Republicans say “x”; the media reports they meant “y”; and the best way to be sued for defamation is to accurately quote a Democrat
President Barack Obama has faced the nation the past three years declaring his debt-exploding policies to be Biblically-based, in the national interest and necessary to remedy the economic crisis he inherited from his GOP predecessor. When addressing the persistence of continuing economic ills in the fourth year of his presidency he asserts that Republicans impede solutions to the nations ills because they put party politics above what’s best for the country or that he didn’t realize just how bad the crisis was. Finally, when addressing follow up questions from the media reminding him of his original contradictory claims and suggesting that he is attributing nefarious non-Christian motives to Republicans in Congress, he…oh, wait a minute, we don’t actually remember hearing such follow ups when Obama meets the press.
The free exercise of religion was fundamental to the founding of America, but so is the right to freely bargain with health care and insurance providers
After President Barack Obama inevitably drops the recently announced mandate that even church-affiliated employers provide health insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization and “Plan B” morning after abortion pills (aka RU-486), will we look back at this exercise as a ruse to make ObamaCare seem more palatable to voters this fall?
After all, the Messiah will be seen as having heard the public outcry including threats of civil disobedience, and graciously agreed to respect the consciences of Roman Catholics? In fact, the subject mandate applies to all religious group employers which include numerous Southern Baptist hospitals and other Protestant and Evangelical organizations, but I digress.
Yes, America’s founding by pilgrims and Puritans, not to mention the first freedom in the Bill of Rights, properly focuses this mandate to fund abortion coverage via insurance premiums on the free exercise of religion, but of course, when Democrats aka Dem-o-bats (pictured, that suck the blood out of health care) rule, our tax dollars regularly fund abortion and yet we don’t see threats of civil disobedience to withhold taxes, do we? Moreover, if theObamaCare mandate is actually put into effect in August 2013 (after the election of course) the only recourse people of conscience would have would be to refuse to pay the ObamaCare fine for refusing to comply.
Caring for the poor is always defined by support for the latest Democratic Party proposal
During my teen and young adult Democratic Party activism years in the 70s and 80s, the number one scare tactic used by the party to scare widows and orphans, i.e. the poor, was their claim that if Republicans controlled the government, they would “take away your checks”. Ronald Reagan, famously asserted his support for a safety net for the “truly needy” and despite several periods of exclusive GOP control of the executive and legislative branches over the last 30 years, the safety net remains intact.
And yet, the Democratic Party mantra against Republicans as having a lack of concern for the poor has continued unabated with the goalposts continually being moved to re-define caring as support for the latest liberal Democrat proposal, whether it be Stimulus, ObamaCare or mortgage bailout bills.
Enter Mitt Romney:
“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
Translation: We agree with the Democratic Party. Our concern for the very poor has been satisfied by the welfare state they have constructed and if we must spend more money to expand that safety net to show we care about the poor, we will.
Mitt makes many mistakes with this statement and one of the mistakes is in thinking that Republicans can ever satisfy the Democrats on the issue of caring for the poor. We can’t. Why? Because their concern is in buying the votes of the poor by keeping them dependent on government and creating more poor people to be dependent on them.
Our native state teaches the now Stone Mountain of Georgia-roosted gamecock a personal lesson: Newt is acceptable
Mike DeVine Law Gamecock is humbled.
That so many voters that have earned my respect for so many years have chosen to support Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney convinces me that Mitt is not so much better than Newt, that a vote for the former Speaker is not acceptable. Newt is a worthy fighter… and the crow and humble pie ordered here, here and here… needed more sugar and salt, respectively, thank you very much.
I still plan to vote for Mitt on Super Tuesday, but I don’t dismiss the primary voters of my native home state lightly. If Newt can give up the vague Bain Capital attacks and show mature discipline over the next months, he can win my enthusiastic support for the nomination and, of course, in the general election.
Romney ought to have to prove himself worthy to bear the mantle of the Party of Lincoln and Reagan as much as Gingrich ought.
May the best man win, I will be open to the idea that we need a street fighter just now, and …much more later…
Palmetto State poised for pragmatic pick over preening vulture anti-capitalists
South Carolinians have seen too many shuttered textile plants never visited by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital to fall for Newt-Perry slurs that blame the buyers of companies already failing due to the internal policies of the sellers or external policies of governments.
Vultures eat the dead. Bain, under Romney, saved jobs worth saving in the private sector (unlike the now government motors taxpayer -funded welfare “jobs” saved by President Barack Obama at a loss) by salvaging the identifiable living and the profits earned saved and created jobs, sight unseen:
The problem with the entire discussion is that jobs are being used as the only measure of the “good” done by Romney. Profits are also good as they allow companies to grow and as they return capital to investors who can then fund the creation or growth of other companies. Indeed, despite our being surrounded by Keynesian-thinking politicians who believe that nothing is as important as consumers having spending money, the indirect benefits to society of profits to investors are arguably at least as large as the indirect benefits of employment.
We have to assume that conservative movement leaders like the former Speaker of the House and a twice re-elected governor of the Lone (jobs-producing in the 21st Century so far) Star State are familiar with the the economic fundamentals that define free market capitalism and that constitutes the foundation of modern day American conservatism. Hence this2000 conservative epiphany-defined gamecock’s disdain for Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry when they launched their respective efforts in my native home state by hurling the “vulture capitalist” epithet at the successful former CEO of Bain Capital and related companies, savior of the post-911 Salt Lake City olympics, and balancer of Bay State budgets.
Originally published January 16, 2007 in The Charlotte Observer.
Achieve King’s dream with equal treatment
Misguided liberal policies assume blacks are inferior victims
MIKE DEVINE
Special to the Observer
“Daddy, why would somebody want to shoot a preacher?”
That was a precocious little boy’s first reaction upon seeing the headline of The Spartanburg Herald announcing the assassination of the 39-year-old leader of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.
No holiday cries out for a progress report more than the one President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1983 and that America celebrated yesterday. Where do we stand nearly 39 years after King’s death on April 4, 1968?
Brandon Woolfolk, a 23-year-old African American junior at UNC Charlotte presently working as a hotel clerk, told me last week that “One change is that back then blacks feared whites. Today, they fear other blacks.”
Mitt’s free market capitalism brand is the best bet to drink at an Obama re-election denial tea party
The depths of Great Depression II and the historic 2010 tea partier conservative-driven Republican Party mid-term landslide encouraged dreams of a Reagan-like 2012 GOP nominee to retire President Barack Obama to a resumption of his autobiographical writing career.
The crashing sounds of Bachmann’s looseness with the facts, Cain’s knowledge gaps and Perry’s non-creative vulture mis-sighting-destruction awoke this South Carolina gamecock from Utopian REM eye-battings to the reality of imperfect choices absent Gippers and Silent Cals.
Apportioning blame in case Ronald Reagan Jr. is not the 2012 GOP presidential nominee
After the historic tea partier-inspired conservative Republican landslide that was the Election of 2010, we had every reason to believe that Reaganites-a-plenty would be vying for the opportunity to retire the disaster that is President Barack Obama.
Surely there are scores, if not hundreds, of articulate, experienced and reliable conservatives on fiscal, social and national security issues who posses the skill sets to campaign and govern effectively? Maybe they exist, but we haven’t seen them in Des Moines, Dubuque or Davenport of late.
The Palmetto State’s new law actually provides free state-issued photo identification cards to all that need them just like the laws of all the other states with such laws that the Department of Justice either pre-cleared or decided not to contest.
So what is the difference between the South Carolina law as opposed to the laws of Georgia (also upheld by their state’s highest court), that DOJ approved and Indiana (also upheld by the nation’s highest court) that DOJ declined to contest?
It is not the language of the respective laws, all of which avoid any semblance of a Jim Crow-style poll tax by, not only providing for the issuance of free photo ID voter registration cards, but also by authorizing a proactive educational campaign as well as allowing for non-photo ID voters to cast provisional ballots on Election Day that can be authenticated later with photo IDs obtained after Election Day.
Despite the above, no less than former President Bill Clinton has characterized photo ID laws as a “return to Jim Crow”, but I digress. I defer:
The court’s liberal lion, then-Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote for the majority that Indiana’s law “is unquestionably relevant to the State’s interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.” Indiana offered free voter ID cards to all citizens, so the inconvenience of picking up an ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles wasn’t an undue burden and was reasonably balanced by the state’s interest in reducing fraud, Justice Stevens wrote.
So, could it be that South Carolina’s sin was the passage of their law too soon after the failure of President Barack Obama’s economic policies became apparent and too soon before his re-election bid?
Holder’s assistant deputy AG in the Civil Rights Division claims in his pre-clearance denial letter that the new law “abridges” the right to vote of an alleged 81,938 “minority citizens who are already registered to vote [in S.C.] and who lack DMV-issued identification”, thus rendering them “effectively disenfranchised”; and that the state has not yet finalized the proposed procedures to implement the issuance of free photo IDs and an education campaign necessary to “mitigate” the new law’s “discriminatory effects”.
DeVine Law Gamecock’s Stone Mountain of Georgia roost-view of what matters most about the news, politics and law of 2011:
Unemployment and the Economy
If enough Americans give up on finding a job, the regularly reported unemployment rate (U-3) could fall to Zero percent. As it happens, the current U-3 rate of 8.6% would stand at over 11% if the labor force were as large as it was in 2007. The more comprehensive U-6 rate measuring all those that are unemployed and those only able to find part-time work is now at Depression Era levels over 17%, which rate doesn’t count self-employed individuals nor those that have dropped out. Over one in five American men are no longer in the labor force.
Jobs Plans, Occupiers and Class Warfare
Three years after President Barack Obama and super-majorities of his fellow Democrats in Congress enacted their Stimulus-Dodd-Frank-ObamaCare-GM takeover/UAW Bailout-Solyndra, anti-Keystone Pipeline and anti-Boeing jobs in right-to-work states, Gulf Oil and ANWR oil-drilling moratorium agenda; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) stands at an anemic 1.8%.
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