1. The Duplicative Home Reduction Act.  It’s a dirty little secret, but many Americans own more than own home (this is a bipartisan phenomenon, and some of the second homes are as far away as Ireland where Sen. Chris Dodd even had one!).  How can we allow this?  The carbon footprint of these multiple dwellings is more like a carbon centipede, and imagine the carbon spew it takes to fly between them.  The DHRA would end the tax deductibility of mortgage interest on the second home, phasing out in year five to a ban on ownership of any second residence.  We could even limit mortgage deductibility now to the home that has the smaller footprint.  Think globally, yes, but live locally.
2. The TransFat Anti-Twinkie (TFAT) Tax.  Yes, chips can fall where they may, but some of the tastier varieties make for very overweight and unhealthy people.  Obesity can and must be made taxable.  Any exchange of fatty foods between adults weighing over 126 pounds (scales can be erected on sidewalks and in shopping malls and made mandatory for passersby, as we do for tractor trailers on the interstate) should be subject to a 25% excise tax.  As a back-up measure, we can tax obesity directly.  The more deposits, the more deposits.
3. The Depopulation Acceleration Act, aka Gates-Buffett-Soros Neighborhood Desertification Plan. Let’s face facts: What good is a tax credit that gives parents $1,000 off their federal income bill for each qualifying child?  The DAA would limit the number of qualifying children to three fewer than the number each family actually has, with a maximum of four qualifying children.  Legislators may then not notice that the GBS NDP is a one-child per family credit!  As a gesture of compassion, the credit will not be refundable to the government for families with mathematically negative numbers of children.
4. The Windmill Proliferation Act. With a suitable exemption for the Kennedy Compound in town of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the WPA will require each U.S. residence to have a windmill projecting from its roof by 2015.  The windmill will be used to power a solar panel which will be used to power the battery on the cell phone each family will be required to have in order to respond to text message alerts on healthy living from the White House.
5. The Super-Light Car Crash Indemnification Act. This legislation will award $100,000 to every family that waives its right to sue over the death of any of its members in an automobile less than 1,000 pounds (passenger weight excluded) that is purchased from GM (Government Motors) and utterly destroyed in what used to be known as a fender-bender on a U.S. interstate.
6. The Tinpot Dictator Recognition Act. This law will render automatic U.S. diplomatic recognition of any dictator seeking to join an international organization formerly premised on democratic processes and create, as a matter of U.S. policy, advance support for unilateral executive actions to abolish presidential term limits in foreign countries.  This will require a side amendment to the Unitary Executive Criticism Act of 2010.
7. The Government Contracting Abolition and Enduring Bureau Act. In order to assist in and expedite the permanent expansion of government, contracting out of government services for any temporary purpose shall be suspended until further notice.
8. The Environmental Reparations Act. Polar bears, snail darters, and wolves have suffered greatly at human hands.  Preserving habitat and achieving animate equality are no longer enough.  The ERA will distribute cash endowments to the surviving members of schools and packs affected by direct (e.g., bow and arrow) and indirect (global warming) human interference.
9. The Media Management and Cooperation Act. This law will elevate the Fairness Doctrine to a statutory requirement and create media equality by obligating all future radio and television broadcasts to emanate daily from the White House.  To further ease the information overload on viewers, only the answers to questions from qualified reporters will be shown.  Viewers will be encouraged to infer the questions from the answers given.

This glimpse of the future is offered as a public service with the understanding that the actual text of the bills will not be available unti1 20 years after their enactment by the totally transparent Democratic Congress expected in the year 2013.

As The Washington Post notes this morning, Latin American caudillos are no novelty, but the silence of the United States (i.e., the Obama administration) in the face of such repression is a first.  Not a first, but similarly worrisome, is the news that Nancy Pelosi, fresh from accusing the C.I.A. of lying to Congress in private briefings, is off to Beijing with nary a word prior to her trip of criticism of China’s abusive human rights practices.  Time was, U.S. Democrats like former Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) were among the leaders of efforts to hold the Chinese accountable for their abuses of workers, and other Democrats spoke of Chinese denial of religious freedom and its record of forced abortion and sterilization.  Pelosi instead wants to engage the oligarchs in Beijing only on climate change.   But it is the climate for political freedom that is turning adverse.

Without doubt, Obama was eloquent, charming, and seemingly at ease.  He had the advantage (a faculty and administration behind him, and the media framing it as the man of reason versus the rabble in the street, with, obligingly, Randall Terry performing that role as if on cue), and he seemed once again to know it.  The students, who prepare for this day with years of labor and the love (and labor and cash) of their families behind them, were respectful and, as students tend to be around our rock-star President, wowed by his skill with words, his symbolic meaning in transcending our historic racial divide, and his graceful humor.

As for his speech, it was un-Barackesque in one sense – he came down from Olympus, where pay grades are seldom referred to at all, and made it plain that on the issue of human life, he does in fact disagree with those who stand for its sanctity.   But he was Barackesque in striving to minimize those differences, in implying that there is “demonization” of opponents afoot (not from him, of course, just unnamed others), and suggesting that, to borrow an irritating catchphrase from a recent era in U.S. Catholic politics, he is all about “dialogue” with those who disagree with him.

There is the rub.  Obama is a man of many mellifluous words, but he is also a man of many unambiguous actions, and every action he has taken to date has been a forthright dismantling of the culture of life and the wall of separation that has existed between taxpayers and abortion.  A complete list would include all of his key personnel in White House domestic policy, HHS, State and the Justice Department.  His policy enactments include rescinding the Mexico City policy that kept the international abortion industry out of the federal Treasury, rescinding the Bush conscience regulations designed to protect medical and health research personnel from having to participate in or facilitate abortion, eliminating all but a smidgeon of abstinence funding for the pregnancy centers that deal directly with women in need, lifting the ban on the use of District of Columbia funds to pay for abortion in his proposed budget, providing federal funding for experiments that rely on killing embryonic humans in fertility clients, and sending Planned Parenthood an additional $10 million federal love note, matching what they spent to elect him last year.

The President’s efforts to spur “dialogue” involve a low-level White House meeting where groups — including, for the record, FRC — are asked to come in and help craft a plan to “reduce the need for abortion.”  To be credible, that plan would have to begin with reversing every decision Obama has made on abortion to date.  But note the phraseology, which suggests a fundamental disagreement.  Who speaks of a “need for child abuse”?  Or a need for white collar crime?  Or a need for bribery of public officials?  If there is a need for something, just how wrong is it?  Planned Parenthood and its allies secured this language in the Democratic Platform last year because they did not want any suggestion from their party that the act of abortion is a moral wrong.  But if it is not a moral wrong, then it is hardly something that needs to be reduced, particularly if, as Planned Parenthood insists, it is physically safe and negligible in its mental health implications.

President Obama and his administration have extraordinary message discipline when it comes to these matters.  That discipline will be on display again soon in the health care debate when the Democrats on the Hill insist that they are deferring that question to some other body (likely an HHS commission that will likewise pronounce itself for “dialogue”) for resolution.  Is there any chance that an Obama-endorsed, government-financed health plan will exclude abortion and taxpayer participation in it?  As a state legislator, Obama stood out as a man so concerned about protecting abortion in all circumstances that he led opposed laws to provide care for infants who survive the procedure.

Yesterday Notre Dame gave a high honor to such a man.  He spoke eloquently.  But the Jesuit fathers who taught me in high school and even a few of the Holy Cross priests who taught me at Notre Dame impressed on me to pay attention to what men do, not just what they say.  They cited the Good Book on knowing people by their fruits.  With Obama, that begins with what is being done to the fruit of the womb.

Among values voters, fully 30 percent of the electorate, McCain won 65 percent to 32 percent, or by two to one.

What these numbers demonstrate is that liberals and neocons instructing the GOP to dump the social, moral and cultural issues are counseling Republicide. When African-Americans, who gave McCain 4 percent of their votes in California, gave Proposition 8, prohibiting gay marriage, 70 percent of their votes, why would the GOP give up one of its trump cards — not only in Middle America but among minorities?

A conservative who could have sharpened the social, moral and cultural differences might, from the exit polls, have done far better.

McCain’s diffidence on life, affirmative action and gay rights, his embrace of amnesty and NAFTA, all help explain the enthusiasm gap.

As we know all too well, the GOP is all too prone to dumping trump cards. Buchanan calls this tendency “Republicide.” It could be taken as referring both to the GOP and the future of the Republic. The latter deserves the first priority. Will the GOP be part of it — and will conservative Democrats make the same commitment? If they are listening to voters, yes.

President Obama also suggested that some (unspecified) Americans need Supreme Court judges who will use their empathy to assure that they feel “welcome in their own nation.” Is Obama referring to judges who will enforce duly enacted civil rights laws? To homosexual couples desiring to “marry” and have the U.S. Constitution traduced to their cause? To Mormons and Christians who are being assaulted in their churches or on the street for their participation in our democracy? To legal immigrants? Illegal immigrants?

In the realm of feeling, any answer is possible. But in the realm of leftwing jurisprudence, only one answer to each of these questions is likely. The empathy that matters is in the eye of the office-holder.

What is becoming of this nation if it is not the puppeteering of what should be an economy of risk and reward where, with reasonable regulation for health, consumer disclosure, and mitigation of monopolies, the government steps back and allows customers and investors to act on opportunity and react to failure? The greed of some private sector actors is real enough, but the umbrage of many political actors rings hollow. Can we recover the bonuses paid to executives who could not keep their businesses profitable? Why, government has made unprofitability the test of whether certain businesses, like certain mortgagees, get aid.

Here is a simpler idea: anyone who receives government bailout aid, direct or indirect, or benefits from a no-bid government contract of any kind, forfeits their right as individuals to donate to federal political campaigns for a period of five years. That would have some genuine impact on this Kabuki cycle

It’s time to send out a call for the dinghies, the tugboats, the fishing trawlers — anything that floats or may float — and make it clear that in its lurch toward the Culture of Death the Obama Administration will be unable to dragoon people of conscience into their ranks or drum them out of their professions. The purest joy of an evildoer is to draw others — especially people of highest character – into their work and thereby drain their moral capital and sully their reputations. All this is happening because the evidence suggests that the ranks of medical personnel committed to abortion as their stock-and-trade is small and, shall we say, not drawn from the elites of the profession. In communities from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Midland, Texas, the local abortionist is a drive-by doc, who visits for the day to conduct his ministrations of destruction upon the population. The dearth of death-dealers makes the crushing of conscience a social value for the Left.

Moreover, it is a sign of their own bad conscience. If so many good people will not perform abortions or hesitate to thrust a cycle of pills at a 15-year-old girl who really needs a wise adult offering her a better way than feeling compelled to submit to sexual exploitation by a boyfriend or adult man, then maybe, just maybe, there is something amiss with those health personnel who seem to hesitate at nothing. For the pro-life community right now, a Mrs. Miniver moment is the right thing. We’ve long upheld the rose as our symbol. Let’s go down to the sea in ships.

In the polarized lens of the Left, this permanent enemy as evoked by conservatives was the war on terror. For the new cultural Left now in power, the “enemy” is capital and the imminent crisis or “catastrophe” is economic disaster. There are many ways to get to overweening government control. In one scene late in 1984 between Orwell’s hero, Winston, and his nemesis in “the Party,” O’Brien (English novelists always liked Irish-surnamed villains), this exchange occurs:

Winston: “But how can you [the Party] control matter? You don’t even control the climate or the law of gravity? And there are disease, pain, death . . . “

O’Brien silenced him with a movement of the hand. “We control matter because we control the mind.”

Today’s champions of unlimited government, oddly enough, do claim they can control the climate and they have plenty of access to young minds, which begs the question, if government could control the climate, would one wish it to?

As you can see regarding the adoption referrals, you can hardly see the adoption referrals. The bright yellow line that crawls along the x axis of the graph is Planned Parenthood’s minuscule involvement in this life-giving option. Roughly 120 babies die in their perimeter for every one that gets a chance at adoption placement. Families are unplanned, not formed, through this agency.