It’s Wednesday, February 8th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, as the WSJ details, America is finally waking up and smelling the bullsh*t:

ObamaCare’s Great Awakening

HHS tells religious believers to go to hell. The public notices.

The political furor over President Obama’s birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn’t be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

In late January the Health and Human Services Department required almost all insurance plans to cover contraceptive and sterilization methods, including the morning-after pill. The decision came after passionate lobbying by religious groups and liberals from the likes of Planned Parenthood, amid government promises of compromise.

In the end, Planned Parenthood won. HHS chose to draw the rule’s conscience exceptions for “religious employers” so narrowly that they will not be extended to religious charities, universities, schools, hospitals, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other institutions that oppose contraception as a matter of religious belief.

The Affordable Care Act itself is ambiguous about what counts as a religious organization that deserves conscience protection. Like so much else in the rushed bill, this was left to administrative discretion. What the law does cement is the principle that the government will decide for everyone what “health care” must mean. The entire thrust of ObamaCare is to standardize benefits and how they must be paid for and provided, regardless of individual choices or ethical convictions. (Alle ist klar, Herr Kommissar!)

To take a small example: The HHS rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration’s legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives.

Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within Ms. Sebelius’s ministry. That may explain why her staff didn’t notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment’s protections for religious freedom. (Or, as we feel far more likely, they just didn’t care!) Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed.

Bad call. The decision has roused the Catholic bishops from their health-care naivete, but they’ve been joined by people of all faiths and even no faith, as it becomes clear that their own deepest moral beliefs may be thrown over eventually. Contraception is the single most prescribed medicine for women between 18 and 44 years old, and nine of 10 insurers and employers already cover it. Yet HHS still decided to rub it in the face of religious hospitals.

Mr. Obama’s allies among Catholic liberals are also professing shock—even the Catholic Health Association’s Sister Carol Keehan, who lobbied for ObamaCare, and Notre Dame’s Father John Jenkins, who invited Mr. Obama to speak on campus in 2009. But if they now claim they were taken for a ride by the secular left, the truth is that they wanted to be deceived in the name of their grander goal of government-enforced equity. The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare’s great enablers.

Speaking of scales from the eyes, we’re eager to hear from former Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, who for a brief moment led a faction of pro-life Democrats against ObamaCare in 2010. They surrendered when Mr. Obama gave them the fig leaf of an executive order that will supposedly prevent federal funds from subsidizing abortions. Mr. Stupak is now a lobbyist at the D.C. law firm Venable LLP.

This is also a teaching moment for Mitt Romney, who has joined the calls to defend “the right to worship in the way of our own choice,” as he put it in a Colorado speech on Monday. “This is a violation of conscience. We must have a President who is willing to protect America’s first right, our right to worship God,” he added.

This is fine as far as it goes, but as usual the GOP front-runner is missing the larger policy and moral issue. The HHS diktat isn’t something unique to President Obama. It is the political essence of government-run medicine. When politics determines who can or should receive what benefits, and who pays what for it, government will use its force to dictate the outcomes that it wants—either for reasons of cost, or to promote its values, which in this case means that “women’s health” trumps religious conscience.

If Mr. Romney can’t make the obvious connection between this infringement of American values and all the other infringements that are inherent in government health care, then he needs better political advisers.

The White House is now trying to cauterize the political damage and saying it is open to some “compromise” on its own contraception decision. But the rule is already final. HHS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama’s second term. Religious liberty won’t be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.

We’re reliving the experience of Pastor Martin Niemoller, who so famously observed:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

So what’s different today?  Obama IS a Communist….and is in the hip pocket of the unions; so he just passed “GO”, collected his billion-plus dollars and went straight to the Jews and Catholics.  Guess who’s next?

In a related example of heinous hypocrisy….

Obama changes tune, urges fundraisers to back super PAC

President Obama once called ‘super’ political action committees — which can raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash to influence elections — a ‘threat to our democracy.’ Now, his re-election campaign is asking its wealthiest fund-raisers to start helping him cash in.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/07/obama-changes-tune-urges-fundraisers-to-back-super-pac/#ixzz1lgejyCr4

Which, as Conn Carrol points out in the Morning Examiner, constitutes….

The Audacity of Hypocrisy

Taken by itself, President Obama’s decision to ask donors to give money to his Super PAC, Priorities USA, could be interpreted as a pragmatic decision by a principled reformer. That is certainly how his campaign manager, Jim Messina, portrayed the decision at The Huffington Post: “With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm.”

But Obama has now been in politics long enough that he has a track record of actions we can check his rhetoric against. And the two don’t match.

Just look at the very beginning of Obama’s political career, when Obama operatives challenged hundreds of nominating petition signatures for longtime progressive activist Alice Palmer, eventually disqualifying her from the ballot. So much for Obama’s commitment to ballot access.

Then, during his presidential campaign against John McCain, Obama promised: 1) to stay within the public financing system; 2) not to run negative ads; and 3) not take money from lobbyists. Obama broke his word on all three. When it gives him a political advantage, like abandoning the public financing system in 2008, Obama has no problem operating under “two sets of rules” in an election.

The only real mystery is where Obama summons the audacity to wonder why cynicism has only increased in this country under his leadership.

Can anyone with half an ounce of brains, or the most minimal modicum of self-respect, trust a word this man says?  Can any serious Catholic believe, even were Tick-Tock to retract his health care mandate tomorrow, he wouldn’t reverse course immediately following his reelection?

Wake up and smell the bullsh*t, America; you elected a….

 ….with a capital “H”.

Since we’re on the subject of patent bullsh*t, two graphs that belie the supposedly upbeat unemployment figures:

Yes, America: our active work force is now down to the same level as the last year of the….Carter Administration.  Now isn’t THAT a helluva coincidence?!?

Next up, the WSJ‘s Stephen Moore has….

A Fairness Quiz for the President

Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama’s largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees?

President Obama has frequently justified his policies—and judged their outcomes—in terms of equity, justice and fairness. That raises an obvious question: How does our existing system—and his own policy record—stack up according to those criteria?

Is it fair that the richest 1% of Americans pay nearly 40% of all federal income taxes, and the richest 10% pay two-thirds of the tax?

Is it fair that the richest 10% of Americans shoulder a higher share of their country’s income-tax burden than do the richest 10% in every other industrialized nation, including socialist Sweden?

Is it fair that American corporations pay the highest statutory corporate tax rate of all other industrialized nations but Japan, which cuts its rate on April 1?

Is it fair that President Obama sends his two daughters to elite private schools that are safer, better-run, and produce higher test scores than public schools in Washington, D.C.—but millions of other families across America are denied that free choice and forced to send their kids to rotten schools?

Is it fair that Americans who build a family business, hire workers, reinvest and save their money—paying a lifetime of federal, state and local taxes often climbing into the millions of dollars—must then pay an additional estate tax of 35% (and as much as 55% when the law changes next year) when they die, rather than passing that money onto their loved ones?

Is it fair that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel and other leading Democrats who preach tax fairness underpaid their own taxes?

Is it fair that after the first three years of Obamanomics, the poor are poorer, the poverty rate is rising, the middle class is losing income, and some 5.5 million fewer Americans have jobs today than in 2007?

Is it fair that roughly 88% of political contributions from supposedly impartial network television reporters, producers and other employees in 2008 went to Democrats?

Is it fair that the three counties with America’s highest median family income just happen to be located in the Washington, D.C., metro area?

Is it fair that wind, solar and ethanol producers get billions of dollars of subsidies each year and pay virtually no taxes, while the oil and gas industry—which provides at least 10 times as much energy—pays tens of billions of dollars of taxes while the president complains that it is “subsidized”?

Is it fair that those who work full-time jobs (and sometimes more) to make ends meet have to pay taxes to support up to 99 weeks of unemployment benefits for those who don’t work?

Is it fair that those who took out responsible mortgages and pay them each month have to see their tax dollars used to subsidize those who acted recklessly, greedily and sometimes deceitfully in taking out mortgages they now can’t afford to repay?

Is it fair that thousands of workers won’t have jobs because the president sided with environmentalists and blocked the shovel-ready Keystone XL oil pipeline?

Is it fair that some of Mr. Obama’s largest campaign contributors received federal loan guarantees on their investments in renewable energy projects that went bust?

Is it fair that federal employees receive benefits that are nearly 50% higher than those of private-sector workers whose taxes pay their salaries, according to the Congressional Budget Office?

Is it fair that soon almost half the federal budget will take income from young working people and redistribute it to old non-working people, even though those over age 65 are already among the wealthiest Americans?

Is it fair that in 27 states workers can be compelled to join a union in order to keep their jobs?

Is it fair that nearly four out of 10 American households now pay no federal income tax at all—a number that has risen every year under Mr. Obama?

Is it fair that Boeing, a private company, was threatened by a federal agency when it sought to add jobs in a right-to-work state rather than in a forced-union state?

Is it fair that our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids—who never voted for Mr. Obama—will have to pay off the $5 trillion of debt accumulated over the past four years, without any benefits to them?

Yes….well….he’ll get back to you after….say, uh….November 6th!

And in the Environmental Moment, we learn another of Team Tick-Tock’s pet investments is knocking it out the park:

Fisker Automotive lays off workers while renegotiating government loan

Fisker Automotive, an electric car maker that received a half-billion-dollar loan from the federal government, said Monday that it has laid off workers in Delaware and California. The layoffs include 26 workers at a former General Motors plant in Wilmington that Fisker is retooling to manufacture its Nina plug-in hybrid sedan. Another 40 contractors and employees who were working in design and development of Fisker’s Karma luxury car in Anaheim, Calif., also have been cut.

The layoffs come as Fisker is seeking to renegotiate its loan agreement with the Department of Energy. Fisker has received $193 million of the $529 million DOE loan, mostly for work on the Karma, which sells for about $100,000. The introduction of the Karma was delayed because of regulatory issues and battery pack problems that prompted a voluntary safety recall by Fisker.

If you’re wondering whether George Kaiser, Kaiser Soros or Baron Buffett own a piece of Fisker, just watch the outcome of Fisker’s loan restructuring.

Meanwhile, back at home in what was formerly known as The Land of Gentle Living, Freestaters are under assault from….

Maryland’s Son of Obama

O’Malley aims at 2016 with another tax increase.

“If tax increases solved budget problems, Maryland would already be sitting on a mountain of cash.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181363813056888.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

Only a Progressive born and bred in the heart of the People’s Dimocratic Republic of Maryland could view yet another in a series of huge tax increases as the springboard to a national presidential campaign.

On the Lighter Side….

Then again, at least The Obamao’s consistent; he treats world leaders with the same dismissive disrespect he accords his constituents:

Finally, we wrap things up with the Wide, Wild World of Sports, and what can only be termed poetic justice:

Broncos’ Moreno charged with DUI

Broncos running back Knowshon Moreno was arrested on charges of DUI in Denver while behind the wheel of a Bentley convertible with personalized license plates that read “SAUCED,” KDVR-31 reported Monday.

The 24-year-old reportedly was driving 70 mph in a 45-mph zone when he was pulled over by Denver police last week. An officer smelled alcohol on his breath and he was asked to undergo a roadside sobriety test, in which he performed poorly. He was charged with DUI, failing to have insurance and careless driving and is scheduled to be arraigned on March 2, according to court records cited by The Denver Post.

Knowshon?!?  Sounds more like Knowbrains to us!

Magoo