Demographics via Steyn

In this column on how the left is redirecting energy into making conservatives look like the anti-sex police, Mark Steyn notes how the government really ought to be encouraging the making of babies.
This made me laugh out loud.

…Peter Costello, formerly Timmy Geithner’s counterpart Down Under, put it this way: “Have one for Mum, one for Dad, and one for Australia.” But in America an oblivious political class, led by a president who characterizes young motherhood as a “punishment,” prefers to offer solutions to problems that don’t exist rather than the ones that are all too real. I think this is what they call handing out condoms on the Titanic.
Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, distills the current hysteria thus: “It’s as if we passed a law requiring mosques to sell bacon and then, when people objected, responded by saying ‘What’s wrong with bacon? You’re trying to ban bacon!!!!’”

Huh? Liberty?

I love this post by Ace yesterday. In it he talks about how pissed off he is by the things he doesn’t even think about anymore because, well, they’re against the law, so of course he wouldn’t do it.

grew up on the East Coast. For a while, I lived in California.

I was blown away to learn that people could just start bonfires on the beach, whenever they liked.
………..Then I started to think like this: What kind of a mind-screw did they do on me when I should be surprised that people would be allowed to do this?

I remember when I first moved to CA being surprised that no one owned the beaches and we could just use them! I remember hiking with a friend who had a flipping cow because we wanted to see what was over that knoll but there wasn’t a trail, and I just walked there, without a trail! [no, this was not an alpine meadow or a switchback shortcut]

We get immune over time to “the rules”. He mentions regulations. I can’t tell you how many business I’ve had in my head over time that go by the wayside because….”what a pain it would be”….well, that and frankly I’m pretty lazy, but still.

The contraception mandate debate has changed the narrative. We’re no longer talking about
“the mandate to buy insurance”, or even
“the mandate for insurers to give out free birth control including abortificants”,
but
whether or not a hospital should be treated like a church.
Or
how a federal mandate in requirements for insurers are any different than state ones.

Say what?
Why the hell can’t a person buy whatever type of insurance he/she wants that’s available from businesses who offer the entire range of versions that they care to sell to anyone across all the state lines?
Seriously. Who does it hurt?
Hospitals? Because they are required to see all the sick. Then fix that problem.

It was very tricky the way the whole narrative was stolen. Hopefully the Supreme Court is just as clever and can remember all of this come March when it’s discussing just one bit of Obamacare.

Go read Ace’s column. It’s a nice reminder of how the rules have played with our heads.

Love It!

ht Ace

Back to the Contraception etc Mandates

Today we have a couple of things to look at.
Jeff Goldstein is working very hard to keep the MSM from co-opting the narrative about the subject.
This is not about contraception, or about free stuff, or even health. It’s about liberty and doing what you choose and entering into contracts without coercion. [bold is mine]

Stacy is correct — and this is a point we here at pw have been beating consistently since the announcement of the original, pre-”compromise” HHS announcement: this is certainly an attack on religious freedom and the First Amendment, but even moreso, it is a power grab by the federal government, who now believes it has the authority to dictate to private companies what they must sell, and for how much they must sell it.

Too, and by extension, they now believe that you as the consumer be mandated to pay for things you don’t want — and that may violate your freedom of conscience — even though they’ve tried to hide that piece of the puzzle by labeling the services as “free”.

The fact is, the services and contraceptive devices have to be paid for, and that cost will be factored in to the overall costs of coverage. Meaning, you will be paying for all the free things whether you want to or not.

To me, it matters not whether “most Catholics” favor the mandate. Most Catholics vote Democrat, too — and they’re just as wrong for doing that.

This is not a Catholic issue, or even a strictly religious issue.

Amen.

With Jonah Goldberg we finally get a big writer noting something I’ve noticed in the past. The left seems to think that Obama (or someone just like him) will ALWAYS be in office from this day forward. He tries to imagine what the left might think if Rick Santorum, or rather who the left thinks is Rick Santorum, should win the presidency.

But let’s imagine the caricature is fair and he really is the boogeyman Rachel Maddow and Co. say he is. Worse, all his talk about “freedom” is just code for the right-wing version of progressive social engineering, i.e., he wants to turn women into breeders á la The Handmaid’s Tale.
Is that who you want in charge of your health care?

Now, add that thought to this new law working it’s way through the process in Washington state.

In the House, lawmakers passed a bill requiring health insurers covering maternity care to also pay for abortions.

You read that right. Not just birth control. Not the “free” stuff, but if you cover maternity care, you must also pay for abortions. (I wonder if there can be a co-pay)

Let’s imagine just 3 potential consequences, shall we?

1) The Hyde amendment denies federal funds for abortion. Washington’s health exchanges dry up and the poor now have to move to a place where they can get onto an exchange.
2) Insurance companies who already are hesitant to cover maternity care due to the expense just don’t cover that at all anymore.
3) Obamacare goes down in flames as does continued freedom in WA state who will still have to abide by the state legislature.

Or what will actually happen….nothing, except in the background where people who object quietly move out of the state and those left don’t really miss them. If this includes insurers, that just means more people under government care.

Which is what the left wants anyway.

Those “Hyper” Females

UPDATE: LOL Dear Mr. Taranto, It really, really, really, really didn’t. Thanks for the traffic though!
Stick around people…..we do have fun here.

…………………………………….
I know many of you follow me just to get the “female” perspective. Thank you! I’ve been asked to comment on James Taranto’s Best of the Web Valentine’s post……“Girls Gone Hyper”

So here you have it. In many ways Mr. Taranto is right. But he’s a funny, funny guy who likes to poke a stick at groups of people now and then and yesterday it was the feminists turn. His description of me (the bold below) caused others to point it out with disdain.

Bennett disparages immature men who waste their lives playing video games. To be sure, such dudes are pathetic. But there’s a reason they’re attracted to that particular pursuit. Video games are a simulacrum of masculine virtue: challenge, mastery, control.

There is a corresponding harsh female stereotype: the childless single woman with a cat or dog that serves as an outlet for her unfulfilled maternal instincts. Bennett and Coontz would dearly love to put these two together, but there’s a reason they’re alone. In a culture of sexual equality or female dominance, women and men who aren’t especially charming, brilliant or beautiful don’t have much to offer each other. Happy Valentine’s Day.

But wait you say, “I see the bold part, but what about the “not especially charming, brilliant or beautiful” part?”

Oh that….he was talking about other women there. Not me. 🙂

Why am I, charming, brilliant, beautiful, and still single and sharing my maternal instincts with my dog and other people’s kids? Because I never met the man I wanted to marry.

Is that because fewer men are more educated than me? No, because I don’t value education more than I do a good mind. (The 2 serious relationships I’ve had were with men who were less educated though incredibly smart. )
But yes, women, like most animals, in our guts want men who are more dominant. Dominant men may be in short supply, or they may just not be around my immediate circle…who knows, but I haven’t met the one who a) was available and b) actually asked me out and c) worked out for the long run. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. OR that I’m not charming!

But do women dry up and become old lady spinsters if we don’t meet said dominant male with whom we have a mutual attraction? (which is what I think Taranto was trying to depict in his poke at feminists)

No, not at all.

Instead we get a dog, or a cat, or a horse. We live in complete freedom coming and going as we please, doing or not doing what we want how we want without an xtra person with whom we would otherwise be compromising. Is it better? Not necessarily. But is it bad? Not even a little.

So no Taranto didn’t bother me. Actually I wondered if perhaps he and his significant other might be on the outs and he poured his own bitterness into the column.

Or perhaps he was just stirring that stick a little for simple fun.
We’ve all done that a time or two eh?

Live by Extortion……

Yes, Planned Parenhood’s methods are used by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

If you cut aide to us, we will disregard our peace pact with Israel,

Happy Valentines Day

It’s all about the love today.

Neo-Neocon discusses Groundhog Day (the movie) and how it relates to love.

“…[W]hat, exactly, made the lovely but, let’s face it, vapid Rita worthy of Phil’s centuries of effort?”

My answer is that he discovered love. Yes, Rita was beautiful, and a good human being with many excellent qualities. But of course she was imperfect, and over the years (centuries? millennia?) Phil no doubt had learned just about all of her flaws. Still, it didn’t matter to him because it wasn’t about Rita, exactly—it was about the fact that, somewhere along the long path of his transformation to wisdom, he finally understood that every person in town, including the ones he couldn’t tolerate at the beginning, was worthy of his attention—and of something one might call “love,” in its broadest sense.

It’s a beautiful thing. So today to celebrate your love, take him/her out for a Starbucks coffee, where you can also love on them for allowing you to bear arms while others are boycotting them for the same thing.

Yes, It Bugs Me Too

Morgan over at House of Eratosthenes takes the time to write about a thing the Obamas do that is enough to drive one whacko.

Here you are, doing your thing….eating right, exercising, using birth control or not, buying health insurance.
And there they are telling you….”that’s good…follow me to learn how to eat right”,
“see what a good exercise guru I’ve hired? I see you’re listening”,
“Now be sure to use that free birth control” and
“I know it can be inconvenient and confusing and even a little expensive to buy insurance, but I’ve made a law now, so you be sure to buy that insurance.”

Morgan sums it pretty nicely:

This late in the game, Barack Obama has come to represent, to me, an emblem of the bossy little seven-year-old who is constantly issuing these proclamations and orders, with great confidence, since He has not so much a shred of uncertainty about any of them…but He lacks the uncertainty about them because there’s never been any necessity for Him to question anything. Has Barack Obama been stuck on the side of the road with a bent chain on His bicycle? Had to take His computer apart because the floppy drive wasn’t working right? Don’t make me laugh.
He lives in that enviable world, although I do not envy it even a little bit — in which each item therein either is readily understood in form & function with only casual thought applied, or else it’s dumb & stupid. You bark an order at it, and hopefully it’ll shape up its shit.

I went to a Pechakucha in town this weekend. They can be very fun. One of the presenters did a deal on her deciding to take her skills at knitting, forming a club, and knitting hats/scarves for the homeless.

Yes, it was a good deed and probably appreciated. What drove me nuts was the “look at me, aren’t I good” aspect of the 6 minutes. I can’t tell you how many times she used the terms “joining her in social change” and “community outreach” with powerpoints of her and her group around town knitting. I go to a tiny, tiny church who has a group of crafters who do similar things with their skills and I can’t imagine them going on about it like this woman did.

I berate myself as just mean and bitchy because perhaps by talking, this woman will get more volunteers while the church stays small. I don’t know, but it’s crazy making and Morgan comes close to nailing it. It’s like this woman is saying….”look, volunteering is good. You should volunteer and do things like I’m doing.” People volunteer all over the freaking place already without your telling us to.

Liberty

Well, I’ve woken up cranky again after reading this column from the editorial board of the Washington Post.

They are calling the President’s “solution” to religious sensitivities a Win-Win.
Say what?
Yes, they actually call the solution “elegant”. Oh so clever.

This is, most likely, a win-win situation. Covering birth control pills or IUDs costs insurers less than covering a pregnancy. In situations where contraceptive coverage has been required, costs have not gone up as a result. So it may be that no one ends up losing. As President Obama put it, “Religious liberty will be protected, and a law that requires free preventive care will not discriminate against women.”

Yes, it’s all about the costs. Not about the religious values of those doing the paying.
[and apparently there is some information somewhere up someone’s rear end that women who don’t get “free” birth control are the ones who have accidental pregnancies, because the rest of us are so responsible and have such great respect for free stuff.]

These editors call this whole big scene a sad day because now we have “ill-advised calls to protections to non-religious employers as well as to religious institutions.” And THAT my friends “stretches religious accommodation beyond any reasonable bound. It would be impossible to administer.”

Yes – that little first amendment doesn’t apply to you. Just officially recognized churches.

Thankfully, President Obama has not yet fooled the bishops. (bold is their’s)

First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen—to cover sterilization and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion. All the other mandated “preventive services” prevent disease, and pregnancy is not a disease. Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal conscience laws. Therefore, we called for the rescission of the mandate altogether.

Second, we explained that the mandate would impose a burden of unprecedented reach and severity on the consciences of those who consider such “services” immoral: insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and schools forced to sponsor and subsidize the coverage; and individual employees and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage. We therefore urged HHS, if it insisted on keeping the mandate, to provide a conscience exemption for all of these stakeholders—not just the extremely small subset of “religious employers” that HHS proposed to exempt initially.

Ed Morrissey (who gets a ht for the bishop’s letter) notes that the administration didn’t even bother to talk with Catholic bishops to see what exactly the problem was before coming up with the latest “solution”.

Obamateurism of the year anyone?

Friday Funny

UPDATED with further outrage at the bottom.

I take it back, we now have a Friday Funny.

Catholic churches will no longer have to cover birth control etc. Catholic insurers will. For free. No extra payments.

Luckily, for the administration, there are no noisy Catholic insurers.

Another unbelievable moment in US history.

UPDATE: So many good quotes, so little time…..go read the Anchoress.

a Taste:

Robert T. Miller at First Things:

Thus far, the bishops have argued that, since the Church believes that abortion, sterilization, and contraception are morally wrong, it is wrong for the government to force the Church’s institutions to fund such things through its health insurance plans. By what logic, however, does the Church restrict this argument to just religious institutions? If these practices are morally wrong in the way the Church clearly says they are, how may the government force any employer who objects to them to funding them?

UPDATE 2:
It’s just too freaking unbelievable.

Obama on Friday made insurers responsible for providing free birth control to employees of religious groups, aiming to placate outraged leaders of the Catholic church who oppose contraception and to defuse an election-year landmine.
………
Providing free birth control is not expected to hurt profits for the multibillion dollar insurance industry.

Read that again. Providing free birth control is not expected to hurt profits for the mulitbillion dollar insurance industry.
What that says is “even though now, we don’t pay up to $600 a year for the 3 million women working for Catholic institutions, when we do, somehow this money will magically not cut into our bottom line because apparently the women who’s birth control is not covered by insurance currently often have children that are unplanned, unexpected, unwanted, and xtra expensive.

An Obama administration official said the new policy would not allow health insurers to increase their premiums, charge co-payments or deductibles to make up for the cost of contraceptives.

Because by God, the Obama administration official get to tell you how to run your business. You must give X and you cannot charge anything for it or make up for it someplace else. I believe they call that a tax.

One critic of the insurance industry had this to say:

Providing contraception, even for free, is cost-effective for insurers so I don’t think they’ll balk,” he said, adding it could even save them money in the long run.

“It may add a little administrative complexity to what they do, but they can deal with it.”

My head is spinning. I know nothing of nothing about running a business, but it’s like these people think that life is completely and totally static.

Apparently EVERY insurance company has enough overhead to give away free birth control without charging for it in ANY manner and can just “deal with it” and THAT is going to placate the people? This is wrong on so many MORE levels I can’t stand it.

Let’s see – you have the churches who find birth control and morning after pills IMMORAL who will now no longer have to cover this in their insurance policies because the insurance policies will cover it and somehow the churches are going to be ok with it because as long as they are not directly involved in IMMORALITY, they’ll be fine.

You have the insurance companies who are not only being told who they will cover and for how long under what policies they are also being told how much they can charge and where they can attach fees and that they must pay for birth control to anyone who asks for it if they are from a church affiliated group.

You will have R&D people no longer giving a rip about creating birthcontrol that is cheaper and safer, because…why? Obviously, if the government is going to force the insurance companies to give the stuff away, the government will also have control of the price of the stuff.

You will have people who want to start up insurance companies say ….”yeah, right, I don’t think so.”

You will have people who own insurance companies suggest to the latest church affiliated group, that no, we don’t insure “your kind”. Because why on earth would they when IF they do, THEN they’ll have to cover birth control for those who want it……at $0. So they themselves will have to pay for it.

And what is the answer for the self insurance church affiliated groups?

It’s as if this administration a) dictated something ridiculously illegal and now that it realizes it, is b) just making stuff up as it goes along to shut the person in front up.

You can’t do this, it’s unconstitutional!
Ok, well we’ll do this then. Nothing unconstitutional about forcing insurance companies to cover birth control.
But you can’t do that, they’ll just raise prices!
Oh, right….Ok, well then we’ll just decree, “They can’t raise prices!”.
But then how will the insurance companies stay profitable?
Oh that will be because they won’t have to pay for unplanned pregnancies. They’ll be happy to cover this, for free.

Or rather you will. But not for free. Yes, don’t worry, this government will happily apply exceptions to the rules in order to not undermine the constitution in its entirety. They won’t be required to pay, but you will.

I am outraged. I expect the Catholic churches will go for this because they are making noises about doing so. But insurance companies? Maaaan.

Number 1 reason for Obamacare? It is the first step in getting everyone onto government universal health care. I’ve never been much of a conspiracy advocate, but why else would all this be going on? What does he expect? He didn’t need to pander to feminists who want their free birth control. He had their votes.

UPDATE 3:

I work for a regulated industry too. And people are always wanting dogs/cats spayed and neutered. If the government can force human health groups to cover services “for free” without charging anyplace….why would it not be possible for them to start insisting our veterinarians start spaying/neutering pets and strays for free? It will save the consumer money and the vets can spend their efforts and get their profit from vaccinating. The pets will be healthier. It MUST be a win/win/win, so lets just do it. Another decree, Obama says. Get thee my pen.

I wish I had a real skill that they wanted if only so I could go John Galt on them.