Catholic bishops are still meeting in Baltimore and the discussions are getting heated about the lack of backbone on the issue of life by too many of their number. A new statement will be drafted under the leadership of the Archbishop of Chicago George, who has been outspoken in his condemnation of the "intrinsic evil" of abortion and of Catholic politicians who are pro-abortion. There was unanimity in aggressively opposing Obama's extreme pro-abortion agenda.

Obama backs Planned Parenthood's Freedom of Choice Act (H.R. 1964) which, among other things, would force Catholic hospitals and doctors to perform abortions or lose federal funds. Bishops vowed hospitals would close rather than comply; Catholic hospitals are roughly one-third of all U.S. hospitals, so their closure would be a disaster for the country's health care network.

Catholic Bishops Vow to Confront Obama Administration Over Abortion
AP
Tuesday, November 11, 2008

BALTIMORE -- The nation's Roman Catholic bishops vowed Tuesday to forcefully confront the Obama administration over its support for abortion rights, saying the church and religious freedom could be under attack in the new presidential administration.

In an impassioned discussion on Catholics in public life, several bishops said they would accept no compromise on abortion policy. Many condemned Catholics who had argued it was morally acceptable to back President-elect Obama because he pledged to reduce abortion rates.

And several prelates promised to call out Catholic policy makers on their failures to follow church teaching. Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pa., singled out Vice President-elect Biden, a Catholic, Scranton native who supports abortion rights.

"I cannot have a vice president-elect coming to Scranton to say he's learned his values there when those values are utterly against the teachings of the Catholic Church," Martino said. The Obama-Biden press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Archbishop Joseph Naumann of the Diocese of Kansas City in Kansas said politicians "can't check your principles at the door of the legislature."

Naumann has said repeatedly that Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic Democrat who supports abortion rights, should stop taking Holy Communion until she changes her stance.

"They cannot call themselves Catholic when they violate such a core belief as the dignity of the unborn," Naumann said Tuesday.

The discussion occurred on the same day the bishops approved a new "Blessing of a Child in the Womb." The prayer seeks a healthy pregnancy for the mother and makes a plea that "our civic rulers" perform their duties "while respecting the gift of human life."

Chicago Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is preparing a statement during the bishops' fall meeting that will press Obama on abortion.

The bishops suggested that the final document include the message that "aggressively pro-abortion policies" would be viewed "as an attack on the church."

Along with their theological opposition to the procedure, church leaders say they worry that any expansion in abortion rights could require Catholic hospitals to perform abortions or lose federal funding. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Chicago said the hospitals would close rather than comply.

During the campaign, many prelates had spoken out on abortion more boldly than they had in 2004, telling Catholic politicians and voters that the issue should be the most important consideration in setting policy and deciding which candidate to back.

Yet, according to exit polls, 54 percent of Catholics chose Obama, who is Protestant. The new bishops' statement is meant to drive home the point in a way that cannot be misconstrued.

"We have a very important thing to say. I think we should say it clearly and with a punch," said New York Cardinal Edward Egan.

But some bishops said church leaders should take care with the tone of the statement.

Bishops differ on whether Catholic lawmakers should refrain from receiving Communion if they diverge from central church beliefs. Each bishop sets policy in his own diocese.

"We must act and be perceived as acting as caring pastors and faithful teachers," said Bishop Blase Cupich of Rapid City, S.D.

But Dr. Patrick Whelan, a pediatrician and president of Catholic Democrats, said angry statements from church leaders were counterproductive and would only alienate Catholics.

"We're calling on the bishops to move away from the more vicious language," Whelan said. He said the church needs to act "in a more creative, constructive way," to end abortion.

Catholics United was among the groups that argued in direct mail and TV ads during the campaign that taking the "pro-life" position means more than opposing abortion rights.

Chris Korzen, the group's executive director, said, "we honestly want to move past the deadlock" on abortion. He said church leaders were making that task harder.

"What are the bishops going to do now?" Korzen said. "`They have burned a lot of bridges with the Democrats and the new administration."

William Ayers and Barack Obama were closely linked in radical politics in Chicago for years.

Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist bomber of the Capitol, the Pentagon and police stations who escaped prison time because of prosecutorial error. One of his compatriots who was separately investigated was sentenced to 58 years in prison for the same things Ayers did as a member of the Weather Underground. (He has claimed he only meant to blow up property and never intended to hurt anyone. This lie has been exposed: three of his people assembling a nail bomb according to his design were killed. The bomb was intended to be set off at a dance at Fort Dix to kill soldiers and their dates.)

When Obama first ran for public office in Illinois, his kickoff event in 1995 was hosted by Ayers in the home he shared with fellow terrorist bomber Bernadine Dohrn. Over the next six years Obama and Ayers worked closely together seeking to instill radicalism into the Chicago school system, not seeking to improve education, but to turn teachers and the kids into community agitators. The project ran through $160 million in charitable contributions and a study found it had no discernible effect.

Ayers and Obama worked as paid directors on the small board of another charity funding radical groups in the Chicago area, including one Arab American group that funneled money to a known Palestinian terrorist organization.

In 2001, while they were still actively collaborating, Ayers published a book glorifying his days as a terrorist bomber in the 1970s, expressing no regret except he hadn't done enough. In a newspaper interview, also in 2001, he showed his continuing hatred of America, saying the very thought of it made him "want to puke." For a Chicago magazine that same year he was shown on the cover standing on the American flag.

Obama has tried repeatedly to downplay his relationship with Ayers and the mainstream media have shown no interest in looking into it. It fell to a researcher at the respected Washington Ethics and Public Policy Center Stanley Kurtz to do the leg work. He has been harrassed by Obama supporters every step of the way and for a time public records in Chicago to which he sought access -- for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge --were blocked.

What Kurtz found is illuminating.

What drew Ayers and Obama together was "community organizing." That's what the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was all about. Teachers were to be taught to become dedicated to provoking (the kids they're teaching, presumably) resistance to "American racism and oppression." Ayers has said in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," his goal is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

Does this sound like what Obama was fixated on during his high school and college days when he "hung out" with black power advocates and Marxist socialists and then went on to live the real thing in Chicago as a community organizer before going off to get a law degree?

Ayers describes himself much like Obama thought about himself, as recounted in "Dreams From My Father." Ayers says: "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist."

Together, Obama and Ayers tried to advance their Marxist socialist goals by making teachers and children in the schools into radicals like themselves. Fortunately, they seemed to have failed in their mission. Hopefully, providing a good education for the kids is still the priority of the Chicago school system.

So Ayers is not only an unrepentant terrorist he is still a radical seeking to change the system. Obama has gone underground with his radicalism, seeking to achieve his goals from the inside of the system rather than from without. There is no indication that his Marxist socialist goals have changed at all.

Clearly, a distaste, a hatred of America still powers Ayers. There is much in Obama's rhetoric that exhibits the same distaste.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe summarizes the "stark" difference between the Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin tickets on issues of life. Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania earlier this year, Obama said that if his daughters made a mistake, he didn't want them "punished with a baby."

Jacoby goes on:

Obama advocates abortion rights even more sweeping than those enacted under Roe v. Wade. "The first thing I'd do as president," he assured the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year, "is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." The measure would not only codify Roe, it would eliminate even restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court has allowed - the federal ban on government funding of abortion, for example, or the law prohibiting partial-birth abortion.

Polls show that 75% of all Americans oppose partial-birth abortions, which Obama wants to bring back.

Jacoby again, this time on Obama's opposition to protecting babies who survive failed abortions:

As an Illinois lawmaker, he [Obama] opposed a bill making it clear that premature babies born alive after surviving a failed abortion must be protected and cannot be killed or simply left to die. Even after virtually identical legislation passed unanimously in the US House and Senate, Obama continued to oppose the state version. On abortion, no presidential candidate has ever been so extreme.

As for the McCain/Palin ticket, Jacoby says this:

And when has a Republican ticket ever been so unabashedly antiabortion? Senator John McCain, long one of the Senate's reliably antiabortion votes, is a father of seven, including an adopted orphan from Bangladesh. His running mate lacks McCain's voting record, yet her bona fides are even more impressive: When Palin and her husband learned last winter that she was carrying a baby with Down syndrome, they never considered not having him. More than 90 percent of pregnant American women in the same position choose abortion. Palin chose life.

Jacoby concludes:

The next president and vice president will be the most pro-choice in US history. Or the most pro-life.

Read the entire article by clicking here.

How does the leading analyst of the Middle East Caroline Glick view the Obama/Biden ticket? She asks whether the addition of Biden as VP nominee means Israel can trust Obama. Her unequivocal answer in effect is “Hell, no.”

OBAMA is currently receiving the support of some 57 percent of American Jews. Although this is less than any Democratic presidential nominee in recent memory, it is still disturbing that a large majority of American Jews support him. The Obama campaign no doubt hopes the Biden selection will shore up Jewish support.

It can only be hoped that despite their party loyalty and what they're telling pollsters, American Jews (indeed, American voters generally) will judge Biden and Obama by their records and positions.

Biden has consistently denied the threat emanating from Iran and Syria not only for Israel but for the U.S. as well. And Obama's statements and actions expose him as a man ill disposed not only toward Israel but America itself.

Here's her analysis.

With Biden On Board, Can Obama Be Trusted?
By Caroline Glick, Aug. 28, 2008

Many American Jewish observers welcomed Barack Obama's selection of Sen. Joseph Biden as his vice-presidential running mate. As a member of the Senate since 1973, and the serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden is a seasoned political player and foreign policy heavyweight. His experience, it is argued, will make up for Obama's inexperience; his moderate liberal views will make up for Obama's radical liberal views.

Biden has a track record of often supporting Israel. And as he entered the Democratic presidential primaries last year, he stepped up his pro-Israel pronouncements. In an interview with the Forward for instance, Biden rejected the anti-Israel call to distance the U.S. from Israel in a bid to ratchet up Arab support for the U.S. As he put it, "In my 34-year career, I have never wavered from the notion that the only time progress has ever been made in the Middle East is when the Arab nations have known that there is no daylight between us and Israel. So the idea of being an 'honest broker' is not, as some of my Democratic colleagues call for, the answer. It is being the smart broker, it is being the smart partner.

But while Biden's rhetoric on America's relationship with Israel is firm, his positions on issues critically important to Israel's national security call into question his willingness to stand by Israel. He is a staunch supporter of an Israeli transfer of the strategically critical Golan Heights to Syria and has harshly criticized the Bush administration for its refusal to support Israeli negotiations with Syria. At the same time, he downplays the significance of Syria's strategic alliance with Iran and its sponsorship of terrorists in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Belittling those ties, Biden has claimed repeatedly and without a shred of evidence that the Syrians really want to put all of that behind them.

The Wall Street Journal notes some questions are being asked about why a Belgian beer company was able to buy Anheuser-Busch and not the other way around.

Taxes were a big part of the reason. The Bud boys were paying almost twice as much in taxes as the Begian company InBev. U.S. corporate taxes are now among the highest in the world. John McCain wants to cut the corporate tax rate to 25%, which is about the world average (Ireland's is 12.5%, for example.) Obama has only been talking about raising taxes. John McCain understands the economy, Obama doesn't. Another reason to vote for John McCain.

Republicans led by John McCain have concluded for reasons of national energy security and to bring relief to American consumers of oil and its derivatives, including gasoline, home heating oil and jet fuel, there are areas in the U. S. in which new oil development, which is blocked by congressional moratoriums, should be allowed.

These forbidden areas include the continental shelves off the west and east coasts of the U.S., parts of the Gulf of Mexico and oil shale lands in the Rocky Mountains. Democrats oppose all such efforts to open up new oil development in these areas and are blocking votes in the House and Senate to allow it.

Also at issue is a particular tract of land in but not part of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) -- 2000 acres out of 19 million acres – known as 10-02. 10-02 was excluded from the Refuge in the original law setting up the refuge in 1980 and designated for oil development; it is not classified legally as wilderness or refuge. Exploration and oil development have been barred in ANWR since the 1980s.

Investors Business Daily - Ramirez

Character counts.

Don't hope for a better life. Vote for it. McCain."

John McCain has taken the lead in developing a national security policy embracing energy security. Recognizing the stranglehold that foreign oil producers have over the U.S. and the rest of the world McCain has called for lifting moratoria on drilling in U.S. territories except for the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge and for building 45 nuclear power plants before 2030 and accelerating work on clean coal technology.

As oil and gasoline prices have skyrocketed, Republican efforts to end prohibitions on drilling have been blocked by the Democratic majority in Congress led by Democratic presidential candidate Senaor Barack Obama. Drilling will not bring any relief to American consumers, Obama maintains. Where have we heard that before? For those who say, well, we have a crisis now, but oil from new developments will take years. Michael Ramirez, the Investor's Business Daily Pulizer Prize winning cartoonist has the perfect answer:

That the U.S. is dependent on oil from Russia, Venezuela, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries is our own fault. For 30 years Congress -- Democrats aided by a few Republicans -- has imposed a prohibition on drilling in new fields off both coasts, the western coast of Florida and in a postage-stamp area of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Hundreds of billions of barrels of oil are known to lie within these territories.

First term state representative Sarah Peake from Provincetown is just another Democrat on Beacon Hill doing what the Democratic House leadership tells her to do. She also works on the wrong side of issues many people in the Fourth Barnstable District care about.

Massachusetts has suffered from being a one-party state for decades. It's run by the legislature and only a remarkable governor such as Romney could get anything done against the legislature's will. The present Democratic governor demonstrates that reality. If Massachusetts gains some party balance in the General Court, all cities and towns and citizens will benefit, including Chatham.

Fortunately, there will be a strong Republican candidate taking her on this fall.

Don Howell has served seven years on the Harwich Board of Selectmen (two as Chair) and as Chairman of the Harwich Republican Town Committee. He's retired from the General Services Administration.Don has owned his own store for over ten years and is active in his community and on Cape issues. In addition to a B.A. from Fordham University he attended the London School of Economics.

With strong, enthusiastic support Howell can win. Peake won narrowly two years ago and can be beaten. Visit Don's website to check out his impressive credentials.