In an number of previous essays the notions of Bertrand de Jouvenel regarding political theory have been utilized. One of these ideas in particular is that government is rightly formed for a particular society and culture when its authority is freely granted by the people, that is it utilizes the authority granted to it by the people and does not have to resort to coercion. This idea of government does not stem from rights or freedoms and the “standard” contract terminology stemming from Hobbes/Lockean political philosophies. Limitations on government stems from both the withholding of authority and that what actions and freedoms state may grant to a person, does not by that granting make that action ethical or moral. For example, the Roman state (and in fact many states) granted the power of life and death to the state over individual citizens. For over 200 years, Christians were put to death for their faith under this power granted. That however, did not make it ethical or moral for a particular Roman to do put a Christian to death. Or more plainly, it was within the boundaries of Roman rule to put a Christian to death but it was unethical for individual Roman to do so. Nero as Emperor could execute Christians as such but it was unethical for Nero the man to do so.

Christians for just slightly under two thousand years have opposed abortion. A statement regarding abortion made today of and by those against abortion that fixes the idea that the act of abortion is a equivalent to murder and the actor be it the mother or the doctor, is equivalent to a murderer is not unheard of in pro-life circles. Some pro-life activists “go this far” and those criticizing the pro-life Christian position remark that this should be a logical consequence of ascribing personhood to the fetus. It is not necessary to ascribe full or even partial “personhood” to a fetus in order to oppose abortion. But even granting that, a view of government as expressed above combined with Christian ethics does not necessitate that step of equivicating abortion with murder. Read the rest of this entry

The blog "Stop the ACLU" has a run-down of just the recent cases of countries doing things in a manner that doesn’t exactly say they like us again.  Cuba and Venezuela opening up their airfields to Russian bombers.  Ecuador (Ecuador!) expelling US diplomats for the second time this month.  Iran continues its nuclear ambitions (and blames economic isolation for their pushback).  North Korea threatens to test a ballistic that some believe could hit the US west coast. 

Hillary Clinton did, however, use the strongest possible terms to denounce that missile test, saying that such a launch would be "very unhelpful". 

Yeah, that’ll teach ’em.

Gilda Radner’s character from old Saturday Night Live shows, Emily Litella, was a hard-of-hearing commentator on the show’s Weekend Update segment.  She would, for example, go on and on with her outrage that the Supreme Court was considering a "deaf" penalty case, or with her support of "Youth in Asia".  When Chevy Chase nudged her and let her know that it was instead a "death" penalty case or "euthanasia", realizing she’d misheard the subject, she meekly turned back to the camera and gave her trademark line, "Never mind."

Apparently, Miss Litella went on to become our first woman President.

Confronting misgivings, even in his own party, President Barack Obama mounted a stout defense of his blueprint to overhaul the economy Thursday, declaring the national crisis is "not as bad as we think" and his plans will speed recovery.

Challenged to provide encouragement as the nation’s "confidence builder in chief," Obama said Americans shouldn’t be whipsawed by bursts of either bad or good news and he was "highly optimistic" about the long term.

The president’s proposals for major health care, energy and education changes in the midst of economic hard times faced skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill, as senators questioned his budget outlook and the deficits it envisions in the middle of the next decade.

(Emphasis on the "Never mind" added.)  This is why many of us are skeptical of the hand of government trying to direct the economy.  We wind up with "cures", such as these massive spending debt packages, that could be worse than the disease.  Just ask a Democrat in the know.

Sen. Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Budget Committee called the track of future deficits "unsustainable" and singled out Obama’s proposal for adding $634 billion in health care spending over the next 10 years.

"Some of us have a real pause about the notion of putting substantially more money into the health care system when we’ve already got a bloated system," said Conrad, D-N.D.

"Unsustainable"?  I thought Obama was supposed to be the responsible, sustainable lifestyle kind of President. 

Now, frankly, I don’t know for sure if even this new analysis of the economy is correct, and there’s no doubt we’ve in the middle of a significant downturn right now.  The point is, rushing through a "fix", and especially a "fix" we’ll be decades paying for, should never, ever be done.  But cries from Washington Democrats, liberal bloggers and pundits that this had to be done now and be done big (with some still saying that it should be much bigger than it is) are irresponsible. 

The size of the "stimulus" is one thing.  The rush to do something, anything, is the worst kind of "government is the solution" thinking.

President Obama, demonstrating another example of what Jim called an "incomplete life ethic", rescinded Bush’s executive order, reversing the ban on most federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.  Bush’s restrictions were informed by his moral beliefs, but Obama will have none of that.

Aides to Obama told reporters in a phone conference Sunday that the new administration intends to be led by a “responsible practice of science and evidence instead of dogma.” Harold Varmus of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said, “We view what happened with stem cell research in the last administration as one manifestation of failure to think carefully about how federal support of science and the use of scientific advice occurs.”

He once said that determining when a baby gets human rights was "above my pay grade".  Apparently, deciding when to destroy them isn’t. 

This, then, is apparently the "rightful place" that he promised to restore science to.  It doesn’t sound like morals and ethics are part of the equation anymore. 

Ryan Anderson, writing in the Weekly Standard, brings this point home (as well as noting a "big lie" that Obama continues to perpetuate).

During the ceremony this morning, Obama announced that by signing this executive order "we will lift the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research." Of course there never was a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research. President Bush was, in fact, the first president in history to fund embryonic stem cell research. The compromise Bush reached, however, put restrictions in place that prevented the further destruction of human embryos. It is these restrictions protecting human life that Obama has lifted.

Anderson notes that, while Obama did appeal to "moral values", he set up a straw man that he could easily knock down and brush aside, supposedly taking the issue off the table.  Anderson’s article covers this and a number of other objections that Obama’s decision simply ignores.  Read the whole thing.

The Washington Post headlined their article, "Obama Aims to Shield Science From Politics".  It not only touches on the signing of the EO, but notes how this value system will affect us going forward.  A memorandum was issued along with this signing.

The memorandum will ensure that "people who are appointed to federal positions in science have strong credentials and that the vetting process for evaluating scientific information doesn’t lead to any undermining of the scientific opinion," he said.

That is to say, Obama wishes to shield science from similar ethical concerns, or indeed any debate, during his administration.  Heck, his spokesmen injected politics into the debate by trash-talking "the last administration as one  manifestation of failure to think carefully."  One wonders how the WaPo headline writer actually came up with that summary of the story.

And finally, Scott Ott satirizes this whole situation, such that it can be, with this:

As he signs an executive order Monday lifting limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, President Barack Obama said he intends to make the wealthiest Americans “bear their fair share of the burden.”

Following through on his inaugural promise “to restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost“, the president will order the National Institutes of Health to extract stem cells from embryos whose parents earn more than $250,000 per year, and to inject them into “the sick and crippled middle class.”

“Let me be perfectly clear,” Mr. Obama said, “if your family earns less than $250,000 per year, the federal government will not harvest one single stem cell from your embryos…not one single cell. In fact, for 95 percent of working families, my stem cell plan contains nothing but miraculous healing. That’s right, the cures are on the way.”

Again, read the whole thing, and get a good chuckle.

Peter Robinson, writing in Forbes, notes three guys who are shocked to find that Obama is such a liberal.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell famously asserted, “needs a constant struggle.”

Congratulations this week to three journalists who have finally taken up that constant struggle: Christopher Buckley, David Gergen and David Brooks. All three used to insist that Obama was some species of centrist or moderate. Now that Obama has proposed the most massive expansion of government in the history of the republic, each has recognized that just conceivably he might have been mistaken.

I touched on Brooks last Friday, but read the article for details on Buckley and Gergen.  The wool over their eyes is slowly being pulled back up, and they don’t like what they see.

What’s interesting is to hear Robinson compare who got Obama wrong with who got him right.

Buckley, Gergen and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.

Contrast Buckley, Gergen and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.

Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. “Just what evidence do you have,” Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, “that he’s anything but a hard-left ideologue?”

The elite journalists, I repeat, got Obama wrong. The troglodytes got him right. As our national drama continues to unfold, bear that in mind.

Please?

David Brooks is shocked — SHOCKED — that Barack Obama tuned out to be liberal! 

You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We like his investments in education and energy innovation. We support health care reform that expands coverage while reducing costs.

But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

And the real kicker:

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

Emphasis mine.  Well, actually, emphasis of this was made by Republicans long before election day.  One only had to look at his record, such as it was, to know this.  And yet these "Brooks Moderates" were so caught up in the words and the history of it all that they apparently turned off those parts of their brains responsible for critical thinking.

Looks like the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune did the same thing.

Whoa!

The Obama administration and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate are blowing the lid off of spending restraint. But they’re finally meeting some resistance within their own party.

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), in an essay published Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, ripped a spending bill passed by the House last week as "a sprawling $410 billion compilation of nine spending measures that lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largesse."

He said he will vote against it, and he urged President Barack Obama to veto it if it passes the Senate. We second that motion.

(Hat tip: Don Surber)  The Tribune endorsed Obama, and now they’re thinking they can pull back the reigns.  They sound like they’re saying, "Obama’s a big spender?  Who knew?"

I will heartily agree that Republicans spent very irresponsibly during their tenure with control of the Legislative and Executive branches.  But Democrats, true to their ever-constant form (a form that moderates like Brooks should have look to history, even recent history, to confirm), have outspent Republicans by a huge, huge margin.  "Tax and spend" wasn’t a catchphrase made up by Ronald Reagan; it’s a description of their MO.

The Democrats who "rediscovered" fiscal responsibility during the Dubya years have shown that outrage to be mere window dressing than principle.  There are indeed Republicans who had the same problem during the Clinton years and while Democrats held Congress.  But there is simply no real equivalence here. 

While it is still true that Republicans will overspend less than Democrats, it pains me to have to put it that way.  Nonetheless, if you value fiscal responsibility, convincing Republicans to slow down on spending seems to me to have a far better chance of success than convincing Democrats of that.  Mr. Brooks, please take note.

That was then:

In early October, as the meltdown of the financial industry gained momentum following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 59% of U.S. voters agreed with Ronald Reagan that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

This is now:

Since then, the stock market has fallen roughly 3,000 points, millions of jobs have been lost, nearly a trillion dollars has been spent so far to bail out the financial industry, an additional $787-billion government stimulus package has been approved, and a new president has taken office who has proposed spending billions and billions more.

Despite all that, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows that the basic views of the American people have not change: 59% of voters still agree with Reagan’s inaugural address statement. Only 28% disagree, and 14% are not sure.

As Pejman Yousefzadeh said at RedState, "It may be Barack Obama’s White House. But it is still Ronald Reagan’s America." 

It’s been a few weeks since we had one of these, and boy are things changing…or not.

"Extraordinary Rendition"?  Keeping the Bush administration policy.

Holding "enemy combatants" without trial?  Obama’s nominee for Solicitor General, Harvard Law Dean Elena Kagan, says yes we can!  (And Obama & Holder second that motion.)

Make Guantanamo Geneva-Convention-compliant?  It already is.

Wiretapping international calls related to terrorists?  The Obama administration continues to protect it.

Continuity we can believe in!

And Nicholas Guariglia says that we should have seen this coming.

Frugality.  Thriftiness.  These terms are being redefined by the NY Times as "dead weight". 

As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.

Today, years after the recovery, even well-off Japanese households use old bath water to do laundry, a popular way to save on utility bills. Sales of whiskey, the favorite drink among moneyed Tokyoites in the booming ’80s, have fallen to a fifth of their peak. And the nation is losing interest in cars; sales have fallen by half since 1990.

Never mind those government types that encouraged banks to give loans to those who couldn’t afford them.  Never mind the investors who spend too much money on too much risk.  No, you, dear person living within your means, you are the reason we’re in this mess. 

I’m sorry, but this reasoning is utterly upside down.  Instead of trash-talking responsible living, perhaps a recession is what we need to pare back some of the overspending we’ve been doing, personally and federally. 

(In fact, some economists say that we would normally have mini-recessions now and then that would serve to do these corrections little by little if the federal government didn’t manipulate monetary policy to keep them away.  Now, after other poor government decisions have come to a head, they’re all hitting at once.)

One of these excesses is arguably federal pensions.  The world is finding out (again) that a one-size-fits-all social security program means when we fail, we all fail since all our eggs are forced to be in fewer baskets (sometimes just one).  Japan is seeing this.

Japan’s aging population is not helping consumption. Businesses had hoped that baby boomers — the generation that reaped the benefits of Japan’s postwar breakneck economic growth — would splurge their lifetime savings upon retirement, which began en masse in 2007. But that has not happened at the scale that companies had hoped.

Economists blame this slow spending on widespread distrust of Japan’s pension system, which is buckling under the weight of one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies. That could serve as a warning for the United States, where workers’ 401(k)’s have been ravaged by declining stocks, pensions are disappearing, and the long-term solvency of the Social Security system is in question.

Other countries, like France and Germany, have had to come to terms with this in the past, and now it’s our turn. 

Spending our way out of overspending is not the answer.  Letting the market roll, with its ups and down, would hurt far, far less than the climbs and crashes we’re having to get used to.

And it’s blowing away the rage that Democrats would have had if Bush had done this.

The economic stimulus signed by President Barack Obama will spread billions of dollars across the country to spruce up aging roads and bridges. But there’s not a dime specifically dedicated to fixing leftover damage from Hurricane Katrina.

And there’s no outrage about it.

Democrats who routinely criticized President George W. Bush for not sending more money to the Gulf Coast appear to be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in his first major spending initiative. Even the Gulf’s fiercest advocates say they’re happy with the stimulus package, and their states have enough money for now to address their needs.

What a difference an administration makes.

It’s a significant change in tone from the Bush years, when any perceived slight of Katrina victims was met with charges that the Republican president who bungled the initial response to the disaster continued to callously ignore the Gulf’s needs years later.

Just last summer, Democrats accused Bush of putting Iraq before New Orleans when he sought to block Gulf Coast reconstruction money from a $162 billion war spending bill. Bush was pilloried for not mentioning the disaster in back-to-back State of the Union addresses.

Bush couldn’t miss mentioning Katrina let alone sending more money there.  But Obama doesn’t spend a dime in a 3/4 of a trillion dollar spending spree and cue the crickets.

What, does Obama hate black people?  That’s preposterous now, and it was preposterous then.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at President Obama’s proposed mortgage rescue plan and finds that it could create far more problems than it solves:

President Obama yesterday announced his plan to prevent home foreclosures, saying he wanted to be “very clear about what this plan will not do: It will not rescue the unscrupulous or irresponsible by throwing good taxpayer money after bad loans . . . And it will not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never be able to afford.”

We really do wish he were right. In fact, the details released yesterday suggest the President’s plan will do all of the above. The plan will help some struggling homeowners. But by investing in failure, the Administration will also prolong the housing downturn and make financing a home purchase more difficult for future borrowers. Meanwhile, the plan isn’t likely to slow the continuing decline in housing prices.

The President’s plan is predicated on the false belief that everyone deserves to own a home. The fact is that not everyone can afford to own a home. The efforts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make it easier for people to buy homes they could not afford are at the heart of the current financial crisis. Unfortunately, the President’s plan does nothing to address this fundamental issue and instead just prolongs the crisis and leaving taxpayers on the hook.

As CNBC’s Rick Santelli correctly points out in this clip, this is an example of government rewarding bad behavior. Unfortunately it’s the 92% of honest, hardworking Americans he refers to that will pay the price.

Some good news from this administration:

President Obama opposes any move to bring back the so-called Fairness Doctrine, a spokesman told FOXNews.com Wednesday.

The statement is the first definitive stance the administration has taken since an aide told an industry publication last summer that Obama opposes the doctrine — a long-abolished policy that would require broadcasters to provide opposing viewpoints on controversial issues.

"As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated," White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told FOXNews.com.

The "Fairness Doctrine" is really just targeted at radio, where conservative voices dominate.  You typically don’t hear those promoting it complaining that there’s too much liberal bias in this newspaper or that TV network; it’s always a complaint about conservative opinions and ideas.  So the idea that this is about "fairness" is just a smokescreen.

Blogger Dan Riehl is skeptical, though.

Instapundit posts word that Obama does not want the Fairness Doctrine back. Great.

That makes him look like quite the moderate. But the actual doctrine was always a stretch. Get back to me in 3-6 months after we see what his FCC does in terms of "localism."

That’s always been the play more likely to get done. Until I hear something from the FCC, the WH release is what I’m growing accustomed to with Obama: just words.

It is possible to have the effect of a "Fairness Doctrine" without the name, so indeed we’ll see.  But it is nice to get the word from the President.  We’ll hold you to that, sir.

Melanie Phillips in the London Daily Mail observes:

The story of 13-year-old Alfie, who reportedly has become a father by 15-year-old Chantelle, is a fable for our tragically degraded times.

Most of the attention has focused upon Alfie, who looks about eight and doesn’t even understand the word ‘financial’. But while Alfie’s youth is exceptional, this situation is not.

Whether or not Alfie is the father of baby Maisie or whether that honour goes to one of Chantelle’s reputed other boyfriends, the fact is that the length and breadth of this country there are many Chantelles, having sex and often getting pregnant while under age.

Phillips points out what has long been a refrain in societies where liberal programs have taken hold; the unintended consequences of government intervention.

There has been a profound loss of the very notions of self-restraint and boundaries of behaviour, promoted from the top by narcissistic liberals and funded at the bottom by welfare benefits which cushion people from the consequences of their actions.

The liberal intelligentsia pushed the idea that the worst things in the world were stigma and shame. Illegitimacy was accordingly abolished, lone mothers provided with welfare benefits and any talk about the advantages to children from marriage and sexual continence was to be banned as ‘judgmental’.

With all constraints on behaviour vilified as ‘moralising’, sex became treated merely as a pleasurable pastime devoid of any spiritual dimension.

As parents careered through serial sexual partnerships, putting their own short-term desires first and effectively behaving like children, they no longer wanted to be bothered with taking responsibility for their own offspring and so started treating them as if they were grown-up.

This was massively reinforced by the approach to sex education and contraception by schools and public health professionals, who treated children as quasi-adults capable of making their own life choices.

What they actually needed, as all children do, was firm and consistent boundaries which taught them that sex was properly an adult activity.

Instead, they were taught to treat sex a bit like bungee-jumping or paragliding – to have fun doing it, but to take precautions to avoid getting hurt.

And, she notes, the only definition of "hurt" was "getting pregnant".  Never mind the emotional or psychological harm that might be involved.

Read the whole thing.  Seems the more sex education we have and the earlier it starts, the more stories like this that we get.  Phillips’ article is a strong argument for the teaching of responsibility and its consequences rather than covering the world in bubble wrap. 

Mickey Kaus is alarmed that the stimulus package has the effect of rolling back welfare reform.  Moe Lane, in responding to Kaus’ shock, wonders why this reaction.

The thing that I enjoy most these days when I read a moderate Democrat’s first realization that he or she really did go out and vote against their core principles/class interests/better judgment this go round is the startled tone that’s usually taken.  Of course you did that.  We told you that you were.  But you were too busy living in the moment to listen.  So, yeah, Mickey: the Democrats – who don’t really care about Obama’s big plans – are going to gut welfare, and it’s entirely possible that Obama doesn’t realize this.  Or if he does, he doesn’t particularly care about your feelings.  Why should he?  He can win you over again, right?  After all, who needs to be faithful if you can sweet-talk your way out every problem?

Go to the link to find out which woman politician had predicted this as well.  Oh yeah, she got that right.

All that’s left for the economic stimulus bill is for President Obama to sign it.  A round-up of reaction:

Dan Spencer at RedState notes an Obama quote from the day before the bill passed, “We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying.”  The accompanying graphic is the ultimate irony.

CBS news reports that the President is going to convene a “fiscal responsibility summit” on February 23rd.  Again with the irony.  The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

And finally, satirist Scott Ott engages in some wishful thinking:

President Barack Obama said today that “after a restless night’s sleep” he will veto the $787 billion economic stimulus package passed by Democrats in Congress on Friday.

“I had a dream,” said a visibly shaken Mr. Obama. “that my daughters, Sasha and Malia, were trapped under the 1,100-page legislation. In the dream I saw my girls as women in their forties and they were still paying for this. I woke up, and did the math, and realized that it wasn’t just a dream. Has anybody read this thing yet?”

Read the whole thing, even if Congress won’t.