The Administration

Would America have social security without Roosevelt? How would the world have been different if Roosevelt had not supported the allies before America’s entrance into World War II?

If Eisenhower had not begun the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, would the American landscape have been very different?

What if Kennedy had not called Nikita Khrushchev’s bluff over the Cuban missile crisis? Could America have tolerated Russian missiles 90 miles offshore?

The president’s ObamaCare compromise is that Catholic charities don't have to offer contraceptives to their employees through their mandatory healthcare insurance policies. Instead, their insurance companies must provide employees the contraceptives for free. This is not a compromise, but a sleight of hand.
 
Who does the administration think is going to pay for these contraceptives? If they think the insurance company, out of the goodness of its heart, will pay out of profits, they are gravely mistaken. Instead, when the insurance company quotes a Catholic charity a health insurance policy that excludes free contraceptives, they will knowingly price it at the same rate as that of an institution that must provide contraceptives to its employees. If they are prohibited from charging the Catholic charities the same rate as other institutions and must charge a lower rate, then the insurance companies will pass the costs on to all the non-Catholic-charity policyholders. That means the rest of America must subsidize contraceptives for the workers of Catholic charities.

There should be and will be a compromise between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church about health regulations and contraceptives. But I disagree with my colleague A.B. Stoddard, most pundits and almost the entire commentariat class about how horrible this is for the Obama campaign.

One of the major political realities of 2012 is the overwhelming support of women for Obama and Democrats and the overwhelming opposition of women to Republicans. I had to laugh at a recent diatribe against Obama by my colleague Dick Morris that mentioned that Gingrich has a problem with the gender gap. Republicans who cheered Dick for that column will not give such an ovation to the part of his column that Dick left out. All Republicans suffer from a gender gap! In fact it is a gender canyon, a gender chasm and a gender solar system in favor of Obama and Democrats and against Republicans and conservatives.

The political tin ear President Obama displayed in siding with the women in his administration on new healthcare regulations requiring contraception coverage for employees of church-affiliated institutions is remarkable. And though it is early in the campaign and Obama will eat crow and retreat on the issue, he won't be able to cool the heat the controversy sparked — Obama will hear about this mistake from now until Election Day. Catholics and Republicans will see to it.

“What have I become?” — Nine Inch Nails

In hindsight it might be seen that the most treacherous moment, well described in David and Julie Eisenhower’s Going Home to Glory, was when Eisenhower tentatively handed over the keys to John F. Kennedy. Fifty years later the Kennedy legacy continues to descend. But what I found most revealing in Mimi Alford’s memoir of our most auspicious beginning at war’s end was in The Washington Post’s Reliable Source column. The part about the partying at Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, where JFK urged her to try amyl nitrate (“I was his guinea pig”). It brought to mind the food testers in barbarian regimes hundreds, thousands of years back.

Isn't it convenient how this administration continues to manipulate our separation of church and state? In fact what they're doing is trampling on the First Amendment without any conscience. Our government was never designed to control the church, and the church should never have control over the government.

This administration is constantly testing the waters to see how much it can erode the rights of the people. There is no justification for forcing people to disregard their deeply held religious convictions in a "free" country. This, coupled with the president's pronouncement a couple of years ago that we were not a Judeo-Christian nation, and his tolerance of restrictions on Catholic priests who serve the military, calls into question his allegiance to our Constitution.

With unbelievable hubris, the ObamaCare bureaucrats in Washington exclude the Church’s non-liturgical mission from the religious exemption of Obamacare. (Not the elected Congress, but self-righteous bureaucrats made this decision!)

These bureaucrats claim the Church serves non-Catholics in its non-liturgical mission, and therefore this is not its core religious mission. Imagine, the bureaucrats understand the Church’s mission better than the clergy! Even many liberal Catholics understand that the mission of the Catholic Church extends beyond the sanctuary.

In 2012 we have yet another election year that is primarily a reaction against the establishment, and the country has swung back and forth yet again, unhappy with both parties. But why?
 
The problem with George W. Bush was not that he was conservative, but that he was not conservative enough — he hurt the credibility of the GOP by bloating the government further, and not just the military and the Department of Homeland Security, but, in his "compassionate" conservatism, blowing money on domestic spending as well.

Friday’s impressive jobs report is a positive shot in the arm for what the economy needs about now. Politically speaking, adding 243,000 new jobs — the most since last April — is good news indeed for the president’s approval ratings.

What caused many economists to breathe a sigh of relief is that many in the private sector appear to be hiring again, including specialty trades such as manufacturing. While this is no time to be popping champagne and celebrating the demise of the Great Recession, last month’s jobs report gives us many indications of the economy moving forward.

Read this morning with interest an interview with Harvard’s Steven Pinker in “Global Briefs” titled “On the State and Future of Violence,” in which questions were asked like “How violent is the today’s world?” Not much, the answer. For which we are all grateful. And as much as I have appreciated Pinker’s outlook for what it does, his interview brought to mind Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay with the fairly astonishing title: “The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992. Which, if I recall correctly, was extended by Charles Krauthammer to an essay titled “The End of Time.”