Category: Democrats

Under the New Pope’s Teaching, Should Pelosi and Biden Be Ex-Communicated?

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Before he became Pope Francis, the Argentine cardinal’s doctrine would have excluded Vice President Joe Biden and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi from Communion. Father Shenan J. Boquet president of Human Life International explains:

While we cannot know what is truly in someone’s heart, all too often political or other high-profile figures who profess to be members of the Catholic faith give rise to scandal when they publicly promote intrinsic evils such as abortion, euthanasia, the redefinition of marriage, and contraception–several of which have been championed by Vice President Biden and Rep. Pelosi throughout their political careers.
As Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, taught in the 2007 ‘Aparecida Document,’ the responsibility of legislators, heads of governments to not receive Holy Communion while engaged in “deeds or words against the commandments, particularly when abortion, euthanasia, and other grave crimes against life and family are encouraged” is a very serious one.
Both Mr. Biden and Mrs. Pelosi are in grave violation of this principle, as neither have so far publicly shown fidelity to the Church on these issues, and both have opposed the Church whenever her teachings conflicted with their anti-life and anti-family ideology.

Myself, I’m Protestant, but if I were Catholic, I’d expect the Pope to stand up to these progressive secularists calling themselves Catholic.

What’s the point in even having a Pope, if he doesn’t ex-communicate a few prominent heretics now and then?

 

#OccupyResoluteDesk: ‘I Take A Balanced Approach To Imbalanced Budgets’

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by Smitty

“Paul Ryan, today, put forward his budget,” says ABC, “and he says, he’s challenging you to come forward with a budget that also reaches balance. Are you going to do that?”
“No,” Obama says. “My goal is not to chase a balanced budget just for the sake of balance,” Obama said. “My goal is, how do we grow the economy, put people back to work. And if we do that we are going to be bringing in more revenue.”

The more full quotation is via The Blaze.

What’s fascinating about this is the attempt to sound reasonable about a fundamentally unreasonable proposition. It’s like telling your spouse: “If I just focus on getting my leg over with enough others to grow sufficiently bored chasing tail, I’ll satisfy myself that there is no one better than you, love.”

Ryan taking 10 years (a decade!) to balance the budget is not a case of “chas[ing] a balanced budget just for the sake of balance”. Such would balancing the budget in one or two years via highly disruptive reforms to, well, everything. This blog bows to Ryans superior wonkiness in terms of knowing what’s possible.

So for BHO to dismiss Ryan on motive, as though balance was somehow a lower priority in its own right, is deeply offensive. May you be hoisted on your mendacious petard, Mr. President.

via JWF and The Weekly Standard

Detroit: What Democrats Do

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If you want to see the long-term effect of Democrat policies, there is no better example than the sad fate of the Motor City:

DETROIT — This city was already sinking under hundreds of millions of dollars in bills that it could not pay when a municipal auditor brought in a veteran financial consultant to dig through the books. A seasoned turnaround man and former actuary with Ford Motor Co., he was stunned by what he found: an additional $7.2 billion in retiree health costs that had never been reported, or even tallied up.
“The city must take some drastic steps,” the consultant, John Boyle, warned the City Council in delivering his report at a public meeting in 2005. Among the options he suggested was filing for bankruptcy.
“I thought all hell would break loose — I thought the flag would finally be raised,” Mr. Boyle recalled in an interview last week. But his warning drew little notice. “It was utterly astounding,” he said.

The Democrats who have run Detroit into the ground don’t care about anything but how much more money they can loot from the city:

Some factors were out of the city’s control. As auto industry jobs moved elsewhere over the decades, for example, Detroit lost much of its affluent tax base. Lower than expected state revenue sharing did not help, nor did corruption allegations in the administration of Kwame M. Kilpatrick, a mayor who resigned in 2008 and was convicted on Monday of racketeering and other federal charges.
But recent findings from a state-appointed review team and interviews with past and present city officials also suggest a city that over the years was remarkably badly run.

What? Democrats don’t know how to run an effective government? Shades of Jimmy Carter! I never suspected such a thing!

 

Lying by Euphemism: ‘New Revenues’

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Journalism is supposed to be about truth. Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times are engaged in deception:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues, President Obama has begun reaching around them to Republican lawmakers with a history of willingness to cut bipartisan deals.

“New revenues” = INCREASING TAXE RATES.

President Obama wants to RAISE TAXES, which Republicans oppose, but these lying bastards at the New York Times — dishonest partisan propagandists, endeavoring to assist their fellow Democrat — realize that the president’s proposal might be less popular if they described it truthfully, and so they begin with this 11-word dependent clause that hides the truth and shifts the blame:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues . . .

In other words, if you buy what Calmes and Weisman are selling, you believe that the problem in Washington is that Republicans won’t negotiate, and that the ideal way to solve the budget problem is with “new revenues,” which could be had easily if weren’t for those Republicans “foreswearing negotiations.” As far as concerns the economic error in the underlying fallacy of their hidden premise, Ronald Reagan once explained that in a single sentence:

“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”

Oh, to be back to the good old days, when the debt was only a trillion dollars! But of course, we can’t cut spending — President Scaremonger won’t let that happen — and therefore the question is how to raise taxes. Never mind that the government could actually collect “news revenues” if it would just stop strangling economic growth with its vicious policies.

No, in the fanatical brains of Democrats, it is necessary as a matter of “social justice” that the rich (however you define that term) be forced to “pay their fair share” (however you define that term). Words have actual meanings, except when Democrats are talking, and then you always have to ask yourself, “What do they really mean when they use words like ‘rich’ and ‘fair’?”

Once you know that someone is attempting to deceive you — and Calmes and Weisman have advertised their deceptive purpose in the first sentence of their article — then all you need to wonder is why they’re lying. Perhaps sinister motives inspire them:

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

 That Orwell fellow was onto something.

 

Power Line Got That Backward

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by Smitty

Power Line points out that the Meteorologist-in-Chief is full of hooey, per this 13-word SOTU passage:

Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods – all are now more frequent and intense.

But it’s not that this particular crap-shot to the dome is unusual. Even the famous

electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket

was delivered in the context of a discussion of cap-n-trade. What I’d like to see is an analysis of something, anything, on which this guy has been forthright, accurate, or at least honest about the reason that a prediction proved inaccurate.

The nicest thing I can say about this guy is that he reflects a fundamentally unserious country.

via Insty

‘He Would Fain Have Had It’

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it. It was mere foolery. I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown (yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets) and, as I told you, he put it by once — but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again, then he put it by again — but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by. And still, as he refused it, the rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar — for he swooned and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”
— Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2

“President Obama sometimes feels strangely compelled to indicate that he is not the Master of America.”
— James Poulos, Forbes

We have come to expect these protestations of helpless impotence when Dear Leader does not get his way:

“Jessica, I am not a dictator, I’m the president,” he said while speaking to reporters in the White House Press Briefing Room. “Ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say we need to go to catch a plane, I can’t have Secret Service block the doorway.”

The stenography pool known as the White House press corps is busy chiseling his immortal words into stone, even as Obama offends sci-fi fans by confusing the Vulcan mind-meld (Star Trek) with “Jedi mind tricks” (Star Wars). But of course, his apologists would plead Obama’s underprivileged Indonesian upbringing as an excuse.

Did I mention he once ate a dog?

This is how it is with a Cult of Personality: Everything must always be interpreted in favor of Dear Leader. His exotic background — the subject of his best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father — can only be praised and celebrated. One is not allowed to interpret the same set of facts as potential evidence that Dear Leader is out of touch with the people he presumes to lead. Any such interpretation is raaaaacist, as is just about any other imaginable criticism of Dear Leader.

This week, Bob Woodward accidentally joined the hate-mob, and if he doesn’t straighten up, he might get listed on the SPLC map right next to the Family Research Council.

When Obama succeeds (and these are always political successes), his press-corps fanboys praise him as transcendent Lightworker — omniscient, super-human, his powers beyond the capacity of mere words to describe — but when Obama fails (and these are always policy failures) his media hagiographers attribute this to the infinite evil of his enemies. And on those rare occasions when Obama’s policy failures are also political failures, as with the allegedly cataclysmic “sequester” cuts that don’t really bother anyone, his journalistic idolators erupt in a fury of confusion.

“And for mine own part, I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.”

 

 

UPDATE (Smitty): welcome, Instapundit readers!

David Weigel Just Doesn’t Get That There ‘Leadership’ Thingy

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by Smitty

Peddling his JournoList wares at Slate, Weigel reveals a bit of density, emphasis mine:

Republicans have one goal, running through all of these negotiations. They don’t want sequestration to be replaced by tax revenue. Any tax revenue. Forcing the president to swallow $85 billion in cuts this year would do that. They’ve got no obvious alternatives.
But a plan like this exposes a quirk of Obama-era fiscal hawksmanship. Republicans want specific cuts. Some of them—total repeal of Obamacare!—they’ll put on the record. The rest of them, they try to put on the White House. As soon as the “supercommittee” failed and sequestration looked real, it became “the president’s sequester.”

As I was trying to explain to Mataconis last night, #OccupyResoluteDesk can’t play drums and lead guitar at the same time like that, Dave. Barack Obama is either an über-genius uniter, stopping global warming and bandaging all the scraped knees, or he’s a two-dimensional cardboard standee tooling about the country reciting teleprompted gibberish at great expense.

As President, Obama commissioned the Super Committee, and owns its failure, just as surely as he ignored its report, and can’t even turn in his budget homework on time. Because even BHO can’t point his fingers at Congress while using them to type.

So, David, your use of the passive voice in trying to excuse BHO for the debacle is as ludicrous as all of the petty abuse being heaped upon Americans over his incompetence. Admittedly, 51% of the voters are blamable victims, having returned the jackwagon to office in November. But don’t paper it over: this Sequestration is a pure, epic failure that #OccupyResoluteDesk owns, because, while his campaign prowess is beyond question, he couldn’t lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer.

Twitter is a having a blast with this, and I’ll sign off with a few sequestration gags that are getting good circulation:

Dodgeball:

Airplane!:

Blues Brothers:

Outlaw Josey Wales: