Here is the liberal idea of their much vaunted "Wall of Separation"....only there when it is a convenient.  But when a church dares to stand on their doctrine and doctrine does not match the liberal progressive doctrine?  Well then wall of separation be dammed.

The Obama administration today said it would move forward with a new mandate requiring most U.S. employers – including religiously affiliated hospitals and schools – to provide health care plans that cover contraceptive services for female employees free of charge.

The guidelines, first proposed in August and set to take effect in August 2012, have been hailed by the abortion-rights community and many Obamare-election supporters.

But the Catholic Church and other religious groups, which consider some forms of contraception as the termination of life, had waged an intensive lobbying campaign for a clear exemption of affiliated institutions from the new rules.

The Department of Health and Human Services today said, despite their concerns, it will hold the line on the requirement, but extended the deadline for compliance until 2013.

Last  Tuesday, during the State Of The Union speech, President Obama again called for more investment in "green energy".   On Thursday, we found out that another green company that Obama invested tax payer dollars in filed for bankruptcy.

Ener1--a company that manufactures batteries for electric cars, and that received $118.5 million in federal stimulus money, and that Vice President Joe Biden visited last year the day after President Obama’s State of the Union Address—announced today that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

In last year’s State of the Union Address, delivered Jan. 25, 2011, President Obama set a national goal of having a million electric vehicles on the road in the United States by 2015—a goal that would be achieved, Obama said, by taking money out of the oil industry and “investing” it in new technology.

First Solyndra, then Beacon Power and now Ener1.  Almost $600 million dollars of taxpayer money flushed down the toilet of ideologically driven investment.  While it is fine for an individual to invest their own money based on their own ideology, it is not fine, in an economy like this, for the government waste taxpayer dollars in such a frivolous manner.

Yet one more reason why Obama must go.

Back in 2008, I spent a lot of time bashing on Team Obama for it's unrelenting character smears of Hillary Clinton (an unrelenting attack that we just found out was officially sanctioned by then Candidate Obama himself).  Well it seems that there is some character assassination going on this year - on the right hand side of the aisle.  Team Romney - taking a page directly from Barack Obama's campaign playbook, has decided to engage in some very egregious character assassination of it's own.  

Needing to convince Republican voters before the Florida primary on Tuesday that Newt Gingrich is an unacceptable option as the party’s presidential nominee, Mr. Romney is increasingly carrying out the attack himself.

It is hardly his first foray onto the dark side, but it is the most intense of his political career and a particular challenge for a candidate whose demeanor has been defined largely by caution and a can-do, problem-solving attitude.

Since his loss in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, Mr. Romney and his aides have carefully planned lines of attack that have emptied their opposition research file against Mr. Gingrich and put Mr. Romney in the midst of a highly personal battle in which he is no longer relying on advertising by an outside group to take the toughest shots at his opponent.

Mr. Romney is now fully participating in his campaign’s efforts to attack Mr. Gingrich’s morals and raise doubts about his emotional stability. Whether he can be withering enough without turning off voters or will appear too politically calculated is one of the biggest tests so far of his skills as a candidate.

The attacks were highly coordinated coming both from the campaign and surrogates.  One of the more questionable attacks is one that even CNN had to classify as "Misleading"...

Well as you can see, there have been a couple of changes around here.  A security update necessitated an upgrade and as long as we were doing it well....

If you run into any problems, please leave a comment or email me at ll at ladieslogic dot com.

So the left and the media (pardon the redundancy) is making a BIG DEAL over the fact that GOP candidate Mitt Romney is worth somewhere in the range of $190 to $250 million dollar range.  Well if they are going to make the net worth an issue, then maybe it is time to make the entire tax record an issue - specifically the fact that, unlike the Democrat incumbents, Mitt Romney puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to helping the needy.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney donated $7 million to charity in the past two years, more than the $6.2 million the candidate and his wife paid in federal taxes in that period, documents the campaign released show.

Romney and his wife, Ann, who jointly file taxes, gave $1.5 million cash in 2010 and $2.6 million cash in 2011 to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the tax documents show.

In Tuesday's State of the Union speech, President Obama droned on (again) about the need for people to "pay their fair share".  If he really cared about making sure those that made a lot of money paid their fair share, he would look a little closer to home than Omaha....

Congressional staffers owed about $10.6 million in unpaid taxes in 2010, a slight increase from the previous year and a growing slice of the roughly $1 billion owed by federal and postal workers nationwide.

The figures come as Republican efforts to pass legislation allowing federal agencies to fire tax delinquent federal employees have slowed and as the White House continues to crack down on improper payments made by agencies to delinquent government contractors and federal beneficiaries.

About 98,000 federal, postal and congressional employees owed $1.03 billion in unpaid taxes at the end of fiscal 2010, according to recordsprovided by the Internal Revenue Service. The total number of delinquent employees dipped slightly from 2009, but the amount owed jumped by $32 million.

The "Great Uniter"....that is what the media lovingly dubbed Barack Obama in 2008.  However, as many of us Chicago natives know, what the media showed us was not reality.  Is it any surprise that we had to turn to a European news source to get this story (HT Carol Platt Liebau).

"Change We Can Believe In", a key Obama campaign slogan, was meant as a slur against Mrs Clinton's personality, intended to highlight how she "couldn't be trusted or believed in when it comes to change", according to a memo seen by America's New Yorker magazine.

"She's driven by political calculation not conviction, regularly backing away and shifting positions ... She embodies trench warfare vs Republicans, and is consumed with beating them rather than unifying the country and building consensus to get things done. She prides herself on working the system, not changing it," the October 2007 memo added.

The memo was written by David Axelrod, a political adviser, as Obama's nomination campaign stalled against Hillary Clinton during the height of the 2008 Democratic nomination process.

Rather than fight out their differences in policy, Mr Axelrod told Obama that the only way to secure a defeat was to attack Mrs Clinton's character. The goal was to paint Obama as the "authentic 'remedy' to what ails Washington and stands in the way of progress" and to discredit his main rival in the process.

Emphasis mine.  We saw that when he was running against Mrs. Clinton and against John McCain.  Care to guess what we will see again this year?

Carol Platt Liebau has always been one of my favorite writers in the TownHall.com stable of writers.  Her post South Carolina analysis today though, almost (but not quite) hits the real lesson of South Carolina.

There's no doubt that South Carolina was a setback for Mitt Romney.  But setbacks can be opportunities, too, and if his campaign is smart, the clear South Carolina defeat will serve as a learning opportunity that will make Romney better able to move forward and engender support among all parts of the Republican Party.
This piece in the Washington Post is revealing.  It's clear that some members of the GOP are struggling with Romney's style -- they want someone "meaner" to take on Barack Obama.

There is no doubt, the 2012 campaign is going to be scorched earth.  The Obama Campaign has already promised it.  A "nice guy" is going to end up getting his a$$ handed to him really fast.

Jonah Goldberg at the Corner has an interesting comment up this afternoon....

Interesting e-mail from a reader:

Regarding Romney’s loss, one thing I have not seen mentioned is the robo calls.  All this week, the Romney campaign flooded republicans with robo calls.  From Monday through Friday we would get literally four to five calls a night.  They would come sometimes ten minutes apart.  If you did not answer them, they left long messages on your answering machine.  I turned off our phone on Weds, but when I turned it back on, on Friday, they were still calling so I turned it off again.  This REALLY pissed off a lot of people I talked to, me included–our son works at night a lot and we try to keep in touch via that line so I was especially unhappy.

This is something I have been complaining about (to the Utah and MN state political parties) for years.  Back in 2000 the national GOP got it into their heads that the optimal number of pre-election contacts for a candidate is 7.  I have no idea where that bit of "conventional wisdom" came from other than some paid consultant.  When it first came out that contact included word of mouth from supporters, emails, mailers, lit drops, lawn signs, news stories AND phone calls.  Over the last few years, sadly, many campaigns have dropped everything BUT the phone calls.  Don't get me wrong - I get why.  The phone calls are cheaper than traditional mailings, less labor intensive than lit drops or putting in lawn signs and more reliable than news stories.  The problem is (as one commenter at the Corner states) - at some point people start to consider the calls to be the telephone equivalent of email spam!

...He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her... John 8:7 (KJV)

So as we all know, Newt Gingrich won yesterdays primary in South Carolina.  The thing for me last night was watching my Facebook feed after the race was called immediately after the polls closed.  A majority of my Utah friends who are also members of the predominant religion in the area, took to Facebook in high dudgeon, wailing and caterwauling about how "dumb" South Carolina voters were in voting for a "serial adulterer".  These are the same people who have spent the last many months trying so very hard to convince Evangelicals that "Mormons are Christians TOOOOOOOOOO...we believe in Christ"

Well this message is for those people.....Christians are (by dictionary definition) people who follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazereth...not just people who "believe" in Him.  Christians are supposed to (by teaching) practice the teachings of Jesus.  One of those teachings is the forgiveness of sin.  Something that was not shown last night.

Fact is this - Newt Gingrich is a member of the Roman Catholic Church.  The RCC has some pretty "odd" (by modern standards) practices when it comes to divorce and their members.  In order to be a member of the RCC and have had a divorce (as my Catholic friends tell me) one has to have repented of ones past sins - including the divorce.  Now I can not profess to know what is in Gingrich's heart....no one but God does.  However, I know that as a Christian I am supposed to show to others, the GRACE that God has shown to me.  Something I did not see out of many of my LDS friends last night.

In thinking about all of that, I am reminded of the old Carolyn Arends hymn we used to sing in Sunday School many many years ago....

We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord 
We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord 
And we pray that all unity may one day be restored 
And they'll know we are Christians by our love, by our love 
They will know we are Christians by our love

Lincoln Brown, posting at Townhall.com, has a very interesting column up.

I’m not going to opine much on this column, but rather throw something out there for debate. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Even for those who don’t follow Utah politics, which would pretty much be anyone living outside of Utah, there was a piece of notable news out of the Beehive State that had nothing to with Hunstman.

State Senator Dan Liljenquist announced his intention to run against Orrin Hatch. It’s a gutsy move. Liljenquist is young both chronologically and politically. He was sworn in to the Utah Senate in 2009. By contrast, Hatch is well established, has seniority, knows how to work D.C, and has a sizeable war chest. Two Utah congressmen, Jason Chaffetz (R) and Jim Matheson (D) opted not to take him on.

He goes on to talk about Dan Liljenquist's record - which we have already discussed in the past.  He then goes on to ask...

The media and the left (pardon the redundancy) get their undies all in a major bunch when the LDS Church or Michele Bachmann's church get involved in anything that even remotely smells political. But when DEMOCRATS blatantly politic from the pulpit.....

In his push for re-election, President Obama has enlisted some of his billionaire buddies to help him engage in a little class warfare.  Warren Buffett has been front and center for well over a year now.  His latest is in response to Mitch McConnell's comment that if Buffett really wanted to pay more he was free to "send in a donation".  Buffett response was "put up or shut up".

So Buffett has pledged to match 1 for 1 all such voluntary contributions made by Republican members of Congress. “And I’ll even go 3 for 1 for McConnell,” he says. That could be quite a bill if McConnell takes the challenge; after all, the Senator is worth at least $10 million. As Buffett put it to me, “I’m not worried.

To which the taxpayers of America should respond - YOU FIRST WARREN!  Because when push comes to shove, whether it is Warren Buffett or Michael Moore or the rest of the 1%, they really are not about paying their fair share - they just want to be seen saying the right thing.

In his Examiner column about RiShawn Biddle's column on education reforms, my friend Gary Gross posited that ObamaCare could end up forcing some much needed education reforms.

It's ironic that Obamacare's expansion of Medicaid is forcing much-needed school reforms. It's also ironic that Obama's stimulus couldn't prevent the reforms:

The Obama administration also helped by providing $95 billion in federal stimulus spending and another $10 billion ladled to states and school districts as part of the Edujobs plan for staving off expected teacher layoffs that weren't ever coming to pass.

And while that is an interesting theory, I think education reform is going to have to happen whether ObamaCare is allowed to stay in place or not.  Reality, as State Sen. Dan Liljenquist often says, is not negotiable and the reality is that with or without Obamacare, many states are looking at budgets that are already stretched to the max.  Medicare is helping to bankrupt those states...and Utah has been sounding that alarm for a year now.

Looks like the PIPS/SOPA blackout is ON.

The freedom, innovation, and economic opportunity that the Internet enables is in jeopardy. Congress is considering legislation that will dramatically change your Internet experience and put an end to reddit and many other sites you use everyday. Internet experts, organizations, companies, entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists, and individuals have repeatedly expressed how dangerous this bill is. If we do nothing, Congress will likely pass the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) or the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House), and then the President will probably sign it into law. There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet, and a few months ago many people thought this legislation would surely pass. However, there’s a new hope that we can defeat this dangerous legislation.
We’ve seen some amazing activism organized by redditors at /r/sopa and across the reddit community at large. You have made a difference in this fight; and as we near the next stage, and after much thought, talking with experts, and hearing the overwhelming voices from the reddit community, we have decided that we will be blacking out reddit on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC).

Emphasis in the original.

Instead of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis “kn0thing” Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meetups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics.