Conservative Thought

Please ponder this, if you were fortunate enough to realize the dream. You now have enough money to retire and let someone else handle your money and estate. Who would you pick to manage those affairs?

Would you blindly pick someone who has had very little experience? Even if that person could say all the right things to your face? No, not likely. You'd carefully select someone who themselves has demonstrated they can be trusted to protect your interests and wealth.

Would you pick someone associated with thugs, crooks and swindlers? Probably not. Even if they were only thugs from the neighborhood or work, you certainly beg questioning good judgment, plus you could losing your money and resources on their interests - which may not coincide with yours.

I could go on, but I believe you get the point. There is so much factual, provable evidence in similar regard related to Mr. Obama that I have to ask... why are you wanting to put him in charge?

He has no substantive experience to lead this great nation (in a time of crisis we need someone who has been there and already knows what to do);
His ideology has failed when it has been applied; He is associated with crooks and terrorists (this doesn't mean he is one, but it does means he lacks good judgment - you know, I really would like someone to lead our nation who possesses good judgment... call me picky.)
Even though he is a smooth talker, his story on key issues (most relating to values, taxes and foreign policy) has changed so many times, it certainly looks as though he has never really thought through these issues - or even may be changing the stance based on who he's talking to (like everyone is stupid.)

Are we doomed if he gets in office? No. But, the damage done can be huge - especially when you realize that the foreign policies of capitulation he espouses yielded 911 (let me know if you need timelines) and the Supreme Court Justices he will pick will have a pro-abortion stance. Let me ask... when did you become you? Were you you as a teen? Yep. Were you you as a toddler? Yep. Were you you when first born? Yep. Were you you moments before when you were in the womb? How about 3 or 6 months prior to popping out of the womb? You know, it was you all along. You were the person from conception and had you been aborted, you would not be here today.

Anyway, enough pause for pondering on my ramblings. Check out the associations of Obama below.

Thanks.

Lee

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Something New Here
Radical? Check. Tied to ACORN? Check. Redistributionist? Check.

By Stanley Kurtz

During his first campaign for the Illinois
state senate in 1995-96, Barack Obama was a member of, and was endorsed
by, the far-left New Party. Obama’s New Party ties give the lie to his
claim to be a post-partisan, post-ideological pragmatist. Particularly
in Chicago, the New Party functioned as the electoral arm of the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). So
despite repeated attempts to distance himself from ACORN, Obama’s New
Party ties raise disturbing questions about his links to those proudly
militant leftists. The media’s near-total silence on this critical
element of Obama’s past is deeply irresponsible

Socialist? Something New Here by Stanley Kurtz on National Review Online

by Robert George

Oct 14, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama's views on life issues
ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not
merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme
pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion
candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He
is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate.
Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in
either house of the United States Congress.

Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life
Catholics and Evangelicals - who aggressively promote Obama's candidacy
and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of
view.

What is going on here?

I have examined the arguments advanced by Obama's
self-identified pro-life supporters, and they are spectacularly weak.
It is nearly unfathomable to me that those advancing them can honestly
believe what they are saying. But before proving my claims about
Obama's abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama
as ''pro-abortion'' rather than ''pro-choice.''

According to the standard argument for the distinction between these labels, nobody is
pro-abortion. Everybody would prefer a world without abortions. After
all, what woman would deliberately get pregnant just to have an
abortion? But given the world as it is, sometimes women find themselves
with unplanned pregnancies at times in their lives when having a baby
would present significant problems for them. So even if abortion is not
medically required, it should be permitted, made as widely available as
possible and, when necessary, paid for with taxpayers' money.

The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus
if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of
Americans: slavery. Many people at the time of the American founding
would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed
abolition. Such people - Thomas Jefferson was one - reasoned that,
given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of
society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic
consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of
plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be
dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest
and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson)
showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves
themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They
certainly didn't think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still,
they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option
and be given constitutional protection.

Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as
''pro-choice''? Of course we would not. It wouldn't matter to us that
they were ''personally opposed'' to slavery, or that they wished that
slavery were ''unnecessary,'' or that they wouldn't dream of forcing
anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a
placard that said ''Against slavery? Don't own one.'' We would observe
that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and
public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning
slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let us assume that
there could be a morally meaningful distinction between being
''pro-abortion'' and being ''pro-choice.'' Who would qualify for the
latter description? Barack Obama certainly would not. For, unlike his
running mate Joe Biden, Obama does not think that abortion is a purely
private choice that public authority should refrain from getting
involved in. Now, Senator Biden is hardly pro-life. He believes that
the killing of the unborn should be legally permitted and relatively
unencumbered. But unlike Obama, at least Biden has sometimes opposed
using taxpayer dollars to fund abortion, thereby leaving Americans free
to choose not to implicate themselves in it. If we stretch things to
create a meaningful category called ''pro-choice,'' then Biden might be
a plausible candidate for the label; at least on occasions when he
respects your choice or mine not to facilitate deliberate feticide.

The same cannot be said for Barack Obama. For starters, he
supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which
protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are
not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of
rape or incest. The abortion industry laments that this longstanding
federal law, according to the pro-abortion group NARAL, ''forces about
half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended
pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead.''
In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have
been exterminated in utero
were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the
situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not
happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them)
would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama
even more than they do his running mate.

But this barely scratches the surface of Obama's extremism. He
has promised that ''the first thing I'd do as President is sign the
Freedom of Choice Act'' (known as FOCA). This proposed legislation
would create a federally guaranteed ''fundamental right'' to abortion
through all nine months of pregnancy, including, as Cardinal Justin
Rigali of Philadelphia has noted in a statement condemning the proposed
Act, ''a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for
undefined 'health' reasons.'' In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually
every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including
parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal
funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for
pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections
against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else
lose their jobs. The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has
proclaimed with approval that FOCA would ''sweep away hundreds of
anti-abortion laws [and] policies.''

It gets worse. Obama, unlike even many ''pro-choice''
legislators, opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions when he served
in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision
that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice. He has referred
to a baby conceived inadvertently by a young woman as a ''punishment''
that she should not endure. He has stated that women's equality
requires access to abortion on demand. Appallingly, he wishes to strip
federal funding from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that provide
alternatives to abortion for pregnant women in need. There is certainly
nothing ''pro-choice'' about that.

But it gets even worse. Senator Obama, despite the urging of
pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support
for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for
Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women
facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key
provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children
in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed
consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age
of their child. This legislation would not make a single abortion
illegal. It simply seeks to make it easier for pregnant women to make
the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test of
whether Obama is ''pro-choice'' rather than pro-abortion. He flunked.
Even Senator Edward Kennedy voted to include coverage of unborn
children in S-CHIP. But Barack Obama stood resolutely with the most
stalwart abortion advocates in opposing it.

It gets worse yet. In an act of breathtaking injustice which
the Obama campaign lied about until critics produced documentary proof
of what he had done, as an Illinois state senator Obama 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. This legislation would not have banned any abortions.
Indeed, it included a specific provision ensuring that it did not
affect abortion laws. (This is one of the points Obama and his campaign
lied about until they were caught.) The federal version of the bill
passed unanimously in the United States Senate, winning the support of
such ardent advocates of legal abortion as John Kerry and Barbara
Boxer. But Barack Obama opposed it and worked to defeat it. For him, a
child marked for abortion gets no protection-even ordinary medical or
comfort care-even if she is born alive and entirely separated from her
mother. So Obama has favored protecting what is literally a form of
infanticide.

You may be thinking, it can't get worse than that. But it does.

For several years, Americans have been debating the use for biomedical research of embryos produced by in vitro
fertilization (originally for reproductive purposes) but now left in a
frozen condition in cryopreservation units. President Bush has
restricted the use of federal funds for stem-cell research of the type
that makes use of these embryos and destroys them in the process. I
support the President's restriction, but some legislators with
excellent pro-life records, including John McCain, argue that the use
of federal money should be permitted where the embryos are going to be
discarded or die anyway as the result of the parents' decision. Senator
Obama, too, wants to lift the restriction.

But Obama would not stop there. He has co-sponsored a
bill-strongly opposed by McCain-that would authorize the large-scale
industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research
in which they would be killed. In fact, the bill Obama co-sponsored
would effectively require the
killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by
cloning. It would make it a federal crime for a woman to save an embryo
by agreeing to have the tiny developing human being implanted in her
womb so that he or she could be brought to term. This ''clone and
kill'' bill would, if enacted, bring something to America that has
heretofore existed only in China-the equivalent of legally mandated
abortion. In an audacious act of deceit, Obama and his co-sponsors
misleadingly call this an anti-cloning bill. But it is
nothing of the kind. What it bans is not cloning, but allowing the
embryonic children produced by cloning to survive.

Can it get still worse? Yes.

Decent people of every persuasion hold out the increasingly
realistic hope of resolving the moral issue surrounding embryonic
stem-cell research by developing methods to produce the exact
equivalent of embryonic stem cells without using (or producing)
embryos. But when a bill was introduced in the United States Senate to
put a modest amount of federal money into research to develop these
methods, Barack Obama was one of the few senators who opposed it. From
any rational vantage point, this is unconscionable. Why would someone
not wish to find a method of producing the pluripotent cells scientists
want that all Americans could enthusiastically endorse? Why create and
kill human embryos when there are alternatives that do not require the
taking of nascent human lives? It is as if Obama is opposed to
stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos.

This ultimate manifestation of Obama's extremism brings us back to the
puzzle of his pro-life Catholic and Evangelical apologists.

They typically do not deny the facts I have reported. They could not;
each one is a matter of public record. But despite Obama's injustices
against the most vulnerable human beings, and despite the extraordinary
support he receives from the industry that profits from killing the
unborn (which should be a good indicator of where he stands), some
Obama supporters insist that he is the better candidate from the
pro-life point of view.

They say that his economic and social policies would so
diminish the demand for abortion that the overall number would actually
go down-despite the federal subsidizing of abortion and the elimination
of hundreds of pro-life laws. The way to save lots of unborn babies,
they say, is to vote for the pro-abortion-oops!
''pro-choice''-candidate. They tell us not to worry that Obama opposes
the Hyde Amendment, the Mexico City Policy (against funding abortion
abroad), parental consent and notification laws, conscience
protections, and the funding of alternatives to embryo-destructive
research. They ask us to look past his support for Roe v. Wade, the
Freedom of Choice Act, partial-birth abortion, and human cloning and
embryo-killing. An Obama presidency, they insist, means less killing of
the unborn.

This is delusional.

We know that the federal and state pro-life laws and policies
that Obama has promised to sweep away (and that John McCain would
protect) save thousands of lives every year. Studies conducted by
Professor Michael New and other social scientists have removed any
doubt. Often enough, the abortion lobby itself confirms the truth of
what these scholars have determined. Tom McClusky has observed that
Planned Parenthood's own statistics show that in each of the seven
states that have FOCA-type legislation on the books, ''abortion rates
have increased while the national rate has decreased.'' In Maryland,
where a bill similar to the one favored by Obama was enacted in 1991,
he notes that ''abortion rates have increased by 8 percent while the overall national abortion rate decreased by
9 percent.'' No one is really surprised. After all, the message clearly
conveyed by policies such as those Obama favors is that abortion is a
legitimate solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies - so clearly
legitimate that taxpayers should be forced to pay for it.

But for a moment let's suppose, against all the evidence, that Obama's proposals would reduce
the number of abortions, even while subsidizing the killing with
taxpayer dollars. Even so, many more unborn human beings would likely
be killed under Obama than under McCain. A Congress controlled by
strong Democratic majorities under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would
enact the bill authorizing the mass industrial production of human
embryos by cloning for research in which they are killed. As president,
Obama would sign it. The number of tiny humans created and killed under
this legislation (assuming that an efficient human cloning technique is
soon perfected) could dwarf the number of lives saved as a result of
the reduced demand for abortion-even if we take a delusionally
optimistic view of what that number would be.

Barack Obama and John McCain differ on many important issues
about which reasonable people of goodwill, including pro-life Americans
of every faith, disagree: how best to fight international terrorism,
how to restore economic growth and prosperity, how to distribute the
tax burden and reduce poverty, etc.

But on abortion and the industrial creation of embryos for
destructive research, there is a profound difference of moral
principle, not just prudence. These questions reveal the character and
judgment of each man. Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief
that members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that
others must respect. Across the spectrum of pro-life concerns for the
unborn, he would deny these small and vulnerable members of the human
family the basic protection of the laws. Over the next four to eight
years, as many as five or even six U.S. Supreme Court justices could
retire. Obama enthusiastically supports Roe v. Wade and would appoint judges who would protect that
morally and constitutionally disastrous decision and even expand its
scope. Indeed, in an interview in Glamour magazine, he made it clear that he would apply a litmus test for Supreme Court nominations: jurists who do not support Roe will not be considered for appointment by Obama. John McCain, by contrast, opposes Roe and
would appoint judges likely to overturn it. This would not make
abortion illegal, but it would return the issue to the forums of
democratic deliberation, where pro-life Americans could engage in a
fair debate to persuade fellow citizens that killing the unborn is no
way to address the problems of pregnant women in need.

What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be? Barack Obama's America is one in which being human just isn't enough
to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may
legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly
practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who
survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a
stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which
some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others
superior in fundamental dignity and rights. In Obama's America, public
policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of
the equal protection of the law. In perhaps the most telling comment
made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator
Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights,
replied: ''that question is above my pay grade.'' It was a profoundly
disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator's pay grade, Obama
presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken
answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until
infancy - and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions,
not even then.

In the end, the efforts of Obama's apologists to depict their
man as the true pro-life candidate that Catholics and Evangelicals may
and even should vote for, doesn't even amount to a nice try. Voting for
the most extreme pro-abortion political candidate in American history
is not the way to save unborn babies.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and
Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and
Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President's
Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States
Commission on Civil Rights. He sits on the editorial board of
Public Discourse.

Copyright 2008 The Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The Witherspoon Institute

Conservative Thought

Friday, October 24, 2008

Contribution Fraud in the Obama Camp

Thursday, October 23, 2008

More on Ability to Submit Illegal Contributions

How Illegal Donations to Obama Can Occur

Monday, October 20, 2008

Definitely something to ponder ... for those who care to take the time.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Hawaii ending universal child health care

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Obama's Abortion Extremism

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Obama's 95% Illusion: It depends on what the meaning of 'tax cut' is.

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