Obama’s Torture Policy for the Unborn

via: americanspectator

If achieving world peace required torturing a single baby, asks a character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, would it be worth it?

“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature — that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance — and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

The liberalism that Barack Obama seeks to complete answers Dostoyevsky’s question with an emphatic yes. What is Obama’s abortion-on-demand-forever policy but the building of a modern American way of life upon the graves of tortured babies? And not just the unavenged tears of one baby but millions of them.

This week, however, Obama did avenge the tears of terrorists. World peace, he said, isn’t worth theirs. He lectured the CIA that “What makes the United States special and what makes you special is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and ideals even when it’s hard.”

Obama’s prim pontifications about America’s “values and ideals” inspired Chris Matthews and Jack Cafferty, among other deep and careful thinkers, to mull over the question: If torturing terrorists works — as the Obama administration had to admit grudgingly this week — is it okay? No, of course not, the chattering class proudly concluded.

One wonders why. What do they care? Having already accepted abortion and euthanasia — which are nothing more than the expedient killing of the unborn and the elderly — why should the expedient torture of terrorists, a lesser evil, trouble them? Oh, that’s right: the terrorists are guilty and the guilty under the ministrations of modern liberalism never suffer. Pain in modern life is for the innocent.

Terrorists, we’re told by pro-abortion liberals, suffer excruciating pain while the ejected unborn and euthanized elderly feel nothing. And even if the latter do suffer pain, say these liberals, that pain is worth it. After all, abortion and euthanasia sustain a pleasant and peaceful lifestyle for the strong. Let the dead bury the dead. Or, as the Supreme Court has said, imagine the disruption to America’s way of life if stare decisis in the case of Roe v. Wade disappeared and women couldn’t plan their careers and futures without the expectation of legal abortion for years to come.

Obama’s liberalism is not an opponent of human rights abuses but an embodiment of them. The CIA restricts itself to methods far less ruthless than those permitted by the platform of the Democratic Party. When will Obama bring his own platform into line with the Geneva Accords?

It is a little late in the day for Obama to worry about America’s moral reputation.  Resisting evil even “when it is hard” hasn’t interested liberalism for at least four decades. It rests on an ideology of expedient evil and crass utilitarianism.

With St. Paul, Western civilization, before modern liberalism ransacked it, said: “One may not do evil so that good may result from it.” But then modern liberalism came along and reversed the formulation and now insists in the case of everything from therapeutic cloning to killing unborn children to dehydrating the elderly that one should do evil so that good may come from it.

Obama only now rediscovers the Christian ethic for terrorists, even as he weaves the “fabric of human destiny” with the tissue of tortured children.

New health czar violates Obama’s ethics reforms

Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, who President Obama appointed as director of the White House Office of Health Care Reform on Monday, took home at least $2.4 million in 2006 and 2007 from serving on the corporate boards of health-care companies whose businesses she would be in a position to affect in her new position.

Since leaving the Clinton administration in 2001, DeParle has made a fortune by serving on 10 boards in the health-care industry in addition to her lucrative career as a managing director at private equity firm CCMP Capital and a senior adviser at JP Morgan Partners. Her journey from the public sector to the private sector and back again would seem to represent the type of revolving door relationship between Washington and corporate America that President Obama pledged to put an end to during the campaign and in an executive order.

Tom Daschle, who was originally supposed to hold the same “health czar” position in addition to serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services, came under fire after it was revealed that he received $220,000 for giving speeches to health groups over two years. But DeParle’s ties to the health-care industry run much deeper. Continue reading . . .

The Limbaugh-Hannity Administration

Rush Limbaugh has taken a week’s vacation.

Twenty million Americans are twitching.

Nervous as well is the rest of the population that comprises almost half the country if not an actual majority. The liberal rest-of-the-crowd is sighing with relief, although considerably tensed at the realization President Limbaugh…sorry, Mr. Limbaugh…will in fact return.

Let not your heart be troubled. With America’s real opposition leader recharging, a transfer of power has gone into effect and Vice President Hannity…ahhh, sorry, that would be Mr. Hannity…has the radio (and TV) reins. America will still be learning the truth.

Somewhere, his golden voice silenced on the evening news at a ridiculously young age of 65, a now 93-year-old Walter Cronkite is surely fuming. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

This all began when President Obama, barely ensconced in the Oval Office, snapped to Republicans on Capitol Hill that “you can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” Really? The example of the legendary CBS television anchor Walter Cronkite says otherwise. Cronkite’s example is an intriguing piece of history that should in fact cause a shiver to run through the Obama White House.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson was under increasing attack from the American left for the war in Vietnam. Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy had taken up an unlikely challenge to the once hugely popular LBJ within the Democrat’s own party. McCarthy, presumed to be an easy loser, had set his sights on upending LBJ in the March 12 New Hampshire primary. On January 31, the North Vietnamese launched what became known as the Tet Offensive, named for the day of the most important Vietnamese holiday, a holiday celebrating the first day of the year on a traditional lunar calendar. The world was stunned to learn over 100 population centers, a majority of the provincial capitals plus the capital of Saigon itself were suddenly under massive assault by the Communists. All of it duly transmitted by television pictures on the evening news, beginning with Walter Cronkite’s broadcast. Even so, the American and South Vietnamese troops responded ferociously, and historians agree that the Tet Offensive was in fact a huge military disaster for the bad guys. But of course that was not conveyed on the television news.

Enter Walter Cronkite. A liberal’s liberal, Cronkite had become the dominating force of television news by 1968. With only three television networks, the avuncular “Uncle Walter” as he was affectionately known to millions, had become one of the most powerful men in America. Television was still a relatively new thing in the late 1960s, the presence of a ubiquitous “anchorman” relaying the news of the day as the nation communed together a bit of a novelty barely a decade old. Cronkite ended his nightly broadcasts by telling Americans reassuringly “and that’s the way it is,” filling in the day’s date as the final tag.

Alas, it wasn’t always the “way it is.” Slowly — very slowly — an increasing number of Americans were beginning to realize that behind the image as “the most trusted man in America” Walter Cronkite was not at all what he seemed. America’s beloved “Uncle Walter,” in reality liberal as all get out, saw the world through his liberal politics and did not hesitate to present the appropriate images and words that confirmed this to anyone who watched him. For Lyndon Johnson, the liberal president who trounced Barry Goldwater a mere four years earlier, this unexpectedly presented a very real problem.

The liberal movement was in the process of splintering, separating big government, national security hawks like FDR-Harry Truman-style Democrats LBJ and his vice president Hubert Humphrey from an emerging far-left culture. This was the moment that baby boomers began to come of age, and the left-most side of this generation was hell-bent on convincing America to get out of Vietnam. In fact, to get out of any military confrontation anywhere, as later opposition to U.S. military actions or support in places as different as Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq and Afghanistan would illustrate vividly. Cronkite, like many liberals in the media, was personally headed down this philosophical path of defeatism if not outright pacifism. Indeed, in his retirement years his far-left views have become even more pronounced as Cronkite became an outspoken advocate of world government, went on camera in a left-wing documentary attacking Fox News over its alleged lack of journalistic ethics (!!!), and demanded the U.S. get out of Iraq, comparing it to Vietnam.

After returning from a trip to the war zones of South Vietnam as Tet wound down, Cronkite made a remarkable decision. It was no longer his job to simply relay the news of the day, even if presented in the subtle language of liberalism. No, Cronkite decided he would quite openly make it his business to take on LBJ, to effectively use his base as a television anchorman to challenge the sitting President of the United States. He was now firmly opposed to the Vietnam War and he was no longer going to pretend to neutrality. He would use his influence to stop LBJ and the war. The story now would be Uncle Walter versus the President.

On February 27, 1968 Walter Cronkite looked his vast and trusting audience of millions of Americans in the eye and said this:

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.…To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.…It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could…”

In other words, Cronkite had decided in fashionable liberal style (as Harry Reid and President Obama so recently did in Iraq) that the war was lost and America should get out. And he was determined to use his powerful anchorman’s presence to make sure this was done.

The effect was almost immediate. In the White House, the President of the United States looked grimly at his television and in a remark that would become famous said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.” Five weeks later, post-Cronkite’s statement, LBJ was reeling from a stunning and humiliating narrow victory against McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary. On top of that there was now the entrance into the race of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. LBJ went on national television — and withdrew his bid for re-election. He was out, and he was changing his Vietnam policy as well in a search for peace. In his book on the media The Powers That Be, liberal journalist David Halberstam would later say, as Cronkite proudly notes in his own memoirs, “it was the first time in history that an anchorman had declared a war over.” Continue reading . . .

A Bleak Day

I love this. The new kind of politics of hope. Eight hours of debate in the HR to pass a bill spending $820 billion, or roughly $102 billion per hour of debate.

Only ten per cent of the “stimulus” to be spent on 2009.

Close to half goes to entities that sponsor or employ or both members of the Service Employees International Union, federal, state, and municipal employee unions, or other Democrat-controlled unions.

This bill is sent to Congress after Obama has been in office for seven days. It is 680 pages long. According to my calculations, not one member of Congress read the entire bill before this vote. Obviously, it would have been impossible, given his schedule, for President Obama to have read the entire bill.

For the amount spent we could have given every unemployed person in the United States roughly $75,000.

We could give every person who had lost a job and is now passing through long-term unemployment of six months or longer roughly $300,000.

There has been pork barrel politics since there has been politics. The scale of this pork is beyond what had ever been imagined before — and no one can be sure it will actually do much stimulation.

Further, no one can be sure that we are not already at the trough/inflection point of the recession such that this money will be spent mostly after the recovery is well under way.

How long until the debt incurred under this program is so immense that it causes a downgrade in the sovereign debt of the USA? What happens to us then?

This has been a punch in the solar plexus to the kind of responsible, far-seeing, mature government processes that are needed to protect America. This is more than the pork barrel. This is a coup for the constituencies of the party in power and against the idea of a responsible government itself. A bleak day.

Unfortunately, it is only the latest in a long series of such days stretching across decades of rule by both parties, to the point where truly responsible government is only a distant echo of our forgotten ancestors. Continue reading . . .

Blago and Al Qaeda: A Question of Rights

According to press reports, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has a popularity level in the polls somewhere in the neighborhood of 4%. Al Qaeda, one would hope, has an even more serious popularity problem, although in certain quarters of the American left don’t bet the ranch on it.

But the real question that needs to be asked is much more fundamental than whether someone is popular or not. The decision by President Obama to close Guantanamo Bay, followed closely by Pennsylvania Congressman Jack Murtha’s assertion that he would have no problem putting up al Qaeda terrorists in a minimum security prison in his congressional district — where they would be entitled to the same rights as your average American pickpocket — raises a very odd question.

Are we watching events unfold that actually have terrorists dedicated to the destruction of the United States — foreign citizens — getting more legal rights than an actual American citizen who happens also to be the sitting governor of his state? Is the Obama administration, headed by an Illinois lawyer who boasts of a degree from Harvard Law School — someone who until a mere five years ago also sat as a member of the Illinois State Senate — actually planning a “process” that will ensure basic constitutional rights for the likes of 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Are they really on the brink of giving Miranda warnings to a roster of others such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash, whose activities include such interesting time-fillers as “key operative” “key leader” “paymaster” and “bodyguard” in a group devoted to mass murder? The last a “bodyguard” to Osama bin Laden himself? All of this at the same time the Illinois State Senate is denying American citizen Rod Blagojevich the right to call witnesses as part of his defense? Because the federal government headed by Mr. Obama says so?

Whoa baby! Continue reading . . .

Good Morning, Suckers

Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats are playing the voters for fools with the so-called stimulus package. The massive $825 billion package is not even targeted on programs to stimulate the economy. Instead, it is laced with runaway government spending for increased welfare, overgrown bureaucracy, pork, political payoffs, and other waste. That runaway spending is causing record smashing deficits of $1.5 trillion or more, equivalent to over 50% of the entire federal budget for fiscal 2008.

For example, the “stimulus” package includes $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts to help “the arts community throughout the United States.” Wouldn’t want our economy to get behind in the international arts competition. The government is going to borrow $50 million out of the private economy to spend on this, which will result in a net loss of economic output rather than a net gain.

Another $2.1 billion is for Head Start, another program not previously known for stimulating the economy. A further $2 billion is to be spent on Child Care Development Block Grants, which provide day care. We are going to revive economic growth through the federal government spending billions on babysitting, rather than tax cuts for capital investment. A similar initiative involves $120 million to finance part-time work for seniors in community service agencies.

Then there is $500 million to speed the processing of applications for Social Security disability claims. This has already created one net new job in the employment of a person within the Obama Administration assigned to figure out what this has to do with stimulating the economy.

Another $6 billion goes to college and universities. We already spend hundreds of billions on these schools, and such education provides valuable long-term benefits. But this is not a means to spark a booming economy in the short term. The same is true of the $13 billion in Title I grants “to provide extra academic support to help raise the achievement of students at risk of educational failure or to help all students in high-poverty schools meet challenging State academic standards,” as the congressional report accompanying the bill explains. Ditto that for the $13 billion in IDEA, Part B State grants to help pay for “the excess costs of providing special education and related services to children with disabilities.”

Then there is the effort to stimulate the economy by increasing welfare spending. There is $20 billion for increased food stamps, including lifting restrictions on how long welfare dependents can receive food stamp benefits. Another $1.7 billion is to be spent to help the homeless, not previously in our history a significant source of economic growth. Another $1 billion goes for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program, to help low income families pay their heating bills, a worthy objective that has nothing to do with stimulating the economy. Still another billion goes to the Community Services Block Grant to support “employment, food, housing, health, and emergency assistance to low-income families and individuals.” Another $200 million goes for senior nutrition programs, such as Meals on Wheels. Then there is an additional $200 million for AmeriCorps, to help satisfy “increased demand for services for vulnerable populations to meet critical needs in communities across the U.S.” Another $5 billion is devoted to public housing. None of this increased welfare spending has anything to do with promoting economic growth. Rather, it retards growth by inducing more dependency on government.

Another $87 billion is to be spent on Medicaid, a welfare program already costing roughly $400 billion per year. Those funds would be spent in part on “family planning services,” meaning contraception. Reagan created a 25-year economic boom in part by cutting top marginal income tax rates. Liberal Democrats are now going to try to do it by passing out condoms.

Medicaid is one of the major entitlement programs projected to explode to overwhelming costs in the future. Obama is assuring the more conservative Blue Dog Democrats that he will address runaway entitlement costs as soon as next month. But to start let’s increase those costs by almost $100 billion right now.

Then there is the funding to maintain and expand bureaucracy and overall big government spending. The “stimulus” package includes $2.5 billion for the National Science Foundation, $2.0 billion for the National Park Service, $650 million for the U.S. Forest Service, $600 million for NASA, $800 million for AMTRAK, $276 million to the State Department to upgrade and modernize its information technology, $150 million for maintenance work at the Smithsonian Institution, $209 million for maintenance work for the Federal Agricultural Research Service, $44 million for repairs and improvements at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Department of Agriculture, and $245 million to upgrade the information technology of the Farm Service Agency. Borrowing money from the private sector to spend on these bureaucracies will not provide a boost to the economy. It will likely again produce a net loss of output.

A shocking provision provides $1.1 billion for so-called federal comparative effectiveness research in regard to health-care services. The congressional report explaining the stimulus bill says:

By knowing what works best and presenting this information more broadly to patients and healthcare professionals, those items, procedures, and interventions that are most effective to prevent, control, and treat health conditions will be utilized, while those that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.

But a government bureaucracy in Washington is never going to know what “items, procedures and interventions are most effective to prevent, control and treat health conditions” for each patient, regardless of how much federal research is done. This is what doctors are for. This bureaucratic initiative is really laying the foundation for the eventual health care rationing to be imposed under the new Obama “universal” health care entitlement program, which is coming soon. I told you so, in previous columns.

To call this spending economic recovery stimulus, however, is an abuse of the English language.

Another abuse is to be found in the $4.2 billion provided to the Neighborhood Stabilization Fund, which provides the funds to local governments to purchase and rehab vacant housing due to foreclosure. The congressional report accompanying the stimulus bill states, “Up to $750 million may be used for a competition for nonprofit entities to enhance the funding included under this heading through capitalization of the funds.” Reportedly, this funding is intended to be siphoned off to ACORN, the far-left, rogue, lawbreaking organization prosecuted across the country in the past couple of years for voter fraud. ACORN has also used violent intimidation tactics in the past to pursue its goals, and was heavily involved in housing programs in the past that led to widespread bad loans.

Another $79 billion is to go the states to maintain their runaway government spending, particularly for such spendthrift jurisdictions as California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. High state government spending is also not a source of economic growth.

Then there are other items in the “stimulus” package that may involve desirable government spending, but do not involve stimulating the economy, and should be subject to the normal budget process. These include $3 billion for health care prevention and wellness programs, such as childhood immunizations and other state and local public health programs, $2.4 billion for projects demonstrating carbon capture technology, $17 billion for Pell Grants, $1 billion for Technology Education, $1.9 billion for the Energy Department for “basic research into the physical sciences,” $650 million for digital TV coupons to help Americans upgrade to digital cable television, $100 million to reduce lead-based paint hazards for children in low income housing, $400 million for “habitat restoration projects” of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, $1.2 billion for summer jobs for youth, $2 billion for Superfund cleanup, and others. Continue reading . . .

Holder the Hater

If President Obama is hoping to change the tone in Washington, it’s hard to imagine how having Eric Holder onboard as his attorney general will help accomplish that goal.

Much has been written about would-be Attorney General Holder’s support for liberal positions, but little has been written about his visceral contempt for conservatives.

His public utterances are chock full of the same old tiresome liberal clichés about those on the right one might find on the Daily Kos website.

The president’s bilious nominee told an American Constitution Society gathering in 2004 that “conservatives have been defenders of the status quo, afraid of the future, and content to allow to continue to exist all but the most blatant inequalities.” They have “made a mockery of the rule of law.” Conservatives try to “put the environment at risk for the sake of unproven economic theories, to play to the fears of our citizens, and not to their hopes, and to return the nation to a time that in fact never existed.”

Conservatives are “breathtaking” in their “arrogance,” Holder claimed. “From redistricting schemes, to attacks on abortion rights, to energy policies that are as shortsighted as they are ineffective, to tax cuts that disproportionately favor those who are well off and perpetuate many of the inequities in our nation, the conservative movement has been unafraid to push the limits in advancing this agenda.”

Holder denounced what he called “the conservative agenda of social division, mindless tax cutting, and a defense posture that does not really make us safer.”

Elsewhere in that ode to liberalism in which he gave credit to leftists for all that is good in modern America, he seemed sympathetic to the so-called Fairness Doctrine:

The nation must be reminded that the word liberal is more than a conservative slur. The nation must be reminded that it was the progressive, liberal tradition that brought about the social and economic changes that were necessary many years ago. The nation must be convinced that it is a progressive future that holds the greatest promise for equality and the continuation of those policies that serve to support the greatest number of our people. In the short term this will not be an easy task. With the mainstream media somewhat cowered by conservative critics, and the conservative media disseminating the news in anything but a fair and balanced manner, and you know what I mean there, the means to reach the greatest number of people is not easily accessible.

Holder also has a long history of involvement in charities and nonprofits that seek to stick it to conservatives.

He has been a member of the board of directors of the American Constitution Society, the mirror image of the Federalist Society. The ACS believes in the myth of the “living” Constitution and views the limits that great charter places on government power as quaint anachronisms to be overcome through clever legal sophistry.

ACS is, of course, funded by the big players in left-wing political finance, including members of the billionaires’ club, the Democracy Alliance. Reliably liberal benefactors of ACS include George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($2,201,500 since 2002), Ford Foundation ($600,000 since 2003), Sandler Family Supporting Foundation ($200,000 in 2003), Tides Foundation ($25,000 since 2002), Barbra Streisand Foundation ($20,000 since 2002).

Meanwhile, it has been exhaustively documented that Holder has what could charitably be called a cavalier approach to a key civil right, you know, that inconvenient, archaic one described in the Second Amendment that the media wishes we would all forget about.

As the Independent Institute’s Stephen P. Halbrook, author of The Founder’s Second Amendment, told a Senate panel considering the nomination, “many Americans have reason to be uneasy about Mr. Holder’s nomination for attorney general. They deserve to have a person in this role who is committed to upholding all parts of the Constitution, including the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, Mr. Holder has proven himself not to be that person.”

As deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Holder pushed for federal licensing of handgun owners and federal registration of guns, waiting periods for gun purchases, and rationing of handgun sales. The former Janet Reno acolyte signed on to a pro-gun prohibition amicus curiae brief in District of Columbia v. Heller, last year’s groundbreaking Supreme Court case in which justices struck down the District’s oppressive handgun ban.

Holder played a role in securing a presidential pardon for a fugitive (Marc Rich) and sentence commutations for Puerto Rican terrorists. He served as apologist for the Clinton administration after it defied a federal court order and seized 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint in 2000.

Found on American Spectator

Obama’s Weekly YouTube Address

It’s not just radio anymore:

Watch Obama’s Weekly YouTube Address

(H/T: Hot Air.) You really have to ask yourself why the media-strategy geniuses of the Bush administration never thought of doing the weekly radio address via YouTube. Meanwhile, note the new president’s justification of his plan:

“I know that some are skeptical about the size and scale of this recovery plan. . . . We won’t just throw money at our problems – we’ll invest in what works.”

“What works”? Apparently not highway construction. Despite all the yadda-yadda-yadda about fixing America’s infrastructure, only 3% of the stimulus is targeted for roads and bridges.

A bait-and-switch you can believe in!

Found on The America Spectator

A Reagan Christmas

The words of one of our greatest presidents would be shockingly out of place today.

Today in America, we proudly celebrate the birthdays of leaders of social change like Martin Luther King, Jr. every January.  We honor the birthdays of leaders of political change like Presidents Washington and Lincoln every February.  We even celebrate each October someone only thinly associated with America on Columbus Day.  But in recent years we have become unwilling to not only publicly celebrate, but to even acknowledge, the December birth of the world’s greatest spiritual leader, and the One in which 90% of Americans report to believe. 
 
Ronald Reagan, however, refused to allow the secularization of America deter him from declaring the true meaning of Christmas.
 
Presidents Bush, Clinton, and others have used their seldom heard weekly radio addresses to speak of their personal feelings of Christmas and their own Christian beliefs, but it’s difficult to find any of our presidents speaking to a legitimately national audience or a crowd of public citizens with such fearless religious conviction as President Reagan.
 
On December 23, 1981, Reagan spoke on national television from the Oval Office about how “Christmas means so much because of one special child” and that many “of us believe in the divinity of the child born in Bethlehem, that he was and is the promised Prince of Peace.”  He told specifically of a “love Jesus taught us,” and with unflinching Biblical references, explained that “Americans have always tried to follow a higher light, a star, if you will.”  And that the success of our nation lies in “trusting in God’s help.”
 
Reagan declared that even though we have been divinely blessed, we have a reciprocal “obligation to the God who guides us, an obligation to the heritage of liberty and dignity handed down to us by our forefathers.”  Continue reading . . .

Carpe diem — or can we all relax now?

“I desperately hope that circumstances will force Obama to repudiate his past. At present we do not know whether this will happen; and so far, I have seen nothing to suggest that it will. Unlike those who see in the emerging shape of his administration evidence that he will be a pragmatic centrist, I do not think it necessarily shows anything of the kind.” –British journalist Melanie Phillips.  Continue reading . . .