It’s Tuesday, February 7th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

First up, a scathing but, as far as we can tell, accurate indictment of the surprise expressed by America’s Catholic hierarchy at having awakened with fleas after spending over 30 years lying with dogs; Christopher Badeaux writing in RedState.com, courtesy of Tim Lester:

Excommunicate the Bishops

 

Most of my writing is on foreign policy. There are few other topic areas other than the law on which I’m comfortable writing. However, as streiff [a blogger] notes, I, like most other Catholics, got to hear a heartfelt letter from my Bishop — a living examplar of St. John Chrysostom’s famous (possibly apocryphal) maxim — explaining that clear out of nowhere, somehow, the Obama Administration decided to make Catholic institutions pay for abortifacents, birth control, and sterilization procedures, all of which are actually explicitly mortal sins in my faith, which is to say, one can be in danger of Hell merely for helping to provide them.

As Sts. Nicholas and Chrysostom would not, in their unenlightened days, have likely had warm feelings for His Excellency, it is perhaps incumbent upon me to note that my Bishop neglected a few details in the sermon he had our deacon read aloud. His Excellency was absolutely silent on the possible election of a man who actively defended the post-uterine execution of neonatal infants, (As were many Protestant “religious leaders” who couldn’t recognize evil if it bit them in the arse.) which I ascribe to moral laziness and cowardice, though it may have been instead interest in funding a short lived billboard campaign in Atlanta extolling Catholics who believe him and the Pope evil to come on back for a quick round of communion. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a self-professing Catholic who is one of the most ardent defenders of the abortion license in our country. Obamacare was passed through the good offices of numerous nominally-Catholic Senators and Representatives, despite warnings from Catholic groups (such as the Knights of Columbus, who fought tooth and nail) and without so much as a peep of the same from our esteemed Bishops, that maybe, just maybe, the Obama Administration might be vaguely interested in making free abortion on demand and contraceptives available to all, conscience exceptions be damned.

No pun.

Instead, in that pastoral letter, there was a general note that this was bad, and we should all be aware of it. In the background, I believe I heard someone dropping bread into a bowl of milk. I may have also heard someone washing his hands before a condemned man, but I’m not sure about that.

Back when there was a New Ledger, I wrote a now long-forgotten piece excoriating the Bishops in this country for complicity in its passage, for not speaking up, for not excommunicating the public officials who actively fight for the abortion license despite the infallible teachings of our Church — and by extension, for enabling a culture of license that enables the Culture of Death. (Piece stolen here; (And is well worth reading) TNL no longer publishes essays.)

I stand by every word, and would like to add a few things. Let me start with the most basic one.

You can all, each of you, and I say this after a week of prayerful meditation and with all of the respect I can give, go straight to the darkest pit in the lowest valley of the Ninth Layer of Hell and burn there. 

It was easy to sell out the unborn, wasn’t it? To just wish away an infallible teaching that — let’s be honest — has been such a headache since a Catholic Supreme Court Justice helped its mass breaking, and Catholic Democrats abandoned everything else to protect that breach, right? To let others commit a sin that our Church treats as so grave that it incurs the automatic sanction of excommunication? All in return for a goal you’ve shared with your Democrat masters since the 1940s — a chance to drive healthcare costs through the roof with the fig leaf of social caring. All so you could work with the sorts of people who are elected to office by publicly calling you theocrats and misogynists for more-or-less upholding the two-thousand-year-old Tradition of our Church.

Thirty pieces of silver must buy one Hell of a lot more for you than it does for me.

Who among you has stepped forward to say, Whoops! Or, We are infallible on matters of faith expressed through the Tradition or through an ecumenical Council, but we can err on policy, and hoo-boy, did we blow this one. Who among you spoke out last week and said, Attention my flock: I must now inform you that the Democratic Party has proven once and for all that if you vote for a Democrat in this country, you engage in material cooperation with evil. We will now be holding weekly mass Confession to handle the backlog until it clears.

Because that is truth. In 2009 and 2010, nominally faithful Catholics who value all of the policy choices you do — labor unions, forced charity, high rates of taxation, urban ghettoes, and of course, universal “health care” — and who claimed to be ardent defenders of the unborn sold out to a one, sacrificed millions of babies and betrayed the infallible teaching of their faith so they could get one gigantic step closer to the social justice you so crave.

And for that, for that moment when they put aside their baptismal and confirmation vows, repeated every Easter, and their recitation of whatever version of the Nicene Creed you’ve settled on this week, your response was … applause. Silence. Satisfaction. A professed willingness to work with the Administration.

You made all of this possible. For almost my entire life, you have given my fellow Catholics every reason to believe they can freely sin, and hey, no problem, so long as they favor higher taxation and government spending. They can murder the unborn, and I have had all of two homilies, two, in my entire time as a Catholic, which is to say from birth and for the thirty-five years after, in parishes and dioceses across the country, in which a priest has said, If you have had, caused, or aided in obtaining an abortion, and you take communion today, you will go to Hell. You look out into your emptying pews, terrified of the wood you see and the flesh you don’t, through families of one, two, or sometimes amazingly three children, and think, Well, at least they’re still coming, as if you do not understand the connection between these things.

In the wake of the sex abuse scandal, I got to hear read to me and my wife and small baby a heartfelt letter from a bishop not even in office when the terrible events at issue took place, making a sincere apology. In 2006, I got to get lectured at Easter about the importance of having lots of illegal immigrants in our country, from the same Bishop who told me last week he’s kinda confused about what happened with this whole Obama thing. As a child, the only time I read of the bishops taking a unified stand was on the evil of Ronald Reagan attempting to dismantle the greatest threat Christianity has known since the height of the Ottoman Empire.

While I’m to the left of many of the readers and writers here on the issue of illegal immigration and how to resolve it, I’m struck by the fact that my Church seems to care more about defending the right to stay here of people whose first act on entering this country is to break its laws — a right not dogmatically defined by my faith — and on the evil of producing nuclear weapons than what it by its very teaching describes as the slaughter of one million innocent babies year in and year out. I am utterly appalled to realize that they are either too gullible, too cowardly, too stupid, or too dishonest with themselves and others to realize that if they tell Catholics that abortion can be traded off for more social welfare, a significant number of Catholics will make that trade, today, now, this instant.

You have materially cooperated with evil, and I have yet to hear mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. (Try the older Confiteor if you prefer: I confess to Almighty God, and to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault. In my thoughts, and in my words; in what I have done, and what I have failed to do.)

You are abetting scandal. You are aiding in the all-but-literal poisoning of political discourse in this country.

And you are lying. You are lying by your words, by your acts, by your omissions. Whatever your rationales, you hide from the truth of what has been before you for forty years, and you aid in that deception to your flock.

And the net result is that you now need to either (1) give in; (2) dump all of your employees into public healthcare (a double win, right?); or (3) disband. Given how you acted when Mitt Romney’s reign in Massachusetts forced you into the same corner, I fully expect (1). Heck, if you can provide abortifacents and prophylactics in New England, why not in Arizona?

In a purer time, you would have been haled before an Ecumenical Council and been required to give an account of yourself, or been summarily excommunicated on the spot. In an emergency, the Pope would do this thing.

I was born into the Faith. I was confirmed before my twelfth birthday. I nearly applied to seminary twice. I married in the Church. I am raising my many-more-than-two-children in the Faith. And every time I see something like this come down the pike, complete with passive-voice verbs and hand washing everywhere, the only things keeping me from joining one of the Orthodox Churches are my dislike of incense, my desire to avoid being as dim as poor Donatist Rod Dreher, and my firm belief that the Church teaches Truth, even though its princes are men by genetics only.

But as you now reap what you have sown for twice my lifetime, I say, with all the charity I can muster, that you can rot.

And as detailed in this related item courtesy of FOX News, Team Tick-Tock’s unconstitutional efforts to quash Freedom of Religion extends beyond the civilian population:

Army Silences Catholic Chaplains

 

The Obama administration has been accused of telling Catholic military chaplains what they can and cannot say from their pulpits after the Army ordered Catholic chaplains not to read a letter to parishioners from their archbishop.

The Secretary of the Army feared the letter could be viewed as a call for civil disobedience.

http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/army-silences-catholic-chaplains.html

We’re left to assume the Army’s idiotically blind commitment to diversity….

 

….only applies to homosexuals and Muslims.  And make no mistake about it: this policy is authored at the highest level of the Military chain of command.

Meanwhile, the WSJ‘s William McGurn rings the bell for….

Obama and the ‘Bitter’ Clingers—Round Two

Where’s Catholic Joe Biden on the contraception mandate?

 

Whatever else the controversial new contraceptive mandate may have done, already it has achieved the unthinkable: Joe Biden is now as silent and reclusive as a Trappist monk.

Mr. Biden, of course, occupies a historic place as our first Catholic vice president and the country’s most prominent Catholic layman. Never before has he been shy about talking about his faith. (Though for The Dear Leader, at least prior to his betrayal of American Catholics, his faith was terribly private and personal!) So it tells you something that two weeks after the Department of Health and Human Services issued this new rule, Mr. Biden has apparently taken a vow of silence.

Mr. Biden knows that he has been left with nothing to say. He knows that beyond the problem of requiring Catholic institutions to provide free health coverage for contraceptive and sterilization services, his president has furthered the impression that the Obama administration is at war with the Catholic Church. (Wrong!  Team Tick-Tock is at war with Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity and Judaism.)

No doubt the vice president also appreciates the potential electoral consequences. Catholics went for Mr. Obama in the 2008 elections, at least partly because of a candidate who professed to be welcoming to people of faith in a way no Democrat had been in decades. Now Mr. Obama faces a much more skeptical Catholic public—which happens to be concentrated in key battleground states such as Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin.

How could the administration so miscalculate the fallout from its action? At the political level, they assumed that the bishops are not popular, that American Catholics do not follow their church’s teaching on contraception, and that contraception is far less controversial than abortion.

On all this, they were right. The difference is that abortion does not affect the way the president of Notre Dame, the bishop of Peoria, or the head of Catholic Charities runs his organization. The mandate does.

Take Catholic Charities, America’s largest private network of social service organizations. Assuming its 70,000 employees have some kind of health insurance, a principled decision not to comply with the mandate would mean $140 million a year in fines alone (plus higher costs to help employees buy insurance individually). That means millions less for struggling families, for refugees, for the sick and elderly and for other needy Americans who benefit from their good works.

Yes, the organization and reach of Catholic social-welfare institutions mean that Catholic groups will be more directly and more disproportionately affected. Yet this is far more than a “Catholic” issue. At a minimum, it means higher taxes and less efficiency for all if the government picks up the slack.

The Founders did not intend the federal government to be limited only by law. They also wanted it limited by a public square thick with private social institutions. The American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks notes that more than half of all the civic institutions in American life have a religious purpose or affiliation—and that our liberty is linked to theirs.

That’s what Mr. Obama’s own appointee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, meant in the recent Supreme Court case (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC) about religious liberty. There she wrote that “religious bodies have been the pre-eminent example” of what an earlier court called “critical buffers between the individual and the power of the State.'”

That speaks to the real end game of the Obama project. In a recent Web post for National Review, Yuval Levin sums up what it means to drive religious life in America into Amish-like enclaves: “In this arena, as in a great many others, the administration is clearly determined to see civil society as merely an extension of the state, and to clear out civil society—clearing out the mediating layers between the individual and the state—when it seems to stand in the way of achieving the president’s agenda. The idea is to leave as few non-individual players as possible in the private sphere, and to turn those few that are left into agents of the government.”

So the harsh winds of modern American liberalism blow through the civic landscape. The Boy Scouts are deemed a “religious organization” to evict them from a San Diego public park they had beautifully maintained for a half-century. Catholic welfare agencies are pushed out of the adoption business because they will not place babies with gay couples. And in their public pronouncements, senior administration officials, including the president and the secretary of state, tend to speak of “the freedom to worship” instead of a much broader “freedom of religion.”

At last week’s National Prayer Breakfast, the president harkened back to his 2008 script, talking up how his own faith informs his public decisions. What people see these days, however, is the candidate who derided small-town Americans as “bitter” people clinging “to guns or religion.”

Turns out he was more correct than he knew. Except that what these Americans are clinging to might better be described as the Second and First Amendments.

Thus Roman Catholics, once the innocent victims of mindless bigotry and hatred Jesse Jackson’s only experienced in his dreams, may well hold in their hands the future of the Republic as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

Speaking of mindless haters, they’re the subject of today’s “MSM Bias….WHAT Bias?!?” segment, as the New York Times‘ Ross Douthat reports on….

The Media’s Abortion Blinders

 

In the most recent Gallup poll on abortion, as many Americans described themselves as pro-life as called themselves pro-choice. A combined 58 percent of Americans stated that abortion should either be “illegal in all circumstances” or “legal in only a few circumstances.” These results do not vary appreciably by gender: in the first Gallup poll to show a slight pro-life majority, conducted in May 2009, half of American women described themselves as pro-life.

But if you’ve followed the media frenzy surrounding the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s decision — which it backpedaled from, with an apology, after a wave of frankly brutal coverage — to discontinue about $700,000 in funding for Planned Parenthood, you would think all these millions of anti-abortion Americans simply do not exist.

From the nightly news shows to print and online media, the coverage’s tone alternated between wonder and outrage — wonder that anyone could possibly find Planned Parenthood even remotely controversial and outrage that the Komen foundation had “politicized” the cause of women’s health.

“That ubiquitous pink ribbon … is sporting a black eye today,” Claire Shipman announced on ABC News Thursday, while Diane Sawyer nodded along. On MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell dressed down the Komen foundation’s founder, Nancy Brinker: “I have to tell you,” Mitchell said, “this is shocking to a lot of your longtime supporters. … How could this have taken place?” In story after story, journalists explicitly passed judgment on Komen for creating a controversy where none need ever have existed.

Conservative complaints about media bias are sometimes overdrawn. But on the abortion issue, the press’s prejudices are often absolute, its biases blatant and its blinders impenetrable. In many (Not many, MOST!) newsrooms and television studios across the country, Planned Parenthood is regarded as the equivalent of, well, the Komen foundation: an apolitical, high-minded and humanitarian institution whose work no rational person — and certainly no self-respecting woman — could possibly question or oppose.

But of course millions of Americans — including, yes, millions of American women — do oppose Planned Parenthood. They oppose the 300,000-plus abortions it performs every year (making it the largest abortion provider in the country), and they oppose its tireless opposition to even modest limits on abortion.

It’s true that abortion is only one of the services Planned Parenthood provides. (Although mammograms, it should be noted, are not necessarily among them: the group usually provides referrals, but not the mammogram itself, which is one of the reasons Komen’s founder had cited for discontinuing the grant.) But abortion is hardly an itty-bitty and purely tangential aspect of its mission, as many credulous journalists have implied.

Planned Parenthood likes to claim that abortion accounts for just 3 percent of its services, for instance, and this statistic has been endlessly recycled in the press. But the percentage of the group’s clients who received an abortion is probably closer to 1 in 10, and Planned Parenthood’s critics have estimated, plausibly, that between 30 and 40 percent of its health center revenue is from abortion.

By way of comparison, the organization also refers pregnant women for adoption. In 2010, this happened 841 times, against 329,445 abortions.

For the minority of Americans who have no moral qualms about using surgery or chemicals to put an end to a growing embryo or fetus, there should be nothing troubling in these numbers. And if you think abortion rights are more important to female health and flourishing than the nearly $2 billion the pink ribbon has raised for breast cancer research, Komen deserved your scorn and Planned Parenthood deserves your donations.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg just pledged $250,000 to Planned Parenthood; that’s obviously his right. Before Komen backtracked, the Yale School of Public Health said its invitation to Brinker to speak at commencement was “under careful review”; that’s certainly any school’s prerogative.

But reporters have different obligations. Even if some forms of partiality are inevitable, journalists betray their calling when they simply ignore self-evident truths about a story.

Three truths, in particular, should be obvious to everyone reporting on the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. First, that the fight against breast cancer is unifying and completely uncontroversial, while the provision of abortion may be the most polarizing issue in the United States today. Second, that it’s no more “political” to disassociate oneself from the nation’s largest abortion provider than it is to associate with it in the first place. Third, that for every American who greeted Komen’s shift with “anger and outrage” (as Andrea Mitchell put it), there was probably an American who was relieved and gratified.

Indeed, that sense of relief was quantifiable: the day after the controversy broke, Komen reported that its daily donations had risen dramatically. But of course, you wouldn’t know that from most of the media coverage. After all, the people making those donations don’t exist.

You know….sorta like when….

 

Nothing to see here folks….move along.  MSM bias….WHAT bias?!?

And since we’re on the subject of those wearing blinders, Alana Goodman in CommentaryMagazine.com describes how the self-described professor of constitutional law has apparently finally read his subject matter:

No, Obama Hasn’t “Gotten Better With Time”

 

It’s easy for conservatives to get disappointed when looking at the mess of a GOP field. But then you hear interviews like this one, and think, maybe, just maybe, there’s a glimmer of hope for Republicans:

In a TODAY exclusive, Matt Lauer asked Obama about his supporters’ disappointment over his first-term performance — that they believe he hasn’t been “the transformational political figure they hoped you would be.”

“What’s frustrated people is that I have not be able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008,” he said. “That’s just the nature of being president,” he said. “It turns out that our founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes.

“What I’m going to just keep on doing is plodding away, very persistent. And you know what? One of the things about being president is you get better as time goes on.”

Have things really gotten so bad for Obama that he’s been forced to campaign on the “Just give me a few more years, I’m starting to get the hang of this” platform? 

The worst part about it is it’s completely and utterly false. His only significant legislative accomplishments came early in his presidency, when Democrats still controlled both the House and Senate. The president hasn’t figured out how to work with House Republicans, and his relationship with Speaker Boehner has only deteriorated over time. After the next 10 months, which Obama will spend campaigning against the “do-nothing Congress,” does anybody really expect the ice to melt if he wins a second term?

Obama’s apologia to his disillusioned supporters is “it’s not me, it’s the broken Washington system.” The problem is, that’s the same “broken system” these voters sent him to Washington to fix back in 2008. That excuse won’t cut it.

What’s frustrating Obama supporters isn’t that he hasn’t been able to “force Congress to implement every aspect of what [he] said in 2008.” Nobody ever expected him to “force” Congress to do anything. He was elected based on his brand as a “consensus-builder” and a “post-partisan” – his plan was to persuade, not to coerce. That wasn’t particularly difficult to do back when the people he had to win over were members of his own party. But when the public rejected Obama’s policies and handed the House over to Republicans, his great powers of persuasion were rendered shockingly ineffective. And no, the president hasn’t gotten any better at it.

And The Dear Leader has exactly ZERO chance of improving his performance given a hundred years, let alone a mere four more.

In a related item, Michael Barone suggests a large part of The Obamao’s inability to grasp the finer points of governance is he’s a….

Box-checking Obama in a Liberal Cocoon

 

It’s unusual when a reporter sympathetic to a politician writes a story that makes his subject look bad. But Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker has now done this twice. The first time was in an article last April on Obama’s foreign policy in which he quoted a “top aide” (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon? It sounds like him) saying that the president was “leading from behind” on Libya. Not what most Americans expect their presidents to do. (Though we’re becoming accustomed to it!)

Now, in an article based on leaked White House memos marked up by Obama, Lizza has done it again. Contrarian liberal blogger Mickey Kaus sums it up: “The president’s decision-making method — at least as described in this piece — seems to consist of mainly checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him.”

A $60 billion cut in the stimulus package? “OK.” Use the reconciliation process to pass the health care bill? A checkmark in the box labeled “yes.” Include medical malpractice reform in the health care bill? The man who as an Illinois legislator often voted “present” writes, “We should explore it.”

According to Lizza, Obama prefers getting information and making decisions by staying up late and reading memos rather than meeting with people — a temperament that’s a liability because face time with the president is one of his major sources of political capital.

Lizza’s reporting undercuts the stated thesis of his article: that Obama sought to bring bipartisan governance to Washington, but was foiled by Republicans’ partisan intransigence. Evidence that Obama ever seriously considered Republican approaches is minimal in the New Yorker article. The alternatives Lizza describes Obama as considering are for even more spending and government control, such as a much bigger stimulus package.

He mentions just in passing that Obama “had decided to pursue health care reform” as well as the stimulus package — a choice that inevitably made bipartisanship harder to achieve.

At one point Lizza does quote Obama writing on a memo, “Have we looked at any of the other GOP recommendations (e.g., Paul Ryan’s) to see if they make any sense?” Another president might have looked at Ryan’s proposals himself or might even have called him on the phone. George W. Bush, in contrast, worked with Democrats — and sometimes even talked with them — on his education plan, his tax cuts and the Iraq War resolution. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate with them on Social Security.

And on Obama’s failure to reach a “go big” budget agreement with House Speaker John Boehner last summer, Lizza presents only the White House talking point: “conservative colleagues rebelled, and Boehner withdrew.” He doesn’t mention Republican claims that Obama upped the ante, demanding more tax increases.

Lizza’s White House sources apparently didn’t leak any memos about some of Obama’s more recent actions, but his article provides a jumping off place for understanding them. As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to. His personal interactions are limited to his liberal Democratic staff — and to the rich liberals he meets at his frequent fundraising events. He has held more of these than George W. Bush, who in turn held more than Bill Clinton.

Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements. Obama says he wants more jobs and to reduce American dependence on oil from unfriendly foreign sources. The pipeline would do both, and is endorsed by labor unions. But Robert Redford doesn’t like Canadian tar sands oil. Case closed.

The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities’ health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths. Catholic bishops responded predictably (But belatedly!) by requiring priests to read letters opposing the policy. Who’s on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else.

Obama fundraising seems to be lagging behind its $1 billion goal, and Democrats fear Republicans are closing the fundraising gap. So Obama seems to be concentrating on meeting the demands of rich liberals he spends so much time with.

The Obamao’s ideological isolation should come as no surprise.

After all, it’s simply in keeping with modern Liberalism’s refusal to countenance any concept or idea which threatens their reality, as exemplified by Manhattan Marxist maven Pauline Kael’s response to Nixon’s triumph over McGovern, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

This exemplifies the most significant difference between the Right and Left: Conservatives at least have the courtesy to familiarize themselves with the principles of Progressivism….enough to understand they’ll never work!

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy today of Carl Polizzi, Henry Percy, writing in American Thinker, details how spendthrift Socialists cannot see the forest for the wind turbines, as they insist on….

Bringing Electricity to an Indian Hogan

 

Would you spend $60,000 to install solar generating equipment on an Indian hogan?  I, and all those who pay their bills to my local utility, have.  A great success, no?  Then imagine that, days after turning on the lights, the volunteers on the project discover that the dwelling is built of railroad ties, which are impregnated with creosote, a known carcinogen, and so the hut must be condemned.  Would you consider that a well-run program worthy of being continued?  Of course you would  —  to end the program would be mean-spirited.  Besides, someone else is paying the bills.

This tragicomic waste centers on Paula Curtis, a single mother of three living on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona.  Look at what the journalist emphasizes in enumerating the stark privations the Curtis family suffers through without electricity:

The children liked to stay with their friends or grandparents, where they could watch movies and plug in their video games. They had a small, battery-powered DVD player, but the batteries often died mid-movie.

The children spent a lot of time reading, and when it was dark, it meant bedtime. On weekends, they stayed up playing board games by the dim light of a kerosene lantern.

That sounds like a description of the way my father grew up — only without the movies and video games and DVD player.

Paula Curtis cuts hair in Flagstaff, but she cannot live there:

“They try to get me to move to town,” she said. “But I can’t afford to move to town. And I don’t like living close to people. I can’t live in an apartment or a trailer court. I can’t see my neighbors looking at me.”

In other words, she chooses not to live in town lest her neighbors look at her.  Fair enough.  But apparently, in twenty-first-century America, there should be no tradeoffs for the choices people make about where they live.  Or at least some people — I know many who have cabins in the north country, and no one has come forward to build solar panels for them.  So because Paula chooses not to live where electricity is available, electricity must be brought to her.  Enter a community activist:

Elsa Johnson, a Navajo woman who lives in Scottsdale, is passionate about bringing solar power to the rural Navajo Reservation with her Plateau Solar Project.

Whenever I hear that some politician or community organizer is “passionate,” I want to vomit.  The word is always used as a self-evident compliment to close off further discussion.  What need to examine motives or methods or results?  The subject is passionate!  Yay!  So was Charles Manson.  And Son of Sam.  And Pol Pot.  Whenever passion appears, be assured that hokum and demagoguery cannot be far behind.

I have no idea if Elsa Johnson lives in a gated community like a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, but Scottsdale is not exactly a downscale town.  If you have a strong stomach, you can listen to Progressive Radio Network interview Ms. Johnson “with hard-hitting questions and a keen understanding of our planet’s interconnecting social and economic fabric,” but somehow my guess is that those “hard-hitting questions” do not delve into her own lifestyle (I’m guessing because my stomach is not that strong).

Her non-profit, Iina Solutions, launched the project to take advantage of the money available from utilities and the federal government to help Navajo residents power their homes.

 “To take advantage of the money available from utilities and the federal government.”  And how.  More follows:

She is partially driven by the irony that the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe are surrounded by coal-fired power plants that send their electricity to Phoenix, Tucson and other big cities but the people living on the reservations get little benefit beyond jobs at the coal mine and power plants.

Ironic indeed — ironic that Ryan Randazzo, author of the piece, can write “little benefit beyond jobs at the coal mine and power plants” without a sense of irony.  What would be a non-ironic benefit?  That everyone on the reservation receive free electricity?  Should all Seattleites receive free air transportation because Boeing manufactures jets nearby?  Should everyone in Detroit receive a free auto?  Such are the questions that Ryan Randazzo might contemplate in his quiet moments, might fruitfully explore while writing on a topic like this.

For the Curtis family project, “Iina Solutions tapped into money available from Salt River Project through a settlement with the Grand Canyon Trust environmental group.”  SRP is the electric utility I write a check to every month, so this was one of my settlements.  Somehow, ratepayers like me, who made possible Elsa Johnson’s folly, go unmentioned in the article.  We’re just the evil people to whom the electricity is sent.

The Grand Canyon Trust “awarded Iina Solutions money to put solar on the Curtis home, hoping it would serve as a demonstration project for more homes to use the same style of power building.”  Well, it has been a demonstration — of poor planning, ignorance, squandered resources, you name it.  But Grand Canyon Trust is doubling down on its losing bet with Iina Solutions, having approved them “to install solar-power units on 25 more Navajo homes with money from the power-plant settlement [payments from SRP to Grand Canyon Trust] and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”  So not just SRP ratepayers, but taxpayers from coast to coast get to participate in this folly.

But before they start, she needs to raise money for labor. Most of the labor for the Curtis home was donated. “I can’t keep asking for that,” she said. “Unemployment is over 50 percent up there. We need jobs.”

Ponder that last statement: unemployment on the Navajo Nation is 50 percent, yet it’s an insult to ask the idle to help bring power to a neighbor’s house.

Compared to the waste elsewhere in government, the foolishness of Grand Canyon Trust is peanuts.  But it is emblematic of what community organizations can accomplish possessed only of lofty idealism, smug self-righteousness, ignorance, incompetence, and other people’s money.

Liberals: as predicted in Romans 1:22!

On the Lighter Side….

Then there’s these from Chris Giberson….

Finally, we’ll call it a day with the “Your Tax Dollars At Work” segment, courtesy of James Taranto and the once-Golden State:

“In an extremely unusual use of taxpayer money, the leaders behind California’s $99 billion high-speed train quietly hired a lobbyist to sway the Legislature–the same politicians who appointed them to build the project in the first place,” reports the San Jose Mercury News:

Documents filed this week show the California High-Speed Rail Authority last year paid $161,103 to one of the country’s biggest public relations firms to lobby the state’s politicians as they consider spending $2.7 billion to launch the polarizing bullet train project.

ail officials paid the lobbyists by issuing debt that will total about $300,000 with interest. It must be paid back through California’s impoverished general fund budget.

The paper notes that “experts, lawmakers and legislative staffers could not remember a major state agency tapping state funds to lobby other members of the state government.” But if it succeeds, what a bargain: They spend $300,000 to get $2.7 billion, a return of 899,900%. If they manage to pull it off, the federal government should look into this as a way of solving the entitlement crisis.

Sorta like robbing Peter to pay Paul….except Peter stole his money from John Q. Public in the first place!

Magoo