Tag Archives: freedom

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….

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.

Even Progressive Europe

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…recognizes the foreign policy of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama to be an abject failure.  Spiegel Online International quotes a few of the German papers’ recognition of this.

The left-leaning [Spiegel‘s characterization here and below] Berliner Zeitung:
Four years ago, Obama pledged to seek reconciliation with the Muslim world. Now, it is doubtful whether he has succeeded. The US and its European allies now have to ask themselves how much support they still enjoy in the countries of the Arab Spring.

The center-left daily Süddeutsche Zeitung
America hardly has influence in the region any longer, and now sees itself confronted with anti-American sentiment in places where it no longer controls the dictators. Meanwhile, forces that simultaneously exploit and spurn America are gaining influence.

The conservative Die Welt
US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins.  …Washington has provided the image of a distracted superpower in the process of decline to the societies there. This image of weakness is being exploited by Salafists and al-Qaida….

And so on.

Foreign Policy and China

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As useless and timid as our foreign policy “strategy” has so graphically shown itself to be in the Middle East and northern Africa, it’s just as foolish in Asia, most especially regarding the People’s Republic of China.

In response to Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s much ballyhooed (in some circles) “pivot toward Asia,” Ambassador John Bolton, writing for The Wall Street Journal at the above link, points out these small details concerning the PRC and its relationship with us.

Whoever becomes president in January will require a policy of sustained American involvement and leadership….  The US is already perilously close to the point strategically where China will simply run the table with its claims [to the South China Sea, right up to the shores of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia].  Potential hostilities are no longer hypothetical.

Last week in Beijing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeated the usual US bromides, namely: resolving the region’s maritime disputes peacefully through negotiation consistent with international-law principles regarding freedom of navigation.

The PRC answered this nonsense with a naked threat of war if we don’t shape up and accede.

Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi replied bluntly that China was sovereign over the territories, and government media mouthpiece Xinhua warned the US that “strategic miscalculations about a rising power could well lead to confrontations and even bloody conflicts, like the war between ancient Athens and Sparta.  To avoid such a catastrophic scenario, Washington has to change its obsolete and doubt-ridden thinking pattern and cooperate with Beijing to settle their differences.

So. Obama has received his marching orders.

Bolton then offers a solution, albeit one that the present administration will find itself unable to implement after looking in the mirror.

Such [timidity] must give way to a strategic approach based on three key elements.

First, the US must decide unequivocally that Beijing’s expansionism…is contrary to American national interests.  There are high, tangible stakes for us and our Asian and Pacific friends, ranging broadly from Japan and South Korea to Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) including Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.  The stakes include undersea mineral resources and sea lanes of communication and trade critical to US and global prosperity.
…
This is about power and resolve.

Second, we must rapidly rebuild America’s Navy, without which any shift in strategic thinking is hollow.  This is a maritime problem at the operational level, demanding adequate resources

China is building its own blue-water navy…actively pursuing anti-access, area-denial tactics and weapons systems intended to push the US back from the Western Pacific.  Unless we increase the Navy’s capabilities, or essentially abandon other ocean spaces, the negative direction and ultimate outcome in the waters off China are clear.

America’s current approach—watching while initially minor incidents risk escalating—puts us at a distinct disadvantage.  Passivity will allow Beijing to prevail repeatedly, incident after incident, until US weakness becomes so palpable that there is no doubt of China’s across-the-board success.

Third, we must work diplomatically, largely behind the scenes, to resolve differences among the other claimants.  In the East China Sea, Japan is the major competitor, while Beijing butts heads with Vietnam, the Philippines and other ASEAN members in the South China Sea.  These regions…for China both are part of the same strategic picture. So it must be for America.

Fat chance.

Our Judiciary’s Selective Enforcement

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The Ninth Circuit strikes again.  The Ninth agreed with a Federal district court that an Idaho law that lets state authorities bring criminal charges against pregnant women who seek abortions by using medications purchased online would likely be found unconstitutional (the Ninth Circuit ruling can be found here).  The Ninth, however, overruled the lower court’s enforcement injunction, saying it was too broad.  Instead, the Ninth substituted its own injunction: state authorities are enjoined only from enforcing the Idaho law against the particular woman who brought the case, not from enforcing the law everywhere else.

The WSJ‘s Law Blog provides a summary of the case:

In May 2011, Mark Hiedeman, the prosecuting attorney in Bannock County, Idaho, brought criminal charges against Jennie Linn McCormack, an unmarried mother of three, after she purchased medications over the Internet in 2010 to terminate her pregnancy.  There are no licensed healthcare providers who offer abortions in southeastern Idaho and Ms McCormack, who didn’t want to have additional children, claimed the medications were prescribed by a physician outside of Bannock County.

The lower court set aside the case against McCormack and enjoined the prosecutor from enforcing the law against anyone on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Set aside your views of abortion for a moment, and consider what this appellate court has done vis-à-vis the injunction.

The law under which Hiedeman attempted to prosecute McCormack was found by the district court to be unconstitutional, and the Ninth agreed: it is likely be found unconstitutional.  Yet the Ninth then overruled the district court’s injunction against enforcing that law at all.

Their logic centers on the premise that the law has not yet, in fact, been found unconstitutional, and so the original broad injunction went too far.  Yet injunctions, by their nature, are temporary—even permanent ones, which can be withdrawn for any number of reasons at any later date when they’re found no longer to be useful.

So where is the harm done by the lower court’s broader injunction?  The state is harmed by not being able to enforce a law that is, nominally, legitimate.  Women are harmed by being threatened with prosecution—and potentially prosecuted and convicted—for acting as McCormack did and who is protected from prosecution for those same actions by the injunction as modified by the Ninth.  The women who are under the gun here, also are in a time-sensitive situation: their pregnancy must be terminated promptly, or not at all.  We the People are harmed by this court’s announcement that selective enforcement of a law, as a matter of state policy, is entirely legitimate.

This is a rule of law question, regardless of what we might think of the legitimacy of abortion itself.