Pursuant to my last post

What are we prepared to do?  Howsabout we take a page from Hobby Lobby — with its icky social conservative values, and embarrassing Christian pieties — and stand up for its liberty by simply denying the government and the courts their usurped authority?

“Hobby Lobby Defies Obama Administration with Civil Disobedience for Religious Liberty”:

Now that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has denied Hobby Lobby’s application for an emergency injunction protecting them from Obamacare’s HHS Mandate on abortion and birth control, Hobby Lobby has decided to defy the federal government to remain true to their religious beliefs, at enormous risk and financial cost.

Hobby Lobby is wholly owned and controlled by the Green family, who are evangelical Christians. The Greens are committed to running their business in accordance with their Christian faith, believing that God wants them to conduct their professional business in accordance with the family’s understanding of the Bible. Hobby Lobby’s mission statement includes, “Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company … consistent with Biblical principles.”

The HHS Mandate goes into effect for Hobby Lobby on Jan. 1, 2013. The Greens correctly understand that some of the drugs the HHS Mandate requires them to cover at no cost in their healthcare plans cause abortions.

Today Hobby Lobby announced that they will not comply with this mandate to become complicit in abortion, which the Greens believe ends an innocent human life. Given Hobby Lobby’s size (it has 572 stores employing more than 13,000 people), by violating the HHS Mandate, it will be subject to over $1.3 million in fines per day. That means over $40 million in fines in January alone. If their case takes another ten months to get before the Supreme Court—which would be the earliest it could get there under the normal order of business—the company would incur almost a half-billion dollars in fines. And then of course the Supreme Court would have to write an opinion in what would likely be a split decision with dissenters, which could easily take four or six months and include hundreds of millions of dollars in additional penalties.

This is civil disobedience, consistent with America’s highest traditions when moral issues are at stake. The Greens are a law-abiding family. They have no desire to defy their own government. But as the Founders launched the American Revolution because they believed the British government was violating their rights, the Greens believe that President Barack Obama and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius are commanding the Greens to sin against God, and that no government has the lawful authority to do so.

[...]

This issue of civil disobedience is never to be undertaken lightly. The Bible teaches Christians to submit to all legitimate governmental authority (e.g., Romans 13:1), and so a person can only disobey the government when there is no other way to obey God.

But here in America, the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and in its First Amendment it protects against a government establishment of an official religion and separately protects the free exercise of religion. On top of that, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) to specifically add an additional layer of protection against government actions that violate a person’s religious beliefs.

The HHS Mandate is a gross violation of the religious beliefs of the Green family. The issue before the courts here is whether the Greens religious-liberty rights include running their secular, for-profit business consistent with their religious beliefs. In other words, is religious liberty just what you do in church on a Sunday morning, or does it include what you do during the week at your job?

The Greens are now putting their fortunes on the line to do what they believe is right. The courts should side with them, affirming a broad scope of religious liberty under the Constitution and RFRA. And the Supreme Court should resolve this matter with dispatch in their favor.

Millions of Christians across the country feel exactly the same way as the Greens. The Obama administration has issued a statist command that is a declaration of war on people of faith who object to abortion, and civil disobedience could break out all over the country unless the courts set this matter right—and quickly.

Of course, it shouldn’t just be Christians. If the government can be so arrogant as to take away one basic foundational right from Christians — or at least attempt to trivialize it and put it into a box (think campus “free speech zones”) — it will be only be emboldened should it be able to cast Christians as backward biblethumpers clinging to their religion at the expense of the Greater Good and “tolerance.”

And that’s been the attempt, aided in many ways by our own “side,” many of whom so fear getting any of that Holy Spirit stain on their sophisticated, worldly J Crew blazers that they actively attacked their own party candidates when those candidates made too much noise about their religious beliefs.

Yet as I argued at the time, it is precisely those beliefs, assaulted so frequently by the secularists and statists and courts, that, defended against governmental overstep, provide the very blueprint to resisting state overreach.

Ironic though it may seem to our own bien pensant, it is their reluctance to stand with the bitterclingers that gives the left the aid it needs to beat back the limited government that same bien pensant “conservative” crowd claims to fight for.

Let me go on record here as saying, my own agnosticism aside, thank God for the true believers.  Because they, along with the gun rights advocates, are standing in the way of the complete government takeover of everything we once understood about individual liberty and autonomy.

Bless their goofy, unhip piety, I say.

(h/t JHo)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 12:57pm
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“Op-Ed: Harry Reid’s filibuster plan and the Supreme Court”

ObamaCare was famously foisted onto Americans with no Republican support.  And if Harry Reid and the progressives have their way, this will become the rule, not the exception — with the biggest impact coming in a fundamental transformation of the Court, the final step needed by progressives to deconstruct the Constitution while appearing to play by its rules, and to (in the short term) implement the fundamental transformation Obama desires, with the long-term view that uprooting the foundational changes made will be near impossible.

Steven Duffield, writing in the Washington Examiner [my emphases]:

The Senate is a unique legislative body that protects the rights of individual senators both to debate and to amend. These rights are valued so highly that it takes a supermajority — today, 60 votes — to deny fellow senators those rights. This higher vote threshold and the prospect of extended debate encourage deliberation, compromise and moderation.

Many Senate liberals want to gut this long-standing protection for minorities. Buried in the Reid Plan is a new rule, the “standing filibuster requirement,” that will allow a partisan majority to shut off deliberation and pass legislation by a bare majority. Disguised as a debate-promoting measure, this new plan is actually just a mechanism to eliminate the higher vote threshold that has long been required to proceed to final passage of bills and nominations.

This spells the effective end to minority rights in the Senate. Today’s 60-vote bar to end debate will be gone, and the Senate will be transformed into President Obama’s rubber stamp.

Making matters worse, Reid plans to impose his plan by breaking Senate rules with the “nuclear option,” a parliamentary trick that will explode any lingering comity among senators. Once the nuclear option is deployed to impose the Reid Plan, it is far more likely to be used again and again to undermine minority rights. This pattern will ultimately make the Senate a mirror image of the House.

The most dramatic impact of the Reid Plan will be with regard to the Supreme Court, where the House of Representatives plays no constitutional role. President Obama will likely fill between one and three Supreme Court vacancies in the next four years, and he will be under enormous pressure from his base to nominate doctrinaire liberals who will reverse the decision upholding the partial-birth abortion ban, weaken personal liberties protected in the Bill of Rights, and eliminate the modest limitations on congressional power that the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have restored.

Senate conservatives will strongly oppose such a nominee. Conservatives already used their rights to extend debate to effectively block lower-court nominees such as “living Constitution” advocate Goodwin Liu and the highly controversial Caitlin Halligan. Each will be on the president’s shortlist for the Supreme Court. Yet if the Reid Plan is in effect, senators will be powerless to prevent the appointment of Liu, Halligan or similar judicial activists, because the 60-vote threshold will be gone and Obama’s party will just fall in line behind his choice.

The future of the Supreme Court isn’t the only thing at stake. While it’s unlikely that liberals will gain control of the House any time soon, it is not out of the question that Obama could command a unified, one-party government in his last two years. Under Reid’s new rules, the president could pass any legislation he wanted without negotiating with conservatives and taking their views into account. That means higher taxes, more spending, bigger government and no chance of entitlement reform.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has promised massive resistance to the Reid gambit, but he will need public support. Americans should be asking themselves if they want to make it easier for Congress to rubber-stamp the president’s whims, or if deliberative democracy and minority rights still matter.

Let’s cut right to the chase here: what Reid is doing is using the Senate to undermine the House, to make moot minority party resistance, and to create a de facto dictatorship that apes the appearance of a representative republic.

And the left then plans to use Court appointments to give the whole effort legal cover and the imprimatur of the High Court.

The best part is?   They believe — with good reason — that most Americans won’t know or won’t care about the importance of such a move.  The Democrats will simply talk about “gridlock” and “getting things done,” then count on the masses to echo that same cry, and the feckless GOP, so worried about appearances, to eventually fold.

It can happen here.  In fact, it is.

The question is, what are we prepared to do about it?

(h/t geoff B)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 12:38pm
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“Angry at the NRA? That Won’t Reduce Gun Violence”

No, but the left does like it some scapegoats, and what can be more evil than an organization that stands for the wholesale slaughter of little teeny-tiny childrens?  Or, to put it more clinically, since when did we start thinking rationality would trump self-serving self-righteousness, particularly when it comes from the political left?

Prof. Stephen L Carter, writing in Bloomberg:

Support for stricter U.S. gun laws hasn’t jumped as fast or as far in recent weeks as many liberals had hoped and expected. If you’re wondering why, maybe the reason is the shakiness of the public’s trust in government itself.

After the horrific murders three weeks ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, gun-control advocates confidently predicted that a wave of revulsion would sweep the nation. We would, in the popular argot, “hit the reset button,” beginning a fresh debate on new terms.

It hasn’t happened that way. Consider a recent roundup of opinion surveys. In the USA Today-Gallup Poll taken just a week after the shooting, when one would expect the largest emotional effect, support for “more strict” gun control in the abstract was at 58 percent, compared with 43 percent about a year earlier. On specifics, 74 percent opposed a ban on private ownership of handguns, and 51 percent opposed a ban on private ownership of assault weapons. (There’s more support for posting armed guards in schools than for limiting access to assault weapons.)

Sure, advocates can try to twist these polls into policy preferences. In truth, although the data reflect what might prove to be temporary majorities for such measures as banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, one searches in vain for a mandate in support of policies many gun-control advocates prefer. The urgency seems to have gone out of the argument. Even the news media seem to have grown bored by the whole thing.

[...]

People will tell pollsters that the widespread availability of certain types of weapons makes the nation more dangerous rather than safer, but they don’t support measures to curtail their use. If Newtown hasn’t pushed the numbers much, why not? One plausible explanation is a lack of trust in the people who would be doing the regulating.

[...]

Sad to say, the lack of trust has been well earned. Consider the recent negotiations over the “fiscal cliff.” Although the last-minute deal has its defenders, it nevertheless showcases the federal government at its least competent. Reform of entitlements and the tax code is left for later. Increasing the debt limit is kicked down the road. And, as usual, the legislation was too long for members to read before they were required to vote. None of this helps to improve the image of Washington.

We are now approaching four years since the U.S. Senate enacted a budget. The last was in April 2009. And bear in mind that federal law requires an annual budget. Imagine the ire of the senators toward a private firm that treated legal requirements so casually.

Amid such ineptitude, “Trust us, we’ll protect you,” isn’t a very persuasive case to make to the tens of millions of Americans who have guns — often very powerful ones — in their homes. And directing fury at gun owners for their lack of trust isn’t likely to increase their faith in government.

As a general proposition, arguments born of emotion are not likely to be well thought out — or to persuade those not already on board. Yet anger has been very much the style of the case for gun control over the past few weeks.

I have to interject here:  arguments born of emotion are more and more likely to persuade those who’ve been baptized in the Oprahfied culture that is contemporary America, a culture that is marked by  an entitlement mentality; an official disdain for competition (which then privately sublimates elsewhere); the celebration of relativism that takes its most pernicious (and sub rosa) forms in things like superficial “diversity” movements and egalitarian strategems; educational policy that pushes dogma and government sanctioned narratives over critical thinking skills — all under the ruse  of promoting “critical thinking skills”; a redefining of “fairness,” “tolerance,” and “equality” such that each means precisely its opposite when discussed in the context of our founding and framing principles.

And the proof that such emotional arguments are more and more likely to persuade is Obama’s election and then re-election, as well as the Democrats’ having built their numbers in the Senate, which hasn’t produced a budget — or done its job at all, aside from acting as a shield for Obama.

So while I agree with the esteemed professor that arguments born of emotion are not likely to be well thought out, I disagree as to their persuasive power.  Ignorant, low-information voters and those who’ve been bathed in the strained pathos of TV reality shows and liberal do-gooderism that has become institutionalized in popular culture, are of course going to be drawn to emotional arguments.  Becoming outraged and pointing fingers is easier — and to many, far more gratifying (emotionally!) — than thinking through a position or understanding an argument.

And it doesn’t help that the political right has become itself so politically superficial that it can no longer make strong rational arguments for its principles, but instead tries constantly to soft-peddle apologies for holding those principles.

But I digress.

[...]

What the polling data teach is that anger isn’t working. Most people are angry at the shooter and at society. They’re not particularly angry at supporters of gun rights.

Few groups this side of the now-moribund Moral Majority seem to excite as much ire and hatred among liberals as the National Rifle Association. Most Americans feel otherwise. In a Gallup poll released last week, the NRA received a 54 percent favorable rating. By comparison, as of this writing, the Real Clear Politics average of President Barack Obama’s approval rating stands at 53.4 percent. For Congress, the figure is an abysmal 18 percent. In other words: The NRA is as popular as the president, and three times as popular as Congress.

The Democrats, who read polls very well, have no doubt come to see that the firearms issue offers less political advantage than they’d hoped. In a Pew Research Center poll taken two weeks ago, respondents were asked if either party “could do a better job reflecting your views about gun control.” Twenty-seven percent said the Republicans could; 28 percent said the Democrats could. The same poll asked about the influence of the National Rifle Association on policy. Some 36 percent said the NRA had too much influence, and 47 percent said the group had the right amount or too little.

Well, that’s good to know:  many Americans still have their heads on straight about guns.  Unfortunately, what sticks out to me from that set of numbers is that Barack Obama’s approval rateing stands at 53.4% — even as jobs continue to be lost, taxes climb higher and higher, and this demonstrably Marxist ideologue — who’s all about “fair shares” — takes off on a tax-payer funder 20 day, $4 million  Hawaiian vacation.

They must approve of his “I got mine” mentality.  Which, too, is part and parcel of the Oprahfication of America.

So.  Full circle.

Although, that might could change…

(h/t palaeomerus)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 10:28am
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“Obama’s jobless ‘recovery’ continues as unemployed jumps by 164,000″

Guess there’s really no reason to massage the numbers any more, right? After all, we got The One we’ve been waiting for for a second time. Which means Utopia is right around the corner, just past that pile of dead and rigored “rich Republicans” stacked like cordwood on the corner of Fair Share Lane and Social Justice Ave.

Bill Wilson, ALG:

Supposedly the recession ended in June 2009, but more than three years later, the economy is still shedding jobs, with 22.4 million who cannot full-time work, and another 5 million who have given up looking all together.

Moreover, labor force participation remains very low at 63.6 percent, as Baby Boomers engage in early retirement and young people fail to enter the workforce. If the labor force participation rate had remained steady at the 65.7 percent level when Obama entered office, today’s unemployment rate would have come in at 10.7 percent, and the underemployed rate at 17 percent. This is a depression. We’re still dead in the water.

This, despite trillions of dollars fiscal and monetary ‘stimulus’ by the government that was supposed to get the economy back on track.

The American people have every right to be outraged at this pathetic performance, and now it is time for Congress to chart a new course. With the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, a sinking dollar, and a regulatory environment that would make Soviet Russia blush, the U.S. is rapidly becoming a terrible place to do business.

Unless the cost of doing business here can be reduced, through lower taxation, reining in new health care, labor, and environmental regulations, and sound money, a robust economic recovery will continue to [elude] policy makers.

I’m going to have to disagree with Mr Wilson’s conclusion here:  nothing is eluding policy makers.  Instead, the New Left “progressives” are doing what they want to do — create a dependency nation and a stronger, more powerful centralized government set to parlay every crisis it creates into an excuse to find a new governmental “solution” (a command and control economy is next, I bet; to take on the “profiteers” responsible for your smaller paycheck) — while the GOP is doing what it does best:  throw up its hands, complain that it has no leverage to operate, and ultimately, after some theater and, selling out its base while enjoying all the perks of being in a big powerful federal government.

After which it will send out fund raising letters imploring us to help them defeat the Democrats.

Newsflash:  Boehner, who was just re-elected as speaker (thanks in part to the vote of TEA Party caucus leader Michele Bachmann), caucused with many Dems to raise tax rates.  The game is over.  And it is us, not the politicians, who got played and then rolled.

****

update:  math.

Posted by Jeff G. @ 9:45am
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“The law of unintended consequences hits the low information voter crowd” (a protein wisdom micro fiction)

       “Wait, Obama said he’d soak the rich. ‘The fuck, dude?”

~ finis ~

(h/t Pablo)’

Posted by Jeff G. @ 9:12am
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“Gun Stats Liberals Don’t Want You To See”

Courtesy of Jawa, and including interactive maps and spreadsheets. Which, true, aren’t as persuasive as a Joy Behar rant or pictures of children’s caskets. But they do have the benefit of being factual. (h/t palaeomerus).

Also of note — and as reported here in the comments today — Utah and Vermont?  Among the lowest crime rates in the nation.

Despite lots of guns.

How is that even possible?

(h/t di and Pablo)

Posted by Jeff G. @ 11:54am
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House gavels. Speaker election. Boehner re-elected w/ Bachmann casting the 218th vote

Live, here.

update:  Boehner wins re-election as Speaker.  With Michele Bachmann’s voting for him, much to my dismay and sadness.

Unless this vote was a face-saving deal — and Boehner declines or resigns — today, the Republican Party officially died.   Or rather, killed themselves out of cowardice.  And no, I don’t care how many concessions Boehner supposedly made to conservatives in private. It’s about the optics.  And the GOP once again said that the status quo is good enough.

Note the date.  If only for the trivia value.

Posted by Jeff G. @ 11:13am
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