Chile's Cautionary Lesson for the US

Mary Anastasia O'Grady writes about communist stirrings in prosperous Chile, the poster child for Chicago-style liberalism.  That's university-of-Chicago style, not Mayor-Daly-like-Chicago style.

Chile's Presdident, Sebastian Pinera (pictured above), is channeling his inner compassionate conservative much to his country's detriment.  He saps the nation's moral and material resources while failing to placate his insatiable critics.

The wedge issue in that nearly-developed country, as everywhere, is income inequality. It seems that where opportunity abounds, some take better advantage of it than others.

Even while the material benefits of the market economy have been piling up for decades, Chile has been intellectually swamped by leftist ideas. The common principle: Economic inequality is immoral and the state has an obligation to correct it. 

Rather than push back against this invitation to tyranny, the right too often cedes the moral high ground to its proponents. Mr. Piñera is among the culprits. His reactive half measures designed to satisfy the moderate elements of the equality brigades are undermining Chilean freedom. They are also undermining his power by making him look weak and incompetent.

For those who look only at outcomes and not at how those outcomes are achieved, income inequality is always a per se scandal.  Some static economic condition is posited as the norm, and the benefit of the Haves is assumed to have come at the expense of the Have-Nots (Saul Alinsky's nomenclature).

The Statist solution is to suppress and control opportunity, and to redistribute emoluments according to some inarticulate notion of fairness, which in practice reduces to patronage, Mayor-Daly-Chicago style.  It doesn't take much for political opportunists to foment a resentful sense of entitlement, and organize the Have-Nots into a captive, demanding community.

It is much easier for the Have-Nots to get what they want at somebody else's expense than to work for it.  In practice, the Have's are usually beyond their reach, so the Have-Some-Want-More's (the middle class) end up footing the bill for fairness, and being punished in essence for achieving modest success.

The Have-Nots (and paid agitators who deign to speak for them) need only occupy a few plazas, overturn some cars, torch a building, defecate on the flag, block a bridge or two--in general, create some made-for-media spectacle.  The chest-thumping politicians will do the rest.

The scandal, to my mind, is that some people look only at outcomes, and discount the sacrifice, effort, toil, dedication, commitment, risk, planning, ingenuity, innovation, education, anxiety, hard work, luck and blessings it takes to achieve success.  Where opportunity abounds, there are many pathways to material advancement.

Some people view income inequality as proof that opportunity doesn't exist rather than as proof that in any human endeavor people will finish in a hierarchy.  They are unable to accept people as God made them.

To the extent that their political choices suppress human capabilities and potentialities under the weight of an aggrandizing state--even a democratically elected one--they, not those who favor the opportunity to succeed, are the immoral ones.  Ultimately, the affects of their fairness are to deprive people of the means to develop and flourish through productive activity, and correspondingly deprive society of material resources that would otherwise derive from augmented productive capacity.

The foregoing is not meant to reduce man to a producer or consumer, e.g., homo-economicus.  Rather, it aims to acknowledge the connaturality of what a man does to who he is, and, moreover, to recognize that in a world of embodied creatures, it is folly to impede their access to the means of generating material sustenance.

As I see it, the solution to the income-inequality conundrum is for those who view only outcomes to broaden the scope of their vision.  Rather than clamor for bigger government and hector people already carrying a heavy load, they need to help and exhort the Have-Nots to emulate the Haves and Have-Some-Want-More's, not envy them; to strive and take better advantage of opportunities available to everyone by sacrificing more, trying harder, etc.

Society could, for example, encourage couples to marry and stay married for the sake of the children they bring into the world, who need love and a stable home to develop into mature, capable adults.  The worst thing society could do is what it currently does: to foment resentment by telling Have-Nots, and even the Have-Some-Want-More's, they are entitled to the Haves' posessions by virtue of mere birth.

In terms of principles, nobody deserves to be left to die, whether or not they are able to take advantage of the many opportunities that democratic liberalism provides.  But, that primordial tenet of enlightened civilization does not translate into an entitlement to have the government take money from one party (living, or yet to be born) in order to pay for another party's stuff.

Income inequality is not immoral.  It is what happens when people are free, and indicates success or failure, both moderate and extreme.

Albeit, sometimes inequalities result from unfair play.  That is what law is meant to protect against and correct; not to make it impossible for those who play fairly to win.

Successful outcomes redound into the future because people transfer wealth to their heirs.  That is neither immoral nor unfair, as the ability to provide for one's posterity is partially what drives sacrifice, commitment, etc., the building blocks of success.

Society needs more people to make sacrifice for the sake of their own and their loved ones' success.  No society can afford to breed an ethos into its citizenry that demands some to make government-compelled sacrifices for the benefit of others simply because those others want free education, or diapers, or contraceptives, or what-have-you.

That too many Americans embrace such an ethos gives credence to the Nancy Pelosis of the world who consider people a burden and cost to society better preempted by government, cut off in the womb, than allowed to live and be free.  People with that ethos are, indeed, a burden and cost to society, which nevertheless doesn't justify her solution.

But, nobody has to have that dead-weight mentality.  It is immoral for the Nancy Pelosis of the world to foment a sense of entitlement, and then exploit it to justify confiscating society's resources to make decisions about who society can and cannot afford to take care of, or, indeed, permit even to be conceived.

People must learn to take care of themselves and their loved ones--as has ever been the case--in ever-broadening circles of identification.  It is the role and competence of families, Churches and elective associations to foment this dynamic, not of government.

There are better ways to take care of free beings who fall through the cracks of political economy than to have government assume control of their sustenance.  Civil society consisting of family, Church and sundry intermediate associations are better suited to the task, minimally because proximity between the helper and the helped breeds mutual accountability.

My fear is that the US under President Obama specifically, and Democratic hegemony generally since 2006, is further down the road to Statist utopia than Chile.  Sadly, it appears that the US provides a cautionary lesson for Chile, and the developing world, rather than the other way around.

Mambo Gallego

Pictured above are Armand Assante, Antonio Banderas, and Desi Arnaz, Jr. from the 1992 film "The Mambo Kings."  I loved the movie for its music, scenes of the Palladium, fine acting, tortured love triangle and sheer stylishness, but had to fast forward through too many pointless skin scenes to recommend it.

It nevertheless features my favorite movie dance.  Set to Tito Puente's "Mambo Gallego" (Galician Mambo) it is sultry without being trashy, and dynamic without being flashy.

It's not just the tightly choreographed Assante and Marushka Detmers who capture the eye.  It's all of the dancers on the floor, who incarnate the music in swaying limbs.

If the clip compels you to seek the sound that drove the mania, Tito Puente's oeuvre is free on Spotify.  I'd especially recommend "The Complete 78's," a set of four albums that features scores of great mambos.

Here is an interview with Armand Assante about his drum duel with the legend.  The scene from the movie is included in the clip.

I saw Tito Puente in concert in the '70's at the Winterland Ice Arena in San Francisco.  It was hardly the 50's Palladium, but the place pulsated nevertheless.

His orchestra was the lead act for Malo (Bad), a band featuring Carlos Santana's little brother, Jorge.  Carlos had mainstreamed Puente's song, "Oye Como Va," to the rock generation.  But Puente's act was so far above either brother's band that the ordering constituted a criminal inversion.

My Aunt's response to the news flash that I'd discovered a great new act (some old guy) was to look at me like I'd just been born. "Oh, brother. I danced to his band as a kid growing up in New York."

Tito's music indeed spanned generations, and is still capable of uniting them in celebration.

Impressions of Miami

Years ago, I thought I'd discovered paradise on earth in Locarno and Lugano, Switzerland, which enjoyed the benefits of Italian culture and Swiss efficiency.  Beautiful people rode trains that ran on time.

I experienced something similar last week in Miami, which is considered the capitol of Latin America.  Happily, it is in the United States where things mostly work correctly, and opportunity (traditionally) abounds.

I knew I'd love the place when checking into the Conrad Hotel in the financial district and I heard Salsa pumping through the speaker system.  By the time I reached the reception desk on the 25th floor, they were playing El Cantante by Hector Lavoe.

The beautiful view of Key Biscayne from that high up didn't hurt my impression either.  Everyone had good skin and spoke Spanish as well as English; the place absolutely pulsated with ritmo.

It wasn't much different wherever I went.  The music, the bilingual chatter, the outrageous heels and hopeless hairdos, the men with shirts opened to the third button; this was definitely a Latin city.

The weather ranged between 72 and 84 degrees (fahrenheit) the entire week, and skies were azure with an occasional cloud.  Between the weather, palms, towers, and sleek architecture, Brickell Avenue felt like a cross between Barcelona and Chicago.

I imagine that my impression would have been less positive during the summer when the weather turns oppressively hot and steamy.  But, then, there's always the beach.

The parks and outdoor spaces were inviting and filled with joggers.  Palm trees grew everywhere, even on the 25th floor.  So, what's not to like?

Altogether, it was a very pleasant experience, although I can see how the place would irritate someone who didn't speak Spanish, like Latin culture, or bear the sun well.

The one blight on my visit was a pair of conversations I had with taxi drivers, my men-on-the-street sources for information about how locals think.  Much like every taxi driver in NYC is seemingly from the Middle East or Asia Minor, every cabbie in Miami is a Cuban refugee.

When talk turned to politics, neither of them particularly liked President Obama or the Democrats.  But, they absolutely vituperated about President Bush.

I couldn't grasp their problem with the much maligned W.  One said that he'd stolen the 2000 election, to which I responded that no recount--even ones done by Liberal newspapers--verified that claim.

He didn't need proof, and none would dissuade him.  That Al Gore moved to invalidate military ballots while railing to count every vote didn't bother him either.

The other driver said that President Bush destroyed the economy, to which I answered that Democrats, not Republicans, pushed banks for decades to lend to people who couldn't afford to pay the loan back.  It was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--Democratic citadels--that set sub-prime quotas on lenders, just as HUD's Henry Cisneros and Andrew Cuomo-- Democratic luminaries--had set quotas on the GSE's.

Maybe the President's re-election strategy will work: blame it all on Bush, and deflect discussion about his record.

It was a bad anecdotal sign for the Republicans.  If they can't win over Cuban immigrants, who reject Statism in their DNA, Florida might be lost.

It would serve Republicans right for sitting on their hands while the Left indulged in an eight-year hate fest towards President Bush.  They hadn't read their Saul Alinsky: "The Thirteenth Rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

The media demonized President Bush so effectively that at least two Cuban-American taxi drivers still hate him for no reason they could explain coherently.  Republicans would be well advised to remind the electorate that President Bush isn't running this year.

They might also argue, as they should have in 2008, that his policies had less to do with causing the financial crisis than did Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the Democratic Party.  At the very least, if President Bush is to blame, then President Clinton is even more so.

With respect to Miami, I left after my first visit with a very positive impression.  If you've never been there, you might want to consider it.

In Praise of Statism

You'll never here it from me.  I fall on the liberty side of the private-public divide--the private side, which includes civil society to care for those who fall through the cracks through misfortune, injudicious use of liberty or any other reason.

The title is merely a pretext for sharing an amusing video that's gone viral.  It is a Reagan-Obama encounter that teaches a lesson delivered often, but evidently never enough.

Redistribution cannot guarantee that everyone has what they need.  It can only guarantee that nobody does--except the illuminati, naturally, who get everything they want along with the power to redistribute society's resources ("make investments" in President Obama's parlance) and dictate to the hoi polloi how to live.

Whoever put this animated video together captured something essential about each former President and sundry character.  It's President Obama's cocksure venality and ivory tower bubble-headedness that most amuses, yet alarms, as we're stuck with him for another 200 days of his willful mismangement.

Would that everyone learned this one lesson: a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have, including the opportunity to rise above your station and make a better life for yourself and your loved ones (with hard work, luck, blessings, the help of others, etc.).  

The chart below indicates that long before it subjects us to serfdom, big government robs us of prosperity, but only because we let it.  Don't be fooled.  Federal hegemony leads to bad governance, not fairness.

Faust Visits the Insurance Lobby

Insurers are concerned that the Supreme Court will strike down ObamaCare's individual mandate, which provides them with a steady new supply of mandated and subsidized customers.  Without it, ObamaCare gives them less than they bargained for: new rules to comply with, profit caps and price controls with no corresponding advantage.

Those who place more trust in free markets than in government omniscience, and who despise crony capitalism for the self-serving hypocrisy it is, can be forgiven for thinking that it serves them right.

Consider the insurers. America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) started promoting something vaguely resembling the Affordable Care Act as long ago as 2006, and a very close resemblance in 2008. Lobbyists always need to manage political risk, but AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni's support gave ObamaCare a big early lift. The trade group now stresses it opposed the final bill, though that opposition came too late to stop the political momentum that it helped to create. 

The best we can say is that the insurers behaved better than the drug companies and their lobbyist Billy Tauzin, who sold out to the White House for a song and bear a large responsibility for the bill... 

The insurers aren't alone. Moody's Investor Service put out a research note on for-profit hospitals this month arguing that losing the mandate "would limit operators' revenue growth and profit margins and constrain cash flow." The American Medical Association is still waiting for the permanent "doc fix" of higher payments it was promised three years ago in return for supporting ObamaCare. 

These companies, professions and industries may not be compensated after all in return for for having betrayed their erstwhile principles, the country, liberty and the Constitution in the bargain (whether the Supreme Court acknowledges it, or not). The Journal's Review & Outlook editors opine that there's a moral to the story worth committing to memory:

[T]here's a larger lesson here for all CEOs as they cope with an increasingly intrusive government. Washington reps and lobbyists will typically suggest that they can cut a sweetheart deal that saves their company or industry from the worst, but the politicians win when they can play divide and conquer with business. 

Business stood up in united fashion against union card-check and won. In health-care the lobbies looked out mainly for themselves, and the companies are now living with the ugly consequences. It's called a Faustian bargain for a reason.

Perhaps leaders of the Business Roundtable will someday learn what members of the Chamber of Commerce instinctively know. The devil doesn't make good deals with anyone.

Obama's Campaign Will Take the Low Road

Karl Rove underscores one of President Obama's least attractive features, one which explains why he so roils the nation's anger, provokes its consternation and deepens its divides.  The multitudes who find his unprecedented push towards Statism and government hegemony objectionable, and moreover who don't want to pay taxes or interest on burgeoning debt to support it, oppose his aggressive overreaching because....  they intend evil.

No honest differences are possible with Mr. Obama. He will impugn the motives of any who disagree with him. As he told the AP, his opponents want to "let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity." His agenda "isn't a partisan feeling . . . [it]isn't a Democratic or Republican idea. It's patriotism." To disagree with him is unpatriotic. That's to be expected from Republicans, whom Mr. Obama says stand for "thinly veiled social Darwinism . . . [that is] antithetical to our entire history." 

Mr. Obama will build entire edifices on top of one fake premise, all dressed up in one big phony assumption... He warned that if the GOP's "cuts . . . were to be spread out evenly across the budget," then "Alzheimer's and cancer and AIDS" research would be slashed, 10 million college students denied assistance, and "thousands" of researchers and teachers "could lose their jobs." But Republicans don't cut across the board. Instead, their focus is on waste, duplication, programs that do not work, and on reform.

President Obama's vision of omniscient, omnipotent government that accumulates and dispenses national resources on the basis of fairness--as if politicians and bureaucrats are best suited to judging what fairness entails--is noxious enough.  In addition, we unfairly suffer the sting of his demagogic lash as the nation's economy languors, its liberties are confiscated and its finances deteriorate.

Rove's article is well worth reading as it highlights the President's facility with saying one thing while doing another.  Viz.,

Among Mr. Obama's more appealing 2008 campaign lines were his pledge not "to pit Red America against Blue America" and his promise to "resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." 

Mr. Obama gave into that temptation the moment he was inaugurated. His harsh attacks, angry misrepresentations and outright falsehoods are light years away from the message of unity and post-partisanship that propelled him into the Oval Office. 

Mr. Romney ... should remind Americans of Mr. Obama's lofty words from his 2008 acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in Denver. There he said, "If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from."

Mr. Obama attacked such a strategy then. Lacking any fresh ideas or a record to run on, it's the strategy he's adopted now.

Among other ways, he has pitted Red America against Blue America in his stimulus bill and subsequent jobs initiatives, which are thinly veiled transfers of Red State resources to Blue State shortfalls caused by excessive spending, taxation, cronyism and corruption.  There is no consideration or magnanimity in him towards those whose opinions of fairness differ from his.

Though "revolutionary" is the word that best captures his essence, "partisan" is a close second.   Come to think of it, both words can be rolled into a third: "lawyer."

That pretty well describes the President, and many if not most graduates from America's prestige law schools, whether they become civil rights attorneys, corporate lawyers, tort litigators, or community organizers.

Demolishing Paul Ryan

Daniel Henninger writes about the Left's warning to any who might challenge its ideological fortress, e.g., the Supreme Court, should it overturn ObamaCare.  Other shots are presently being fired across House GOP Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's bow.

You may have heard of his cruelty and black heart.  He's the one that Democrats and the President accuse (this week) of social Darwinism, Trojan-horse deception and historical anachronism.

Mr. Ryan justifies the GOP's proposed budget--which increases this year's federal outlays of $3.6 trillion (yes, you read that correctly) to a mere $4.9 trillion in 2022 rather than the President's proposed $5.8 trillion (yes, you read that correctly, too)--on rather different grounds than the President alleges: Catholic Social Doctrine.

"To me, the principle of subsidiarity . . . meaning government closest to the people governs best . . . where we, through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities, through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community, that's how we advance the common good. By not having big government crowd out civic society, but by having enough space in our communities so that we can interact with each other, and take care of people who are down and out in our communities. 

"Those principles are very, very important, and the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenets of Catholic social teaching, means don't keep people poor, don't make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life. Help people get out of poverty out onto a life of independence."

For the dual impudence of proposing a responsible federal budget and invoking Catholic Social Doctrine to justify it, Mr. Ryan has been accused of shilling for the Catholic Church. Assuming ad arguendo that it were true, that would be a self-evidently disreputable thing for a politician to do.

Unlike shilling for the Department of Health and Human Services or the American Civil Liberties Union (groups that regularly assail the Catholic Church), invoking Catholic Social Doctrine to promote local governance and to help the poor escape dependence must be stopped before somebody listens.

The fortress being defended is the Left's totem: an overarching federal power subordinate to no one but the Statist ideologues who run it.  As Henninger writes, "At any suggestion that a conservative idea might be threatening its ideological fortress, the American left now launches ICBMs of rhetorical destruction."

Bring on the denunciations.  I imagine that Ryan wears them as badges of honor.  Would that more Catholics were so stalwart in their beliefs.

Mother of Five Boys Has Never Worked A Day In Her Life!

“Guess what, (Romney’s) wife has actually never worked a day in her life," said Democratic strategist and CNN contributor Hilary Rosen.  Thankfully, she has experienced fierce blowback from all quarters including President Obama, and has since apologized.

As the clip below illustrates, Rosen was in the middle of deprecating Ann Romney's bona fides as a woman in touch with the economic concerns of less wealthy women. What she revealed is that Democratic Party apparatchiks don't consider child-raising and home-making real work.

Fifty years of anti-natalist propaganda have done little to elevate feminist consciousness regarding the value of womens' work done at home.  Rather, it has created a world in which women are ashamed to admit that they don't have an outside occupation (even at negligible compensation), as if autonomy from men and children were the ultimate measures of a woman's dignity.

Pity for women and society, let alone children and men.  As my mother-of-eight-wife says, the stereotype of barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen has yielded to the ideal of well-shod and sterile in the boardroom.

Rosen ... said she was trying to talk about economic issues, then added, "This is going to be an ugly campaign season."

Indeed.  President Obama's circles are loaded with this type of woman--fast mouthed, chip-on-the-shoulder, in-your-face, lavishly remunerated, orientationally-challenged: a type which is supposedly proliferating in battle-ground states--and are bereft of the Ann Romney type.

When Democrats talk about women and women's issues, they're talking about the Hilary Rosens of the world.  They are addressing narrow sexual obsessions and Nietzschean power lust, not the mothers of five children or their pressing concerns.

In the I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman category, Presidential spokesperson Jay Carney turned Hilary's faux pas of saying what she thought into an occasion for reciting President Obama's economic triumphs.  After those three seconds elapsed, he downplayed the relationship between Rosen and the President.

He ... attempted to distance the president from Rosen by saying he could not confirm reporting that she has made 35 visits to the Obama White House and that he could not characterize how close she is to the administration. "I don't know how to assess her overall relationship with the White House," he said.

The Washington press corp was satisfied with Carney's evasion.  Are you?

Consider that President Obama's advisors counseled Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to hire Rosen as a communications consultant. The DNC has paid Rosen's firm $120,000 since 2011 for the service of training Wasserman-Schultz to "tone it down."

Rosen is not a stay-at-home mom, but she most definitely constitutes what passes for a woman in today's Democratic Party, the legal profession, the media and on university campuses.  Excuse the redundancy.

Rosen has twins with Elizabeth Birch, with whom she separated in 2006. She was in 2004 the interim director for the Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender lobbyist organization. Birch was the executive director of the group for eight years.

You might want to recall this episode when pondering headlines regarding the GOP's "war on women."  Personally, I have a lot of respect for the Ann Romneys of the world--5 million of them in the US--and the Mitt Romneys who stay with them and take care of their families.

The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin

Shelby Steele wades into the Trayvon Martin quagmire to opine that agitators for justice--vigilante, if not kangaroo--are appealing to poetic truth, a deviation from actual truth.

Rather than correspond to reality, poetic truth is crafted to preserve an effect.  The poetic truth at stake is that white America is ferociously bigoted.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites. 

If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call "to turn the moment into a movement"—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

This story bears all the earmarkings of today's politicized, Leftist media milieu.  From President Obama's comment that his son would look like Trayvon, to the media's parsing of whether Hispanics consider themselves Hispanics, this spectacle has played out like a Tom Wolfe novel.

Why should the looks of a dead victim elicit Presidential comment?  Did Trayvon's resemblance make his death more personal to the President than the other 44 murders committed that day in the US?

Twenty one other corpses would also have looked like his son, as long as one only looks skin deep.  The US average is 45 murders per day; 49% of the victims are black.

On skin basis alone, his son would also look like the killer 52% of the time.  Does he identify with them, too?

White, asian and other-race victims might have had big ears, long creased faces, deep voices, Statist beliefs, Alinsyite training, or some other mark of similarity to the President.  Why did he not feel affinity with them?

I can't even imagine President Bush making a similar comment.  I can, however, imagine the media's outcry if he had.

President Obama benefits not only from the double standard that protects Democratic politicians.  He benefits from a triple standard that additionally justifies any comment made by a Liberal, black public figure.

The President has achieved his political objectives.  The black community is lathered up; the agitators are inciting violence; the media is strumming familiar chords of white guilt; Liberals are on the offensive against stand-your-ground laws; his base has been reenergized.

All it took was the exploitation of a teenager's violent death, and a little help from his friends: Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson.  I wonder if adding Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama to that hand would make it a Full House, or Five of a Kind?

The President's gamble has not addressed actual truth, however.  The Trayvon Martins of the world--black teens from broken homes, with too-quick of fists and too little respect for rules, authority or convention--are still exposed to violence at the hands of others just like themselves.

The George Zimmermans of the world--gun-toting busy bodies too quick to give up on the police's ability to protect homes, preserve public safety and capture predators--are still frustrated by society's inability to deal with threats to life, liberty and property.

This time, Trayvon died at George's hand.  By any standard, it's more often the other way around, which is why legislators adopt stand-your-ground laws.

Trayvon was staying at the home of his father's girlfriend (in George Zimmerman's neighborhood) because he was on suspension from school for possession of marijuana.  He'd been found with a screwdriver and jewelry, which he said a friend gave him.

It wasn't his first suspension.  He'd also recently taken a swing at a bus driver.

Trayvon doesn't sound like the kind of person I would like to know, or have my children go to school with.  While he took a bullet at too young an age, his violent end was not completely unpredictable.

Instead of urging calm as he did a year earlier when Major Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on fellow soldiers, killing 13 and wounding 32 others, President Obama fomented discord, rancor, division and violence.

He may consider that fair.  I don't.  Neither do I trust his sense of fairness.

I'm not surprised at President Obama's actions given his background in community organizing and familiarity with Saul Alinsky's handbook for revolutionaries.  I am disgusted, however, that there is still non-negligible support for an Alinskyite President.

Change means movement.  Movement means friction.  Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.  In these pages it is our open political purpose to cooperate with that great law of change..." (Rules for Radicals (1971), p. 21)

Move over Occupy Wall Street.  This quarter's poetic truth goes by the name of Trayvon.

So, Where Have You Been?

Taking care of business, thank you for asking.  It just so happens that business took me to New York City briefly, which is always ... different.

There's a lot I could say about the city, or nothing at all.  Suffice it to say that NYC is sui generis.

I'll restrict myself to commenting on a few of my favorite things, and one of my least.

Most enjoyable meal: roast beef sandwich at the Carnegie Deli.  I love the place for its garishly opulent sandwiches, which nobody is expected to eat in one sitting.  The waitress even brought extra bread on the side to break it up into several smaller sandwiches.

Least enjoyable meal: a hamburger and fries in a bar at the Four Seasons Hotel.  It's not that the hamburger was bad; it wasn't.  It just wasn't worth $50, despite the little steel cage in which the shoestring fries were incarcerated.  The hotel stay and service, however, more than compensated.

Favorite view this time: the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings at night from the hotel room.  Majestic.

Favorite stroll: from Columbus Circle to St. Patrick's Cathedral down 5th Avenue.  While on the topic of St. Patrick's Cathedral, it's the most beautiful Gothic structure in the US, at least that I've seen.

I love the way it's surrounded by office towers, as if to indicate that after all these centuries, millennia, the Church is still in the middle of the world, still struggling to lift everyone's sights to higher things.  Masses and confessions are plentiful throughout the day.

Teaching was enjoyable.  I gave a full day on Corporate Governance & Ethics to senior executives.

Subject matter included Citigroup from the merger between Citibank and Travelers to the financial crisis, with a special emphasis on Jack Grubman (pictured above); the Securities Analyst Settlement between various regulators and the ten largest Wall Street firms; Morgan Stanley from its merger with Dean Witter to the financial crisis, with a special emphasis on the power struggle between Phil Purcell and John Mack (pictured below, Mack on the viewer's left, Purcell on the right); and the conclusions of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which highlighted failures in corporate governance.

The Morgan Stanley story is one of my favorites for all of the twists and turns it takes before and after Mack's ousting. His triumphant return in 2005, and public abdication of responsibility in 2009 for bankers' self-control, are especially poignant.

"We cannot control ourselves," indeed.  These are the words that no free society can afford to have its businessman, or citizens, take to heart, as external control necessarily proliferates where self-control fails.

Raquel Welch Meets Lysistrata

I don't know what to make of the coincidence.  Neither am I certain there's any connection between (1) Raquel Welch's recent lamentations about society's sexual addiction, especially men's to digital sex, and (2) Liberal Ladies' Who Lunch declaration of a sex strike (April 28-May 5) over supposed threats to their reproductive choices.

The two stories nevertheless strike me as being related via men's libidos.  First, the Liberal Ladies:

Younger men and women may not remember the ‘good old days’ when the only reproductive choice we had was to deny men access to sex. In truth, if we lose our hard won rights to medical care, birth control and pregnancy choice, it won’t only affect women. Men will have to go back to the days when they waited for or paid for sex. This issue impacts all of us. This strike is designed to make that point. IT IS NOT A PUNISHMENT OR A WEAPON TO BE USED AGAINST ANYONE! It’s a week in which you are conscious of the attack on women’s rights, nothing more. [Emphasis added] 

Ask your man to stand with you in solidarity and speak up for your rights, because when we lose our reproductive choices, so do they.

If I understand their rationale, Catholics and others who don't want to be coerced by government to buy other people's contraception, abortifacients and sterilizations present a dire threat to these Ladies' reproductive choices.  To their minds, resisting women's aggression = an attack on women's rights.

I'm tempted to hold this up as exhibit A of why women were denied the vote for so long.  Liberal Ladies Who Lunch make it harder for thoughtful women to be taken seriously.

As convoluted as their reasoning is (and annoying as references to "hard won rights" are--they were in fact the most easily won rights in the annals of human history; all it took was for the Supreme Court to mug American society), a sex strike would nevertheless seem an ideal tactic for achieving solidarity with men they don't sleep with, not those they do.

People who don't want to pay (especially under coercion) for others' recreational sex lives and related atrocities would be delighted for women to keep their knees together and to make men wait.  They'll settle, however, for not having to cooperate with evil.

Those who believe that the Ladies' choices are objectively disordered and intrinsically immoral--the purported attackers--are not among those who would mind (all things considered) waiting for sex, or being denied it. The Ladies' strike thus seems badly aimed at the wrong men.

What is to be gained by cutting off sex partners who already support everything the Ladies will to impose on the unwilling? As the strike announcement points out, they too depend upon these reproductive choices--especially the ones not to conceive or, nature having asserted its hegemony over choice, to kill the product of conception, human life, before it sees the light of day.

Their vulnerability to the Ladies extortion is proof of their commitment.  The strike seems aimed at rousing these too-comfortable men into action, to picking up the cudgels and engaging in battle with the alleged attackers. 

How old-fashioned of these modern Ladies--perhaps NOW Ladies would be more apposite--to expect men to fight their battles, and to enlist them by their gonads.  Perhaps a return to the days when men had to wait has its uses.

Anomalies notwithstanding, these Liberal Ladies are in effect telling their sex partners there will be no piece until there is no peace.  So, boys, go make some war or don't bother to beg.

Times have changed since Aristophanes' day, even Virginia Woolf's.  Lysistrata exhorted the women of Greece to cut their men off in order to end the Peloponnesian War, not instigate it.  Virginia Woolf asked what women could do to end war, generally, and thus entertained the same strategy.

Liberal Ladies Who Lunch must be confused.  They identify those who resist their aggression as attackers; they claim the mantle of modernity while resorting to behavior of millennial vintage; they view a man in control of his libido as a threat, and a man under the control of his libido as an ally; and they advocate a sex strike in order to foment, rather than end, strife.

Which brings me to Raquel Welch, a non-confused woman, who drew titters this week by descrying porn addiction, which made her--albeit in its soft form--an international celebrity for five decades.  She entered the fray by discussing sexual addiction, generally, and the misidentification of happiness with gratification. 

Raquel Welch: It’s just dehumanizing. And I have to honestly say, I think this era of porn is at least partially responsible for it. Where is the anticipation and the personalization? It’s all pre-fab now. You have these images coming at you unannounced and unsolicited. It just gets to be so plastic and phony to me. Maybe men respond to that. But is it really better than an experience with a real life girl that he cares about? It’s an exploitation of the poor male’s libidos. Poor babies, they can’t control themselves.

MH: I cannot dispute any of what you’re saying.

Raquel Welch: I just imagine them sitting in front of their computers, completely annihilated. They haven’t done anything, they don’t have a job, they barely have ambition anymore. And it makes for laziness and a not very good sex partner. Do they know how to negotiate something that isn’t pre-fab and injected directly into their brain?

MH: You make some good points, but it could also be argued that railing against kids today and their sexual obsessiveness could come across as a little over-the-hill cranky and prudish.

Raquel Welch: I know it does, and I’m fine with that. I don’t care if I’m becoming one of those old fogies who says, “Back in my day we didn’t have to hear about sex all the time.” Can you imagine? My fantasies were all made up on my own. They’re ruining us with all the explanations and the graphicness. Nobody remembers what it’s like to be left to form your own ideas about what’s erotic and sexual. We’re not allowed any individuality. I thought that was the fun of the whole thing. It’s my fantasy. I didn’t pick it off the Internet somewhere. It’s my fantasy.

Clearly, Raquel has a mind of her own.  She's more than the body that made her famous.

As I see it, exploitation of men's libidos is the tie that binds these stories.  But, where Raquel Welch (who has slaughtered more men than any women alive) pities and chides men for being pathetic, Liberal Ladies are content to take advantage of men's lack of self-control to suit their own purposes.

Raquel has picked up wisdom over the years.  The Liberal Ladies still have much to learn.  That doesn't stop them from dictating Obama Administration policy, however, and sending their men into political battle to impose it on the scandalized.

In both stories, men's presumed (and fomented) inability to control their libidos leads to unfortunate outcomes: annihilation in Welch's telling; susceptibility to extortion in the Liberal Ladies' gambit.

The moral of these stories is that feeding sexual addictions makes men pliable and gets them used.

John Stuart Mill wrote that "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."  That Liberal Ladies would menace men with a sex strike suggests that it's high time for men to stop grunting like pigs, acting like fools, and guiding their lives as Socrates wouldn't, with faculties not noted for reason.

Were men more more practiced at appreciating beauty without consuming it, and taking possession of their eyes and minds, they wouldn't be at the mercy of Liberal Ladies Who Extort.  That seems a small price to pay for genuine liberation.

Raquel and the Liberal Ladies have done us a service by pointing out the nub of problems that vex our relations and roil our politics.  Men don't control themselves, and women take advantage.

The solution seems obvious: men need to control their libidos, quit responding to feminine beauty like cavemen, and get sex out of their eyes and heads.  An entertainment strike on TV viewing, movie-going, computer surfing and magazine reading--in a word, on media--would seem a good place to start

With respect to women, Raquel lamented the enervating affect of contraception on society and marriage, the "cornerstone of civilization," in a 2010 interview. 

"Seriously, folks, if an aging sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it's gotta be pretty bad. In fact, it's precisely because of the sexy image I've had that it's important for me to speak up and say: Come on girls! Time to pull up our socks! We're capable of so much better."

I don't know what Raquel would say to the Liberal Ladies.  Perhaps she'd applaud them for taking control of their sexuality, but probably wouldn't for taking control of their men's.  She might even chide them for cooperating with pathetic men to debase moral standards.

Perhaps she would simply encourage them to say no to sexual manipulation, and caution them about institutional arrangements that sap marriage, society and, ironically, eroticism and sexuality, of vitality.

Santorum's Southern Double

What began as a seemingly Quixotic run for the Republican nomination is not looking so hopelessly romantic tonight.  Rick Santorum has taken both the Alabama and Mississippi primaries.

In doing so, he prevailed over Mitt Romney's money in Newt Gingrich's backyard.  This, after capturing 51% of the vote in Kansas last weekend, is startling.

The man may not have money and organization, but he has traction.  Can he really win the nomination, however, over the howls of angst from Dorothy Rabinowitz (whose man is Newt Gingrich) and the Upper East Side Republican set?

For now, two things are worth pointing out.  The first is that at least one highly educated woman has happily and safely reposed her trust in him. There are probably a lot more like her in the country who would welcome a President whose primary gesture of solidarity with women wasn't to toss them free condoms.

I imagine there are a lot of women who wish they'd met a Rick Santorum, or are glad they did, and hope their daughters do, too.  I pray they speak loudly and persistently on Facebook, Twitter, etc. to baffle the media and counteract its assault on his values and person.

The second is that Rick Santorum is solidifying a momentous rapprochement that has grown throughout the abortion wars between Evangelicals, Catholics, and some mainline denominations such as southern Baptists.  This is an event of historic proportions.

The simple facts are that many if not most reasonable Americans are religious, even in big cities, and they have more to fear from unreasonable secularism than they do from a Papist putsch.  They want a seat at the table, and they appear to be lining up behind Santorum in order to claim it.

I have been thinking that Romney-Santorum makes sense because they compliment each other's electoral strengths, and compensate for each other's weaknesses.  While hoping against hope for a more conservative candidate, I have fatalistically assumed that money and media would have its way, and that Romney would prevail.

The prospect of an actual Santorum candidacy, however, liberates the mind to consider his possible running mates.  Santorum-Rubio?  Santorum-Paul--Rand, not Ron?

I like the sound of either pairing.  Personally, I think he'd be well advised to align himself with a classical-liberal-leaning VP in order to temper his mildly-Statist economic tendencies, and to ensure that he caucuses with someone closer to the upper east side perspective before pronouncing on social issues.

He wants to win over Americans' hearts and minds to what he knows to be good and true.  Beyond the dependency belt in Democratic strongholds, I don't think there's much distance between him and a majority of Americans on those scores.

A Quixotic tilt at windmills, however, won't build the enduring coalition necessary to heal the nation from decades of faulty reasoning, libidinous morals, putrid enculturation and Leftist jurisprudence.  I pray that should a Santorum candidacy materialize, God gives him the wisdom to lead his Party and campaign effectively.

What Public Employee Unions are Doing to Our Country

William McGurn's speech to the 2012 Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar is published in the March issue of Imprimis, Hillsdale's monthly contribution to public discourse.  If you don't receive it yet, it's worth reading, and you can subscribe for free by following the links at the appended issue.

McGurn's topic is public employees unions, specifically those at the state and local level.  His thesis is that "public sector unions have successfully redefined key relationships in our economic and civic life."

[T]he elected politicians who represent us at the negotiating table are not in fact management... our taxing and spending decisions at the city and state level are in practice decided by our public sector contracts, and ... when you put this all together, what emerges is a completely different picture of the modern civil servant. In short, we work for him, not the other way around.

McGurn illustrates the problem of politicians and union leaders being in bed with one another with the indelicate example of former New Jersey Governor, MF Global executive chairman and Democratic Party luminary, Jon Corzine.  The Governor actually was in bed with the New Jersey leader of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), Carla Katz, who pressed him in emails--and God knows where else--during sensitive negotiations over a contested contract with the union.

The dalliance only made ludicrous a widespread and grave phenomenon:

The public employees [that elected leaders] are supposed to manage in effect manage them. The unions provide politicians with campaign funds and volunteers and votes, and the politicians pay for what the unions demand in return with public money. 

In New Jersey as elsewhere, most leaders of public sector unions are not sleeping with the politicians who set their salary and benefits. They are, however, doing all they can to install and keep in office those they wish—while fighting hard against the ones they oppose. And until we recognize the real master in this relationship, we will never reform the system.

McGurn's second point is that contracts and spending, once negotiated with subservient politicians, set the policy agenda.  The tail wags the dog; the people no longer have anything to do with it, except pay.

You and I make spending decisions the way all households do. We take our income, and we live within our means. In sharp contrast, public employee unions have introduced a whole new dynamic: They negotiate pay and benefits in contracts we can’t rewrite. When the revenues to meet these obligations fall short, they push to raise taxes to make up the difference.

His final point follows from the first two: in reality, the public works for the public sector unions rather than the other way around.

Citing a Wall Street Journal interview with Fred Siegel, former editor of the left-leaning magazine, Dissent, McGurn notes the political dynamic that has brought this about.

[Public sector unions have "'become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it’s the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there’s no connection between effort and reward. You’re guaranteed your job. You’re guaranteed your salary increase. There’s a kind of bureaucratic equality.' 

'This vanguard ... becomes in the eyes of many liberals the model for the middle class. Public-sector unions are what all workers should be like. Their benefits are the kind of benefits everyone should get.” So instead of the private sector defining the public, the public sector is thought to define the private.

Today, public sector union members outnumber their private sector counterparts for the first time in American history.  From the 1950's until now--a period of steadily rising prosperity, productivity and living standards--private sector employees in unions have dropped from one in three workers to one in fourteen: 33% to 7%.

McGurn ends hopefully--for taxpayers and those who realize that current arrangements are unsustainable as well as unjust--if grimly.

One of the few silver linings of our tough economy today is that it is forcing tough decisions. Big city mayors and governors are having issues with their public employees, because we’ve reached a point where we simply cannot afford business as usual. With a sluggish economy—and fewer taxpayers—the problems that have piled up are becoming too difficult to ignore.

President Obama and the Democratic Congress came to the rescue with 2009's stimulus gusher, which gave the status quo a lease on life by piling debt onto citizens (and threatening them with tax increases) in well-run red states for the privilege of being in union with corrupt blue states.  Laboratories of democracy, indeed.

Thanks to the voters rescuing the House from Nancy Pelosi in 2010, the President's 2011 American Jobs Act, which would have larded the trough with another half trillion dollars, was DOA.  That didn't stop the President from trying, and won't in the future.

The following chart of State and local government spending between 2000 and 2010 evidences a near doubling over the decade, despite 2008's ruinous financial crisis that crushed workers in the private sector who nevertheless had to assume the debt burden of the public sector bailout.

Why is it exactly that public service employees are exempt from economic shocks that private service employees who live in the real world are exposed to?  It's worse: they're exempt from the dislocations their economic security arrangements impose on private service employees via taxes and debt.   

Today's WSJ ran an apposite op-ed regarding California's Greecification by Stanford professors Michael Boskin and John Cogan.

Partly due to generous union wages and benefits, inflexible work rules and lobbying for more spending, many state programs and institutions spend too much and achieve too little. For example, annual spending on each California prison inmate is equal to an entire middle-income family's after-tax income. Many of California's K-12 public schools rank poorly on standardized tests. The unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities of workers in the state-run Calpers system, which includes teachers and university personnel, totals around $250 billion.

None of this addresses the influence of public sector unions at the federal level.  McGurn notes:

Plainly it is an issue when the teachers unions represent one of the largest blocs of delegates at Democratic conventions, when the largest single campaign contributor in the 2010 elections was the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, when union money at the federal level goes at an overwhelming rate to Democratic candidates, and when the Congressional Budget Office tells us that federal employees earn more than their counterparts in the private sector. 

Nonetheless, I believe that the greater challenge today—to state and city finances, to democratic representation, to the middle class—is at the state and local level. This is partly because state and city unions have the power to negotiate wages and benefits that their counterparts at the federal level largely do not. More fundamentally, it is because we cannot reform at the federal level without correcting a problem that is bringing our cities and states to bankruptcy.

Public sector unions are a deeply troubling problem, perhaps the critical problem facing the nation this election season.  Beyond driving incessant and relentless tax grabs, they escalate our perilous federal debt, and perpetuate an entitlement mentality in government.

Last fall's credit downgrade was apparently insufficient to drive home the point.  The next one will hurt more, as will any rise in short or long term rates.

Unions haven't been discussed much during the Republican debates mainly because questions about their influence aren't asked by the Democratic journalists moderating them.  I hope but don't expect the deficiency to be supplied in debates between President Obama and the eventual Republican nominee.

Regardless, the public should be acutely aware of this ticking time bomb and corruption of democratic politics.  The problem will be fixed in accordance with economic reality, or the nation will collapse in the attempt to make economic reality accord with utopian visions of a highly remunerated workforce guaranteed prosperity by the stroke of a politician's pen.

Whatever security and entitlement such visions promise are illusory.  At the end of the day, nobody is secure if the bills can't be paid, or if they can but at such a high cost that the economy and middle class's nest-egg are crushed beneath their weight.

It is amazing to consider that both FDR and labor titan Samuel Gompers knew that private sector unions and public sector unions were fundamentally incompatible, but that modern day politicians, labor bosses and large segments of the population don't.  Today's travesty will end when the taxpaying voters, fair-minded recipients of government largesse and lovers of fair play put an end to it at the ballot box at all levels of governemnt.

Bishop Dolan and Our Phony Contraception Debate

The Wall Street Journal's editorial section is doing its best to keep the public focused on the Obama administration's usurpation of constitutional liberties despite the rest of the mainstream media's following the administration's lead and burying the matter of Kathleen Sibelius's ObamaCare mandate in the MoveOn.org file.

In an editorial entitled "Bishop Dolan's Liberty Letter" they bring his studiously ignored correspondence to light.

Cardinal Dolan explains that "As pastors and shepherds, each of us would prefer to spend our energy engaged in and promoting the works of mercy to which the Church is dedicated: healing the sick, teaching our youth and helping the poor." The problem, and the genesis of this Catholic confrontation with Washington, is the government's "bureaucratic intrusion into the internal life of the church" and its bid "to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be exercised." 

The test of pluralism in a democracy is the protection afforded to minority views, especially of religious faith and practice. Nine of 10 health plans already cover contraceptive and sterilization methods...

Pluralism: one of those shibboleths incessantly invoked to advance the sexual revolution that has plagued American politics and social life since the invention of that little mother of discord pictured above.  Now that the counter culture is the status quo, and governs, there is evidently no longer any need to respect differences.

The gloves are off, or should I say the mask.  Tyranny of the majority apparently isn't such a worrisome thing after all.

[Bishop Dolan] also relates a remarkable meeting that he says the White House convened with the bishops to "work out the wrinkles" of the mandate... [T]he White House's solution is merely for the bishops to shut up about the wrinkles. Cardinal Dolan writes that "there was not even a nod to the deeper concerns about trespassing upon religious freedom." White House staffers also cited some writings by vicars of the Catholic left in support of the mandate, in effect telling the bishops that they know less about church teachings than your average Washington Post columnist. 

As a study in ideology and power, the anecdote is chilling, compounded by all the recent claims by Democrats and liberals that Catholics who actually abide by their faith are opposed to modernity. Such prejudice is supposedly defunct in contemporary America, except when it's practiced against religion... 

"Religious freedom is our heritage, our legacy and our firm belief," Cardinal Dolan concludes. The sad reality is that his letter will not persuade the dominant wing of America's governing political party from insisting that religion kneel before its secular will.

It will be up to the American electorate, or the Supreme Court, to persuade the Democratic Party that it is unseemly, not to mention unconstitutional, to commit hegemonic acts "inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects" against unpopular minorities (Romer v. Evans; 1996), and religions. Thank God that the editors of the WSJ's editorial page see the problem.

In a related op-ed entitled "Limbaugh and Our Phony Contraception Debate," Georgetown Law grad Cathy Ruse pulls the halo off of Sandra Fluke, she of the mendacious testimony before Congress, which proceeded to kill a provision protecting the conscience rights of people who disagree with her about sexuality.

Last week Sandra Fluke, a student at Georgetown University Law Center, went to Congress looking for a handout. She wants free birth-control pills, and she wants the federal government to make her Catholic school give them to her. 

I'm a graduate of Georgetown Law and former chief counsel of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution. Based on her testimony, I wonder how much Ms. Fluke really knows about the university or the Constitution...

I was not Catholic when I attended Georgetown Law, but I certainly knew the university was. So did Ms. Fluke. She told the Washington Post that she chose Georgetown knowing specifically that the school did not cover drugs that run contrary to Catholic teaching in its student health plans. During her law school years she was a president of "Students for Reproductive Justice" and made it her mission to get the school to give up one of the last remnants of its Catholicism. Ms. Fluke is not the "everywoman" portrayed in the media.

No, indeed, Ms. Fluke is a long shot from everywoman.  She is uberwoman, a self-appointed champion aiming to force everywoman's church out of business because it doesn't believe what she and the cognoscenti believe: that everywoman must worship at the altar of promiscuity, sterility, lesbianism, abortion, sterilization, death and all the other things that "Students for Reproductive Justice" routinely support.

I do not know if she is a slut as Mr. Limbaugh contended before apologizing. But, she is a degenerate.

The unreported scandal is that even Catholic law schools have been recruiting, coddling, mentoring, advancing, and tenuring womyn like her for decades.  She is, unfortunately, no fluke.

Congress and the Obama administration are overflowing with them, as are the courts, law firms, state and local governments, and every institution where there are resources to misappropriate.  These monist obsessives are like Orks overrunning Osgiliath.

Today, even men are thoroughly steeped in feminist dogma, especially the ones from big-named schools, or living in what WSJ editorialists used to call the porn belt.  In essence, Christians are now reaping the intolerance and narrow-mindedness that law schools and universities have intentionally sown.

At the hearing of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee chaired by Nancy Pelosi, Sandra Fluke testified as a victim. Having to buy your own contraception is a burden, she said. She testified that all around her at Georgetown she could see the faces of students who were suffering because of Georgetown's refusal to abandon its Catholic principles. 

Exactly what does the face of a law student who must buy her own birth-control pills look like? Did I see them all around me and just not know it? Do male law students who must buy their own condoms have the same look? Perhaps Ms. Fluke should have brought photos to Congress to illustrate her point. 

In her testimony, Ms. Fluke claimed that, "Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school." That's $1,000 per year. But an employee at a Target pharmacy near the university told the Weekly Standard last week that one month's worth of generic oral contraceptives is $9 per month. "That's the price without insurance," the employee said. (It's also $9 per month at Wal-Mart.)

Ms. Fluke joins that burgeoning list of Liberal celebrities that crawl out of the slime to tell the expedient lie at the critical moment, which is shortly forgotten but long rewarded with accolades, publicity, appointments, perhaps tenure and, if she's exceptionally unscrupulous (for a Democrat), a perch in Congress like Ms. Pelosi's.  She reminds me of Ron Fitzsimmons, the abortion careerist the media used to trot out to fib about partial birth abortions being exceedingly rare, even long after admitting to having "lied through his teeth."

Here is a lengthier excerpt from Ms. Fluke's testimony to provide a fuller picture of the law as taught at Georgetown.

Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary. Forty percent of female students at Georgetown Law report struggling financially as a result of this policy. One told us of how embarrassed and powerless she felt when she was standing at the pharmacy counter, learning for the first time that contraception wasn’t covered, and had to walk away because she couldn’t afford it. Women like her have no choice but to go without contraception. Just last week, a married female student told me she had to stop using contraception because she couldn’t afford it any longer. Women employed in low wage jobs without contraceptive coverage face the same choice.

You might respond that contraception is accessible in lots of other ways. Unfortunately, that’s not true. Women’s health clinics provide vital medical services, but as the Guttmacher Institute has documented, clinics are unable to meet the crushing demand for these services. Clinics are closing and women are being forced to go without...

When [waivers to the non-coverage policy due to medical condition] do exist, these exceptions don’t accomplish their well-intended goals because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose aren’t, a woman’s health takes a back seat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.

In sixty-five percent of cases, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed these prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms.

Reality to earth.  It's $9 per month, for a product more related to entertainment than to sickness.

Not that facts, or truth, matter to her side of the kulturkampf, the aggressor's side.  She knows from Saul Alinsky's handbook for revolutionaries that any means to her ends are acceptable.

Sandra Fluke is the kind of witness that gives the law a bad name, and makes everywoman, her husband and her children cynical about the law's ability to render justice.

In this instance, everyperson just wants to be left alone.  That used to be called privacy by the Left, which Ms. Fluke is probably too young to remember and too selfish to care to know.

Any legal regime that would embrace her likes is simply the rule of womyn masquerading as the rule of law.  This is what the sexual revolution has done for, and to, America.

At issue isn't inhalers for asthmatics or insulin for diabetics. Contraception isn't like other kinds of "health care." Yes, birth-control pills can be prescribed to address medical problems, though that's relatively rare and the Catholic Church has no quarrel with their use in this circumstance. And the university's insurance covers prescriptions in these cases. 

Still, Ms. Fluke is not mollified. Why? Because at the end of the day this is not about coverage of a medical condition. 

Ms. Fluke's crusade for reproductive justice is simply a demand that a Catholic institution pay for drugs that make it possible for her to have sex without getting pregnant. It's nothing grander or nobler than that. Georgetown's refusal to do so does not mean she has to have less sex, only that she has to take financial responsibility for it herself. 

Should Ms. Fluke give up a cup or two of coffee at Starbucks each month to pay for her birth control, or should Georgetown give up its religion? Even a first-year law student should know where the Constitution comes down on that.

Georgetown should be embarrassed to count her among its students.  The woman is primarily educated in manipulation, hyperbole, histrionics, grievance, entitlement and power dynamics.

In this she's just like our President, just not as smart.  What little law she's learned is merely coincidental to her interest in defeating the enemy she's constructed in her mind.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.  Just because Sandra Fluke and her lesbian friend with polycystic ovarian syndrome wear feminist blinders doesn't mean you need to let the intolerant Party, theirs, rob you blind of your constitutional inheritance.