Last fall, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius spoke at a NARAL Pro Choice America fundraiser:

“We’ve come a long way in women’s health over the last few decades, but we are in a war,” Sebelius said, referencing Republicans’ attempts to cut Medicaid, repeal the federal health reform law (PL 111-148) and eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. Republican lawmakers “don’t just want to go after the last 18 months, they want to roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive health care in America,” she said.

This is interesting. People who think it’s hyperbolic to speak of the Obama administration’s war on religion ought to note that it wasn’t a right-wing talk radio host who characterized this as “war,” but the Secretary of HHS. Bill McGurn comments:

[E]ven Catholics who supported President Obama on his signature health bill recognize the contraceptive mandate as a bridge too far. These include the Catholic Health Association’s Sr. Carol Keehan, whose well-publicized embrace of the Affordable Care Act gave the president critical cover when he needed it. Others simply question whether forcing Catholic hospitals to drop health insurance for their employees rather than submit to Madam Sebelius’s bull is really the image the president wants during a tough re-election year.

Then there are the Catholic bishops. Just two years ago, many seemed to regard ObamaCare as a compassionate piece of legislation if only a few provisions (e.g., conscience rights and abortion funding) could be tweaked. Now they are learning the real problem is the whole thing is built on force—from the individual mandate and doctors’ fees to the panels deciding what treatment grandma is entitled to. The awakening has led to a new bishops’ committee on religious liberty, and tough, unprecedented criticism.

Via Ramesh Ponnuru, here’s a provocative analysis by Michael S. Greve, detailing the way the administration appears to have made a point of putting the screws to religious institutions. Excerpt:

This “process” has been playing out while Mrs. Sebelius’s office has issued hundreds of waivers for employer health plans that fail to comply with the ACA’s and HHS’s exalted standards, such as “mini-med” plans used by McDonald’s. Without those waivers, the ranks of the uninsured would swell. Hiding the ACA’s inanity is sufficient reason to suspend the legal requirements; First Amendment objections apparently aren’t.

I find the TSA’s procedures to be often ridiculous. But barring further information that would put his decision to refuse a patdown in a better light, it looks to me like Sen. Rand Paul was being prissy:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was escorted away from a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint at the Nashville airport on Monday after declining to undergo an enhanced security pat-down, the agency said. He later completed a different screening process and boarded a different flight than originally scheduled.

Contrary to some news reports, TSA agents never detained Paul after the incident, the agency said.

An alarm sounded as the senator passed through a body-imaging machine Monday, and he “refused to complete the screening process in order to resolve the issue,” the TSA said in a statement. “Passengers, as in this case, who refuse to comply with security procedures are denied access to the secure gate area. He was escorted out of the screening area by local law enforcement.”

Look, if you or I walk through an airport checkpoint, and the alarm goes off — as it has done with me before — we’re going to get patted down. That’s fair. The things people don’t like about the TSA are the random patdowns, especially when they target people like little old ladies. Does anybody believe that if an alarm goes off when you go through the metal detector at the airport, that you should be able to refuse a security patdown? If Rand Paul were a Muslim cleric, not a famously libertarian US Senator, would anybody defend his refusal? I wouldn’t, and neither would you. So why should a U.S. senator receive special treatment? Are there two sets of airport security laws in this country, one for senior American politicians, and another for the rest of us?

On the other hand, watch this clip from a James Fallows post about the Paul incident. Paul sounds reasonable. Fallows suggests that Paul might have run afoul of some TSA agents who were behaving unreasonably. I have never had that experience, but I don’t travel nearly as often as Fallows does. Fallows writes:

This is one of the great airport-by-airport variations in TSA demeanor, in my experience. In some — for instance, BWI on our last trip through there — you sense that you’re dealing with human beings trying to apply the rules but not rub in their authority. At some other places, you have officers who look as if they’re waiting for a traveler to provoke them by showing “attitude.” TSA-Dulles usually seems that way to me, though friends in New York tell me that if I traveled through JFK more, I’d have it at the top of my list.

So, I think it’s possible that Sen. Paul may have been pushed around by TSA agents on an authority trip. But I think it’s equally possible that Sen. Paul tried to play the authority card on them. I want to know more details about the incident. Please post more in the combox thread if you find them.

You see Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday?  This part, I mean:

The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” bristles with aggrievement and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.

We disappointed them.

As Michelle said to Oprah in an interview she did with the president last May: “I always told the voters, the question isn’t whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we’re ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves.”

They still believed, as their friend Valerie Jarrett once said, that Obama was “just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

If you are a reader of a certain age, you cannot read this passage without thinking of Jimmy Carter, the man who was too good for the people who elected him. As the journalist Elizabeth Drew once said on a PBS documentary about Carter:

 He’s a very, very smart man. And very well intentioned. But feel, feel is very, very important in politics, especially in a president. And Carter just didn’t have very much of it.

I have for years strongly recommended to my readers the Mars Hill Audio Journal, Ken Myers’ quarterly in which he interviews thought leaders, not all of them Christian or even religious, on topics of vital interest to intellectually and culturally engaged Christians. If you are an intellectually serious Christian, you should want to understand the culture of postmodernity — and I cannot imagine a better guide than Mars Hill Audio Journal.

Now, right after the Hosanna-Tabor ruling, and Obama’s HHS policy infringing on the conscience rights of Catholic institutions, I’m pleased to discover that MHAJ has a fairly new spinoff: Dialogues on Law & Justice, where host Ken Myers conducts in-depth interviews with scholars about issues related to faith and the law. These are downloadable without subscription — in other words, they’re free. If you know Ken’s interview style, you’ll know that he has a knack for asking deep, probing questions, but in a way that makes the topics accessible to a non-specialist audience. And you’ll know too that he approaches these topics not from a strictly political or even tactical viewpoint, but from one of philosophical and theological first principles, informed by a rich understanding of history.

Hosanna-Tabor, and now HHS, signal to conservatives that questions surrounding the law and religious liberty are going to be even more crucial in the years to come. And so, in turn, will the Dialogues on Law & Justice site.

Whose fault is Newt Gingrich’s rise? Noah Millman suggests that it has to do with the vacuum created by Romney’s lack of alpha male cred:

If Romney wants to win this, he has to win it. Himself. By making the case for himself. This isn’t about having a “vision” for the future of America or of the GOP – what on earth is Gingrich’s vision? And it certainly isn’t about comparing resumes – and, in the end, that’s all talk about “electability” is. It’s about him. Presidential politics in America has gotten absurdly personal, but that’s just a fact of political life. Romney needs to convince first the Republican electorate, then the general electorate, that they would follow him.

Mark Steyn follows this line of thought, and seems to doubt that with Mitt, there is any there there. Romney has the best campaign money can buy, but doesn’t seem to grasp that a credible presidential candidacy has to be about something more than the sum of its consultants and position papers:

Mitt’s strategy for 2012 as for 2008 was to sit on his lead and run out the clock: Four years ago, that strategy died in New Hampshire; this time round it died one state later. Congratulations! Years ago, I was chit-chatting with Arthur Laurents, the writer of West Side Story and The Way We Were and much else, about some show that was in trouble on the road that he’d been called in to “fix.” “The trouble with a bad show,” he sighed, “is that you can make it better but you can never make it good.” The Romney candidacy is better than it was four years ago, but it’s not clear that it’s good. Mitt needs to get good real fast: A real speech, real plan, real responses, and real fire in the belly. Does he have it in him?

Steyn’s column is titled, “The Man Who Gave Us Newt” — stating that Romney’s awfulness drove voters into Newt’s arms. Conor Friedersdorf argues that Newt may be a creature of the Republican establishment, but not in the way you think. Newt may be the official GOP establishment’s nightmare, but he is exactly the kind of figure that the real GOP establishment valorizes. Excerpt:

People bear responsibility for the media they consume. Voters ultimately own the politicians they elevate. But if you’re wondering to which “thought leaders” his rise can be attributed, best to ask, “Whose approach to politics produces, as its logical conclusion, a candidacy like Gingrich 2012?” Surveying the centrality of attacks on the mainstream media, the casting of President Obama as a radical other, and the trick where you shrewdly repeat a racially provocative line, get accused of racism, and cast yourself as an aggrieved victim for political advantage, Gingrich ’12 is modeled after the successful tactics of movement conservatism’s demagogues. Is there any candidate in memory whose persona so closely resembles an egomaniacal talk-radio host? The rank-and-file in South Carolina accept a would-be president behaving that way because they’re used to their “thought leaders” talking like that. They aren’t in on the reality that a lot of what they hear on talk radio resembles performance art; they don’t presume that the rhetoric and arguments employed daily on Fox News are often contrived or disingenuous.

Along these lines, I would urge you to read, or re-read, John Derbyshire’s excellent 2009 TAC essay about how talk radio has harmed the conservative movement. Excerpt:

It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem—Feminazis instead of feminism—and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. “Revolt against the masses?” asked Jeffrey Hart. “Limbaugh is the masses.”

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right. But however much this dumbing down has damaged the conservative brand, it appeals to millions of Americans. McDonald’s profits rose 80 percent last year.

I have been engaged in a friendly e-mail dispute with some Christian friends over the 2012 presidential race. As little enthusiasm as I have for the Obama administration (which is to say, none), I cannot for the life of me understand the apocalyptic rhetoric and conviction so many conservatives have about him. I talk all the time with fellow conservatives who have a visceral fear of the Kenyan Marxist winning a second term. I honestly don’t get it. As you know, I didn’t vote for Obama (nor for McCain; I wrote in a candidate), but I hoped that at least he would do some good on the two big failures of the Bush administration (for which I twice voted): foreign policy — specifically, dialing back on this willingness to make America the policeman of the world — and financial reform. He’s been a big disappointment, though it must be said that if a Republican president would have been in office, we wouldn’t have gotten even as much as we did. My lack of fear of a second Obama term comes from the thought that on these two big issues — Wall Street and war-making — a Republican president with a Republican Congress would likely be far worse than this mediocrity we now have in the White House.

The one area that I agree Obama ought to be feared is on religious liberty. His administration was on the wrong side of the recent Hosanna Tabor case, in which every member of the Supreme Court, including the liberal justices, ruled for religious liberty, and against the Administration. And now, with last week’s word that the Department of Health and Human Services is going to compel Catholic institutions to pay for employee contraception via insurance, it is clear that Obama is by no means merely a nominal threat to religious freedom. Princeton law professor Robert George nails it:

In every area touching the sanctity of human life and issues of sexual morality, the Obama administration is aggressively prosecuting the agenda its critics predicted and its most ardent left-wing supporters hoped for. Those who are driving the train, including key administration officials who self-identify as members of the Catholic Church, have no regard for the ethical beliefs of Catholics and others when they are in conflict with left-liberal orthodoxy.  Their task, as they perceive it, is to fortify and expand the “right to abortion” and “sexual freedom” wherever they can.  They pursue this agenda with a religious zeal because, in fact, the ideology in which abortion is a “right” and “sexual freedom” is a core value is their religion. These beliefs are integral to their worldview. If, like Kathleen Sebelius, they happen to be Catholics, you can be assured that it won’t be Catholic teaching, or the Judaeo-Christian ethic, that shapes their policies on issues of life and death and marriage and sexual morality; it will be liberal ideology—pure and simple—that does the shaping.

Interestingly, Obama and his people have been willing to break the hearts of those on the left when it comes Guantanamo, rendition, basic procedural rights of detainees and those accused of supporting terrorism, targeted assassinations, drone attacks, and so forth.  But they keep faith strictly with them when it comes to anything pertaining to abortion, contraception, and other central components of the ideology of lifestyle liberalism—the conscience rights of Catholics and others be damned.

Pro-life citizens, including many Catholics, who in 2008 allowed themselves to be persuaded that Obama wouldn’t, as his critics warned, push abortion hard and run roughshod over the religious liberty and rights of conscience of Catholics and other pro-life citizens and their institutions, have now gotten a rude awakening. His administration revealed its contempt for religious freedom and the rights of people and communities of faith when it embraced an extreme and utterly untenable position on the ministerial exemption in the Hosanna-Tabor case.  In case anyone thought that was some sort of isolated mistake, the President’s abortifacient and contraception mandate leaves the matter in no doubt.

The liberal Catholic writer Michael Sean Winters, who blogs for the progressive Catholic newspaper National Catholic Reporter, wrote a stinging rebuke to Obama over this issue. Excerpt:

President Barack Obama lost my vote yesterday when he declined to expand the exceedingly narrow conscience exemptions proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The issue of conscience protections is so foundational, I do not see how I ever could, in good conscience, vote for this man again.

More:

I accuse you, Mr. President, of failing to live out the respect for diversity that you so properly and beautifully proclaimed as a cardinal virtue at Notre Dame. Or, are we to believe that diversity is only to be lauded when it advances the interests of those with whom we agree? That’s not diversity. That’s misuse of a noble principle for ignoble ends.

I accuse you, Mr. President, of betraying philosophic liberalism, which began, lest we forget, as a defense of the rights of conscience. As Catholics, we need to be honest and admit that, three hundred years ago, the defense of conscience was not high on the agenda of Holy Mother Church. But, we Catholics learned to embrace the idea that the coercion of conscience is a violation of human dignity. This is a lesson, Mr. President, that you and too many of your fellow liberals have apparently unlearned.

You really should read the whole thing. Again, Winters identifies himself as a liberal Democrat, but he says Obama has pushed him too far with this thing. It is bizarre that Obama would have done this. He defends Guantanamo, he defends abandoning his previously stated views on civil liberties, but on this, on compelling Catholic institutions to violate their institutional consciences to provide contraception coverage in private insurance, Obama is willing to go to the mat?

What is wrong with these people? What is the upside in antagonizing religious voters like this?

I have more or less been thinking that once again, I’m going to sit out a presidential election, but if anything compels me to hold my nose and vote Republican instead of sitting this election out as a disaffected conservative, it will be this issue. It’s not that I agree with the Catholic Church’s position on contraception. It’s that, as Winters writes, the primacy of conscience and religious liberty is so great that as a believer, I am hard-pressed to justify functional neutrality.

Rocco Palmo reports on the Catholic bishops’ response. Excerpt:

The HHS rule requires that sterilization and contraception – including controversial abortifacients – be included among “preventive services” coverage in almost every healthcare plan available to Americans. “The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs,” added Cardinal-designate Dolan.

At issue, the U.S. bishops and other religious leaders insist, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for the conscience of Catholics and all other Americans.

“This is nothing less than a direct attack on religion and First Amendment rights,” said Franciscan Sister Jane Marie Klein, chairperson of the board at Franciscan Alliance, Inc., a system of 13 Catholic hospitals. “I have hundreds of employees who will be upset and confused by this edict. I cannot understand it at all.”

Again, this is not fundamentally about contraception and sterilization. I don’t believe what the Catholic Church teaches about these things. That is beside the point. The point is that for Catholics and Catholic institutions, this is a very big issue. Why does the administration insist on forcing itself onto these institutions? It could well be that they know the great majority of Catholics reject the Church’s teaching on contraception, and that, according to one study, up to 48 percent of all Catholic hospitals have performed direct sterilizations, in spite of clear Church teaching against it. The administration is probably gambling that the bishops are paper tigers on this issue, because they don’t have their people behind them.

Well, Team Obama has lost the liberal Catholic Michael Sean Winters, and for reasons that every religious believer and friend of the First Amendment should take seriously. Winters again:

Some commentators, including those in the comment section on my post yesterday, have charged that people like me, Catholics who have been generally supportive of the President, were duped, that we should confess our sins of political apostasy, and go rushing into the arms of a waiting GOP. I respectfully decline the indictment and, even more, the remedy. Nothing that happened yesterday made the contemporary GOP less mean-spirited, or more inclined to support the rights of our immigrant brothers and sisters, or less bellicose in their approach to foreign affairs, or more concerned about the how the government can and should alleviate poverty. … As for myself, I could not, in good conscience, vote for any of the current Republicans seeking the presidency.

But, yesterday, as soon as I learned of this decision, I knew instantly that I also could not, in good conscience, ever vote for Mr. Obama again. …

I have not been one of those Christians who has been quick to credit the hyperbolic meme that the Administration is making “war” on religion. After this, I concede that I was probably wrong. As with the Massachusetts state court ruling several years ago, which compelled Catholic Charities of Boston to get out of the adoption business, we are faced with an elite establishment that seems determined to use legal means to cast out of the public square religious believers who do not accept the sexual autonomy and egalitarianism that is the raison d’etre of the activist core of the modern Democratic Party. Obama will cave, and has caved, on civil liberties, on Wall Street, on any number of issues. But this issue is where he draws his line in the sand. Instructive, that.

No, not really. Ha-ha! But boy, did the 63-year-old rocker abuse the National Anthem at the start of yesterday’s Patriots-Ravens game. We were all sitting on the front porch at my mom and dad’s house after lunch when a horrible screeching sound came from inside the house. We thought one of the kids might be hurt, or a cat had got into the house and was stuck somewhere. I went inside to investigate, and it turns out someone had left the TV on, and there was this elderly man on screen, looking like a bag lady and sounding like a tomcat who’d gotten his goolies caught in a vise:

Ross Douthat explores why it’s so hard to find a good presidential candidate these days. Like most rational people, he dreads the likely Obama-Romney contest to come this fall:

But the presidency, unexpectedly, has exposed [Obama’s] limits as a communicator. Now when Obama demonizes, it seems clumsy; when he tries to persuade, it falls on deaf ears. Unlike Reagan and Clinton, the two masters, he seems unable to either bully or inspire.

What Obama has left, though, is the same capable, even ruthless organization that helped him over the top last time around. Maybe he’ll rediscover the old 2008 magic as well. But if not, the 2012 election is shaping up to be the most wearying sort of American presidential campaign: a clash of two managers, slogging their way toward a prize that a stronger candidate might have taken in a walk.

You know what I think? Romney is the same kind of guy — neither loved nor feared. The difference is we know this now, not after three years of a Romney presidency. Reader PJ wrote on the “Romneyness” thread:

I cannot stomach either Romney or Gingrich, but my assumption long has been that Romney was possibly electable and Gingrich less so depending on how the economy goes from here. But I find myself questioning that after this week and I don’t understand the view that electability is still slam dunk in Romney’s corner. For all of Gingrich’s baggage, he can at least defend or deflect attacks successfully. Romney has been running for president for 6 years now and cannot deflect an attack on his Bain work with a GOP electorate that is largely sympathetic to capitalism? How in the world does anyone think he will be able to do so when it comes to swing voters if he can’t do it now?

That’s a great point. I keep bringing up John Podhoretz’s tweet from last week, in which he expressed bafflement that Romney has been running for president for five or six years, and he still doesn’t know how to handle questions about his wealth. I don’t care one bit for Romney, I can’t stand Gingrich, and I believe that there are legitimate structural questions that need asking about wealth and taxation in this country — and yet, it would have taken me maybe 10 minutes to have come up with Romney responses to Gingrich’s attacks that were far more potent than anything Romney offered.

I wonder who will be the first TV journalist to ask Romney the Roger-Mudd-to-Ted-Kennedy question: “Why do you want to be president?” True, Romney will not likely give a deer-in-headlights response, as did Kennedy, but I bet his answer will be so canned that it will tell us something about him. But maybe nothing that we don’t already know. After South Carolina, I think of Romney as the Canned Cranberry Sauce candidate: the appearance of substance, but made of jelly, and so recently glopped from the can I can still see the rings.

So I got Mrs. Dreher a copy of “The Homesick Texan Cookbook” for Christmas, and boy, does she love it — though I don’t think she would recommend its queso recipe. I thought the queso was fine, but Julie said the mouthfeel was all wrong, and that there’s just no getting around the fact that Velveeta is the sine qua non of real Tex-Mex queso.

Last night she made the Texas sheet cake recipe from the book. It was, well, a chocolate sheet cake. She said people had it all the time when she was growing up in Texas. It seems like nothing special, but oh my freaking LBJ, it was some good! I don’t really like chocolate, but I couldn’t get enough of this stuff. I can’t figure out why something so simple was so extraordinarily good. I shared a piece today with my niece Claire, who loves to bake, and asked her what she thought. With the first bite, her face lit up like she’d just snorted something illegal but extremely pleasant. “What is that?” she said. I wish I knew.

All I can figure is that this odd step made a big difference. I’ve never seen a cake made this way:

Sift the sugar and flour together in a bowl.

Melt the butter on low in a saucepan, and when melted add cocoa and water and heat until boiling.

Pour cocoa mix over sugar and flour and mix well with a spoon.

I suppose Alton Brown or Harold McGee could explain this, but something magical must take place chemically in the boiling of the cocoa and butter.

Julie didn’t put ancho chile powder in the version she made last night, because she didn’t want to make it taste weird to the kids. I can’t wait till she makes it again, this time with chile.

Buy the book for your homesick Texan, is what I’d advise. I knew that when I gave it to her, this increased substantially the risk that I would be forced to eat something made with Dr Pepper, which is completely vile. But love demands taking chances, does it not?