With one out of every 4 Americans a Catholic, I think that we are beginning to see some anti-Catholic resentment starting to surface with Judge Sotomayor's historic nomination to the Supreme Court. With Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi both Catholics, and Sotomayor poised to become the sixth out of 9 Catholics on the Supreme Court, and former Speaker Gingrich in the opposition recently converting, will Obama himself succumb to the lure of Catholicism in his odyssey for spiritual direction in the aftermath of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?
I'm, of course, mocking this Catholic conspiracy theory; the fact is that only one President, JFK, has ever been elected President, and he ran into considerable resistance based on misinformation about the Catholic Church. Kennedy had to address this issue on multiple occasions, most prominently at the 1960 Greater Houston Ministerial Association meeting, echoing Jefferson's affirmation of the separation of church and state. In fact, the 2006 US Senate race in Pennsylvania was between Catholics from different parties.
There has been much ado and speculation about the distribution of faith on the court (assuming Sotomayor is confirmed, 6 Catholics, 2 Jews (Ginsburg and Breyer, Clinton picks), and a Protestant (JP Stevens); this morning, for instance, I pulled up 700 hits on Google on "6 Catholics" and "Supreme Court". I guess the obsession with the faith of Supreme Court members is because of all of those religious split 5-2-2 decisions on the court and the relevant quotes cited from the papal encyclicals and the Talmud... I recently pointed out in another post on progressive Catholics that recent Gallup polls showed that self-identified Catholics, if anything, are more liberal than others on issues of abortion and embryonic stem cell research, areas where the Church has maintained consistent, unambiguous positions (against them).
Bernanke Warns that $2T Deficits Are Unsustainable
No! REALLY? Mr. Chairman, where were you when Obama and Congressional Democrats went on their federal spending spree, arguing they could additionally "cut taxes" (reimbursable credits for the 40% whom don't pay federal income taxes), create a new health care entitlement or pass along a "cap-and-trade" tax to consumers? Deficits four times the previous record?
Voodoo Health Care Economics
Once again, we hear Democratic health care proponents arguing about the comparably much lower costs in foreign single-payer systems. Once again, we find liberals engaging in misleading rhetoric: If, after all, we can cover everybody in a fraction of the cost, why do they need new money? At the center of everything is how government is part of the problem, not the solution. All this talk about adding new bodies to a health care system already straining with inflationary pressures only makes the situation worse. We need to reform malpractice insurance, provide incentives for consumers to have a vested interest in controlling costs, recover costs from people whom receive but do not pay towards their fair share of health care costs, and stop the patchwork of expensive state health care mandates that inhibit consumer choice.
California: Time to Crack Down on Unjustifiable Pensions
Will someone explain to me how California and local cities/counties allow themselves to be in the position of giving retirees a six-figure income for life? How can you justify giving out pensions that are larger than what most people make working full-time? I do not want the American taxpayer to be in a position of having to back up gold-plated benefits for California local and state employees.
Murder of US Army Recruiter in Little Rock vs Tiller Murder
Apparently the murder Monday in Little Rock of an Army hometown recruiting assistant, Private William Long, and the wounding of his colleague, Quinton Ezeagwulu, by Abulhakin Muhammad, also known as Carlos Bledsoe, doesn't rank as high as the murder of someone whom had killed 60,000 late-term babies: I noticed something like 21K hits on Google for the former vs. 2.2M for the latter. Muhammad, a recent Muslim convert, claimed that he had been motivated to act by seeing some video, apparently critical of US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. No reports of Attorney General Eric Holder stepping up protection of US recruiting stations. My guess is that the Obama Administration doesn't want to make waves given his second American Apology Tour, today in Saudi Arabia, and tomorrow in Cairo, for an address to the world's Muslims. God bless you, Pvt. Long; rest in peace; thank you for your service, Pvt. Ezeagwulu.
President Obama's Apology Tour The Sequel is due to end in Dresden, which was firebombed late in WWII. I have a bad feeling about this. He criticized the atomic bombing of Japan during the first apology tour.
Sotomayor While Working for the NY District Attorney
From the November 1983 New York Times Magazine:
What I am finding, both statistically and emotionally is that the worst victims of crimes are not general society - i.e., white folks - but minorities themselves. The violence, the sorrow are perpetrated by minorities on minorities. Once I started doing felonies, it became less hard. No matter how liberal I am, I'm still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous."The causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes"? Let's get this straight: most people do not choose to commit crimes, including members of disadvantaged groups. Of all people, Sonia Sotomayor knows that she was able to come out of the projects to earn degrees from two highly-rated universities and attain professional career success. Why did she expect less initiative, hard work, and personal responsibility from others than she herself expected of herself? Wasn't it time she, an intelligent women capable of independent judgment, questioned the liberal propaganda she had been exposed to that is little more than apologetics for minority-based crime? She implies as a "good liberal", she should not be "outraged" by violent crime (I guess she expects it as the inevitable consequence of events and factors beyond one's control). What I find disturbing is that a professional lawyer is not outraged by crime INTRINSICALLY, regardless of the ethnicity of the perpetrator or the victim or even the nature of the crime?
Of course, we conservatives know that the reason that liberals are so obsessed with political spin and ethnic backgrounds of political or judicial candidates and gimmick/surface-level solutions (e.g., announcing the Gitmo closure without a detailed plan on what to do with detainees). Liberals are more concerned with judicial outcome versus judicial process. They also rely on code words and hidden agendas. For example, Barack Obama frequently talks about the rule of law (e.g., alleged rights for Guantanamo Bay detainees), but when the bonuses in the contracts of AIG executives became an issue, or when Lilly Ledbetter tried to file an alleged pay discrimination complaint for incidents beyond the review period, Obama didn't have the same concerns.
It's already a given that Sotomayor is a liberal jurist and will do whatever it takes to impose her liberal ideology on Court decisions. That's already been demonstrated by how she and two other Clinton appointees attempted by bury the Ricci case, which involved New Haven changing the rules after the firefighter promotion game was played, i.e., throwing out a promotion test only because they didn't like the racial distributions of the results, never mind that the test was specifically constructed to be culturally-neutral.
Other comments on recent discussions on the Sotomayor nomination: There's this constant chatter about "words out of context" and "bad choice of words", i.e., Latinas make inherently better decisions than white male jurists; all of this stuff is disingenuous political spin. Most people, including conservatives, wouldn't have flinched if Sonia had simply asserted that Latinas were able to serve equally well as whites. Obama and others aren't really concerned about what Sotomayor said, but that she got caught saying it. Then I recently listened to a Dennis Miller podcast where the Media Matters representative made reference to the New Republic post talking about Sotomayor's boorish behavior from the bench, nitpicking feedback annoying her colleagues, or other liberals questioning her intellectual heft. [New Republic is not a conservative publication.] The Miller guest just dismissed this all as sexist nonsense, that Sotomayor's aggressive, alienating behavior only means that she's good at doing her job, and male executives never get criticized for being jerks. (Granted, he didn't phrase it that way.)
Thought Provoking Quote by Mother Teresa on Abortion
What is taking place in America is a war against the child. And if we accept that the mother can kill her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?Pelosi Demands Online Access of House Congressional Expense Reports
It is rare for me to praise anything Pelosi does, but a mandate to publish on the Internet expense reports is a step in the right direction (already available but in printed form); according to the Chief Administrative Officer this should be in effect by the end of August. The Wall Street Journal reports that the vast amount of expenses are staffing-related, but a few Congressman also spent money on luxury cars and high-end personal computers. It's not enough simply to put the data online, but to provide data analytical functionality so we can compare and contrast which Representatives are more thrifty with taxpayer money. Majority Leader Senator Reid is contemplating whether to do the same with the Senate: as Jean-Luc Picard would say, "Make it so!"
