"The nation’s Social Security and Medicare programs are sliding closer to insolvency, the federal government warned Monday in a new report underscoring the fiscal challenges facing the two mammoth retirement programs as baby boomers begin to retire." (And some think that making Medicare required for everyone is the solution. Only in Washington is failing on an even larger scale considered success.)

FALSANI:
What is sin?
OBAMA:
Being out of alignment with my values.
FALSANI:
What happens if you have sin in your life?
OBAMA:
I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.
(What brand of Christianity does this represent?  Honestly, I have no idea. Read the whole interview.)

“Nice work, occupiers,” tweeted Jeremy Tooker, owner of the popular Four Barrel Coffee. “You made me leave my sick kid at home to go clean paint bombs off my windows. That’ll show Wall Street, fellas.” (More May Day Occupy Wall Street madness at Yourish.com.)

"For activists and Christians opposed to the so-called Israeli occupation, two key votes by the United Methodists will certainly serve as a discouragement. On Wed., May 2, the denomination twice voted to reject resolutions that called for a divestment from companies accused of assisting Israel in the ongoing dispute over Middle Eastern lands." (The UMC cares for both the Jews and the Palestinians, and won’t blame one side for violence from both. Good for them.) (Oh, and on May 1st, "A Qassam rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip and exploded in an open area in Ashkelon Coast Regional Council.")

And finally, Economics 101, from Chuck Asay. (Click for a larger version.)

Remember when George W. Bush was "shredding the Constitution"?

As a senator and presidential candidate, [President Obama] had criticized George W. Bush for flouting the role of Congress. And during his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled Congress, Mr. Obama largely worked through the legislative process to achieve his domestic policy goals.

But increasingly in recent months, the administration has been seeking ways to act without Congress. Branding its unilateral efforts “We Can’t Wait,” a slogan that aides said Mr. Obama coined at that strategy meeting, the White House has rolled out dozens of new policies — on creating jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy standards, curbing domestic violence and more.

Each time, Mr. Obama has emphasized the fact that he is bypassing lawmakers. When he announced a cut in refinancing fees for federally insured mortgages last month, for example, he said: “If Congress refuses to act, I’ve said that I’ll continue to do everything in my power to act without them.”

Aides say many more such moves are coming. Not just a short-term shift in governing style and a re-election strategy, Mr. Obama’s increasingly assertive use of executive action could foreshadow pitched battles over the separation of powers in his second term, should he win and Republicans consolidate their power in Congress.

Congress is as much a part of the Constitution as is freedom of speech and the Commerce Clause. Yet Obama is willing to do an end-run around the representatives of the people. Isn’t that what Democrats have accused corporate interests of doing? Bribing Congress and ignoring it both result in a less representative government. But since he’s a Democrat, then it’s OK with those Occupy Wall Street types.

And the media, predictably, are defending him.

Mr. Obama got fed up, finally, last fall, according to Mr. Savage’s article, and the result was the “We Can’t Wait” project, which has led to dozens of executive actions on a range of issues, including jobs for veterans and fuel economy standards.

Unlike the Bush/Cheney team, Mr. Obama did not take office with the explicit goal of creating new powers for the presidency. That was not part of his agenda. Moreover, his executive actions often are more modest in their effect than the White House’s public relations team might admit.

Government by executive order is not sustainable in the long-term. Nor is it desirable, whether you agree or disagree with those orders. But in this particular case, there may be no alternative.

"He didn’t mean to, but this nasty ol’ Congress just won’t bow down and do his bidding, so there may be no alternative." I would remind Democrats that there are more Republicans in Congress precisely because he got his way so much when Democrats had bigger majorities. By doing an end-run around Congress, he’s trying to nullify the results of the last mid-term election; your votes.

For the Left, it’s not so much about principle as it is about politics.

Being on a business trip for a week makes it hard to keep up with blogging. And being on the US west coast helps with the realization that the world doesn’t revolve around Eastern time.

On with the links.

Obama is invoking Reagan a lot these days, trying to promote his agenda. But as Steven Hayward notes, Obama takes Reagan’s words out of the context of the politics and the times in which they were spoken.

Just prior to Reagan, Jimmy Carter worked with the dictatorship of North Korea to send food in return for not pursuing  nukes. In light of the recent (failed) N. Korea missile launch, you have to wonder why we thought it was a good idea to strike bargains with megalomaniacs.

The Hillary Rosen remarks, condemning Anne Romney for being a stay-at-home mom tipped the hand of the Democrats as to what they really think of women who make that choice. (Because, as with everything else from the Left, it’s not about the principle so much as it is the politics). On the Right, some were suggesting that we don’t need to worry about this because it means stooping to their level to respond to "Rosen-gate". But Ben Howe points out that, yes, this issue is worth our time and effort to respond to.

Irony Alert: For the third year in a row, Democrats punt on the budget, while at the same time accusing the Paul Ryan budget of being irresponsible.

Abortion as religion, with Planned Parenthood writing the prayer book.

"Everyone’s going to need healthcare, so Congress can force you to buy it", or so says President Obama in defense of the individual mandate. So my question is: what else is everyone going to need, such that he can force certain choices on you?

I’ll start:

• Everyone’s going to need food.
• Everyone’s going to need a casket.

Post yours in the comments.

If celibacy is to blame for the sexual abuse in the Catholic church, how does that explain the continuing abuses in the public schools? (Hint: it doesn’t.)

Here are 4 hard truths of health care reform. (Hint: if they promised something, it’s generally not going to happen.)

"[I]f you come down hard on Limbaugh because he has crossed a line, you must come down hard on Schultz and Maher because they have crossed the same line…." (Hint: Schultz and Maher supporters haven’t.)

New York City Mayor Bloomberg, not content with nannying the well-off on what they can and can’t eat at restaurants, now is denying food to the homeless because it might be too salty. (Hint: That’s not compassion.)

If they had been Republicans, this would have been racist. (Hint: They’re Democrats.)

Is Zionism humanitarianism? (Hint: Yes.)

In Canada, strip searches from possession of a deadly … crayon.

Also from the Great White North, government intrusion into homeschool, saying that Christian parents can’t teach a Biblical view of homosexuality. Freedom of religion is being chipped away slowly enough that most don’t see it.

If Obama is some post-racial president, why is he launching "African Americans for Obama"?

Medical "ethicists" are seriously arguing that post-birth newborns are "not persons" and can ethically be "aborted".

With all the religious implications of Obama’s policies, you’d think he’d have kept around his faith-based council for advice. Nope, they’ve just faded away.

Movie reviewers of the liberal persuasion are all for anti-war, anti-military or pro-environmental message movies, but that idea gets thrown out when they disapprove of the message. Suddenly, it’s "propaganda".

Scofflaw Democrats. "The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 further provides that if, for two years in a row, more than 45% of Medicare funding is coming from general revenues rather than Medicare taxes, the president must submit legislation to Congress to address the Medicare funding crisis. President Bush dutifully followed the law, but President Obama has ignored it for the last three years."

Obama claims that we can’t drill our way out of the energy problem, and then, in the same speech, notes that domestic oil production is at it’s highest level in 8 years. Because we drilled! Can’t have it both ways, Mr. President, but the press will try to let you have it.

President Obama may have picked the wrong fight when his administration announced they were forcing the Catholic Church to provide contraceptives including the morning after pill to their employees. In his unforced error, the President may have awakened the sleeping giant of the Catholic Church and set the wheels in motion for a permanent political shift. From the Daily Mail:

Prominent Catholic leaders across the U.S. have threatened to turn voters against President Obama over his controversial plans to offer free birth control.

The fight is over a provision of the health reform law announced on January 20 that would require health insurance plans — including those offered by institutions such as Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities — to offer free birth control including sterilization.

According to estimates, there are some 70 million Catholic voters – and many could be posed to vote against the president in the crucial upcoming election.

Catholic League head Bill Donohue said: ‘Never before, unprecedented in American history, for the federal government to line up against the Roman Catholic Church,’ CBS New York reported.

‘This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.’ Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who was promoted to the status of a Cardinal just weeks ago, spoke out about the issue.

‘It’s not about contraception. It’s about the right of conscience,’ he told reporters. ‘The government doesn’t have the right to butt into the internal governance and teachings of the church,” he said.

‘This is not a Catholic issue, it’s an American issue. We’re strong on this issue of conscience, and that’s what’s at stake here.’

Catholic clergy on Sunday called on the faithful to write Congress to protest new birth control rules from President Barack Obama’s administration, stepping up a campaign that began a week ago with denunciations from the pulpit at Masses across the country.

Catholics are traditionally staunchly pro-life despite their tendency to vote for Democrats. But over the past couple of election cycles, Catholics have slowly begun to wake up to the fact that many prominent Democrats who also profess to be Catholics (think John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi) don’t hold the same values as those that the church endorses.

The Catholic Church is rising to the challenge because they realize this controversy is not just about abortion. It’s also about religious liberty. And they are finally realizing that Democrats that they have worked to elect over the past several decades are not their allies. It’s about time.

Recently jobs numbers came out … two data points are of interest and can be used, perhaps, to judge the bias of the sources. One set, points out that January job numbers are up and by one metric unemployment has dropped to 8.3%, getting firmly below 9. The other set, which is new as well, points out the divergence between two proxies which normally track but recently have diverged. Unemployment, as tracked by those applying for unemployment benefits and jobs, normally tracks well with the number of unemployed. Yet in the last 18 months this tracking has diverged. More and more people have (according to the second unemployment proxy) have given up seeking work. By that second metric, unemployment is above 10.5%.

Honest reporting would, I offer, report both points. There are many, who for political reasons, decide on or the other figure is more significant. Are there good reasons besides the nominally “bad” political partisanship ones for not noting both?

Oh, by the by, I’ve got to run early to get to a job site about an hours drive north. My links post will go out tonight.

The breast cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, has guidelines as to who it will fund with its money. There were some recent changes, the results of which caused a political firestorm.

Komen said it could not continue to fund Planned Parenthood because it has adopted new guidelines that bar it from funding organizations under congressional investigation. The House oversight and investigations subcommittee announced in the fall an investigation into Planned Parenthood’s funding.

Planned Parenthood has been at the center of a lot of heated political battles lately. Most center on whether the group, as an abortion provider, should receive government funds for other services it provides, such as offering contraceptives and preventive screenings.

For the Left , Planned Parenthood, and abortion in general, is a serious political hot potato that must not be curtailed in the least. So when judging whether or not any action against PP, by Komen or anyone, is reasonable, the first question they ask is…well, they don’t ask questions. It’s just wrong by definition. And also by definition, it’s politically motivated.

Never mind what people or organizations actually say, or that they’re in line with previously enacted guidelines. Nope, doesn’t matter at all. It’s always political.

Apparently in Florida Democrat PACS and large contributors are posting their own pro-Gingrich anti-Romney ads. Two questions. First, do you think that is because the feel Mr Gingrich is a weaker opponent against Mr Obama or is it because they actually prefer him as a possible President. If you thought it was the former, and not the latter, why do you think that supporting a person who you think is less fit for office is your patriotic duty? If you think that it is likely that the answer was the former how do you then explain the lack of objections to this tactics on left leaning blogs?

Rick Santorum and his wife went through the tragedy of a stillborn baby. Normally, pundits on the Left would be silent or respectful. Don Surber points this out.

JACQUELINE Kennedy suffered the three worst outcomes of a pregnancy.

She suffered a miscarriage in 1955. Her daughter, Arabella, was stillborn in 1956. And in 1963, her son, Patrick, died two days after his birth.

I don’t remember a newspaper columnist or television commentator making light of her personal tragedies.

That was then, this is now.

Nearly 50 years after the death of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, some liberal commentators made political use of the death of Gabriel Santorum, who died within two hours of his birth.

As his mother, Karen, wrote in 1998 in her book, “Letters to Gabriel,” she and her husband brought him home before his burial. She had to explain to two young children the death of the baby brother they had expected.

His father is a Republican who now is running for president.

After Rick Santorum won the Iowa primary, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and Alan Colmes of Fox News decided to make fun of how the Santorums handled this death.

“He’s not a little weird, it’s that he’s really weird,” Robinson said of Santorum.

“And some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird, um, that I think that some Republicans are gonna be off-put.

“Um, not everybody is going to, going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the, the, the stillborn ah, ah, child, ah, um, whose body they took home to, to kind of sleep with it, introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.”

Peter Wehner, writing at Commentary, finds this rather unwierd.

On these comments I have three observations to make, the first of which is that spending time with a stillborn child (or one who died shortly after birth, as in the Santorum case) is commonly recommended. The matter of taking the child home for a few hours is less common, but they did it so that their other children could also spend a little time with the deceased child, and that is definitely recommended.

Wehner cites recommendations from the American Pregnancy Association. Going back to Don Surber, he notes one particular circumstance why taking the stillborn child home to the family might not be done.

Charles Lane, editorial writer for the Washington Post, responded to the Santorum controversy by recalling his family’s loss of a son whose heart stopped two hours before birth.

“I regret that, unlike the Santorums, who presented the body of their child to their children, we did not show Jonathan’s body to our other son, who was six years old at the time,” Lane wrote.

“When I told him what had happened, his first question was, “Well, where is the baby?”

“I tried to explain what a morgue is, and why the baby went there. It was awkward and unsatisfactory — too abstract.

“In hindsight, I was not protecting my son from a difficult conversation, I was protecting myself.”

Perfectly understandable, but to go ahead and do it is most certainly not "weird".

So what’s the difference between then and now? Back to Wehner:

The second point is the casual cruelty of Robinson and those like him. Robinson seems completely comfortable lampooning a man and his wife who had experienced the worst possible nightmare for parents: the death of their child. It is one thing to say you would act differently if you were in the situation faced by Rick and Karen Santorum?; it’s quite another to deride them as “crazy” and “very weird,” which is what commentators on the left are increasingly doing, and with particular delight and glee.

We are seeing how ideology and partisan politics can so disfigure people’s minds and hearts that they become vicious in their assaults on those with whom they have political disagreements. I would hope no one I know would, in a thousand years, ridicule parents who were grappling with unfathomable human pain. Even if those parents were liberal. Even if they were running for president and first lady.

The third point is it tells you something about the culture in which we live that in some quarters those who routinely champion abortion, even partial-birth abortion, are viewed as enlightened and morally sophisticated while those grieving the loss of their son, whom they took home for a night before burying, are mercilessly mocked.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the times.

Some of this may be attributable to "the times" in general, to be sure. But I would like to note the blatant hypocrisy of liberals who claim to care more than their conservative brethren. This from the ideology that, as Wehner so aptly puts it, "champion[s] abortion, even partial-birth abortion". That is a culture of death, one that does not value life or give it the proper reverence, especially for the least of these.

I always find the term "Christian Liberal" as something of an oxymoron. I understand why Christians might be drawn to some of the Left’s rhetoric and positions, but this sort of behavior belies much of what goes on beneath, and it’s not something I could bear to support. I can still love my fellow man, give to good charities, and care for the poor without having to support a political party where this sort of attitude is barely beneath the surface.

Starting with Occupy Wall Street:

• If the Tea Party had been shown to have done just a few of these things, if would have run on the nightly news for days. (Just recall how unsubstantiated accusations of racism were reported), and they would have been (rightly) castigated. When OWS does it, the press is mute.
• Richmond charged the Tea Partiers $10,000 to have a rally. OWS, nothing. The Tea Party is going to ask for their money back on the grounds that the government is playing favorites.
• It looks like even those who oppose the fat cats on Wall St. can act just like them. For a group upset at how the wealth has been spread around, they don’t do such a good job at spreading it themselves.
• When Lech Walesa, Poland’s former President, said he support OWS, the AP was all over it. But when he got more details about what was really going on and what the demands were (such as they were), he decided not to support it, saying "American is sliding towards socialism."  All of a sudden, the AP website didn’t seem to think that Walesa existed. Oh, that liberal media.
• Vagrants started to take advantage of the free food at the OWS protests, and all of a sudden the 99% started acting like the 1%. One protestor was quoted as saying, “It’s turning into us against them. They come in here and they’re looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don’t bring anything to the table at all.” It got so bad, the folks manning the kitchen staged their own protest against providing food for free to those who weren’t there to support the cause, aka freeloaders.
• Take a look at these headlines. If they described Tea Partiers, you just know they’d be the top story on the nightly news. OWS gets a pass. A lot of passes, actually.

Folks who support assisted-suicide claim they just want to stop suffering. Today’s slippery slope defines "suffering" as "loneliness" and financial troubles.

James Taranto starts out by describing what sounds like the housing bubble. But he’s not. What other bubble is out there, inflating as we speak, and is ready to burst?

With a Democrat in the White House, the "no blood for oil" chant has gone on hiatus. Imagine if Dubya had gone into Libya.

And finally, speaking of OWS, here’s a graphic to help the media tell Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party apart. (Click for a bigger image.)

And the Supreme Court case hasn’t even started. No, this unraveling is happening all on its own. From the AP:

At stake is the CLASS Act, a major new program intended to provide affordable long-term care insurance. Last Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the administration would not proceed with the plan because she has been unable to find a way to make the program financially solvent.

Even before ObamaCare goes into full effect, it’s clear that it was not the money-saving bill it was sold as.

Officials said they discovered they could not make CLASS both affordable and financially solvent while keeping it a voluntary program open to virtually all workers, as the law required. The law mandated that the administration certify CLASS would remain financially solvent for 75 years before putting it into place.

The only way to pay for socialized health care is to mandate it, juwst lke the (in my opinion) unconstitutional individual mandate it. The road to tyranny is paved with good intentions.

Megan McArdle lets us know that this is not, or shouldn’t be, a surprise, and wonders what other "good intentions" are still buried in the bill.

It is of course, great news that the administration has not actually gone forward and implemented an unsustainable program that would have had disastrous effects on the federal budget.  But it’s not great news that HHS has found that the program was just as disastrous as conservatives said it was . . . yet a Democratic Congress, deep in the passion of their historic moment, passed the damn thing anyway.  It’s in fact deeply troubling.  The problems with CLASS were known from day one, but no one listened, because it gave them good numbers to sell their program politically.

Now it turns out that ObamaCare reduces the deficit over ten years by about $70 billion instead of $140 billion.  Only . . . what about all the other stuff that had problems, like the reimbursement cuts that both Medicare’s chief actuary and the head of the CBO warned might very likely prove too deep to sustain medically or politically?  Can we assume that Democrats exercised the same thought and foresight about the other parts of ObamaCare that they did with the CLASS Act?  How come all of those liberal health care wonks that Kevin [Drum] cites were unable to identify the problems with this program before it passed?

This is going to be very, very messy. It needs to be repealed, the sooner the better.

Let me get this straight: The government tells banks who they must lend to. Banks comply, and in doing so, very nearly go under. (Oversimplification, I know.) Obama propped up his friends in the banking industry by bailing them out. And the "Occupy Wall Street" folks are upset at the bankers? No, not just them; they’re upset at capitalism in general. Here’s a list of proposed demands that should make you squirm. Yes, it’s just a proposal from a forum post, but the promoted it to the front page of the site. And it gets general approval from the liberal commenters. "Universal single payer healthcare", "Guaranteed living wage regardless of employment" (emphasis mine), "Free college education", etc. The taxes required for all of this make the current unsustainable spending look like chump change. This certainly does not represent "the other 99%", as they claim.

Democrats insist that the Tea Party is run by the Koch brothers, on the idea that since the Kochs support it and give money to it, that they therefore control it. Wrong, but let’s go with that. How, then, to explain the big Soros, union, and other astroturfing money coming in to support OWS? (Additionally, if the Tea Party is racist for not having some requisite number of minorities among them, will those same people level that charge against OWS? Yeah, right. It’s not applied in the same way, depending on your political persuasion, so, in truth, it’s just a political bludgeon.)

And let me ask you this; if hundreds of Tea Partiers were being arrested around America, don’t you think the liberal pundits would be all over it? But when it happens at OWS, little if anything. In fact, the differences in how the media cover these two movements is and will be a very instructive lesson in media bias.

Getting away from OWS, when  you quote Ronald Reagan, you don’t think a little context might be in order?

Crony capitalism for Republicans? Bad. Crony capitalism for Democrats? Oh look, a squirrel!

And finally, if you’re going to protest, place the blame where it really belongs. (Click for a larger image.)

The mantra is always that the rich should pay their "fair share". Roseanne Barr recently said that anyone with personal wealth over $100 million should send the excess to the government (and if they won’t, she deadpanned that we should send them to reeducation camps or behead them (civility watch!)). President Obama said that you don’t have any inherent right to a certain amount of profit.

Now that’s an interesting juxtaposition; Roseanne Barr has more courage of her convictions, such that she should have a more concrete dollar value than Obama’s "certain amount".

What I would like to find out is, if there are liberals who would go on the record saying exactly (or even closely) what these values should be.

• How much is the rich’s "fair share"? The only answer we’ve ever had is "more than they’re paying now".
• Should the government put a limit on how much private citizens are allowed to earn, or a limit on total wealth? If so, how much?
• Should the government put a limit on the profit a private company is allowed to make, as either a percentage or an absolute annual amount? If so, how much?

Herman Cain has his "999" plan. Rep. John Linder started a Flat Tax proposal. You know where these guys stand. But how about the Left coming out and telling us how much is too much? What’s the target they’re shooting at?