The Republican presidential campaign thus far has been so bizarre and, frankly, depressing, that some of us have failed to adequately cover worrisome developments on a number of other important fronts. By ineptness and, worse, by deliberate design, Barack Obama daily makes this nation weaker abroad, less free (and more authoritarian) at home, economically more feeble, and in the civic realm more bitterly divided than ever. Meanwhile, ominous developments crowd the world stage. In short, we’re in a big heap of trouble. The recent litany of Obama’s odiousness begins with his growing, unambiguous war against traditional Christianity. He has now left no room for any pretense otherwise to be believed. Right on the heels of a unanimous Supreme Court, including his own two appointees, smacking down his administration’s attempt to kill the “ministerial exemption” for employment practices of faith-based institutions, an unchastened Obama has decided that even faith-based organizations must provide insurance that covers contraception — even including abortifacients. This is not just a narrow policy disagreement; it is, as Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh wrote , the president’s way of saying “To Hell With You” to people of faith — “To hell with your religious beliefs. To hell with your religious liberty. To hell with your freedom of conscience.” Zubik continued: “This is government by fiat that attacks the rights of everyone — not only Catholics; not only people of all religion. At no other time in memory or history has there been such a governmental intrusion on freedom not only with regard to religion, but even across-the-board with all citizens.” Obama’s broadsides, plural, against religious liberty are only a part of his radical transgressions against the U.S. Constitution. Conservatives are rightly up in arms about Obama’s illegal recess appointments . Obamacare, of course, contains several anti-Constitutional abominations , including the “individual mandate” and the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Meanwhile, his administration is flagrantly violating precedent by trying to force explicit hiring quotas on the Fire Department of New York, in a case in which a key amicus brief was filed on January 24 at the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. And so on. Abroad, this man leading the Occupy the Oval Office movement is even worse. He threw away a clear victory in Iraq and may be doing the same in Afghanistan. His fecklessness regarding Iran, perfectly in line with his long record of favoring Shia interests, is now leading to a crisis of the first order. His strange mishandling of the Egyptian revolution has left the United States with very little leverage in a country that for more than three decades was a major American ally, and has left Coptic Christians scared to death . He long ago insulted allies such as Israel and Great Britain, repeatedly and with malice aforethought. He seems to have no real relationship of any positive nature with any allied foreign leader, perhaps with the exception of those in Brazil, whose oil exploration he subsidizes while blocking tens of thousands of jobs that would come from domestic energy production he has snuffed out. And he seems hell-bent on a mission to starve the American armed forces to dangerous thinness. Killing the private college-loan industry. Hobbling private for-profit colleges. Illegally seizing auto companies. Whoring for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Turning public policy over to thuggish union bosses and destroying jobs in South Carolina to do so. Turning the Justice Department into a thoroughly corrupt, lawless, racialist, hyper-politicized, gun-running, vote-fraud-enabling, bullying arm of the left wing of the Democratic Party. Regulating the life out of almost every aspect of the economy. Buying political support by funneling taxpayer money to failing private alternative-energy companies. Lying with the Supreme Court sitting in front of him about what they decided in the Citizens United case. Lying about so many things that one loses count. Roiling racial tensions every chance he gets. This is a man who has no interest in serving the United States that most of us know and love. Instead, he’s a man who, by hook and definitely by crook, serves the despicable vision of the utterly foreign America he wants to impose on us. Four more years of this guy in power, and we are doomed. He is a menace, and, by every legal means possible, he must be stopped — and his maladministration reversed and thoroughly buried.
Religious groups at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee are banned from making leadership decisions based on religion, thanks to rules set forward by officials enforcing its “nondiscrimination policy.” According to the administration, “membership in registered student organizations is open to everyone and that everyone, if desired, has the opportunity to seek leadership positions.” That “plurality” became a top priority over religious freedom when a gay student claimed he had been “kicked out” of a Christian fraternity. In response, the university examined the constitutions of some 300 groups and found that several weren’t in compliance with Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy. The groups included the Christian Legal Society, which violates the policy by expecting its officers to lead Bible studies, prayer and worship at chapter meetings. When John Roberts of Fox News reached out to the university for comment, they only issued the pat statement: “Vanderbilt officials refused to be interviewed, and instead released a statement saying in part “We are committed to making our campus a welcoming environment for all of our students.” Unless you’re Christian, of course. The rule has been criticized by 23 members of Congress, the national Christian Legal Society, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Nashville, and others. The nondiscrimination policy is a direct contradiction to the school’s own words when it insists that students “are entitled to exercise the rights of citizens.” George Will, when writing about the issue last fall, noted that the Court has upheld the ability of groups to discriminate when defining themselves: In wiser moments, the court has held that “this freedom to gather in association . . . necessarily presupposes the freedom to identify the people who constitute the association and to limit the association to those people only.” In 1984, William Brennan, the court’s leading liberal of the last half-century, said: “There can be no clearer example of an intrusion into the internal structure or affairs of an association than a regulation that forces the group to accept members it does not desire. Such a regulation may impair the ability of the original members to express only those views that brought them together. Freedom of association therefore plainly presupposes a freedom not to associate.” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) had a number of pointed questions about how this rule would work in practice, revealing how shortsighted it is: If one of the leaders of Vanderbilt’s Muslim Students Association were to convert to Christianity, is the group required to maintain that person in his or her leadership role despite the fact that he or she is no longer Muslim? Vanderbilt informed the Christian Legal Society that its requirement that student leaders “lead Bible studies, prayer, and worship” was against the policy because it implied that these leaders must hold certain religious beliefs. How do you suggest religious groups at Vanderbilt fulfill their purposes without leaders who can accomplish such core tasks of religious leadership? While this dispute was originally confined to religious organizations, your statement of January 20 states that all student organizations must accept any student as a member or a leader. If a group of straight students-the majority at Vanderbilt-were to join the Vanderbilt Lambda Association, vote themselves into office, and disband the group or alter the group’s mission, what recourse would LGBT members of the Lambda Association have? If a member of the College Republicans joins the College Democrats to discover their plans for political activism and report those plans back to the College Republicans in order to thwart them, do the College Democrats have any way to stop him or her? Under this policy, must an ideological student journal like Vanderbilt’s Orbis accept editors or publish columnists who disagree with, mock, or denigrate its progressive political views? Many groups in the Occupy movement choose to make decisions by consensus. How could a Vanderbilt-based Occupy group operate if a small group of students joined specifically to prevent the group from acting in any way by constantly preventing a consensus from forming? If a student were to join an environmentalist group like Vanderbilt SPEAR and then use his membership in that group to increase his or her credibility when publicly criticizing the group’s positions in the Nashville or Vanderbilt newspapers, what could the group do to prevent this? It is unlikely any response will be forthcoming: FIRE has written to officials at the school before, and have received no response. Even more likely, these are questions the officials have never even considered, and will have a hard time answering. Updated: A spokesperson from Vanderbilt returned my call inquiring about the policy with the following email: Per your phone call, here is a link to Vanderbilt University’s longstanding nondiscrimination policy. It is not a new policy – http://hr.vanderbilt.edu/policies/HR-001.php Also, here is a link to a message from our chancellor – http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2012/01/chancellor-message-jan-20/. This is all I can provide at this time. I replied that this appears to be the first time the school has applied this policy in this way. I don’t think she’ll be responding, but I can’t help but note that a university that touts its openness and free inquiry refuses to answer press inquiries. Not exactly the approach you take when you want to counter the message that you’re unfriendly to the First Amendment.
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Vanderbilt Drops the Ball on Religious Freedom – UPDATED: Vanderbilt Replies
POW! In his typical understated New York fashion, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani went on Fox and Friends yesterday and smacked Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for their sudden yearning for class warfare. “What the hell are you doing, Newt? I expect this from Saul Alinsky. This is what Saul Alinsky taught Barack Obama, and what you’re saying is part of the reason we’re in so much trouble right now,” said a furious and frustrated America’s mayor. Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal reports there are now second thoughts in the Gingrich camp about identifying a man who repeatedly identifies himself as a “Reagan conservative” with a 28-minute documentary attacking Mitt Romney as a big bad capitalist. Good thinking. One has to wonder: What in the world is Gingrich SuperPAC honcho Rick Tyler smoking? In a clip of an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, played on air by Rush Limbaugh, Tyler responds to Mitchell’s question of whether or not the anti-Romney approach taken by the Gingrich campaign is not causing Gingrich himself problems — with Republican voters. To which Tyler answers by saying that Obama’s David Axelrod knows infinitely more about Romney’s Bain Capital than the Gingrich camp and will let fly if Romney is the nominee. So therefore, was the implication, the attacks on Romney over Bain by the Gingrich campaign are as nothing… and necessary to boot. To say the least, we’ve been critical of Governor Romney in this space. He is a nice guy but not a conservative. In fact, the one thing Newt is doing right is identifying Romney as a “Massachusetts moderate.” True. Absolutely. Romney is a 21st century Rockefeller Republican, just another card-carrying GOP moderate of the type that has routinely lost presidential elections or turned in historically disappointing presidencies that are nothing if not just more status quo. We’ve taken flack from the anti-Newt side of the corral and others for thinking of Speaker Gingrich from our experience with him in his days as a young Reaganite leader of the Conservative Opportunity Society in the House. Newt, it has been insisted to us, is not a conservative at all but a liberal… an opportunist… a man unable to stop shooting himself in the foot etc., etc. Suffice to say, this was certainly not the impression he gave in repeated dealings with him as an energetic Reaganite House leader carrying the war straight to the liberal likes of Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright. But what Mr. Tyler is saying… plus the disgraceful Romney-attack ads coming from the Gingrich SuperPAC now being played on conservative talk radio… can not only deepen that impression of the anti-Newts, it can have the end result of self-sabotaging the Gingrich campaign and his reputation beyond as a Reagan conservative. Lending the distinct and to some alarming impression that in a fit of fury at Romney (justified) the ex-Speaker is switching from being a leader of the Conservative Opportunity Society to what might be called the Gingrich/Perry Conservative Resentment Society. There are 1,000 and one ways to go after Romney’s record as a “Massachusetts moderate.” Flip-flopping, abortion, planned parenthood, the anti-Reagan streak when convenient, the “I was an independent and I’m not a partisan” shtick used to run for office in Massachusetts. Even under attack on Bain, Governor Romney seems too timid to make a full throated defense of economic freedom and capitalism. Indeed, Romney’s very timidity in defending both himself and the core principle of conservatism that is economic freedom should serve as yet another fire bell in the night as to the lack of boldness inherent in a potential Romney administration. One of the other points Mayor Giuliani made is perhaps key to the entire campaign — the emotional desire of both Rudy Giuliani and millions of grassroots Republicans/conservatives to raise the Reagan conservative banner. Newt was making progress on this path. But in an apparent — and understandable — desire to even the score with Romney over all those Iowa commercials, Gingrich himself or his advisers (that means you, Rick Tyler) are using an influx of cash to the end result of effectively trashing the Reagan legacy, not to mention the ex-Speaker’s credibility as a Reagan conservative. This baloney — and that is what it is — should stop. The offensive Gingrich radio ads being run on conservative talk radio effectively attacking free markets and economic liberty under the guise of Bain-did-bad should be halted on the spot. Designed this way or not, they are perceived as a vivid and direct Alinsky/Obama style attack on capitalism and economic freedom. In particular, to run them on the shows of the most prominent conservative talkers in the land — whose audiences are large precisely because the hosts are Reagan conservatives — is akin to running ads on evangelical radio stations attacking religion. This isn’t serious strategy. This is self-sabotage. The fact of the matter is that Newt Gingrich has made an excellent case for himself — and against Romney. Rick Perry, once filled with promise, is stumbling around out there not simply because of bad debate performances but because he gave the impression with his in-state tuition answer for the children of illegals that he was at heart a closet liberal. A perception he has doubled-down on with this “vulture capital” routine, the latter doing nothing if not reminding that Mr. Perry began his career as a Democrat supporting Al Gore. It is often said that Social Security is the “third rail” of politics. Touch it, so goes the tale, and your career will die. In the wake of the Gingrich/Perry attacks on Romney it can perhaps be added that economic freedom is the third rail of conservative politics. If one touches it — “touches” defined as being perceived as attacking economic freedom — a conservative will find their career if not dead at least impossibly scorched. Speaker Gingrich and Governor Perry are in the process of scorching themselves and killing both their campaigns and larger Reagan conservative reputations. If this continues, perhaps the best thing all around would be if someone quietly said two words to each. Get out.
Excerpt from:
Newt, Perry: Time to Get Out?
I’m at the Santorum event tonight in Iowa. Nate Silver at the New York Times says we should not be surprised by a Santorum win, and I would not be surprised by a Santorum win. It is very possible based on the strength of evangelicals showing up across Iowa today to organize and get to the caucuses tonight.. These people really, really do not want Mitt Romney. However misguided I may think it is, because others have flamed out they are rallying to Santorum as the alternative. But Santorum didn’t see it coming. We’re in a small location overloaded with press risers. The place is small for the standards of a front runner, though I’m sure we’ll hear the word “cozy.” Heck, I might use the word cozy to describe it. Santorum’s party tonight reflects the campaign — it started off small, didn’t really expect what was coming, and tonight will be packed. I suspect the Fire Marshall is going to use “excess capacity” to describe it by 9pm. The media just overwhelms the room. And in Iowa the Hawkeye Caucii start in about 30 minutes.
The rest is here:
Santorum Did Not Expect This
It’s a sad commentary on the Obama administration both that the Republican effort to dethrone him seems so desperately important that it dominated (my) column-writing in the year before election year and that the administration flouts laws and constitutional traditions in so many ways that it’s almost impossible to blow the whistle on them all. That said, I have been seriously amiss in writing too little in 2011 on the following stories, some of which I covered at length in previous years — and all of which I enthusiastically invite other reporters and columnists to write about. The Obamite War Against the Heroic FDNY: Contradicting the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano which held that results of a race-neutral exam for firefighter promotions ought to be honored, the Obama/Holder Justice Department has been trying to force New York City’s fire department to throw out results of a race-neutral test, and to admit into its academy black applicants even if they missed 70 percent of simple questions — in the process, blocking the admission of black applicants who actually performed well on the test. (Go figure.) DoJ instructions even suggested explicitly quota-based academy admissions, thus ignoring plenty of other Supreme Court precedent. In the latest news, the city of New York has, quite rightly, appealed the rogue judge’s order (the judge and the Obamites are aligned) appointing a “monitor” for the fire force’s personnel moves. The Obamite Effort to Discourage Voting by the Military: Eric Eversole, executive director of the Military Voter Protection Project, came on my radio show in September to discuss this, but it still merits far more attention. Clearly, the Obama administration has, at best, fallen down on the job, and more likely, actively discouraged military voting. Clearly, they believe military voters tend to be conservative, so the Obamites want them disenfranchised. Judicial Wars: Usually one of my favorite topics, this has slipped away from me this year — partly because Republican senators are so frustratingly weak-kneed about the whole subject. Ed Whelan has some statistics here . Sadly, only a smattering of GOP senators would even support their own Judiciary Committee Ranking Member, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, in opposing the nomination of Susan Owens Hickey to a federal district court, and they wouldn’t do even a temporary filibuster against the manifestly ill-qualified Alison Nathan. Blocking Obamite Efforts to Nationalize Education Policy: U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett has introduced the LEARN Act to let states opt out of federal micromanagement, and it appears to be a great idea. As Gary Palmer of the Alabama Policy Institute points out (and as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has been noting as well), the Obama administration is improperly using the “waiver” process to force their own policy choices on the states. Obamite Flouting of Clear Legislative Language: U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf complains that White House science czar and compulsory abortion advocate John Holdren is violating the law in using federal appropriations for unapproved purposes (in this case, certain bilateral activities with China). Likewise, the Washington Times ‘ Emily Miller catches the White House blowing off other Appropriations restrictions, thus further indicating that he is dangerously authoritarian in outlook. Obamites Cheating for Union Goons: So many examples of this tendency could be mentioned here that I won’t even try to list them all. But here’s one highlighted by the Workplace Fairness Institute. In short, the National Labor Relations Board has become, like the Justice Department, a lawless agency. Obamite War Against Catholics and Other Traditionalist People of Faith : The Catholic Advocate explains in this short online video, and writes in another forum the following: Think about some of the policies that have taken root since Obama entered the White House: •
