U.S. President Barack Obama will not attempt to impose a controversial new health care mandate that attempted to make religious organizations to pay for contraceptives, abortion inducing drugs and sterilization treatment.

“Under the rule, women will still have access to free preventive care that includes contraceptive services, no matter where they work – that core principle remains,” Obama said Friday.

But he quickly added that “religious organizations won’t have to pay for these services, and no religious institution will have to provide these services directly.”

The proposed rule sparked a furor – especially among Catholics, who generally oppose most methods of birth control. And the bad blood may not be over – even as Obama offered his “accommodation” (he specifically refused to call it a “compromise”).

As usual, we’re proceeding straight through the social conservative kerfuffle and addressing the fiscal/ libertarian issues.

Well we’re not … smarter people whose hatred of Obamacare is much more rationally grounded than ours are …

“Critics are missing the larger point,” John Cochrane of The Cato Institute wrote in an op-ed article published in The Wall Street Journal. “Why should the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decree that any of us must pay for ‘insurance’ that covers contraceptives?”

Ah … now we’re talking.

“Sure, churches should be exempt,” Cochrane continues. “We should all be exempt.”

He’s right. Given Obamacare’s infringements on individual liberty, its costly tax hikes and its deficit-busting new entitlements … this contraceptive flap is the least of our worries about the new law.

Pic: via Daylife

***

Like everything else the federal government touches, America’s education system has turned into an unmitigated (and increasingly costly) disaster for students, parents and taxpayers alike in recent decades.

America is falling further behind the rest of the world in other countries, while the taxpayer tab for these diminishing returns keeps climbing.

Top-down attempts to impose government-defined “accountability” over the sprawling federal system have failed – while attempts to inject some real accountability (a.k.a. the accountability of the marketplace) are routinely demonized by armies of overpaid, government-funded educrats and a supplicant legacy media.

Acknowledging (and reinforcing) this ongoing, systemic failure, U.S. President Barack Obama is issuing an executive order this week that will grant “flexibility waivers” to states which are failing to meet federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards.

Ten states are set to receive the waivers: Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Meanwhile New Mexico is expected to have its waiver request approved soon.

Another 28 states are expected to apply for the waivers in the coming weeks.

Passed in 2001, NCLB has been up for renewal since 2007 but Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been unable to come to terms on its extension – arguing over whether its standards for academic progress were appropriately realistic.

So … does Obama have the authority to unilaterally alter this legislation? That’s debatable … (probably not).

What isn’t up for debate, though, is government’s ongoing failure to education our nation’s children … and Obama’s incompetence and hyprocrisy in addressing that failure. In 2010, Obama acknowledged in an interview on The Today Show that the “broader problem” in America’s education marketplace was that parents who lack “a bunch of connections” don’t have real choices.

That’s for damn sure …

Of course rather than expanding parental choices in the Washington marketplace, Obama has sought to eliminate them. In fact, it was his decision to abandon the Washington D.C. school choice program in 2009 that prompted USA Today to reverse its previous position and endorse parental choice.

The same institutional opposition to parental choice endures here in South Carolina – where an overabundance of taxpayer resources and government-run accountability programs have managed to produce the absolute worst public education system in America.

At some point, we believe that our state and federal leaders will finally recognize that the best thing government can do to improve individual academic outcomes is to get the hell out of the way and let parents play a more active role in the process.

The only question is whether it will be too late for our country at that point …

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Dear Editor,

Here are a pair of insightful glimpses into the ground conditions in Afghanistan. For those of you who have been there, you will no doubt recognize that each contains at least some truth.  Many members of the public at large, however, will not.

The first is the companion piece to a major report submitted to officials in Congress by Lt. Colonel Daniel L. Davis:

http://armedforcesjournal.com/2012/02/8904030

Biting criticism of the upper-level military leadership there, no doubt.

The second is a great wrap-up by the folks at STRATFOR (a.k.a. Strategic Forecasting, Inc):

http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical-diary/2013-taliban-and-us-commitment-afghanistan?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20120206&utm_term=agenda&utm_content=link8&elq=67001bdeb0cf41ae8a231187f3bb298f

Read through these two pieces and you’ll see the nexus – al Qaeda (our original enemy in Afghanistan) quickly dissolved and fled (for the most part) wholly intact across the border into Pakistan, leaving the Taliban “home team” to continue fighting us on their terms.

Saying that the US military can’t force the Taliban to fight us on our own terms is no insult to our forces there; it is merely a statement of military/ counter-insurgency fact. Keep in mind, however, that squaring off against the Taliban in a conventional ground war was never our goal in Afghanistan. Keeping al Qaeda from enjoying the wide-ranging freedom to operate that they possessed prior to October 2001 has been the goal.

The former is not possible for any military, while the latter is arguably achievable.

I’m working on what has turned into a pretty depressing report regarding the situation on the ground for the operatives who continue to plug away there, but what really surprised me is how little of the information (although mostly open-source) gets reported, meaning that most Americans have no idea. The Davis article may make news this week, or (more likely) it may not.

As has always been the case, Afghanistan is a broken, dangerous place. We did not break it, but the (limited) extent to which we can fix enough of it to get the hell out is the question that remains.

Sincerely,

Mike Frederick
Surfside Beach, S.C.

The author’s 24-year public safety career includes service as a U.S. Army soldier, S.C. law enforcement officer, and federal counterterrorism official. Currently a Chief of Police, Frederick also teaches criminal justice and terrorism as an adjunct professor and serves as a threat assessment consultant.

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(This is a letter to the editor from a FITS reader. It does not necessarily reflect the editorial position of FITSNews.com. To submit your letter for consideration – anonymously or otherwise – click here).

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The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to uphold a lower court ruling voiding Proposition 8 – the 2008 California ballot amendment that outlawed gay marriage in the Golden State.

“Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the majority opinion for the court.

A dissenting opinion by Judge N. Randy Smith argued that there were “legitimate governmental interests” served by defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman.

We disagree with both views.

We’ve been unambiguous in our support of gay rights here at FITS, and we believe that any law which permits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong. Having said that, we don’t believe that government has any role whatsoever as it relates to defining the institution of marriage. Those decisions – in our opinion – should be left up to individual churches.

California overwhelmingly approved a gay marriage ban – known as Proposition 22 – by a 61-39 percent margin in March of 2000.  However, in May of 2008 this law (which conflicted with another state statute) was overturned by the California Supreme Court.  Five months later California voters approved another gay marriage ban – this time inserting the “same-sex only” marriage definition into the state constitution.  That measure – known as Proposition 8 – was approved by a much slimmer 52-48 percent margin in November 2008.

Six states – Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont – permit gay marriage, however these unions are not recognized by the federal government per the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

U.S. President Barack Obama originally supported civil unions for gay couples – not gay marriage – but more recently he has said that his position on the issue is “evolving.”

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Howard Rich

By Howard Rich || Klaus Schwab, a German academic and founder of the World Economic Forum, recently proclaimed the death of capitalism as we know it — a curious critique coming from the head of an organization whose motto finds “entrepreneurship is in the global public interest.”

“Capitalism, in its current form, no longer fits the world around us,” Schwab declared at the most recent installment of his globalist gathering in Davois, Switzerland, adding that the world’s business and political leaders “have failed to learn the lessons from the financial crisis.”

The latter half of this observation is indisputable. The doctrine of chasing good money after bad has reached dangerous dimensions on both sides of the Atlantic — yet leaders continue to plow ahead with new deficit spending and fresh bailouts regardless.

But is refusing to acknowledge the increasingly-costly failure of this ever-escalating interventionism really an indictment of capitalism? It would be easy to condemn Schwab for conducting a botched autopsy on the capitalist economic model, but what he’s really done is more intellectually dishonest — he has misidentified the “victim.”

Capitalism is far from dead. As proof we need only examine the ongoing rise of the global black market — which employed 1.8 billion people (half of the world’s work force) and did $10 trillion worth of business in 2009. Within a decade, this “shadow economy” will employ two-thirds of the global work force and represent the largest economy on the planet.

More conventionally we ought to consider China — which has embraced free market reforms and seen its economy expand 16-fold over the last 30 years. In the last two decades this rising tide has lifted an estimated 440 million Chinese out of poverty.

Meanwhile in India — another country which has abandoned central planning — an estimated 230 million people have been lifted out of poverty over the last five years alone.

Not only is capitalism very much alive, as long as there is supply, demand and self-interest in the world it cannot be killed. But it can be severely constrained — as we are witnessing.

The fact that the European economy is unable to perpetually prop up an overextended banking system responsible for underwriting the unsustainable expansion of the continent’s sovereign governments is not an indictment of capitalism.

Instead it is an indictment of botched command economic planning and the unchecked expansion of the welfare state — which are conspiring to undermine the ability of the free market to create wealth.

Therein lies Schwab’s fundamental error — the economic system he’s attempting to pen an obituary for isn’t capitalism, its pseudo-socialism.

Rather than permitting the invisible hand of the marketplace to optimally apportion resources — thereby creating a naturally-ascending cycle of innovation, expansion, creative destruction and reinvention — sovereign leaders have chosen to put the doctrine of Keynesian intervention on steroids.

Rather than permitting the free flow of ideas, goods and services within the economy, these leaders create new taxes, new mandates and new activist bureaucracies — all while manipulating currencies and making speculative investments with public money.

On a more fundamental level these leaders have completely shredded the notion of equal opportunity — one of the basic building blocks of the capitalist system — and replaced it with a presumption of entitlement.

The promise of a “fair shake” has been replaced by the expectation of receiving one’s “fair share,” which of course is predicated on government’s desire to redistribute wealth evenly among the masses while simultaneously preserving a well-connected government-financial oligarchy.

So on the one hand we have corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and labor leaders manipulating the welfare state’s purse strings in an effort to expand the reach of the dependence economy.

On the other we have select corporations and global financial institutions eliminating their own risk through a variety of taxpayer-funded guarantees and bailout mechanisms — pocketing the winnings from good investments while passing the debt from bad investments onto the shoulders of already-overburdened taxpayers.

Again, that’s not capitalism, but pseudo-socialism — a system the world has already conclusively discredited.

If Schwab’s organization truly intends to foster entrepreneurship around the globe, then it must first correctly identify the forces that are working against it. Beyond that it must advance policies that seek to reinvigorate the free market as opposed to repressing it further.

Howard Rich is chairman of Americans for Limited Government. He is also a syndicated columnist for Liberty Features. This column, which is reprinted with permission, was originally published in Investor’s Business Daily.

Legendary actor/ director (and professed “Republican”) Clint Eastwood appeared in a two-minute advertisement during halftime of Super Bowl XLVI declaring that it was “halftime in America, too” and that our nation need only look to Detroit as a road map for restoring its fortunes.

Really?

“It’s halftime in America too,” Eastwood declared in the spot, which was paid for by Chrysler. “People are out of work and they’re hurting. And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback.”

That much we agree with …  in fact we also accept the ad’s premise that “fog, division, discord and blame make it hard to see what lies ahead.”

But the rest of Eastwood’s analysis (if you can call the pablum he spouted “analysis”) left us scratching our heads.

“This country can’t be knocked out with one punch,” the 81-year-old Hollywood legend said. “We get right back up again, and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Ya, it’s halftime in America, and our second half is about to begin.”

That’s all well and good … inspiring, even … but it doesn’t change the facts.

In 2008, Chrysler received $12.5 billion in taxpayer-funded bailout money – a move supported by both former president George W. Bush and current president Barack Obama. The government also dictated Chrysler’s bankruptcy proceedings to give the unions a majority stake in the new company.

Is this really something we’re supposed to be celebrating? Because the last time we checked that’s not America at work, that’s the government usurping control of the free market at the expense of the taxpayers.

And we don’t give a damn if an American (and ostensibly a “Republican”) icon is trying to tell us differently. Nor do we care that Chrysler has paid its bailout money back.

That’s not the point …

What is the point? The thousands of American small businesses which didn’t meet government’s “Too Big to Fail” threshold. Are these companies “roaring back?” Of course not … they’ve either been scrapped or they’re still stuck in neutral, and their future remains bleak given the exorbitant taxes that must be paid in order to subsidize the still-escalating costs of government’s interventionism.

Those companies can’t afford to hire lobbyists … or pay $3.5 million per thirty seconds for a Super Bowl ad.

Watching Clint Eastwood shill for a company like Chrysler is another depressing reminding of the new order of things in America, where welfare statists and crony capitalists keep saddling the rest of us with new debt that we have little hope of ever repaying.

And with all due respect to Dirty Harry, it isn’t “halftime” for America … it’s more like the two-minute warning.

***

The American economy posted solid employment gains in January, although worries persist about the extent and the sustainability of the nation’s belated “recovery,”cloud the long-term employment picture.

Nonetheless, the U.S. economy created 243,000 jobs last month according to statistics released on Friday by the U.S. Department of Labor. That was good enough to drop the nation’s jobless rate from 8.5 to 8.3 percent. Meanwhile the underemployment rate – a broader, more accurate measure of joblessness – edged down from 15.2 to 15.1 percent.

In South Carolina, the unemployment rate currently stands at 9.5 percent, while the underemployment rate is 18.4 percent.

While those declines are good news for U.S. President Barack Obama – who has earned poor marks for his handling of the economy through the first three years of his administration – storm clouds remain on the horizon. In fact earlier this week the Congressional Budget Office projected that unemployment would climb back up to 8.9 percent by the end of 2012 and up to 9.3 percent by the end of 2013.

Also, within the existing declines are some troubling undercurrents.

For example of the 12.8 million Americans who are currently unemployed – 43 percent of them have been that way for more than six months. Back in June 2009 that figure was below 30 percent. Moreover, the number of working age Americans who are not part of the labor force shot up by 1.2 million in January – evidence that lots of people are simply giving up their search for gainful employment.

More importantly for Obama’s political future, January marked the 35th consecutive month in which the unemployment rate has remained above 8 percent – which is a mark that Obama’s economic advisers said the rate wouldn’t exceed after the passage of the so-called “stimulus” three years ago.

Don’t get us wrong, positive numbers are, well … positive. Our only concern is that the fundamentals for sustained employment growth are simply not there.

FEBRUARY 2011 EMPLOYMENT REPORT

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“Can we all get along?”

Apparently not … not anymore. Not in America.

Once an industrious land of innovation and self-determination, the United States has deteriorated rapidly into a nation of lazy, entitled leeches. And yes … we’re referring every bit as much to the thuggish union boss in Detroit and the bailed out Wall Street executive in New York as we are to the welfare queen on the streets of South Central Los Angeles, which is where Rodney King offered his famous plea in May of 1992.

“Please, we can get along here …”

No, Rodney … we can’t. At least not with government attempting to enforce a “new collectivism” on all of us.

In the span of a few decades, America has forsaken the free market principles on which it was founded and embraced Keynesian interventionism on an unprecedented scale. And yes, we’re including the “compassionate conservatism” of former president George W. Bush in that indictment every bit as much as the “hope and change” of current U.S. President Barack Obama.

And let’s not forget the crony capitalism and socialized medicine machinations of the 2012 candidate known as #Obamneyich.

America has gone “round the bend,” as it were. Totally nuts. Insane in the membrane. Bat shit crazy. And while the ever-escalating costs of government continues to produce diminishing returns, both major political parties refuse to acknowledge this fundamental dynamic – that a command economic system which seeks to impose fairness and equality for all people is quickly destroying our nation.

Seriously … after $5 trillion of deficit spending, half of America is now classified as either poor or low-income. And yet in spite of this glaring governmental failure, all that Republicans and Democrats in Washington, D.C. can commit to trimming is $2.1 trillion over the next decade? Even that amount (set against the backdrop of another $7 trillion in deficit spending, incidentally) is already looking unlikely as bipartisan warmongers are pushing to hold U.S. Department of Defense spending harmless from these “cuts.”

In fact Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, wants to add $2 trillion to the military budget over the next decade so that our country can continue to police the world.

Speaking of Romney, it’s actually one of his quotes – or rather the furor that ensued in response to one of his quotes – that prompted us to write this article in the first place.

Far be it from us to defend an ideological fraud like Romney, but let’s be honest – the heat that the former Massachusetts governor is getting over his “I don’t care about the very poor” comment is ridiculous.

For starters, here’s the context of Romney’s quote, which was offered during an interview with CNN earlier this week …

I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine.

Make no mistake Romney has gift-wrapped a potent sound bite for Democrats, who have determined to make class warfare their political modus operandi. Compounding Romney’s problem? The fact that he is very rich – and pays a much lower tax rate than the majority of American taxpayers.

But as we’ve noted previously, that doesn’t mean Romney’s capital gains taxes should be raised (a concept former president Bill Clinton understood) it means that income taxes for the rest of us should be cut – and cut dramatically.

Indeed, the key to victory over those who would seek to divide Americans based on their income levels is simple – let all Americans keep more of what they earn. Rising tides lift all boats, right? And besides, excessively high tax actually choke off revenue for government, something that America’s bureaucrats would be learning the hard way right now had our politicians not committed to borrowing us into oblivion.

In his CNN interview, Romney was clearly attempting to engage Obama in the battle for independent, middle class American votes. And while that’s a political demographic worth targeting, he got himself in trouble by accepting Obama’s class warfare narrative.

Here’s the thing: We do need to be concerned about the very poor … but we also need to be concerned about the very rich, and every individual income earner in between. We need to let every income earner keep more of their money and we need to remove barriers to advancement for all of them.

Why? Because America is not a zero sum game of finite opportunity (despite our leaders’ best efforts to turn it into such a place), it is a nation in which everyone’s prosperity could materially advance if we simply returned to our free market roots and got government out of every nook and cranny of our economy. Unfortunately, politicians of both parties are too busy making promises or pandering to the “fair share” crowd to realize that government’s size and scope – and the growing burden it’s placing on American taxpayers – is the real enemy of every class.

Can we all get along?

No … at least not until we figure out that.

***

After shedding more than 1.4 million workers between 2008 and 2010, union membership held steady in 2011 – although the percentage of the American workforce that’s unionized edged down again.

A total of 14.7 million workers – or 11.8 percent of the nation’s workforce – were unionized last year, according to statistics released this week by the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s roughly the same number as 2010 – when unionized workers represented 11.9 percent of the workforce.

As usual, government continues to keep the unions in business – with 37 percent of the taxpayer-funded workforce currently represented by a union compared to just 6.9 percent of the private sector. Back in the 1940s, 33.9 percent of the private sector workforce was unionized compared to just 9.8 percent of the public sector.

How times have changed, right?

The administration of Barack Obama – which benefited from millions of dollars in campaign contributions from organized labor – has done everything within its power to slow the decline of unions in America, including billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailout money. Meanwhile Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have also acted as a glorified government good squad – forcing companies like Boeing to keep new jobs in union states.

In recent decades, the American free market has categorically rejected unionism – while government has sought to prop it up with increasingly large amounts of our money (an approach Obama has put on steroids).

That’s too bad.

Unions by and large have proven to be nothing but corrupt cancers – more interested in preserving political power and perks for their leaders than protecting the best interest of the American worker. And yet there’s an army of politicians – led by Obama – willing to accommodate them as long as their pockets stay greased with campaign contributions.

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Okay … that headline is an admittedly false pretense, but let’s be real. Isn’t our job as unaccountable bloggers to provide juvenile oversimplifications of current events in order to assist global spread of attention deficit disorder?

Exactly … and we take our “tip of the spear’ role in the vanguard of current thought very seriously.

Anyway, in true Pilate-like fashion this is how we have chosen to delineate the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to revoke its partnership with Planned Parenthood – a decision that was reached in response to a federal investigation into the latter organization’s alleged misuse of public funds.

Or depending on your view of the situation, a decision that was reached thanks to the elevation of a pro-life leader to a key administrative post within the foundation. Whatever … we don’t really care, although we’re sure former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum can educate us on the intricacies of federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Our view on these matters is less “obtuse …”

“Regarding the Susan G. Komen controversy, let the record reflect that (FITSNews) is 100 percent supportive of boobies,” our founding editor tweeted on Wednesday.

That’s right, people. Breasts are categorically awesome, and as a token of his unyielding devotion to this mammalogical ideology our founding editor will continue to make himself available to any women in need of assistance with self-exams (or any woman who has yet to find a “Breast Buddy”).

Talk about sacrifice …

But what of the merits of this controversy?

We are proudly pro-life here at FITS , a position that we have adopted based on the immutable (and routinely-regurgitated) mantra that “the first right is the right to life.” Having said that, we don’t necessarily wear that position on our sleeves – and we understand that there are certain situations in which abortion is necessary.

At the end of the day, though, it’s Susan G. Komen’s foundation – and she can make whatever decisions she wants with its resources. If you like the decision, support her efforts – if you don’t, support Planned Parenthood. All we know is that tax dollars should stay out of this debate … a position that this website has consistently maintained.

You know … along with our love of boobies.

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