I was reading Associated Press reporter Sam Hananel’s coverage (“Unions see sharp membership declines again”) of Uncle Sam’s latest report on union membership, and I came to this paragraph about what happened with private-sector union representation in 2010:

Union membership in the private sector fell from 7.2 percent to 6.9 percent, a low point not seen since the infancy of the labor movement in the 1930s. The steepest decline was seen in the construction industry, where unemployment remains around 20 percent.

Naturally, I expected to see Hananel’s reportage next address what happened in the public sector. As you’ll see, readers only got half of what they should have been told:

Public employment unions saw a 1.2 percent decline, mostly from job cuts among state and local government workers. Those unions could see further declines this year, as states eliminate jobs in an effort to make up multibillion-dollar budget deficits.

Okay Sam, but what is the percentage of overall public sector union representation?

It would appear that Mr. Hananel would rather the AP’s readers, listeners and viewers not know that public-sector union representation (36.2%) is over five times higher than it is in the private sector (source data):

Hananel had to consciously avoid reporting the overall statistic for public union representation, because it’s the very first highlight in the actual report issued by the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The AP reporter told readers about Items 3 and 4 above, but “somehow” missed Item 1. Amazing.

Mr. Hananel reveals a bit of his bias in the following paragraph:

Last year was the first time that public employees made up a majority of all union workers. Unlike private employers, government offices do not hire outside consultants to help them fend off union organizers. But newly elected governors and lawmakers in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida and other states are backing legislation that would make government offices less union-friendly.

I don’t want to pretend that outside union-prevention consultants aren’t a factor, but there are several other more important reasons why public employee unions make up a majority (51.8%) of the nation’s workers. The most obvious is that governments generally don’t go out of business. Companies can and do go out of business, very often because inflexible labor contracts have tied their hands. Just as obvious: Governments, at least until recently, have blithely passed on the cost of their excessive labor contracts and opulent future promises to taxpayers, who generally haven’t paid as much attention as they should have.

Hananel picks on Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida, all of which “just so happen” to have new Republican governors. Yet this passage from a Honolulu report indicates that it isn’t only new Republicans who are concerned about the high costs of public-sector unions:

(New Demcratic Hawaii Governor Neil) Abercrombie has already laid down parameters that may crimp lawmakers’ ability to make ends meet. The governor, after all, has said he will not raise the general excise tax, will not take from the counties’ share of the transient accommodations tax, will not implement furloughs, will not delay tax refunds and will not cut warm bodies.

Yet, other new Democratic governors from California to Illinois to New York are looking at those very things. In addition to tax increases, on the table are sacred cows like reductions in spending on education and cuts to public employee union benefits.

Gosh, Sam, how did you miss that? (/sarc)

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Rick Santorum, January 2011:

“The question is — and this is what Barack Obama didn’t want to answer: Is that human life a person under the Constitution? And Barack Obama says no,” Santorum says in the interview, which was first picked up by CBN’s David Brody. “Well if that person, human life is not a person, then, I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, ‘We are going to decide who are people and who are not people.’”

Reuters — January 19, 2011:

An abortion doctor killed hundreds of babies by cutting their spinal cords with scissors after removing them from mothers late in their pregnancies, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams charged Dr. Kermitt Gosnell, 69, and nine associates with eight counts of murder, following a year-long investigation by a grand jury, whose report was unveiled on Wednesday.

The defendants are charged with first-degree murder in the cases of seven babies for which there is substantial evidence, Williams said.

Hundreds of other babies are likely to have died in Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic, which he operated from 1979 to 2010, Williams said.

A third-degree murder charge stemmed from the death of a mother who died from an overdose of anesthetics, he said.

“My comprehension of the English language can’t adequately describe the barbaric nature of Dr. Gosnell,” Williams said at a news conference.

Gosnell and his associates were arrested without incident on Wednesday, and Williams said he may seek the death penalty for Gosnell.

He said Gosnell’s clients, many of whom were poor (*), were charged $325 for a first-trimester abortion and between $1,625 and $3,000 for an illegal abortion after 24 weeks.

* – A press which is willing willing to carry water for minority victimization in so many other venues, some of them questionable, only notes that the victims were “poor.” Michelle Malkin: “The 281-page grand jury report released Wednesday provides a bone-chilling account of how Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society” systematically preyed on poor, minority pregnant women and their live, viable babies.”

Here’s Jesse Jackson in 1977, from a footnote in a book by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and a co-author, providing the best evidence that before it went awry in the late 1970s (largely due to Jackson’s tragic abandonment of prolife principles), the civil-rights movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King, was staunchly prolife:

Barack Obama’s antilife track record is long and outspokenly strident. Based on the litany of positions and actions noted here in October 2008, especially the following item, it is inarguably true that he would find at least some portion of what went on in Gosnell’s “clinic” acceptable:

Obama, as an Illinois state senator, opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist’s unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability. The Obama campaign lied about his vote until critics produced documentary proof of what he had done. In fact, Sen. Obama continues to lie about his inhuman voting record in regard to the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, even stooping so low as to run a disgusting television ad attacking the disabled survivor of a botched abortion.

The only question is how much.

Rick Santorum is right. It IS remarkable that any black man (self-identified in Obama’s case) would so stridently support a practice that snuffs out innocent human life at any stage.

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UPDATE: William Saletan in Slate (HT to an e-mailer) –

The Baby Butcher
Pro-choice absolutism and the grisly abortion scandal in Philadelphia.

… Now these absolutists face an awkward discovery. A grand jury in Philadelphia has indicted a local doctor for running an abortion clinic in which no limits applied. Babies of all sizes and gestational ages were casually butchered. It’s a tale of gore and nihilism—and an occasion for pro-choice advocates to reflect on the limits of reproductive freedom.

Don’t bet on it.

UPDATE 2: Brent Bozell gets it, on multiple levels — “MRC’s Bozell: Media Attack on Santorum Illustrates Campaign to Delegitimize Conservative Thought.”

UPDATE 3: Taranto at Best of the Web embarrassingly whiffs on Santorum, committing a multitude of rare blunders –

We agree that it is intellectually defensible to draw a parallel between the antiabortion movement and the civil rights movement, or between abortion and slavery–though we would also note that this is an inflammatory and highly controversial comparison. Making the argument in a way that persuades rather than alienates those who are not already convinced requires an extraordinarily high degree of subtlety and sensitivity. In this regard Santorum’s comment falls very far short.

The ONLY reason that the abortion-slavery parallel “is an inflammatory and highly controversial comparison” is because it makes people uncomfortable with the truth. It would be nice if the goal were always to (quickly) “persuade and not alienate,” but sometimes shaking people out of their non-thinking comfort zone can be a step towards ultimate persuasion.

The fact is that the early civil-rights movement’s pioneers clearly understood that slavery (infamously upheld in the Dred Scot decision) and the post-slavery Jim Crow laws depended on the perception that blacks were lesser forms of human life. This “justified” enslaving them and, after the Civil War, segregating them. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson understood that.

Similarly, the legality of abortion ultimately depends on the perception that human life in the womb is a lesser form of life undeserving of legal protection. That’s why Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. King, and so many other blacks correctly call abortion the civil rights issue of our day.” It’s also why Jesse Jackson’s betrayal of his prolife principles is one of the most tragic and horribly consequential decisions made by a public figure in the last 40 years.

Taranto then dangerously doubles down:

What makes it racially invidious is not the underlying argument or the rhetorical inelegance with which Santorum makes it. It is the implication that because Obama is “a black man,” he is obliged to agree with Santorum.

The notion that the range of acceptable opinion is narrower for a black person than for a white person (or for a woman than a man, or a homosexual than a heterosexual) is a pernicious form of bigotry.

… To be sure, an unborn child, unlike a dog of any age, is human, and the idea that it should be treated as a legal person is not self-evidently absurd. But neither is it self-evidently correct, and abortion laws before Roe v. Wade were never predicated on the idea that legal personhood precedes birth.

Wow. Santorum’s the bigot? What a load of rubbish.

As to personhood, the only reason societies never bestowed “legal” personhood on an unborn baby before Roe v. Wade is that no one until just a few years before Roe ever conceived (pun intended) of the idea that someone would voluntarily choose to end its life before birth — and then have the gall to expect legal protection from any consequences for doing so. Everybody knew the natural-law truth that a pre-born baby is a person, which is why it was “self-evidently” not a subject of debate.

The reason a black person should be more concerned about the consequences of abortion on demand is simply because a monstrously disproportionate number of preborn black and minority babies are being killed — a fact Taranto conveniently avoided:

Black women are more than 3 times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are roughly 2 times as likely.

It’s not racist to suggest that a black or Hispanic person would be expected to care more about this ongoing minority holocaust and devote more energy to stopping it than a white person.

Dedicated eugenicist Margaret Sanger, whose “intellectual” successors include Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Obama administration science czar John Holdren, still believe in the desirability of eliminating “lesser beings” from the gene pool (through sterilization, aggressive contraception, and abortion) and/or cutting them off from government services (through euthanasia). From their perspective, abortion on demand works out to be pretty effective tool for accomplishing that. The leftist elites’ claims to be looking out for the interests of blacks and other minorities will remain sheer hypocrisy unless and until they acquire a belief in the sanctity of human life from conception until natural death.

Barack Obama is one of those leftist elitists, and a (self-identified) black man to boot. As such, Rick Santorum is right.

From Anchorage, Alaska:

Jan 16, 2011 / 01:02 pm

Tweeting and texting, the Echo Boomers are taking the reins of the decades-long effort to restore legal protection to the unborn in Alaska and across the U.S.

These 20-somethings – children of Baby Boomers and Generation Xers – were born and raised after the 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade. They are survivors of the era of legalized abortion in America. But a full third of their generation did not survive – 26 million of their brothers, sisters and friends have been aborted.

For those who made it, like 28-year-old Christine Kurka of Eagle River, Alaska and 22-year-old Windy Thomas of Anchorage, the abortion debate is about human rights – rights they believe should be equally applied to all members of the human family, including the very youngest.

At age 18, Kurka was motivated to speak up for the unborn. Her awakening came during a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where she heard recordings of the Nuremberg trials. She understood that apathy, silence and the deflection of responsibility were no defense in the face of evil.

“If we say nothing, we are acquiescing,” Kurka told the Catholic Anchor in a recent interview.

Kurka began to see a correlation between the destruction of the Jewish people behind the walls of concentration camps and abortion.

“It’s a quiet thing, people don’t see it,” she explained.

She realized “it wasn’t going to be enough to just personally stay away from abortion or not to have one myself. I was going to have to be actively speaking and doing something.”

As the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaches on Jan. 22, the faces and voices of the pro-life movement are changing. But in terms of political action, charity towards mothers and babies and efforts to educate the public on the facts of prenatal life, Kurka’s generation is following a well-proved path.

Pro-life predecessors

While a growing number of Alaska’s pro-life activists aren’t out of their 20s, they have four decades of experience behind them.

Anchorage Catholic Pam Albrecht has been at the forefront of the abortion debate since 1969, when Planned Parenthood first lobbied Alaska’s legislators to legalize abortion. With help from local attorneys Wayne Ross and Bob Flint, Albrecht produced flyers opposing the legalization and urged Alaskans to write their legislators.

However, the legislation passed, and in 1972 Alaska amended its constitution to become one of the first states to explicitly recognize a so-called right to “privacy,” interpreted by some to mean a right to abortion on demand.

Meanwhile, Albrecht began to appreciate how women were being pressured into abortion.

“I could see this problem was more than just ‘this baby’,” said soft-spoken Albrecht.

So she and fellow Catholic Kim Syren founded Birthright – to help expectant mothers in crisis choose life for their babies by providing friendship and material support, like housing and clothing.

Eventually, Birthright was folded into Catholic Social Services’ Pregnancy Support program. And Albrecht continues on with Project Rachel, helping mothers suffering after abortion.

Mirroring the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, other early pro-life advocates took the abortion debate to Anchorage clinic doors in the 1980s. Local pro-lifers organized peaceful sit-ins to slow the abortion business in Anchorage and raise awareness of what was going on inside. Ninety-two people joined the first sit-in, making it the largest civil disobedience event in the history of Alaska. A photo of the arrest of Jesuit Father George Endal, in his 80s at the time, made the front page of the Anchorage Times.

On the sidewalks were “sidewalk counselors,” pro-lifers specially trained to engage with the abortion-minded and help them find life-affirming options.

Still, today, members of the Legion of Mary, a Catholic lay apostolate, continue to pray on the sidewalks several times a week and offer help to women outside Alaska Women’s Health, P.C. – an abortion facility on Lake Otis Parkway.

Most young adults are pro-life

Thirty years later, in an age where the term “partial-birth abortion” is familiar and where prenatal ultrasounds are commonplace, the American people — including young adults — are increasingly pro-life.

A 2010 Marist College poll showed that nearly 60 percent of the nation’s 18-to-29-year-olds consider abortion morally wrong. Just 20 percent of that group thinks abortion is morally acceptable. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

At several points in 2010 (just one example: at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog; graphic), I pointed out that despite the federal government’s continued insistence that its budget deficit for fiscal 2010 was on track to come in lower than fiscal 2009, the deficit based on real spending would be, and turned out to be, higher in fiscal 2010. That’s important to know, as clever year-crossing accounting entries can’t change the fact that Uncle Sam’s financial situation continues to worsen at an accelerating rate. Don’t expect the establishment press to acknowledge this; the illusion of improvement is important to getting their propped-up president another four years.

Similarly, it may be futile to expect that establishment media outlets, especially the Associated Press, will ever report that 2010 was the worst yearby far in new home construction since World War II. That this is indeed the case was shown last month (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog). This post will use December 2010 data, most of which is now in, to add an exclamation point.

Yesterday, the AP’s Winston Smith-like headline writers tried to pass off 2010 as bad, but not as bad as 2009. As is the case with the government’s annual budget deficit, the AP’s persistent prevarication in the face of drop-dead obvious facts is an attempt to make readers, listeners and viewers believe that as bad as things are, they’re at least improving (with implication, of course, that our poor, put-upon president is making progress cleaning up what was supposedly George Bush’s mess). Things are not getting better, and Martin Crutsinger’s narrative in the related article stops just short of saying so.

Here are a few paragraphs from Crustinger’s dispatch:

2010 ends as 2nd worst year for home construction

U.S. homebuilders are coming off their two worst years in more than a half-century, and the outlook for this year is only slightly better.

Economists say it could take three more years before the industry begins building homes at a healthy rate. In the mean time, the housing downturn is dragging on the broader economy, with one-quarter of the jobs lost since the recession began in the construction field.

Builders normally help lead the economy out of a recession. Construction projects fuel growth and that leads to more hiring.

… Homebuilders broke ground on a total of 587,600 homes in 2010, just slightly better than the 554,000 started in 2009, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday Those are the lowest annual totals on records dating back to 1959.

And the pace is getting worse. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that builders started work at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 529,000 new homes and apartments last month. That’s a drop of 4.3 percent from November and the slowest pace since October 2009.

Building permits, considered a good barometer for future activity, rose 16.7 percent in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 635,000, the best pace since March.

But builders pulled more permits in California, New York and Pennsylvania ahead of code changes in 2011 — a factor that likely influenced the spike.

Now that we have 12 months of 2010 data for everything except new unit sales, it’s easy to prove not only that 2010 was significantly worse than 2009, but also that the market decline since the expiration of the homebuyer’s credit in April has been downright frightening (Census data sources, all not seasonally adjusted, which differ slightly from the seasonally adjusted numbers AP reported above — permits; starts; completions; sales):

So let’s see. In 2010, which the AP’s headline writer said and Martin Crutsinger seemed to imply at certain points was better than 2009 in terms of “home construction”:

• Buidling permits, which only lead to construction, were up slightly, at least partially and maybe entirely because of a year-end rush to beat stricter 2011 rules in certain states.
• Yes, housing starts were up, but all of the improvement over 2009, and then some, occurred during the first four months of the year.
• Units completed dropped sharply.
• New home sales, the whole reason why they get built in the first place, also fell by double digits.

As seen above, comparing May through December of 2010 to the same months in 2009 demonstrates that the new home industry is in the midst of a serious double-dip decline across the board.

If all of this doesn’t convince readers that 2010 was worse than 2009, the following graphic will (link):

At the end of 2010, there were almost 13% fewer single-family homes under construction, and industrywide inventory shrank by one-sixth.

What was that about 2010 being better for “home construction” than 2009? You guys at the AP are joking, right?

In the face of the above evidence, only a fool or a deliberately fibbing propagandist would try to convince readers, listeners, and viewers that last year was better for new housing construction than 2009. Someone should ask Tom Curley at the Associated Press and other CEOs and editors at establishment media outlets who persist in promoting the myth of new home industry improvement: Which is it?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Jeffrey Anderson at National Review, on the House’s vote to repeal Obamacare:

This wasn’t the way the Democrats saw things playing out.

After Obamacare was passed (so we could find out what was in it), people were supposed to learn to love it. The House of Representatives certainly wasn’t supposed to pass a bill to repeal it — especially not less than ten months after that glorious day in March when the Democrats effectively told the American people that, when they wanted their opinion, they’d ask for it. Yet all of this has now happened.

The vote also conveyed at least three other things:

1. Repeal is far more popular than Obamacare ever was. …
2. Very few Democratic representatives genuinely oppose Obamacare. … repeal was a reflection of popular will, not a circumvention of it.
3. This will set up a battle royale in 2012. …

But whoever the nominee is, November 6, 2012, will decide the fate of Obama, the fate of Obamacare, and, to some significant degree, the fate of a nation …

As to Point 2 above, 10 Democrats who voted against Obamacare in March 2010 were against repeal yesterday. They are: Jason Altmire (Pa.), John Barrow (Ga.), Ben Chandler (Ky.), Tim Holden (Pa.), Larry Kissell (N.C.), Dan Lipinski (Ill.), Stephen Lynch (Mass.), Jim Matheson (Utah), Collin Peterson (Minn.), Heath Shuler (N.C.). Their opposition to repeal indicates that their “no” votes on Obamacare had everything to do with political survival, and nothing to do with their real political convictions.

______________________________________________________

James Hansen of NASA wants to take the economy down until we surrender to the campaign of global wealth redistribution disguised as “climate change.” He’s upset that voters have punished politicians who supported “climate change”-inspired cap and trade legilsation by replacing them with those who don’t:

The nation’s most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about this, blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the “best hope” to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China’s will.

Even in the fantasyland of the Obama administration, that should be a firing offense. If it’s not, there’s no reason to believe Obama or his administration when they assert that a prosperous economy is of paramount importance.

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At BigGovernment.com: “Another Farmer Says Rep. Sanford Bishop Didn’t Pursue Pigford Fraud Allegations.”

For those new to the topic, “Pigford” is the lawsuit by black farmers against the USDA for discrimination in lending and other assistance which allegedly occurred decades ago. It turned into a feeding trough for trial lawyers and tens of thousands of blacks who never farmed.

The infamous Shirley Sherrod and her husband Charles were early Pigford beneficiaries to the tune of $13 million, despite past history of serious worker abuse at their “New Communities” farm “cooperative.”

One of the items I never got to before the election was noting that the aforementioned Congressman Bishop received the coveted Shirley Sherrod endorsement and a $300 contribution from Ms. Sherrod (third item at link) in his most reelection bid. Bishop narrowly defeated his Republican opponent. Bishop is a walking, talking PAC-man. Looking into charges of Pigford fraud would appear to be very low on his list of priorities.

From Los Angeles:

Jan 19, 2011 / 06:03 pm

Mexican producer and actor Eduardo Verastegui has announced that his organization, Mantle of Guadalupe, is planning to build the largest pro-life women’s clinic in the United States.

Verastegui’s announcement came during the first-ever gala held by Mantle of Guadalupe and Catholic Charities of Los Angeles.

The gala took place Jan. 15 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills and brought together 300 noted guests, including Philip Rivers from the San Diego Chargers, Mexican actor Karyme Lozano, actor Sean Astin from “The Lord of the Rings,” violinist Roddy Chong and motivational speaker Nick Vujicic.

Vujicic also received an award for his courageous testimony in defense of human life.

During the gala, Verastegui, who is the founder of Mantle of Guadalupe, reiterated his commitment to defend life and announced that the organization’s new goal is the construction of “the largest women’s clinic in the United States.”

“I will not use my talents except to elevate my Christian, pro-life and Hispanic values,” Verastegui promised the guests.

At the conclusion of his remarks, the Mexican actor introduced several young Hispanic mothers and their babies who were saved thanks to the work of Mantle of Guadalupe. They were greeted with a prolonged standing ovation. “These babies are the fruits of Mantle of Guadalupe, they are the result of your generosity. If only just one of them were here, everything I have done in my life recently since filming ‘Bella’ would have been worth it,” he said.

Upon receiving his award, Vujicic, a young Australian – born without arms or legs – thanked God for the gift of life. “He can turn a kid without arms or legs into his own arms and legs,” Vujicic said during remarks peppered with loud applause from the guests. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The folks in the establishment press are looking for any sign of upward movement in the housing market, especially in new home construction, that they can portray positively as the beginning of a general recovery.

That desperate search explains the content of the following e-mail alert from CNN, which arrived in my inbox this morning:

Some “surge.” As seen here (scroll to the very end of the report), the actual, i.e., not seasonally adjusted, number of building permits issued in December was 47,700. That’s fewer than the 49,200 permits issued in December 2009, and the second-lowest December in the 52 years the Census Bureau has been tracking permits.

Seasonal calculations like the one leading to the “surge” CNN cited are suspect because there has been a significant deviation from the norm during the most recent two years in housing. Such deviations can distort the results. The reality: Surge, schmurge.

Sadly, e-mails like the one CNN issued have a great deal of undeserved influence, especially among the relatively disengaged, who use such alerts to try to quickly get a handle on what’s going on without having to dig around for it. In this case, they’ve been misled.

I’ll have more to say about the disgraceful reporting of Wednesday’s housing news, particularly by the Associated Press, tomorrow.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

At the New Criterion (HT to an e-mailer), “One Man Global Content Provider” Steyn analyzes the decline of the UK, and assesses the chances of a repeat performance here — or, more accurately, the chances that the repeat performance already in progress here can be halted.

The “Dependence Day” title comes from this portion of Steyn’s essay:

After the (2005) London Tube bombings, (then-UK Prime Minister) Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. A national holiday every July 5th: They can call it Dependence Day.

Find the time to read the whole very sobering thing.

If the U.S. is somehow able to put the brakes on its decline, it will be in no small part due to “The Tea Party’s Lasting Influence” cited in Rob Roll’s earlier post.

After they were sworn in two weeks ago, the members of the Republican-controlled 112th House of Representatives did something that had never been done before on the floor of the House: they read the Constitution in its entirety. Some liberals complained that the version read omitted parts that had been amended, like the part that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. And these are the people who, in the aftermath of the Arizona shootings, tell us not to try and score political points on everything? But I digress.

Along with reading the Constitution, the House instituted a new rule which requires all bills submitted to cite where in the Constitution Congress is given the authority to enact such a law. These new genuflections to the Constitution run in stark contrast to the shredding of the document that the Democrat-controlled 111th Congress engaged in. The trashing of that sacred document was best exemplified by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s response to a reporter’s question about how Congress can force Americans to buy health insurance. With noticeable contempt she replied, “Are you serious? Are you serious? Are you serious?”

This begs the question, where did this new found respect for the Constitution come from? It did not come from Congress because Congress, by its very nature, is reactive. It came from the Tea Party. It is the Tea Partiers who have brought the Constitution back into the center of the political dialogue, where it belongs.

In the aftermath of the landslide midterm election, the question has been asked, “Will the Tea Party continue to be a powerful force in American politics?” I believe I found the answer to that question last weekend.

I had the opportunity to judge a high school speech and debate tournament. The event I judged, Student Congress, allowed students to write their own bills and then submit them for debate. I was surprised by what I heard. I heard the Constitution invoked in the debate on almost every single piece of legislation. What is even more important is that I did not just hear the standard invocations of the first amendment, I heard students bring up parts of the Constitution that are usually ignored. For example, one student mentioned the the very-important yet often-forgotten Tenth Amendment, which states that all powers not given to Congress are given to the states to the people. Even more encouraging than that, some students even cited the Federalist Papers, which were written by the framers of the Constitution to explain why they structured the federal government the way they did.

This is and will be the lasting legacy of the Tea Party movement; it has increased the American people’s awareness of our founding documents and the messages they contain. The most important message is this: that our rights come from God and no politician can give you them or take them away.

____________________________________________

Robert Roll is a freshman majoring in Finance at Ohio Northern University, and the blog owner’s nephew.

Donald Berwick, Barack Obama’s recess-appointed head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, has just received a stinging rebuke from a country he praised as a model worth following in health care services delivery, as noted in an Investors Business Daily editorial last night:

In his speech, (UK Prime Minister David) Cameron noted he thought Britain was falling behind on health care. “In Shanghai, the average child is two years ahead of a child here,” he said. “In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria or, interestingly, Poland, you are less likely to die once admitted into hospital after a heart attack than you are in the U.K.”

During an interview with BBC Radio 4′s Today program, Cameron went farther, saying, “I don’t think we should put up with a second-rate — with coming second-best,” he said, quickly correcting himself. “We should aim to be the best.” Some consider it a gaffe. We consider it the honest truth, a rare moment of candor from a politician.

Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama’s choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, has praised the NHS, whose horror stories of rationed services and medicines with sometimes fatal effects we have documented.

Berwick says: “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional. Britain, you chose well.” Well, Dr. Berwick, Britain is having second thoughts.

We have a chance not to repeat the British mistake and stop the runaway train of nationalized health care before it leaves the station. We can repeal ObamaCare then replace it, adding real market reforms, like taking lawyers out of the operating room through malpractice reform, allowing insurance competition across state lines, and empowering health care consumers through health savings accounts or their equivalent.

This administration has a clear tendency to imitate socialists experiments which failed, the most obvious being its attempt to stimulate the economy through massive amounts of government spending. It stimulated nothing — not even employment.

Berwick may think he’s pursuing health care excellence, but the UK’s National Health Service has proven that a statist approach to health results in the achievement of the opposite. As with the stimulus, the stubborn use of previously failed policy prescriptions indicates that it isn’t about achieving excellence at all. It’s about increasing power and control over citizens’ lives.

From Oceanside, California:

Jan 19, 2011 / 05:43 am

A Catholic man is running across America and praying the whole way. Despite the difficulties he has faced, he says he wants to use his talents to serve God and to help those he prays for.

Jeff Grabosky, 27, plans to begin his 3,700-mile run in Oceanside, California on Jan. 20 and end in Long Island’s Smith Point in New York City on May 26.

The primary mission of his run is to encourage prayer in America and across the world. He is taking prayer requests and praying a decade of the Rosary for each intention during his run.

Grabosky’s faith has helped him survive some “very difficult times,” he told CNA in a Jan. 17 interview. A week after his mother died from cancer in 2006, his wife told him that she was leaving him.

“I was left living out of my car for two months,” he said. “It took everything I had just to make it to the end of each day, as it felt the world around me was crashing down. The one consistent thing in my life was prayer as I constantly asked God for his help. As difficult as things were, I trusted that the Lord would help pull me through and that He had a plan.”

Grabosky’s “long road back” included setbacks like a collapsed lung and a week-long stay in intensive care. But his faith in God “only became stronger” because of what he experienced.

Now he wants to inspire others to pursue their dreams “even if this world thinks that it may be out of the ordinary or even impossible.”

The New Jersey native has been around runners since his childhood, when his mother would take him to the track on summer mornings. He ran cross country and track through middle school and high school, but he was not fast enough to run on the Division I team of University of Notre Dame, where he graduated from in 2005. He only ran intramural cross country and finished his first marathon as a senior in college.

He first had the idea to run across America after his second marathon finish in 2008.

“I thought a run across the country would be an awesome experience and an incredible challenge, but I put it on the back burner for some time because of what I had going on in my life.”

He said that the physical challenges of his task will be “extremely difficult” but the mental challenges will be even harder.

“I think it will be easy to become frustrated and to think negatively,” he added. “I will need to stay focused at all times.”

Loneliness is one problem he anticipates because he is running solo without a support team. He said he has planned in advance how much food and water to carry, appropriate clothes to wear, where to stay, and what route to follow.

Grabosky took inspiration from his mother, who used to pray the Rosary whenever she ran.

The prayer requests he is receiving have opened his eyes to how “everyone is struggling with something.” He saw no better way to help those in need than to encourage prayer and pray for their intentions.

“It’s interesting how God works. I started out thinking I would need to finish this run for myself, but now more than anything I need to finish it for all those I am praying for,” he said. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

Dick Cheney: “Obama has learned that Bush policies were right” –

President Obama has “learned from experience” that some of the Bush administration’s decisions on terrorism issues were necessary, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

In his first interview since undergoing major heart surgery last July, Cheney said he thinks Obama has been forced to rethink some of his national security positions now that he sits in the Oval Office.

Cheney’s giving Obama too much credit. I believe that the correct take is: “White House pollsters have learned that moving away from some of the Bush administration’s decisions on terrorism issues would be political suicide.”

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It’s not like there’s bandwidth rationing going on (just give the FCC time) — “The following article on Muslim-Christian relations was solicited and then rejected by the Washington Post’s ‘On Faith’ blog.” It’s published here at Pajamas Media, which apparently found the necessary bandwidth.

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As Steve Jobs again takes a medical leave from Apple, it’s worth reflecting on what the company has accomplished, and what similarly innovative companies face today.

Accomplishments, even including failures, which nonetheless moved along innovation: Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, Macintosh, Newton, iPod/iTunes, iPhone, iPad –and I’ve surely missed a few.

Apple went public in 1980. When it did so, “it generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly created more millionaires (about 300) than any company in history.”

It would be easy to assume that had Apple faced today’s regulatory environment, it would nonetheless have successfully gone public, as did Google roughly 20 years later. I’m not so sure. Given the early-stage setbacks with the Apple III, the company’s founders and investors might instead have sold out to IBM, which did not become a truly despised rival until the Mac debuted in 1984.

Does anyone believe that we’d have seen a similar litany of life-improving innovations under Big Blue? Neither do I, which leads me to wonder what we’ve lost because more recent pioneers like YouTube and many other smaller firms and their investors have concluded at crunch time that getting bought out by Google or Microsoft is preferable to navigating the costly, treacherous waters of going public under Sarbanes Oxley.

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Venezuela’s Oil Reserves top Saudia Arabia’s — Too bad statist and socialist Hugo Chavez can’t figure out how to keep production going:

Venezuela’s oil production fell to 2.36 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2008, after climbing as high as 3.18 million bpd in 1997, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) estimated the country’s output was about 2.24 million bpd in December (2008).

There is some evidence of improvement, but the country’s failure to capitalize on its good fortune it is the Chavez regime’s most obvious failure. The country could be extremely prosperous, but instead is in serious decline.