Obama Administration to Congress: We’re not interested in lowering gas prices – UPDATED

Secretary Chu: The Energy Department is not working to get gas prices down.

It is amazing when they let the truth out. President Obama’s Energy Secretary Stephen Chu gave an honest answer when he gave a direct answer to a direct question in testimony to Congress:

Chu specifically cited a reported breakthrough announced Monday by Envia Systems, which received funding from DOE’s ARPA-E, that could help slash the price of electric vehicle batteries.

He also touted natural gas as “great” and said DOE is researching how to reduce the cost of compressed natural gas tanks for vehicles.

High gasoline prices will make research into such alternatives more urgent, Chu said.

“But is the overall goal to get our price” of gasoline down, asked Nunnelee.

“No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied. “We think that if you consider all these energy policies, including energy efficiency, we think that we can go a long way to becoming less dependent on oil and [diversifying] our supply and we’ll help the American economy and the American consumers.”

 

Mark Levin plays some more of Secretary Chu’s testimony where he makes it clear that the Obama Administration intends to drive up prices by limiting future supply:

6th Circuit Court of Appeals Sides with Christian Grad Student

This is where it gets interesting, according to the evidence, the textbooks the EMU used said that councilors cannot be value neutral and that values are essential to the healing process:

Defendant Ametrano, Chair of the formal review committee that dismissed Ms. Ward from the program, assigned a book as required reading in a required course Ms. Ward took from Defendant Ametrano, which states that “[i]t is now generally recognized that the therapeutic endeavor is a value-laden process and that all counselors, to some degree, communicate their values to clients,” and that “the assumption that counseling is value-neutral is no longer tenable.”

(Ex. 8 at 73.) A true and accurate copy of excerpts from this book, Becoming a Helper by Marianne Schneider Corey and Gerald Corey and published in 2007, is attached as Exhibit 8.

This book also explains that “because the values [counselors] hold cannot be kept out of their work, they should not refuse to discuss their core values.” (Id.)

Regarding values, the book further states: “In our view it is neither possible nor desirable for helpers to remain neutral or to keep their values separate from their professional relationships. Because values have a significant impact on the helping process, it is important to express them openly when doing so is appropriate.” (Id. at 73.)

As taught by the EMU counseling department in required courses, the counseling profession understands that personal values impact a counselor’s practice, and that exposing a client to your values can be an appropriate course of action in a counseling relationship.

The other textbooks used in EMU’s own courses said that referring a client is the appropriate action when a values conflict may become an issue in the client/therapist relationship.  EMU could demonstrate no rule or reason to ban or prevent Ms. Ward from asking for the referral. To be clear, in multiple instances EMU violated standard counselling practices and procedures in order to persecute Julea Ward for holding Christian beliefs.

CBN:

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of a Christian graduate student expelled from Eastern Michigan University’s counseling program after refusing to provide services to a gay client.

In 2009, EMU student Julea Ward was assigned a client seeking help with a homosexual relationship.

Believing that taking on such a case would violate her Christian convictions, Ward asked the clinic to reassign the client to another counselor — a move in keeping with the school’s counseling code of ethics.

“I explained that I was a Christian and that I could not [endorse] homosexual behavior,” Ward said.

Following a formal review hearing, EMU sent Ward a letter dismissing her from the school’s graduate program.

“Rather than allow Julea to refer a potential client to another qualified counselor — a common, professional practice to best serve clients — EMU attacked and questioned Julea’s religious beliefs and ultimately expelled her from the program because of them,” said Alliance Defense Fund Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco, who argued Ward’s case last October.

Click here to read Ward’s complaint against EMU.

The 6th Circuit sided with Ward in a sternly-worded decision being hailed by Christian groups as a victory for free speech and religious freedom.

“A reasonable jury could conclude that Ward’s professors ejected her from the counseling program because of hostility toward her speech and faith,” the appellate court wrote in its opinion Friday.

“A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems… as the price for obtaining a degree,” the 6th Circuit wrote. “Tolerance is a two-way street.”

The court did not mince words in the ruling:

Here too, what did Ward do wrong? Ward was willing to work with all clients and to respect the school’s affirmation directives in doing so. That is why she asked to refer gay and lesbian clients (and some heterosexual clients) if the conversation required her to affirm their sexual practices. What more could the rule require? Surely, for example, the ban on discrimination against clients based on their religion (1) does not require a Muslim counselor to tell a Jewish client that his religious beliefs are correct if the conversation takes a turn in that direction and (2) does not require an atheist counselor to tell a person of faith that there is a God if the client is wrestling with faithbased issues. Tolerance is a two-way street. Otherwise, the rule mandates orthodoxy, not anti-discrimination.

Alinsky-tied group awarded $56 million federal loan…

…to start a non-profit health insurance company, but the group is has no experience in the insurance industry. What the group does have experience in is far left radical activism. Saul Alinsky was a 1960’s revolutionary communist activist.

More Obama pals get your money.

Like many of the “green jobs” projects that the Obama Administration has given huge loans to, this is yet another big taxpayer investment that will likely never be paid back and is instead taxpayer dollars used for Democrats political activism.  Many “green jobs” government loan recipients went out of business soon after receiving the loans, but the CEO’s of the companies were large political contributors who paid themselves large salaries and bonuses before ceasing operations.

Fox News:

A Saul Alinsky-tied group has been awarded a $56 million federal loan to start up a nonprofit health insurance company — one of several organizations across the country this week tapped to launch a new network of insurers under the sponsorship of the federal health care overhaul.

The Wisconsin group, Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative, was awarded the funding on Tuesday. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the group is expected to provide coverage statewide within five years after starting on a smaller scale in early 2014.

But Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson questioned the group’s credentials — given its affiliation and lack of experience in the insurance field. 

“The indisputable fact is that Common Ground was an outgrowth of the Alinsky operation in Chicago,” Wilson said. “We’re not giving money to a group with experience in health care issues or in setting up exchanges. … We’re handing the money to people who have been trained by arguably the single most expert individual on community organizing in the last 100 years.”

Common Ground, a Milwaukee group that dates back to 2004, is an affiliate of the Alinsky-founded Industrial Areas Foundation.

Santorum, Reagan, Obama and Satan…

Rick Santorum was attacked for saying that Satan has targeted America. Rick Santorum isn’t alone.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s mentor Saul Alinsky dedicated his book, “Rules for Radicals” to Satan:

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: From all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

 

Dr. Paul Kengor:

As Reagan himself put it, “We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin.” Reagan dared to use the “J” word, inserting a distinctly Christian claim: “There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.”

Reagan’s speech came at 3:04 p.m. on March 8, 1983 in the Citrus Crown Ballroom at the Orlando Sheraton Twin Towers Hotel. The audience was the National Association of Evangelicals. He began by thanking all those present for their prayers, saying that their intercession had “made all the difference” in his life. He cited his favorite quote from Lincoln, about being driven to his knees by the conviction he had nowhere else to go. He then commended the role of religious faith in American democracy. “[F]reedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly sought and humbly accepted,” Reagan maintained. “The American experiment in democracy rests on this insight.” He said the discovery of that insight was the “great triumph” of the Founders. Indeed it was.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.

Romney ads blast Santorum for supporting “No Child Left Behind”, but Romney supported it too (video)

The “No Child Left Behind Act” has been a colossal failure. While the testing in the act did indeed give is a better idea of just how bad public schools are failing our children, it made the problem worse because school districts and teachers started teaching the test, and thus weren’t truly educating. This is something I have seen first hand.

Teaching is a missionary vocation. When the federal government and/or a bureaucratic and/or a union mentality is introduced that kills the missionary attitude and spirit. This is why our current public school model is failing more than it is succeeding.

Obama to cut healthcare benefits for active duty and retired US military, no cuts for government unions

Obama’s new proposed budget, which has no chance of passing, not only proposed giving $800 million to the Muslim Brotherhood, he wants to slash medical benefits for retired and active duty military. The military likely will not vote for Obama and the government unions will; it is just that simple.

Washington Free Beacon:

The Obama administration’s proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers’ benefits untouched. The proposal is causing a major rift within the Pentagon, according to U.S. officials. Several congressional aides suggested the move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare’s state-run insurance exchanges.

The disparity in treatment between civilian and uniformed personnel is causing a backlash within the military that could undermine recruitment and retention.

The proposed increases in health care payments by service members, which must be approved by Congress, are part of the Pentagon’s $487 billion cut in spending. It seeks to save $1.8 billion from the Tricare medical system in the fiscal 2013 budget, and $12.9 billion by 2017.

Many in Congress are opposing the proposed changes, which would require the passage of new legislation before being put in place.

“We shouldn’t ask our military to pay our bills when we aren’t willing to impose a similar hardship on the rest of the population,” Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a Republican from California, said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. “We can’t keep asking those who have given so much to give that much more.”

Administration officials told Congress that one goal of the increased fees is to force military retirees to reduce their involvement in Tricare and eventually opt out of the program in favor of alternatives established by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

Hill Poll: Likely voters prefer lower individual, business tax rates

The Hill:

Three-quarters of likely voters believe the nation’s top earners should pay lower, not higher, tax rates, according to a new poll for The Hill.

The big majority opted for a lower tax bill when asked to choose specific rates; precisely 75 percent said the right level for top earners was 30 percent or below.

The current rate for top earners is 35 percent. Only 4 percent thought it was appropriate to take 40 percent, which is approximately the level that President Obama is seeking from January 2013 onward.

The Hill Poll also found that 73 percent of likely voters believe corporations should pay a lower rate than the current 35 percent, as both the White House and Republicans push plans to lower rates.

The new data seem to run counter to several polls that have found support for raising taxes on high-income earners. In an Associated Press-GfK poll released Friday, 65 percent said they favored President Obama’s “Buffett Rule” that millionaires should pay at least 30 percent of their income. And a Pew poll conducted in June found 66 percent of adults favored raising taxes on those making more than $250,000 as a way to tackle the deficit.

But The Hill poll found that a dramatically different picture emerges when voters are asked to specify the “most appropriate” rates.

 

 

IBD: Obama’s Double Talk on Sky-High Gas Prices

Related: IBD: Five Biggest Whoppers In Obama’s Energy Speech – UPDATED!

IBD:

When gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2008, candidate Barack Obama said it was due to previous failed energy policies. Now that prices are heading still higher, President Obama calls it progress.

Already, pump prices are higher than they’ve been in previous years, suggesting they will top $4 soon and possibly reach an unprecedented $5 this summer.

President Obama is starting to notice the political implications. So he sent Robert Gibbs — now a top campaign adviser — out to tell the public not to worry.

“Just on Friday, the Department of the Interior issued permits that will expand our exploration in the Arctic,” Gibbs said Sunday. “Our domestic oil production is at an eight-year high, and our use of foreign oil is at a 16-year low. So we’re making progress.”

“Progress” isn’t exactly how Obama described the country’s energy picture in 2008, when gas prices were closing in on $4 a gallon. Then, it was a clear sign of “Washington’s failure to lead on energy,” which was “turning the middle-class squeeze into a devastating vise-grip for millions of Americans.”

Read more HERE.

 

Gallup: Unemployment 9%, Not 8.3%

Yup, it’s like that….

When the administration knew that the 8.3% number was a blip from people leaving the workforce they kept saying 8.3% and still are.

Gallup:

Unemployment in the U.S. rose to nine percent in mid-February, up from 8.3 percent a month earlier, according to a new Gallup survey. The polling company said this suggests that it is “premature” to assume the economy will not feature prominently in the 2012 election season.

Gallup figures typically provide an indication of what the government will report at the end of the month.

“The U.S. unemployment rate, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, is 9.0% in mid-February,” Gallup said in its mid-month unemployment survey, released on February 17. “The mid-month reading normally reflects what the U.S. government reports for the entire month, and is up from 8.3% in mid-January.”

Britain passes 50% tax rate for the evil rich, and loses $807.53 million in tax revenue in three months…

If you tax the productive, the productive produce less, pay less in tax, pay people off and it ripples through the economy; or as my teenage daughter might say “duh!”. Those stuck in such a bracket rearrange their affairs to avoid the tax. They invest in China, expatriate, buy gold or other hard assets or just stop moving their money; they stop taking as much risk.

UK Telegraph:

The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million [that is$807.53 American] compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period.

Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.

The self-assessment returns from January, when most income tax is paid by the better-off, have been eagerly awaited by the Treasury and government ministers as they provide the first evidence of the success, or failure, of the 50p rate. It is the first year following the introduction of the 50p rate which had been expected to boost tax revenues from self-assessment by more than £1billion.

A Treasury source said the relatively poor revenues from self-assessment returns was partly down to highly-paid individuals arranging their affairs to avoid paying the 50p rate.

“It’s true that SA revenues are a bit disappointing — it’s still early, but it looks like there’s been quite a lot of forestalling and other manoeuvring to avoid the top rate,” said the source.

However, another Treasury source added that the tax deadline had been extended by two days because of industrial action at HM Revenue and Customs. Therefore, it was too early to begin assessing the revenues raised from the 50p rate of tax because about 20 per cent of self-assessment tax is paid in the hours before the deadline.

Francesca Lagerberg, head of tax at Grant Thornton, an accountancy firm, said: “My guess is that because the 50 per cent rate was flagged up in advance many taxpayers, particularly those with their own businesses, decided to extract dividends ahead of the change. It highlights the fact that high tax rates don’t always deliver high tax revenues.”

AEI Study: Elite Media Spins Economic News Positive when Democrats in Power, Negative When Republicans in Power

[Editor’s Note – We have been reporting incidents of this so this seemed like a good time to bring out this study, which I had posted on my old college blog, once again which confirms what so many who are paying close attention have observed.]

According to the elite media “most economists” were surprised by month after month after month of unexpectedunexpectedunexpectedunexpected bad economic news. Of course to those who were paying attention the news wasn’t unexpected at all.

AEI:

https://www.aei.org/publication/partisan-bias-in-newspapers/

Newspaper headlines reporting on unemployment, gross domestic product, retail sales, and durable goods tended to be negative when a Republican is in the White House.

Economists have been puzzled this year by the persistence with which perceptions about the economy have lagged behind the economic data. For the most recent 12-month period for which we have data, for example, the economy grew almost exactly as fast as it did during the best 12-month period during President Clinton’s two terms. But the economic mood of the country has been much different.

It isn’t just the economy that influences people’s perceptions. In research we just released, we find that media coverage is also an important determinant. We found that newspaper headlines reporting economic news on unemployment, gross domestic product (GDP), retail sales, and durable goods tended to be much more frequently negative when a Republican was in the White House. And this was true even after accounting for the economic numbers on which the stories were based and how those numbers were changing over time.

We also found that positive headlines explained whether people thought that the economy was getting better more than the economic variables themselves. Newspapers are indeed important.

There have, of course, been numerous anecdotal claims of media bias. What has been lacking has been a rigorous scientific study of media bias, and our new paper is an attempt to provide just that.

If we limit ourselves to news coverage of economic data, it is possible to get an objective measure of the news behind the stories. Our research team first collected a list of days that important economic news was released for most papers since 1991 and for four major papers and the Associated Press since 1985. We then used Nexis, a computer database of news stories that contains information on 389 newspapers, to gather all of the 12,620 headlines that ran in America’s newspapers covering economic news stories. We excluded follow-up and feature stories because we wanted to be able to link the headlines directly with the numbers on which they were based.

Headlines are relatively easy to classify since they say things are getting better, worse or mixed. For example, on Jan. 31, the government reported that the real GDP had grown 4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2003. The New York Times covered this, appropriately, as good news, writing the headline, “Economy remained strong in 4th quarter, U.S. reports.” At the same time, the Chicago Tribune wrote that “GDP growth disappoints; job worries linger.” Headlines are so divergent, it’s sometimes hard to believe they are referring to the same event.

Actual economic data explains much about the headlines–but far from everything. We found that the incidence of positive coverage during Republican presidencies was fairly steady–but economic news under President Clinton received by far the most positive coverage. This partisan gap or bias (the difference in positive headlines between Republicans and Democrats for the same underlying economic news) consistently implied that Democrats got between 10 and 20 percentage points more positive headlines.

We also examined individual newspapers. Among the top 10 papers, we found strong evidence that the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Washington Postwere much more likely to have positive headlines for Democrats even with the same economic news. The New York Post showed no statistically significant difference. The Los Angeles Times did not tend to treat Republicans and Democrats significantly differently.

Even including the Los Angeles Times, Ronald Reagan, a president who presided over one of the most vigorous economies in our history, still received seven percent fewer positive news stories than Clinton after accounting for the different economic conditions.

What motivates newspapers and their copy editors to pick the headlines that they do is not a question we tried to answer. Whether these motivations are conscious or not, a partisan gap exists, and it helps explain one of this year’s biggest economic puzzles. Unfortunately, the recent charges of political bias at CBS may only be a small part of the problem with the news.

U.S. per capita government debt worse than Greece

Via the Washington Examiner:


According to a new analysis by the office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, the United States has a higher per capita debt burden than any European country, including riot-ridden Greece.

Using the most recent data available from the International Monetary Fund, the Senate Budget Committee found that U.S. federal government debt per capita is nearly $45,000. That is almost 15 percent higher than the per capita debt burden of Greece ($38,937).

The Senate Budget Committee also notes that our debt per capita would rise to $75,000 by 2020 if President Obama’s budget became law.

Earlier last month, the U.S. government’s total out standing debt, $15,419,800,222,325, surpassed the nation’s gross domestic product ($15,294,300,000,000).

Forbes: Government Education Spending Up 7 Times & Nothing To Show For It

Forbes:

Solyndra’s in the classroom.

Accordingly, the “investment in education” that Obama wants more (and more, and more) of is actually “federal-government-directed investment in education”. When considering whether we really want more of this, it is important to remember that it was “federal-government-directed investment in energy” that gave us Solyndra, Ener1, and Beacon Power, and that it was “federal-government-directed investment in housing” that has cost taxpayers more than $150 billion in losses (thus far) at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

So, how would we know if increased government “investment” in education was producing a return? We would see a steady rise in the ratio of GDP to “nonresidential produced assets” over time. Our GDP is produced by a combination of physical capital and human capital. Accordingly, if the economic value of our human capital were rising, the impact would show up in the numbers as increasing productivity of physical capital.

Now, here is the bad news. While total real ($2010) government spending on education increased almost 13-fold from 1951 to 2009, the measured GDP return on physical capital actually declined slightly, from 47.7% to 44.1%. This could not have happened if we were getting an appreciable economic return on our huge “investment” in education.

What follows is a “first approximation analysis”. The numbers could be done with more precision, but they are good enough to give us an idea of what the nation has been getting (actually, not getting) for its massive “investments” in education.

Assuming that about 25% of our total population is in school at any one time, average real (2010 dollars) government spending per student rose from $1,763 in 1951 to $12,209 in 2009. This is an increase of about 7 times. Assuming an average of 13 years of education per student (some go to college, some drop out of high school), this means that during this 58-year time period, we increased our real “investment” in the human capital represented by each student from $22,913 to $158,717.

More:

Also, imagine if, instead of being given a 2009 education for $158,717, an average student were given a 1967-style education for about $58,000, and $100,000 in capital with which to start his working life. This would be sufficient to start any number of small businesses. Alternatively, if put in an IRA earning a real return of 6%, the $100,000 would grow to about $1.8 million over 50 years.

The huge government “investments” made in education over the past 50 years have produced little more than “Solyndras in the classroom”. They have enriched teachers unions and other rent-seekers, but have added little or nothing to the economic prospects of students. America does not need more such “investment”.

Read more HERE.

 

IBD: Five Biggest Whoppers In Obama’s Energy Speech – UPDATED!

Who did not see this piece coming form a mile away:

IBD:

Energy: The White House billed President Obama’s energy policy speech as a response to mounting criticism of record high gas prices. What he delivered was a grab bag of excuses and outright falsehoods.

Obama’s main message to struggling motorists was: It’s not my fault, so stop whining. The speech only got worse from there, recycling excuses and myths that Obama’s peddled for years. But there were some standout whoppers that deserve debunking. The five biggest:

“We’re focused on production.”

Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.

Obama has chosen almost always to limit production. He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.

His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index. The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011. Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”

“The U.S. consumes more than a fifth of the world’s oil. But we only have 2% of the world’s oil reserves.”

Fact: Obama constantly refers to this statistic to buttress his claim that “we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices.” The argument goes that since the U.S. supply is limited, it won’t ever make a difference to world prices.

It’s bogus. New exploration and drilling technologies have uncovered vast amounts of recoverable oil.

In fact, the U.S. has a mind-boggling 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to “fuel the present needs in the U.S. for around 250 years,” according to the Institute for Energy Research. The problem is the government has put most of this supply off limits.

“Because of the investments we’ve made, the use of clean, renewable energy in this country has nearly doubled.”

Fact: Production of renewable energy — biomass, wind, solar and the like — climbed just 12% between 2008 and 2011, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

“We need to double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising.”

Fact: Renewable energy simply won’t play an important role in the country’s energy picture anytime soon, accounting for just 13% of U.S. energy production by 2035, according to the EIA.

“There are no short-term silver bullets when it comes to gas prices.”

Fact: Obama could drive down oil prices right now simply by announcing a more aggressive effort to boost domestic supplies. When President Bush lifted a moratorium in 2008, oil prices immediately fell $9 a barrel.

Obama said in his speech that Americans aren’t stupid. He’s right about that, which is why most are giving his energy policy a thumbs down.

Tapper: Why Is Obama Asking “Indignant” About Higher Gas Prices When He Campaigned On It

Obama statements from 2008:

[youtube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3d_CJoO0OA]

[youtube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPyFbNWffHE]

Barack Obama 2008 ad on Gas Prices [Editor’s Note – and yes he did take money from oil companies, specifically BP… the oil spill company who got all those safety waivers]

Obama saying he wants $4.00 a gallon gas

Obama In 2008 Supported a Gas Pipeline From Canada

Mitt Lied: Romney did require Catholic hospitals to provide morning-after pills

Via Pundit and Pundette [Great work in finding this evidence P & P – Editor]:

The Boston Catholic Insider provides a detailed timeline that refutes Romney’s assertions about a Massachusetts morning-after pill mandate:

No, absolutely not. Of course not.
There was no requirement in Massachusetts for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims. That was entirely voluntary on their part. There was no such requirement.

BCI finds the opposite to be true. Their synopsis:

In 2005 Romney vetoed a bill to provide access to the so-called “morning-after-pill,” knowing his veto would be overridden, but months later, he decided Catholic hospitals did have to give the morning-after pill to rape victims. Key points to note:

  1. Romney had publicly claimed the bill did not apply to private religious hospitals
  2. He reversed his own July 2005 veto against abortifacients by signing an October bill seeking a federal waiver to expand distribution of Plan B abortifacients.
  3. On December 7, 2005, Romney’s Department of Public Health said that Catholic and other privately-run hospitals could opt out of giving the morning-after pill to rape victims because of religious or moral objections
  4. On December 8, 2005 Romney reversed the legal opinion of his own State Department of Public Health, instructing all Catholic hospitals and others to provide the chemical Plan B “morning after pill” to rape victims.  He was quoted as saying, ““I think, in my personal view, it’s the right thing for hospitals to provide  information and access to emergency contraception to anyone who is a  victim of rape.”

Please note the principled leadership shown by Romney here. For it, against it, rinse, repeat.

BCI’s conclusion:

When Romney was asked in the debate if he had required Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims and had infringed on Catholics’ rights, he responded, “No, absolutely not. Of course not.” That was untrue.

When Romney said “for the Catholic Church to provide morning-after pills to rape victims…was entirely voluntary on their part”, that was also untrue.

For him to suggest to the citizens of the United States on national television that Cardinal O’Malley and the Catholic Church would “voluntarily” provide morning-after pills is an egregious misrepresentation of Catholic Church teachings and an egregious misrepresentation of what actually happened in this situation.

BCI hopes that the media and other candidates call him out on this.

It’s a matter of public record. Not only did Romney destroy conscience protections, a la the Obama administration, but he lied outright about it as recently as two days ago. This should disqualify him as a serious candidate.

Anti-conservatism is anti-intellectualism

A good friend of mine sent me a link to a piece that contained every bigoted false claim in the book that progressive secular leftists use to smear traditionalists, Jews and Christians. Of course, only those who aren’t aware of history and the use of such smears, which are nothing more than discredited cliches, actually believe such nonsense. My friend asked me, “Does part of conservatism stand against reason in the sense of being simply anti-intellectual?”.

To answer my friend’s question I said, “Let me be clear; anti-conservatism is anti-intellectualism”. Why?

American Conservatism demands that we look at our history and traditions to use them as a guide. To ascertain works and what doesn’t in order to have the happiest and healthiest society we can while recognizing that man’s nature is flawed and that society will never be perfect.

Leftists, by and large, believe that rationality must be imposed from above.  They believe in a rule of the elite (oligarchy) over the “ignorant masses”. The believe that freedom leaves too much to chance. This kind of thinking is what our Founders, Alexis de Tocqueville and traditional American conservatives would call out as tyrannical. The progressive secular left believes that our traditions, Biblical codes, and history are merely mysticism (anti-intellectualism); thus they believe that 6,000 years of human experience means nothing now that they are here to enlighten us.

The left even rejects Aristotle’s Law of Identity, they believe that truth is fungible, relative to ones own ideology,  and that there are no truths that are self evident.

The left pushes for top down government and central planning for our economy and society, a plan and philosophy that has failed every time it has been tried; often with massive bloodshed to boot. Even in cases where there was not much bloodshed there was still a large amount of human suffering. We see this in Western Europe even now, and we see more suffering here at home as a result of our own dabbling in leftism.

We have seen study after study show that people are more free and have more wealth when they live in a society with the the Judea/Christian ethic.

Those who push Marxism/Leftism/Utopianism/Socialism/Communism/Progressivism or whatever one may wish to call it are selling a defective product and use deceptive advertising to sell it.

Muslim Brotherhood Decides What FBI Agents Get To Learn About Islam

President Obama recently proposed $800 million in aid for the Muslim Brotherhood (LINK). Now we learn this:

National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy:

While we’re on the subject of the Muslim Brotherhood, this February 16 report from Steve Emerson at the Investigative Project on Terrorism will be an eye-opener. As I mentioned in my column over the weekend, the FBI — following the administration’s lead — is purging its training materials of publications that are deemed offensive to Muslims (you know, crazy stuff like claims that passages in the Koran and Hadith promote violent jihad, Islamic supremacism, killing of apostates, oppression of women, etc.). So what are the criteria the Bureau uses to figure out what materials are offensive? And who decides?

You’ll never guess. Steve, who has been talking to some mighty outraged law-enforcement officials, writes:

It was just revealed two days ago that FBI Director Mueller secretly met on February 8 at FBI headquarters with a coalition of groups including various Islamist and militant Arabic groups who in the past have defended Hamas and Hizballah and have also issued blatantly anti-Semitic statements. At this meeting, the FBI revealed that it had removed more than 1000 presentations and curricula on Islam from FBI offices around the country that was deemed “offensive.” The FBI did not reveal what criteria was used to determine why material was considered “offensive” but knowledgeable law enforcement sources have told the IPT that it was these radical groups who made that determination. Moreover, numerous FBI agents have confirmed that from now on, FBI headquarters has banned all FBI offices from inviting any counter-terrorist specialists who are considered “anti-Islam” by Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

The February 8 FBI meeting was the culmination of a series of unpublicized directives issued in the last three months by top FBI officials to all its field offices to immediately recall and withdraw any presentation or curricula on Islam throughout the entire FBI. In fact, according to informed sources and undisclosed documents, the FBI directive was instigated by radical Muslim groups in the US who had repeatedly met with top officials of the Obama Administration to complain, among other things, that the mere usage of the term of “radical Islam” in FBI curricula was “offensive” and ‘racist.” And thus, directives went out by Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Mueller to censor all such material. Included in the material destroyed or removed by the FBI and the DOJ were powerpoints and articles that defined jihad as “holy war” or presentations that portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization bent on taking over the world—a major tenet that the Muslim Brotherhood has publicly stated for decades.

Feel safer now?

America is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation

The Economist:

AMERICANS love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on.

But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.

Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end “too big to fail” by authorising regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do. But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions.

Hardly anyone has actually read Dodd-Frank, besides the Chinese government and our correspondent in New York (see article). Those who have struggle to make sense of it, not least because so much detail has yet to be filled in: of the 400 rules it mandates, only 93 have been finalised. So financial firms in America must prepare to comply with a law that is partly unintelligible and partly unknowable.

Read more HERE.

Jeff Bell: Social Conservatism Wins Elections in Key States

Who is Jeff Bell?

Mr. Bell, 68, is an unlikely tribune for social conservatism. His main interest has always been economics. He was “an early supply-sider” who worked on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980 and Jack Kemp’s in 1988. In 1978 he ran an anti-tax campaign for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, defeating Republican incumbent Clifford Case in the primary but losing to Democrat Bill Bradley.

Even now his day job is to advocate for the gold standard at the American Principles Project. But he’s been interested in social issues since the 1980s, when “it became increasingly clear to me . . . that social issues were beginning to be very important in comparison to economic issues,” in part because “Reaganomics worked so well that the Democrats . . . kind of retired the economic issues.”

Jeff Bell:

Social conservatism, Mr. Bell argues in his forthcoming book, “The Case for Polarized Politics,” has a winning track record for the GOP. “Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964,” he observes. “The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.”

The Democrats who won, including even Barack Obama in 2008, did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns. In 1992 Bill Clinton was a death-penalty advocate who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). “Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority,” Mr. Bell says. “It isn’t coincidental.”

Even without immediate gains among minority voters, Mr. Bell sees social issues as the path to a GOP majority in 2012. They account for the George W. Bush-era red-blue divide, which Mr. Bell says endures—and, he adds, red has the advantage: “There was one state in 2000 that Bush carried that I would say was socially left of center, and that was New Hampshire,” the only state that flipped to John Kerry four years later. “By 2004, every state—all 31 states that Bush carried—were socially conservative states.” Those states now have 292 electoral votes, with 270 sufficient for a majority.

By contrast, not all the Kerry states are socially liberal. “The swing vote in the Midwest is socially conservative and less conservative economically,” Mr. Bell says, so that “social conservatism is more likely to be helpful than economic conservatism.”

The roots of social conservatism, he maintains, lie in the American Revolution. “Nature’s God is the only authority cited in the Declaration of Independence. . . . The usual [assumption] is, the U.S. has social conservatism because it’s more religious. . . . My feeling is that the very founding of the country is the natural law, which is God-given, but it isn’t particular to any one religion. . . . If you believe that rights are unalienable and that they come from God, the odds are that you’re a social conservative.”

Read more HERE.

Hareetz: The strange illness of Jewish anti-Semitism

This is a very important read. This problem of leftist Jews being reflexively anti-Semitic to rabidly so is something that this writer has witnessed first hand, mostly from radicalize academics and students. I am glad that more and more people are speaking out against this problem as I have witnessed these people act as if they are a defense attorney for genocidal jihadists. The people who I have seen with this problem seem irrational to the point of mental illness.

Hareetz:

Diagnosis

The 1930s Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked “Is there another People on Earth so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape, robbery committed by their enemies fill their hearts with admiration and awe?”

This is Jew Flu – the virus of Jewish Anti-Semitism, and its Jewish Anti- and Post-Zionist mutations, afflicting a small but inordinately loud minority of Hebrews.

Its modern symptoms are a rejection of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state and a dismissal of its right to defend itself militarily, while embracing the goals of its nihilistic Arab enemies. Those infected with the virus wildly inflate Israeli sins real or imagined, while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian anti-semitism and outrages against Jews.

Those afflicted with Jew Flu often view the notion of Peoplehood as an artifice, which implies a rejection of Jewish national self-determination and acceptance of the 90-year-old Palestinian Arab contention that Jews are not a nation but merely members of a religion, and as such don?t merit a national home of their own.

Is Jew Flu a bona-fide illness? Michael Welner, a psychiatrist at New York University, suggests that Jewish Anti-Semitism is akin to a personality disorder, enabling a person to “derive some psychological benefit from this pathological thinking.”

What causes Jew Flu? Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin argues for twin culprits: so-called ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, where “population segments under chronic siege commonly embrace the indictments of their besiegers however bigoted and outrageous”, as well as “the psychodynamics of abused children who blame themselves for their situation and believe they could mollify their tormenters if they were ‘good’.”

Julie Ancis, a psychology professor at Georgia State University says that it isn’t “uncommon for a minority group with a history of oppression and persecution to possess internalized self-hatred regarding their cultural/religious identity.”

I’m no therapist, but that won’t restrain me from proposing my own theory for the ultimate cause of Jew Flu. More on that later.

Since the defamations of Jew Flu victims are propagated across the Internet and are extensively documented and challenged in many fine books and articles, repeating them here would be redundant.

Suffice it to say that Noam Chomsky, Daniel Boyarin, Joel Kovel, Avrum Burg, Ilan Pappe, Steve Quester, Jacqueline Rose, Tony Judt, Naomi Klein, Michael Neumann, Ben Ehrenreich, (the apparently “outed”) Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and their ilk, spout pronouncements eerily similar to the propaganda routinely ejaculated by representatives of Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah.

At the same time, a hearty “shout out” is due those who have made it their business to forcefully rebut the Jewish defamers, including Andrea Levin, Edward Alexander, Alan Dershowitz, David Solway and others. Those interested in a quick and free primer on Jew Flu should download Alvin Rosenfeld’s UJA-sponsored brief, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism”.

History

Jew Flu, of course, isn’t new: It has lurked in our midst for millennia. Jews collaborated with Greeks, Romans and Inquisitors; Bolshevik self loathers displayed savagery towards their brethren; their prophet Karl Marx was described by author Rafael Patai as the “most influential of Jewish self haters”, who thought “Israelite faith” most repugnant, and whose rabid anti-Semitism was attributed by the historian Simon Dubnow to “the natural hatred of the renegade for the camp he deserted.”

Incredibly, certain young Jews in Weimar Germany, members of a certain Association of National-German Jews were sufficiently maddened by Jew Flu to attempt to “identify and ingratiate (themselves) with the Nazi Party”.

Jew Flu developed its anti-Zionist strain in the decades preceding the creation of Israel: renowned philosopher Martin Buber of Hebrew University and others actually justified the Palestinian Arab pogroms of 1921, 1929 and the late 30s, urging that desperate Jewish holocaust refugees be permitted to enter Palestine only with Arab permission.

In 1944, and with the destruction of European Jewry proceeding apace, Lessing Rosenwald, the President of the American Council for Judaism equated the ideal of Jewish Statehood with the concept of a racial state “the Hitlerian concept”.

Following remission during the post-Holocaust years, Jewry experienced a relapse of Jew Flu in the aftermath of the ’67 Six Day War. In the U.S., young Jewish radicals of the New Left branded Israel a fascist, colonial power while praising Arab countries as progressive and revolutionary – unsurprising since many were Soviet client states.

They remained largely silent as Soviet tanks crushed the 1968 Prague Spring – presumably a ‘progressive’ development.

New Left sentiments found expression in Israel even during the aftermath of the traumatic Yom Kippur War; at a Tel Aviv reception in late 1973, my mother found herself amid a chatty crowd of cocktailing cultural figures casually dismissive of their own country’s right to exist.

The infection among Israel’s cultural elites intensified through the Lebanon War and the two Intifadas that sandwiched the delusional Oslo era. As author Aharon Meged lamented in 1994, there existed “an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia, and its print and electronic media, with people committed to our annihilation.”

Epitomizing this “moral identification” were the certain prominent Jewish journalists who, according to Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, crucially failed the so-called ‘lynch test’, by exhibiting an inability to ever criticize Palestinian terror, even following the widely televised gruesome execution of two Jews by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah In 2000.

Metamorphosis

It was at this time that Jew Flu claimed a childhood friend of mine. We’d come of age together in the early ’80s, like-minded Zionists, he more “Kahanish” in temperament. Immigrating to Israel the day after graduation, he’d serve in the IDF, settle in Jerusalem, marry, spawn a brood, and settle into the life of an Israeli academic, where anti Zionist stances are common and open identification as an Israeli patriot is tantamount to career suicide.

Infection struck during the Oslo years: before the millennium was out, the youthful Kahanist yeshiva boy had morphed into a militant Jewish Anti Zionist, mindlessly spouting hackneyed and malicious anti-Israel canards on leftwing and Arab websites, and regularly consorting with a posse of Arab academics in Ramallah.

This episode recalled a scene from “Radio Days”, the Woody Allen movie in which an uncle fasting on Yom Kippur indignantly watches the Jewish communists next door brazenly barbecuing. In Holiday suit he marches out the front door to scold the Reds on their evil ways, only to return shortly after chewing on a chicken drumstick, indignantly decrying religion as the opiate of the masses.

Those like my friend afflicted with Jew Flu deny their infection, contending that criticism of Israel isn’t Anti-Semitism or even Anti-Israel.

Helpfully, Natan Sharansky formulated his so-called 3D litmus test to clearly distinguish mere Israel critics from Jew Flu victims, and has allowed me to diagnose my old friend.

As it turns out, the afflicted regularly engage in at least one of the following -Demonization (comparing Israeli actions to Nazism and referring to Arab refugee camps as Auschwitz);- Double Standards (singling out Israel for human rights abuses while ignoring the blatant human rights violators such as Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestinian Authority, North Korea, Cuba, China, Myanmar etc); and Delegitimization (denying Israel the fundamental right to exist as a Jewish state)

During March 2002, Jihadist suicide murderers were exploding on Israeli buses every other day, massacring and maiming hundreds of Jews in a cascade of latter-day pogroms; savage images of Haim Nahman Bialik’s monumental poem, “City of Slaughter” blazed across the broken land.

125 Jews were massacred and hundreds were wounded by Palestinian suicide murderers that month. Yet unsurprisingly my stricken friend declined comment.

My friend seems to amuse his Arab colleagues: Appearing at a conference some years ago at Cairo’s American University, an Egyptian fellow panelist quipped to the audience that our mutual friend was “more pro-Palestinian than me – I am more pro-Israel than him.”

Incidentally, this college has since instituted a ban on Israeli academics.

At this point allow me to complicate things: It’s easy to assume that those struck with Jew Flu would be contemptuous of Jewish religious observance. They often hold Marxist views, which would imply an atheist outlook.

Yet what one should one make of my friend who performs Kiddush on Friday nights, fasts on Yom Kippur and uses two sets of dishes in his kosher kitchen? Would such Jewish customs be performed by an anti-Semite?

Knesset speaker Avrum Burg is a lifelong modern orthodox Jew, a skull capped davener whose Jew Flu was latent for years but burst out into the open when he took to smearing Israel in Nazi-like browns.

Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin are pleasant, prominent and yarmulked professors of Jewish history who don tefilin daily, daven on Shabbat and holidays and are easily mistaken in appearance for West Bank settlers.

Yet Daniel is comfortable vilifying Israel regularly as a violent outlaw state. And Jonathan admitted to me some years ago during an especially sweaty Simchat Torah “hakafa” on the Lower East Side that his views are identical if not even more radical than Daniel’s (if that was possible.)

Actually, it is interesting that the views of such radical yet observant Jews resemble the tenets of Catholic Liberation Theology. But could such a trio be accused of outright anti-Semitism?

The Burgs and Boyarins of this world have long revered another devout Jew, the departed Yishayahu Leibowitz, a renowned scholar, recipient of the Israel Prize, and editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia, a Jerusalemite who habitually referred to drafted Israeli soldiers who happened to be defending his charmed way of life as “Judeo-Nazis”.

Was Leibowitz an anti-Semite?

Submitting their pronouncements to the Sharansky test demonstrates that even tefilin wearing, kosher food eating Kiddush reciters can speak and write like anti-Semites.

Prognosis

But back to the elusive cause of Jew Flu: what makes one Jew vulnerable and not another? Wouldn’t a far larger proportion of Jews fall prey to Jew Flu if, say, Stockholm syndrome was the culprit? Is there a prime mover, some physiological or neurological smoking gun pointing to a root cause?

There may be. David Brooks recently reported in the New York Times on research by a Haifa University team led by Reem Yahya who studied the brains scans of Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations.

Brooks reports that “the two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.”

This phenomenon was epitomized by Rosa Luxemburg, a prominent Bolshevik and Jew Flu victim. “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” declared Rosa the Red. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”

And then there’s the modest story Ahmad the cabbie related to me last week as we drove through Eilat-like Palm Springs: Ahmad’s brother in Nablus was employed for many years by an Israeli Jewish building contractor. When the outbreak of Intifada in 2000 permanently barred Ahmad’s brother from work in Israel, his Jewish boss continued to pay the brother’s salary for five years.

The intriguing research out of Haifa suggests that Jews may very well be inherently altruistic. But while exhibiting more sensitivity to another group’s pain is one thing, embracing the goals of people openly committed to one’s destruction is a form of madness.

So here’s my ultimate theory for the cause of this nefarious virus: Jew Flu is a condition in which being “more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than (one’s) own metastasizes into a malignant emotional and moral identification with people committed to (one’s) annihilation.”

Dr. Mary Grabar: Teaching George Washington When Professors Aim to ‘Stop Santorum’

This is one of the most important columns you may see. Read every last word.

Dr. Mary Grabar:

In an age and time when I find most of my college students unfamiliar with the story of Adam and Eve or the origin of the phrase, “judge not lest ye be judged,” I enter discussions about religion with some caution. Almost universally my students do not believe that religious belief is necessary for morality, and seem to be offended by the very concept.

But when one discusses the speeches of our earlier presidents, as I do in my composition classes, it is necessary to address religion’s role.

So last week, as we discussed George Washington’s Farewell Address, I asked students to recall the major points he made. Because several of them had already studied the speech in high school, they listed points most emphasized by teachers: his cautions about foreign entanglements, factional discord, and debt. Not many recalled his injunction to use the Constitution as a safeguard against “internal enemies.” Only one recalled his reminder about the importance of religion.

Although it does not take up much of the speech, it is an important passage, and one worth recalling in today’s age when libertarian ideals seem to motivate most college students and when many conservative pundits caution us about focusing on social issues.

But Washington reminds us, as do the other Founding Fathers, of why the Constitution is necessary in the first place.

The Constitution is structured according to a vision of mankind as inherently flawed, as marked by Original Sin. This view of human nature is what sets apart those who established the longest-lasting Constitution from the utopian idealists who see human nature as essentially good. Those human beings who are flawed by selfishness or irrationality (as they see it) can be shaped by the right social and political forces—and woe to the man who resists the efforts by the utopian theorists to make him good! We have seen that in the death tolls of such schemes.

But in Washington’s view, because character alone cannot be trusted, a division of powers helps provide checks against branches of government and of individuals. Washington echoes James Madison.

Yet, even with such multiple safeguards and a contract that stands beyond the immediate interests of parties, Washington still reminds us of the importance of religion. He calls “religion and morality” the “indispensable supports” of the “dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.” In fact, he implies that patriotism is impossible without “these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” It’s a sentence I emphasize. I ask students if they agree. Of course not, they almost unanimously say. One does not need to be religious to be patriotic. One does not need to believe in God to be moral.

Washington continues: “The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”

Notice that Washington calls on the “mere politician” to respect religion and morality. Washington then claims, “A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.” (It’s no wonder that moderns who ascribe to the notion that religion is a private affair that should be divorced from political life would rather forget George Washington or wipe him from the history books.)

Furthermore, Washington maintains that morality emerges from religion, as he asks a rhetorical question: “Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?” This leads to my question of why we ask those who testify in court to place their hands on the Bible. This inspires more looks of consternation among students who have been educated in the idea that any kind of insistence on religious faith is an expression of “intolerance.”

Washington finally ends that paragraph by stating point blank, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

That is about as unequivocal a statement as one can get.

Earlier in the speech, Washington had cautioned about regional animosities. Reminding them of the common “religion, manners, habits, and political principles” they shared, Washington encouraged citizens to adopt the identity “American”.

This is where students are apt to point out the changes that have taken place in over 200 years. The United States is no longer as homogenous as it was back then, when the vast majority of Americans belonged to various denominations of Protestantism. Students echo the standard line about “diversity” that infuses our educational establishment. They parrot the notion that it is an expression of “intolerance” to state that our nation is based upon a common moral and religious foundation of Judeo-Christian principles.

Yet, in spite of their constant exposure to “diversity” and a “globalism,” students have almost no ability to place our form of government and society into a global context. I remind students of the historical fact that Christianity introduced the notion that all people are equal in the eyes of the Creator. I ask students about our most basic laws. Why are parents who abuse or kill their children prosecuted? After all, in Greek and Roman culture, the father had the prerogative of allowing his infant child to die of exposure. Why do we take care of our elderly, even beyond the point of their “usefulness” to us? After all, Eskimos and other primitive societies, simply abandoned the weak and elderly, sending them off on ice floes. Apparently, students today don’t hear about such practices, while they are constantly bombarded about the “social injustice” of our economic system.

So, why, I ask, do our laws follow this Judeo-Christian injunction against killing? Other primitive societies, and now professors of ethics, like Peter Singer at Princeton, do not see anything unethical about killing handicapped infants.

When looks of horror register on the faces of students when I tell them about Singer’s proposal to allow parents to kill handicapped children, I tell them that their recoil at the thought of killing babies indicates the fact that even if they are not practicing Christians or Jews they have imbibed the values of a Judeo-Christian culture that values life. Those like Singer, quite significantly, begin by rejecting the Bible, which provides the premise that life is sacred.

The professor who works in a non-tenured position, as I do, broaches such topics with trepidation, lest any student (often called the “customer”) complain to the administration.

But I was pleasantly surprised when several students told me how much they had enjoyed and appreciated the discussion about religion in Washington’s speech. One, who is a Hindu, stayed after class, to tell me this.

Yet, if and when they follow today’s political debates in the news, students are likely to hear attacks upon Republican candidates’ religiosity and lack of respect for the “separation of church and state.” This is especially true about Rick Santorum who has been most outspoken about the importance of religion in public life.

In the classroom students are likely to hear views like those of Georgetown University Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who charges Republicans with “secular-baiting” in his blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education. He claims Newt Gingrich pioneered the genre and Mitt Romney took it a “milestone” in its “evolution.” It is Santorum, however, whom he charges with demonizing Secularism, by reminding audiences of the atheistic nature of the “’French Revolution, moving onto the facists, and the Nazis and the communists and the Baathists.’”

Instead of considering the historical veracity of Santorum’s statement, Berlinerblau attributes nefarious and crazy motives to Santorum: “It is easy, lucrative, and even pleasurable, to pulverize sinister Secularism. It rallies the base, secures contributions, and helps conservative voters focus on demonic (i.e., liberal, Democratic) forces possessing our political system.” Running with his theory, Berlinerblau assigns an all-or-nothing faith in “divine revelation,” as if Santorum imagines he has a direct line to God. Berlinerblau then posits that religionists like Santorum might hear different things from God and thus have no basis upon which to decide policies. Such “anti-secular rhetoric,” he maintains, is “at its core . . . a demagogic evasion” (italics retained).

After he has whipped himself up to making Santorum a dictatorial theocrat, Berlinerblau concludes ominously, “Santorum and others will keep baiting secularism, and evading difficult issues, until someone stops them.”

In class, it will be worth reminding students about how the French Revolutionists and the Soviet Communists did first kill all the priests and nuns. It will be worth reminding students of the freedom voters have in drawing upon religious principles when they exercise their right to vote—in spite of many professors’ desire to simply “stop” people of religious faith, like Rick Santorum.