THE FIRST STREET JOURNAL.

Another Sunday morning,¹ and your Editor is writer’s blocked, so it’s time for another From Around the Blogroll post!

From Karen, the Lonely Conservative:

Catholic Bishops Respond To Biden’s Lie About HHS Contraception Mandate

October 12, 2012

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement today refuting Vice President Joe Biden’s claim during last night’s debate that Catholic organizations are not being forced to pay for contraception and abortion inducing drugs.

Last night, the following statement was made during the Vice Presidential debate regarding the decision of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to force virtually all employers to include sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion, in the health insurance coverage they provide their employees:

“With regard to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely clear. No religious institution—Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital—none has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact. That is a fact.”

This is not a fact. The HHS mandate contains a narrow, four-part exemption for certain “religious employers.” That exemption was made final in February and does not extend to “Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital,” or any other religious charity that offers its services to all, regardless of the faith of those served.

HHS has proposed an additional “accommodation” for religious organizations like these, which HHS itself describes as “non-exempt.” That proposal does not even potentially relieve these organizations from the obligation “to pay for contraception” and “to be a vehicle to get contraception.” They will have to serve as a vehicle, because they will still be forced to provide their employees with health coverage, and that coverage will still have to include sterilization, contraception, and abortifacients. They will have to pay for these things, because the premiums that the organizations (and their employees) are required to pay will still be applied, along with other funds, to cover the cost of these drugs and surgeries. (Read More)

I think crazy Uncle Joe needs to go to confession.

If “crazy Uncle Joe” was a real Catholic, he wouldn’t be supporting abortion in the first place, he wouldn’t have voted in support of abortion at every opportunity when he was in the Senate, and he’d be siding with the bishops on this.

The dirty little secret is that the Obama Administration would have had the bishops absolutely on their side on this issue, if they had been willing to be flexible enough to grant the exemption for conscience. The Catholic bishops absolutely supported the health care reform bill, and lobbied to have it passed. The bishops are politically liberal on most of the social issues — immigration reform, guaranteed health care, welfare benefits and the like — because of their support for the poor. They really differ with the Democratic Party only on artificial contraception, abortion and same-sex “marriage.”

But the Obama Administration wouldn’t include the conscience exemption, because they have no respect at all for differences of opinion on abortion, and they want to use the power of the state for force the Church to comply; to President Obama, the lesson of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket was that St Thomas lost, and that the Church must be brought to heel. Whether President Obama sees himself as King Henry II — or, perhaps, King Henry VIII, who rejected the Catholic Church and set up the Church of England — he is sadly lacking in comparison to either man.²

We all know how much the Democrats are for women’s rights, and how they are never, never, never sexist, right? From Hot Air:

Pelosi’s PAC runs kitchen-themed ad against first female combat fighter pilot

POSTED AT 9:21 AM ON OCTOBER 12, 2012 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

The first female combat pilot in U.S. military history would seem an unlikely target for a kitchen-themed attack ad, and yet that’s exactly what Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority PAC and Rep. Ron Barber have cooked up for Martha McSally, a retired Air Force colonel and pioneering A-10 pilot.

“Wall St. and Martha McSally—here’s what they’ve got cooking,” a female voiceover says as well-worn recipe cards pop out of a recipe box against a backdrop of fresh groceries. The ad features a photo of McSally on a recipe card alongside scribbled accusations like, “raise retirement age” and “essentially end Medicare.” The ad concludes, “McSally and Wall St.— a recipe for disaster.”

McSally, for her part, calls the accusations false and the ad’s theme “laughable.”

“The fact that they use this theme of Martha McSally in a kitchen cooking up recipes is…overtly sexist and insulting to any woman, but it certainly doesn’t fit specifically with me,” she said in a phone interview. “For crying out loud, I served 26 years in the military. I was too busy shooting 30 mm out of my A-10 at the Taliban and al Qaeda to spend any time in a kitchen.”

More at the link. But we’ve seen this from our friends on the left before: we used to be told that women just don’t make up false accusations of sexual harassment . . . until Paula Jones accused a rather prominent Democrat of sexual harassment. We were told that women don’t make up false accusations of rape (think: the Duke Lacrosse team here) . . . until two women accused Julian Assange of rape. We were told that women were powerful self-achievers . . . until one who was Governor of Alaska ran for vice president and had the unmitigated gall to not abort a child she knew in advance would have Down Syndrome.

From Patterico:

Bubba Won’t Let Hillary Get Thrown Under the Bus on Benghazi

Don’t wait, Bubba. Let’s have this discussion now:

With tensions between President Obama and the Clintons at a new high, former President Bill Clinton is moving fast to develop a contingency plan for how his wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, should react if Obama attempts to tie the Benghazi fiasco around her neck, according to author Ed Klein.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, Klein said sources close to the Clintons tell him that Bill Clinton has assembled an informal legal team to discuss how the Secretary of State should deal with the issue of being blamed for not preventing the Benghazi terrorist attack last month.

What do you mean “if” Obama tries to blame her? That ship has sailed, my friend:

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters during a press conference Friday that responsibility for the consulate in Libya fell on the State Department, not the White House.

Let’s watch Hillary getting thrown under the bus. Video proof is always best, isn’t it?

(Nice, nice job by Ed Henry there, by the way — asking the tough questions, following up, and generally doing what much of Big Media won’t do.)

Security is a State Department issue. That’s what he says, repeatedly.

Yup. I’m seeing tire marks all over Hillary.

Go, Bubba, go.

The lovely Mrs Clinton ran the famous 3:00 AM phone call ad against Barack Obama during the 2008 primaries, and she was half-right: Mr Obama wasn’t the right person to be answering that phone call. Trouble is, neither was she.

The last man President Obama can risk alienating is former President Clinton. There will be some pretty quick backtracking by the White House on this one.

From Hube:

 UM, IT IS A PUBLIC INSTITUTION

What to do when political correctness collides with … political correctness?

Case in point: The chief diversity officer at Gallaudet University – a federally funded institution – was put on administrative leave because she signed a petition against gay marriage. Here’s the real conundrum:

[Dr. Angela] McCaskill was the first deaf African American female to earn a Ph.D. from Gallaudet, where she has worked for 23 years in various roles, including becoming the deputy to the president and associate provost of diversity and inclusion in 2011, according to her biography on the university website.

How dare the university president do that to a differently-abled black woman!! That normative-biased racist-sexist!!!

To their credit, those campaigning for gay marriage in the state have more sense than the idiot college prez. The Marylanders for Marriage Equality said

We strongly disagree with the decision to put the chief diversity officer on leave and hope she is reinstated immediately. Everyone is entitled to free speech and to their own opinion about Question 6 (the referendum on the ballot), which is about treating everyone fairly and equally under the law.

Yep. And since Gallaudet gets federal backing and funds, Dr. McCaskill should have greater freedom of speech protections than a private university. But she’s finding out the hard way that “diversity” in campus-speak means only one thing — and that doesn’t include diversity of opinion.

Hube is just being silly here; liberals, respecting diversity of opinion? Unless you are a white male, you are not allowed to have independent thought.

Another short post from Hube led me to this story:

A bus driver told a 12 year-old student that he should have been aborted because his family had a Romney-Ryan sign in their yard.
Freedom Eden reported:

Mark Belling discussed this story on his radio program yesterday. It’s another tale of a Leftist behaving badly.

The Leftist, a 78-year-old woman, a New Berlin school bus driver, has been harassing a student on her bus route because there’s a Mitt Romney yard sign at his home.

The child attends a Catholic school in New Berlin. He rides a Durham school bus. The company also provides service to the New Berlin public school district.

Belling read a letter from the 12-year-old boy’s mother, detailing the alleged abusive behavior by the bus driver.

Apparently, the Romney-Ryan yard sign bugs the bus driver and she’s been harassing the boy, making rude comments to him related to politics.

When the driver engaged the 12-year-old boy in a political conservation, he responded by saying that Obama is pro-abortion.

The bus driver allegedly said to the child, “Maybe your mom should have chosen abortion for you.”

Understandably, this really upset the boy. Other kids on the bus verified the boy’s account and are providing written statements.

The mom made her son’s school aware of the situation. She also went to Durham School Service in New Berlin and spoke to Michael Bennett, the manager.

UPDATE: The bus driver was fired after the report on Mark’s show.

It certainly worked out for the best in the end. And it’s just more evidence that supporting President Obama is supporting high unemployment, in this case, for herself.

Finally, Victory Girls isn’t on the blogroll, but I got this reference from The Other McCain, which is:

Private Citizen makes TV Ad warning against Socialism; says “Vote Republican!”

by KATE on OCTOBER 11, 2012

Thomas Peterffy grew up in socialist Hungary. Even though he didn’t speak English, he knew he wanted that “American Dream” so in 1956, he immigrated to the United States. He worked hard and eventually started his own business that today employs thousands of people. Forbes Magazine estimates Mr. Peterffy’s net worth of $4.6 billion.

So?

Mr. Peterffy isn’t running for any political office. He’s not part of a super PAC or shadowy Spooky Dude. He’s not lobbying for or against any ballot measures. He’s a private citizen who’s afraid of what Socialism can do to our country. He’s also putting his money where his mouth is by spending $5-$10 million dollars on an Ad which is running now through Election Day on CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, and test markets in Ohio, Wisconsin, and possibly Florida.

And the Ad itself? It’s simply a plea for an end to what he sees as growing hostility to personal success – and to vote Republican.

“I grew up in a socialist country and I have seen what that does to people. There is no hope, no freedom, no pride in achievement,” he says with a soft Hungarian accent in the ad. “The nation became poorer and poorer, and that’s what I see happening here.”

“America’s wealth comes from the efforts of people striving for success. Take away their incentive with badmouthing success and you take away the wealth that helps us take care of the needy,” he says in the commercial.

Pretty powerful stuff. Check out the 1-minute Ad yourself:

Let’s hope thinking Democrats and Independents are paying attention. But even with such a winsome Ad, the Socialist Left in this country will never get it. They don’t want to “get it”. They say they’re not “against success”, they just want the successful to pay their “fair share”. And remember, a socialist is someone who thinks EVERYTHING benefits from a government program, and bureaucracies are never wrong, or redundant.

Oh wait, maybe that’s the Democratic Party. Sometimes I have trouble telling them apart.

Mr Peterffy’s ad is dead on target: as much as our friends on the left think that the top producers are rewarded too greatly, and as much as they want to somehow even the score by taxing those people more, in hurting our most productive citizens they will be hurting our least productive citizens as well.

Mr Peterffy grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary, where the Soviet Union brutally suppressed an uprising against Communism in 1956. But a perhaps better example would be the stark differences between West and East Germany. Both the western and eastern sections of Germany were devastated by World War II, and both had to be rebuilt, virtually from the ground up. West Germany adhered to the market economy model of its occupiers (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), and flourished, while East Germany, tightly controlled by Soviet-style Communism, was much less productive and poorer. The Germans were almost identically culturally, and though the western part of Germany was the more industrialized region before World War II, the eastern parts were almost as prosperous; it was the imposition of socialism and rigid government controls which kept that devastated country an impoverished one.³ The economy was controlled not by market forces, not by the aggregate will of the public, but by the oh-so-intelligent political decision takers, the ones who knew best how to make an economy flourish. Mr Peterffy sees that same mindset here, and so do I. We have the economic geniuses of the Obama Administration crafting a huge stimulus plan, spending $831 billion⁴ on it, and it completely failed to achieve its stated objectives. We have the politically motivated Obama Administration, promising to shift us to a “green” economy, backing more than a dozen “green” energy firms through grants and loan guarantees, and seeing them go bankrupt.

Your Editor is a bit more charitable in his assessment of the motivations of our friends on the left than some are. He is certain that they have actually been motivated by good and noble desires, and that they actually do believe that their economic views and policies are the right ones, are the ones which will produce greater prosperity for all of us. But whether their motives are good or evil, their actual results have been nothing but failures. They don’t understand economics, because they do not understand people, and the motivations of the hundreds of millions of individuals who really control the economy. They have been great with charts and graphs and scholarly papers, and it all looks so professionally done, but it was all a house of cards, a house of cards which collapsed, because the public did not behave as the brilliant minds in the Obama Administration expected them to behave. The motivations, the intentions, the intelligence and the professionalism of all of those brilliant people are all irrelevant; the only thing that matters is results, and the result of their policies has been failure.
________________________________