Category Archives: rights

Controlling Religion

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Last Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, reports The Weekly Standard, the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, was asked this question by Steve Kroft:

Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?

Obama gave this answer, in part [emphasis mine]:

…I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because—you know, in a lot of these places—the one organizing principle—has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn’t been controlled completely by the government.

So, in this man’s eyes, Islam—and by extension, all religion?—must be under government control, and not left to the individual consciences of the men and women involved?

He seems to have implemented this view with his attacks on religion here at home—his HHS ruling on contraceptives and abortifacients, for instance; his VA’s attacks on prayer in our National Cemetery System; his Justice Department’s lack of support for (if not outright obstruction of) defending military memorials because some of the symbology looks like religious icons; his attempted omission of any reference to God from the Democratic Party platform, until public outcry forced him into a square-filler insertion of a passing referent; and so on.

Hmm….

Promises and Policies

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Fox News reports this from the CBO:

Nearly 6 million Americans—most of them in the middle class—will face a tax penalty for not carrying medical coverage once President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law is fully in place, congressional budget analysts said Wednesday…a 50 percent increase [over CBO’s report from last year].

Recall Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s solemn promise from his 2008 campaign, repeated constantly over these last four years.  He’s not going to raise taxes on any one of us with less than $200,000 of annual income, or on couples of us with a combined annual income less than $250,000.

The CBO said why this sharp increase had occurred, too.

…most of the increase in its estimate is due to changes in underlying projections about the economy, incorporating the effects of new federal legislation, as well as higher unemployment and lower wages.

How’re those several promises

  • that promised no-tax-increase
  • unemployment held under 8%
  • everyone pays their “fair share”
  • failure to achieve would produce a one-term presidency (yet he’s running for a second term)
  • and so on

and our “recovery” working out for you?

With all this government “help,” we’re having trouble building anything anymore.

So Now Our Government

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…is apologizing for the uniquely American value of free speech?  And we tax payers are paying for this shameful behavior with our own dollars!?

This from Fox News:

The American Embassy in Islamabad, in a bid to tamp down public rage over the anti-Islam film produced in the US, is spending $70,000 to air an ad on Pakistani television that features President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denouncing the video.

And beyond this appalling obsequiousness, there’s this blatant duck and cover [emphasis added]:

In the ad, Obama is seen talking about America’s tradition of religious tolerance and Clinton is seen saying that the US government had nothing to do with the video….

It’s not us—we in government didn’t do it.

It gets…better:

[State’s spokeswoman Victoria] Nuland said it was common practice to pay to air public service announcements in Pakistan and noted that the embassy there had done it at least one other time, in the aftermath of a deadly 2005 earthquake that hit the country.

So, here’s our government putting its apology for American values on a par with expressing sympathy for a tragedy.

Can we afford four more years of retreat and timidity concerning American rights and culture?

Redistribution

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…by government of one individual’s wealth to another?  Hmm….

This is then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama in a speech at Loyola University in October 1998.

 [T]he trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources, and hence facilitate some redistribution because I actually believe in redistribution.

Obama’s Hypocrisy

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This from Bret Stephens, in The Wall Street Journal [emphasis mine].

“Hasa Diga Eebowai” is the hit number in Broadway’s hit musical “The Book of Mormon,” which won nine Tony awards last year.  What does the phrase mean? I can’t tell you, because it’s unprintable in a family newspaper.

[I]f you can afford to shell out several hundred bucks for a seat, then you can watch a Mormon missionary get his holy book stuffed—well, I can’t tell you about that, either….

The “Book of Mormon”—a performance of which Hillary Clinton attended last year, without registering a complaint—comes to mind as the administration falls over itself denouncing “Innocence of Muslims.”  This is a film that may or may not exist; whose makers are likely not who they say they are; whose actors claim to have known neither the plot nor purpose of the film; and which has never been seen by any member of the public except as a video clip on the Internet.

No matter.  The film, the administration says, is “hateful and offensive” (Susan Rice), “reprehensible and disgusting” (Jay Carney) and, in a twist, “disgusting and reprehensible” (Hillary Clinton).  Mr. Carney, the White House spokesman, also lays sole blame on the film for inciting the riots that have swept the Muslim world and claimed the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three of his staff in Libya.

So let’s get this straight: In the consensus view of modern American liberalism, it is hilarious to mock Mormons and Mormonism but outrageous to mock Muslims and Islam.  Why?  Maybe it’s because nobody has ever been harmed, much less killed, making fun of Mormons.

RTWT.  There’s more, about the assault on American free speech by this American government, and about the necessary mutuality of respect.

Stephens centers his article on the behaviors of liberalism and progressivism, but Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is the head Progressive, and his silence on his movement’s hypocrisy is deafening.