A couple of items related to spending and our national debt.

Obama called Bush’s increase in the debt "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic". What does he think about his own contribution to the debt?

Obama signed an agreement to fund the DC-area incredibly successful school voucher program. Yet with all the new spending he added, he didn’t fund this. Does he really care about education, or just teacher unions?

"…and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God." These words complete the US Presidential oath of office.

Preserve. Protect. Defend. What do those words mean? Aren’t these the duties of the President? If the President of the failed to do that, could he be brought up on criminal charges? How, in fact, do  you defend the Constitution?

Here are some ideas. Preserve the principles of the Constitution. Protect Constitutional rights of the people. And here’s one: Defend the laws passed using the process defined in the Constitution.

But our President has decided which laws he will preserve, protect and defend, and those he won’t. It started with the Defense of Marriage Act, and now this:

The Obama Justice Department has concluded that legislation banning same-sex couples from receiving military and veterans benefits violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment and will no longer defend the statute in court, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in a letter to Congressional leaders on Friday.

“The legislative record of these provisions contains no rationale for providing veterans’ benefits to opposite-sex couples of veterans but not to legally married same-sex spouses of veterans,” Holder wrote. “Neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of Veterans Affairs identified any justifications for that distinction that would warrant treating these provisions differently from Section 3 of DOMA.”

But that’s not his call to make. He isn’t there to decide which laws, in his estimation, are worth defending and which aren’t. The duly elected representatives of the people have made these laws. The executive branch does not have the Constitutional right to override the people or the legislative branch. It is, I contend, a breach of his oath of office.

Instead, the Justice Department is pre-empting the judicial branch’s process.

Holder said DOJ would no longer defend the provisions in Title 38 which prevent same-sex couples who are legally married from obtaining benefits. He said that Congress would be provided a “full and fair opportunity” to defend the statues in the McLaughlin v. Panetta case if they wished to do so.

Congress does not have the role of defending its legislation; that is Holder’s job.

Comments on the liberal "Talking Points Memo" blog on this article are uniformly positive about this move by the DOJ. But I wonder if they would be so happy about some social conservative President deciding he wouldn’t press federal charges against someone who killed an abortion doctor. For the Left, the decision as to whether something is Constitutional always takes a back seat to whether it’s politically expedient for their side. They like the outcome, so never mind the law, and never mind the people. Win at all costs.

Even if one of those costs is our founding principles.

No, I’m not talking about priests abusing boys back in the 1960s. I’m talking about public schools today.

Los Angeles police are investigating a teacher aide at Miramonte Elementary School who allegedly sent love letters to an 11-year-old student. The student’s mother discovered the letters in 2009, but she says police and school officials didn’t take the matter seriously until last week, when two other teachers at the same school were arrested for sexually abusing students in separate cases. Is sexual abuse in schools really as common as these reports make it seem?

Possibly. The best available study suggests that about 10 percent of students suffer some form of sexual abuse during their school careers. In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Association of University Women, surveyors asked students between eighth and 11th grades whether they had ever experienced inappropriate sexual conduct at school. The list of such conduct included lewd comments, exposure to pornography, peeping in the locker room, and sexual touching or grabbing. Around one in 10 students said they had been the victim of one or more such things from a teacher or other school employee, and two-thirds of those reported the incident involved physical contact. If these numbers are representative of the student population nationwide, 4.5 million students currently in grades K-12 have suffered some form of sexual abuse by an educator, and more than 3 million have experienced sexual touching or assault. This number would include both inappropriate romantic relationships between teachers and upperclassmen, and outright pedophilia. 

For over a decade, and more, we’ve known this situation existed in public schools. The media, however, rather than report on this current problem, continues to harp on Catholic priests who did what they did 50 years ago. Indeed, it should be reported, but how about a little perspective? The occasional comely female teacher who hits on boys in her classes is occasionally highlighted, but the study cited here is but 12 years old, and there is no evidence that the incidence has decreased.

The professor who worked on the best study of its kind on the subject, Charol Shakeshaft of Virginia Commonwealth University, should be on your news radar. She contributed to this linked report as well.

Schools today do exactly what the Catholic Church did in the 60s; ignore the problem and move teachers to another district. ("Passing the trash", as they call it.) But the media have not given public schools nearly the investigation that they’ve given the Catholic Church, instead solely focusing on individual cases, so as to make the problem seem more isolated than it is.

Some Greeks are not willing to do what it takes to bring government spending in line with what is needed to get out of its crushing debt. They’d rather keep getting their government perks. Instead, they’d rather leave this debt to be paid by their grandchildren, and they’d rather burn things.

The Greek parliament approved a deeply unpopular austerity bill to secure a second EU/IMF bailout and avoid national bankruptcy, as buildings burned across central Athens and violence spread around the country.

Cinemas, cafes, shops and banks were set ablaze in central Athens as black-masked protesters fought riot police outside parliament.

State television reported the violence spread to the tourist islands of Corfu and Crete, the northern city of Thessaloniki and towns in central Greece. Shops were looted in the capital where police said 34 buildings were ablaze.

This is just a very angry OWS protest. They think the government is the answer to all their problems, and when the find it isn’t, they protest. They want the government to keep its power of confiscating wealth and spreading it around, in spite of the fact that they are, indeed, running out of other people’s money with which to maintain the lifestyle they’re accustomed to.

This is the problem with socialization, even a little bit of it. People begin to expect it, but the economics of the situation simply don’t allow it to be sustainable over the long-term. So when it has to be scaled back, this is what you get.

And we’re, for some insane reason, trying to replicate this "success" here. Then, this, too, is in our future.

California, like Greece, has been spending like there’s no tomorrow. And, like Greece, there may not be a tomorrow, if they can find $3.3 billion in the couch cushions.

Occupy Wall Street complained about how powerless they were against big banks and other members of "the 1%". Their solution was more government intervention to make things "fair". Ironically, their best success came when they themselves, the people, switched banks to protest fees and other things. In many cases, we don’t need government to act for us, we just need to act. The people already have the power. Use it!

James Taranto on the fallout from the Planned Parenthood / Susan G. Komen for the Cure dustup: "Planned Parenthood’s bitter campaign against Komen–aided by left-liberal activists and media–is analogous to a protection racket: Nice charity you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it. The message to other Planned Parenthood donors is that if they don’t play nice and keep coughing up the cash, they’ll get the Komen treatment."

Speaking of which, if even a New York Times columnist recognizes press bias in anything dealing with abortion, you know it’s getting much worse.

Speaking of which, while the media did report that donations to Planned Parenthood were up after the controversy, they conveniently didn’t report that Komen donations doubled.

Abortion pill via vending machine. Talk about changing the concept of "over the counter". What does it say about our society that a university finds it useful to dedicate entire vending machines to abortion pills? A cousin of mine commented, "These are the same people, of course, who will freak out at the presence of Chemicals In Food. But take a pill strong enough to abort before the fertilized egg attaches to the uterine wall? No biggie."

Churches using school buildings during weekends is not a church-state issue. It just isn’t. New York City politicians are evicting some because of fear of lawsuits, not for any actual legal reasons. As Ed Stetzer says, "Any constitutional concerns about church use of public school buildings can be answered by a religion-neutral approach. A government that is religion-neutral we will not discriminate based on the content of speech–even unpopular religious speech. Thus, I stand with my Muslim friends who wish to rent on Friday, my Jewish friends on Saturday, and my Christian friends on Sunday–all paying money to use space that belongs to us all."

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.

While it’s never been solely a Christian-oriented movement, homeschooling is also rising with folks of a more liberal persuasion. Some of the reasons are different, but a surprising number are similar as well.

Before getting to the specific homeschooling instance, in New Jersey, I wanted to point out this wonderful irony.

According to federal Department of Education statistics nearly 2 million children in the U.S. are home-schooled. The number in New Jersey is estimated to be about 40,000.

While supporters cite the studies suggesting home-schooled students do better on standardized tests, critics counter that these students are not held to the same standards as their peers in traditional schools.

Um, guys, that’s the very reason many people homeschool, so they won’t be held to the same standards as public schools. We prefer higher ones. Hence the better test scores.

On, then, to the main thrust of the story. Read the whole thing.

There was a time when Heather Kirchner thought mothers who home-schooled their children were the types “who wore long skirts and praised Jesus, and all that.”

But that was before the Sayreville resident decided to home-school her own daughter, Anya.

Kirchner actually wears jeans, and like the two dozen other families that are part of the year-old Homeschool Village Co-op in Central Jersey, she doesn’t consider herself to be particularly religious.

The co-op is one of dozens in the state formed by home-schooling parents looking to network and provide their children with opportunities to conduct science experiments, play sports and games, and socialize.

What’s different about Homeschool Village is that its mission is secular.

According to a 2007 survey conducted by the federal Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, 83.3 percent of home-schooling parents named “a desire to provide religious or moral instruction” as an important reason to home-school, and it was the most important for 35.8 percent of the parents.

“We are the opposite of that,” said Vanessa Bowden, a former South Brunswick public school teacher who already is home-schooling her 2 year-old daughter and 4-year-old twins.

In Bowden’s view, there are “two sects of home-schooling people” — the religious kind “and then the hippies,” like her.

We have a lot of oil here in America. Obama said we have only 2% of the world’s oil reserves. But John Hinderaker reminds us that

…very few Americans are aware of the technical definition of oil “reserves” that is enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under American law (other countries record as “reserves” whatever is in the ground), oil isn’t counted as part of our “reserves” unless it can legally be developed under current regulations, and it would be economic to develop at current prices. So when Obama says we only have two percent of the world’s oil “reserves,” he is documenting the extent to which the Democratic Party, by blocking energy development, is destroying jobs and making us all poorer.

Read the whole thing.

James Taranto quotes from last night’s State of the Union address and ponders.

In the next few weeks, I will sign an executive order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many [federally funded] construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

"The money we’re no longer spending at war" is a fiction. It is money that has never been collected or borrowed and won’t have to be because there is (touch wood) no war to fight. It’s like a wife demanding that her husband buy her an expensive gift with the money she saved by not buying herself something even more expensive. Does Obama really think Americans foolish enough to fall for this?

The answer, unfortunately, is a resounding "Yes" for those who voted for the man.

This is not the Mark of the Beast. But you certainly don’t get there without something like this.

India has launched an ambitious program to fit each of its 1.2 billion residents with an Unique identification number (UID). Each number will be tied into three pieces of biometric data: fingerprints (all ten digits), iris scans (both eyes), and a picture of the face. Starting this month, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will begin processing people in various locations around the country. UIDAI aims to slowly roll out the program through February of 2011 and to ID 600 million people in the next four years!

It’s being instituted to combat social welfare fraud, but it won’t stop there.

Yet the UID is going to be used for much more than social welfare programs. The UIDAI is in discussions with many institutions (banks, local/state governments, etc) to allow them to use the UID as a means of identity verification. These institutions will pay the UIDAI some fee to cover costs and generate revenue. There seems to be little doubt that once it is established, the UID will become a preferred method (if not the preferred method) of identification in India.

It’s optional now, but how long do you think that will last? Never mind the Biblical overtones, many layers of privacy are being stripped away. And the further question is, why does the government need to know every little thing that I do?

Sounds like a power grab to me.

After protesting the SOPA/PIPA bills going through Congress (rightly, in my estimation) by going "dark" for 24 hours, Wikipedia is back, to the relief of students everywhere who may have never opened a real, physical encyclopedia in this post-book world. The protest brought the issue of anti-piracy vs. anti-freedom to the attention of many people.

Now, I’d like those folks who were very concerned over those bills to look up a couple of things on Wikipedia that should also have garnered their attention recently, if they’re really concerned about what government is doing without their knowledge.

Operation Fast and Furious

Solyndra

If you’ve not heard about this in the news, that’s perfectly understandable. They’ve been nearly blacked-out themselves regarding these issues. Which is odd considering F&F is responsible for the deaths of Americans.

Are you really concerned about what your government is doing, and you’re not just jumping on the SOPA bandwagon? Read up.

Indeed.

“[W]e should allow more access to oil, natural gas and coal opportunities on federal lands,” states the year-end report released Tuesday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The report does not specifically mention the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but it endorses moving forward quickly with projects that “deliver electricity and fuel,” including pipelines.

I agree creating jobs for the sake of jobs is not always desirable (i.e. make-work, do-nothing jobs, or, as an extreme example, increasing the demand for contract killers), but this is energy we have at home that does not prop up terrorism or our enemies. The result is economic prosperity, and not just in the energy industry.

Thanks to capitalism, millions of America’s poor are paying less to heat their homes this winter. The middle class and even the rich are saving money because capitalists have found a cheaper way to drill for natural gas on American soil. That increases supply, which drops the prices — by 35% this winter over last winter — but the capitalists still profit because drilling this way dropped their costs.

Not only that, but the natural gas from this drilling has resulted in cheaper feedstock for plastics, ammonia and fertilizer.

The natural gas feedstock supplants oil-based feedstock, thus reducing our dependency on foreign oil.

And, if you continue reading, the EPA is trying to scare folks with junk science so they’ll be against drilling.

I guess this will be just another panel, like his deficit commission, that he can sweep under the rug and ignore, but bring up if anyone says he’s done nothing about the problem.

It’s us.

The United States now ranks the highest in terms of charity in a massive global survey that put the nation in fifth place in 2010, according to CAFAmerica, a member organization of the United Kingdom based Charities Aid Foundation International Network of Offices, providing charitable financial services to individuals, global corporations, charities, and foundations.

According to those surveyed, two out of three Americans said they donated money to charity (65 percent), more than two out of five volunteered their time (43 percent) and roughly three out of four helped a stranger (73 percent).  The new “World Giving Index (WGI) 2011” report is based on over 150,000 Gallup polling interviews with members of the public in 153 countries. The 2011 report looks at three aspects of giving behavior of individuals in the preceding month, asking if they have donated money to a charity, volunteered time to an organization, or helped a stranger. 

People like former President Jimmy Carter and singer Bono used to say that the US was "cheap", but John Stossel pointed out that that was not really true, (and Arthur Brooks noted that most charitable giving comes from the religious Right side of the political spectrum). We weren’t "cheap" then, and we’ve kept rising in this particular ranking since then.

I’m proud to be an American.

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.

Planned Parenthood is a "women’s health" organization only in the most technical of senses. Their 2010 annual report shows 329,445 abortions in all of the US vs. 841 adoption referrals and 31,098 other prenatal services. 91% of its services are abortions.

So never mind what euphemism they come up with, call it what it is; an abortion mill.