A press release from the Secular Coalition for America:

Marking the first time in history a presidential administration has met for a policy briefing with the American nontheist community, on February 26 the Secular Coalition for America will engage with White House officials on issues of great concern to the secular movement

Some of their specific goals:

Fixing Faith-Based Initiatives: Taking all necessary steps to make certain that religious organizations receiving federal funding for social welfare programs cannot discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion, that program beneficiaries are never subject to proselytizing, and that secular options are made equally available to those in need.

"There has been a movement toward theocracy in America that is too often overlooked," said Faircloth. "As a result, good Americans, including children, have been harmed, and men and women in uniform denied their rights. This strikes at the very core of American values. The Secular Coalition for America seeks justice for every citizen, regardless of creed."

While justice for every citizen is indeed a laudable goal, I fail to see how religious institutions have, on the whole, impeded that goal.

After all, our nation's founding fathers, on the whole, were deeply religious, but that did not prevent them from founding a government that seeks to be just to all citizens, regardless of creed.

Would the Secular Coalition for America have a problem with this scene?

It depicts our first Continental Congress.

A memory of history should provide wisdom to help decide what should be done next in the health care debate:

A piecrust promise is one that is easily made and easily broken. The promise – more a rumor than anything else – that the U.S. Senate will use the reconciliation process to adopt a strong ban on abortion funding if the House passes the Senate-approved bill is flakier than most. Never before in the history of the 34-year abortion funding debate have pro-life members of Congress approved a bill containing abortion funding on the promise that a subsequent vote will fix the problem.

... pro-life House Democrats have no reason to believe that the “reconciliation fix” on abortion is anything more than a piecrust promise. If they were to proceed anyway and vote for H.R. 3590, it would indeed be “career-defining” for these House members who have so far stood tall for their, and their constituents’, convictions. (Chuck Donovan at The Foundry)

The Good - Stupak is not standing down:

Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak said yesterday at a townhall in his home state, "I'm more optimistic than I was a week ago" that a deal could be reached to pass a health care bill that bans public funding of abortion. Some speculated that this meant Stupak was ready to cave. "Obviously they don’t know me," Stupak said in an interview this afternoon with THE WEEKLY STANDARD. "If I didn’t" cave in November, "why would I do it now after all the crap I’ve been through?"

"Everyone’s going around saying there’s a compromise—there’s no such thing," Stupak said. What's changed between this week and last, Stupak went on, is that he had his first real conversation with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Congressman Henry Waxman about fixing the bill. (Weekly Standard)

The Bad - one of his coalition is wavering:

Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a key supporter of Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) anti-abortion language intended for the health care bill, said Tuesday night that he’s satisfied the Senate abortion language prohibits federal funding of abortions and will likely vote for the bill.

“I think the Senate language keeps the purpose of the Hyde amendment,” Kildee told reporters. “I’ll probably vote for it.”

Kildee’s conversion undermines the position of Stupak, his fellow Michigan Democrat who has been demanding changes to the Senate bill. (Roll Call)

Update - Kildee's office says this Roll Call report is innacurate and that he is still undecided.

Why?

"So that you can find out what is in it!"

What are the wages of challenging Nancy Pelosi? Political death by a well-funded leftist challenger, as the Detroit news reports today:

I'll give you one guess for which candidate EMILY'S List, Planned Parenthood and NARAL will be supporting next cycle in Michigan's first congressional district.

From USA Today:

“Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.”

“These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.”

The means on average a federal worker receives $108,476 in salary + benefits per year vs. a private worker who receives $69,928 in salary + benefits per year ... for essentially the same job.

Ph/t: Big Government, which also has a chart comparing various professions.

I admire how Prager critiques Leftist values because they are different from the values of America's founding:

"I used to believe that the Left and the Right had similar goals for America, that they just differed in the means they wanted to use to get there. I was mistaken. The Left has a very different vision of America than those who hold to America’s founding values, most especially individualism and small government. Their vision is one in which a once-in-a-lifetime chance to establish a giant welfare state dominated by the Left is worth any price — even America’s steep financial decline." (National Review)

An important observation from Mark Steyn:

... When seeking to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, President Ford liked to say: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." Which is true enough. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people's response is: Nuts to that. Public sector workers have succeeded in redefining time itself: Every year, they receive 14 monthly payments. You do the math. And for about seven months' work - for many of them the workday ends at 2:30 p.m. When they retire, they get 14 monthly pension payments. In other words: Economic reality is not my problem. I want my benefits. And, if it bankrupts the entire state a generation from now, who cares as long as they keep the checks coming until I croak?

We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap's enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the general societal interest. He's got his, and to hell with everyone else. People's sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense. (Washington Times)

From Simon Heffer writing for the UK Telegraph:

"For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one."

Some words of encouragement this Monday morning from our Senate's majority leader:

Way to set the bar low, Senator.

An illustrative example from this morning's Washington Post column by Charles Krauthammer:

Obama [suggested] that his health-care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments), they are in favor.
Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?
Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However — life is a vale of howevers — suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed — say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak, and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

More wisdom and wit here.

Our friend at the Acton Institute Samuel Gregg writing for the Public Discourse:

In his famous critique of the Treaty of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), John Maynard Keynes observed: “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency.” History, however, illustrates that the greatest debauchers of money have not been Communist revolutionaries or even run-of-the-mill counterfeiters. The primary culprits have been entirely legitimate governments.

... [Th ere is] an on-going problem with governments’ management of the supply of money. Sometimes this has devastating consequences. Few today, for example, would question the contributions of flawed monetary policy to the Great Depression. Many remember the debilitating stagflation of the 1970s that owed much to the neo-Keynesian monetary policies pursued by governments after World War II. Today scholars such as the historian of the Federal Reserve Allan Meltzer suggest that the Federal Reserve’s present strategy for preventing future inflation is seriously flawed and setting us up for significant problems in the future.

It is not as if alternatives have not been considered. The now-common model of relative central bank independence arose partly from a desire to dilute the ability of politicians with short-term horizons to influence monetary policy. Likewise, one of the chief attractions of the gold standard which functioned in increasingly diluted forms until President Nixon terminated the dollar’s direct convertibility into gold in 1971 was its ability to constrain governments’ ability to succumb to demands for cheap money.

Along these lines, suggestions have been made to remove government from the business of money-supply altogether. [Read more.]

Take a look at the upper right-hand corner of the Senate Republicans website:

Hmm ... now what does that remind us of?

That looks vaguely familiar.

And don't think that switching the facebook and twitter icons fooled us!

From a Washington Times editorial this morning:

The Republican health care bill also recognizes that protecting the value and inherent dignity of all human life is the foundation of all health care. The Republican plan prohibits taxpayer-funded abortion coverage. Period.

Barring the use of taxpayer funds for abortion and insurance policies that cover abortion has been the law of the land for more than 30 years, and a majority of Americans want to keep it that way. In the fall, a bipartisan majority in the House of Representatives approved an amendment co-authored by Reps. Bart Stupak, Michigan Democrat, and Joe Pitts, Pennsylvania Republican, that would uphold current law.

Unfortunately, the health care bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve creates a loophole through which taxpayer funds could be used for abortions and to subsidize insurance policies that cover abortion.

It's encouraging to see what a firm collaborator Leader Boehner has been with the pro-life efforts of Rep. Stupak on the Democrat side and Rep. Pitts in his own party.

"No abortion funding in health care" is truly a bi-partisan position.

Awkward timing, to say the least:

Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he's obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson's brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. (Weekly Standard)

American Principles in Action Calls on Senate to Reject Federal Meddling in Private Education

Today, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 4247, "Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act."  Under this act, any public or private school that receives federal funding would have to obtain a state clearance certifying that they are handling issues relating to restraint and seclusion according to new federal standards.

While acknowledging that preventing harmful restraint and seclusion is noble, Andresen Blom, the Executive Director of American Principles in Action, indicated that the expansion of federal regulations is deeply misguided:

"With radicals like Kevin Jennings being given powerful positions in the Department of Education, the last thing Americans need in the clumsy hands of the federal government is our private and religious schools.  80% of Catholic parochial schools as well as a large number of independent private schools accept some form of funding from the federal government.  Americans do not pay their hard-earned money to private schools in order to subject them to burdensome and subjective regulations written by unelected federal and state bureaucrats. This is nothing less than another egregious federal power grab that intrudes on private and religious education."

American Principles in Action calls upon the Senate to reject S. 2860, sponsored by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), which is the Senate version of the same legislation.

Find out more at: www.americanprinciplesinaction.org/

A code-red all-hands-on-deck situation is developing:

White House officials tell ABC News that in his remarks tomorrow President Obama will indicate a willingness to work with Republicans on some issue to get a health care reform bill passed but will suggest that if it is necessary, Democrats will use the controversial "reconciliation" rules requiring only 51 Senate votes to pass the "fix" to the Senate bill, as opposed to the 60 votes to stop a filibuster and proceed to a vote on a bill.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been awaiting the president’s remarks direction on how health care reform will proceed. (Political Punch)

This is a gross abuse of power, which contradicts what Obama himself has said was the responsible way of crafting legislation in the upper chamber (Breitbart has video).

The first fight, however, will be for Pelosi to assemble enough democrat votes to pass the Senate bill through the House, so it is to that question we will devote our attention first.

The latest on one of Obama's most controversial appointees:

At least one senator has put a secret hold on the confirmation of openly gay law professor Chai Feldblum and four others to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

A Senate committee approved all the nominations, including Feldblum’s, as a group in December.

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Monday that Reid is “working to get an agreement” with Republicans to consider the nomination of Feldblum and other EEOC commissioners.

There has been no public indication yet of which senator has placed the hold on the EEOC nominees’ full Senate confirmation vote.

Reminder: we have an action item and Facebook group related to Feldblum's nomination.

Robert Koons writing for our friends at the Public Discourse, says new technological developments and pressing national needs suggest that the future of higher education may be one friendlier to the classical tradition of liberal education:

When Russell Kirk wrote about his experiences as a junior professor at Michigan State University, he invariably referred to it as Behemoth State University. Michigan State, my alma mater, was a decent agricultural college grown into a massive research university by a politically adept poultry scientist, John Hannah.

Today, I work at a similar institution, the University of Texas at Austin, which recently gave its head football coach a $2 million raise while cutting $8 million from its budget for foreign language instruction. T

he research university, whether public (like Texas or Michigan State) or private (like Stanford, Duke or Johns Hopkins), represents 20th-century gigantism at its apogee, combining all the virtues of Stalinist central planning, progressivist-utopian fantasy, and industrial mass-production.

On the surface, the Behemoth State Universities appear to be a smashing success, realizing all of the ardent hopes of the egalitarian architects of the G. I. Bill of the 1940’s and the scientific boosters of the Sputnik era. Millions of Americans have dutifully jumped through the hoops and claimed their credentials. Promoters of the system are quick to point out that college graduates earn an additional 60% in income, amounting to a college-education premium of over $1 million on average during the course of a lifetime... [Read the rest.]

Some exceedingly strange advice from the founder of Microsoft:

Microsoft founder Bill Gates told a recent TED conference, an organization which is sponsored by one of the largest toxic waste polluters on the planet, that vaccines need to be used to reduce world population figures in order to solve global warming and lower CO2 emissions.

Stating that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”

Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates is referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.

“I’m not sure what the nothing-to-see-here explanation is for Bill Gates’ theory that “new vaccines” can help lower the population of the world,” points out the Cryptogon blog, “But I thought about the incidents from the 1990s where the World Health Organization was providing a “tetanus vaccine” to poor girls and women (and just poor girls and women) that contained human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG). For those who don’t want to delve into that, in short, it was a World Health Organization experiment; a test of a vaccine against pregnancy.”

After presenting an equation that included the number of people on the planet and CO2 emissions, Gates said, “Probably one of these numbers is going to get pretty near to zero.”

Global warming advocates never quite avoid the implication that the easiest solution to the "problem" of people's use of energy and resources is to elimate future people, instead of welcoming people who through innovation, solve more "problems" than they cause.