From TheTidings.com:

Notre Dame and Obama: Action, reaction and principles of life

What is the purpose of presenting “honorary degrees,” or similar kudos, at the college and university level? Do commencement speakers require such honors? What does it suggest to honor someone? How does a Catholic institution not commit error by honoring an individual whose views conflict with core principles of Catholic teaching?

“Doctor,” in academia, suggests “teacher.” If Notre Dame does not want to imply endorsement of President Obama’s position on abortion, it should not present an honorary “teaching” award — doctor of laws, no less — to one who suggested that determining when a baby gets human rights was above his pay grade.

Academic institutions, Catholic entities included, have a right and an obligation to promote the critical discussion of controversial issues. As Catholics who believe in the goodness of God, we are blessed with free will, and doubly blessed that our country bestows freedom on us as American citizens. But as we learn (or should learn) early on, neither free will nor constitutional freedom is absolute, if we are persons and institutions of conscience with respect for our fellow human beings. more……

Conservative Nation’s position on this: let Obama present his commencement address, but follow ASU’s lead and do not bestow upon him the honorary degree..

A couple of sites at the forefront of the controversy, neither of which Conservative Nation explicitly endorses:

notredamescandal.com
stopobamanotredame.com

-Cnation

Group operating out of small building donated $33 million to Obama campaign

Fox News’ Glenn Beck may have uncovered another twist to a series of ACORN’s alleged scandals when he revealed on his show that the group’s main affiliate is operating out of a former New Orleans funeral home and bringing in millions of taxpayer dollars.

The Service Employees International Union’s New Orleans headquarters location that also houses ACORN is supposed to be home to more than 270 related corporations and non-profits.

Acorn / SEIU funeral home headquarters

“Does that former funeral home look big enough to you to house 270 organizations?” Beck asked. “The owner of the building is a company whose partners are – oh my gosh! – Wade and Dale Rathke.”

Former funeral home owned by Service Employees International Union and said to house 270 groups, including ACORN

Wade Rathke, a New Orleans resident, is founder of ACORN and also founder and chief organizer of Service Employees International Union, which donated $33 million to President Obama’s campaign last year.The online OpenSecrets.org estimates Obama’s entire campaign spending at about $640 million. more……

Currently, both ACORN as an organization and/or its members are under indictment in Pennsylvania,  and Nevada where they racked up a whopping 39 felony counts.

In the mean time, the Conyers investigation of ACORN has inexplicably been dropped, while ACORN continues to enjoy the full support of congressional democrats and Barney Frank.

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-Cnation

Mark Impomeni: Bring On the Truth Commission
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) held a torturous press conference today to address charges that she raised no objections when informed in 2002 and 2003 about the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorist detainees. Pelosi was out of the country last week, so perhaps she can be forgiven for not realizing that the narrative on this story had been set in her absence. It has been pretty conclusively established by records of the briefings she received that Pelosi has been fibbing since the first day she claimed not to have known about the interrogations more……

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Jim Geraghty: The Alinsky Administration
In a letter to the Boston Globe, Alinsky’s son wrote that “the Democratic National Convention had all the elements of the perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style. . . .  Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well.” more……

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Michelle Oddis: No One Knows What You’re Talking About
Cap and Trade: An environmental policy that puts a mandatory cap or limit on the amount of pollutants that can be emitted by a company or group through a credit allowance system. That company or group can later sell/trade those credits if they emit less of their allotted amount of pollutants to companies who pollute more.

How can Republicans convince voters that cap and trade drives up energy bills when according to Rasmussen about 29% believe that cap and trade has something to do with regulating Wall Street, 17% think the term applies to health care reform, and 30% have no idea? more……

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Bruce Walker: Still the biggest missing story in politics
In August of last year I wrote an article, “The Biggest Missing Story in Politics,” which reviewed the single most important datum in the last thirteen Battleground Polls over a period stretching from early 2002 to late 2008.  The critical fact, completely ignored by almost everyone, was that in answering Question D3, which asked the respondent what he considered his ideology to be, sixty percent of the American people described themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative.” more……

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Ronald Brownstein: His Crowd
All the controversy about President Obama’s upcoming appearance at Notre Dame is overshadowing a larger point about the university commencement tour he began Wednesday night in Arizona: Obama is presenting Democrats an opportunity to establish a lasting and potentially crushing advantage with the Millennial Generation, the largest in American history.

Young voters are not as reflexively Democratic or liberal as many people might think. Since 18-year-olds were granted the vote in 1972, younger voters have often tracked fairly close to the national trend in presidential elections: Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush carried them in 1984 and 1988, and they split almost evenly between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000.

But over the past three elections, voters under 30 have moved steadily toward the Democrats. In the 2004 presidential race more……

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Michelle Malkin: Washington Can’t Meet the Cheerios Standard
I think it’s time we applied the same advertising standards to Washington’s legislative products that the feds apply to breakfast foods. The Food and Drug Administration rapped General Mills this week for making misleading claims about the benefits of Cheerios. The food manufacturer says the whole-grain O’s are “clinically proven to lower cholesterol.” The FDA demanded packaging changes to ensure truth in labeling.

Well, how about the bogus marketing of the fiscal “stimulus”? President Obama and the Democrats promoted the trillion-dollar package as job creation salvation. The White House claims more……

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-Cnation

I am at a loss for words.

For those of you who, like me, had not seen this before, here is Federal Reserve inspector general Elizabeth Coleman trying to weasel out of answering what she does or does not know about $trillions of off-balance-sheet transactions that happened under her watch.

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-Cnation

In a May 5th Business Insider article, the Obama administration was described  by a Chrysler creditors representative as “the most shocking “end justifies the means” group they have ever encountered”. Obama himself was described by another as “the most dangerous smooth talker on the planet- and I knew Kissinger.” (According to the article, both of these individuals voter for Obama.)

But here’s the thing – all anyone has to do is take the time to really look at what Obama has done already (quadrupled the budget deficit, given the country’s #3 automaker to the UAW, taken control of the 2010 census and enlisted ACORN to help with the count, etc…), what he has on deck (socialized medicine, massive carbon/environmental taxes, amnesty for illegals), and who he has installed or is in the process of installing into key cabinet positions throughout the administration (Hilda Solis, Harold Koh, Janet Napolitano, Gary Locke, Sonia Sotomayer, etc…) and the picture that will emerge is that of our country’s horrifying free fall into socialism under what many – myself included – view as an increasingly fascist regime, and marked by an escalating disregard for the rule of law at national, state and local levels by this administration and its loyalists.

There’s an element of society who now sees this as ‘their time’. It’s no longer about pursuing the American Dream, about taking advantage of the opportunities provided all of us  – by virtue of living in the greatest country in the world – to pull ourselves up and make something of ourselves and our lives. No, it’s now about ‘social justice’, about robbing the rich to give to the poor like some sort of half-assed government robin hood, about tearing down those among us who create wealth and prosperity, about attacking industry, and ultimately, the destruction of the free market and our capitalist society

In a Canada Free Press article the other day, Daniel Greenfield wrote “Even now when banks are being nationalized and major automakers turned over to union ownership, it is mainly people over 40 who are even noticing that anything is wrong”. My own observations and experiences in daily life suggest that he is correct. Part of the problem, I think, is that the younger generation lacks any meaningful frame of reference from which to gauge the sweeping changes that are overtaking us and marking our decline. They certainly have no personal experience, and they’re sure as hell not learning about it in school anymore, so where does that leave us?

Just yesterday, a comment posted to an anti-illegal-immigration post of mine from a a week or two ago suggested that I “Go Die!”. The commenter, it turns out, was a 17-year-old girl from Spokane who’s position, I’ll have to assume, is the result of 11-12 years of public education from which love of God and Country have been all but stricken from the curriculum and replaced by “King and King”, “An Inconvenient Truth”, and promotion of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ over American unity and sovereignty.

I’ve invited her back in an attempt at something approaching a discussion, and I hope she returns even though I know she won’t. They never do.

There’s a lot of talk these days about Republicans taking congress in 2010 and possibly even the white house in 2012. Well….that remains to be seen, but there is another wildcard in this whole thing that I don’t see being discussed nearly as much as it needs to be.

The left-leaning demographic in this country is growing by the hour through several means:

1. The public school system, which is overwhelmingly liberal both in the classrooms and at the administrative levels
2. Unchecked illegal immigration
3. Expanding entitlement/handout programs
4. Preferential treatment being given by our White House to unions.

On points 3 & 4, there’s a saying something to the effect of  “A system that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on Paul’s support”. In Obama’s Amerika, the producers in our country are Peter, while the rapidly-approaching-50-percent of Americans who pay no federal taxes at all are Paul.  Michelle Malkin today has a piece on the SEIU’s influence on the White House that I urge you to read.

On point 2, there is a reason why our borders have not been secured and work site enforcement has been halted. For republicans, it’s been about cheap labor. For democrats, it’s been about votes. For Obama, it’s about establishing a permanent democrat majority.

Which brings us to point 1, and probably the liberal left’s biggest coup, the public educational system.

Ever since we first went into Iraq and tried to train a government, an army, and a police force, my position has been that in order to establish any real stability, we need to stay long enough to educate the next generation of Iraqi children from kindergarten through young adulthood; only then could we be certain that they actually understood democracy enough to run their country, but also – and more importantly – only then could we be sure that they would renounce the ways of Sadaam Hussein and the Baath party.

Why? because he who controls the educational system controls the direction of the country.

We, as conservatives, have dropped the ball in a huge way in the education arena. Liberals own it lock, stock and barrel, and we are seeing first-hand the results: legitimate dissent is seen as ‘hate’, Christians are seen as ‘religious bigots’ (see Carrie Prejean), Americans who believe in the rule of law and the Constitution are viewed as ‘right wing extremists’, capitalism andthe free market system are being seen as ‘bad’, while socialism – although not explicitly being called that, is gradually being embraced.

The educational system is where we need to take the fight. We may or may not take back congress and the white house over the next several years, but even if we do, our victory will be short-lived if we don’t start getting re-involved in education, and I mean right now! It will take at least another generation to unravel the damage done by 40 years of liberal dominance in the schools, and I’m afraid we still haven’t seen the worst of it.

I’m on my lunch break and wrote this very quickly, I hope it makes sense.

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-Cnation

Kyle-Anne Shiver: Barack Obama, the Quintessential Liberal Fascist
In what may eventually prove to be a devious rhetorical feat of monstrous proportions, while the left has been indulging and fostering the “Bush Is Hitler” meme, they may have just put a genuine ideological fascist heir in the White House.

There is inherent danger in making scurrilous comparisons (as were perpetrated unceasingly against George W. Bush), but there seem to be some very worrisome signs in the rise of Barack Obama that we Americans would be foolish to ignore. more……

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Thomas Sowell: Housing Boom and Bust
Let us go back to square one to consider the empirical consequences of policies in the housing market. Politicians in Washington set out to solve a national problem that did not exist — a nationwide shortage of “affordable housing” — and have now left us with a problem whose existence is as undeniable as it is painful. When the political crusade for affordable housing took off and built up steam during the 1990s, the share of their incomes that Americans were spending on housing in 1998 was 17 percent, compared to 30 percent in the early 1980s. Even during the housing boom of 2005, the median home took just 22 percent of the median American income. more……

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Ed Morrissey: Are the elderly cost effective?
Greg Hengler at Townhall captures this revealing moment in the Senate Finance Committee hearings on health-care reform. The speaker, Professor Stuart Altman of Brandeis University, tells the committee that resources get wasted in the American health-care system, especially for one segment of the population. Professor Altman says he’s reluctant to mention it, but why waste money on in-depth treatment for people who won’t live long anyway? Better to warehouse them and save the resources for the young more……

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Andrew C. McCarthy: Poison Photo-Drop
American soldiers, American civilians, and other innocent people are going to die because Pres. Barack Obama wants to release photographs of prisoner abuse. Note: I said, “wants to release” — not “has to release,” or “is being forced to release,” or “will comply with court orders by releasing.” The photos, quite likely thousands of them, will be released because the president wants them released. Any other description of the situation is a dodge. more……

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Fox News: House Majority Leader: Congressional Hearings Should Explore Pelosi’s Interrogation Briefing
The House majority leader reluctantly agreed Tuesday that congressional hearings should investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s assertion that she wasn’t informed, more than six years ago, that harsh interrogation methods were used on an Al-Qaeda leader.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., called Republican challenges to Pelosi’s assertion a diversion from the real question of whether the Bush administration tortured terrorist suspects. Nonetheless, he acknowledged the controversy should be resolved. more……

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Daniel Greenfield: How the Democratic Party Went from Thomas Jefferson to Karl Marx
Nationalization, the Welfare State and Bureaucracies to control every aspect of human behavior are just some of the building blocks of the emerging “Great Society”, the socialism with a human face that Social Liberals have aimed at for well over a century. Unlike Lenin’s revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, our transition to a Marxist system was meant to be gradual and seamless. Like a lobster in a pot of boiling water, the temperature was being turned up slowly and gradually. Even now when banks are being nationalized and major automakers turned over to union ownership, it is mainly people over 40 who are even noticing that anything is wrong. more……

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-Cnation

Miss California 2009
Carrie Prejean

This woman continues to blow me away. The strength, courage, poise, integrity, and flat-out refusal to take any shit from anyone is both inspiring and encouraging.

On top of all that, Miss Prejean gets bonus points for unintentionally pulling back the curtain on the disgraceful National Organization for Women, who, to their shame, have been nowhere to be found on this.

Without further adieu, here’s Carrie Prejean’s press conference from today (5/12/2009) where it was announced that she would be allowed to retain her Miss California 2009 title.

If you have a young daughter, have her watch this vid with you and show her what a real role model looks like.

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-Cnation

Limbaugh and Oxycontin? What about Obama and cocaine?

This is sort of about Wanda Sykes, but then again it really isn’t. In my opinion, she’s nothing beyond average, just another voice in a very large group of rather unoriginal comics to whom shock value is an acceptable substitute for wit and intelligence.

This does have  to do with something she said last night at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner; frankly, it’s not even that it came from her – it could have come from anyone – but her parroting of this particular thing last night was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

What is ‘it’, you ask?

‘It’ is the tired, old Oxycontin attack on Rush Limbaugh.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, back in 2003, Limbaugh was being investigated for illegally obtaining the prescription drugs oxycodone and hydrocodone. On October 10th 2003, Rush admitted to his listeners that he was in fact addicted to prescription painkillers, and that the addiction stemmed from several years of severe back pain heightened by a botched surgery intended to correct those problems. He announced that immediately after the broadcast,  he would enter inpatient treatment for 30 days.

Through various twists and turns, the investigation of Limbaugh culminated in 2006 with charged being dropped in exchange for repayment of approximately $30,000 in investigative costs, along with an agreement that he would complete an 18-month therapy regimen with his physician.

Now, as you can probably imagine, the left has had a field day with this whole situation for years. Nevermind that the landscape of the liberal left is literally riddled with drug casualties, many who have over the years been elevated to hero/legend status (Joplin and Morrisson come to mind as two who, had they lived, probably would not have achieved anywhere near the level of idolatry that their post-mortem selves did). Then of course there are those who have managed to beat their drug/alcohol demons and in some cases even make it back to the top of their game. Look no further than Robert Downey JR as an example of the latter. The respect heaped upon Downey by his hollywood counterparts and the liberal media in general is fairly unaminous. (And yes, I do realize he is now a conservative.)

So, why then is Limbaugh’s past drug use so unacceptable to the left? Where is the ‘forgive and forget’ attitude that they bestow upon their own?

Of course, the above is rhetorical; there’s nothing the least bit unusual about the left using a conservative’s personal human failings against them in malicious attempts to prove what hypocrites they are, while the same human failings in a fellow liberal are portrayed as courageous battles to be triumphantly overcome.

This type of  double-standard is a liberal stock-in-trade. However, it’s not every day that you get to see it in such brazen display as it was during Sykes’ set at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

What she said about Limbaugh:

“Mr. President . . . you’ve had your fair share of critics. … Rush Limbaugh, one of your big critics, boy — Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails. So you’re saying, ‘I hope America fails.’ You’re like, ‘I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs or our soldiers in Iraq.’ He just wants our country to fail.

To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything differently than Osama bin Laden is saying. You know you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight”

What I find most disengenuous about this – aside from the fact that she completely misrepresented what Limbaugh actually said – is that she said it in the presence of a United States president who, by his own admission, smoked dope and did blow in college. From his book “Dreams From My Father”:

“I blew a few smoke rings,remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though. …”

“Blow” is a street name for cocaine. “Smack” is slang for heroin.

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man …..I had discovered that it didn’t make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate’s sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you’d met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. … You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection.”

Michelle Malkin wonders “why don’t comedians do many jokes on Obama?” Well, if Sykes had any courage – and honesty – at all, another part of her set may have gone something lke this:

Yo, wassuup!, I’m Barak [sniff] Obama and [sniff, snort] I’d like to take a moment [sniff, rub nose] to talk to you about [snnniiiiffffff] ……hey, I know that dude…..uh, where was I…..[snort] oh yeah…..I want to be president of the United States of America……..[breaks into hysterical stoner laughter]. Thanks, and y’all be cool!

Of course, that would be a stark admission that the Obamessiah is but a mere mortal; a flawed being with human failings just like the rest of us.

Or maybe, just maybe she could have taken the high road and left the drug references, 20th hijacker jokes and kidney failure references out in the gutter where they belonged.

I don’t necessarily begrudge Obama’s past drug use, but if we are going to forgive or overlook it, then we have to forgive Limbaugh’s as well.

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-Cnation

Michelle Malikn: Battered Hedge Fund Managers’ Syndrome
My column today looks at the abusive relationship between Barack Obama and the hedge fund industry. He keeps taking their money. They keep getting publicly tongue-lashed. Looks like the cycle has ended. Last week, non-TARP lenders objected to the UAW-pandering Chrysler deal. This week, AQR Capital Management LLC hedge fund manager Cliff Asness — at considerable risk to himself and his business — issued a striking manifesto responding to the president’s self-serving demagoguery and flagrant disregard for the rule of law. more……

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Ed Morrissey: A couple of random thoughts on Sykes, NerdProm, and double standards
Comedians like Wanda Sykes are almost literally a dime a dozen.  They like to make headlines by being outrageous, but otherwise have as little relevance to everyday life as Baywatch does to Shakespeare.  She belongs in the same category as Janeane Garofalo, who apparently can’t gain attention any other way than to play the race card by yelling “White Power” on stage at conservatives.  Neither that nor calling Rush Limbaugh the 20th hijacker is witty, funny, or incisive.  It’s at the same level of intellect as babies playing with their soiled diapers, and about as meaningful. more……

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Thomas Sowell: A Dying Constitution
While Pres. Barack Obama has, in one sense, tipped his hand by saying that he wants judges with “empathy” for certain groups, he has in a more fundamental sense concealed the real goal — getting judges who will ratify an ever-expanding scope of federal-government power and an ever-declining restraint by the Constitution of the United States.
This is consistent with everything else that Obama has done in office and is consistent with his decades-long track record of alliances with people who reject the fundamentals of American society. more……

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Ruben Navarrette: Stalled On Immigration
SAN DIEGO — Democrats are in a tough spot on immigration reform. Actually, make that a number of tough spots.
For one thing, they’re caught between pandering to Latino constituents who want them to strike a deal that legalizes millions of illegal immigrants and catering to organized labor, which adamantly opposes the one element of reform Republicans say must be part of the deal: guest workers.
For another, now that Democrats control Congress and the White House, they’ve run out of excuses as to why they’re doing nothing more……

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Pam Meister: Benedict Arlen Learns That Traitors Never Prosper
While contemplating his move from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, Sen. Arlen Specter was promised not only that he would be allowed to keep his committee assignments, but that he would keep the same level of seniority as though he had been first elected as a Democrat back in 1980.
Sorry, Arlen. Only real Democrats get to be senior committee members.
Complaints by rank-and-file Democrats prompted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to go back on his word and Specter is now the most junior Democratic member of the five committees on which he serves more……

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Sen. Mitch McConnell: McConnell Says Supreme Court Justice Should Apply Laws, Not Make Them
“During the campaign, then-Senator Obama said his criteria for picking a judge were not legal brilliance or a judicious temperament, but “empathy” — empathy, that is, for particular parties or groups over others. And the president emphasized that point again last week.
“This idea of “empathy” sounds appealing at first. After all, judges — especially those on the Supreme Court — hold a lot of power. And they ought to take care to use their power wisely.
“But you can see the problem with this view if you ever find yourself in front of a court and you’re not arguing for the party or group for whom the judge is empathetic. Suppose you happen to have, objectively, a very good case under the law. What fairness can you expect if the judge was appointed based on the ability to “empathize” with the opposing party?
“And anyone who’s ever been unfairly judged understands why “empathy” should not trump the rule of law. more……

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Howie Carr: This is not your father’s welfare state
In Gov. Deval Patrick’s Massachusetts, if you’re on the dole, you may be eligible to get a free car. So much for the budget Armageddon they keep talking about at the State House.
Let the taxpayers worry about those billion-dollar deficits. If you’re on welfare, come on down!
Nice enough that the layabouts get a free car – plus the state picks up the tab for insurance, excise tax, title, registration, inspection, and approved repairs. The absolute frosting on the cake is a free AAA membership. more……

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-Cnation