This would be amusing were it not so disgusting -- and sad.

Conservative and religious groups panned the Obama administration's long-awaited  "accommodation" meant to spare religious-affiliated groups from the so-called  contraceptive mandate, calling a proposal unveiled Friday "radically  inadequate."

....

Another lawsuit was brought by Ave Maria University in Florida. The school's president, Jim Towey, said Friday that the suit would stand "until we have heard where our country's Catholic bishops stand."

Towey, in a statement, called the latest proposal a "provocation," and a "bizarre, new bureaucracy to obscure who exactly is paying for the abortion-inducing drugs and other services covered by the mandate."

Except those who want the government to take it all over, which is a surprising piece of the so-called "Mainstream" Catholics:

Another group that has been supportive of the administration in the past, Catholics United, praised the proposal Friday.

"This is a victory not only for the Obama administration, but for the Catholic Church," director James Salt said.

Note that you can call something anything you want.  This 501c(4) is a political organization that is not officially affiliated with the Catholic Church, but has taken its moniker so as to promote the belief that it is.  And if you read that story, you won't find the distinction pointed out.

Why not?

Well, isn't it obvious?

Incidentally the group was formed after the 2004 elections in which Republicans attempted to convince Catholics not to vote for John Kerry because he supported abortion.

So does the Catholic Church, at least in name and formal claims.

But the problem with reducing health care to a social justice argument and claim of entitlement is that when that is then coupled with an "unending and unalienable right to life" you wind up with an impossible mixture of demand and supply.  That is, you have the demand from a religious organization to spend other people's money to prolong or enhance that which is not naturally achievable. 

Without the force of government such a demand falls to private charity and conscience, and that serves as the counterbalance against what is otherwise a black hole that consumes all resource in a futile attempt to keep each individual from meeting God for the second time just one more year, month, day, hour and then finally second.

This is by definition an unnatural and Satanic thing, if you believe in God.  For if you believe in God then you also believe God had a hand in Man's design, and in that design he placed mortality.  That is, we all shall die.  While you can make an argument under the rubric of God's design that acts taken to intentionally shorten one's life are sinful (immoral) we don't want to go there, do we, or we'd be talking about sloth and corpulance, and that discussion would have to begin with high-fructose corn syrup, carbs and "engineered" transfats and hydrogenated oils, all of which are a gross distortion of what that very same God put on the planet with us for our consumption.

Now, having set forward the intentional derogation of what which God placed on the planet, we now have groups that call for a very pleasant "barbell" strategy.  Rather than stress individual responsibility and consequence for one's actions (like, for instance, the consequence that comes from screwing anything that walks on two legs without a care in the world) we then decide that we'll move the line of where "life" is wherever it's convenient -- when it's convenient.

So we charge a man who murders a pregnant woman with two murders, but at the same time were that same woman to walk into an abortion clinic an hour earlier, abort the fetus and then be murdered we would charge the same killer with one murder instead of two.  Where did the other murder disappear to? 

There are generally speaking four forms of homicide: Praiseworthy, Justified, Excusable and Felonious.  Shooting Hitler, had you been able to do so, would have been in the first category.  The rapist breaking into your home is the second.  The third is the sort that happens when through no fault of your own there is a car accident and someone dies.  And finally, the last is what happens when some thug jumps a fence and opens fire with a gun that doesn't really exist in a city that waves paper around and claims it will stop bullets.

The puerile insanity that pervades so-called "public debate" among the latter category stands in stark contrast to the facts -- a million killings take place every single year in America, and we don't call them homicides because they are killings of convenience with 99% of them only being possible because of a consensual act of the person who causes them to be committed.

At the same time we want to have a debate about "gun control", centered on rifles when in point of fact baseball bats, hammers and other blunt instruments are used to murder more often than rifles in a given year.  Yet nobody is arguing for banning baseball bats and hammers.

The argument is often made that "assault weapons" are only for committing mass-murder.  Yet the facts are that millions of them destroy nothing other than paper every single year in America.  In 2011 there were 323 homicides in which a rifle (of any sort, including but not limited to an "assault weapon") was used -- out of 12,644 murders, or 2.6%.

This compared with 728 murders, or about twice as many, committed with hands, feet, fists and other body parts, 1,694 committed with knives and 1,659 committed with other weapons (such as golf clubs, baseball bats and hammers.)

Will all those "Good Catholics" who stand for pre-crime amputation of hands and feet please rise!

This is what passes for "public debate" these days -- a legislative feel-good festival of fact-free pablum.  It is why our nation is disintegrating around us; we have for decades promised people that which we cannot deliver and deflected our political and economic debate from mathematical reality.  We wish to argue over "assault weapons" when on a comparative basis they are responsible for less than 3% of all murders, half of those committed with hands and feet and one tenth of those committed with knives and blunt instruments such as baseball bats and golf clubs combined.  Yet we hold Congressional hearings and pass laws under the claim of "emergency" with legislators not even reading the bill before voting on it, and then the traitorous governor who orchestrated this knowing these facts and thus doing so with intentional disregard for public safety and unalienable rights sends his jackbooted bastards around to try to drum up support ex-post facto. 

It does appear, however, that finally the public has woken up, at least in New York. 

If this spreads into the other areas of our national political scene where similar and even more-outrageous lies, scams and frauds are conducted by the day, whether it be in "health care", "education" or God forbid, banking and finance, then we would really be making progress.

Many people have emailed me wondering why I have spent so much time on the 2nd Amendment issues and why there's even a separate category that I created for it here on The Ticker, when this is primarily a blog about finance and economics.

That's simple, really: The destruction of fact-based analysis and journalism is not restricted to economics and finance and there is no better illustration of the intentional lying and obfuscation that goes on in our government and political sphere than is found in this topic, or for that matter in the so-called "health care" debate as applies to religious organizations.

Those who embrace "government" lies for their own political agenda eventually find themselves with the running chainsaw of lies they attempted to foist on others being shoved up their exit door.  The Catholic Church and affiliated groups have taken what was a pastoral mandate to promote and provide charity for the less-fortunate and attempted to foist that off as a mandate enforced not by persuasion from the pulpit but rather by physical force.  Having taken their preaching of fire and brimstone and turned it into 3,200fps chunks of lead flung by government agents at their behest they now scream as those chunks embed themselves in their own bodies, writing in self-inflicted agony brought by their own idiotic conversion of persuasion to force.

Likewise we take what was an argument of moral persuasion when it comes to health care -- take care of oneself or suffer the consequences, including the possibility that you might need to beg for help from someone else, and turned that into a mandate backed with force.  Then when that force is turned upon you and suddenly the "promise" of lower cost health care turns out to be instead a doubling of your expense what are you to do?  You ceded the debate when you gave the government the right to shove its guns up your ass and demand your money exactly as a robber does, and now you complain about the terms?  Perhaps you should think about reversing your original consent, eh?

Likewise with the markets -- we all scream about the "housing bust" and how it hurt people, but what government did was protect those who stole from you.  Now we have individual counties discovering they were rooked out of a million dollars in recording fees and that virtually every transaction over the last two years in those counties is tainted and thus the supposed "owners" of those homes are exposed to having to pay twice or losing their house entirely!  Rather than imprison the fraudsters we said "protect those poor homeowners" and what we got was "protection" all right -- exactly as the mafia provides it by demanding you hand over the contents of your wallet or Guido comes and breaks your legs.  Meanwhile the robber barons on Wall Street go free despite admitting to forging hundreds of thousands of documents and laundering money for various nefarious and illegal purposes.

At the core of all of this is your refusal to demand fact-based examination of policy along with adherence to the Rule of Law and Constitution.   As soon as you compromise on those principles and allow "expedience" or "feelings" to trump facts you will be screwed by those who are sociopaths and act not out of compassion but unbridled greed and avarice. 

These people are known as legislators, governors, Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, Judges, and Presidents, and until and unless you, as citizens, put your foot down and say "NO", willing to defend that statement with your lives, fortunes and sacred honor, this crap will not end.