rawdog

A quote from Jillian’s invaluable piece this morning:

If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated, and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.

That’s from Representative Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), in a threatening letter to True the Vote, a tea-party offshoot focused on having clean elections. But the gentleman from Maryland has said more than he intended: His words much more accurately describe the actions of the IRS in targeting tea-party groups. If Jillian’s story is indicative, they did so abetted by a number of regulatory agencies. 

The story of Catherine Engelbrect’s harassment at the hands of multiple regulatory agencies highlights a critical fact: With a legal and regulatory environment as complex (and sometimes contradictory) as our own, practically anybody can be found guilty of a violation at any time, given a sufficiently motivated regulator. With congressional Democrats leaning on the IRS (and possibly other agencies) to go after tea-party groups and other conservatives, the spectacularly abusive actions of the agency were a forgone conclusion. While Congress is investigating what exactly the IRS was up to, it might take a look at itself: All communications between members of Congress and the IRS, OSHA, and other agencies regarding conservative-leaning nonprofits should be made available for public scrutiny. We might be able to trust Congress to investigate the IRS, but we cannot trust Congress to investigate Congress. 

If we weren’t in the middle of a perfect storm of national political controversies, last week’s announcement from Oregon of the first cloned human embryo might well be dominating the airwaves. Even so, in the past few days my colleagues and I have received many e-mails asking about cloning and its moral significance. Anyone interested in the ethical questions surrounding human cloning could do worse than to read Human Cloning and Human Dignity, a 2002 report from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Although the report is over a decade old, its ethical analysis is well worth revisiting.

In his excellent NRO article about last week’s news, Samuel Aquila makes the important point that the commonly heard distinction between “therapeutic cloning” and “reproductive cloning” is disingenuous, since the creation of a cloned human embryo creates a new human being, and therefore deserves to be called a form of reproduction. (That is why Human Cloning and Human Dignity eschewed those terms and instead settled on the terms “cloning for biomedical research” and “cloning to produce children.”) The fact that cloned embryos have largely the same DNA as an existing human being should not distract us from the fact that they are new and unique human organisms, by virtue of their organic and developmental unity as living beings. Nor does the fact that cloned embryos are sometimes destroyed to create stem cells alter the reality that “therapeutic cloning” creates new, unique human organisms. Creating human beings — whether through cloning, IVF, or for that matter through ordinary sexual reproduction — solely to destroy them for biomedical research is to treat some human beings as resources to be exploited for the benefit of others.

And what of the ethics of cloning to produce children? Assuming that the medical safety of human reproductive cloning could somehow be established beforehand — itself a dubious prospect — the practice of reproductive cloning raises the specter of the eugenic control of human reproduction, and the pursuit of extreme mastery over children by their parents, who would be seeking to define in advance the precise genetic properties of their offspring. Cloning would also generate children who would lack a genetic mother or father. They would have instead an egg donor, a gestational surrogate to carry the child to term, and a donor of the chromosomal material being cloned — though these three roles could all be fulfilled by a single woman, they could just as easily each belong to a different person. (Strictly speaking, the genetic parents of the person being cloned would also be the genetic parents of the cloned child, but they would lack anything like the normal relationship, either biological or social, that genetic parents have with their children.) The deliberate creation of children with these unprecedented parental relationships goes well beyond any of the most pernicious social experimentation on children already being conducted in today’s assisted-reproduction industry.

The experiment reported last week in Oregon brings cloning-to-produce-children one step closer. Other research, like experiments on the cloning of non-human primates, will also bring us closer to cloning-to-produce-children. But the cloning of non-human primates (something that the authors of the recent cloning paper have worked on in the past) is not in itself a violation of human dignity, and a strong case can be made for pursuing the cloning of non-human animals for medical purposes. But we must draw a bright line around any form of human cloning and vigorously oppose it as a morally illicit instrumentalization of human life.

— Brendan P. Foht is assistant editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society.

Boston College commencement goes on today without the presence of Boston’s Sean Cardinal O’Malley. He’s staying away on account of the Catholic college’s commencement speaker, Irish prime minister Enda Kenny, who is advocating liberalization of the country’s abortion laws. The cardinal has expressed his disappointment in the school, which has ignored the guidance of the bishops of the U.S. that “Catholic institutions not honor government officials or politicians who promote abortion with their laws and policies.”

The decision by Boston College is particularly disappointing given that Boston should know better. It has experienced the pain of violence against human life in a particularly deep and stark way this spring. And Catholics there know the terrible harm done to human life and moral credibility by abuse scandals, which Irish Catholics are still in the course of confronting. But Boston College has chosen to contribute to the confusion, causing harm, as Cardinal O’Malley has said.

About the proposed law, the Catholic bishops of Ireland have said: “The unavoidable choice that now faces all our public representatives is: will I chose to defend and vindicate the equal right to life of a mother and the child in her womb in all circumstances, or will I choose to licence the direct and intentional killing of the innocent baby in the womb?

“The ideology of choice has become very powerful here,” David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, which “promotes the place of marriage and religion in society,” explains in an interview with National Review Online. Quinn, who is also a columnist with the Irish Independent and the Irish Catholic, is grateful to the cardinal.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Were you surprised to hear that Enda Kenny would be speaking at Boston College’s commencement? That Cardinal O’Malley would decide not to attend? 

DAVID QUINN: I wasn’t surprised that our Taoiseach would be speaking at Boston College. This is pretty much par for the course for many Catholic universities, isn’t it? I suppose we should add that the invitation was issued before the abortion legislation here was published. On the other hand, Boston College has to have known that such legislation was planned. I was very glad to hear that Cardinal O’Malley will not be attending the event. He is a man of integrity and he is taking a necessary moral stand. 

LOPEZ: Kenny has said “Our aim is to protect the lives of women and their unborn babies by clarifying the circumstances in which doctors can intervene where a woman’s life is at risk.” Is that not true? 

QUINN: Mr. Kenny is being disingenuous. The most controversial aspect of the planned legislation is that it will permit abortion when a woman is deemed to be suicidal. The first thing to be said here is that there is no scientific evidence that abortion can save the life of a suicidal woman. Also, if a pregnant woman is suicidal it is very likely to have nothing at all to do with the pregnancy as such, and in any case, there will always be alternative forms of help available other than abortion. What is not in doubt is that an abortion in such a case kills an unborn human life. So how can Mr. Kenny possibly say he is protecting the lives of unborn babies?

LOPEZ: At least he is making reference to unborn babies? 

QUINN: I think Mr. Kenny genuinely believes he is pro-life, but if he does, he needs to think more deeply about what he is doing. How can any pro-life politician possibly support a law that will allow for the direct and intentional taking of innocent human life? To a certain extent he is hiding behind a supreme court decision of 1992 which helped to pave the way for this legislation. But no politician ever has an excuse for voting in favor of a law that he believes to be unjust. It takes a lot of rationalization for pro-life politicians to persuade themselves this law is just. It is anything but.

LOPEZ: What would the legislation mean for religious freedom, and should that matter if we’re talking about women’s lives and health? 

QUINN: The bill forces doctors to perform what are deemed emergency terminations. It also forces pro-life doctors to refer woman seeking abortions to pro-choice doctors. Lastly it requires that every hospital with a maternity unit must perform “lawful terminations” regardless of its ethos. This makes it one of the worst laws from a conscience point of view anywhere, so far as I know. Even countries with very liberal abortion laws don’t usually go as far as this. This alone shows that freedom of conscience and religion can be respected even in countries that believe in the right to abortion.

LOPEZ: How did Ireland get to this point? 

QUINN: I suppose it was inevitable that Ireland would eventually go down this path. I once interviewed Cardinal Ratzinger (as he was back in 1995), and he said that while Ireland was an island physically, it was not an island culturally. We are tremendously influenced by cultural developments in Britain and America. But there is an aggressive edge to what’s happening that I think is partly the result of the years of Catholic dominance and the child-abuse scandals. For example, Ireland has closed its embassy to the Holy See at the same time as Britain, which is historically Protestant, has been expanding its embassy.

In a way, Ireland’s cultural elite, and many ordinary people too unfortunately, are angry at the Church in the same way they were once angry at Britain. It took decades for that anger to subside. I often say that for the Irish, Church-bashing has replaced “Brit-bashing.”

LOPEZ: Is there real help for a woman in Ireland who finds herself pregnant without support? For a couple whose child will have special needs? 

QUINN: It is extremely important to point out that Ireland has an excellent maternal health-care system by and large. World Health Organization data show that we are one of the safest places in the Western world for a woman to have a child. Our maternal death rate is half that of Britain and a quarter of America’s and both of those countries have abortion-on-demand.

Unfortunately, the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in an Irish hospital has given much of the world the completely false impression that Ireland is an unsafe place for pregnant women and that our Catholic-influenced pro-life laws are to blame. The WHO data prove otherwise. In respect of Savita herself, there are plenty of doctors who say the problem wasn’t the law, but the fact that the hospital didn’t spot and properly manage the infection that eventually killed her, namely sepsis.
In answer to the second part of your question, there are organizations that help women find an alternative to abortion, for example, a service run by the Irish bishops’ conference called Cura. There are also supports for children with special needs, although as in many other countries these can be improved.

LOPEZ:  Has the United States done the world a disservice in 40 years of legal abortion and the misuse and abuse of words such as “women’s health” and “choice”? 

QUINN: The short answer is “yes.” As I said a little earlier, we are tremendously influenced both by Britain and America, which have had liberal abortion laws for years. Our forthcoming law will not lead to abortion-on-demand to begin with, but it is the foot in the door. The ideology of choice has become very powerful here. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with a person’s life-plan, including a baby. That is extremely unfortunate to put it mildly. The irony is that we passed a new constitutional amendment a few months ago supposedly aimed at protecting children’s rights, and then the same government gets set to pass this law. 

LOPEZ: What does the Gosnell trial look like from over there?

QUINN: It got very little coverage here, so almost no one has heard of it.

LOPEZ: Can you really make a compelling case for man/woman marriage in 90 seconds?

QUINN: You’re referring to a video we produced on the matter a few months ago.  

Can you make a compelling case in 90 seconds? Probably not. But what you can do is get people thinking, and you especially show people who are basically against same-sex marriage but also wonder “what harm can it do?” that there is a credible case against it worth exploring. The video has received over 78,000 hits, and it has been more viewed in the U.S. than in Ireland. 

LOPEZ: What is the future of marriage in Ireland? 

QUINN: We are becoming very like other Western countries. Our divorce rate is still low, but more than a third of births are outside marriage, the number of adults over 18 who are married has fallen to just under half, and our rate of cohabitation is on par with the U.S. rate. In addition, people increasingly have an adult-centered view of marriage. They don’t see it as an institution primarily though not exclusively directed towards the care of children and towards providing children with a mother and a father who love them. In that kind of climate it’s no wonder support for same-sex marriage in Ireland now stands at over 60 percent, although I suspect a lot of that support is soft and would be severely tested in a referendum.

LOPEZ: Who was Donal Walsh and what could the world learn from him?

QUINN: Donal Walsh was a very brave teenager diagnosed with cancer at the age of 12 who died a few days ago aged 16. Ireland has quite a high suicide rate among young males and Donal’s message was that life is worth living and should never be thrown away no matter what you’re going through. It is a very important message at any time but especially now with a debate about assisted suicide also taking hold in Ireland. 

Jillian’s terrific piece on the homepage is a riveting glimpse into the resources the Government of the United States can deploy when an ordinary citizen makes the mistake of catching its eye.

Catherine Engelbrecht is a small businesswoman who three years ago, for the first time in her life, got politically active. In short order, she attracted an IRS audit of her personal taxes, and of her business, and the full proctological monty of her non-profit — plus visits from the FBI, OSHA, and the ATF. The most powerful government on the planet decided, for no valid reason, to go fishing in the Engelbrechts’ lives in a sustained effort to turn a law-abiding couple into criminals, and determined not to rest until they’d got the goods on them. There are no goods to be got, but to America’s shame this is now a land in which there are laws against everything — or, at any rate, regulations (we’re way beyond laws at this stage) — and any one of us is in non-compliance with something or other any hour of the day. So, if they’re serious about getting you on something, anything, eventually they will. And they’ll take as much time as they want: The process is the punishment.

Meanwhile, who regulates the regulators? The president’s senior communications adviser dismisses media queries as “offensive“; the attorney general sneers at attempted gongressional oversight as “unacceptable“; and the IRS commissioner insists that to target individual citizens for bureaucratic harassment on the basis of their political beliefs is “absolutely not illegal.”

That last one reminds me of the great George Jonas’s observation three decades ago when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were discovered to be burning down the barns of Québec separatists. With his customary glibness, the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, blithely responded that if people were that upset by the Mounties’ illegal barn-burning maybe he’d make it legal for them to burn barns. As Jonas remarked, M. Trudeau had missed the point: Barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong.

That’s the distinction that wretched boob of an IRS commissioner, Steven Miller, and too many of his federal colleagues no longer grasp, if ever they did. Consider this tease (top left-hand corner) on the home page of Government Executive, the magazine for senior federal bureaucrats:

The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren’t Corrupt

Great. So, if the vast majority aren’t, what proportion is corrupt? Thirty-eight per cent? Thirty-three? Twenty-seven? And that’s the good news?

The battle lines are drawn for the November election in Virginia, with Democrats seeking to portray the GOP ticket that emerged from the party’s state convention this weekend as “extreme” and “all Tea Party, all the time.”

Republican Ken Cuccinelli, a leader in the anti-Obamacare movement as the state’s attorney general, was already a focus of Democratic attacks as the presumptive Republican nominee for governor. Now Democrats think they can discredit E. W. Jackson, the minister and lawyer the GOP nominated for lieutenant governor after four ballots this weekend.

Jackson is indeed a strong cup of tea. He told delegates on Saturday he was “not an African American, but an American” and vowed to “get the government off our backs, off our property, out of our families, out of our health care and out of our way.”

The Huffington Post is already circulating a video in which Jackson railed against “an unholy alliance between certain so-called civil rights leaders and Planned Parenthood, which has killed unborn black babies by the tens of millions. Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide.”

Some establishment Republicans I spoke with on Saturday are concerned that Jackson will alienate Northern Virginia moderates with his views. But Jackson supporters say that their man, a graduate of both the Harvard Law School and Harvard Divinity School, is just the jolt of excitement that will turn out traditional non-voters.

Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a Democratic political strategist who specializes in turning out the “Bubba” vote, says a Cuccinelli-Jackson ticket may not be a political mistake.

“Politicians, overall as a trade, are in the bottom of the outhouse,” he told the Washington Post. “And the reason is, they talk out of the side of their mouths, most of them. . . . . The fact that Ken Cuccinelli’s talking out of the front of his mouth and not the side of his mouth, I think, is refreshing to everybody, whether you agree with him or not.”

The lengths to which some are going to excuse the IRS corruption (“the tea-party groups deserved extra scrutiny”), the AP monitoring (“national security”), Benghazi (“confusion” — or the Republicans did it by cutting back on funding for embassy security), the Sebelius shakedowns (no choice when the House tries to stop Obamacare) all evoke the old Nixonian cast. The only mystery as these scandals spread and expand in the weeks ahead will be who this time around will play the zealous Rabbi Baruch Korff, who hits the road to whip up the grass-roots base?  Who will play Representative Charles Sandman, the die-hard congressional obstructionist? And who will play Al Haig, the final White House loyalist who juggles all the subpoenas?

Former Obama-administration press secretary Robert Gibbs said the DOJ has not provided enough of an explanation for its seizure of Associated Press reporters’ phone records, and that “the onus clearly on the Justice Department” to provide a clear explanation.

“Right now, we’ve sort of been struck by the fact that nobody’s explained why you needed such a broad subpoena, why so many people’s records were subpoenaed,” Gibbs said on Morning Joe today. “I know it’s difficult in the middle of an investigation, but I think, quite frankly, it’s something that’s sort of largely owed to the American people.”

The Washington Post is reporting that the Justice Department took extraordinary steps to investigate Fox News reporter James Rosen for possible leaks of classified information about North Korea:”It used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.”

Context is everything. The very same month Justice’s probe into Rosen’s story began, the Obama administration’s war on Fox News began. As NRO’s Eliana Johnson has reported:

 In June of 2009, the president complained about a “certain cable network” devoted entirely to attacking his administration. Four months later, former White House communications director Anita Dunn in 2009 said of Fox, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” adding, “We don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” The administration went on to try to exclude Fox from the network pool that covers the White House, making a recent appointee — pay czar Kenneth Feinberg — available for interviews to every network but Fox. When the other networks refused to conduct the interview until Fox was included, the White House relented. But the verbal assault continued, with Obama telling Rolling Stone magazine in 2010 that the network represents a point of view that is “ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive  in the world.”

The public war that the Obama administration waged against Fox News was ugly enough. Perhaps with the Washington Post story we are now seeing the tip of the iceberg regarding the administration’s private war against Fox News. 

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus accused President Obama of having “built up an atmosphere of guerrilla warfare” that created fertile ground for the scandals now roiling his administration. 

“This is the problem with this entire situation [with the AP], with the IRS, with Benghazi: you have all these situations — all these unprecedented scandals — yet the president knows nothing about it,” Priebus said. 

Jason Chaffetz raises the prospect:

Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, says President Barack Obama may face impeachment over his administration’s response to the Benghazi attack.

“They purposefully and willfully misled the American people, and that’s unacceptable,” Chaffetz tells me. “It’s part of a pattern of deception.”

Behind the scenes, he says, House Republicans are frustrated by the White House’s evasiveness, and the calls for impeachment will likely increase.

Chaffetz acknowledges that House speaker John Boehner is wary of moving too swiftly against the president, but the brash, 46-year-old conservative is tired of waiting for answers. He’s ready to issue subpoenas and schedule more hearings. 

More here.

Forbes magazine explains how Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy will end climate-change denialism in the Republican party.

Since his emergence as a national political figure, Barack Obama has managed to deflect accusations of wrongdoing and impropriety with ease. Republicans on Capitol Hill are determined to put that to an end by making him pay for the unfolding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.

“Ultimately responsibility lies with the president. Obama has spent the better part of the last five years doing non-stop campaigning,” says a senior Republican Senate aide who points to the administration’s larger pattern of “using political offices to intimidate and harrass” its opponents. “When bureaucrats see the leader of an organization doing that, it shouldn’t shock us when they start doing the same. That appears to have been what happened here.”

Republican lawmakers, led by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Florida senator Marco Rubio, are now hammering the president for fostering a “culture of intimidation” that encourages the vilification of one’s political opponents. “There is a culture of intimidation throughout the administration,” McConnell told NBC’s David Gregory on Sunday. “It’s no wonder the agents in the IRS sorta get the message. The president demonizes his opponents.” On the Senate floor last week, Rubio too described a “culture of intimidation” and, referring to the IRS’s targeting, argued that the culture “leads to this kind of behavior throughout the administration.” House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp spoke of the same culture his opening statement at Friday’s hearing on the IRS scandal.

The repeated use of the term is no accident. “Mitch McConnell doesn’t say anything without thinking about why he is going to say it,” another senior GOP aide tells National Review Online. “If you hear him talking about a culture of intimidation at the IRS, he’s not just coming up with that on the spot.” This is a theme McConnell has touched on repeatedly during Obama’s tenure, and it is again emerging as Republicans seek to hang the IRS scandal around the president’s neck. 

The president has frequently been called thin-skinned; he is noticeably irked by criticism and it is hard to miss the contempt in which he holds his critics. In press conferences, campaign speeches, and off-the-cuff remarks, he has returned fire. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the billionaire Koch brothers have all been targets. “I can’t remember a president ever singling out individuals the way he does, it’s just unprecedented,” the Senate aide tells me. The manner in which the president has reacted and responded to his critics over the past four years is now being used to substantiate Republicans’ charge that, if the top dog acts like a bully, his underlings are likely to follow suit.

Take Fox News. In June of 2009, the president complained about a “certain cable network” devoted entirely to attacking his administration. Four months later, former White House communications director Anita Dunn in 2009 said of Fox, “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” adding, “We don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” The administration went on to try to exclude Fox from the network pool that covers the White House, making a recent appointee – pay czar Kenneth Feinberg – available for interviews to every network but Fox. When the other networks refused to conduct the interview until Fox was included, the White House relented. But the verbal assault continued, with Obama telling Rolling Stone in 2010 that the network represents a point of view that is “ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world.”

Charles and David Koch have come in for similar treatment. The billionaire brothers, who co-chair the country’s second-largest private company, sit atop a constellation of right-leaning non-profit organizations opposed to the president’s agenda. With administration officials urging reporters to write about “the most insidious power grab of all time,” and the president warning of “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates across the country,” the Koch brothers became the bête noire of the midterm election.

McConnell last year warned that the administration’s actions demonstrated its willingness to use the powers of government to silence American citizens. (He also cited the IRS’s harrassment of tea-party groups as a case in point). The Koch brothers, McConnell said, became household names “not for the tens of thousands of people they employ, not for their generosity to charity,” but because of the administration’s bullying. “If the President of the United States opposed these kinds of tactics, all he’d have to do is condemn them. Instead, he’s joined the effort.” He went on to link the president’s rhetorical war against them to the harrassment and death threats to which they were subjected.

As with Fox News and the Koch brothers, so too, Republicans say, with the Tea Party. “The White House may be keen on this strategy that it was one or two employees at some far off agency, but the president was very clear on strategy that these groups were not to be trusted, and if you’re working at one of these agencies,” argues the Senate aide, “and if you want to see the president get reelected, you want to make it difficult for these organizations to form and flourish.”

Both GOP lawmakers and their staff are careful about lodging accusations about what the president knew about what was happening at the IRS — and when he knew it – saying that the investigations currently underway by both Congress and the inspector general will determine that. But to make the president pay for this scandal, in their view, that may be immaterial.

On “Face the Nation” this week, Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) said it’s past time for Attorney General Eric Holder to step down. He cited Fast and Furious, as well as  the Department of Justice’s monitoring of AP reporters’ phone calls. Cornyn also questioned the circumstances of Holder’s recusal. “You know, I’ve lost confidence in the attorney general a long time ago over his cover-up over the Fast and Furious investigation,” he said. 

“I think it’s past time for him to go and for the president to appoint somebody who the public can have confidence in,” he concluded. 

This morning on “This Week,” White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer said that the law regarding the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party-affiliated groups is “irrelevant.” When host George Stephanopoulos asked him if the president thinks it is illegal for IRS employees to create lists targeting groups and individuals, Pfeiffer responded, “I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity needs the stopped. It needs to be fixed.”