Why Does Rick Santorum Have "Serious Problems" With the Gold Standard?

by Ralph Benko, Forbes: On a recent episode of the Glenn Beck Show, Beck had an exchange, summarized here, with presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

“I think you’ve got to put the Fed back in the business of just managing the money supply for the purposes of holding inflation in check,” Santorum said. “If the Fed’s only mission was dollar stabilization, then they wouldn't be doing what they’re doing right now.”

Glenn pushed Santorum harder on this issue. “There are no checks and balances [on the Fed]. How is this not a criminal organization? Because what they’re doing to us…it’s the biggest heist in human history.”

“To go that one step forward and say ‘Well let’s abolish the Fed and go back to a gold standard,’ I have some serious problems with that,” Santorum said. Glenn cut in. “You can’t afford the lifestyle we have on gold.”

“The problem is the idea with the gold standard was…gold would increase as economic growth increases,” Santorum continued.

“That’s not necessarily true anymore, I mean we don’t have a lot of gold supplies in this country that we can increase as the economy increases, and can become – in fact, are – dependent on a lot of not particularly great areas of the world for gold mining.”

Yes, Senator Santorum you do have a serious problem. The conservative movement greatly hopes that your comments represent casual and unconsidered statements … and that future pronouncements will reveal an intelligent open-mindedness on monetary policy (a separate question from abolishing the Fed).

For starters: money supply? This is an anachronism. The premier monetarist, Prof. Milton Friedman, disavowed managing the money supply in a famous June 7, 2003 interview with the Financial Times: “The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success.”

As Forbes.com columnist and a leading debunker of the quantity theory of money Nathan Lewis wrote in Why the Gold Standard Still Matters Today:

The amount of metal piled in a vault has little relationship to the value (or quantity) of paper banknotes. In 1779 the Bank of England held 953,066 ounces of gold in reserve. In 1783 this had fallen to 339,261 ounces. One year later, in 1784, it had grown to 1,683,724 ounces. A year after that, it was down to 703,692 ounces, but in 1786 it bounced back up again to 1,535,538 ounces.

These gyrations had no effect on the value of the British pound, which was pegged to gold at 3.89375 pounds per ounce.

“A gold standard does not place some artificial limit on the supply of money, nor is the supply of money constrained to the output of gold mines. The supply of base money grows or contracts as necessary to maintain the currency’s value in line with the gold parity. Between 1775 and 1900, the U.S. base money supply increased by 163 times–in line with an expanding economy and a population that went from 3.9 million in 1790 to 76.2 million in 1900. Over this 125-year period, the amount of gold in the world increased by about 3.4 times due to mining.

“The only thing that mattered was the value. The dollar maintained its link near $20.67 per ounce throughout the 19th century (with a lapse during the Civil War).”

If sheer quantity mattered, which it does not, the pointlessness of worrying becomes even more obvious if one looks at the inventory of monetary gold by the governments of the world. The United States’ holdings, as of January 2011, of 286 million ounces, tower above those of most other countries. (China: 37 million ounces. Russia: 27 million ounces.)

As for making America “dependent on a lot of not very great areas of the world for gold mining?” Charles Dickens’ satirized this very sentiment by placing it in the mouth of a particularly dimwitted legislator in Nicholas Nickleby:

‘Besides which,’ continued Mr Gregsbury, ‘I should expect … a few little arguments about the disastrous effects of a return to cash payments and a metallic currency, with a touch now and then about the exportation of bullion, and the Emperor of Russia, and bank notes, and all that kind of thing, which it’s only necessary to talk fluently about, because nobody understands it.’

Presumably Sen. Santorum, in referring to “not very great areas of the world,” had in mind the modern version of the “Emperor of Russia,” a favorite bogeyman of those opposed to gold convertibility then as now.

Who condemns gold puts himself on the opposite side of Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and a clear majority of the conservative leaders, especially free market ones. Condemning the gold standard aligns one with leading Obamunists such as Paul Krugman, July 6 New York Times blog post, “The Armageddon Caucus“: “Gold bugs have taken over the GOP,” Think Progress‘ Marie Diamond that “the …Tea Party groups are determined to make returning to the gold standard a litmus test for GOP presidential candidates….” The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal who wrote on April 27, “Conservatives are … rallying around the gold standard wing of their party.” Or Thomas Frank’s July 2011 story in Harper’s Magazine condemning gold as “yet another eccentricity of the right-wing fringe has moved into the mainstream of American life.”

As my sainted grandmother used to say, Senator… lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. It is an oddity, one hopes not indicative of anything more than a casual misstatement, to see someone of Sen. Santorum’s stature — one who proudly styles himself a conservative — aligning, as Nixon did, with economic ultra-liberals.
Presidential candidates — especially newly prominent ones — deserve an opportunity to grow out of casually held old views. No less respectable a source than the Bank of England, summarized by AOL’s DailyFinance recently published a paper showing that the current paper-based monetary system is dramatically inferior to the form of gold standard enjoyed by the world under Bretton Woods —destroyed by President Johnson and then repudiated by President Nixon. Economic growth has been much slower, panics and crashes much more frequent, under the current system than under even a dilute form of gold standard.

The conservative movement respectfully asks those who aspire to the presidency at least to reserve judgment on the critical issue of monetary policy. If unwilling to embrace gold with Dr. Paul or to join with Speaker Gingrich in calling for a gold commission, at least emulate Gov. Romney in maintaining an openness to “look at a whole range of ideas on how to have greater stability in our currency and in our monetary policies.”
------------
Ralph Benko is a senior economics adviser to The American Principles Project and author of The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World. He is working on a new book, called "A Golden Age: the political consequences of the peace." He is also a contributor to the ARRA News Service

---

Tags: Ralph Benko, Rick Santorum , Gold Standard To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

A New Gold Commission?

Ralph Benko - Senior Advisor,
American Principles Project’s
Gold Standard

By Ralph Benko: "The gold standard is a modern, digital, information-sharing, global operating standard.  Moreover, it is a stable, networking, efficient, price transmission system in the form of a stable international monetary standard," says Lewis E. Lehrman.

Big media is paying attention to proposals for a new Gold Commission.  This concept first was floated by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and reported by The Weekly Standard. A Gold Commission then was proposed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as part of his (winning) campaign for South Carolina. Lehrman (with whose scholarly institute this writer professionally is associated) was mentioned in both instances.

Rep. Ron Paul -- now campaigning for president, in large part, on the gold standard -- and Lehrman both served on the Reagan Gold Commission.  The Commission met well before the good Dr. Milton Friedman distanced himself from the theory known as monetarism. Following a theory much in vogue the majority of the Commission endorsed the paper standard.  Dr. Paul and Mr. Lehrman filed a minority report calling for the restoration of a stable dollar defined by law as a certain weight of gold:  the gold standard. Republished, The Case for Gold remains readily available from the Mises Institute and the Cato Institute.

The gold standard is no atavism, neither clipper ship nor ox cart. Under the gold standard we will have checking accounts and credit cards and currency, not carry around purses filled with gold coins to make our daily purchases.  Legal gold convertibility simply kept, and will again keep, the dollar's value stable over time.  There is as much gold per capita now as there was at the height of the classical gold standard; claims that there is "not enough gold" betray a deep ignorance of the workings of the system.

There are a lot of reasons for taking gold seriously, now. Here are three:
1.    The gold standard is Constitutional money; paper is not.  The Constitution contemplated money defined as precious metal. As delegate George Read observed at the Constitutional Convention, the power to issue paper money was seen "as alarming as the mark of the Beast in Revelations."

2.    The gold standard will control spending.  Congress will spend every cent it can get its hands on.  To constrain it we must cut off its access to money.  There are only three ways in which it can get its hands on material amounts our money:  taxing , borrowing and printing.  We must keep up the fight on taxes and borrowing.  But the most pernicious way of getting our money is by "printing" it.  The gold standard locks away printing press money.

3.    The gold standard creates widespread prosperity. As historian Brian Domitrovic wrote: "there is the record of 1878-82 and its own run of some 40% growth...  Rather, in the four years before 1878, growth had come in at 13%; in the previous ten years, growth had totaled 49%. In other words, 1878-82 was a mega-acceleration from a high base.

"And after? Over the next decade, another historic expansion of 49%. 49% on top of 40% on top of 49%, 1868 to 1892. That's registering 'the strongest output growth...in US history outside of wartime.'

"Regarding policy, there was one major shift that occurred in these heroic years in the latter 19th century. In 1879, the U.S. went back on the gold standard.

"A modern, digital, information-sharing, global operating standard," says Lehrman. Let's boot up that commission and take a really close look as to how gold might be the "golden bullet" to get an American economic miracle roaring.  Gold:  Dignity, Prosperity, and Liberty.

Ralph Benko, who testified on the constitutional and legal history of US monetary policy before the Reagan Gold Commission, is the senior advisor, economics, to American Principles in Action and advisor to and editor of The Lehrman Institute's thegoldstandardnow.org. He is co-author, with Charles Kadlec, of The 21st Century Gold Standard available free for downloading at agoldenage.com.

---

Tags: Ralph Benko, Gold Standard To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

Obama’s Budget Bomb

He Proposes Spending Increases, While Disarming America

Quoted: April 6th, 2009

By Ken Blackwell, Contributing Author, ARRA News Service: Early in his administration, President Obama, pledged to cut the federal deficit in half. But his recent budget proposal, to say Obama has not kept his promise is an understatement.

Determined to keep Americans drowning in debt, Obama proposes to accelerate federal spending $3.8 trillion in 2013 to $5.8 trillion in 2022, a whopping increase of 53 percent. By spending more than $45 trillion in the next 10 years, the most generous accounting would assume $6.7 trillion would be added to the federal deficit, bringing debt-to-GDP ratio who a crushing 76.5 percent.

The slow ending of the Afghanistan war gave the Obama Administration room for an $800 billion Washington-style accounting gimmick, where borrowed money that would not have been used is counted as saved. In terms of actual cuts in defense spending, Obama is shifting the focus from what is known to work in missile defense to developing futuristic missile intercepts which will require years of experimenting at great expense to taxpayers while a vulnerable America waits.

It has become obvious that America faces increasing nuclear threats from hostile regimes like Iran and North Korea. In June, Iran announced it was planning to triple its capacity to produce 20 percent enriched uranium, which can easily be converted to weapons-grade material. This week, Iranian President Ahmadinejad plans a major announcement for Iran’s advancement in its atomic program, a move to show how increased U.N. sanctions have failed to halt Iran’s technical progress.

Our first line of defense against short and intermediate-range airborne attacks is the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3), which can intercept enemy missiles while in flight. Their proven track record is why they are also essential to the NATO effort in Europe to defend against missiles from hostile nations.

Yet, despite the SM-3’s impressive performance history and expanding capabilities that will ultimately protect our homeland from a long-range missile attack, President Obama has all but turned his back on the missile. In his newly released budget, the President cuts funding for the newest evolution of SM-3 (known as IB), which will result in 52 percent fewer missiles while commanders in theater have
consistently complained about shortages. The President’s $300 million reduction may also slow production, which could make the new missile delivery date of 2015 very difficult to meet.

The timing couldn’t be worse considering U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta predicted last month that Iran would be capable of launching a nuclear missile at the U.S. as soon as 2014.

But President Obama’s short-sightedness doesn't end there. At the same time the President chopped funding for the first missile that will be able to protect us against an ICBM attack, he chose to pour $224 million into a sophisticated and tedious missile program that is on life support.

The missile, known as IIB, is but a back-of-the napkin concept that will not be ready for deployment until 2020, at the earliest. In a bipartisan move this past December, Congress virtually eliminated the 2012 budget for the program. The message was clear: we have more urgent budget priorities and current threats demand we deploy a missile to protect the continental United States much sooner than
2020.

Apparently, President Obama did not receive that message from Congress. After spending millions on development, Obama has unilaterally decided to shift resources toward more complex future missile variants—a process notorious for being obscenely over budget and off schedule—while rejecting the Congress’ more sensible approach to fiscal responsibility and a more robust national defense.

President Obama’s decisions on missile defense will create a multiple-year window where a country such as Iran could strike before our new SM-3s are in place. By reversing course, not only would taxpayer dollars be used more effectively, America will be properly protected from enemies well into the future.
----------------------
J. Ken Blackwell is aa fomer Ohio Treasurer and Secretary of State. He is the co-author of the new bestseller: The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Club for Growth and of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies He is a contributing author to the ARRA News Service.

---

Tags: Ken Blackwell, Barack Obama, budget, budget bomb, accounting gimmick, spending increases, Disarming America, unilateral reductions, cutting military programs, threats, Iran, North Korea To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

Occupy Unmasked - Official Movie Trailer

Citizens United: The trailer for the new film produced by Citizens United and directed by Stephen K. Bannon. "Occupy Unmasked" goes deep into the "Occupy" movement and exposes its origins as well as the radical ideas behind "income inequality" that has become the centerpiece of the Obama re-election effort. The film is due to be released Spring 2012.

---

Tags: Occupy Wall Street, OWS, Occupy, The Occupy Movement, Occupy Unmasked, movie, movie trailer, Andrew Breitbart, Citizens United Productions, Stephen K. Bannon, David N. Bossie, Official Trailer, Citizens United To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

Love Your Bloggers - Protect Your Voice Campaign Kicks Off

ARRA News Service - Protect Your Voice: The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity called on CPAC 2012 attendees to sign a petition that aims to grant bloggers the same legal protection journalists have. According to American Journalism Review's 2009 analysis there were 30 percent less statehouse reporters then compared to 2003. While their grant has not been renewed to do the study since then, any reporter can attest to the continued cutbacks by walking into a newsroom.

Fortunately, a new wave of energized reporters has been filling those vacancies out of passion - many unpaid. These bloggers are dedicated to informing their citizenry of its elected officials’ actions. They are addressing the threat to democracy.

Because of this, we believe they deserve the same protections as reporters in the court room. We aim to protect the bloggers that are reporting on acts of government as meticulously and honestly as the journalist sitting next to him or her at the press conference. Citizen Journalists and Bloggers should not be penalized for providing a valuable service to our country. Citizen Journalists and Bloggers in every state deserve to be included in the state’s shield laws and granted Freedom of the Press rights.

Times have changed and it’s time for the law to adjust. Go to ProtectYourVoice.org to show your some post Valentine Day love for bloggers .

---

Tags: citizen journalist, blogger, free speech government abuse, shield laws, protect your voice, promote accountability, transparency, protect source, access to public information, Valentine Day, To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

Sen. Mike Lee: Obama ‘Manifestly Wrong’ on U.S. Constitution

By Rob Bluey and Brandon Stewart: Few lawmakers have expressed as much outrage over President Obama’s unconstitutional “recess” appointments as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). He was among the first to warn about the consequences of the president’s unilateral action on Jan. 4.

More than a month later, a new director is running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three members of National Labor Relations Board are conducting business—all in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, Lee said in an interview with Heritage following a speech Monday.

“He’s reading the Constitution in a way that’s manifestly wrong,” Lee explained. “It’s contrary to the text. It’s contrary to tradition and practice, and it’s contrary to logic.”

Lee said the Constitution gives the president the ability to make recess appointments — but in this case the Senate wasn’t in recess. Just days before Obama made the appointments, for example, the Senate held a pro-forma session to pass the payroll tax cut extension.

“The president’s analysis doesn’t work,” Lee said. “It collapses under its own logic.”

In addition to his Heritage speech, Lee has testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and vowed to take other actions to oppose the appointments. And while it’s unclear if any of the individuals would be removed from office, Lee said he’ll continue to fight against executive branch overreach regardless of who is serving in the White House.

“This is not a partisan issue for me. I would be equally outraged if this were a Republican president doing this same thing,” Lee said. “Once this gains some momentum, this practice could be very destructive to the Senate’s prerogative of advice and consent. This is a power that doesn’t belong to the president. It belongs to the people of the United States of America.”

---

Tags: Senator, Mike Lee, advice and consent, constitution, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, executive branch, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, national labor relations board, NLRB, President Obama, recess appointments, Richard Cordray, Richard Griffin, unconstitutional, Video To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

The Three Most Important Action Items For The Next President

By Ken Blackwell, Contributing Author: The first thing the next President must do is return America to sustainable economic prosperity. This begins with four actions: two to balance revenue with spending and two to unleash America’s potential. He should initiate a national campaign for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, capping federal spending at 18% of GDP.

Second, he should call for fundamental tax reform via a flat tax with generous exemptions for adults and children in the home and only two to three deductions.

Third, on his first day, he should sign dozens of Executive Orders repealing unhelpful regulations imposed during the past four years, from carbon emissions to health care to finance.

And fourth, he should launch a policy for national energy independence, beginning on his first day by approving the Keystone pipeline and opening certain federal lands to responsible oil and gas development and proposing legislation for an “all of the above” approach, with clean coal, oil, gas, nuclear and renewable energy.

The second thing the President must do is tackle the greatest short-term threat to national security by addressing the Middle East. He must begin a comprehensive review of the multilayered, interrelated issues that make the Middle East a Gordian knot. The three essential elements of any strategy must be:

1) that a nuclear-armed Iran will not be allowed under any circumstances;

2) that America resolutely stands by and for a fully defensible Israel;

3) the development of a proactive and coherent policy regarding the Arab Spring.

The third thing the President must do is nominate the right people to the federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court. On his first day, he must start vetting candidates for every current vacancy on the 13 federal appellate courts and immediately begin developing a short list of potential nominees to the Supreme Court. The President must make unmistakably clear that seeing these nominees confirmed is a nonnegotiable priority and that the growing obstructionism of the past quarter-century — and especially the past decade — must end.

The courts concern all areas of national policy, beyond being of paramount importance for the social issues of abortion, marriage, religious liberty and gun rights. The courts play an increasingly central role in economic and security issues. He must declare originalism to be the official approach to interpreting the Constitution in accordance with the original meaning of its text and nominate judges who will faithful apply originalism on the bench.
---------------
J. Ken Blackwell is a conservative family values advocate. Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council. He is the co-author of the new bestseller: The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency. He is a National Federation of Republican Assemblies board member and a contributing author to the ARRA News Service. Blackwell's article was also published on Time Ideas

---

Tags: Ken Blackwell, important action items, next President, economic prosperity, fundamental tax reform, flat tax, repeal  regulations, national energy policy, energy independence, treat to national security, federal judges, originalism, US Constitution, conservative, elections, politics To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

Morally Challenged Secretary Sebelius Scraps Conscience Exception for Health Plans

"To be morally challenged, one has to have been born. Obviously the same can be said for a moral person. However, the moral person is not seeking the death of the "unborn" or the "elderly." ~ Dr. Bill Smith

Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service: While the following shared article is rather long, there was no way I could in good conscious crop it. Why, because the article addresses those claiming to be social conservatives and to those who should be social conservatives based on their faith. Also, it applies to those seeking to be "moral beings."

Is it critical to ask what has brought our Nation to the point that Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius could even consider, let alone proceed with "scraping the conscience exception for health plans"? The Obama administration has again proceeded brazenly without apparent fear of retribution by the public at large or even by those who are morally offended by Sebelius' action.

The article's author addresses his first-hand view of the conflict within the Catholic Church which has aided the Obama administration's open challenge to the moral conscious of the church without fearing that such action could result in negative consequence from Catholic voters in November. If this article awakens people, it will have served a very good purpose, but that will not stop the questionable actions of the Obama administration.

Protestants on the other side of the church isle have the same problem within their ranks. In fact their less restrictive hierarchy, many even aid in their ignoring and / or failing to vote their moral conscious. Numerous Protestants like numerous Catholics have surrendered or subjugated their moral conscious to a man-created, and often perverted, social consciousness. Whenever one considers promoting death in the womb or in the hospital bed, or the re-engineering of marriage and the traditional family, or changing social structure to avoid alleged inconveniences "of life," they have lost their way to the liberal progressive agenda.  That agenda then continues to expand to devour other individual beliefs and values like liberty, freedom, individual responsibility, pride, love of country, etc.

Within the Christian churches of America, thankfully there are those who have continually stood based on moral conscious based in Truth. Unfortunately, there are large numbers of "influential morally challenged people" who have gained access to power via the ballot box. These individuals do not permit themselves to be intellectually confronted by the morals of the church in any way that would stop them in their pursuit of social justice up to and including supporting death and harm to others. Consider these morally challenged individuals: Nancy Pelosi (Catholic), Kathleen Sebelius (Catholic) Harry Reid (Mormon), Chuck Schumer (Reformed Judaism), Hillary Clinton (Methodist), Barack Obama (Christianity/ Former Church of Christ), Joe Biden (Roman Catholicism). Tell me again, why are these people making decisions and taking actions  that affect us and attack our moral conscious? 

---

by Streiff (Diary), RedState : As the implementation of Obamacare rolls into high gear, we’ve been given insight into how it will be implemented in general. On January 20, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would not exempt health plans provided by non-profit religious employers from the requirement to provide “contraceptive services.”

… Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA -approved forms of contraception. Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services.

The category of “all FDA-approved forms of contraception” includes the abortifacients, like the “morning after pill.” At the same time I couldn’t help but note that the group of health plans provided by “non-profit religious employers” who do not support contraception winnows the field down rather quickly to those provided by either the Catholic Church or one of its social service or medical subsidiaries.

The best is yet to come.

By way of full disclosure, I’m Roman Catholic. I’m a convert who became Catholic with eyes wide open rather than a “cradle Catholic” who was born into the religion. As such I’ve never ceased to be amazed at the antics of many of our Church leadership. I write it off to equal parts cognitive dissonance and a pathological desire to be popular.

The Democrat party has been anti-Catholic in its political positions since George McGovern ran for president yet the priesthood and heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in America tend to hail from Democrat constituencies. So on the one hand the Magesterium is teaching very traditional social values while on the other it is embracing without even a hint of credulity every lefty scheme that comes down the pike.

For instance, in 1983, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops declared nuclear weapons to be immoral and weren’t terribly fond of deterrence either. By 1988 they had decided SDI was destabilizing as was the US linking a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan to future arms treaties. When communist terrorists were trying to create a people’s paradise in El Salvador, many of our bishops ignored what was happening to personal liberty under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua as they stumbled over themselves to create the “sanctuary movement”.

Without putting too fine a point on it but there was no daylight between the position of the Magesterium and that of the Kremlin on these issues.

Not that they are all commies or anything. But there were MOVEMENTS out there that had freakin Pete Seeger singing protest songs and James Earl Jones and Ed Asner at their rallies. How could you not be in favor of these things?

Similar stampedes took place on global warming and immigration.

This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. When given the choice between seeming to endorse a religious conservative for office and seeming to endorse a heterodox leftist there is no limit to the contortions a large share of our bishops won’t put themselves through to help the lefty. To wit: by the black letter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church supporting abortion is forbidden. If a public figure does so this failure is compounded by “scandal”, that is, an action that could cause others to question their faith. The fact that there are very few bishops in the nation who have taken steps to discipline pro-abort advocates and politicians especially when they proclaim themselves to be devout.

The second strain is the want to be liked. For most of American history, Catholics were THE OTHER. It was a foreign religion practiced by all manner of foreigners who either couldn’t speak English (Italians, Poles, etc.) or who could barely speak it (the Irish, it goes without saying). What other religion still has amendments to state constitutions directly aimed at its religious schools?

Just when things were going well with JFK (another devout Catholic) in the White House, he gets killed and the whole counter culture begins. If there was anything less cool in the 1960s than being in ROTC it was being a Catholic who believed in monogamy and abstinence until marriage not to mention avowing any religion that did not use mind altering drugs. Being cool is still important and despite his views on abortion Obama, that epitome of coolness, was invited to give a commencement address at a Catholic university.

This mindset was most egregiously on display during the 2008 election. The Catholic heirarchy — and I have to digress here for a moment to emphasize that we have many traditional bishops in this country who have fought the good fight for decades — wanted to catch the Hope-and-Change wave and had a problem: Barrack Obama loves him some abortion. Not just plain vanilla abortion. He is in favor of partial birth aboriton. He is in favor of killing a kid who happens to survive the abortion procedure.

Demonstrating again a contortionist skill that would gain them employment at any county fair in the country the bishops issued a document called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship.”
 
As first blush it looks like a strong statement in favor of life which would not have helped Obama, or any other elected Democrat for that matter, until one reads deeper.

34. Catholics often face difficult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.

35. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

In other words if you feel like the opposition to the war in Iraq or midnight basketball or furthering the ends of labor unions or any other pet peeve are “morally grave reasons” you can vote for the pro-abort. And they got what they wanted: American Catholics gave a majority of their votes to Obama.

Then came Obamacare which gave the bishops a real taste of what happens when you create a moral equivalence between universal health care and abortion. You get them both.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was heartbroken and gobsmacked, or gobsmacked and heartbroken, when they got the bad news about the elimination of an exemption for religious conscience in health plans.

President Obama telephoned Archbishop Dolan on Friday morning to tell him of the decision, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The pair had discussed the issue during a November meeting, during which the archbishop “got the message that they could work together,” said the spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh.

The issue was likely to form the “backdrop to future relations,” she said. “It’s too big to ignore… the elephant is tramping around in the sanctuary.”

An administration official on Tuesday confirmed the call was made on Friday and reiterated comments made by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that the administration is committed to its partnerships with faith-based groups.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), a Catholic who supports abortion rights and access to contraception, said she thought the White House had handled the decision “very well” by being open to listening to religious leaders. “Contraception is about preventing unintended pregnancy,” she said. “I think that they did what they needed to do.”

So up until November Archbishop Dolan was being led to believe that he and the Obama Administration could work together and there would be a conscience exemption in the health care reform regulations and then he gets a call telling him that he’s been played for a chump.

It is really difficult to understate the cultural significance of this decision. If Congress doesn’t intervene and we end up with a pro-abort in the White House, which seems virtually certain regardless of how Obama fares in November, it is hard to see how this precedent will not be applied first to euthanasia, which seems to be the next big thing, and then to abortion. If left as it is, it really marks the end of independent churches in the United States.

The decision even managed to concern the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, another of the “smells and bells” Catholics on the left, or Catholycs as my friend Tom Crowe terms them, whose collective ass gets tired when confronted with the whole issue of morality.

One of Barack Obama’s great attractions as a presidential candidate was his sensitivity to the feelings and intellectual concerns of religious believers. That is why it is so remarkable that he utterly botched the admittedly difficult question of how contraceptive services should be treated under the new health care law.

His administration mishandled this decision not once but twice. In the process, Obama threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus and strengthened the hand of those inside the Church who had originally sought to derail the health care law.

. . .

---

Tags: Morally Challenged, federal healthcare, Obamacare, Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, abortifacients, conscience exception, scrapped, Magesterium, Catholic, Protestant, Church, Christians, faith, US Constitution, freedom of religion, Big Government, violating personal conscious To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

Crackers, Joe Scarborouth, MSNBC

A PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS.  EARLIER THIS WEEK COMMENTATORS ON MSNBC (BETTER KNOW AS THE OBAMA NETWORK) CALLED THE VOTERS IN THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE "CRACKERS".   AN OLD TERM COINED MANY YEARS AGO TO REFER TO SOUTHERN RACISTS IN CERTAIN AREAS OF THE SOUTH---THIS DOES NOT SURPRISE ME.   MSNBC IS BEGINNING TO PLAY THE RACE CARD EARLY IN THIS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION YEAR.  HEY JOE (THAT'S JOE SCARBOROUGH) WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT BUDDY?  AREN'T THOSE IN THE PANHANDLE YOUR FRIENDS AND FORMER CONSTITUENTS.  SAY SOMETHING BUDDY, PERHAPS YOU ARE AFRAID YOU WILL GO THE WAY OF BUCHANAN---THAT'S EXACTLY IT.  HAVE YOU REALLY JOINED THE ROUND TABLE OF CONSERVATIVE HATERS ON YOUR MORNING SHOW OR ARE YOU JUST AFRAID TO OPEN YOU MOUTH FOR FEAR OF GETTING THAT PINK SLIP!  DRINK YOU STARBUCKS AND QUIT PLAYING THE TOKEN CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE YOUR ARE A LIBERAL LACKEY!

---

Tags: crackers, joe Scarborouth, msnbc, commentary  To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!

Missed Opportunity In the Response to the Presidents SOTU Address

By Ken Blackwell: The official Republican response to the President's State of the Union Address was fine - as far as it went. But Gov. Mitch Daniels missed a golden opportunity to put before the American people a better vision of family, faith, and freedom.

Interestingly,'the only mention of family in Gov. Daniels' response was his praise for President Obama's own family. Let me stipulate: The Obama family is a model family, apparently devoted to one another. The president even lives happily under the same roof with his mother-in-law. Now, that's devotion.

But Gov. Daniels could have noted that the policies of the Obama administration are the most antagonistic to the family of any administration in history. This is a fact. With 42% of American children born out-of-wedlock, a tragedy of fatherlessness is being visited on millions of homes. Bill Bennett rightly calls this "the broken hearth." And broken hearths lead to broken hearts.

Does the president address this in his budget? No. Instead, he gives hundreds of millions to Planned Parenthood, the world's leading trafficker in abortion. We know that the more sexual contacts young people have prior to marriage, the more likely they are never to marry, or to divorce after marriage. You cannot be pro-family and shovel money at this evil enterprise. This is one shovel-ready project we should reject.

Yet, President Obama has told Speaker Boehner that any cut in federal funds for Planned Parenthood is "a non-starter." President Obama has relentlessly pushed abortion at home and abroad. Obamacare is the most massive expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade. Under Obamacare, health care coverage will include abortion. Thus, we will all be forced to pay for the killing of unborn children.

The president is concerned, he tells us, about education. We must all share that concern. But he has taken over college loans, an unprecedented power grab. He does this even as his administration is menacing the liberty of every private and religious college in America. If your college does not want to push condoms in the dorms or dispense abortion-producing drugs at Student Health, the Obama administration threatens you with action.

Dr. Larry Arnn is president of Hillsdale College, a proud independent college founded by abolitionists in the 1850s. Hillsdale takes no federal funds. Dr. Arnn recently spoke of how the intact family undergirds limited government:

The principles of our country stem from the laws of Nature and Nature's God. This word "Nature" is full of rich meaning. It comes from the Latin word for birth, so of course the nature of man, and natural rights must be understood to include the process of begetting and growth by which human beings come to be . . . If families do not raise children, then the government will. What then becomes of limited government?

I offer Dr. Arnn's eloquent analysis to President Obama. That terrible figure of 42% out-of-wedlock births shows up the false promises of those who said that abortion-on-demand would end welfare and poverty. When they said that, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was less than half what it is today.

Social scientist Charles Murray has written a new book, Coming Apart, in which he shows that the dream of upward mobility for millions is being lost. In this important work, he shows that marriage and religion are central to the economic well-being of millions of Americans.

The Obama administration is actively hostile to marriage, refusing even to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. That law was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president. And Mr. Obama's administration is seeking suppress the conscience rights of millions - including Catholics, Evangelicals, Lutherans, and Orthodox Jews. His radical demand that every federally-supported institution in the country dispense abortifacients is a grave threat to religious liberty.

To the fires of social discord this administration is adding fuel. To those on the lower rungs of life's ladder, asserting their God-given right to rise, this administration is breaking the first rungs. These are the issues I'd like to see both of our major parties address in 2012.
---------------
J. Ken Blackwell is a conservative family values advocate. Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, the American Civil Rights Union and is on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He is the co-author of the new bestseller: The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency. He is a National Federation of Republican Assemblies board member and a contributing author to the ARRA News Service. Blackwell's article was also published today on TownHall

---

Tags: Ken Blackwell, family, faith, freedom, missed opportunity, response, Mitch Daniels, Barack Obama, State of the Union, SOTU,, 2012 To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to Conservative Voices. Thanks!