The Left's Nervous Breakdown

Noman loves James Taranto's Best of the Web Today, and today proves no exception to the rule.  Commencing with the defeat of President's Obama's American Jobs Act legislation in the Democratically-controlled Senate, he offers his analysis of hand-wringing on the Left.

Portnoy observes: "What I believe is happening is that the left is reading the handwriting on the wall and resigning itself to the harsh reality [that] the man they trusted to 'fundamentally transform America' is on the verge of being unelected." 

We'd go a step further. Not only does Obama's re-election look to be in serious jeopardy, but his presidency has been an almost unmitigated disaster for progressive liberalism, nearly every tenet of which has been revealed to be untenable either practically, politically or both. 

Stimulus Sr. discredited Keynesian demand-side economics--the notion that the way to produce employment and growth is through massive government spending. The real tragedy is that even after blowing hundreds of billions of dollars, Obama and many other Democrats failed to learn the lesson. 

ObamaCare proved a political fiasco, showing that there are limits to Americans' willingness to tolerate the expansion of the welfare state. Because most provisions have not yet taken effect, the policy disaster is delayed and may be averted if either Congress repeals it in 2013 or the Supreme Court strikes it down as unconstitutional next year. The latter case would mark a huge legal defeat for liberalism. It would be the first time since the New Deal that the court has recognized a serious limitation on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. 

Even something as small as Bank of America's recently announced $5-a-month debit-card fee is liberal policy failure. The fee is intended to recoup money lost by price controls on merchant fees included in last year's Dodd-Frank law. 

 

The administration's only major success has been in the area of terrorism. Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki are dead, and long may they rot. But their deaths were not the result of progressive liberal policies. Except in the area of interrogation, the current administration has largely kept its predecessor's antiterror policies, albeit often reluctantly. 

The power of unions has diminished, with Wisconsin, the first state to establish so-called collective bargaining for government employees, having abolished it. "Card check," which would have enabled unions to take over workplaces without approval by secret ballot, couldn't even get past a Democratic Congress. Neither could "cap and trade," the administration's plan to combat global warming--a phenomenon increasingly many Americans suspect is a hoax. 

We can think of just one area in which liberalism has enjoyed unambiguous success during the Obama years: gay rights. The Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010 would not have become law with a Republican in the White House. 

 

The left got what it wanted in 2008: a liberal president with a sweeping agenda and big Democratic majorities capable of enacting it. The result has been a great and failed experiment in progressive politics and governance. In due course, one hopes, the left will absorb some lessons--but for now, they seem to be suffering a nervous breakdown. 

That is one way to understand why so much of the liberal establishment is rallying behind Krugman's Army, as the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are known. Everything they believe in has failed, so they are turning nihilistic.

That's a devastating assessment, and one that is largely correct.  The last three years have been a reminder to the left, and the electorate, to be mindful about what it wishes for--"hopes for" might be more apposite.

Noman would take issue with Taranto only by adding one other area of unambiguous success: abortion politics.  With the passage of ObamaCare and recent HHS directives adopted pursuant to it, the President's personal interest in restoring funds to Planned Parenthood in New Hampshire, and recent skirmishes in which he has unequivocally entered the fray on the side of death, Moloch has never eaten so well in America.

The Left sees the intrinsic connection between the economic and the social issues.  It is the Right that prefers not to notice.

Liberals know that if they insist on or win nothing else, social victories will eventually result in government control over private initiative.  Any self-debilitating abuse can be wrapped in the appealing language of rights and freedom.  Dependence follows the erosion of character.

Whether by intention or outcome, Liberals tend to champion only freedoms that enslave and/or destabilize: e.g., sexual rights, drug use rights, children's rights to be free of parental control, procedure rights for criminals (at the expense of victims and society), free speech rights for communists and jihadists (but not for pro-lifers, or conservative students on campus).

Once the person, a social animal, is shorn from the familial, ecclesial and other communities that give him context, reference and support; once he is taught to demand his abstract individual rights in splendid isolation from others; once he is schooled to nurture grievance and a sense of entitlement; once his moral conscience is replaced with a social one; he will decline into dependence as surely as night follows day.

The State will be waiting to care for him and minister to his needs--at the cost of his resources, his soul, and increasingly of his intelligence.  As David Mamet writes, the Left cannot honestly evaluate the results of its actions.

In sum, the Obama Administration has dealt one winning hand after another to the culture of death.  It will take longer for fiscal Conservatives to understand that Leftist social policies have just as conclusively demonstrated--no less than the aforementioned economic disasters--the utter failure of the Statist agenda.

When the Right confronts the Left's social agenda with the vigor it does its economic one, the Left will really have a nervous breakdown.  For then it will have been deprived of its ace in the hole.

Rick Santorum demonstrated this beautifully at Dartmouth the other night (see at minute 16:48).  Asked about child poverty, he underscored the breakdown of the American family.  Five percent of children living in two-parent families are living in poverty.  Thirty percent in single-parent families are.  He connected the economy to its etymological root in the Greek word for family.

Noman was struck by he unease-cum-alarm on Charlie Rose and Julianna Goldman's faces as he passionately and intelligently made his points?  Santorum even triggered the angry disruption of an audience heckler (at minutes 17:44 and 18:08).

Noman thought they might be having nervous breakdowns.

Who's the Extremist Now?

William McGurn is fast becoming Noman's favorite columnist.  He comments today on liberal ideologues' ploy to blame last week's impending government shutdown on tea-party ideologues, when it was they who were willing to shut it down in order to defend (rather than defund) Planned Parenthood's place at the federal government's liberal feeding trough.

[O]n Planned Parenthood funding, [John Boehner] has secured something that those concerned about restoring these contentious issues to the people should appreciate: an agreement that the Senate will vote on a separate measure to defund Planned Parenthood.

Surely it tells you something about who the real extremists are that an up or down vote is deemed a concession. In an appearance at a rally before the deal, Mr. Schumer vowed that any bill taking taxpayer dollars from Planned Parenthood would "never, never, never" pass the Senate. In the normal way of doing things, it wouldn't even have come up for a vote.

Most Americans, it is probably safe to say, have no idea that we are talking about an organization that performed 332,278 abortions in 2009—one abortion every 95 seconds. Planned Parenthood counters that no federal dollars go to abortion, but Americans are not stupid. They know money is fungible.

As for serving pregnant women, that would be worth some congressional attention too. Planned Parenthood's own numbers show that more than 97% of pregnant women it treated were given abortions—against fewer than 3% who received nonabortion services such as adoption or prenatal care.

Think about it.  In 2009, this taxpayer funded organization ended 332,278 human lives in the womb.  97% of the women who went to it for "counseling" prevented their own developing children from ever seeing the light of day.  Try explaining, without sounding imbecilic, casuistic or disingenuous, why defending this practice is mainstream, and fighting to merely stop funding it with taxpayer dollars is extreme.  (Keep in mind that the public never voted to decriminalize abortion in the first place.  That was done by a 7-2 vote of the Supreme Court.)

If you can, congratulations of a sort are in order. You are certainly made of the right stuff to become a politician, lawyer, or community organizer.  And all those jobs pay very well.

Fiscal Conservatism Alone?

The Wall Street Journal editorializes about the tea party's "success" in last Friday's budget resolution.

This is getting to be a habit. President Obama ferociously resists tax cuts, trade agreements and spending cuts—right up to the moment he strikes a deal with Republicans and hails the tax cuts, trade agreements and spending cuts as his idea. What a difference an election makes.

This is the larger political meaning of Friday's last minute budget deal for fiscal 2011 that averted a government shutdown. Mr. Obama has now agreed to a pair of tax cut and spending deals that repudiate his core economic philosophy and his agenda of the last two years—and has then hailed both as great achievements. Republicans in Washington have reversed the nation's fiscal debate and are slowly repairing the harm done since the Nancy Pelosi Congress began to set the direction of government in 2007.

Noman can't argue with that.  President Obama is an adept politician, meaning, unfortunately, that he is a great liar and a consummate phony.  Noman does take issue with the following, though.

Yes, we know, $39 billion in spending cuts for 2011 is less than the $61 billion passed by the House and shrinks the overall federal budget by only a little more than 1%. The compromise also doesn't repeal ObamaCare, kill the EPA's anticarbon rules, defund Planned Parenthood, reform the entitlement state, or part the Red Sea...

Now the battle moves to the debt ceiling increase and Paul Ryan's new 2012 budget later this year, and there are lessons from this fight to keep in mind. One is to focus on spending and budget issues, not extraneous policy fights. Republicans have the advantage when they are talking about the overall level of spending and ways to control it. They lose that edge when the debate veers off into a battle over social issues.

We certainly agree that, amid a $1.5 trillion deficit, taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood is preposterous. Let George Soros or Peter Lewis spend their private fortunes to support the group's abortion counseling. But Mr. Boehner was wise to drop the provision on Friday rather than let Mr. Obama portray a shutdown as a fight over abortion rights. If Republicans want to win this fight in the coming months, they need to convince voters that Planned Parenthood funding is a low fiscal priority, not make it seem as if they want to use the budget to stage a cultural brawl.

This point is especially crucial in the looming showdown over increasing the debt limit. Mr. Obama will marshal a parade of Wall Street and Federal Reserve worthies predicting Armageddon if the debt limit isn't raised as early as mid-May. Republicans will play into his hands of they seek to load up any debt limit increase with policies unrelated to spending and debt reduction.

Since when is $330 million unrelated to spending?  And, anyone who thinks that Planned Parenthood's portion of liberals' federal cornucopia is a discrete and isolated chunk is fooling themselves.  The same people are feeding at the government trough under various guises, e.g., health care, community organizing, foreign aid.  Liberals will squawk whenever any and every piece of their pork pie is threatened.  So, conservatives at the WSJ, and elsewhere, had better find their moral voice and get familiar with reasons for taking on social liberals.  They'll be running into them wherever they probe for cuts.

Ultimately, the problem with what the editorial counsels is that it ignores the vital connection between the social and fiscal issues, a connection that Democrats never ignore.  If two years of Democratic hegemony in DC taught us anything, it is that statist priorities, corporatist economics, and the sexual revolution march arm in arm.  They are all components of the culture of death.

Noman has come to appreciate the vital importance of the economic issues to freedom.  From a purely pragmatic perspective, the choice between a party that wholeheartedly loves abortion, hates traditional religion, and wants to take away all his money on the one hand--the Democrats--and a party that harbors some who love abortion, and hate traditional religion, but will let him keep his money--the Republicans--is an easy one.  But, until the first two items are removed from the equation, the choice merely offers the difference between a quick capitulation and a slow capitulation to government domination.  Moral degradation and statism advance together.  Dependence is central and crucial to both of them.

The only coalition capable of straightening out this country's problems will include libertarians and Christians; those who want small federal government and a large sphere of personal liberty, with those who want moral self-governance in both government and persons.  Endlessly deferring the interests of either group is the wrong way to advance the interests of the other, and of the coalition.  Economic conservatives will have to learn to appreciate the vital importance of the social issues to freedom.  That's when the party will really get going.

Abortion, and Budgets

The federal government averted a shutdown Friday night when the Democrats agreed to a few more billion dollars in unspecified cuts, and the Republicans dropped their insistence on federally defunding Planned Parenthood (and other riders).  Noman wasn't surprised, as he didn't expect the rider to get as far as it did.  The Republicans weren't ready to shut down the government over the issue, and the Democrats were.  Dems focused their prerogative-preserving attacks on the "far right's ideological agenda," and Republicans shied away from the fight.  Pity.  They missed a teachable moment.  

Those who kill their babies are the ones with something to hide from the public, not those who oppose forcing others to pay for the crime.  It's a shame that Republicans couldn't find one eloquent spokesman to argue the case for life--a Henry Hyde, for instance--when it mattered, or to explain the link between fiscal and social issues to the electorate.  Let Noman try. Only a people decent enough to accept limits to its self-gratifying behavior (thereby avoiding a last resort to mayhem in the womb) is likely to be decent enough to accept limits to its spending and borrowing.  Anyone who identifies the act of exterminating babies (for instance, the one pictured above) as the touchstone of personal liberty--something that feminists and philanderers have been arguing for decades--and moreover who expects others to stand silently by with their mouths shut and their wallets opened, is also likely to expect others to fund whatever social priorities s/he identifies.  Responsibility and decency are habits of the person that will manifest themselves in personal action, both socially and economically.  

Moreover, social conservatives were no more responsible for this unnecessary crisis than were social liberals--less by Noman's reckoning.  Funding for planned planned parenthood did not waft into the public budget on a breeze.  It was imposed by Democrats on the American public by means similar to those employed by Republicans trying to free the public from the imposition.  This season's budget skirmish would not have been necessary had lefties not prevailed in earlier budget contests.  And, in the final analysis, it was the left that was willing to exercise the nuclear option in its insistence, not the right.  The media specializes in clamoring about ideologues on the right, while denying (by their silence) the existence of ideologues on the left.  The public should not be hoodwinked about the contest, or the stakes. 

The funding issue, as per agreement, will come before the Senate, which will vote it down because Democrats run the show there.  And, Democrats fight with rat-like rage for all things abortion.  Generally, to vote "D" means to cast a vote for dependence, depravity, and death.  And, abortion satisfies all three conditions.  (1) It encourages irresponsible men and women to turn to government-funded agencies in order to avoid the responsibility for a baby that their actions have brought (or might bring, in the case of contraception) into existence.  (2) What could be more depraved than a mother delivering her baby to the executioner.  And, (3) death is the alpha and the omega of the act: its motive and end.  

Every Senator will be on record as to where they stand on government funding of abortion.  I hope that Republican Senators, when explaining why funding "women's services" is none of the federal government's business--whether or not it's running deficits, but especially when it is--will take the time to explain that the culture of death, which menaces us all, rides the coat tails of the abortion lobby.

In some ways the dispute over Planned Parenthood funding is symbolic. The legal right to abortion is not at stake, and the subsidy doesn't even pay directly for abortion, which the group is required to fund from nonfederal revenue. So why is it the Democratic Party's No. 1 priority?

Our best answer is identity politics. As we observed in January, for many liberal women, their sexual identity is bound up in their politics, and especially in the politics of abortion. Just about anyone who lives in a big American city has the experience of being told by a woman, probably a youngish college-educated woman, that she would never vote Republican because the GOP is against abortion.

There are single-issue antiabortion voters as well, and our guess is that they are more numerous nationwide. Republicans have on the whole done better than Democrats in federal elections since 1980, when the parties first became polarized around abortion; and the Roe effect ought to give them a demographic boost.

But single-issue pro-abortion voters are still a crucial component of the Democratic electoral base. As National Journal reported last week, President Obama is "struggling with every other segment of the white electorate, including younger voters," with the exception of "well-educated white women."

Noman believes that these "well educated white women" are rather poorly educated, especially about ethics.  But, they are highly indoctrinated, with a chip on their shoulders for not being born with men's ability to arise from a sexual encounter unburdened by new, separate life within.  They are the quintessence of narrow-mindedness, especially about their nature and all that goes with it, regardless of how many degrees they have.

Noman's opinion of why Democrats are so adamant about abortion is that Democrats are the party of the left, and as leftists, are neo-Hegelians who believe that the state is the march of God in the world.  There is no room for devotion to another God--especially not the God whose followers colonized this country and established the American nation--and abortion strikes at the heart of Christian civilization.  For lefties in America and throughout the occident, Christ, the great Liberator, must die again by being ripped from the culture, and having his church shackled; the Holy Spirit must be denied access to the human heart by enslaving man to his libido, and occluding his conscience as to the morality of personal action; God must be diminished by belittling His fatherhood, and debasing human fatherhood, thereby discrediting the concept of fatherhood generally.  Just Noman's opinion.

Abortion, turns mother against child, and enlists the complicity of fathers, and/or law.  Thus, the mother-child bond nurtured within a family--the most intimate bond known to man--is converted from the seedbed of security to the font of alienation.  Every American born after 1973--the year the Supreme Court definitively turned the country over to culture warriors on the left--was born to a mother that could have turned thumbs down on his existence, including (until 2007) in the 9th month of pregnancy; none have intrinsic value; all have worth merely by the good graces of another who deigned to let him live.  The person, shorn of supernatural and human context, and oriented towards vice is easy prey for the aggrandizing state promising cradle to grave security.  In reality, it offers dependence, depravity and death.  And abortion is the key to its achieving the desired result, sooner or later.

Consider how far the march of this false god has advanced in the last four years, since Nancy Pelosi's Congress joined with Harry Reid's Senate to govern in accordance with leftist beliefs.  Did anyone ever think that the Leviathan federal government would be strong enough to fend off efforts to reduce a $1.65 trillion deficit.  Noman didn't.

Defund Planned Parenthood, and quit making people like the ones above pay for activity on behalf of a god (of state) that they won't worship.  Let PP survive on the support of those who believe in the sanctity of taking human life.

Equality For Religious Believers, Barely, For Now

The Supreme Court thwarted the anti-christian left in its latest design to disadvantage religious believers, and to cut off the charter-school escape route from public-school indoctrination.  The Court voted 5-4 to deny a taxpayer standing to challenge an Arizona tax credit program for parents of children in private schools. The suit alleged that granting a tax credit to such parents is tantamount to subsidizing religious education, and therefore a violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.  Separation of Church and State, and all that.

Private-School Tax Break Is Upheld

It surprises non-Americans to learn that parents of children in US religious schools are denied government assistance, yet they are forced to subsidize the secular, often anti-religious, education of everyone else's children who attend school for free.  Lefties deny religious believers the kind of affirmatively-obligated benefits they demand of the government for themselves and anyone who will acquiesce to them.  And, the Supreme Court generally obliges them in their duplicity. With few exceptions, public schools in the US have become indoctrination centers where little children are taught politically correct bromides, and preached to about the mystical properties of condoms before they are physically capable of using them.   In this video, children are initiated into the cult of "Barack Hussein Obama, Mm, Mm, Mm," while imbibing liberal sound bites. 

Believe it or not, had the Arizona program entailed a government expenditure, it would have been ruled unconstitutional as an establishment of religion.  It's OK under post WW II jurisprudence for the government to "establish" irreligion, or anti-religion by making such expenditures.  It's only religion that the founding fathers presumably wanted to prejudice (which is undoubtedly why they enshrined the free exercise of religion as the person's first constitutional right, and protected it against the establishment of a federal church analogous to the Church of England;  Oh well, never mind the history.)  This program survived the censorial axe because it involved a tax credit--money that the government doesn't take from taxpayers--rather than an expenditure of money it's already taken.

Obama appointee, Elena Kagan, wasn't impressed with the distinction, which she referred to as one without a difference.  "Either way, government has financed the religious activity.  And so either way, taxpayers should be able to challenge the subsidy."  This quote reveals that Justice Kagan is not a very precise thinker.  Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, points out that Kagan's position "assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector's hands." The point is that the government is not financing the activity "either way"; it only extends a subsidy by giving the money out of its own accounts, not the taxpayers'.  What Kagan meant to say is that either way, government action, or inaction, has made it easier for citizens to engage in religious activity.  And, that is the state of affairs that seven decades of leftish legal sophistry has aimed at preventing.  The thrust of liberal Church-State jurisprudence is to discourage religious activity by making it comparatively, and actually, more costly to engage in than lefty approved activity, which is subsidized.  Economic realities are used to deter the religious upbringing of future Americans, analogously to the way that President Obama stated during the campaign he would deter coal mining: by making it so costly via legislative and regulatory burdens that no one could profitably engage in it.  The activity is not outlawed outright; it is merely handicapped out of existence.

With respect to President Obama's Supreme Court appointee, it's scary (but not surprising), and speaks poorly of her objectivity and ability to reason precisely, that Justice Kagan thinks government subsidizes an activity by merely refraining from taking away taxpayers' money that is spent on it.  The Journal queries whether Justice Kagan thinks the "government [is] also establishing religion by not imposing a 100% tax rate on churches, mosques and synagogues?"  Her "reasoning" would go further, it seems, to hold that anything less than 100% tax on individual incomes might be a government subsidy of religious activity, and therefore run afoul of the Establishment Clause.

Supreme School Choice

Sadly, but again not surprisingly, it was only a 5-4 victory.  The left never gives up, and won't until the last religious believer is harassed, marginalized and driven "into the closet" (underground).  That's what lefties mean by high sounding words such as liberty, tolerance, pluralism and equality.  To it's credit, Eric Holder's Justice Department finally took the average American's side of a dispute.  Noman's guess is  that the Obama Administration must be very worried about the 2012 elections, and used this case to partially establish its Bubba bona fides.

Argument By Snide Remark

Kevin Drum (pictured above) blogs for "Mother Jones," the venerable leftist rag that gave us "Pinto Madness" (1977).  Discussing the question of whether Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana, should run for the Republican presidential nominatiion, Drum writes:

But the usual question remains: how does he get through the primaries? When he hops over to Iowa, they'll expect him to denounce sharia law, make jokes about Obama's Kenyan birth, throw himself wholeheartedly into the culture wars, pretend that global warming is a liberal conspiracy, and make dire remarks about the specter of socialism taking over America. In other words, he'll have to act like a public clown, and if he doesn't do it, he'll lose. So it's pretty much a no-win scenario for him. If he's smart, he'll wait for 2016 and hope that the Republican Party has come to its senses by then. 

Noman doesn't take liberal advice to Republicans very seriously.  They already have their own party to ruin.  Offhand, Noman would reply that if Daniels believed as Drum did, that holding and espousing such beliefs are clownish, then Daniels probably wouldn't be fit to be the Republican Governor of Indiana, let alone President of the United States.  Moreover, on what grounds are any of these positions execrable?  Sneering aside, do liberals have anything to add to the public discourse?  Even a minute's consideration of Drum's list of topics that are supposedly beyond the pale of serious consideration indicates that you need to be a loon to peremptorily dismiss them, not to call for debate on them.

• Sharia Law - What's not to denounce?  If he means to say that conservatives fear sharia law in the US, he's wrong.  Conservatives fear Islamic terrorism--and dissipation of the public's will to fight it attributable to political correctness and insane liberal sentiment that ignores, dismisses, minimizes, or justifies it.  

• Obama's Kenyan Birth - Noman thought it was Indonesian.  Does Drum have information or evidence that the President himself, and the Governor of the State of Hawaii have not been able to produce?  Why should conservatives have to prove a negative when it should be so easy for liberals to prove the positive.  Perhaps lefties should perform the following thought experiment: Imagine that George Bush had been sired by a foreign revolutionary, and raised abroad in his youth.  Further imagine that he was unable to produce a US birth certificate in order to answer questions about his satisfaction of the Constitutional requirement.  Further imagine that his defenders attacked anyone who asked the question...

• Culture Wars - Drum seems to think that people he disagrees with should just give up, or, barring that, shut up.  Noman sees the light.  What a wonderful world the sexual revolution has actually brought us.  In just 50 short years we've liberated the culture from the evils of stable marriages, commitment and promise keeping, safe wombs, masculine men, feminine women, moderate politics, modesty, self-control, disease free love-making, and joyful procreation.  Alarums by Churchmen and others about the "Culture of Death" are just manifestations of misogyny, homophobia, and medieval superstition.

• Global Warming - What does this man make of the revelations at East Anglia, or of honestly verified data indicating that the planet has been cooling for decades?  Never mind.  The sky is falling; the sky is falling!  And the only 'correct' option is to immediately regulate procreation, shackle the free market, and forcibly redistribute wealth from developed to less developed nations.  Wait a minute. Weren't those the goals of the Soviet Union?

• Socialism Taking Over America - Nah.  President Obama is for the free market.  He says so, and that settles it.  We can forget that the Government just took over the 16% of the economy that is health care; nationalized two of the big three automobile manufacturers; forayed through the balance sheets and capital structures of the nation's biggest banks; took possession of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which between them own or guarantee $5 trillion of mortgages; assumed greater control of the credit allocation process via the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and is treating carbon--what humans exhale--as a regulable toxic substance.  Also, ignore government's deficit spending, which is projected to exceed receipts by well over $1 trillion dollars every year for a decade, and longer; the public debt, which skyrocketed from $9 trillion to $14 trillion during Pelosi-Reid's four-year fantasy party on Capitol Hill; and Democratic insistence on raising taxes as the answer to every public ill.  Nothing to worry about hear.  Let's MoveOn.org.

Noman says "three cheers for conservative clowns."  They're preferable to the alternative.  And may the Republican Party never come to its senses in the way Drum counsels.

The Sound Of One Hand Clapping

Republicans have gotten the message.  People are alarmed at the size of government, both in dollar terms and in the scope of its ambition.  They don't appreciate its priorities, or its ceaseless subsidizing of personal irresponsibility, opportunism, and dependence.  They are terrified by yawning deficits and Gibralter-sized debt.  They are menaced by the grasping fingers of bureaucrats and scheming politicians who clutch for ever-larger shares of personal wealth in order to pay for their grandiose designs, and lifestyles.  People are wising up to the government-employee-union-scam: government workers earn better than private-sector equivalents, work less, enjoy greater job security, have far superior benefits, boss common people around, retire earlier, and saddle taxpayers with unsustainable legacy costs.  Many are infuriated at Hollywood propaganda, and the culture's hyper-sensualized lures to turn left.  They at least don't want tax dollars funding only one side's message.  

What Republicans don't seem to fathom, or at least lack the ability to articulate, is that the fiscal piece of their puzzle necessarily connects with a social piece.  It is necessary, but insufficient to say that we need to cut,  starve or repeal the abominations that reckless Democrats foist on the populace.  Democrats see a real problem.  Some people cannot take care of themselves, or get themselves out of intractable messes, and need to be helped, or even taken care of.  This group is the Democrats' mother's milk--or at least its invocation is.

Republicans need to communicate that the country must have fewer, not more, people in this needy class, and that Democratic governance ordered towards expanding, rather than contracting, its size is not sustainable.  Republicans must champion the socially conservative notions that people have a duty to be responsible for themselves, their family members, their fellow parishioners, and the like, in concentric circles expanding outward from the human heart to its natural attachments.  (Democrats go the other way, from some mass phenomenon--real or imagined--inward to the pocketbook of unrelated people.)  Moreover, the government's role is to foster and strengthen intermediary institutions such as the nuclear family, extended family and the church--to honor the "subjectivity of society," in Pope John Paul II's memorable phrase--and not to foment their demise as it does under Democratic sway (e.g., marriage penalties in the tax code; single parenthood subsidized by welfare).  Republicans are the only ones with the moral authority to proclaim the message that economic (classical) liberalism dovetails naturally with social conservatism, given Democrat's devotion to collectivist illusions, cost- and wealth-spreading designs, and debilitating the intermediary associations between the "individual" and the state.

The broader that Democrat's social welfare net expands, the greater the number of people who are snared by it, or resort to it, who choose dependency rather than responsibility for oneself and one's loved ones, because it pays better, and demands less.  This is the dynamic that is corrupting the country (and alarming its populace) from the inside out, person by person, eroded character by eroded character.

These reflections are provoked by an article in today's WSJ foretelling of Republicans initial attempt to constrain the entitlement black hole swallowng the nation's economy.

Republicans to Propose Overhaul to Medicaid

Republicans want to allow states more latitude on spending federal money (that is, federal taxpayer's money), permitting states to determine where it can best be spent.  In the sane world, this is called an application of the "principle of subsidiarity."  In the liberal political world, "this is yet another indication that a very significant part of the entitlement savings in the Ryan budget will come from severe cuts in health care for low- and moderate-income Americans."  That is not an argument that Republicans will ever win, as the terms undermine them: cost savings vs. care for the needy.  Can it be long before some prominent Churchman regurgitates this soundbite, thereby cloaking it in the mantle of Christian charity?  

It is ironically Republicans' duty--sooner or later met--to propose the novel idea that people themselves, with their families, churches, neighborhood-associations and the like have the primary responsibility in making sure that the poor and low-income do not suffer from the federal government's transfer of initiative, and authority, back to the people, where they resided and belonged in the first place.  It is the people's responsibility to do this with their own money, of their own volition, without government coercion or confiscation.  If Republicans don't draw the necessary connection between economic liberalism and what goes by the name of social conservatism--adherence to faith, traditional family, personal responsibility, "self"-sufficiency (fully recognizing that the personal self is a social entity), cardinal virtues, respect for traditions and the past, love of country that manifests itself in ways other than criticism and reform agendas, etc--their message will make the sound of one hand clapping, and be only as effective as it is noisy.  The coupling of economic and social conservatism is more than a marriage of convenience contracted in order to win a few political contests.  It is the basis for an enduring philosophy of personal and political self-governance.

Family

Here's something you don't see everyday.  Noman thanks God that he sees it annually when he visits Spain, or when he receives a family picture from his good friends Chema and Rosa.  A sight like this confirms that God hasn't given up on humanity's future.

Josemaria (Chema) Postigo of Segovia is one of twelve children.  Rosa Pich of Barcelona is one of sixteen.  They both grew up knowing the warmth of a big family and the security of knowing that they weren't alone in this big world.  As you can see, their marriage has been fruitful.

Nofamily has enjoyed the Postigo-Pich's friendship for decades--something else Noman thanks God for--and has a number of Nochildren the same age as theirs.  They befriended Nofamily when it lived in Barcelona between 1992 and 2002.  Noman knows of no people more generous, self-giving, friendly, open and fun-loving than the Postigo-Pichs, which perhaps you can make out on the children's faces.  Rosa is indefatigable, indomitable and fearless.  Chema is the kind of guy who will offer you an arm or a leg and mean it.  He is happy and big-hearted--even in the face of health problems and more than his fair share of troubles--the way that Noman thought all Spaniards were, before discovering that Spaniards, like Americans, came in all varieties.

Rosa's parents were treasures.  Noman was only in their family home a few times while both were alive, once on vacation in the Pyrenees.  Nevertheless, his overwhelming recollection of Carmina, Rosa's mother, was of a woman who always looked to serve others, to make them more comfortable, to see that they had what they needed.  She was kind and alert, a real dynamo.  Her husband said of her that "she was in every sense a unique woman, kind, happy, with an incredible and inexhaustible capacity to devote herself to everyone and everything." When people told her to slow down and relax, she replied that she would have plenty of time to rest in heaven.  Her heart gave out while she sewed school robes (batas) for a girl's club.  Noman visited her casket at the wake, intending to pray for her, and spontaneously began to pray to her for his Nofamily.  He has never been more certain of a person's sanctity.  

Rosa's father, Rafael, was a force of nature.  He was an extraordinary man: intelligent, curious, far-sighted yet detail-oriented, industrious, thoughtful, dedicated, hard-driving, humorous, gracious, and wildly generous.  He was not the type to sit around lamenting what wasn't; rather, he was a prime mover who made certain that what needed to be, became, and was.  During the decades that Noman knew him, he was intensely interested in, and dedicated to, children's formation: personal, intellectual, humanistic, cultural and spiritual.  Towards the end of his life, Rafael was very curious about home-schooling--a non-existent option in Spain.  Rafael was a people-person extraordinaire, and a great man.  Noman is blessed to have known him, thankful for the time they spent talking, and lucky to have learned from him.

The picture at top is testimony to Rafael and Carmina's love and dedication, and of Chema's parents, especially his mother's.  And, each of those children has the same generosity beating in his or her heart.  Under the tutelage of population controllers and eugenicists, people have come to think of families this size as weird, even unhealthy.  They have been instructed to want only one or two children, if any; they have been told that children are a one-way ticket to poverty.  Social-psychology has been marshaled to disparage openness to procreation as irresponsible, selfish and even threatening to the planet.  Pity, and hogwash. Each of those children is going to fill the world with love, happiness and consideration for others, which they have learned from growing up with many sibling and generous parents.  Incidentally, they are also going to buy houses, clothing, food, education and all sorts of goods and services that will provide jobs and income for providers, and make the economy hum with prosperity.  People are the source of wealth, not poverty.  Compare those benefits to alarums about carbon footprints.

Noman thinks the choice is clear, and encourages everyone to procreate early and often.

Choice On Trial

The European Court of Human Rights is being asked to decide whether the biological and social conditions necessary to safeguard human procreation trump the determination of social actors to prevent it.  The case of V.C. v. Slovakia involves the alleged involuntary sterilization of a gypsy woman in a hospital. Slovakia, it appears, made the sterilization of gypsy undesirables a priority in 1999, after the fall of its communist regime.

European Court Considers Forced Sterilization Case

While there will be myriad factual issues to resolve--What the purpose of the sterilization was?; Whether or not the woman gave her informed consent?--it is the political ones that will take center stage.  First, will the eugenic ideology that underlies and provides impetus to aggressive population control movements the world over be unequivocally condemned, or justified (as in the US case of Buck v. Bell)?   Secondly, will the oft-recognized negative freedom of protection from state interference in a couple's decision to naturally procreate be upheld, or will the state be permitted to disregard that right in the absence of compelling, rational reasons?  It seems to Noman that a Court predisposed to favor eugenics will be able to dispose of the case(s) on factual grounds, leaving forced sterilizations a viable public option in practice.  On the other hand, a Court predisposed to favor bodily integrity and marital prerogatives over eugenic ideology has an opportunity to proclaim a resounding affirmation of life, even in dicta.  Stay tuned to see whether the European Court of Human Rights is worthy of the name, and that fancy facility it sits in.

A Modest Policy Prescription

Economics has its limits, as this man would be the first to tell you.  He is Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa (Ben Bernanke's Japanese counterpart), and he's out to voice frustration with simplistic criticism of his country's relatively stagnant economic performance.  Since Japan's halcyon days of the 1980's, it has tried nearly everything to arrest a slide in its consumer prices, and stock market performance, all to no avail.  For what it's worth, the US is recycling a number of Shirakawa's innovative ideas, e.g., quantitative easing.  Japan, nevertheless, continues to experience a "decrease in economic metabolism."   That doesn't sound good.  

Japan's Bernanke Hits Out At His Critics in the West

What especially caught Noman's eye was one cause mentioned of the persistent deflation: declining population.  According to Governor Shirakawa, "Japanese businesses and households have become so discouraged about the economy's long-term growth prospects, largely because of the nation's declining population and slower productivity growth, that they keep reigning in their spending."  Thus, the Japanese could grow out of their economic malaise by simply procreating more.  Noman wonders whey they don't.  It's funny how in the long run, the natural thing to do is also the intelligent thing to do.  What's even funnier--"curiouser" might be a better word--is that people who see the relation in the ecological context, refuse to see it in the demographic context.

The article notes that the BOJ can't fix these problems on its own, even though it is rolling out programs Governor Shirakawa thinks might help.  At the risk of offending the good people who follow this blog, Noman can't resist suggesting one such program: cash for condoms.

State of the Union - An About Face

In a move away from the center and towards his party's gay but debilitating sexual ideology, President Obama has instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to stop defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.  You might recall DOMA as one of President Clinton's steps to the center.  

Contrary to the Obama Administration's position the day before yesterday, it now believes that a federal law defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman violates the Constitution.  Presumably, polygamists will be jumping in droves onto the President's joy ride leftward.

Obama Administration's Reversal on Gay Marriage

We can remotely thank Justice Anthony Kennedy for today's metamorphosis for copying-and-pasting liberal talking points into constitutional law.  In the 1996 case of Roemer v. Evans, Justice Kennedy, fresh from ascending to the left's Pantheon of Useful Idiots in 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, wrote for the majority that Amendment 2 to Colorado's state constitution was a violation of the federal constitution.  

Amendment 2 manifest the nefarious design of preventing any governmental entity in the state from bowing to leftist pressure to recognize gays and lesbians as a specially protected class.  All kinds of neat privileges flowed from that designation.  

Joseph Sobran once observed of the scam that it takes a great deal of political clout to be identified as an oppressed minority.  

The "inevitable inference" drawn by Justice Kennedy was that Coloradans' overwhelmingly expressed desire to be left alone could only be "born of animosity," a "bare...desire to harm a politically unpopular group."  Noman says poppycock.  

In Justice Kennedy's Constitutional estimation--now law--hate is the only explanation for why Coloradans would not want its landlords forced to rent to gays and lesbians despite moral objections to gays having sex on their property, for instance.

That's the trick with specially protected classes: only they have rights; everyone else has duties despite moral objections.  Noman says that's a counter-intuitive conclusion to reach from an alleged "application" of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

By 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overturned its 1986 precedent, Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the constitutionality of state anti-sodomy statutes.  In a mere 17 years that living, breathing Constitution--which lives in Georgetown and breathes only with its left lung--erected the right of a 55-year-old man to bugger a 31-year-old man (perhaps it was the other way around) alongside the hallowed rights of free speech, religious practice, open assembly, arms bearing, and the like.  

The founding fathers, we are to believe, risked life, limb and property in order to assure that any-and-every American adult could indulge in whatever bacchanalia his fantasy could devise, contingent upon his securing consent from everyone at the orgy.  

Justice Kennedy writing for the Court proclaimed that "Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today."  Funny, that's what Julia Roberts said in 1993's "The Pelican Brief."  You don't think that's where the Justice gets his constitutional philosophy from, do you?  

Noman says that decades of unremitting 24/7/365 bombardment from Hollywood's big guns undoubtedly explains the "changing legal and social views on gay rights."  Which brings us back to President Obama and Attorney General Holder.  

They ascribe DOMA to an era "of stereotype-based thinking and animus" that violates the Equal Protection Clause.  They offer Lawrence--that left-wing mugging of justice--as evidence that legal and social attitudes regarding gay marriage have swung gays' way.  They claim that they are bound neither by precedent they don't like, nor to defend laws differentiating gays from non-gays, even those with a rational basis for their enactment.  

At least we can be thankful that this is political branch "reasoning," which the people can repudiate at the next election.  Unfortunately, the President's two orientationally-ambiguous appointees to the Court will undoubtedly be joining a slender majority in the near future to impose lasting damage on the American soul, with Catholic Justice Kennedy likely penning the opinion.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger

This entire exercise is so vast and unnecessary an over-reaching of federal power (So what else is new with this Administration?) as to make Noman cling to his guns and religion and want to join a tea party.  The sympathetic case of Edith Windsor cited in the article --what would a liberal argument be without a tear-jerking story?--is disgusting, but not for the reasons proffered by the Administration.  

If her and Thea Spyer's union had been federally recognized, it would have saved her $350,000 in estate taxes.  Noman is irate that the federal government deigns to tax the dead after having taxed them their entire lives!  

The Administration's conclusion is that federal non-recognition of their "marriage" therefore must violate the Equal Protection of the Constitution.  Noman's conclusions are that (1) the federal estate tax should immediately be abolished; (2) this problem was set up by bad tax planning, not federal discrimination; and (3) even were that not the case, there are less radical ways to narrowly address the supposed defects in DOMA.  

First, there would be no disparity in estate tax treatment if President Obama had made President Bush's elimination of the estate tax permanent and liberals hadn't fought tooth-and-nail to stave off total elimination until some year after Thea Spyer died.  Liberals who clamor to tax people's money at death lose the moral authority to whine about unfairness when one of theirs gets hit.  

It's their own fault!  It is so typical of the Left to create problems, and then to propose solutions that accomplish yet more Liberal objectives, all-the-while creating more problems to "solve."  

Second, it's a pity that Thea Spyer's tax advisors--any woman with an estate large enough to yield a $350,000 tax bill must have had tax advisers--hadn't heard about Joint Tenancy with Rights of Survivorship, considered a merger, or devised any of the myriad other ways that one might (and will have to in the future, thanks to the President's "compromise" with post-election Republicans last year) devise in order to avoid exactly this kind of governmental abuse.  

Gays and lesbians seem to disproportionately suffer from this problem.  It makes Noman wonder if Edith and Thea were lazy, stupid, or intent on setting this challenge up.  

Third, if DOMA has a severability clause, which the DOJ's letter seems to presume, the defect can be more narrowly addressed than by declaring the millennia-deep understanding of marriage to violate the U.S. Constitution.  Just think about the audacity of that declaration.  

What's next, a declaration that private property violates the Constitution?  Noman says these people's hubris knows no bounds, and won't until reality establishes some for them through The People.