Simon Potter

Lee Iacococca For President!!!!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 07:08:21 PDT

Would you believe that Lee Iacocca is 82 years old and is still kicking butt? Check out his latest rant.

Just as true today as it was when his book first came out. He was, and still is, a brilliant businessman!

Often we need to be reminded of Iacocca's words.

Remember Lee Iacocca , the man who rescued Chrysler Corporation from its death throes? He's now 82 years old and has a new book, 'Where Have All The Leaders Gone?'.

Lee Iacocca Says :

'Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage with this so called president? We should be screaming bloody murder! We've got a gang of tax-cheating clueless leftists trying to steer our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even run a ridiculous cash for-clunkers program without losing $26 billion of the taxpayers' money, much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'trust me, the economy is getting better..'Better?

You've got to be kidding. This is America , not the damned 'Titanic'. I'll give you a sound bite: 'Throw all the Democrats out, along with Obama!' You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore..

The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs.. While we're fiddling in Afghanistan, Iran is completing their nuclear bombs and missiles and nobody seems to know what to do. And the liberal press is waving

'pom-poms' instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of the 'America' my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough.

How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have. The Biggest 'C' is Crisis! (Iacocca elaborates on nine C's of leadership, with crisis being the first.)

Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with thumb up your butt and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down. On September 11, 2001 , we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. A hell of a mess, so here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war now with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving.. But our soldiers are dying daily.

We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the world, and it's getting worse every day!

We've lost the manufacturing edge to Asia , while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs.

Gas prices are going to skyrocket again, and nobody in power has a lucid plan to open drilling to solve the problem. This country has the largest oil reserves in the WORLD, and we cannot drill for it because the politicians have been bought by the flea-hugging environmentalists.

Our schools are in a complete disaster because of the teachers' union.

Our borders are like sieves and they want to give all illegals' amnesty and free healthcare.

The middle class is being squeezed to death every day.

These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: 'Where have all the leaders gone?' Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, omnipotence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point..

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo?

We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping the government will make it better for them. Now, that's just crazy.. Deal with life.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed

that there could ever be a time when 'The Big Three' referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, look what Obama did about it!

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem.

The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the Chicago gangsters in Congress. We didn't elect you to turn this country into a losing European Socialist state. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bonehead on NBC or CNN news will call them a name? Give me a break. Why

don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough? Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope - I believe in America .. In my lifetime, I've had the privilege of living through some of America 's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises: The 'Great Depression,' 'World War II,' the 'Korean War', the ' Kennedy Assassination,' the 'Vietnam War,' the 1970's oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years since 9/11.

Make your own contribution by sending this to everyone you know and care about. It's our country, folks, and it's our future. Our future is at stake!

Congressman Colonel David Crockett and the Constitution

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:03:32 PDT

This is definitely a speech that should be required reading throughout your middle, high school and college level education. There is a famous Benjamin Franklin quote when ask about what the delegates to the Constitution Convention in Philidelphia had done ("Well, Doctor, what have we got--a Republic or a Monarchy?) said "A Republic, if you can keep it."

Patriotism

Not Yours To Give

Col. David Crockett
US Representative from TennesseeOriginally published in "The Life of Colonel David Crockett,"
by Edward Sylvester Ellis.

One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:

"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him.

"Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."

He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.

Later, when asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, Crockett gave this explanation:

"Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made houseless, and, besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.

"The next summer, when it began to be time to think about election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of a stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly.

"I began: 'Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called
candidates, and---‘

"Yes I know you; you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine, I shall not vote for you again."

"This was a sockdolager...I begged him to tell me what was the matter.

" ’Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth-while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intend by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for my rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest.…But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.'

" 'I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, for I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.’

“ ‘No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live in the backwoods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some sufferers by a fire in Georgetown. Is that true?’

" ‘Well, my friend; I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve its suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.'

" ‘It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by a tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. 'No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose. If twice as many houses had been burned in this county as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief. There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the sufferers by contributing each one week's pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of wealthy men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life.' "The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditably; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.'

" 'So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you.'

"I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have opposition, and this man should go to talking, he would set others to talking, and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, and the fact is, I was so fully convinced that he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:

" ‘Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully. I have heard many speeches in Congress about the powers of Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.'

"He laughingly replied; 'Yes, Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You say that you are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than beating you for it. If, as you go around the district, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and, perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.'

" ‘If I don't’, said I, 'I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get up a gathering of the people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbecue, and I will pay for it.'

" ‘No, Colonel, we are not rich people in this section, but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbecue, and some to spare for those who have none. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbecue. This is Thursday; I will see to getting it up on Saturday week. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.’

" 'Well, I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-bye. I must know your name.’

" 'My name is Bunce.'

" 'Not Horatio Bunce?'

" 'Yes.’

" 'Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before, though you say you have seen me, but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend.'

"It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met him. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for his remarkable intelligence and incorruptible integrity, and for a heart brimful and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame had extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him, before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.

"At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with, and I found that it gave the people an interest and a confidence in me stronger than I had ever seen manifested before.

"Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached his house, and, under ordinary circumstances, should have gone early to bed, I kept him up until midnight, talking about the principles and affairs of government, and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before.

"I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him - no, that is not the word - I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times every year; and I will tell you, sir, if every one who professes to be a Christian lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.

"But to return to my story. The next morning we went to the barbecue, and, to my surprise, found about a thousand men there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted - at least, they all knew me.

"In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered up around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying:

" ‘Fellow-citizens - I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice, or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgment is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only.’"

"I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying:

" ‘And now, fellow-citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that the most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.

" ‘It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but he is entitled to the
credit for it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.'

"He came upon the stand and said:

" ‘Fellow-citizens - It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.'

"He went down, and there went up from that crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.'
"I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the remembrance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the honors I have received and all the reputation I have ever made, or ever shall make, as a member of Congress.'

"Now, sir," concluded Crockett, "you know why I made that speech yesterday.

"There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a week's pay. There are in that House many very wealthy men - men who think nothing of spending a week's pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased--a debt which could not be paid by money--and the insignificance and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it."

Chuck Green - On Obama May of 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 19:47:46 PDT

Excellent read..........
Here's an opinion piece by
Chuck Green who writes
"Greener Pastures" for the
Denver Post Aurora Sentinel...one
of the more liberal papers in the
country. Additionally, Mr. Green
is a life long Democrat...so this is
rather a stunning piece...

Obama is victim of Bush's failed
promises
Greener Pastures Column -- 5/ 15/10

Barack Obama is setting a record-setting number of records during his first year in office.
Largest budget ever. Largest deficit ever. Largest number of broken promises ever. Most self-serving speeches ever. Largest number of agenda-setting failures ever. Fastest dive in popularity ever.

Wow! Talk about change.

Just one year ago, fresh from his inauguration celebrations, President Obama was flying high. After one of the nation's most inspiring political campaigns, the election of America 's first black president had captured the hopes and dreams of millions. To his devout followers, it was inconceivable that a year later his administration would be gripped in self-imposed crisis.

Of course, they don't see it as self-imposed. It's all George Bush's fault.

George Bush, who doesn't have a vote in congress and who no longer occupies the White House, is to blame for it all.

He broke Obama's promise to put all bills on the White House web site for five days before signing them.

He broke Obama's promise to have the congressional health care negotiations broadcast live on C-SPAN.

He broke Obama's promise to end earmarks.

He broke Obama's promise to keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent.

He broke Obama's promise to close the detention center at Guantanamo in the first year.

He broke Obama's promise to make peace with direct, no precondition talks with America 's most hate-filled enemies during his first year in office, ushering in a new era of global cooperation.

He broke Obama's promise to end the hiring of former lobbyists into high White House jobs.

He broke Obama's promise to end no-compete contracts with the government.

He broke Obama's promise to disclose the names of all attendees at closed White House meetings.

He broke Obama's promise for a new era of bipartisan cooperation in all matters.

He broke Obama's promise to have chosen a home church to attend Sunday services with his family by Easter of last year.

Yes, it's all George Bush's fault. President Obama is nothing more than a puppet in the never-ending failed Bush administration.
If only George Bush wasn't still in charge, all of President Obama's problems would be solved. His promises would have been kept, the economy would be back on track, Iran would have stopped its work on developing a nuclear bomb and would be negotiating a peace treaty with Israel . North Korea would have ended its tyrannical regime, and integrity would have been restored to the federal government.

Oh, and did I mention what it would be like if the Democrats, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, didn't have the heavy yoke of George Bush around their necks? There would be no ear marks, no closed-door drafting of bills, no increase in deficit spending, no special-interest influence (unions), no vote buying (Nebraska, Louisiana).

If only George Bush wasn't still in charge, we'd have real change by now.

All the broken promises, all the failed legislation and delay (health care reform, immigration reform) is not President Obama's fault or the fault of the Democrat-controlled Congress. It's all George Bush's fault.

Take for example the decision of Eric Holder, the president's attorney general, to hold terrorists' trials in New York City . Or his decision to try the Christmas Day underpants bomber as a civilian.

Two disastrous decisions.

Certainly those were bad judgments based on poor advice from George Bush.

Need more proof?

You might recall that when Scott Brown won the election to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts , capturing "the Ted Kennedy seat", President Obama said that Brown's victory was the result of the same voter anger that propelled Obama into office in 2008. People were still angry about George Bush and the policies of the past 10 years. And they wanted change.

Yes, according to the president, the voter rebellion in Massachusetts was George Bush's fault.

Therefore, in retaliation, they elected a Republican to the Ted Kennedy seat, ending a half-century of domination by Democrats. It is all George Bush's fault.

Will the failed administration of George Bush ever end, and the time for hope and change ever arrive?

Will President Obama ever accept responsibility for something... - anything?
(Chuck Green is a veteran Colorado journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Denver Post.)

Our(?) Education System

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 08:00:55 PDT

I really hope that I'm not breaking any copyright laws and if I am please forgive me. I just feel that this should be more widely read. The Department of Education is like the Federal Reserve in that both should be eliminated. The government has no business funding either department. Having "Free Education" is step 10 and having a "national bank" is step 5 in Karl Marx and Frederic Engels's "The Communist Manifesto".

Racing To The Trough

Malcolm A. Kline, August 2, 2011

When local officials accept federal funds for the higher purpose of more qualitative national standards in education, about all they get is the “national” part, a trend now evident as states are urged by the federal government to adopt national curriculum standards known as “Common Core.” “Texas was asked to sign onto Common Core before it was written,” Texas Education commissioner Robert Scott said of the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top education program. “We said no.”
Now that the Common Core standards are at least partially developed, “Four-year colleges require more of incoming freshman than Race to the Top does of younger students,” Ze’ev Wurman, a business leader in the Silicon Valley, said at the Heritage Foundation seminar on July 27, 2011 that Scott keynoted.
The prospects that what comes out of the Race to the Top curriculum will contribute to the sum of human knowledge are dim. “The Common Core standards were developed by the same people who gave us the English Language Arts (ELA) standards,” Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas argues, and says, “The ELA standards are not very good.”
Texas, Scott pointed out, is already trying to upgrade its education standards. “We had a course on math modeling where they measured carbon dioxide and temperatures,” Scott said. “We were going to call it ‘global warming math’ but settled on ‘Al Goreithms.’”
Unlike Scott, while in office, embattled Washington, D. C. schools commissioner Michelle Rhee couldn’t say no to federal largesse. Rather than adopt the relatively tougher standards of the state of Massachusetts, Rhee opted for softer guidelines that would help assure receipt of Race to the Top money from the federal government, James Stergios, executive director of the Boston-based Pioneer Institute, also said at Heritage.
Many may follow suit. There’s more than $4 billion at stake.
At the Heritage conference, Theodore Rebarber, chief executive officer of Accountability Works, pointed out that the Department of Education is the third largest agency in the federal government. Indeed, the agency that Ronald Reagan wanted to eliminate when it was created three decades ago boasts a $50 billion budget and 4,200 employees, Lindsay Burke, a policy analyst at Heritage noted.
Public schools receive a tenth of their funding from the federal government, according to Stergios, of the Pioneer Institute. In the meantime, the Pioneer Institute filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain information on the meetings that led to the formation of the Common Core standards in Race to the Top. As of yet, neither the federal government nor the state of Massachusetts, with whom Pioneer filed the requests, has responded to them.
Scott claimed that Texas balanced its budget partly by cutting education spending by 40 percent. “It can be done,” he asserted.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org

Geert Wilders' Politically Prophetic Speech on Freedom in Nashville

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Sat, 14 May 2011 10:53:30 PDT

Jihad Watch has posted the recent speech by Geert Wilders in Nashville, Tennessee. It makes me ill that a European politician has to come here to remind us of the preciousness of freedom, especially the freedom of speech and religion. But there it is and I can only pray that Holland will be able to turn the tide before all of the Jews have to leave and the United States will wake up before we end up with a dual system of law (one for Muslims and the other for the rest) and de facto blasphemy laws under the guise of protection from "hate crimes."

A Warning to America
Speech of Geert Wilders, Cornerstone Church, Nashville, 12 May 2011

Dear friends from Tennessee. I am very happy to be in your midst today. I am happy and proud to be in this impressive church.

My friends, I am here to speak words of truth and freedom.

Do you know why America is in a better state than Europe? Because you enjoy more freedom than Europeans.

And do you know why Americans enjoy more freedom than Europeans? Because you are still allowed to tell the truth.

In Europe and Canada people are dragged to court for telling the truth about islam.

I, too, have been dragged to court. I am an elected member of the house of representatives in the Netherlands. I am currently standing in court like a common criminal for saying that islam is a dangerous totalitarian ideology rather than a religion.

Read it all here.

Rep. King Op-Ed: It's Time to Shut Down the IRS

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 08:44:13 PDT

Rep. King Op-Ed: It's Time to Shut Down the IRS
Rep. Steve King (IA-05)

Washington Times, Apr 15 - As the government edged closer and closer to a shutdown, administrators in congressional offices and federal agencies were tasked with determining whether they and their employees provided “essential” or “nonessential” services. Those employees deemed to be essential are allowed to continue working during a shutdown; those deemed to be nonessential are sent home.

This determination of essential versus nonessential probably sent a ripple of fear through employees of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In my opinion, the IRS is one of the least essential agencies in the federal government. If I had my way, we would shut down the non-essential IRS forever.

This is why I am an advocate for legislation that does just that. The FairTax Act seeks to reform the tax structure of the United States by replacing the inefficient income tax with a pro-growth consumption tax and would eliminate the need for the IRS because the FairTax would be administered in much the same manner as states administer state sales taxes. Americans would no longer have to file a return because taxes would be collected at the point of sale for a good or service.

This turns the idea of taxation in the United States on its head. Instead of each taxpayer having money deducted automatically from every paycheck, the FairTax would empower Americans to decide for themselves how much to pay in federal taxes each year because they would only be taxed on the new goods and services they purchased.

The FairTax also would free Americans from the lost man-hours and the expenses associated with simply complying with the IRS code. Did you know that Americans spend more than 6 billion hours a year to comply with the tax code? Even with this time and effort, the tax code is so complex that some have estimated that as many as 40 percent of Americans are out of compliance.

Repealing the tax code and replacing it with the FairTax’s national sales tax also would promote an important public policy goal: eliminating a tax and regulatory scheme that is riddled with carve-outs and exceptions for special-interest groups. Politicians would no longer be able to use the tax code as a means of engaging in social engineering, and Americans would no longer be penalized for purchasing a good or service that was out of favor with the ruling class.

A majority of Americans would rather be mugged than audited, and 51 percent would rather have a root canal. At times, it seems the IRS code is structured in such a way as to make noncompliance the norm, just so the federal government can lay a greater claim to Americans’ income through audits and penalties. It doesn’t have to be this way.

If we want to grow our economy and create jobs, we should stop the harmful practice of taxing work, savings and investments. We need more of all these things, and yet our income-tax code taxes them through the estate tax, the gift tax, capital-gains taxes, the alternative minimum tax, the self-employment tax and corporate and individual income taxes. The FairTax would eliminate these disincentives for productive behavior and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that has made this nation great.

As Americans file their returns this year, they should reflect on whether an agency founded in 1913 remains essential in the 21st century. If they do, they will come to the same conclusion that I have: It is time to pass the FairTax Act and shut down the IRS for good.

Online: Washington Times

The Economic Meltdown and Andrew Jackson's Farewell Address Warning

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:41:29 PDT

Irony: Andrew Jackson On a Federal Reserve Note

by John Rubino on January 9, 2010

Karl Golovin, a retired customs agent and security director for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, just forwarded a transcript of Andrew Jackson’s farewell address. It’s pretty amazing. Here’s Karl’s intro, followed by an excerpt:

“During his presidency, Andrew Jackson viewed as his crowning achievement that he “Killed the Bank,” the 2nd Bank of the U.S. Our current ‘Federal Reserve,’ created in 1913, is the 3rd Bank of the U.S. Jackson was intent upon restoring an honest, Constitutional monetary system. There probably never has been written a more articulate, prophetic vision of what calamity would befall our nation if we did not diligently stay that course, as argued by Jackson in the following excerpt from his farewell address in 1837. It reads as if written this very day about our present financial circumstances:”

“. . . . In reviewing the conflicts which have taken place between different interests in the United States and the policy pursued since the adoption of our present form of Government, we find nothing that has produced such deep-seated evil as the course of legislation in relation to the currency. The Constitution of the United States unquestionably intended to secure to the people a circulating medium of gold and silver. But the establishment of a national bank by Congress, with the privilege of issuing paper money receivable in the payment of the public dues, and the unfortunate course of legislation in the several States upon the same subject, drove from general circulation the constitutional currency and substituted one of paper in its place.

It was not easy for men engaged in the ordinary pursuits of business, whose attention had not been particularly drawn to the subject, to foresee all the consequences of a currency exclusively of paper, and we ought not on that account to be surprised at the facility with which laws were obtained to carry into effect the paper system. Honest and even enlightened men are sometimes misled by the specious and plausible statements of the designing. But experience has now proved the mischiefs and dangers of a paper currency, and it rests with you to determine whether the proper remedy shall be applied.

The paper system being founded on public confidence and having of itself no intrinsic value, it is liable to great and sudden fluctuations, thereby rendering property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain. The corporations which create the paper money cannot be relied upon to keep the circulating medium uniform in amount. In times of prosperity, when confidence is high, they are tempted by the prospect of gain or by the influence of those who hope to profit by it to extend their issues of paper beyond the bounds of discretion and the reasonable demands of business; and when these issues have been pushed on from day to day, until public confidence is at length shaken, then a reaction takes place, and they immediately withdraw the credits they have given, suddenly curtail their issues, and produce an unexpected and ruinous contraction of the circulating medium, which is felt by the whole community. The banks by this means save themselves, and the mischievous consequences of their imprudence or cupidity are visited upon the public. Nor does the evil stop here. These ebbs and flows in the currency and these indiscreet extensions of credit naturally engender a spirit of speculation injurious to the habits and character of the people. We have already seen its effects in the wild spirit of speculation in the public lands and various kinds of stock which within the last year or two seized upon such a multitude of our citizens and threatened to pervade all classes of society and to withdraw their attention from the sober pursuits of honest industry. It is not by encouraging this spirit that we shall best preserve public virtue and promote the true interests of our country; but if your currency continues as exclusively paper as it now is, it will foster this eager desire to amass wealth without labor; it will multiply the number of dependents on bank accommodations and bank favors; the temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice will become stronger and stronger, and inevitably lead to corruption, which will find its way into your public councils and destroy at no distant day the purity of your Government. Some of the evils which arise from this system of paper press with peculiar hardship upon the class of society least able to bear it. A portion of this currency frequently becomes depreciated or worthless, and all of it is easily counterfeited in such a manner as to require peculiar skill and much experience to distinguish the counterfeit from the genuine note. These frauds are most generally perpetrated in the smaller notes, which are used in the daily transactions of ordinary business, and the losses occasioned by them are commonly thrown upon the laboring classes of society, whose situation and pursuits put it out of their power to guard themselves from these impositions, and whose daily wages are necessary for their subsistence. It is the duty of every government so to regulate its currency as to protect this numerous class, as far as practicable, from the impositions of avarice and fraud. It is more especially the duty of the United States, where the Government is emphatically the Government of the people, and where this respectable portion of our citizens are so proudly distinguished from the laboring classes of all other nations by their independent spirit, their love of liberty, their intelligence, and their high tone of moral character. Their industry in peace is the source of our wealth and their bravery in war has covered us with glory; and the Government of the United States will but ill discharge its duties if it leaves them a prey to such dishonest impositions. Yet it is evident that their interests can not be effectually protected unless silver and gold are restored to circulation.

These views alone of the paper currency are sufficient to call for immediate reform; but there is another consideration which should still more strongly press it upon your attention.

Recent events have proved that the paper-money system of this country may be used as an engine to undermine your free institutions, and that those who desire to engross all power in the hands of the few and to govern by corruption or force are aware of its power and prepared to employ it. Your banks now furnish your only circulating medium, and money is plenty or scarce according to the quantity of notes issued by them. While they have capitals not greatly disproportioned to each other, they are competitors in business, and no one of them can exercise dominion over the rest; and although in the present state of the currency these banks may and do operate injuriously upon the habits of business, the pecuniary concerns, and the moral tone of society, yet, from their number and dispersed situation, they can not combine for the purposes of political influence, and whatever may be the dispositions of some of them their power of mischief must necessarily be confined to a narrow space and felt only in their immediate neighborhoods.

But when the charter for the Bank of the United States was obtained from Congress it perfected the schemes of the paper system and gave to its advocates the position they have struggled to obtain from the commencement of the Federal Government to the present hour. The immense capital and peculiar privileges bestowed upon it enabled it to exercise despotic sway over the other banks in every part of the country. From its superior strength it could seriously injure, if not destroy, the business of any one of them which might incur its resentment; and it openly claimed for itself the power of regulating the currency throughout the United States. In other words, it asserted (and it undoubtedly possessed) the power to make money plenty or scarce at its pleasure, at any time and in any quarter of the Union, by controlling the issues of other banks and permitting an expansion or compelling a general contraction of the circulating medium, according to its own will. The other banking institutions were sensible of its strength, and they soon generally became its obedient instruments, ready at all times to execute its mandates; and with the banks necessarily went also that numerous class of persons in our commercial cities who depend altogether on bank credits for their solvency and means of business, and who are therefore obliged, for their own safety, to propitiate the favor of the money power by distinguished zeal and devotion in its service. The result of the ill-advised legislation which established this great monopoly was to concentrate the whole moneyed power of the Union, with its boundless means of corruption and its numerous dependents, under the direction and command of one acknowledged head, thus organizing this particular interest as one body and securing to it unity and concert of action throughout the United States, and enabling it to bring forward upon any occasion its entire and undivided strength to support or defeat any measure of the Government. In the hands of this formidable power, thus perfectly organized, was also placed unlimited dominion over the amount of the circulating medium, giving it the power to regulate the value of property and the fruits of labor in every quarter of the Union, and to bestow prosperity or bring ruin upon any city or section of the country as might best comport with its own interest or policy.

We are not left to conjecture how the moneyed power, thus organized and with such a weapon in its hands, would be likely to use it. The distress and alarm which pervaded and agitated the whole country when the Bank of the United States waged war upon the people in order to compel them to submit to its demands can not yet be forgotten. The ruthless and unsparing temper with which whole cities and communities were oppressed, individuals impoverished and ruined, and a scene of cheerful prosperity suddenly changed into one of gloom and despondency ought to be indelibly impressed on the memory of the people of the United States. If such was its power in a time of peace, what would it not have been in a season of war, with an enemy at your doors? No nation but the freemen of the United States could have come out victorious from such a contest; yet, if you had not conquered, the Government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few, and this organized money power from its secret conclave would have dictated the choice of your highest officers and compelled you to make peace or war, as best suited their own wishes. The forms of your Government might for a time have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it.

The distress and sufferings inflicted on the people by the bank are some of the fruits of that system of policy which is continually striving to enlarge the authority of the Federal Government beyond the limits fixed by the Constitution. The powers enumerated in that instrument do not confer on Congress the right to establish such a corporation as the Bank of the United States, and the evil consequences which followed may warn us of the danger of departing from the true rule of construction and of permitting temporary circumstances or the hope of better promoting the public welfare to influence in any degree our decisions upon the extent of the authority of the General Government. Let us abide by the Constitution as it is written, or amend it in the constitutional mode if it is found to be defective.

The severe lessons of experience will, I doubt not, be sufficient to prevent Congress from again chartering such a monopoly, even if the Constitution did not present an insuperable objection to it. But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government. The power which the moneyed interest can exercise, when concentrated under a single head and with our present system of currency, was sufficiently demonstrated in the struggle made by the Bank of the United States. Defeated in the General Government, tho same class of intriguers and politicians will now resort to the States and endeavor to obtain there the same organization which they failed to perpetuate in the Union; and with specious and deceitful plans of public advantages and State interests and State pride they will endeavor to establish in the different States one moneyed institution with overgrown capital and exclusive privileges sufficient to enable it to control the operations of the other banks. Such an institution will be pregnant with the same evils produced by the Bank of the United States, although its sphere of action is more confined, and in the State in which it is chartered the money power will be able to embody its whole strength and to move together with undivided force to accomplish any object it may wish to attain. You have already had abundant evidence of its power to inflict injury upon the agricultural, mechanical, and laboring classes of society, and over those whose engagements in trade or speculation render them dependent on bank facilities the dominion of the State monopoly will be absolute and their obedience unlimited. With such a bank and a paper currency the money power would in a few years govern the State and control its measures, and if a sufficient number of States can be induced to create such establishments the time will soon come when it will again take the field against the United States and succeed in perfecting and perpetuating its organization by a charter from Congress.

It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society–and that by no means a numerous one–by its control over the currency, to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs. The agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes have little or no share in the direction of the great moneyed corporations, and from their habits and the nature of their pursuits they are incapable of forming extensive combinations to act together with united force. Such concert of action may sometimes be produced in a single city or in a small district of country by means of personal communications with each other, but they have no regular or active correspondence with those who are engaged in similar pursuits in distant places; they have but little patronage to give to the press, and exercise but a small share of influence over it; they have no crowd of dependents about them who hope to grow rich without labor by their countenance and favor, and who are therefore always ready to execute their wishes. The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer all know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil. Yet these classes of society form the great body of the people of the United States; they are the bone and sinew of the country–men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws, and who, moreover, hold the great mass of our national wealth, although it is distributed in moderate amounts among the millions of freemen who possess it. But with overwhelming numbers and wealth on their side they are in constant danger of losing their fair influence in the Government, and with difficulty maintain their just rights against the incessant efforts daily made to encroach upon them. The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different States, and which are employed altogether for their benefit; and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations.

The paper-money system and its natural associations–monopoly and exclusive privileges–have already struck their roots too deep in the soil, and it will require all your efforts to check its further growth and to eradicate the evil. The men who profit by the abuses and desire to perpetuate them will continue to besiege the halls of legislation in the General Government as well as in the States, and will seek by every artifice to mislead and deceive the public servants. It is to yourselves that you must look for safety and the means of guarding and perpetuating your free institutions. In your hands is rightfully placed the sovereignty of the country, and to you everyone placed in authority is ultimately responsible. It is always in your power to see that the wishes of the people are carried into faithful execution, and their will, when once made known, must sooner or later be obeyed; and while the people remain, as I trust they ever will, uncorrupted and incorruptible, and continue watchful and jealous of their rights, the Government is safe, and the cause of freedom will continue to triumph over all its enemies.

But it will require steady and persevering exertions on your part to rid yourselves of the iniquities and mischiefs of the paper system and to check the spirit of monopoly and other abuses which have sprung up with it, and of which it is the main support. So many interests are united to resist all reform on this subject that you must not hope the conflict will be a short one nor success easy. My humble efforts have not been spared during my administration of the Government to restore the constitutional currency of gold and silver, and something, I trust, has been done toward the accomplishment of this most desirable object; but enough yet remains to require all your energy and perseverance. The power, however, is in your hands, and the remedy must and will be applied if you determine upon it….”

Why We Should Withdraw from the UN and Terminate Their Lease

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 20:39:53 PDT

The Deep, Virulent Evil of the United Nations

By Ben Shapiro (Archive) · Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Blood on the bed. That's what 12-year-old Tamar Fogel saw last week when she opened the door to her parents' bedroom in Itamar, Israel. The blood covered the blankets and the bodies of her father, Rabbi Udi Fogel, and her 3-month-old sister, Hadas. In the other room, her mother, Ruth, lay murdered. So did her brothers, Yoav, 11, and Elad, 4.
Five members of the Fogel family were slaughtered in their home last week because they dared to live on historic Jewish land. They were not murderers and were not occupiers. They were people who simply wished to leave in peace and be left alone to bring up their children. Now those children have been buried along with their parents.
And the Arab Palestinian populace, which by and large constitutes the most evil population on the face of the planet, celebrated. Residents of Gaza -- an area already handed over to the Arab Palestinians by the Israeli government, supposedly in the interests of peace -- handed out candy in exultation over the crimes. These are the same people who train their small children to wear suicide vests and force them to watch propaganda about Muslims dying to "liberate" Jerusalem.
Hamas, naturally, cheered wildly and suggested that the murder of a 3-month-old fell short of Muslim expectations: "The report of five murdered Israelis is not enough to punish someone," said the Hamas spokesperson. The leader of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad, was slightly subtler, equating instead the murder of children in their beds with Israeli anti-terrorism military action.
The world community parroted Fayyad's line, with the United Nations, European Union, Russian Federation and United States condemning the attack by stating, "Attacks on any civilians are completely unacceptable in any circumstance" -- code for equating Israeli military action and Palestinian Arab thuggery.
Just to clarify their position, the United Nations held a very special event last Monday night. No, it wasn't a fundraiser to benefit the orphaned children of the Fogel family. It was a premiere screening of "Miral," a film by Julian Schnabel, a self-hating Jew and world-famous director; it's based on a book by his Arab Palestinian girlfriend, Rula Jebreal. "Miral" is a virulently anti-Israel movie casting the state of Israel in the worst possible light. Every Israeli soldier is a brutal murderer; every Palestinian is a wounded innocent; Jews are usurpers of Arab Palestinian property rights. Every anti-Israel trope is employed. "These settlers living here are our real cancer," says one Arab Palestinian character. A cancer, presumably, that must be cut out by force or stabbed to death in its bed.
"I expect to be told that the other side of the coin is not represented," Schnabel told the press several months ago. "It was not my task to tell the whole story." That purposefully one-sided treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict brought out the stars Monday night. Al Pacino, who apparently learned nothing from playing Shylock, showed up. So did Sean Penn, the useful idiot that terrorist group Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade once asked to "represent our pain and our cause." Josh Brolin and Robert De Niro also came out to support the newest anti-Israel smear campaign.
This is what the United Nations does when faced by implacable evil: it reverses the roles. Israel is always the bully, and those who slit children's throats and soak their toys in blood are the victims. Jewish blood is cheap at the U.N. But it isn't cheap for Americans, who foot the taxpayer bill for that stinking, festering pustule of moral incoherence. We pay for the red carpet that welcomes the moronic actors who present public cover for knife-wielding child-killers. We pay for the conversion of the U.N. into an Arab Palestinian propaganda movie theater.
The U.N. has no authority, legal or ethical. Any legislator who votes for further funding for that perverse institution has blood on his or her hands.
COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM.

Japan's Nuclear "Crisis"

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:59:36 PDT

This article is from the Wall Street Journal. This is personal use and non-commercial.....I just think that it explains the situation better than I can.

Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl

The containment structures appear to be working, and the latest reactor designs aren't vulnerable to the coolant problem at issue here.

By WILLIAM TUCKER

Even while thousands of people are reported dead or missing, whole neighborhoods lie in ruins, and gas and oil fires rage out of control, press coverage of the Japanese earthquake has quickly settled on the troubles at two nuclear reactors as the center of the catastrophe.
Rep. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), a longtime opponent of nuclear power, has warned of "another Chernobyl" and predicted "the same thing could happen here." In response, he has called for an immediate suspension of licensing procedures for the Westinghouse AP1000, a "Generation III" reactor that has been laboring through design review at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for seven years.

Author William Tucker explains why the danger is limited at Japan's nuclear reactors.

Before we respond with such panic, though, it would be useful to review exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it.
The core of a nuclear reactor operates at about 550 degrees Fahrenheit, well below the temperature of a coal furnace and only slightly hotter than a kitchen oven. If anything unusual occurs, the control rods immediately drop, shutting off the nuclear reaction. You can't have a "runaway reactor," nor can a reactor explode like a nuclear bomb. A commercial reactor is to a bomb what Vaseline is to napalm. Although both are made from petroleum jelly, only one of them has potentially explosive material.
Once the reactor has shut down, there remains "decay heat" from traces of other radioactive isotopes. This can take more than a week to cool down, and the rods must be continually bathed in cooling waters to keep them from overheating.
On all Generation II reactors—the ones currently in operation—the cooling water is circulated by electric pumps. The new Generation III reactors such as the AP1000 have a simplified "passive" cooling system where the water circulates by natural convection with no pumping required.
If the pumps are knocked out in a Generation II reactor—as they were at Fukushima Daiichi by the tsunami—the water in the cooling system can overheat and evaporate. The resulting steam increases internal pressure that must be vented. There was a small release of radioactive steam at Three Mile Island in 1979, and there have also been a few releases at Fukushima Daiichi. These produce radiation at about the level of one dental X-ray in the immediate vicinity and quickly dissipate.

Editorial Board Member Mary Kissel explains the Japanese response to the quake.

If the coolant continues to evaporate, the water level can fall below the level of the fuel rods, exposing them. This will cause a meltdown, meaning the fuel rods melt to the bottom of the steel pressure vessel.
Early speculation was that in a case like this the fuel might continue melting right through the steel and perhaps even through the concrete containment structure—the so-called China syndrome, where the fuel would melt all the way to China. But Three Mile Island proved this doesn't happen. The melted fuel rods simply aren't hot enough to melt steel or concrete.
The decay heat must still be absorbed, however, and as a last-ditch effort the emergency core cooling system can be activated to flood the entire containment structure with water. This will do considerable damage to the reactor but will prevent any further steam releases. The Japanese have now reportedly done this using seawater in at least two of the troubled reactors. These reactors will never be restarted.

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None of this amounts to "another Chernobyl." The Chernobyl reactor had two crucial design flaws. First, it used graphite (carbon) instead of water to "moderate" the neutrons, which makes possible the nuclear reaction. The graphite caught fire in April 1986 and burned for four days. Water does not catch fire.
Second, Chernobyl had no containment structure. When the graphite caught fire, it spouted a plume of radioactive smoke that spread across the globe. A containment structure would have both smothered the fire and contained the radioactivity.
If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing. With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.
What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw.
Mr. Tucker is author of "Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey" (Bartleby Press, 2010).

Another Perspective

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:00:01 PST

Yes, I copied this from The American Spectator.

I listened to a radio show, Janet Parshall, last week I believe, on this very subject. You must know that I hold Janet Parshall in the highest regard and think that her show "In the Market Place" is the best. I was also very much swayed by her and her guest's argument for the SCOTUS decision on the Westboro case. I also want to mention that I find that group's philosophy and actions despicable. There is no honor, truth or honesty within their ranks as they only seek to promote disharmony that will result in their filing lawsuits for the primary purpose of funding their nefarious activities.

That being said, I present this because it has convinced me that Justice Samuel Alito, although being the lone dissenter, is in reality the only one that is right. This is a person who has gained my wholehearted respect and admiration. This is truly a patriot and a person who has "man-ed up" and wrote an opinion that is full of truth in an era that has fully rejected it, irrespective of the wrath of opinion that may be launched against him.

Another Perspective

Justice Alito Was Right

By William Murchison on 3.9.11 @ 6:09AM

It fell to Justice Samuel Alito the other day to remind Americans how far their culture of liberation has veered from common sense and appreciation of the small decencies that undergird civilization.
On a question of "free speech" -- at its center a claimed right to begrime with taunts and insults the funeral of a U.S. Marine -- the four members of the U.S. Supreme Court's liberal-permissivist bloc weren't likely to find against the jeer leaders. It was the conservative bloc whose behavior startled. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Justice Clarence Thomas went along with the permissivists, in the name of "robust, uninhibited, and wide-open" debate. As if the honored word "debate" applied to placards exhorting onlookers to "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."
Against his eight colleagues, Sam Alito stood in lonely, honorable dissent. "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate," he wrote, "is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case." Alito saw no free speech deprivation in the judgment a district court had levied against the traveling freak show known as Westboro Baptist Church, in Kansas: a gang keener on disrupting military funerals than on preaching the redemptive love of Jesus.
The picketers could have picketed almost anywhere in America, said Alito. Why at the church where the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder was being held? From the claim of free speech rights there was no logical pathway to the intentional infliction of "severe emotional injury on private persons at a time of intense emotional sensitivity.'"
Among the judicial precedents Alito noted was a 1942 case in which the high court called attention to "the social interest in order and morality." That was of course back when American culture accorded order and morality a higher seat in national proceedings than was due trash-talking and narcissistic chest-thumping. The debasement of traditional norms of respect and civility, from the 1960s forward, accompanied cultural grants of latitude to do anything that resembled self-expression: burn a U.S. flag, swear on the air, publish pornography, insult or howl down a speaker.
Daniel Webster crying "Liberty and Union, now and forever," the Westboro wackos proclaiming, at military funerals, God's hatred of "fags" -- both are the same, it seems. Except they aren't. Not according to right reason they aren't.
I trust, after 47 years in the media, teaching and talking and writing, I needn't protest my devotion to "freedom of speech, or of the press," as the Founding Fathers referred to it. I am bound to add that free speech obtained its dignity and cultural warrant through the importance that earlier generations attributed to that "robust" debate praised by the court's 8-1 majority. That "God Hates Dead Soldiers" should be considered an idea on the same plane as "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" is further evidence that modern society barely knows up from down.
When I taught journalism at a major university, I thrust Milton's "Areopagitica" in my students' faces. Here! Look! This is what free speech is about -- the quest for Truth! "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties," Milton had written. Yes! Yes!
Accordingly, we bind ourselves to put up with a fair amount of nonsense -- but not all nonsense, because no morally healthy society accords unlimited living space to the ugly, the twisted, the debased. Perhaps our own society just doesn't know anymore, due in part to Supreme Court tutelage, what real debasement looks like. We might get up a good debate on that topic, assuming the Westboro wackos and their pious defenders could be kept at bay.
Mr. Murchison is completing a biography of the founding father John Dickinson. An earlier version of this column appeared in the Dallas Morning News.

Education In America - Straight from Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" -Item 10 "

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:01:55 PST

This was copied from Poor Richards blog in its entirety. Except for the end statements after the link.

http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2010/10/test.html

The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.
Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.
How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.

Almost all of these books, articles, and reports are out of print and hard to obtain. Luckily for us, John Taylor Gatto tracked them down. Gatto was voted the New York City Teacher of the Year three times and the New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. But he became disillusioned with schools—the way they enforce conformity, the way they kill the natural creativity, inquisitiveness, and love of learning that every little child has at the beginning. So he began to dig into terra incognita, the roots of America's educational system.

In 1888, the Senate Committee on Education was getting jittery about the localized, non-standardized, non-mandatory form of education that was actually teaching children to read at advanced levels, to comprehend history, and, egads, to think for themselves. The committee's report stated, "We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."

By the turn of the century, America's new educrats were pushing a new form of schooling with a new mission (and it wasn't to teach). The famous philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1897:

Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.

In his 1905 dissertation for Columbia Teachers College, Elwood Cubberly—the future Dean of Education at Stanford—wrote that schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."

The next year, the Rockefeller Education Board—which funded the creation of numerous public schools—issued a statement which read in part:

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

In that same book, The Philosophy of Education, Harris also revealed:

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

Writes Gatto: "Another major architect of standardized testing, H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about 'the perfect organization of the hive.'"
While President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, James Bryant Conant wrote that the change to a forced, rigid, potential-destroying educational system had been demanded by "certain industrialists and the innovative who were altering the nature of the industrial process."

In other words, the captains of industry and government explicitly wanted an educational system that would maintain social order by teaching us just enough to get by but not enough so that we could think for ourselves, question the sociopolitical order, or communicate articulately. We were to become good worker-drones, with a razor-thin slice of the population—mainly the children of the captains of industry and government—to rise to the level where they could continue running things.

This was the openly admitted blueprint for the public schooling system, a blueprint which remains unchanged to this day. Although the true reasons behind it aren't often publicly expressed, they're apparently still known within education circles. Clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine wrote in 2001:

I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn't have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, "They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world…that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world."

John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling (New York: Oxford Village Press, 2001), is the source for all of the above historical quotes. It is a profoundly important, unnerving book, which I recommend most highly. You can order it from Gatto's Website, which now contains the entire book online for free.
The final quote above is from page 74 of Bruce E. Levine's excellent book Commonsense Rebellion: Debunking Psychiatry, Confronting Society (New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2001).

http://newsfromthewest.blogspot.com/2009/03/educational-syst...

From Karl Marx and Frederick Engels - The Communist Manifesto

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

Observations by Victor Davis Hansen of the Hoover Institute

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:15:04 PST

This is an article from Victor Davis Hansen, a Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University ...

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the
more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if
superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and
income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools
(based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in
the nation, along with an over regulated private sector, a stagnant and
shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that
restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on
a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County . I
also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns
like San Joaquin , Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been
driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and
impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and
Selma . My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no
ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles
away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal
testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the
rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained
and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First,
remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of
illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming - to
such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile
backbone of the old rural California , for all practical purposes has ceased
to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley , the effects of arbitrary
cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of
prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants
in the towns in these areas - which used to make harvesters, hydraulic
lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment - have largely shut down; their
production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture
itself - from almonds to raisins - has increasingly become corporatized and
mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So
unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye
no different from what I have seen in the Third World . There is a Caribbean
look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various
outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos
cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese,
goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all
sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business - rigid zoning
laws, strict building codes, constant inspections - but apparently none of
that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not
regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the
upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring
the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond
the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the
regulators' defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer
park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on
former small farms - the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with
the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities
from the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don't think I can
remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley
have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently
rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000
to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly - with
suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the
world's richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of
the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen?
Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away
potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the
national debt and uncertain future?

California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water
available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta,
but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash,
furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California 's rural
hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as
the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the
road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw
garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me.
So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive
into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash
into the environment of my host.

In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here - composed of everything
from half-empty paint cans and children's plastic toys to diapers and moldy
food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state
EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to
Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating
down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we
cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might
invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes
dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven
residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from
my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open
a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least
what I might call a "counter business." I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen
trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic
chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There
are no "facilities" such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see
lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have
simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking
fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a
distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost
anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last
week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets,
gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax
California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go
transactions.

In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did
not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when "food
stamps" were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship
between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical
appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were
loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or
Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in
the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the
trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don't editorialize here on
the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast
numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food
assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class.
California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of
income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from
Washington explain some of this?

Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a
hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or
drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market
in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic - there
were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of
"diversity," but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there
are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid
societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all
diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers
or at least the chief sources of income - whether through emergency rooms,
rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer
from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the
ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of
11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over
the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal
immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California's entitlements and
taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate
effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and
agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of
these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.

Fresno 's California State University campus is embroiled in controversy
over the student body president's announcing that he is an illegal alien,
with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won't comment
on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF
for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the
Chicano and Latin American Studies program's sizable curriculum was a fuzzy
American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of
the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town,
Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American
counterparts.

I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now
terrified of being deported to Mexico . I can understand that, given the
chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States . But here
is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal
with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national
chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and
moral place than the United States.

So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, "Please
do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me
stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate." I think the DREAM Act
protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had
they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave
at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What
it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or
demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to
the place of his birth?

I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above
description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard
can only be termed "indifferent." California does not care whether one broke
the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing
of the illegal immigrant - no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with
American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or
skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and
more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of
California 's burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly
have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd
that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of
banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and
without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their
footsteps. How odd - to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta
- that California is at once both the nation's most unfree and most free
state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their
feet, both into and out of California - and the result is a sort of social,
cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor
of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome,
and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Congressional Prayer Caucus to Obama: Issue National Motto Correction

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:59:50 PST

I have shamelessly copied this article from the Dakota Voice after having received an email from a brother-in-law who lives in Maine. I should also add that after having "Googled" the topic, I found that Congressman J. Randy Forbes has written a similar article on his website click here.

Congressional Prayer Caucus to Obama: Issue National Motto Correction

By Guest Author on December 6th, 2010

The following press release was issued from the Congressional Prayer Caucus today:

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (VA-04), along with 42 bipartisan Members of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, today sent a letter to President Barack Obama calling on him to issue a correction to a speech he gave in Jakarta, Indonesia, in which he inaccurately referred to our national motto as being “E Pluribus unum.” The official national motto is “In God We Trust.”

“For the President of the United States to incorrectly state something as foundational as our national motto in another country is unacceptable. The President is the primary representative of our nation to the world, and whether mistake or intention, his actions cast aside an integral part of American society,” said Forbes. “President Reagan once warned that ‘If we ever forget that we’re one national under God, then we will be a nation gone under.’”

In his speech on November 10, 2010 at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, President Obama said “But I believe that the history of both America and Indonesia should give us hope. It is a story written into our national mottos. In the United States, our motto is E pluribus unum – out of many one…our nations show that hundreds of millions who hold different beliefs can be united in freedom under one flag.”

“In God We Trust” has been a foundational phrase used throughout our nation’s history, from Presidential proclamations, to engravings in both the House and Senate chambers, to the oath taken by all federal employees. In 1956, Congress passed and President Eisenhower signed into law establishing “In God We Trust” as the official national motto of the United States. The motto is referred to in the national anthem and is engraved on U.S. coins and currency.

In addition, on October 18, during a fundraiser, President Obama said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This was the third time in over a month that the President omitted the word “Creator” from the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence specifically recognizes God, the Creator, as the source of inalienable rights.

“Once may be a mistake. But twice is a pattern. These omissions and inaccuracies are a part of a larger pattern we are seeing with the President where he is inaccurately reflecting America and undercutting important parts of our nation’s history,” said Forbes. “Trust in God is embedded into the fabric of society and history in the United States. If we allow these threads to be pulled, we will begin to unravel the very freedoms that birthed America.”

In the letter, the members asked that the President issue a correction to the speech he gave in Jakarta and expressed their willingness to meet with him to discuss the issue further. A copy of the letter is available here

.

The Congressional Prayer Caucus is a bipartisan group of Members of Congress dedicated to preserving America’s religious heritage and protecting religious liberties. The Prayer Caucus successfully led efforts to ensure that “In God We Trust” was included in the newly constructed Capitol Visitor Center after it had been removed and the national motto incorrectly noted as “E Pluribus unum.” Congressman Forbes is founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus.

A Wisconsin Citizen's Open Letter to the New Governor and Senator

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:58:34 PST

This, my fellow Americans, is a homerun.

Open Letter to Wisconsin Governor-Elect Scott Walker & Senator-Elect Ron Johnson

By Dave Brown · Friday, December 3, 2010

Congratulations on your election victories on 2 November 2010! We are blessed to have two men of good character to lead and represent Wisconsin. There are three critical issues that require your immediate attention. If these issues are not addressed first, all others are meaningless. It will take courage on your part equal to the courage demonstrated by the Founding Fathers and more recently by New Jersey Governor Chris Christy. Government spending must be drastically reduced. The survival of our country depends on it. The short term goal should be a 50% reduction. There can be only one of two results in this defining battle ... saving America, or the destruction of America. Opposition to your efforts will be intense.

The national debt is at 13.5 trillion. Even if government spending is cut 50% it will take several generations to repay this debt. With minor spending reductions, like those being recommended by the debt and deficit commission, the debt will not be re-paid, ever. The federal government spent 1.4 trillion in 2009 and 1.35 trillion in 2010 more than it took in tax revenue. This un-checked spending is destroying the United States of America.

"Men of energy of character must have enemies; because there are two sides to every question, and taking one with decision, and acting on it with effect, those who take the other will of course be hostile in proportion as they feel that effect." 

--Thomas Jefferson, December 21, 1817

I believe in the country of our Founding Fathers. The principles of honoring the Almighty, personal responsibility, character, integrity, and honesty make the foundation that supports the American ideal. Without a true respect for these principles no person will ever enjoy their unalienable rights granted by the Creator among those being life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Fortunately for Wisconsinites both of you have demonstrated a healthy respect for these principles. I believe you are both up to the challenge.

Here are the major issues:

PUBLIC EMPLOYEES

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824

The number of federal, state, and local employees must be reduced by 50%. At the federal level this means postal workers, agency bureaucrats, FBI, CIA, and the list goes on and on. At the state level this means starting with divesting the University of Wisconsin system. Let the new private university compete in the free market. If their customers (students) don't mind paying six figure salaries to professors that work one day/week, and don't mind supplying University administrators with lavish compensation including luxury housing with servants, luxury cars, and unlimited expense accounts then great! On the other hand if struggling students don't see why they have to pay for these luxuries academia may have to adjust how they do business, or lose all of their customers. It also means cutting teachers, firefighters, non-frontline police, DNR, etc… Those public employees that remain must have compensation equivalent to similar jobs in the private sector.

Reason must be applied when making cuts, example: In most cases reductions would not be appropriate in frontline law enforcement, national security, FBI, and border patrol. This means the men and women on the street. However desk jockeys and bureaucrats in these agencies can and must be eliminated. No cuts in military personnel would be appropriate in a time of war either. However, elimination of entire agencies like the postal service, departments of education, energy, housing and urban development, agriculture, NASA, to name a few would help meet the 50% target.

Can we survive a 50% cut in government employees? Here are the current government full time employee numbers:

Federal 14.6 million
State 3.8 million
Local 11.0 million
-------------------------------
Total 29.4 million

Certainly America will survive with half of 29.4 million. 14.7 million government employees still looks extraordinarily high and inappropriate for a free country. Note these numbers do not include 1.5 million state and 3.2 million local government part time employees.

Not only will America survive it will thrive after these reductions are made. It may take some adjustment for the newly unemployed public workers to find meaningful, productive work in the private sector. Adjusting to the required work standard in the private sector may be traumatic for some but when they do the economy will expand and improve.

For remaining government employees pensions must be abolished. No public employee including elected officials should receive a pension or any other benefit (health insurance) of any type under any circumstance upon termination of employment. The only exception would be for retired military honorably discharged after 20 years of service or for any military service person injured while serving. Retired military and/or injured military should receive a pension and healthcare for the remainder of their lives.

Forcing a productive citizen to pay for the public employee's life of ease and enjoyment in retirement (that usually begins around age 50 for this very privileged class) against his will is unconstitutional.

XIII Amendment Section I, ratified December 6, 1865

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The language is clear and needs no lawyer to translate the meaning to citizens. It means if a politician enters into a contract with a pubic employee union, or passes a law that obligates me to pay pension and benefits to the idle public employee for the remainder of their natural lives so they may live in ease, leisure, and comfort in retirement is clearly unconstitutional. It is not only unconstitutional; it is illegal, immoral, and obscene. It is the definition of involuntary servitude. Why should those working in the private sector, who receive no pension, be expected to save for our own retirement and be required to pay the public employee's pension? We are all familiar with standard justifications for this...but these are noble professions, who could possibly be against police, firemen, teachers, etc…, or compensation and benefits must be high or we will lose these very special people to the private market place, or they work in difficult conditions so they deserve lavish benefits... There is no limit to the straw man arguments from public union leaders and politicians to justify this mess.

Public employee unions must be abolished and outlawed.

Public employees organized into a union feeding at the same public trough elbow to elbow with lawmakers is an obvious disaster for the tax payer. Peer pressure on lawmakers from their unionized fellow trough eaters to keep the trough full at all costs is intense and is the reason politicians give up their soul, some quicker than others, once elected to office. The politician quickly realizes his highest priority is to keep squeezing the tax payer so the trough remains full. Life at the trough looks very attractive to many working and/or idling in the private sector. It is like a giant magnet attracting more and more people. It is obvious to those working in the private sector the public employee's compensation and benefits are much better than his.

The politician/lawmaker realizes his fellow trough eaters are always a solid vote so why wouldn't he want to add more and more trough eaters? What a wonderful system he thinks to himself, a real no-brainer! He realizes he has the power to extract more money from the tax payer because he makes the laws that direct the guys with the uniforms and guns, that run the IRS, and run the prisons. The stunning part for those in the private sector is that no politician is willing to acknowledge the obvious -- the public employee orgy of compensation and benefits has sunk America into a black hole of debt.

Public employees are keenly aware they have no chance whatsoever to match their lavish government compensation and benefits in the private sector. They will fight as King George III did to force the productive class to keep the trough full, at gun point if required.

ENTITLEMENTS

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

--Benjamin Franklin, On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor, November 1766

Entitlements are destroying our country morally and financially. Welfare, unemployment, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and housing subsidies must be abolished. No where in the constitution is the government authorized to take the treasure and earnings from one and give to another. As Ben Franklin observed 244 years ago ...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer... This was true in 1766, true in 2010, and will still be true in 2254 (if we survive). As for the cost of medical care, consumers must pay for medical care. The current system of having others pay for one's medical care removes any incentive to shop for the best provider, the best price for meds, or for many to take care to eat a proper diet and exercise. The free market will do as it always does when not interfered with by government -- it will reward care providers that provide the best service at the best price and punish those that don't. The winner is the consumer. It is no more complicated than that.

Will this be a painful adjustment? Yes. Will people suffer? Yes. Remember Freedom is not free. Freedom means you reap what you sow. Freedom gives the individual a choice of planning, working, learning, and living responsibly. Which means more often than not you will enjoy the blessings and rewards of living this way. Freedom also means the individual can choose to not plan, not work, not learn, and live irresponsibly. These choices usually lead to a miserable life, probably behind bars or dead at an early age.

"Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

--James Madison

The current system of forcing the responsible to pay for irresponsible is unconstitutional and immoral. One lucky break for the irresponsible and for good people that happen to fall on hard times, is that America is the most charitable, giving nation on the planet. There are hundreds of charitable organizations in America. There is no finer charity than The Salvation Army. The CEO makes $13,000 a year. $0.93 of every dollar donated goes directly to the needy. Compare this incredibly high ratio to that of the federal government. What percentage of a dollar given to the government goes to the needy after paying the 14.6 million federal government employees, 82,000 of which make more than $150,000/year? I do not imagine it is close to $0.93.

TAXATION

"[A] wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."

--Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

Income tax, state and federal, must be abolished. The practice of confiscating a large percentage of a productive worker's wages from his pay before he ever takes possession of his justly earned compensation dulls the pain of surrendering his earnings to the government. If productive citizens had to write a check out to the state and federal government every month for their share of taxes based on their income there would be revolution tomorrow. All capital gains taxes must be abolished. The death tax must be abolished.

Taxation should be levied on purchased goods and services only. The percentage tax rate must be the same for all consumers and for all goods and services. The government cannot make punitive tax rates on businesses or products it does not favor for any reason. This includes oil, gas, tobacco, alcohol, etc... Everything is taxed at the same rate. Corporate taxes must be abolished. This is a devious way for government to tax citizens without accountability. Only people pay taxes, not corporations.

SUMMARY

These are the main issues and unless addressed first makes addressing all other issues equivalent to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Mr. Walker, when you gave back over $300,000 of your county salary it spoke volumes of the type of man you are. It reminds me of a quote I read on the church bulletin board years ago that stuck with me, that goes: What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.

You both are good men and I believe you are up for the challenge. God bless both of you. I will support you in any way needed.

Dave Brown 
Franklin, WI

The Subtle Way Hollywood Turns the Christian Theme

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 11:45:18 PST

Does caring, working together in harmony, joyous relationships equal boring? Do we have to have conflict within our own ranks to provide excitement? And why can't we take something that someone else wrote and that has a very wide following and not change it thereby changing the underlying goodness of the story?

Mere Entertainment?
By: Anne Morse|Published: December 9, 2010 10:53 AM
Topics: Arts & Media, Books, Religion & Society

Many Christians are eagerly anticipating the third film of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, due in theaters in December. We love the fact that these deeply Christian stories are making their way to a wider audience. But one theologian wonders if the films really are a faithful representation of Lewis’s deeply Christian worldview.

In a Touchstone magazine essay titled “Narnia Invaded,” Steven Boyer says we should “think carefully about a significant element in Lewis’s vision that does not play very well in our world”: His “particular fondness for hierarchy.”

Christianity teaches that there is a hierarchal distinction between God and the world He created, with humans rightly subordinating to the God who creates and sustains us. As well, the Christian tradition teaches the goodness of hierarchy through all sorts of human relationships. “When that order is respected, real joy and freedom are the result,” Boyer says.

Writers like Dante, Spenser, Milton, and Virgil, along with Lewis, “understand the idea that just rulership and obedience are inextricable one from the other—that they are, in fact, the same virtue in different modes,” Boyer adds. Of course, throughout history people have abused hierarchy—everyone from dictators to fathers who demand unquestioning obedience from their families. And this is why, for many moderns, the very word hierarchy reeks of domination and oppression.

Unfortunately, this is the view of hierarchy the Narnia scriptwriters embrace. For instance, in Lewis’s books, the lion Aslan makes the four Pevensie children kings of Narnia, who rule harmoniously over Narnia. Peter, the oldest brother, is made the High King over the others. When the children return to Narnia and encounter Prince Caspian, the relationship between Peter and Caspian is marked by mutual respect, reliance, and open-handedness.

But the scriptwriters destroy this view of honorable cooperation. Peter and Caspian—whose dealings are marked by rancor and antagonism—battle constantly over who is really in charge in their efforts to rescue Narnia from the evil King Miraz. During a great battle, their own ignoble desires lead to the unnecessary deaths of their own soldiers.

But if you page through Prince Caspian, you’ll find that Peter and Caspian treat one another with great respect and cooperation.

The film’s depiction of hierarchy reveals a great deal about the scriptwriters, who are, Boyer notes, essentially admitting that they “understand nothing about power other than that it is meant to make other people do what you want them to do.” In effect, the scriptwriters accept the view of hierarchy embraced by the evil King Miraz, who stole the throne from Caspian: For Miraz, there is no such thing as legitimate hierarchy, only power. Kingship is not about sacrificing for one’s subjects, but about enjoying unquestioned authority—and destroying anyone who stands in the way.

Sadly, Boyer says, this means that viewers of the Narnia films are getting “mere entertainment” instead of Lewis’s “richly Christian view of the world.”

And what of the latest film in the series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?

I saw an advance screening of the film a couple of weeks ago. I’m pleased to say that there is more respect for appropriate hierarchy here than in the previous two films. For instance, after Edmund and Lucy Pevensie fall back into Narnia through a seascape, Edmund unthinkingly attempts to take charge in a tense situation. The ship’s captain, Drinian, respectfully tells Edmund that the only person he takes orders from is Prince Caspian. Edmund accepts this gentle rebuke. We also see, through Lucy and Edmund’s obnoxious cousin Eustace, the consequences of failing to respect appropriate hierarchy.

When the travelers arrive at an uninhabited island, they discover that anything dropped into a body of water will turn to gold. Caspian—realizing the immense wealth and power that could come to anyone who exploited this knowledge—claims the island as a Narnian possession. He sternly forbids his companions from telling anyone about the island’s secret on pain of death. Edmund immediately (and rather nastily) contests Caspian’s right to command him.

While this may seem like a revisiting of the “who’s the boss?” hostility so much in evidence in Prince Caspian between Peter and Caspian, in reality, the scene comes straight out of the book:

“The king who owned this island,” said Caspian slowly, and his face flushed as he spoke, ”would soon be the richest of all kings of the world. I claim this land for ever as a Narnian possession. . . . And I bind all of you to secrecy. No one must know of this. Not even Drinian—on pain of death, do you hear?”

“Who are you talking to?” said Edmund. “I’m no subject of yours. If anything it’s the other way round. I am one of the four ancient sovereigns of Narnia and you are under allegiance to the High King my brother.”

“So it has come to that, King Edmund, has it?” said Caspian, laying his hand on his sword-hilt.”

In the book, Aslan appears to wake the children out of the trance the island has put them under. In the film, Lucy reminds them that the magician they encountered earlier had warned them that evil would try to sway them from their path.

Parents whose children have watched the previous two Chronicles of Narnia films, and who are eagerly awaiting the third one, might consider using Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a springboard for a discussion about both biblical and non-biblical hierarchy. With this film, as with all others, children should be taught to identify the worldview of those who created it. Where and why does the film deviate from Lewis’s original? Did screenwriters add scenes and change the story in order to add more excitement? Or did they alter the story in order to tone down the Christian message?

While we should be mindful of the film’s messages, we should not focus on them so hard that we cut into our enjoyment of it. It’s a rollicking adventure story, filled with dragons and sea serpents, magicians and Dufflepuds, a delightfully bratty schoolboy who gets his comeuppance—and a Lion who takes the young adventurers to the end of the world.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You Think Our Religious Practice(Christianity) is Safe?

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 19:53:28 PST

When it was happening overseas we ignored it with the reasoning, "It can never happen in the United States".
It's happening in Canada, it will soon be hear.

CULTURE NEWS

Sunday, December 12, 2010
Biblical Preaching Banned from Canadian TV
A Canadian evangelical preacher has been stricken from Christian TV broadcasting after homosexualists complained that he modeled himself after his counterparts in the United States by criticizing the state-sanctioned Gay Agenda.

-- From "Broadcaster suspends reverend's TV show" by CTV.ca News Staff 12/11/10

Christian broadcaster CTS has taken the television show of evangelical minister Charles McVety off the air, after an industry watchdog ruled that statements he had made about homosexuals violated its broadcasting codes.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) said that it had received complaints about how McVety's program, Word TV, had portrayed issues "such as homosexuality, Islam, Haiti and euthanasia," it said in a decision issued Wednesday.

The complaints charged that the program "had included discriminatory comments on the basis of sexual orientation, religion and mental disability," the organization said.

In response, CTS decided to suspend the show, saying that such concerns "are treated seriously."

An influential Canadian evangelical, McVety models himself on the televangical stars south of the border, and has been known to express controversial views.

To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.

From "Evangelical TV show pulled from the air" by Charles Lewis, National Post 12/10/10

. . . commenting on Toronto's massive gay pride parade, ". . . [it] is a criminal activity, to parade down the streets in the nude," Rev. McVety said on Word TV. "There is the Criminal Code of Canada that says you can't do that. It's an abuse of public space, it's abuse of our children."

The broadcasting council said Rev. McVety derided the city for advertising Toronto as a "sex tourism destination ... with full opportunity for sex with hot boys."

. . . strong comments about a proposed 2010 change to Ontario's sex curriculum that presented homosexuality in a more accepting light . . . "[W]e send little Johnny and little Jane to school, not to learn to be homosexuals and lesbians," Rev. McVety said on air. "We send them there to learn reading, writing and arithmetic and history and all these wonderful things, but unfortunately there is an activist group that is afoot that wants to change our curriculum. Why? Because unfortunately they have an insatiable appetite for sex, especially with young people. And there are not enough of them, so they want to proselytize your children and mine, our grandchildren and turn them into homosexuals."

To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.

From "Religious Program Distorted Facts and Contained Abusive Comments about Homosexuals" posted at Broadcaster, Canada's Communications Magazine 12/9/10

The CBSC's Ontario Regional Panel examined the complaints under the Human Rights clauses of the CAB Code of Ethics and Equitable Portrayal Code, which prohibit the broadcast of abusive or unduly discriminatory comment about identifiable groups. It also examined them under the Religious Programming Clause of the CAB Code of Ethics, which prohibits attacks on identifiable groups in such programming, as well as the Negative Portrayal Clause of the CAB Equitable Portrayal Code.

With respect to the comments about homosexuality, the Panel explained that the program was entitled to air objections to that practice generally, to government funding of gay pride parades and to changes made to an Ontario school curriculum that would include discussion of homosexuality. When, however, the program suggested that homosexuals prey on children, it violated the Human Rights, Religious Programming and Negative Portrayal Clauses.

. . . [McVety] also stated that "speaking out" against homosexuality is now a "crime" in Canada, which is also an inaccurate statement regarding the hate speech provisions of the Criminal Code.

To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
Posted by Gabriel Mephibosheth at 1:02 PM
Labels: anti-Christian, ban, Bible, Canada, censorship, evangelicals, gay agenda, hate crimes, hate speech, homosexuality, indoctrination, parade, pastor, pedophilia, public schools, TV
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Margarine - One of the Most Insidious Hoaxes

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 19:14:03 PST

BUTTER! Glad I never got onto the margarine bandwagon.

By The Weston A. Price Foundation

The Weston A. Price Foundation provides accurate information about nutrition and is dedicated to putting nutrient-dense foods back on American tables.

Members receive a lively and informative quarterly journal and email updates on current issues and events.Visit their website at www.westonaprice.org .

Are you still shunning butter from your diet? You can stop today because butter can be a very healthy part of your diet.
Why Butter is Better

* Vitamins ...

Butter is a rich source of easily absorbed vitamin A, needed for a wide range of functions, from maintaining good vision to keeping the endocrine system in top shape.

Butter also contains all the other fat-soluble vitamins (D, E and K2), which are often lacking in the modern industrial diet.
* Minerals ...

Butter is rich in important trace minerals, including manganese, chromium, zinc, copper and selenium (a powerful antioxidant). Butter provides more selenium per gram than wheat germ or herring. Butter is also an excellent source of iodine.
* Fatty Acids ...

Butter provides appreciable amounts of short- and medium-chain fatty acids, which support immune function, boost metabolism and have anti-microbial properties; that is, they fight against pathogenic microorganisms in the intestinal tract.

Butter also provides the perfect balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. Arachidonic acid in butter is important for brain function, skin health and prostaglandin balance.
* Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) ...

When butter comes from cows eating green grass, it contains high levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a compound that gives excellent protection against cancer and also helps your body build muscle rather than store fat.
* Glycospingolipids ...

These are a special category of fatty acids that protect against gastrointestinal infections, especially in the very young and the elderly. Children given reduced-fat milks have higher rates of diarrhea than those who drink whole milk.
* Cholesterol ...

Despite all of the misinformation you may have heard, cholesterol is needed to maintain intestinal health and for brain and nervous system development in the young.
* Wulzen Factor ...

A hormone-like substance that prevents arthritis and joint stiffness, ensuring that calcium in your body is put into your bones rather than your joints and other tissues. The Wulzen factor is present only in raw butter and cream; it is destroyed by pasteurization.

Butter and Your Health

Is butter really healthy? Let us count the ways …

1. Heart Disease

Butter contains many nutrients that protect against heart disease including vitamins A, D, K2, and E, lecithin, iodine and selenium. A Medical Research Council survey showed that men eating butter ran half the risk of developing heart disease as those using margarine (Nutrition Week 3/22/91, 21:12).
2. Cancer

The short- and medium-chain fatty acids in butter have strong anti-tumor effects. Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in butter from grass-fed cows also gives excellent protection against cancer.
3. Arthritis

The Wulzen or "anti-stiffness" factor in raw butter and also Vitamin K2 in grasss-fed butter, protect against calcification of the joints as well as hardening of the arteries, cataracts and calcification of the pineal gland. Calves fed pasteurized milk or skim milk develop joint stiffness and do not thrive.
4. Osteoporosis

Vitamins A, D and K2 in butter are essential for the proper absorption of calcium and phosphorus and hence necessary for strong bones and teeth.
5. Thyroid Health

Butter is a good source of iodine, in a highly absorbable form. Butter consumption prevents goiter in mountainous areas where seafood is not available. In addition, vitamin A in butter is essential for proper functioning of the thyroid gland.
6. Digestion

Glycospingolipids in butterfat protect against gastrointestinal infection, especially in the very young and the elderly.
7. Growth & Development

Many factors in the butter ensure optimal growth of children, especially iodine and vitamins A, D and K2. Low-fat diets have been linked to failure to thrive in children -- yet low-fat diets are often recommended for youngsters!
8. Asthma

Saturated fats in butter are critical to lung function and protect against asthma.
9. Overweight

CLA and short- and medium-chain fatty acids in butter help control weight gain.
10. Fertility

Many nutrients contained in butter are needed for fertility and normal reproduction.

Why You Should Avoid Margarine, Shortening and Spreads

There are a myriad of unhealthy components to margarine and other butter imposters, including:

* Trans fats: These unnatural fats in margarine, shortenings and spreads are formed during the process of hydrogenation, which turns liquid vegetable oils into a solid fat

Trans fats contribute to heart disease, cancer, bone problems, hormonal imbalance and skin disease; infertility, difficulties in pregnancy and problems with lactation; and low birth weight, growth problems and learning disabilities in children.

A U.S. government panel of scientists determined that man-made trans fats are unsafe at any level. (Small amounts of natural trans fats occur in butter and other animal fats, but these are not harmful.)
* Free radicals: Free radicals and other toxic breakdown products are the result of high temperature industrial processing of vegetable oils. They contribute to numerous health problems, including cancer and heart disease.
* Synthetic vitamins: Synthetic vitamin A and other vitamins are added to margarine and spreads. These often have an opposite (and detrimental) effect compared to the natural vitamins in butter.
* Emulsifiers and preservatives: Numerous additives of questionable safety are added to margarines and spreads. Most vegetable shortening is stabilized with preservatives like BHT.
* Hexane and other solvents: Used in the extraction process, these industrial chemicals can have toxic effects.
* Bleach: The natural color of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil is grey so manufacturers bleach it to make it white. Yellow coloring is then added to margarine and spreads.
* Artificial flavors: These help mask the terrible taste and odor of partially hydrogenated oils, and provide a fake butter taste.
* Mono- and di-glycerides: These contain trans fats that manufacturers do not have to list on the label. They are used in high amounts in so-called "low-trans" spreads.
* Soy protein isolate: This highly processed powder is added to "low-trans" spreads to give them body. It can contribute to thyroid dysfunction, digestive disorders and many other health problems.
* Sterols: Often added to spreads to give them cholesterol-lowering qualities, these estrogen compounds can cause endocrine problems; in animals these sterols contribute to sexual inversion.

How to Purchase Butter

The BEST butter is raw butter from grass-fed cows, preferably organic. Next is pasteurized butter from grass-fed cows, followed by regular pasteurized butter from supermarkets. Even the latter two are still a much healthier choice than margarine or spreads.

And where is the FDA? When are we going to realize that we should not shirk our own responsibilities by transferring them to a bureaucracy?

How to Straighten This Country Out

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:11:01 PST

By ED Kennedy - Wednesday, December 1, 2010

The recent election offers an incredible opportunity to take actions strong enough to actually get our country out of its current rut and on the road to prosperity.

The economic proposal offered by former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles does nothing but make matters worse. Raising taxes has never solved any economic problem. The solution to our huge and ever-rising deficits is to increase the tax base by making the economy bigger and government smaller.

How do we do it? Here's how:

First, do away with the IRS.

Replace it with the Fair Tax. Every Fair Tax proposal I've seen calls for lower-income citizens to receive advanced rebates to prevent further hardship on those folks until we can create higher-paying jobs for them. The Fair Tax would cause hundreds of companies to either open headquarters locations or move entirely to the U.S.

The result would be millions of new jobs, good jobs that would result in much higher revenues being collected from the Fair Tax. Employers would be competing for good workers, and the economy would explode with success.

Now, the broken economy is solved. The only thing that could slow it down is continued irresponsible spending by a government gone wrong. So let's fix government.

Let's start by completely doing away with the Department of Education.

This department is a $100 billion quagmire that turns every dollar into 17 cents. Since the formation of this boondoggle more than 30 years ago, education has gone backward. The only result we see from the $100 billion this national disgrace spends annually is increased and unnecessary paperwork for already overworked teachers.

The government would support state schools to the tune of $25 billion of current DOE funding. The states would decide how best to spend the dollars to improve education, and the feds would stay out of their business - thereby saving taxpayers $75 billion a year and greatly improving the education product offered to our children.

Now that we are finally moving in the right direction, let's dissolve the Department of Energy.

This is another bureaucratic nightmare that costs billions and serves no purpose. Since its inception during the Carter administration, energy prices have skyrocketed and we are more dependent than ever on foreign oil. Let individual states determine if they want to drill for oil within their states' boundaries or off their coasts.

This would allow us to take advantage of a couple of the world's richest reserves in Alaska and the Dakotas. The resulting fall in OPEC oil prices would help economies all over the world to grow. The only nations to be hurt would be those that use oil revenues to support terrorism.

In order to keep the remaining departments of government from devouring our newfound prosperity with further incompetence, we'll cut every department's budget by 50 percent. These excess government workers would easily be able to find "productive" jobs in our now-booming economy. The result would be more efficient government that supported rather than crushed good economic initiatives.

EPA and FDA would be defanged and no longer the enemy of every business with an environmental solution or health care breakthrough.

The only department that would be exempted from drastic cuts would be the Department of Defense. The DOD would be charged with protecting our borders and protecting us from terrorists. The DOD would be subjected to extensive audits to expose any wasteful or unnecessary spending. Those guilty of buying "hundred-dollar toilet seats" would be fired and severely punished.

What about health care, you ask? Simple! Scrap the worst piece of legislation in history, Obamacare, and replace it with tort reform and allow health care insurers to compete across state lines. Rates would drop and our now much more gainfully employed workers would more easily be able to afford it.

Finally, put prayer back in schools.

In the 30 years since liberals have kicked God out of our schools, our society and the values that made it great have gone into decay. Respect for authority is disappearing, and our schools are more dangerous and less productive because of these problems.

Let every state put "prayer in schools" on the ballot during the next statewide election. My guess is that such initiatives would pass overwhelmingly in most states. Atheists, radicals and others who object would have the same options that Christians now have: Put their children in private school, home school or find a state with laws they like. This fringe element could also consider moving to countries like Iran, North Korea or France.

These simple improvements might not solve everything, but they would get the ball rolling in the proper direction.

God bless America!

Businessman Ed Kennedy lives in Pinehurst. Contact him at ekennedy10@nc.rr.com.

PatriotPost.US Alert:: TSA Invasive Body Scanners

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:50:15 PST

Friday, November 12, 2010

Breaking: An investigation by The Patriot Post has determine that the three primary manufacturers of full body scanners being purchased by TSA with Obama (taxpayer) "stimulus" funding, are located in (you guessed it) Democrat congressional districts favored for such boondoggle funding in California and Massachusetts.

L-3 Communications ($165 million contract) is in Massachusetts congressional district 7 (Demo Rep. Ed Markey). American Science and Engineering is in Massachusetts congressional district 5 (Demo Rep. Niki Tsongas). And, Rapiscan ($173 million contract) is in California's 36th congressional district (Demo Rep. Jane Harman).

If you think the TSA scanners now being deployed at airports around the nation -- thanks to $73 million in Obama (taxpayer) stimulus funding -- are not invasive, you might reconsider after viewing this virtual strip search, which is a low resolution of the much higher resolution TSA scans now being used.

Is there a privacy issue here? Want your wives and daughters scanned or searched using the "enhanced pat down procedure" if a woman refuses to subject herself to the scan? Did you know that TnA, er, uh, TSA employees have cached these images? Reuters reports and thousands of them have been posted on the Web. Further, there are also health related concerns about scanner radiation.

When it comes to airport security matters, we put some stock into what the Israelis have to say. In April of this year, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority, Rafi Sela, who has been an expert in security and defence technology for 30 years, said of the body scanners: "I don't know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747. That's why we haven't put them in [Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport]." (Obviously Sela's security decisions are not directed by politicians with stimulus money to burn.)

Sela believes a "trusted traveller" network would be better because pre-approved low-risk passengers would be subject only to expedited screening and higher risk individuals could then be subject to much more proven technology like automatic sniffers now used to detect explosive residue on airline baggage.

As for the "random search" procedures in effect at U.S. airports, Sela says, "Random searches are like Russian roulette." He is an advocate of behavioral profiling, but that would offend the sensibilities of travelers who actually fit the profile of a terrorist.

View a list of airports with scanners.
Links to more info on the new TSA protocols:
Assume the position:

Assume the position 2:

Assume the position 3:

Pilot Association says NO:

Columnist Steve Chapman concludes, "The war on terrorism is going to get personal. Very personal. Americans have long resented the hassles that go with air travel ever since 9/11 — long security lines, limits on liquids, forced removal of footwear and so on. But if the Transportation Security Administration has its way, we will look back to 2009 as the good old days. The agency is rolling out new full-body scanners, which eventually will replace metal detectors at all checkpoints. These machines replicate the experience of taking off your clothes, but without the fun. They enable agents to get a view of your body that leaves nothing to the imagination. For the camera-shy, TSA will offer an alternative: "enhanced" pat-downs. This is not the gentle frisking you may have experienced at the airport in the past. It requires agents to probe aggressively in intimate zones — breasts, buttocks, crotches. If you enjoyed your last mammography or prostate exam, you'll love the enhanced pat-down. And you'll get a chance to have an interesting conversation with your children about being touched by strangers. Besides the indignity of having one's body exposed to an airport screener, there is a danger the images will find a wider audience. The U.S. Marshals Service recently admitted saving some 35,000 images from a machine at a federal courthouse in Florida. TSA says that will never happen. Human experience says, oh, yes, it will."

And you think we are FREE?

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 17:14:11 PST

What follows is an email newsletter from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and if it doesn't 1) scare the heck out of you and 2) overwhelm you with outrage, I don't think anything will.

OUR GOVERNMENT IS SO OUT OF CONTROL THAT OUR VERY LIVES ARE IN DANGER. THE THREAT ISN'T IN SOME DISTANT FUTURE BUT HAS ARRIVE.

1. SEARCHES TO GET ON AN AIRPLANE THAT ARE TANTAMOUNT TO FULL BODY, STRIP SEARCHES. AND THE PROCEDURES DO NOT PROTECT US AS THE BUREAUCRATS WOULD HAVE YOU THINK.....THEY DON'T CARE BECAUSE THEY CAN EXEMPT THEMSELVES FROM THE SEARCHES.

See my blog "Have We Gone Insane?" "HOMELAND SECURITY?" (Another nasty joke on "We the People" or is it Homeland Prison?

2. POLICEMEN AND BORDER PATROL AGENTS GOING TO JAIL FOR DOING THEIR JOBS. THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (JOKE OF THE CENTURY) IS COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL AS YOU WILL UNDERSTAND FROM THIS ARTICLE.

3. DOJ JUDGES LEGISLATING FROM THE BENCH AND USURPING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE WHEN IT DOESN'T SUIT THEIR AGENDAS.

Check out what one judge has done to the will of the people of Oklahoma that do not wish to use International law or sharia law......In Defense of the Sharia Ban

Dear Defender of Freedom,

Help make sure this is the last Thanksgiving a mother is away from her son!

Take Action Now!

Thanksgiving is time every year when we all travel many miles to be around the ones we love. I wish I could tell you that Stephanie Mohr was going home this Thanksgiving to be with her son Adam. Stephanie is sitting hundreds of miles away from Adam in a jail cell where she was sentenced to spend 10 years of her life for a “crime” she didn’t commit!

This holiday season and all year long, LELDF has one goal and that is to defend those officers that have been wrongly accused for actions taken in line of duty. Please click here to learn more about LELDF and our mission!
Please -- let me explain.

Stephanie received more than 25 letters of commendation and two awards during her years on the police force. But all that matters to the bureaucrats at the federal Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice is that she was a white police officer whose police dog bit an illegal immigrant on the leg back in 1995.

You may have heard about her case. On the night of September 21, 1995, she was on patrol with her police dog, Valk. The area she patrolled, Takoma Park, had been suffering a rash of burglaries.

So when her partner, Sergeant Anthony Delozier, and Stephanie got a call for back-up from an officer who had spotted two men on the roof of a nearby store, they knew they might have found the criminals.

When they arrived, the situation was tense. The two suspects, Ricardo Mendez and Herrera Cruz, had been ordered down from the roof and told to face a wall. They were shouting back and forth to each other in a stream of Spanish. And then it happened.

Mendez made a move -- as if to flee the scene. Stephanie instantly released her dog, Valk, who was trained to perform the police department’s standard “bite and hold.” That’s exactly what Valk did -- he bit Mendez on the leg and held him until the other officers and she was able to handcuff him. Thankfully, a police helicopter was overhead and had monitored the arrest.

Both of the suspects were charged with 4th degree burglary. Herrera Cruz pled guilty, was sentenced to time served, and deported to Mexico. Mendez was convicted of illegally entering the U.S. and selling crack cocaine and was deported to San Salvador.

As for Stephanie Mohr, she was relieved to get two dangerous drug dealers off our streets.

So imagine her shock -- five years later -- when the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was going to indict me for “violating” Mendez’s civil rights by allowing her police dog to bite his leg!

At first, Stephanie simply could not believe it.

Ricardo Mendez was a convicted felon. An illegal immigrant. And it was her duty to release Valk and stop Mendez from fleeing the scene that night back in 1995! But the facts didn’t matter to the bureaucrats in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

They had been looking for cases of “police brutality” to investigate.

And Stephanie was exactly what they wanted:

A white police officer whose police dog had bitten a San Salvadoran immigrant. Her fellow officers testified in court that she had done her job by the book. The P.G. County police training clearly states that if a felony suspect makes a move, they are authorized to release our police dogs.

The jury agreed and voted to acquit her 11-1. And that’s when things really got ugly. Civil rights groups were furious. Everyone from Amnesty International to the NAACP declared the arrest “racist” and demanded an investigation of Stephanie and of the police department. The Justice Department insisted on a second trial because of the one lone juror who had sided with the prosecution.

The second trial was a circus.

The government flew Mendez in from San Salvador and Cruz from Mexico at taxpayer expense to testify against Stephanie. That’s right -- they wanted the jury to take the word of two convicted felons over the word of decorated police officers! To make matters worse, they stacked the jury with minorities who would be sympathetic to illegal immigrants. They drummed up minority witnesses who accused Stephanie of using racial epithets against them – without a shred of proof! And this time, their strategy worked.

Stephanie was convicted and sentenced to prison for ten years. Ten years -- for putting her life on the line every day and arresting a dangerous drug dealer! Stephanie left the courtroom in shock, without a chance to even kiss Adam or his daddy good-bye. Stephanie has been here in the Alderson, West Virginia prison now for seven years.

Stephanie thinks about Adam every constantly. Stephanie says it is an unimaginable pain. Maybe something only a mother can feel.

Stephanie missed seven of his birthdays and this Thanksgiving will be another holiday that Stephanie is separated from her son.But with your help, by donating $25, $50 , $100 or as much as you can afford to The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund we can try to make sure this is the last holiday Stephanie has to spend in a cold jail cell.

If you’ve heard of LELDF then you know we are the best friend a police officer could ever have. LELDF helps defend good officers who have been unfairly persecuted for their split-second, use-of-force decisions in the line of duty.

After I heard about her case, I told everyone on my board, including former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, about it. Since then, LELDF has been defending Stephanie Mohr. We have filed two appeals with the U.S. Court of Appeals, and paid for legal briefs, expert witnesses, and research. We have recently filed a Petition for Commutation of Sentence with the President and a Habeas Corpus Petition with the Bureau of Prisons to force them to grant Stephanie an early release to her home or a half way house so she can be employed.

I would like to tell you that Stephanie’s story is unique but the fact is, that police men and women are wrongly accused every year for actions taken in line of duty.

Will you help LELDF defend Stephanie and other officers in a similar situation by sending a tax-deductible contribution to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund?
The U.S. Department of Justice has had unlimited federal tax dollars to spend on the cases against officers like Stephanie. But she must rely on the generous hearts of people like you to help clear her innocent name and send her home to her son Adam.

So all I can do now is hope that good Americans like you will come to their defense.

Any gift you can send -- be it $25, $50, $100, or $500 -- is tax-deductible. These officers have no other choice. They must rely on good Americans like you to right the wrong that has been done.

Sincerely,
Dave Martin
Chairman, LELDF

P.S. If she can be sent to prison for doing her job, then every police officer in this nation faces the risk of being put behind bars for protecting your family and mine. Won’t you please help me clear her name and get Stephanie home to her son before she misses another Thanksgiving? Thank you for any donation that you can spare.

Have We Gone Insane?

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:40:22 PST

Have we gone insane? There was a time when sane men and women, who are our elected officials would never have even entertained the idea of body scanners our invasive body searches. The chairman of the Homeland Security(?) committee, The Honorable Mr. Rockefeller, stated in his opening statement that the proposed changes to airport security were receiving comments from all quarters. "I appreciate peoples concerns. I understand there is a frustration. I realize some of these screening procedures appear invasive." (emphasis added by me).

He goes on to characterized this unconscionable and barbaric procedure as "unavoidable". What is the matter here? Have we raised a nation of blundering idiots? This is the best that can be presented?

The pity of it all is that experts such as Charles Slepian, who was the guest of Janet Parshall on yesterday's "In the Market with Janet Parshall" will tell you that these procedures DO NOT WORK. For example, these searches will not pick up an explosive that is in powder form such as one person who was caught with powder in his underwear. Answering Janet's question about training reveals the absurdity of TSA's hiring practices. He states that the minimum training requirement of 40 hours with another 20 hours or so of on-the-job training. Policemen get 6 to 8 months in an academy and they are not being trained in bomb detection. A military person will go through a special bomb detection school which is after other schools that lead up to it. It takes many months and sometimes years before they are put in the field. "Yet we don't make an effort to hire them."

He goes on to say that we don't use the kinds of people who can profile, such as retired police officers. He also says that "we do not build a security force in the United States based on security skills, we base it on job need and that's unfortunate." "We take the people who need a job and we give them the job, we give them the minimum training, but they are not prepared to undertake the responsibilities of that job. It's as simple as that. If it were otherwise, we would take some of those many many thousands of young men and women who are coming back from military service who are dealing with bombs in the field, and dealing with IED's, they are also dealing with personalities, they also do profiling. We would be taking some of those police officers who do the 20 years and are out and have a vast, vast well of experience and we don't use them either."

"We have the wrong people doing the wrong jobs to protect America"

There is so much wrong about the direction being taken and these by the very people who we elect to do our will.

Please, do not become complacent because we made a change in this last election. That was merely the "shot fired across the bow". We need to fire all of the political establishment (class).

We need term limits for everyone, including the Supremes (all Federal judges).

We need the Fairtax bills in both House and Senate passed and signed into law

We need the Federal government out of education. The states need to "man-up"

We need the Federal banking system removed.

We need the Federal government to divest themselves of all businesses such as Freddie Mack and Fanny May.

We need to abolish unions for government workers

We need to get the government out of unions in general.

We need limits on how long a person can work for the State department, Defense department, etc.

We need legislation that is a) read by and understood by every congressman b) understandable down to the 5th grade level c) is paid for up front

We need to balance the budget and make it against the law for the government to go into debt.

We need to revoke all legislation that exempts the politician from any program or law.

We need to secure our borders and enforce laws currently on the books.

We need to have humane immigration that allows us to have a guest worker program and paths to citizenship that are not as difficult and costly as they are currently.

As to airport security.............maybe it's time to borrow from our friends...........

A great alternative to body scanners at airports

The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports.
It's a booth you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you. They see this as a win-win for everyone, with none of the whining about racial profiling. It also would eliminate the costs of long and expensive trials. Justice would be swift. Case closed!
You're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system: "Attention standby passengers — we now have a seat available on flight number ____. Shalom."

IMPRIMIS - Hillsdale College - Mike Pence Address September 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 19:18:09 PST

MIKE PENCE graduated from Hanover College in 1981 and earned his J.D. from Indiana University School of Law in 1986. After running for Congress in 1988 and 1990, he was named president of the Indiana Policy Review Commission, a state think tank based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1991. He was first elected to Congress from Indiana’s 6th District in 2000 and was most recently elected to a fifth term in 2008. That same year he was elected to serve as House Republican Conference Chairman. During the 109th Congress, he also served as chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus in the House of Representatives.

Imprimis
OVER 1,900,000 READERS MONTHLY
October 2010 • Volume 39, Number 10

The Presidency and the Constitution

Mike Pence
U.S. Representative, Indiana’s 6th Congressional District

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on the Hillsdale College campus on September 20, 2010.
The presidency is the most visible thread that runs through the tapestry of the American government. More often than not, for good or for ill, it sets the tone for the other branches and spurs the expectations of the people. Its powers are vast and consequential, its requirements impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purpose as set forth in the Constitution of the United States.
Isn’t it amazing, given the great and momentous nature of the office, that those who seek it seldom pause to consider what they are seeking? Rather, unconstrained by principle or reflection, there is a mad rush toward something that, once its powers are seized, the new president can wield as an instrument with which to transform the nation and the people according to his highest aspirations.
But, other than in a crisis of the house divided, the presidency is neither fit nor intended to be such an instrument. When it is made that, the country sustains a wound, and cries out justly and indignantly. And what the nation says is the theme of this address. What it says—informed by its long history, impelled by the laws of nature and nature’s God—is that we as a people are not to be ruled and not to be commanded. It says that the president should never forget this; that he has not risen above us, but is merely one of us, chosen by ballot, dismissed after his term, tasked not to transform and work his will upon us, but to bear the weight of decision and to carry out faithfully the design laid down in the Constitution in accordance with the Declaration of Independence.
* * *
The presidency must adhere to its definition as expressed in the Constitution, and to conduct defined over time and by tradition. While the powers of the office have enlarged, along with those of the legislature and the judiciary, the framework of the government was intended to restrict abuses common to classical empires and to the regal states of the 18th century.
Without proper adherence to the role contemplated in the Constitution for the presidency, the checks and balances in the constitutional plan become weakened. This has been most obvious in recent years when the three branches of government have been subject to the tutelage of a single party. Under either party, presidents have often forgotten that they are intended to restrain the Congress at times, and that the Congress is independent of their desires. And thus fused in unholy unity, the political class has raged forward in a drunken expansion of powers and prerogatives, mistakenly assuming that to exercise power is by default to do good.
Even the simplest among us knows that this is not so. Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh. Therefore, those who are entrusted with it must educate themselves in self-restraint. A republic is about limitation, and for good reason, because we are mortal and our actions are imperfect.
The tragedy of presidential decision is that even with the best choice, some, perhaps many, will be left behind, and some, perhaps many, may die. Because of this, a true statesman lives continuously with what Churchill called “stress of soul.” He may give to Paul, but only because he robs Peter. And that is why you must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness. For all greatness is tempered by mortality, every soul is equal, and distinctions among men cannot be owned; they are on loan from God, who takes them back and evens accounts at the end.
It is a tragedy indeed that new generations taking office attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it. In the judiciary, this has seldom been better expressed than by Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” In the Congress, it presents itself in massive legislation, acts and codes thousands of pages long and so monstrously over-complicated that no human being can read through them—much less understand them, much less apply them justly to a people that increasingly feel like they are no longer being asked, but rather told. Our nation finds itself in the position of a dog whose duty it is not to ask why—because the “why” is too elevated for his nature—but simply to obey.

Imprimis (im-pri-mis), [Latin]: in the first place
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America is not a dog, and does not require a “because-I-said-so” jurisprudence; or legislators who knit laws of such insulting complexity that they are heavier than chains; or a president who acts like, speaks like, and is received as a king.
The president is not our teacher, our tutor, our guide or ruler. He does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision. It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law, and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others. It is neither his job nor his prerogative to shift the power of decision away from them, and to him and the acolytes of his choosing.
Is my characterization of unprecedented presumption incorrect? Listen to the words of the leader of President Obama’s transition team and perhaps his next chief-of-staff: “It’s important that President-Elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.” Or, more recently, the latest presidential appointment to avoid confirmation by the Senate—the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—who wrote last Friday: “President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again.”
“Take power. . .rule. . .leveling.” Though it is the model now, this has never been and should never again be the model of the presidency or the character of the American president. No one can say this too strongly, and no one can say it enough until it is remedied. We are not subjects; we are citizens. We fought a war so that we do not have to treat even kings like kings, and—if I may remind you—we won that war. Since then, the principle of royalty has, in this country, been inoperative. Who is better suited or more required to exemplify this conviction, in word and deed, than the President of the United States?
* * *
The powers of the presidency are extraordinary and necessarily great, and great presidents treat them sparingly. For example, it is not the president’s job to manipulate the nation’s youth for the sake of his agenda or his party. They are a potent political force when massed by the social network to which they are permanently attached. But if the president has their true interests at heart he will neither flatter them nor let them adore him, for in flattery is condescension and in adoration is direction, and youth is neither seasoned nor tested enough to direct a nation. Nor should it be the president’s business to presume to direct them. It is difficult enough to do right by one’s own children. No one can be the father of a whole continent’s youth.
Is the president, therefore, expected to turn away from this and other easy advantage? Yes. Like Harry Truman, who went to bed before the result on election night, he must know when to withdraw, to hold back, and to forgo attention, publicity, or advantage.
There is no finer, more moving, or more profound understanding of the nature of the presidency and the command of humility placed upon it than that expressed by President Coolidge. He, like Lincoln, lost a child while he was president, a son of sixteen. “The day I became president,” Coolidge wrote, “he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, ‘If my father was president I would not work in a tobacco field,’ Calvin replied, ‘If my father were your father you would.’” His admiration for the boy was obvious.
Young Calvin contracted blood poisoning from an incident on the South Lawn of the White House. Coolidge wrote, “What might have happened to him under other circumstances we do not know, but if I had not been president. . . .” And then he continued,
In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him.
A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic, but life itself. It communicates that the president feels the gravity of his office and is willing to sacrifice himself; that his eye is not upon his own prospects but on the storm of history, through which he must navigate with the specific powers accorded to him and the limitations placed on those powers both by man and by God.
* * *
The modern presidency has drifted far from the great strength and illumination of its source: the Constitution as given life by the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document ever written. The Constitution—terse, sober, and specific—does not, except by implication, address the president’s demeanor. But this we can read in the best qualities of the founding generation, which we would do well to imitate. In the Capitol Rotunda are heroic paintings of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the victory at Saratoga, the victory at Yorktown, and—something seldom seen in history—a general, the leader of an armed rebellion, resigning his commission and surrendering his army to a new democracy. Upon hearing from Benjamin West that George Washington, having won the war and been urged by some to use the army to make himself king, would instead return to his farm, King George III said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” He did, and he was.
To aspire to such virtue and self-restraint would in a sense be difficult, but in another sense it should be easy—difficult because it would be demanding and ideal, and easy because it is the right thing to do and the rewards are immediately self-evident.
A president who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse: he will be thrown, and the nation along with him. The president solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does not solemnly swear to ignore, overlook, supplement, or reinterpret it. Other than in a crisis of existence, such as the Civil War, amendment should be the sole means of circumventing the Constitution. For if a president joins the powers of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.
Is the Constitution a fluctuating and inconstant document, a collection of suggestions whose purpose is to stimulate debate in a future to which the Founders were necessarily blind? Progressives tell us that even the Framers themselves could not reach agreement in its regard. But they did agree upon it. And they wrote it down. And they signed it. And they lived by it. Its words are unchanging and unchangeable except, again, by amendment. There is no allowance for a president to override it according to his supposed superior conception. Why is this good? It is good because the sun will burn out, the Ohio River will flow backwards, and the cow will jump over the moon 10,000 times before any modern president’s conception is superior to that of the Founders of this nation.
Would it be such a great surprise that a good part of the political strife of our times is because one president after another, rather than keeping faith with it, argues with the document he is supposed to live by? This discontent will only be calmed by returning the presidency to the nation’s first principles. The Constitution and the Declaration should be on a president’s mind all the time, as the prism through which the light of all question of governance passes. Though we have—sometimes gradually, sometimes radically—moved away from this, we can move back to it. And who better than the president to restore this wholesome devotion to limited government?
* * *
And as the president returns to the consistent application of the principles in the Constitution, he will also ensure fiscal responsibility and prosperity. Who is better suited, with his executive and veto powers, to carry over the duty of self-restraint and discipline to the idea of fiscal solvency? When the president restrains government spending, leaving room for the American people to enjoy the fruits of their labor, growth is inevitable. As Senator Robert Taft wrote: “Liberty has been the key to our progress in the past and is the key to our progress in the future.… If we can preserve liberty in all its essentials, there is no limit to the future of the American people.” Whereas the president must be cautious, dutiful, and deferential at home,his character must change abroad. Were he to ask for a primer on how to act in relation to other states, which no holder of the office has needed to this point, and were that primer to be written by the American people, whether of 1776 or 2010, you can be confident that it would contain the following instructions: You do not bow to kings. Outside our shores, the President of the United States of America bows to no man. When in foreign lands, you do not criticize your own country. You do not argue the case against the United States, but the case for it. You do not apologize to the enemies of the United States. Should you be confused, a country, people, or region that harbors,
shelters, supports, encourages, or cheers attacks upon our country or the slaughter of our friends and
families are enemies of the United States. And, to repeat, you do not apologize to them. Closely related to this, and perhaps the least ambiguous of the president’s complex responsibilities, is his duty as commander-in-chief of the military. In this regard there is a very simple rule, unknown to some presidents regardless of party: If, after careful determination, intense stress of soul, and the deepest prayer, you go to war, then, having gone to war, you go to war to win. You do not cast away
American lives, or those of the innocent noncombatant enemy, upon a theory, a gambit, or a notion. And if the politics of your own election or of your party intrude upon your decisions for even an
instant—there are no words for this. More commonplace, but hardly less important, are other expectations of the president in this regard. He must not stint on the equipment and provisioning
of the armed forces, and if he errs it must be not on the side of scarcity but of surplus. And he must be the guardian of his troops, taking every step to avoid the loss of even a single life. The American soldier is as precious as the closest of your kin—because he is your kin, and for his sake the president
must, in effect, say to the Congress and to the people: “I am the Commander-in-Chief. It is my sacred duty to defend the United States, and to give our soldiers what they need to complete the mission and come home safe, whatever the cost.”
If, in fulfilling this duty, the president wavers, he will have betrayed his office, for this is not a policy, it is probity. It is written on the blood-soaked ground of Saratoga, Yorktown, Antietam, Cold Harbor, the Marne, Guadalcanal, the Pointe du Hoc, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a thousand other places in our history, in lessons repeated over and over again.
* * *
The presidency, a great and complex subject upon which I have only touched, has become symbolic of overreaching. There are many truths that we have been frightened to tell or face. If we run from them, they will catch us with our backs turned and pull us down. Better that we should not flee but rather stop and look them in the eye.
What might our forebearers say to us, knowing what they knew, and having done what they did? I have no doubt that they would tell us to channel our passions, speak the truth and do what is right, slowly and with resolution; to work calmly, steadily and without animus or fear; to be like a rock in the tide, let the water tumble about us, and be firm and unashamed in our love of country.
I see us like those in Philadelphia in 1776. Danger all around, but a fresh chapter, ready to begin, uncorrupted, with great possibilities and—inexplicably, perhaps miraculously—the way is clearing ahead. I have never doubted that Providence can appear in history like the sun emerging from behind the clouds, if only as a reward for adherence to first principles. As Winston Churchill said in a speech to Congress on December 26, 1941: “He must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honor to be the faithful servants.”
As Americans, we inherit what Lincoln in his First Inaugural called “the mystic chords of memory stretching from every patriot grave.” They bind us to the great and the humble, the known and the unknown of Americans past—and if I hear them clearly, what they say is that although we may have strayed, we have not strayed too far to return, for we are their descendants. We can still astound the world with justice, reason and strength. I know this is true, but even if it was not we could not in decency stand down, if only for our debt to history. We owe a debt to those who came before, who did great things, and suffered more than we suffer, and gave more than we give, and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for us, whom they did not know. For we “drink from wells we did not dig” and are “warmed by fires we did not build,” and so we must be faithful in our time as they were in theirs.
Many great generations are gone, but by the character and memory of their existence they forbid us to despair of the republic. I see them crossing the prairies in the sun and wind. I see their faces looking out from steel mills and coal mines, and immigrant ships crawling into the harbors at dawn. I see them at war, at work and at peace. I see them, long departed, looking into the camera, with hopeful and sad eyes. And I see them embracing their children, who became us. They are our family and our blood, and we cannot desert them. In spirit, all of them come down to all of us, in a connection that, out of love, we cannot betray.
They are silent now and forever, but from the eternal silence of every patriot grave there is yet an echo that says, “It is not too late; keep faith with us, keep faith with God, and do not, do not ever despair of the republic.” ■

DID YOU KNOW?
Sam Knecht, chairman and professor of art at Hillsdale College, has produced an oil painting of the signing of the American Constitution. Measuring over 5'x9', it will hang in Hillsdale’s Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. To view the painting online, go to hillsdale.edu/kirbycenter/painting.

Just Plane Crazy: Obama’s Dog Flies to Vacation on Separate Jet

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:09:11 PDT

Just Plane Crazy: Obama’s Dog Flies to Vacation on Separate Jet
By Doug Powers • July 17, 2010 02:26 PM
**Written by Doug Powers
The Obamas arrived at their vacation spot in Maine, and the local paper, the Morning Sentinel, described the scene:
The president was the first to walk onto the tarmac, dressed casually in a pale blue Oxford shirt and khakis. A few minutes later, the first lady, dressed in black capris, a tank-top and sandals, walked onto the runway. Shortly afterward, Malia and Sasha joined their parents.
Baldacci and his wife, Karen, presented the family with gift bags full of Maine-made goodies, including baskets made by the Passamaquoddy Tribe, popcorn from Little Lad’s Bakery in East Corinth, iconic L.L. Bean bags, University of Maine ice hockey hats, and an assortment of other Maine foods and books.
Karen Baldacci said the bags for Malia and Sasha contained one loon toy and one chickadee toy that sound their natural calls.
Arriving in a small jet before the Obamas was the first dog, Bo, a Portuguese water dog given as a present by the late U.S. Sen Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.; and the president’s personal aide Reggie Love, who chatted with Baldacci.
Not enough room on Air Force One for a Portuguese water dog and Reggie Love? Obama had to have a smaller jet (G3 Gulfstream, according to the story) serve as Air Force One instead of the 747 the president usually uses because of the size of the airport, but still, it’s a dog — and we’re all supposed to sacrifice in order to get through these tough economic times, right Mr. President? … Um, Mr. President?
There was some concern because the jet carrying the First Couple’s egos was a bit late in arriving due to rough weather over Shangri-La.
Incidentally, my dog saw this story and wants his own jet now, too. Thanks Obama.
Vacation update: What do you think attracted Obama to this ice cream shop?
(h/t Warner Todd Huston)
**Written by Doug Powers

"I Feel Like I Can Fly"

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 20:54:56 PDT

Staff Photo by Angela Lewis/Chattanooga Times Free Press
Sep 30, 2010
Athlete Rachel Cannon smiles as she sits atop Axel while learning the Special Olympics competition course on a ranch in Flintstone, Ga. Thursday afternoon.

The muscles in Rachel Cannon’s legs stiffened so tightly she shook with pain, but the 17-year-old with crippling cerebral palsy and scoliosis never gave up horseback riding.
“I just realized, ‘Oh, I can do this,’” she said.
Six practice sessions later, the horse has become a way to soothe her fears, Cannon said. Stretching helped her muscles relax, and she now is training to compete in the Special Olympics.
“I have to depend on everybody for my every single need almost, but being on the horse makes me more mobile,” she said. “I feel like I can fly.”
Cannon is one of 33 special-needs children from Catoosa, Walker and Hamilton county schools who are preparing for the Equestrian Special Olympics on Oct. 30. The event, at Eagles Rest Ranch in Flintstone, Ga., is sponsored by the Catoosa and Walker County Special Olympics.
“There is value in using sports to help people learn healthy life skills,” said Wendy Bigham, spokeswoman for Special Olympics Georgia. “So many students are stuck at home and they don’t have a lot of outlets to stay healthy.”
More than 23,078 special-needs, school-age children are competing in the Special Olympics this year across Georgia, Bigham said.
Ginger Brown, owner of the licensed SpiritHorse Therapeutic Riding facility at Eagles Rest, is one of three instructors who train the students at no charge. Brown depends on donations to fund the cost of operating the ranch. She also has 33 volunteer Special Olympics state-trained riding teachers and other workers who help the students.
Some riders are autistic, others have cerebral palsy and some have Down syndrome. Many use wheelchairs, Brown said. She and her staff train students twice a week to prepare for the Olympics.
It hurts some of the riders when they start because they’re using muscles to balance on the horse that they haven’t used in wheelchairs, Brown said.
“I’ve seen kids sweat and turn beet-red in the face because they were using muscles that were just painful, but they refuse to quit and they have made great strides,” she said.
The result has been special-needs children who have increased their independence, confidence and ability to communicate, according to Brown.
No child has been seriously injured at the ranch in the two years she’s hosted the Special Olympics, Brown said. Even if they fall, they get up and try again, she said.
“They feel the freedom and independence they get from being on top of the horse, and they want to try,” Brown said.

The Many Evil Tentacles of George Soros - Traitor and/or Enemy of the U.S.?

noreply@blogger.com (Dennis C Laman) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:11:44 PDT

Organizations Funded Directly by George Soros and his Open Society Institute
By Discover The Networks

Organizations that, in recent years, have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Institute (OSI) include those in the list below. To view a comprehensive profile of any particular organization, click on its name.

Air America Radio: Now defunct, this was a self-identified "liberal" radio network.
Alliance for Justice: Best known for its activism vis a vis the appointment of federal judges, this group consistently depicts Republican judicial nominees as "extremists."
America Coming Together: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose purpose was to coordinate and organize pro-Democrat voter-mobilization programs.
America Votes: Soros also played a major role in creating this group, whose get-out-the-vote campaigns targeted likely Democratic voters.
American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy: This organization "opposes laws that require employers and persons providing education, health care, or other social services to verify citizenship or immigration status."
American Civil Liberties Union: This group opposes virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by the U.S. government. It supports open borders, has rushed to the defense of suspected terrorists and their abettors, and appointed former New Left terrorist Bernardine Dohrn to its Advisory Board.
American Constitution Society for Law and Policy: This Washington, DC-based think tank seeks to move American jurisprudence to the left by recruiting, indoctrinating, and mobilizing young law students, helping them acquire positions of power. It also provides leftist Democrats with a bully pulpit from which to denounce their political adversaries.
American Family Voices: This group creates and coordinates media campaigns charging Republicans with wrongdoing.
American Federation of Teachers: After longtime AFT President Albert Shanker died in in 1997, he was succeeded by Sandra Feldman, who slowly “re-branded” the union, allying it with some of the most powerful left-wing elements of the New Labor Movement. When Feldman died in 2004, Edward McElroy took her place, followed by Randi Weingarten in 2008. All of them kept the union on the leftward course it had adopted in its post-Shanker period.
American Friends Service Committee: This group views the United States as the principal cause of human suffering around the world. As such, it favors America's unilateral disarmament, the dissolution of American borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, the abolition of the death penalty, and the repeal of the Patriot Act.
American Immigration Council: This non-profit organization is a prominent member of the open-borders lobby. It advocates expanded rights and amnesty for illegal aliens residing in the U.S.
American Immigration Law Foundation: This group supports amnesty for illegal aliens, on whose behalf it litigates against the U.S. government.
American Institute for Social Justice: AISJ's goal is to produce skilled community organizers who can “transform poor communities” by agitating for increased government spending on city services, drug interdiction, crime prevention, housing, public-sector jobs, access to healthcare, and public schools.
American Library Association: This group has been an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's War on Terror -- most particularly, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, which it calls "a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users."
The American Prospect, Inc.: This corporation trains and mentors young leftwing journalists, and organizes strategy meetings for leftist leaders.
Amnesty International: This organization directs a grossly disproportionate share of its criticism for human rights violations at the United States and Israel.
Arab American Institute Foundation: The Arab American Institute denounces the purportedly widespread civil liberties violations directed against Arab Americans in the post-9/11 period, and characterizes Israel as a brutal oppressor of the Palestinian people.
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now: This group conducts voter mobilization drives on behalf of leftist Democrats. These initiatives have been notoriously marred by fraud and corruption.
Bill of Rights Defense Committee: This group provides a detailed blueprint for activists interested in getting their local towns, cities, and even college campuses to publicly declare their opposition to the Patriot Act, and to designate themselves "Civil Liberties Safe Zones." The organization also came to the defense of self-described radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who was convicted in 2005 of providing material support for terrorism.
Brennan Center for Justice: This think tank/legal activist group generates scholarly studies, mounts media campaigns, files amicus briefs, gives pro bono support to activists, and litigates test cases in pursuit of radical "change."
Brookings Institution: This organization has been involved with a variety of internationalist and state-sponsored programs, including one that aspires to facilitate the establishment of a U.N.-dominated world government. Brookings Fellows have also called for additional global collaboration on trade and banking; the expansion of the Kyoto Protocol; and nationalized health insurance for children. Nine Brookings economists signed a petitionopposing President Bush's tax cuts in 2003.
Campaign for America's Future: This group supports tax hikes, socialized medicine, and a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs.
Campaign for Better Health Care: This organization favors a single-payer, government-run, universal health care system.
Campus Progress: A project of the Soros-bankrolled Center for American Progress, this group seeks to "strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses, counter the growing influence of right-wing groups on campus, and empower new generations of progressive leaders."
Casa de Maryland: This organization aggressively lobbies legislators to vote in favor of policies that promote expanded rights, including amnesty, for illegal aliens currently residing in the United States.
Catalist: This is a for-profit political consultancy that seeks "to help progressive organizations realize measurable increases in civic participation and electoral success by building and operating a robust national voter database of every voting-age American."
Catholics for a Free Choice: This nominally Catholic organization supports women's right to abortion-on-demand.
Center for American Progress: This leftist think tank is headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, works closely with Hillary Clinton, and employs numerous former Clinton administration staffers. It is committed to "developing a long-term vision of a progressive America" and "providing a forum to generate new progressive ideas and policy proposals."
Center for Community Change: This group recruits and trains activists to spearhead leftist "political issue campaigns." Promoting increased funding for social welfare programs by bringing "attention to major national issues related to poverty," the Center bases its training programs on the techniques taught by the famed radical organizer Saul Alinsky.
Center for Constitutional Rights: This pro-Castro organization is a core member of the open borders lobby, has opposed virtually all post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures by the U.S. government, and alleges that American injustice provokes acts of international terrorism.
Center for Economic and Policy Research: This group opposed welfare reform, supports "living wage" laws, rejects tax cuts, and consistently lauds the professed achievements of socialist regimes, most notably Venezuela.
Center for Reproductive Rights: CRR's mission is to guarantee safe, affordable contraception and abortion-on-demand for all women, including adolescents. The organization has filed state and federal lawsuits demanding access to taxpayer-funded abortions (through Medicaid) for low-income women.
Center for Responsible Lending: This organization was a major player in the subprime mortgage crisis. According to Phil Kerpen (vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity), CRL “sh[ook] down and harass[ed] banks into making bad loans to unqualified borrowers.” Moreover, CRL negotiated a contract enabling it to operate as a conduit of high-risk loans to Fannie Mae.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: Reasoning from the premise that tax cuts generally help only the wealthy, this organization advocates greater tax expenditures on social welfare programs for low earners.
Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS): Aiming to redistribute wealth by way of higher taxes imposed on those whose incomes are above average, COWS contends that "it is important that state government be able to harness fair contribution from all parts of society – including corporations and the wealthy."
Change America Now: Formed in December 2006, Change America Now describes itself as "an independent political organization created to educate citizens on the failed policies of the Republican Congress and to contrast that record of failure with the promise offered by a Democratic agenda."
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: This group litigates and brings ethics charges against "government officials who sacrifice the common good to special interests" and "betray the public trust." Almost all of its targets are Republicans.
Coalition for an International Criminal Court: This group seeks to subordinate American criminal-justice procedures to those of an international court.
Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund: Defenders of Wildlife opposes oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It condemns logging, ranching, mining, and even the use of recreational motorized vehicles as activities that are destructive to the environment.
Democracy Alliance: This self-described "liberal organization" aims to raise $200 million to develop a funding clearinghouse for leftist groups. Soros is a major donor to this group.
Democracy 21: This group is a staunch supporter of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act.
Democracy Now!: Democracy Now! was created in 1996 by WBAI radio news director Amy Goodman and four partners to provide "perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media," i.e., the views of radical and foreign journalists, left and labor activists, and ideological foes of capitalism.
Democratic Justice Fund: DJF opposes the Patriot Act and most efforts to restrict or regulate immigration into the United States -- particularly from countries designated by the State Department as "terrorist nations."
Democratic Party: Soros' funding activities are devoted largely to helping the Democratic Party solidify its power base. In a November 2003 interview, Soros stated that defeating President Bush in 2004 "is the central focus of my life" ... "a matter of life and death." He pledged to raise $75 million to defeat Bush, and personally donated nearly a third of that amount to anti-Bush organizations. "America under Bush," he said, "is a danger to the world, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is." Claiming that "the Republican party has been captured by a bunch of extremists," Soros accuses the Bush administration of following a "supremacist ideology" in whose rhetoric he claims to hear echoes of "Nazi slogans."
Earthjustice: This group seeks to place severe restrictions on how U.S. land and waterways may be used. It opposes most mining and logging initiatives, commercial fishing businesses, and the use of motorized vehicles in undeveloped areas.
Electronic Privacy Information Center: This organization has been a harsh critic of the USA PATRIOT Act and has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in litigating two cases calling for the FBI "to publicly release or account for thousands of pages of information about the government's use of PATRIOT Act powers."
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights: Co-founded by the revolutionary communist Van Jones, this anti-poverty organization claims that “decades of disinvestment in our cities” -- compounded by “excessive, racist policing and over-incarceration” -- have “led to despair and homelessness.”
EMILY's List: This political network raises money for Democratic female political candidates who support unrestricted access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
Energy Action Coalition: Founded in 2004, this group describes itself as “a coalition of 50 youth-led environmental and social justice groups working together to build the youth clean energy and climate movement.” For EAC, this means “dismantling oppression” according to its principles of environmental justice.
Fair Immigration Reform Movement: This is the open-borders arm of the Center for Community Change.
Feminist Majority: Characterizing the United States as an inherently sexist nation, this group focuses on "advancing the legal, social and political equality of women with men, countering the backlash to women's advancement, and recruiting and training young feminists to encourage future leadership for the feminist movement in the United States."
Four Freedoms Fund: This organization was designed to serve as a conduit through which large foundations could fund state-based open-borders organizations more flexibly and quickly.
Free Exchange on Campus: This organization was created solely to oppose the efforts of one individual, David Horowitz, and his campaign to have universities adopt an "Academic Bill of Rights," as well as todenounce Horowitz's 2006 book The Professors. Member organizations of FEC include Campus Progress (a project of the Center for American Progress); the American Association of University Professors; theAmerican Civil Liberties Union; People For the American Way; the United States Student Association; theCenter for Campus Free Speech; the American Library Association; Free Press; and the National Association of State Public Interest Research Groups.
Free Press: This "media reform" organization has worked closely with many notable leftists and such organizations as Media Matters for America, Air America Radio, Global Exchange, Code Pink, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Mother Jones magazine, and Pacifica Radio.
Funding Exchange: Dedicated to the concept of philanthropy as a vehicle for social change, this organization pairs leftist donors and foundations with likeminded groups and activists who are dedicated to bringing about their own version of "progressive" change and social justice. Many of these grantees assume that American society is rife with racism, discrimination, exploitation, and inequity and needs to be overhauled via sustained education, activism, and social agitation.
Gamaliel Foundation: Modeling its tactics on those of the radical Sixties activist Saul Alinsky, this group takes a strong stand against current homeland security measures and immigration restrictions.
Gisha: Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement: This anti-Israel organization seeks to help Palestinians "exercise their right to freedom of movement."
Global Exchange: Established in 1988 by pro-Castro radical Medea Benjamin, this group consistently condemns America's foreign policy, business practices, and domestic life. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Global Exchange advised Americans to examine "the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world -- from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel."
Grantmakers Without Borders: GWB tends to be very supportive of leftist environmental, anti-war, and civil rights groups. It is also generally hostile to capitalism, which it deems one of the chief "political, economic, and social systems" that give rise to a host of "social ills."
Green For All: This group was created by Van Jones to lobby for federal climate, energy, and economic policy initiatives.
Health Care for America Now: This group supports a “single payer” model where the federal government would be in charge of financing and administering the entire U.S. healthcare system.
Human Rights First: This group supports open borders and the rights of illegal aliens; charges that the Patriot Act severely erodes Americans' civil liberties; has filed amicus curiae briefs on behalf of terror suspect Jose Padilla; and deplores the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities.
Human Rights Watch: This group directs a disproportionate share of its criticism at the United States and Israel. It opposes the death penalty in all cases, and supports open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens.
I'lam: This anti-Israel NGO seeks "to develop and empower the Arab media and to give voice to Palestinian issues."
Immigrant Defense Project: To advance the cause of illegal immigrants, the IDP provides immigration law backup support and counseling to New York defense attorneys and others who represent or assist immigrants in criminal justice and immigration systems, as well as to immigrants themselves.
Immigrant Legal Resource Center: This group claims to have helped gain amnesty for some three million illegal aliens in the U.S., and in the 1980s was part of the sanctuary movement which sought to grant asylum to refugees from the failed Communist states of Central America.
Immigrant Workers Citizenship Project: This open-borders organization advocates mass immigration to the U.S.
Immigration Policy Center: IPC is an advocate of open borders and contends that the massive influx of illegal immigrants into America is due to U.S. government policy, since “the broken immigration system […] spurs unauthorized immigration in the first place.”
Independent Media Center: This Internet-based, news and events bulletin board represents an invariably leftist, anti-capitalist perspective and serves as a mouthpiece for anti-globalization/anti-America themes.
Independent Media Institute: IMI administers the SPIN Project (Strategic Press Information Network), which provides leftist organizations with "accessible and affordable strategic communications consulting, training, coaching, networking opportunities and concrete tools" to help them "achieve their social justice goals."
Institute for America's Future: IAF supports socialized medicine, increased government funding for education, and the creation of an infrastructure "to ensure that the voice of the progressive majority is heard."
Institute for Policy Studies: This think tank has long supported Communist and anti-American causes around the world. Viewing capitalism as a breeding ground for "unrestrained greed," IPS seeks to provide a corrective to "unrestrained markets and individualism." Professing an unquestioning faith in the righteousness of the United Nations, it aims to bring American foreign policy under UN control.
Institute for Public Accuracy: This p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Israel organization sponsored actor Sean Penn’s celebrated visit to Baghdad in 2002. It also sponsored visits to Iraq by Democratic Congressmen Nick Rahall and former Democrat Senator James Abourezk
Institute for Women's Policy Research: This group views the U.S. as a nation rife with discrimination against women, and publishes research to draw attention to this alleged state of affairs. It also advocates unrestricted access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand, stating that "access to abortion is essential to the economic well-being of women and girls."
International Crisis Group: One of this organization's leading figures is its Mideast Director, Robert Malley, who was a President Bill Clinton's Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs. His analysis of the Mideast conflict is markedly pro-Palestinian.
Joint Victory Campaign 2004: Founded by George Soros and Harold Ickes, this group was a major fundraising entity for Democrats during the 2004 election cycle. It collected contributions (including large amounts from Soros personally) and disbursed them to two other groups, America Coming Together and the Media Fund, which also worked on behalf of Democrats.
LatinoJustice PRLDF: This organization p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }supports bilingual education, the racial gerrymandering of voting districts, and expanded rights for illegal aliens.
Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: This group views America as an unremittingly racist nation; uses the courts to mandate race-based affirmative action preferences in business and academia; has filed briefs against the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to limit the wholesale granting of green cards and to identify potential terrorists; condemns the Patriot Act; and calls on Americans to "recognize the contribution" of illegal aliens.
League of United Latin American Citizens: This group views America as a nation plagued by "an alarming increase in xenophobia and anti-Hispanic sentiment"; favors racial preferences; supports the legalization of illegal Hispanic aliens; opposes military surveillance of U.S. borders; opposes making English America's official language; favors open borders; and rejects anti-terrorism legislation like the Patriot Act.
League of Women Voters Education Fund: The League supports taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand; supports "motor-voter" registration, which allows anyone with a driver's license to become a voter, regardless of citizenship status; and supports tax hikes and socialized medicine.
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee: IRS records indicate that Soros's Open Society Institute made a September 2002 grant of $20,000 to this organization. Stewart was the criminal-defense attorney who was later convicted for abetting her client, the "blind sheik" Omar Abdel Rahman, in terrorist activities connected with his Islamic Group.
MADRE: This international women's organization deems America the world's foremost violator of human rights. As such, it seeks to "communicat[e] the real-life impact of U.S. policies on women and families confronting violence, poverty and repression around the world," and to "demand alternatives to destructive U.S. policies." It also advocates unrestricted access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement: This group views the U.S. as a nation replete with racism and discrimination against blacks; seeks to establish an independent black nation in the southeastern United States; and demands reparations for slavery.
Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition: This group calls for the expansion of civil rights and liberties for illegal aliens; laments that illegal aliens in America are commonly subjected to "worker exploitation"; supports tuition-assistance programs for illegal aliens attending college; and characterizes the Patriot Act as a "very troubling" assault on civil liberties.
Media Fund: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose purpose was to conceptualize, produce, and place political ads on television, radio, print, and the Internet.
Mercy Corps: Vis a vis the Arab-Israeli conflict, Mercy Corps places all blame for Palestinian poverty and suffering directly on Israel.
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund: This group advocates open borders, free college tuition for illegal aliens, lowered educational standards to accommodate Hispanics, and voting rights for criminals. In MALDEF's view, supporters of making English the official language of the United States are "motivated by racism and anti-immigrant sentiments," while advocates of sanctions against employers reliant on illegal labor seek to discriminate against "brown-skinned people."
Meyer, Suozzi, English and Klein, PC: This influential defender of Big Labor is headed by Democrat operativeHarold Ickes.
Midwest Academy: This entity trains radical activists in the tactics of direct action, targeting, confrontation, and intimidation.
Migration Policy Institute: This group seeks to create "a North America with gradually disappearing border controls ... with permanent migration remaining at moderate levels."
Military Families Speak Out: This group ascribes the U.S. invasion of Iraq to American imperialism and lust for oil.
MoveOn.org: This Web-based organization supports Democratic political candidates through fundraising, advertising, and get-out-the-vote drives.
Ms. Foundation for Women: This group laments what it views as the widespread and enduring flaws of American society: racism, sexism, homophobia, and the violation of civil rights and liberties. It focuses its philanthropy on groups that promote affirmative action for women, unfettered access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand, amnesty for illegal aliens, and big government generally.
NARAL Pro-Choice America: This group supports taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand, and works to elect pro-abortion Democrats.
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund: The NAACP supports racial preferences in employment and education, as well as the racial gerrymandering of voting districts. Underpinning its support for race preferences is the fervent belief that white racism in the United States remains an intractable, largely undiminished, phenomenon.
The Nation Institute: This nonprofit entity sponsors leftist conferences, fellowships, awards for radical activists, and journalism internships.
National Abortion Federation: This group opposes any restrictions on abortion at either the state or federal levels, and champions the introduction of unrestricted abortion into developing regions of the world.
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty: This group was established in 1976 as the first "fully staffed national organization exclusively devoted to abolishing capital punishment."
National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy: This group depicts the United States as a nation in need of dramatic structural change financed by philanthropic organizations. It overwhelmingly promotes grant-makers and grantees with leftist agendas, while criticizing their conservative counterparts.
National Committee for Voting Integrity: This group opposes "the implementation of proof of citizenship and photo identification requirements for eligible electors in American elections as the means of assuring election integrity."
National Council for Research on Women: This group supports big government, high taxes, military spending cuts, increased social welfare spending, and the unrestricted right to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
National Council of La Raza: This group lobbies for racial preferences, bilingual education, stricter hate-crime laws, mass immigration, and amnesty for illegal aliens.
National Council of Women's Organizations: This group views the United States as a nation rife with injustice against girls and women. It advocates high levels of spending for social welfare programs, and supports race and gender preferences for minorities and women in business and academia.
National Immigration Forum: Opposing the enforcement of present immigration laws, this organization urges the American government to "legalize" en masse all illegal aliens currently in the United States who have no criminal records, and to dramatically increase the number of visas available for those wishing to migrate to the U.S. The Forum is particularly committed to opening the borders to unskilled, low-income workers, and immediately making them eligible for welfare and social service programs.
National Immigration Law Center: This group seeks to win unrestricted access to government-funded social welfare programs for illegal aliens.
National Lawyers Guild: This group promotes open borders; seeks to weaken America's intelligence-gathering agencies; condemns the Patriot Act as an assault on civil liberties; rejects capitalism as an unviable economic system; has rushed to the defense of convicted terrorists and their abettors; and generally opposes all U.S. foreign policy positions, just as it did during the Cold War when it sided with the Soviets.
National Organization for Women: This group advocates the unfettered right to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand; seeks to "eradicate racism, sexism and homophobia" from American society; attacks Christianity and traditional religious values; and supports gender-based preferences for women.
National Partnership for Women and Families: p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; ThTTThis organization supports race- and sex-based preferences in employment and education. It also advocates for the universal "right" of women to undergo taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason.
National Priorities Project: This group supports government-mandated redistribution of wealth -- through higher taxes and greater expenditures on social welfare programs. NPP exhorts the government to redirect a significant portion of its military funding toward public education, universal health insurance, environmentalist projects, and welfare programs.
National Security Archive Fund: This group collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to a degree that compromises American national security and the safety of intelligence agents.
National Women's Law Center: This group supports taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand; lobbies against conservative judicial appointees; advocates increased welfare spending to help low-income mothers; and favors higher taxes for the purpose of generating more funds for such government programs as Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, foster care, health care, child-support enforcement, and student loans.
Natural Resources Defense Council: One of the most influential environmentalist lobbying groups in the United States, the Council claims a membership of one million people.
Pacifica Foundation: This entity owns and operates Pacifica Radio, awash from its birth with the socialist-Marxist rhetoric of class warfare and hatred for capitalism.
Peace and Security Funders Group: This is an association of more than 50 foundations that give money to leftist anti-war and environmentalist causes. Its members tend to depict America as the world's chief source of international conflict, environmental destruction, and economic inequalities.
Peace Development Fund: In PDF's calculus, the United States needs a massive overhaul of its social and economic institutions. "Recently," explains PDF, "we have witnessed the negative effects of neo-liberalism and the globalization of capitalism, the de-industrialization of the U.S. and the growing gap between the rich and poor ..."
People for the American Way: This group opposes the Patriot Act, anti-terrorism measures generally, and the allegedly growing influence of the "religious right."
Physicians for Human Rights: This group is selectively and disproportionately critical of the United States andIsrael in its condemnations of human rights violations.
Physicians for Social Responsibility: This is an anti-U.S.-military organization that also embraces the tenets of radical environmentalism.
Planned Parenthood: This group is the largest abortion provider in the United States and advocates taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
Ploughshares Fund: This public grantmaking foundation opposes America's development of a missile defense system, and contributes to many organizations that are highly critical of U.S. foreign policies and military ventures.
Presidential Climate Action Project: PCAP's mission is to create a new 21st-century economy, completely carbon-free and based largely on renewable energy. A key advisor to the organization is the revolutionary communist Van Jones.
Prison Moratorium Project: This initiative was created in 1995 for the express purpose of working for the elimination of all prisons in the United States and the release of all inmates. Reasoning from the premise that incarceration is never an appropriate means of dealing with crime, it deems American society's inherent inequities the root of all criminal behavior.
Progressive States Network: PSN's mission is to "pass progressive legislation in all fifty states by providing coordinated research and strategic advocacy tools to forward-thinking state legislators."
Project Vote: This is the voter-mobilization arm of the Soros-funded ACORN. A persistent pattern of lawlessness and corruption has followed ACORN/Project Vote activities over the years.
Pro Publica: Claiming that “investigative journalism is at risk,” this group aims to remedy this lacuna in news publishing by “expos[ing] abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.”
Proteus Fund: This foundation directs its philanthropy toward a number of radical leftwing organizations.
Public Citizen Foundation: Public Citizen seeks increased government intervention and litigation against corporations -- a practice founded on the notion that American corporations, like the capitalist system of which they are a part, are inherently inclined toward corruption.
Rebuild and Renew America Now (a.k.a. Unity '09): Spearheaded by MoveOn.org and overseen by longtime activist Heather Booth, this coalition was formed to facilitate the passage of President Obama’s "historic" $3.5 trillion budget for fiscal year 2010.
Secretary of State Project: This project was launched in July 2006 as an independent "527" organization devoted to helping Democrats get elected to the office of Secretary of State in selected swing, or battleground, states.
Sentencing Project: Asserting that prison-sentencing patterns are racially discriminatory, this initiative advocates voting rights for felons.
Shadow Democratic Party: This is an elaborate network of non-profit activist groups organized by George Soros and others to mobilize resources -- money, get-out-the-vote drives, campaign advertising, and policy iniatives -- to elect Democratic candidates and guide the Democratic Party towards the left.
Sojourners: This evangelical Christian ministry preaches radical leftwing politics. During the 1980s it championed Communist revolution in Central America and chastised U.S. policy-makers for their tendency "to assume the very worst about their Soviet counterparts." More recently, Sojourners has taken up the cause of environmental activism, opposed welfare reform as a "mean-spirited Republican agenda," and mounted a defense of affirmative action.
Southern Poverty Law Center: This organization monitors the activities of what it calls “hate groups” in the United States. It exaggerates the prevalence of white racism directed against American minorities.
The American Prospect, Inc.: The American Prospect, Inc. (TAP) is a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization that effectively owns and publishes the left-liberal magazine The American Prospect.
The Nation Institute: The Nation Institute since 1978 has worked in conjunction with The Nationmagazine to recruit, train and influence journalism interns who will carry the Institute's leftist politics into the mainstream.
Thunder Road Group: This political consultancy, in whose creation Soros had a hand, coordinates strategy for the Media Fund, America Coming Together, and America Votes.
Tides Foundation and Tides Center: Tides is a major funder of the radical Left.
U.S. Public Interest Research Group: This is an umbrella organization of student groups that support leftist agendas.
Universal Healthcare Action Network: This organization supports a single-payer health care system controlled by the federal government.
Urban Institute: This research organization favors socialized medicine, expansion of the federal welfare bureaucracy, and tax hikes for higher income-earners.
USAction Education Fund: USAction lists its priorities as: "fighting the right wing agenda"; "building grassroots political power"; winning "social, racial and economic justice for all"; supporting a system of taxpayer-funded socialized medicine; reversing "reckless tax cuts for millionaires and corporations" which shield the "wealthy" from paying their "fair share"; advocating for "pro-consumer and environmental regulation of corporate abuse"; "strengthening progressive voices on local, state and national issues"; and working to "register, educate and get out the vote ... [to] help progressives get elected at all levels of government."
World Organization Against Torture: This coalition works closely with groups that condemn Israeli security measures against Palestinian terrorism.
YWCA World Office, Switzerland: The YWCA opposes abstinence education; supports universal access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand; and opposes school vouchers.