration, Ginnie Mae, and the Community Reinvestment Act. Ten million of these 17 million dicey mortgages — or about 40 percent of the nation’s subprime and otherwise low-grade mortgages — were either owned or securitized by Fannie and Freddie when they collapsed last year.

That Obama would now give these two companies a blank check is incomprehensible. Taxpayers got another thumb in the eye when Fannie and Freddie chose the same Christmas news dump to announce $42 million in bonuses for 12 top executivesobviously for their excellent work last year as they drove the ship into the iceberg. Keep that one in mind the next time you hear Obama feign outrage over Wall Street bonuses.

The question that everyone should be asking is why the untapped $289 billion in the credit line isn’t enough.  That represents more than three times the amount spent already, when the crisis hit its peak.  At this point, we should be seeing improvement rather than an escalation of crisis in the housing market, or at least some stabilization, if this strategy was correct in the first place.

Instead, Obama now wants no cap at all, which means that he has plans to spend a lot more money on inflating a housing bubble that still needs deflating.  That will once again start the cycle of price escalation, speculation, and eventually another collapse of the bubble.  The pattern is utterly predictable, as is the damage it will inflict on the economy.

We need to demand some answers from this administration from its attempt to aggrandize its power in the dark of night.

http://hotair.com/archives/2009/12/29/the-new-housing-bubble/

As Chesterton said, “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”

Mark Twain

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed.
If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”


— Mark Twain

 
 

Tax Time! 12-29

Why taxes are immoral and evil

Thanks Sen. Dodd for the Mismanagement of the People’s Money and for Making America Less Safe!

“Sen. Dodd, D-Conn., Slashed Aviation Security Funding for Pet Constituency”

By: Mark Hemingway, The Wasington Examiner, Commentary Staff Writer, 12/28/09

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2009, for a series of votes.

Now that our attention is focused on airline security measures thanks to the failed airline attack on Christmas Day, it’s worth mentioning that one senator took money away from aviation security to line the pockets of a constituency that supported his presidential campaign in a big way.

Back in July, Senator Chris Dodd, D-Conn., proposed an amendment reducing aviation security appropriations by $4.5 million in favor of firefighter grants — a notoriously inneffective program. In fact, the money was specifically “for screening operations and the amount for explosives detection systems.” The amendment was also sponsored by Sen. Lieberman, D-Conn., and Sen. Carper, D-Del., but Dodd deserves to be singled out here because the firefighters union is a pet constituency of his. In 2007 he campaigned all through Iowa with the firefighters union. It was one of the few distinguishable features of Dodd’s ill-fated presidential bid.

The text of the amendment is below:

 (Purpose: To provide additional funds for FIRE grants under section 33 of the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974)

 On page 77, between lines 16 and 17, insert the following:

 SEC. X (a) The amount appropriated under the heading “firefighter assistance grants” under the heading “Federal Emergency Management Agency” under by title III for necessary expenses for programs authorized by the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 is increased by $10,000,000 for necessary expenses to carry out the programs authorized under section 33 of that Act (15 U.S.C. 2229).

   (b) The total amount of appropriations under the heading “Aviation Security” under the heading “Transportation Security Administration” under title II, the amount for screening operations and the amount for explosives detection systems under the first proviso under that heading, and the amount for the purchase and installation of explosives detection systems under the second proviso under that heading are reduced by $4,500,000.

   (c) From the unobligated balances of amounts appropriated before the date of enactment of this Act for the appropriations account under the heading “state and local programs” under the heading “Federal Emergency Management Agency” for “Trucking Industry Security Grants”, $5,500,000 are rescinded.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Sen-Dodd-D-Conn-slashed-aviation-security-funding-for-pet-constituency-80209967.html

Thank Your Military

An average group of Americans gathered to publicly thank their United Stated Military for the freedom they provide. If you want to thank your military, pass this video on to every person you know so it will eventually reach every present and former military person across the globe.
We want the military to know we appreciate their service and sacrifice!

Dick Cheney: Obama ‘Trying to Pretend’ America Is Not At War

….“Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? . . . It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation-the restructuring of American society.” . . . Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.”….

By Mike Allen, Politico, December 30, 2009

Dick Cheney is seen at a campaign stop for Kay Bailey Hutchison in Nov.
Dick Cheney is accusing Obama of ‘trying to pretend we are not at war.’
 

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted sky bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term “war on terror” and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

“[W]e are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe,” Cheney said in a statement to POLITICO. “Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation-the restructuring of American society.”

Cheney was joining a chorus of Republicans who have criticized Obama following the Christmas Day attack, in which a Nigerian suspect is accused of trying to blow up a loaded airliner with a bomb stitched into his underwear.

A senior Democrat said in response: “It’s telling that in attacking the president and the administration, that Vice President Cheney did not condemn the attack against our nation on Christmas Day.”

Foreshadowing the party’s strategy for next year’s midterm congressional elections, GOP officeholders have eschewed the customary partisan restraint following a terrorist incident, and have baldly portrayed Democrats as weak on security.

Rep. Peter King of New York, ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and a member of the Intelligence committee, said Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show: “I think that the administration has made a mistake by treating this terrorist as a common criminal, by putting him into the criminal-justice system. I wish they had put him into a military tribunal so we could get as much intelligence and information out of him as we could.”

Here is Cheney’s full statement:

“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core al Qaeda trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency – social transformation-the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.” ….. continued….
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/31054.html

Ten New Reasons Why Obamacare Can Still Be Killed

New reasons emerge almost daily as to why Obamacare can and must be defeated.
 
Phyllis Schlafly :: Townhall.com Columnist
 
 
By Phyllis Schlafly, TownHall, December 29, 2009
 
 
 1. The American people oppose Obamacare by almost two to one in the latest CNN poll. Other polls show lopsided opposition to passing either the Senate or House health care bill.

Public opinion is against the bill because of its obscene costs in higher taxes, burdensome debt, anti-freedom mandates, rationing and reduced care for seniors. The American people have awakened to the fact that Obamacare is transformational legislation that will drag us against popular will into European-style socialism.

 

2. The Democrats’ double-counting of Obamacare’s financial benefits has been exposed as a colossal lie. Harry Reid told the Senate that his bill strengthens our future by both “cutting our towering national deficit by as much as $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years” AND “strengthening Medicare and extending its life by nearly a decade.”

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) refuted that assertion. CBO said the claim that Obamacare would provide these benefits simultaneously “would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position.”

3. Obamacare is unconstitutional because of its mandate that all individuals must carry “approved” health insurance and all businesses must give health insurance to their employees whether or not the company can afford it. “Universal” coverage will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service with power to punish those who don’t have such a plan.

Constitutional lawyers point out that the Commerce Clause does not give Congress the authority to force Americans to buy health insurance as a condition of living in our country because personal health insurance is not “commerce.” The CBO wrote that “a mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action”; the Supreme Court has never upheld any requirement that an individual must participate in economic activity.

4. Since the Senate bill imposes sharp limits on health-insurance companies’ ability to raise fees or exclude coverage, it likely will force many of them out of business. Obamacare is unconstitutional because it violates the Bill of Rights protections against takings without just compensation and deprivation of property without due process of law.

5. Other Obamacare provisions blatantly legislate racial and other forms of discrimination. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sent two letters to the president and congressional leaders warning about the obnoxious requirements for racist and sexist quotas.

The Senate bill requires that “priority” for federal grants be given to institutions offering “preferential” admissions to minorities (race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation and religion). Institutions training social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, behavioral pediatricians, psychiatric nurses and counselors will be ineligible for federal grants unless they enroll “individuals and groups from different racial, ethnic, cultural, geographic, religious, linguistic and class backgrounds, and different genders and sexual orientations.”

6. Obama’s claim that “everybody” will now be covered creates few winners but lots of losers. Universal health insurance will be achieved by forcing young people to pay the additional costs (insurance for the youngest third of the population would rise by 35 percent), and by restricting and rationing care for the elderly.

7. According to Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post, the “wild card is immigration.” From 1999 to 2008, 60 percent of the increase in the uninsured occurred among Hispanics, and Obama’s refusal to close our borders will make this problem more costly every year.

8. Obamacare gives Medicare bureaucrats the power to ration health care by forcing doctors to prescribe cheaper medical devices and drugs. In the recent case of Hays v. Sebelius, the court ruled that Medicare doesn’t have the right to make this rule, but Obamacare takes jurisdiction away from the courts to hear any appeal from decisions of the new Medicare Commission.

The “stick” applied to primary-care doctors is imposing financial penalties if they refer too many patients to specialists. The “carrot” is financial rewards to doctors who give up small practices and consolidate into larger medical groups or become salaried employees of hospitals or other large institutions.

9. The Senate bill contains at least a dozen of what can be described as bribes. Sen. Mary Landrieu received a $300 million increase in Medicaid funding for her state (known as the Second Louisiana Purchase), and a $100 million bribe to Sen. Ben Nelson gives Nebraska a permanent exemption from the costs of Medicaid expansion.

10. The Senate bill even has a four-page section artfully written to enable ACORN to get federal health care grants. This section describes grant recipients as “community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups” having “existing relationships … with uninsured and underinsured consumers.”

http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2009/12/29/ten_new_reasons_why_
obamacare_can_still_be_killed

America Needs a Good Old-Fashioned President Not a King!

EXCERPT:  Obama and Doing vs Being – UPDATED“, The Anchoress, Tuesday, December 29, 2009

…..I suspect that what Obama wanted was to be the King, not the President. The King’s role is largely ceremonial. In time of national tragedy the King goes before the camera and says, “this is very sad.” If he can assign blame on a perceived enemy he does so, and then he steps aside and retires to his amusements while those actually in charge clean up the mess and determine how to prevent future messes. Everyone loves the King, defers to the King, rushes to do for the King, but the King -who tends to get bored and distracted by the dry business of actually governing- is responsible for very little, and most are just as glad of it.

If a King is on vacation and his country encounters an critical issue, he knows there is no need to come jetting back to the palace, because the Prime Minister is taking care of reality. All the King needs to do is -in a day or three- show up at a microphone in casual dress and do the PR work of expressing concern over the issue and confidence in the government. The King can command instant coverage, even if there is only time for audio.

A King does not worry, so much, about representative governance, since it is irrelevent to his standing.

Sadly, though, America is not in need of his Kingship.

America needs a good old-fashioned President:

I miss old-fashioned American presidents; flawed men who had no allusions that they were perfect. Men who (in Clinton’s case) needed to be loved too much and (in Bush’s case) didn’t need it enough, but who still, for all the personal and political mistakes, were simply trying to lead America, not to rule it, or “remake” it or “save” it from its stiff-necked, fussy, independent, generous, vulgar, valiant, dreaming, energetic, creative, preening, heroic, world-leading, free and glorious self.

Bring back the flawed human president who we were free to love or hate without reserve, fear or condemnation, because the target was strong enough to take it. The president who could sometimes be petty but sometimes be pretty damned gracious, too. The president who could make a mistake at a doorway and laugh about it, and whom the press did not have to protect from the passing mockery such a mistake would bring.


Don Surber shows a wonderful picture of President Bush, helping Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd walk as they gather to confer a congressional Gold Medal to the Tuskegee airmen who served in World War II.

I miss having an American President who could describe himself – as Clinton once did – as “a punching clown; you punch me and I’m bounce right back up and into your face;” or a president who could, with ironic self awareness describe himself as “misunderestimated.” America needs a guy who can laugh at himself and take the nation’s chaffing with a shrug, instead of a godling of the press’ needy creation, one “too perfect to be mocked”.

So, we have a King. But we haven’t a Prime Minister. Mrs. Pelosi won’t do, nor will Mr. Reid. We need a president…… Continued……….

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/theanchoress/2009/12/29/obama-and-doing-vs-being/

Nancy Pelosi to Bishops on Abortion: “I Practically Mourn This Difference of Opinion”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was interviewed in a recent edition of Newsweek, in which she had the opportunity to set the bishops straight on the participation of Catholics in public life.

  • I think you have had some brushes with [church] hierarchy.

 I have some concerns about the church’s position respecting a woman’s right to choose. I have some concerns about the church’s position on gay rights. I am a practicing Catholic, although they’re probably not too happy about that. But it is my faith. I practically mourn this difference of opinion because I feel what I was raised to believe is consistent with what I profess, and that is that we are all endowed with a free will and a responsibility to answer for our actions. And that women should have that opportunity to exercise their free will.

  • Is it difficult for you to reconcile your faith with the role you have in public life?

You know, I had five children in six years. The day I brought my fifth baby home, that week my daughter turned 6. So I appreciate and value all that they want to talk about in terms of family and the rest. When I speak to my archbishop in San Francisco and his role is to try to change my mind on the subject, well then he is exercising his pastoral duty to me as one of his flock. When they call me on the phone here to talk about, or come to see me about an issue, that’s a different story. Then they are advocates, and I am a public official, and I have a different responsibility.

http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/12/30/nancy-pelosi-to-bishops-on-abortion-i-practically-mourn-this-difference-of-opinion/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AmericanCatholic+%28American+Catholic%29

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