Pun Salad

Our (arbitrary) inclusion rule forces us to bid goodbye (once again) to Newt Gingrich this week; he's down to a 3.7% probability at Intrade.

He could be back, though. Because, whatever his flaws, his first name is not "Mitt".

• At Reason, Jacob Sullum pointed out the sheer phoniness of President Obama's promised "accommodation" for religious organizations who would prefer not to pay for "health care" they consider to be immoral.

  By exempting churches from the birth control mandate, Obama concedes their religious freedom is at stake. But he arbitrarily denies that freedom to church-affiliated organizations. Although he acknowledges "many genuine concerns" about the mandate, he isn't willing to address them in a genuine way.

  Sullum is dismayed by the mainstream media who "reported the administration's spin as fact."

  More generally: Obamacare isn't just a war on religious liberty, it's a war on liberty in general. And Obama can't allow conscientious objectors.

• Keith Hennessey notes a problem with President Obama's campaign-speech demand that "Congress needs to make the Buffett Rule a reality." And right now! According to the Prez, it's one of the "things we can do today."

  The "Buffett Rule" is a mandate that "millionaires" pay at least 30% of their incomes in taxes. Only problem is, as Hennessey points out, Obama's proposal is "vaporware"; the Administration hasn't actually proposed any legislation that would implement the Buffett Rule.

  But my guess is that it plays well with focus groups as a campaign issue. And running against Congress probably does too.

  President Obama continually demonstrates his contempt for the intelligence of the electorate. But can he really get away with saying "I demand that Congress act immediately on legislation that I haven't actually proposed myself"? Hey, maybe!

• There was also Obama-action on the corporate tax front this week, and it was (predictably) phony. Peter Suderman's headline about the proposal deserves quoting in full:

  Obama Administration Proposes Corporate Tax Overhaul Based on Theory That Loopholes Are Bad and Should Be Replaced With Different Loopholes

  After examining the details, Suderman sums up the Orwellian reality:

  So the Obama administration's proposal to reform the corporate tax code is a tax cut that will probably result in a net tax hike, and a tax simplification that will include the creation of new loopholes.

• President Obama, using the p-word in 2012:

  It's the easiest thing in the world (to) make phony election-year promises about lower gas prices.

  Senator Obama, 2008, making phony election-year promises about lower gas prices:

  Proposed Obama campaign slogan: "Because You'll Believe Anything"

Here's a letter I sent to my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, about the latest instance of their occasional bad habit of letting "activist" opinion into their news articles (links added):

Your recent news article ("In Protest", page B1, Sunday February 26) erred in uncritically echoing the views of the activists holding the "peace vigil" in Dover the previous day, concerning the West Bank city of Hebron. The article held an obvious anti-Israel bias and presented the activists' claims, mistakenly, as fact.

Specifically: The article referred to "a massacre of 40 of [Hebron's] locals at a mosque by Israeli forces" eighteen years ago. A few minutes spent checking reputable sources might have revealed that the massacre was not perpetrated by "Israeli forces", but by one Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish extremist from the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba. Goldstein was a maniac, acting alone. The body count is usually reported as 29, not 40; this doesn't include Goldstein himself, who was eventually overcome by the mosque's worshipers and beaten to death. Subsequent violence in Hebron claimed both Palestinian and Israeli lives.

It's fine if Foster's reports on the doings of local activist groups. It's not so fine when a news article acts as a mere conduit for a particular group's one-sided opinions and bogus "facts".