Capitalistic greed as our problem? I’ve been hearing a lot of that lately. Especially when traversing topics such as the BP oil spill or nationalized healthcare. Add to it the bit about inequality among the masses and you’ve usually put the cherry on top. Self-deprecatory statements, such as,

Moreover, I am also enraged by the sheer amount of greed, which exists in our country today—and not just our country, but it is passing onto other nations too.

seem to make it pretty clear – it’s the fault of those greedy, capitalistic Americans.

If greed was truly the problem, then we should all become sincere communists (I know, that’s an oxymoron). But greed isn’t the problem… it’s selfishness. Selfish rich, selfish poor, selfish capitalists, selfish communists, etc.

And there’s no human way around that.

###

And about those rich folk… in the Bible. Interesting thoughts at Stand to Reason.

###

NOTICE – No Guns Allowed A law, in New Mexico, is going into effect which will allow concealed carry weapon (CCW) permit holders to dine in establishments which have a beer & wine license. Restaurant owners do have the prerogative, however, to not allow such permit holders to bring their weapons into the restaurant, simply by posting a notice on the premises. From the Santa Fe New Mexican,

The law, passed by the Legislature this year, will allow people with concealed-carry licenses to take their guns into restaurants with beer-and-wine licenses. However, restaurant owners have the right to keep guns out of their establishments. All they have to do is post a sign.

Wow. I had no idea it was so simple to keep guns out of an establishment! Maybe someone should start posting these types of signs at bank entrances?

###

Too bad they didn’t have a “no guns allowed” sign. From the Orange County Register,

Police are looking for a male suspect in connection with an armed robbery that took place in Yorba Linda on Sunday.

The robbery occurred around 12:54 p.m. when a lone man walked into the Round Table Pizza on Yorba Linda Boulevard near Lakeview Avenue, brandished a black handgun and demanded money from the cashier, Brea Police Sgt. Bill Smyser said.

###

The unengaged president. Mark Steyn provides, as always, a good read. An excerpt,

To return to Cohen’s question: “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?” Well, he’s a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. “Who is this guy?” Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. “What are his core beliefs?” It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It’s the “nothing else” that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Timothy Dalrymple, in his second article of a series on the Tea party, asks this question.  (His first was; is it a social justice movement?  More are coming.)  He asks this particular question because of a similar question asked by Jim Wallis, he of Sojourners and the Christian Left. 

Dalrymple notes that, for starters, that for a guy who doesn’t like to be caricatured (and who does?), Wallis certainly uses it to make his points.  Some excerpts from Dalrymple:

The first sleight of hand comes in the phase, "Tea Party Libertarianism." Wallis poses the question: "Just how Christian is the Tea Party movement — and the Libertarian political philosophy that lies behind it?" Yet not all Tea Party supporters are Libertarians, and Wallis twists the Libertarian "political philosophy" beyond recognition.

[…]

How, then, does Reverend Wallis describe the "political philosophy" of the Tea Party? Wallis likens the Tea Partiers to the murderous Cain, who believed or pretended to believe that he was not his brother’s keeper.

[…]

Finally (I will deal with the racism charge in the third part of this series), Wallis condemns the Tea Party’s "preference for the strong over the weak" through its "supreme confidence in the market" — indeed, in a "sinless market" that has no need for oversight or regulation. The values of the Tea Party do not honor "God’s priorities" but "the priorities of the Chamber of Commerce."

These are powerful claims. They are also patently absurd. Only those who are already conditioned to expect the worst of political conservatives can believe that this represents a fair and honest account of the beliefs and values of the Tea Party movement. Would any Tea Partier — any single one, out of the millions across America who support or participate in the movement — actually accept this definition? It is an astonishing distortion of the Tea Party message to reduce it to "just leave me alone and don’t spend my money."

Rather than painting the movement with the brush of Rand Paul, Reverend Wallis might have consulted the polling data that shows what the majority of Tea Party supporters believe. He would have found a reality that defies the caricature.

Dalrymple proceeds to deal with these caricatures one by one, showing that Wallis either has no idea what the Tea Partiers really stand for, or who they really are.  Dalrymple does a good job of being moderate in his pronouncements, noting, in many places, that neither side, Wallis nor the Tea Partiers, inhabit the extreme positions they each are often accused of, and does a great job of explaining what’s really going on in conservatives’ heads.  Example:

What also needs to be refuted is the notion that resistance to higher levels of taxation is necessarily selfish. To resent a tax hike (or the prospect of one) is not to neglect the needy, and to wish to retain control over the funds one has secured in order to care for one’s family is not necessarily selfish. Conservatives generally are more generous with their giving than liberals, yet they resent it when a distant bureaucracy extracts their money in order to distribute public funds to the special interest groups on whose votes and donations they rely. Conservatives would prefer that care for the needy remain as local and personal as possible. Jobless Joe is more accountable to use the money he is given wisely, and to strive to become self-sufficient as swiftly as possible, when he receives that money from the members of the church down the street. This is not to deny that government services are needed, but it is to refute the notion that "taxed enough already" is a slogan of economic narcissism.

So, is this a Christian movement?  Dalrymple’s answer is a solid "yes and no".  I’ll let you read the whole thing to get his complete take on it, but answering this provided another point of moderation between the two sides.

In the New York Times poll, 39% of Tea Party supporters identified themselves as evangelicals or "born again," and 83% identify as Protestant or Catholic. If Wallis were correct in his description of the philosophy that undergirds their movement, then these conservative Christians would be abandoning the essential ethical principles of their faith. Yet this is hardly the case. What separates Jim Wallis from the Tea Partiers is not a difference of moral quality, or the presence and absence of compassion, but a different vision of the society that biblical love and justice require.

This is a much more sober description of the differences that in Wallis’ article.  In it, he labels some of the (supposed, caricatures) values of the Tea Party as "decidedly un-Christian", while at the same time saying he wants to "have the dialog".  In reality, he’s made up his mind already.  Dalrymple, arguing from the Right, gives both sides a benefit of the doubt that Wallis doesn’t seem to be willing to do.

You can please some of the people, some of the time, but… Evidently, the city of New Haven has removed the words “in the year of our Lord” from its high school diplomas, this year (HT: First Things). From the school superintendent,

I’m surprised it took this long for someone to notice it. We certainly don’t want to offend anyone.

Well, actually, you are offending someone – me! I think what you really should say is that you don’t want to offend secularists.

###

And here I thought they were communists. China is predicted, for next year, to surpass the U.S. in manufacturing output. Could there be a profit motive there?

###

Who’s going where? Interactive map, from Forbes, showing the numbers of people moving to and from various counties in the U.S.

###

When you outlaw guns… Over the weekend, in Chicago, 54 people were shot, with 10 of them being killed. Chicago has, since 1982, had a ban on new handgun registrations. Imagine how many people would have been shot had there been no handgun ban for almost the last 30 years. Oh no, wait – imagine how many people would have been able to defend themselves, if there had been no handgun ban at all.

In his (always excellent) column yesterday, James Taranto noted that, earlier this month, President Obama was calling small-government conservatives hypocrites for expecting the government to lead in the Gulf oil spill issue.

In an interview with Politico, the president said: "I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending."

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

"Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much," Obama said. "Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms."

Got that? If you didn’t support Obama’s effort to take over the health-care system, you’re a hypocrite if you expect him to lead in a crisis, and the oil spill is the fault of the minority party in Congress for its hypothetical opposition that hypothetically deterred Obama from taking hypothetical preventive measures.

Obama makes it clear that he has no idea at all what the Tea Partiers are all about (or he does, and feigns ignorance to make some political points).  Small government types are actually more correctly labeled "right-sized government" types.  It just doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily. 

Our Constitution enumerates the powers of government, and was written with a particular role of government in mind.  Our Founding Fathers, understanding man’s fallen nature as revealed in the Bible and seeking to restrain the inevitable power grab that all governments throughout history had tended towards, tried to restrain the beast while still providing enough power to do the job it was intended to do.

And so the Tea Partiers seek to restore government to that role and restraint.  It so happens that this proper size of government is quite a bit smaller than what we have now, so "smaller government" is a good enough label for now.  And the health care takeover is just the latest and most blatant attempt to "super-size" this beast.

But comparing opposition to the health care bill with criticism of the federal government’s handling of the Gulf oil spill is like comparing apples with prime numbers.  One is not what our Constitution intended (and some are making the case that it doesn’t allow it at all), especially requiring all citizens to purchase something and penalize them if they don’t.  The other is an interstate crisis that the federal government is specifically for. 

In this case, Obama has been dithering while Louisiana tried to get booms or barrier islands to block the oil.  He didn’t use a well-tested and very effective method to clean things up early on.  He turned down offers of help from 17 countries.  He’s used this disaster to push for ethanol subsidies that have been panned by both Republicans and Democrats alike for, among other things, shrinking the food supply in poor countries.

Are those of us "small government" types hypocritical to suggest we get leadership from our President in a time of crisis?  No, we’re not, and either the President knows this but is willing to use this situation to score political points, or he’s hopelessly ignorant about his critics. 

In the meantime, we’re stuck with a community organizer in the Oval Office who won’t or can’t or doesn’t know how to lead.  BP deserves what it gets (and likely more) as the fallout from this spill continues, but President Obama is likely to be protected by his party and what supporters he still has left.  (Hey, when you’ve lost James Carville, you’ve lost a lot of the Left.)  It’s a teachable moment.  Is the President in class?

Which country’s citizens see it as more socially just; the capitalistic United States, or the bit-more-socialist Germany?

70 % of Germans polled consider their economic system hardly or not at all socially just. "A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters finds that 24% believe American society is generally unfair and discriminatory".

The very of embodiment of capitalism, the U.S., fares better in the category "social justice" than welfare state Germany, based on the subjective judgement of each population?

Makes you wonder whether Germany shouldn’t turn to American style capitalism in order to improve social justice in the country…

Hey, Michael Moore, do you hear me? Michael?

As German blogger David notes, this is a subjective measure, but it’s very interesting to see the huge disparity.  Part of this is likely due to what each country’s people consider "socially just", so that standard may be different.  But I think that’s an important issue.  I find it very likely that Germans, who have come to expect more hand-holding by their government, don’t see what their government does as enough, mostly because government can never do "enough".  At some point the individual has to own their situation, but growing up and living in a culture where this is expected, any time the government falls short (and it will fall short, a lot) is perceived as "unjust", and contributes to an overall disappointment with a government that is quite possibly redistributing much more wealth than the United States.

In the US, the pendulum can swing the other way, too.  In a country built on individualism, it’s possible that most might see the economic system as being just fine, might see those not making it as moochers, and thus consider it more "just".  But as has been noted before, the same folks who defend capitalism the most (i.e. the center-right in this country) also give more in charity personally, in both time and money, and don’t expect the government (i.e. everybody else) to do it for them.  They own their own social justice issue, and thus, I believe, see it as just.  Not perfect, because neither situation is, and people will fall through the cracks under both systems.  But they do own it themselves.

Arlen Specter joins 3 other high-profile politicians who, having been campaigned for by President Barack Obama, lost their race.  Erick Erickson has a summary of yesterday’s primary results in which Rand Paul, who associated himself with the Tea Party, handily beat Trey Grayson. 

Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics notes, however, that as much as the current administration would like to classify it as such, this is not as simple as a general anti-incumbent movement.

But how many Republican incumbents are in severe jeopardy of losing their seat in Congress to a Democratic challenger?

I count one: Joseph Cao of New Orleans.

Meanwhile, I count more than 20 Democrats in the House and Senate who are in severe jeopardy. Lower the threshold from "severe" to "serious" jeopardy, and I count maybe four Republicans and more than 50 Democrats.

The White House is absolutely, positively correct that there is a divide between America and Washington – but what they fail to appreciate (or, more likely, they appreciate it but want to fake-out the press) is that Washington, D.C. now belongs to Barack Obama.

Cost is zeroing in on ousting an incumbent from one party with a challenger of the other.  He’s not considering situations like Bob Bennett’s, where he lost his primary bid earlier this month (a distant third) to another Tea Partier.  But even this plays into Cost’s contention.  Bennett wasn’t ousted simply because he was an incumbent.  The Tea Party is an ideological movement, and Republicans in Utah spoke loudly that they want their representatives to demonstrate conservative principles.  Reaching across the aisle, as good as that can be, should not trump principles.  The Republican Party has lost touch with its base, trying to show how much they can be just like Democrats, too.  (See the spending habits of George W. Bush and the Republican Congress for examples.) 

The election of Scott Brown and these primaries were the warm-up acts, I believe, of a rejection of Barack Obama’s policies.  The November elections will be the main event.  It’s still 6 months until then, but it appears that the ideas of the Tea Party are resonating with Americans, and they’re not showing any sign of going away.

Headline from Yahoo! News, Illegal immigrants plan to leave over Ariz. law. (see snapshot below)

In my opinion, before we demonize those who simply wish to enforce U.S. law, we should ask ourselves whether or not the U.S. law in question, as referenced by Doug, is just or unjust. If it is unjust, then we have no moral obligation to follow it. If it is just, then we have the moral obligation to follow it in a civil, rational manner.

In Arizona, if you are a law abiding citizen, you will soon have the same rights as criminals. Governor Jan Brewer recently signed into law a bill which will allow people without a permit to carry a concealed weapon (i.e., a gun). The law, which should take effect in July or August, allows people to forgo the background checks and classes currently required for a concealed carry weapon permit. Arizona now joins Alaska and Vermont as the only states to allow concealed carry without a permit.

In other words, law abiding citizens, concerned with their own self defense, can now do what criminals ALREADY do! – namely – walk around armed.

No, they didn’t.

Actually, the headline reads, Small Riot Breaks Out at Immigration Protest.

The protest was directed towards the signing of SB1070, in Arizona. The controversial Arizona bill clamps down on illegal “immigration” by requiring local police officers to question people about their immigration status if they suspect the person is in this country illegally. Illegal “immigration” advocates fear such a law will result in racial profiling. From the article,

Witnesses say a group protesting against SB1070 began to fight with a man who was for the controversial immigration bill.

Police tried escorting that man away from the scene, fearing for his safety, when they too came under attack by people throwing items, including water bottles.

It appears that the first racial profiling to occur, upon the bill’s signing into law, would be on the part of the protester who, yelling at the man police escorted from the scene, shouted, “F*** you! F***ing racist!” (see video here).

Tea partiers mostly white, conservative, male, pro-life, poll says

So says the New Mexico Independent.

From the post,

According to a recent Gallup poll, tea partiers are mostly white (79 percent), conservative (70 percent) and male (55 percent). While 68 percent of tea party supporters have not graduated from college, 55 percent—make more than $50,000 per year.

And yet, Timothy Johnson, a black tea partier, states,

“Black Republicans find themselves always having to prove who they are. Because the assumption is the Republican Party is for whites and the Democratic Party is for blacks,”

That was from the article, Black conservative tea party backers take heat.

Do you think liberals on staff at the New Mexico Independent will note how black tea partiers are called Uncle Tom, Oreos, and traitors?

The health care mandate is defended as Constitutional because it’s just a tax.

It gives people a choice: they can buy health insurance or they can pay a tax roughly equal to the cost of health insurance, which is used to subsidize the government’s health care program and families who wish to purchase health insurance….

Two questions.

1. Can the government mandate purchasing a GM automobile now that they have a controlling interest in GM with a similar tax, i.e., buy the car or pay a tax used to subsidize the program for those families to buy the same sort of car who cannot afford it? If the first is allowed, why not the second? And don’t pull the “not GM, but any automaker” argument. GM could install a proprietary widget in their car and the law would require that quite easily.
2. How about taxing people who don’t have at least one child of their own and adopt one child? Single -> tax. The tax roughly equal to the cost of supporting two children, which is used to subsidize those families which struggle to support those two children.

So, are the above two measures Constitutional? If they are not, why is the healthcare measure Constitutional while these are not?

That’s the conclusion of a study (if you wish to call it that) highlighted by CNN.

Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds.

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

The IQ differences, while statistically significant, are not stunning — on the order of 6 to 11 points — and the data should not be used to stereotype or make assumptions about people, experts say. But they show how certain patterns of identifying with particular ideologies develop, and how some people’s behaviors come to be.

The thing is, here’s how they define their terms.

The study takes the American view of liberal vs. conservative. It defines "liberal" in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. It does not look at other factors that play into American political beliefs, such as abortion, gun control and gay rights.

"Liberals are more likely to be concerned about total strangers; conservatives are likely to be concerned with people they associate with," he said.

But even using their (extremely flawed) definition, conservatives are more likely to give to charity, and do charity themselves, than liberals.  We’ve covered that topic before, a long time ago, in regards to giving for those victims of the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami in 2006; clearly people who are "genetically nonrelated".  And Rev. Don Sensing, for whom the hat tip goes (including the title of this post), makes one (of many) points against this study’s presuppositions and conclusions.

Consider these data from September 2008:

Last Friday, Sen. Joseph Biden, the Democratic candidate for vice president, released his tax returns for the years 1998 to 2007. The returns revealed that in one year, 1999, Biden and his wife Jill gave $120 to charity out of an adjusted gross income of $210,979. In 2005, out of an adjusted gross income of $321,379, the Bidens gave $380. In nine out of the ten years for which tax returns were released, the Bidens gave less than $400 to charity; in the tenth year, 2007, when Biden was running for president, they gave $995 out of an adjusted gross income of $319,853.

That’s liberal Joe Biden, btw. What about conservative (well, comparatively) John McCain?

In 2007, the Arizona senator reported $405,409 in total income and contributed $105,467, or 26 percent of his total income, to charity.
In 2006, Mr. McCain said he had $358,414 in total income and donated $64,695, or 18 percent of his total income, to charity.

You really should read his whole disassembly of this sham.

I’d like to pose a question to any out there who might support SSM. Allow me a moment to set the question up with some numbers.

The percentage of the population, based on a John Fund essay some years ago which I’m not going to dig up for y’all, offered that if finds that upwards 6% of the population are gay then in Canada, where SSM was legalized, then it was observed that about 6% of that gay population was availing itself of the opportunity to get married. This means that the SSM question affects just under .4% of the population. Conversely 94% of the population is not gay, and a considerably higher proportion of that population does get married. Within that larger set, a certain number of the marriages are “weak”, that is have significant difficulties in staying hitched. Today’s high divorce rate is a symptom of that fact.

Marriage itself is a institution and a practice which involves many things, including the relational aspect between the two individuals, the community, and immediate and extended family (that is kids). The arguments for SSM stress the first as being the primary aspect, i.e., that marriage is primarily a bond between two people in a loving and nurturing relationship. This argument consequentially reduces the emphasis on the other aspects of marriage. For the “weak” marriages above that in turn improves the chance of those marriages breaking up, because if marriage is “about” relationship and the relationship is sour or lost, then there is no point in continuing.

So here’s my question: If SSM were enacted, say federally, it seems quite plausible that the number of SSM marriage partners is roughly commensurate with increase in the number of children from broken families due to a new emphasis on the partner aspect of marriage. So, for argument, grant that these numbers are about the same, that is the number of people in new gay marriages is equal to the number of children abandoned to state care. If that were the case, would legalizing SSM still be the right thing to do?

“Elective abortion takes the life of an innocent human being.” – Scott Klusendorf

At Conversant Life, we have the post Dobson and Pigskin Politics, regarding the recent controversy surrounding the pro-life commercial produced for the upcoming Superbowl. Excerpts from the post,

In the article [ABC], Gary Schneeberger, a Focus on the Family spokesman, is quoted as saying, “There is nothing political or controversial about the spot.” Are you kidding me? Nothing political or controversial… right. Focus on the Family has become synonymous with both politics and controversy due to its strong alignment with crazy right-wing ideologies.

…

Regardless of where one stands on abortion, the only thing most us will take away from this commercial is that Focus on the Family ran a commercial during the Super Bowl, and the message, however good it might be, will be lost. Look, I do think abortion should be avoided in most circumstances and there are many folks on both sides of the political aisle who agree on this. But how to actually reduce the occurrence of abortions is the point of contention and Focus on the Family has unfortunately become associated with the Christian Coalition/Pat Robertson political machine on this. (FYI, Robertson says things like, “The feminist agenda encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”)

Where does one begin when addressing such illogical ranting? Does Jonathan (the post’s author) truly believe that an argument for choice – which, if pro-choice supporters wish to be consistent, is what the pro-life option really is – is, in reality, some crazy ideology? And is their argument so weak that they need to make a National Enquirer-esque link with Pat Robertson?

One has to wonder what those, like-minded with Jonathan, have to say regarding the Scott Klusendorf quote leading off this post? If, in fact, the unborn are human beings, then that changes everything. The ‘rights’ issue being discussed, then, moves from that of privacy to that of civil; from reproductive rights to life rights. As I have argued before, when faced with arguments against the pro-life movement, consider replacing the word “abortion” with that of “slavery”. The shortcomings of the pro-choice (sic) argument then become painfully clear.

Regardless of where one stands on slavery, the only thing most us will take away from this commercial is that Focus on the Family ran a commercial during the Super Bowl, and the message, however good it might be, will be lost. Look, I do think slavery should be avoided in most circumstances and there are many folks on both sides of the political aisle who agree on this. But how to actually reduce the occurrence of slaves is the point of contention…

Yeah, there’s a crazy ideology at play here, but it has nothing to do with being pro-life.

Unless you’ve been living in a closet for 2 week, or are a die-hard Obama supporter trying to avoid the news, Scott Brown, the Republican, won the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.

Yes, that Ted Kennedy.

Was this simply a local election, judged solely on local issues?  I don’t think so, especially since Brown himself injected national issues into it when he said he would vote against health care "reform".  Yes, local issues played a part, but I think the national ones overshadowed them. 

This is Massachusetts, after all, one of the bluest of blue states, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3.5 to 1, and where they were replacing a Democrat who’d held that seat for a generation. 

Polls a month ago put Coakley ahead by 20 points.  Brown then made it national, and all of a sudden the momentum shifted in a big way.  The payoffs, most notably to Senator Ben Nelson, didn’t help matters.

There are those that say conservatives shouldn’t get credit for Coakley’s defeat, and explain why the loss was mostly, if not wholly, due to disappointment by Democrats in Obama; what he promised vs. what he’s delivered.  The problem with that analysis is that not much on that front has changed in 3-4 weeks, when Coakley’s numbers tanked.  The issues noted in that blog post — military commissions, international surveillance, drug laws, sentencing reform, Gitmo’s closing, the Afghanistan war, anti-terror policies — have not substantially changed one bit since mid-December.  So you can’t really say that those are the issues that moved the voters.  A sea changed occurred, and there’s one thing, one major issue, that did change during that time; the health care "reform" bill. 

According to Rasmussen, 56% of voters thought that this was the most important issue.  Brown brought up the issue of voting against it, and once he did, voters flocked to his side.  Now true, some did so because they don’t like it at all, and some did so because they thought it didn’t go far enough.  Rasmussen notes:

Forty-seven percent (47%) favor the health care legislation before Congress while 51% oppose it. However, the intensity was clearly with those who are opposed. Just 25% of voters in Massachusetts Strongly Favor the plan while 41% Strongly Oppose it.

Fifty percent (50%) say it would be better to pass no health care legislation at all rather than passing the bill before Congress.

But the point here is this is Massachusetts, after all, where Democrats far outnumber Republicans and where Ted Kennedy was in a safe Senate seat for a generation.  And they’ve elected a man who says he’ll vote against the health care "reform" bill.  Conservatives, mostly of the Tea Party variety, have been getting the word out on how awful this bill will be, and while the opinion polls have gone against it, now, more importantly, the voters have as well, pulling off what’s been called an epic upset. 

Will Democrats in Washington get the message?  We’ll see.