“Obama caved. Yes, he did! We talked him back down. He no longer… He can’t tell the Catholic Church what to do. Obama got the message. Obama,  he’s slinking away in shame.”  I said, “No, he’s not,” and no, he did not cave in any way, shape, manner, or form.  “Obama offers a compromise proposal said to be respectful of religious concerns.”  Now, look at this.  The right to religious liberty in this context is unequivocal in our country and in the Constitution.  Since when does a president have the power to threaten to issue a rule gutting religious liberty and then claims the power to make compromises on that issue?

He doesn’t have the power to do anything that he did today.  He doesn’t have the power to dictate that anybody, anywhere, provide taxpayer-funded abortion or abortion services, or contraception.  He doesn’t have the power. And particularly with the separation of church and state and the Bill of Rights. The government just can’t get in religion in any way, shape, manner, or form. But when it’s religion and it’s the Catholic Church and it’s Obama telling them, “Hey, we know you don’t like abortion, but guess what? You’re gonna have to start paying for ‘em! Ha-ha-ha-ha.”

He can’t do that.  Then he comes along and offers a compromise. “Okay, we’ll shift my demand that this be done to the insurance companies,” and everybody says, “Good, we beat him back!”  No, you didn’t.  Nobody beat Obama back on this.  He’s just now telling another group he has no legal authority over what they’re gonna have to do.  He can’t any more tell the Catholic Church what they have to do than he can tell insurance companies what they have to do.  Not by fiat.  The president does not have the kind of power Obama is wielding.  But he’ll get a with it as long as nobody tries to stop him.  Recess appointments when there aren’t any recesses?

Fine, he’ll do it! If the Senate is not gonna stop him, if he’s gonna make recess appointments when we’re not even in recess and the Senate accepts it? Why stop, if you’re him?  Just because it’s unconstitutional doesn’t mean that that alone is going to disallow him from doing it.  People rob banks even though it’s against the law. And if we stop trying to catch bank robbers, a lot more people would be robbing banks.  If we stop trying to catch murderers, a lot more people would commit murder.  By the same token, the law doesn’t stop people from doing things.  It’s the enforcement that does.

So if the Senate’s not gonna enforce its own rules and stand up for itself, Obama’s gonna keep getting away with this.  So the Catholic Church did stand up.  They said, “You can’t make us do this. This is outrageous.”  Obama says, “Okay, fine, fine. I’ll move on. I’ll make the insurance companies do it.” At the end of the day, he’s still mandating that a business or an industry over which he has no legal authority whatsoever must now, at his direction, make available free conception and abortion-related services.  He doesn’t have this authority.  He didn’t have the authority to make the initial demand; he doesn’t have the authority to make the “compromise.”

And this is how we lose our liberty and how we lose the Constitution.  The suggestion that Obama has the power to alter that which he doesn’t have the power to do in the first place, is unacceptable.  This is I guess another way of illustrating this is — and this is exactly what happened today, by the way.  Obama does something that’s so abhorrent to people that they stand up and say, “You can’t do that.”  Making Catholic Church pay for, fund, make available abortion services, contraception services.  He doesn’t authority to do that.  But the moment he backs down in their minds and shifts the responsibility insurance companies, people say, “Okay, fine. Good.”

He doesn’t have the authority to do either. He got away with it.  He just switched the victim in this case.  So just like the woman who got angry (in my estimation at the wrong thing) in Wyoming when they wouldn’t let her on the airplane, people today who think President Obama got beat back are missing the point.  He wins big.  He has just codified now the notion that taxpayers, via insurance companies or whatever, can be forced to provide whatever he demands be provided. And that whoever pays for it, at whatever price he suggests or demands, will become the law of the land.  This is not the United States of America. This is not the US Constitution.

OBAMA’S PLOY ADDS INSULT TO INJURY

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on President Obama’s revised healthcare plan as it affects Catholic institutions:

President Obama’s latest ploy just adds insult to injury. If the insurance plan of a Catholic institution must cover services it deems immoral, then such a healthcare plan is offensive, plain and simple.

The Catholic League, for example, uses Christian Brothers as its insurance carrier. So if a future employee of ours were to demand free abortion-inducing drugs, and she is allowed to request free drugs from Christian Brothers, then the rest of us would, in effect, be subsidizing her abortion. This is outrageous and will not stand judicial scrutiny.

When it comes to the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a half loaf. We want now, and in the future, the same rights we have enjoyed since the beginning of the republic.

Obama Didn’t Cave on the HHS Mandate; He’s Making an Unprecedented Power Grab

February 10, 2012

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Everybody’s reporting that Obama’s caving on this mandate that the Catholic services provide abortion and all. There’s not a cave here!  There may be an accommodation, but there’s no big cave-in here.  It’s still the government mandating this stuff happen.  They’re just changing the provider. It’s not done by the church. He says he gave them a way out of it by mandating the insurance companies do it, but that’s not the point here.

Great to have you.  It’s Friday.  Let’s go to!

JOHNNY DONOVAN:  Live from the Left Coast at our satellite studios in Los Angeles, it is Open Line Friday!

RUSH:  Never mind, I can’t hear you anyway.  Greetings, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.  Open Line Friday.  And you know the rules on Friday.  When we go to the phones, you get to determine what it is we talk about, ladies and gentlemen.  Monday through Thursday, you have to talk about things I care about, but on Friday, I take a giant career risk unseen anywhere else in major media.  And that is you get to determine what we talk about, whether I care about it or not.  Great to have you.  Here again the telephone number is 800-282-2882.  The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

So everywhere I’m reading that Obama is caving on the mandate in Obamacare that Catholic churches — well, not churches, but the schools and hospitals are mandated to provide contraceptives and abortion-related services that they religiously disagree with.  “What’s happened here is that Obama’s caved! He has seen, he has heard, and now he’s gonna shift that burden to the insurance companies!” Now, there are a bunch of stories today — that one and another one involving a woman getting on an airplane, trying to get on an airplane to fly to Denver who was not permitted to get on an airplane because there were no female TSA agents to pat her down.  None were on board.

She even said (paraphrased), “Look, I’ll wave it. I’ll let a guy pat me down. I need to get to Denver.”  They said, “Nope, not gonna have any of that. You have to take a different flight on a different day.” It’s a small down, small airport, not a whole lot of flights. And her reaction is instructive.  My point here is, ladies and gentlemen, we are losing freedom and liberty inch by inch.  It’s not being taken — well, in some cases it is, but in most cases it’s not being taken from us in giant grabs.  It’s little by little by little such that people don’t even see it.  It doesn’t even register.  Let me start with the AP version of the Obama story.  “Retreating in the face of a political uproar, President Barack Obama on Friday will announce that religious…”

He’s supposed to do it in five or six minutes now, right in the middle of this program. President Obama “on Friday will announce that religious employers will not have to cover birth control for their employees after all, The Associated Press has learned. The administration instead will demand that insurance companies will be the ones directly responsible for providing free contraception.” And we’re supposed to applaud this?  We’re supposed to think that we have emerged with a big victory here?  Obama can mandate that we buy insurance, and now Obama can mandate what insurance companies must offer — and after mandating what insurance companies must offer, then Obama can mandate what insurance companies can charge for it?

Freedom doesn’t mean anything to this guy!  Freedom doesn’t mean anything to this regime or this administration.  To me, this is breathtaking.  This is an incredible sight to behold here.  So Obama is said to “offer a compromise proposal that is respectful of religious concerns,” and everybody’s applauding today.  Now, look at this.  The right to religious liberty in this context is unequivocal in our country and in the Constitution.  It’s right there in the Bill of Rights.  Since when does a president have the power to threaten to issue a rule gutting religious liberty?  That’s the first thing.  And, by the way, I don’t think any of this a mistake.

I don’t think this religious kerfuffle is something that they overreached on.  I think roiling this country and distracting people, setting up these extreme things like this and then walking them back to create the illusion, “Okay, you know what?  We’re not gonna take your freedom,” it’s all BS, folks.  And this is being spun in such a way to make it look like the winners are winning and the losers are losing, and they’re not.  The First Amendment — the Bill of Rights of the Constitution — explicitly says that government shall have nothing to do with religion.  You hear, do you not, the left constantly caterwauling, whining and moaning about “separation of church and state”?

Hispanic conservatives form super PAC 

Russ Jones – OneNewsNow – 2/10/2012 7:45:00 AM

A conservative Hispanic organization is the first of its kind to assert its influence and throw its hat into the political arena.

Hispanic Vote has officially registered as the Federal Election Commission’s first Hispanic conservative super PAC. Laura Ramirez-Drain, co-founder of Hispanic Vote, says the mission of the organization is to reach the 21.7 million eligible Hispanic voters, specifically the younger generation and registered Independents in 2012 and future elections.

“Traditional values – that is so important because in the Hispanic community, we are very tied into traditional values,” the co-founder accounts. “We have to show the people that the conservative traditional values are one of the main principles.”