Before America as a nation takes this criticism seriously, perhaps we should consider what the law entails and how this compares with what goes on in Red China.

The Arizona law will permit police to ascertain an individual’s identity and thus legality after initial contact. Essentially, this isn’t anything that isn’t already authorized by law and is perhaps an even better guarantor of individual liberty and dignity than what is already permitted.

In a number of decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that police could compel an individual to identify themselves even when it had not been established that the law had even been violated or that there was probable cause indicating such. Interestingly, there were no riotous mobs in the streets when it was thought these kinds of identity checks were only going to be aimed at actual Americans.

Even if scores of those with no legal standing in the United States are removed from the streets of Arizona as a result of the new law, they will still fair considerably better than those taken into custody in dictatorships. In Iran, several American coed tourists straying over the Islamic Republic’s border with Iraq were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

And unlike illegals here, those there are not fawned over with lavish government handouts with their bureaucratic benefactors hoping the outsiders will recast the entire society in a foreign image.

It could be properly argued that the American students deserved some kind of punishment for violating another country’s sovereign borders. What likely cannot be argued against is that the accommodations they languished in made Camp Gitmo look like a swanky New York City hotel. Guards there are not going out of their way to provide American delicacies or to treat our holy books and founding documents with a nauseating degree of deference.

In China, one house church pastor sentenced to prison was allowed to languish and suffer without access to his diabetic medicine. And it could be argued that he can be considered one of the lucky ones. It has been claimed that organs are regularly harvested from dissident Tibetans and Christians.

If Red China had the illegal alien problem plaguing the United States, do you honestly believe authorities there would do little than look over the papers of these transnational vagrants, whisper sweet nothings in their ears, and release them on their recognizance which many have very little of to begin with given their connections to the drug trade, human smuggling, and assorted gangs. And given the propensity of a certain atrocity to occur throughout Chinese history (be it during the Great Cultural Revolution or in rumors a few years back regarding what was being done to fetuses), if a wife in China told her husband that they would be having a little Mexican later that evening that wouldn’t mean he should expect to have a taco or burrito for dinner.

Many infringements upon human rights stem from an improper understanding of the relationship between social institutions such as government and the individual. In America, the extremes of these have been minimized in part due to the assumption that the individual possesses worth of his own created in the image of God. The individual is not owned by the state.

As an officially atheistic socialist country, the Chinese Communist Party and state see themselves as the highest authority with these determining that it is not so much the individual that counts but rather the group as a whole. After all, if we are simply nothing more than animated primordial ooze as the Darwinian insists and upon which Marxist-Leninism rests, it is kind of hard to get worked up over one person when there are over a billion more walking around easily capable of taking the place of a defective cog in the machine of state.

Since in the Communist system you are less an individual, the more the system provides of those things deemed to be necessities by the overseers (under whom fewer things end up being defined as necessities than in a free market economy) in such command societies such commodities extended only so that the goals mapped out for you by the COMMUNITY might be achieved. In a constitutional republican system, it is believed that the individual is best suited to determine for themselves which needs and desires should take priority for oneself and one’s family. Granted, the system is not perfect, but it is far preferable and more in line with what God intended for humanity.

Thus, that is no doubt why China would rank homelessness as a human rights violation while not batting an eye at putting a bullet in the back of the head of a House Church pastor so that his kidneys might remain undamaged for organ harvesting. In America, those who love liberty must first inquire as to why the individual is homeless before formulating an appropriate policy response.

Though it is not politically correct to mention it these days and even if they represent only a fraction of those without a domicile, frankly there are those that simply refuse to do that which is necessary to maintain a residence or they engage in behaviors that cause their homes to be lost. Of those that went into vapors when Glenn Beck critiqued the subject, tell me where is the social justice to take from those working and scrimping in order to hoe their own path to give it to those living irresponsibly and demanding a standard of living far above a subsistence level with a few basic comforts that they are not willing to exert the labor necessary to acquire?

One might feel sorry for the children of such deadbeats and somehow provide enough for the children to get by without hardly a single bread crumb going to such pathetic excuses for parents. It is preferable that such outreach come from the private sector free to point out the deficiencies of individual character and the blunt steps necessary to correct the situation. Often in these times where we must constantly walk around on eggshells for fear of offending some self-enlightened leftist do-gooder with a law degree or a bullhorn and definitely too much time on their hands, government is unable to articulate those steps necessary for complete restoration.

And while we are at it, perhaps something needs to be said about and to these women that fall for scumbag men. If you find the boozing and carousing attractive when you are young only to have it morph into not knowing how you are going to feed the five kids because he’s blowing the milk money on beer and backhanded you across the face because you dared ask where he was the night before, other than for tossing his rear in jail, don’t expect much pity and especially don’t expect some behaved guy you wouldn’t give the time of day to 15 years ago to take you in as if he has some obligation to provide for another man’s progeny.

One of contemporary liberalism’s most glaring intellectual deficiencies is that it assumes that the remainder of the world, when you come down to it, lives no differently than the people of the United States. Before we pull out the sackcloth and ashes to belittle ourselves embarrassingly on the world stage, let’s at least make sure we don’t waste the effort on autocrats, thieves, cutthroats, and homicidal mass murderers.

by Frederick Meekins

Now that Barack Obama has decided to be for the Ground Zero mosque before being implicitly against it (perhaps), discussion about his faith has once again reached a fever pitch. To many, his stance proves he’s a Muslim, with a recent poll showing that almost 20 percent of Americans hold that opinion; to others, it just reflects a desire to be faithful to the Constitution (now, that would be change). The truth, however, is a bit more nuanced. Obama is not religiously Muslim. Culturally, though . . . well, that’s a different matter altogether.

In reality, calling Obama a “Muslim” gives him too much credit. As G.K. Chesterton once said, “We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.” The truth, however, is that few people have thought thoroughly and to a definite end. And Obama is no exception. He hasn’t even thought matters through enough to understand the folly of statism. Even more to the point, he is a moral relativist, a position the antithesis of any absolutist faith. Inherent in Islam is that belief that Allah, not man, has authored right and wrong and that, consequently, it isn’t a matter of opinion. Thus, Obama cannot truly believe in Islam — or in Christianity or Judaism, for that matter (he could perhaps be a Buddhist, but Buddhism isn’t truly a faith but a way of life).

Oh, and since some will ask, how do I know Obama is a relativist? It’s simple: Virtually all leftists are, as the denial of moral reality that is relativism lies at the heart of liberalism.

Speaking of relativists, this matter of Obama’s “faith” much reminds me of Adolf Hitler and paganism. Like Obama, Hitler sometimes feigned a belief in Christianity, but in reality he held the religion in contempt. He believed it was “the greatest trick the Jews ever played on Western civilization” and lamented that it was not a warrior creed like Islam or the ancient Germanic paganism with which the Nazis wanted to replace Christianity (I wrote about this here). Yet, while Hitler’s second in command, Heinrich Himmler, certainly believed in the ancient pagan myths — going so far as to launch expeditions to the Far East to prove them, à la Raiders of the Lost Ark — it’s silly to think that the leader himself viewed them as anything but a utilitarian device. He wasn’t quite that romantic.

But what about culturally? For sure, Hitler preferred seeing Swastikas and runes (respectively, pagan symbols and letters) to crosses and crèches, rebuilt Germanic pagan temples to churches. That was where his passions lay. (If some are upset at a comparison between Hitler and Obama, know that I’d never call the president a National Socialist. He’s an international socialist. Also, Hitler was patriotic.)

Obama also has passions, and there is no question as to where they lie. As journalist Todd Fitchette wrote in “The un-faith of Obama”:

he continues to openly praise Islam; he bows to Muslim leaders; he claims that the Muslim call to prayer is “the most beautiful sound in the world;” he regularly quotes from the Koran and cites it for directing his life . . . .

In the past year alone he made a big deal out of hosting a celebratory dinner to open the month of Ramadan — held in the state dining room; he refused to attend the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts (an avowed Christian organization), and, refused to attend the National Day of Prayer because he claimed to do so would be offensive to non-Christians.

Then there is that king of Freudian slips, when Obama matter-of-factly said to interviewer George Stephanopoulos, “You’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith,” and didn’t seem headed for a correction until Stephanopoulos interjected. (Note: This doesn’t contradict my assertion that Obama has no real faith. Nancy Pelosi has spoken of her Catholic faith, but, also being a relativist, it can be nothing more than part of her cultural tapestry.)

And are Obama’s passions surprising? He spent some of his formative years in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, where he was registered as a Muslim in both schools he attended and sometimes prayed on Fridays in a mosque. Moreover, there is another factor, one most people don’t consider.

As many know, there once was a great boxer named Cassius Clay. He converted to Islam in 1964, seemingly bothered that Jesus was portrayed as “a white with blond hair and blue eyes,” as he put it, and took the name “Muhammad Ali.” Of course, the irony of this is that, despite being intensely aware of his slave roots, he rejected the name of an abolitionist (Clay) and took the name of a slave owner (Muhammad). It also perhaps eluded him that Christians were the first ones to outlaw slavery while Muslims give black Africans rope and chains to this day.

But I mention this because Ali’s path is a common one in the black community; it is why we’ve long had the Black Muslims and why Islamic names are so common among American blacks. Many blacks have bought the bill of goods that Christianity is the white man’s religion, the faith of oppressors. And they embrace Islam as part of a rejection of “white” society.

Obviously, being part of this milieu could only have reinforced Obama’s affinity for things Muslim and antipathy for things authentically Christian — of which Western Civilization is one. And if Americans hadn’t been brainwashed with political correctness, they would have understood this. With foreign and domestic Muslim influence, attendance at a Black Liberation Theology, pseudo-Christian church and alliances with ex-terrorists and declared communists, Obama perfectly fits the profile of an America hater. The wolf never really wore sheep’s clothing; it’s just that Americans had wool pulled over their eyes.

As for Obama’s eyes, they cannot look heavenward when they’re so busy looking down on little people who “cling to guns and religion.” I sense that Obama is a certain kind of person, one much like Hitler — who wanted to create a new German pagan religion with himself at its center — in a particular sense. This type of person essentially says the following to God, “The Universe just isn’t big enough for the two of us.” And his little world certainly isn’t, filled to all corners as it is with his bloated, power-hungry ego. This, by the way, has been acknowledged by more honest secularists. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century poster boy for atheism who is rumored to have been a philosopher (in reality, he is someone who helped discredit the field), once said through his version of Zarathustra, “If there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God? Therefore there can be no gods.” I have a feeling that Obama cannot endure it to be no god.

It is, again, unwise to give Obama too much credit. Good faith is defined as “an act of the will informed by the intellect,” and any kind of faith requires submission to something higher than yourself. Obama is neither that intellectual nor that humble. But all humans have passions, and his aren’t hard to discern. He is anti-American, anti-western, anti-Christian (the traditional variety), anti-white and anti-life. He is more comfortable dining with Bill Ayres than the Queen of England, more internationalist than nationalist, and perhaps more at home in Dar al-Islam than Dar al-Harb. He has lived abroad and traveled much, but he is a lover of nations like a Casanova is a lover of women: He has known many but loves, and is faithful to, none — not even the one to which he should be married. He is a cultural traitor, and, as Cicero said about traitors two-thousand years ago, “A murderer is less to be feared.”

To quote Chesterton again, he once said, “There was a time when men weren’t very sure of themselves, but they were very sure of what the truth was. Now men are very sure of themselves but not at all sure of what the truth is.” The latter describes Obama. If he does have faith, it is in himself. And that is a faith terribly misplaced.

Selwyn Duke is a writer, columnist and public speaker whose work has been published widely online and in print, on both the local and national levels. He has been featured on the Rush Limbaugh Show and has been a regular guest on the award-winning Michael Savage Show. His work has appeared in Pat Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative and he writes regularly for The New American and Christian Music Perspective.  He is a regular contributor to Ether Zone.

Selwyn Duke can be reached at: SelwynDuke@optonline.net

“Published originally at EtherZone.com

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“ … Intelligence information from captured al Qaeda documents, computers, and operatives indicates that al Qaeda has targeted 9 American Cities for nuclear attack.” (SOURCE)

While the Obama Regime fiddles modern day Rome is about to burn.

Iran is quickly, quickly, reaching the point at which they can produce an atomic bomb. Never mind the experts predictions that they are a year away. They have been wrong many times before. I suspect they are very wrong this time and your life may depend upon your preparation for that day when Iran lobs a nuclear bomb over the US strapped atop a second rate guided missile that, nevertheless, can get the job done.

Never, ever, allow yourself to believe that Iran is only blustering when saying they will wipe Israel off the map. Remember, they have also said a world without America is desirable — and possible. They mean to blast America from the map as well.

However, a nuclear guided missile is not necessary to bring America to its knees. Iran knows that, as does al Qaida. Those suitcase bombs, placed in America’s major cities will do the trick and do it well.

Security experts, as reported above, tell us they have reason to believe that Islamic terrorists have been able to smuggle at least 7 and as many as 70 nuclear bombs into America by simply walking across the border between Mexico and the US. So much for border security, huh?

Captured terrorist documents tell us the targeted cities are: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Of course, New York and Washington are the top two cities on the list for obvious reasons. They represent the seat of America’s government and the seat of America’s economic system. The destruction of those two cities, alone, will throw the entire nation into fearful confusion and spread panic much as a prairie fire races across the plains.

Some reports proclaim that one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at least two suitcase nukes reached al-Qaida operatives in the U.S. Each suitcase weighed between 50 and 80 kilograms (approximately 110 to 176 pounds) and contained enough fissionable plutonium and uranium to produce an explosive yield in excess of two kilotons. The plutonium and uranium are kept in separate compartments that are linked to a triggering mechanism that can be activated by a clock or a call from the cell phone. (SOURCE)

If these security experts are to be believed, the nuclear bombs are already in place within America. So, it is only a matter of time.

I have to wonder if THAT is the reason the Obama Regime will not attack Iran and take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. I have to wonder if this is the reason Obama will not allow Israel to do so. Could it be, is it possible, that Al Qaida and Iran are, even now, blackmailing the American government? (It’s called nuclear blackmail.)

Iran IS in the process of building the “Islam Bomb.” That we know. We also know they will use it. We know they will use it on Israel and they will use in on America. Nuclear blackmail is the only reasonable answer to the question of why the US has not already taken Iran out. Nothing else makes any sense.

Even the bible scriptures of the Old Testament tell us that Russia and Iran will team up to attack Israel. (Ezekiel chapters 38-39) What do we have today? Russia and Iran have formed an alliance, a nuclear alliance, for the purpose of producing nuclear power, which will, in turn, make it possible for Iran to use the spent fuel rods (supplied by Russia) from their nuclear reactor(s) to produce the materials necessary for their atomic bomb. (There is a much more scientific explanation for this, but this is all one needs to know to understand the danger to Israel and the US from Iran.)

As Obama brings US combat troops home form Iraq, which borders Iran, one has to wonder why? Why are the troops coming home when it is so painfully obvious they are going to have to return in a few weeks, a few months, or a few years?

We have told you many times in our commentaries that America will never leave the Middle East again. We have a long-coveted military position in that troubled area, which gives us the advantage of being “forward deployed” in a region that foments most of the world’s problems. As the world’s policeman, by default, America needed a police station in that troubled neighborhood. Now we have it — and we will not be giving it up.

But understand this: American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are only speed bumps in Iran’s path once they have the bomb. And they will have the bomb any day now.

Will the Obama Regime tell the American people the truth about the terrorist capability to wreak nuclear destruction on the homeland? No, I don’t think they will.

Will Obama take the risk that nuclear bombs are here and can be detonated at any time, and take the iniatives and mount an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities? Again, I believe the answer to be no. You see, that takes strong leadership, of which Obama is not capable.

With the Damocles Sword of nuclear disaster dangling perilously over America’s head it will call for a leader with a steel backbone and rock solid determination to do what needs so desperately to be done.

Time is NOT on our side – not anymore. We have reached the point at which anything we do is going to mean massive death and destruction to our friends and ourselves.

Yes, dear reader, I understand that all this sounds like an unlikely conspiracy. But remember — as a TV promo says: “ALL conspiracy theories are not just theories.” Sometimes, those “theories” turn out to be very prescient. We have no choice now but to wait and see. It is sad that so many innocent people will die, needlessly, if this theory proves to be anything more than just a theory.

J. D. Longstreet blogs daily at INSIGHT on Freedom at: http://www.csadispatch.blogspot.com/

E-Mail: longstreet1862@gmail.com

Join Christians Against Leftist Heresy

History consists for the great part of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites.

~ Edmund Burke

Continuing a series of columns on Benjamin Wiker’s “10 Books Every Conservative Must Read,” we come to Chapter 4, “Reflections on the Revolution of France” (1790) by Sir Edmund Burke, whom Wiker calls the first great modern conservative philosopher.

The French Revolution (1789-99) – also called “The Reign of Terror” (1793-94) where 40,000 people were killed that year alone and by some estimates as many as 450,000 killed during the War in the Vendee (1793-96) – mirrored the terrible genocide perpetrated by Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot in the 20th century. The French Revolution remains a point of historical revisionism and idealism and is still widely viewed by liberals as an anomaly of the lofty principles of revolution – as opposed to Burke’s contemporary narrative based in realism as the predictable catastrophe of the French Revolution.

Burke queried: How could such sublime precepts like Liberté, égalité, fraternité devolve so rapidly into the bloodlust autocracy of the Jacobins? Perhaps one cause was the anti-Christian, materialist atheism of the Enlightenment and the propaganda generated by French philosophers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot; that all evil was to be found in the nobility and the church, and its allegation that all virtue and righteousness belonged to the secular rationalists and the common people. It is no mistake, then, that Maximilien de Robespierre, a devotee of Rousseau, and the poor working-class radicals, the sans-culottes, enflamed by propaganda, perpetrated the Reign of Terror, murdering the nobles, the clergy and destroying the Christian church.

Burke, a student of history and traditions, understood that humanity’s love of chaos was viral throughout history, regardless of gender, time period, race, social class or circumstance. The problem is sin. The impact of these vices can be comprehended and their impact upon society lessened, but they cannot be conquered by man without abolishing him, so deep and intractable the curse of sin is. It was this sin problem being ignored by man’s great modern technological advances that prompted the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis to write, “The Abolition of Man” (1943). Against this secular utopianism, the French revolutionaries arrogantly proclaimed that they were establishing a Republic of Virtue, and then engaged in many cruel, maniacal crimes against humanity that live on in infamy to this day.

Wiker argues that the primary basis of Enlightenment Age brutality was the utter hatred of Christianity, for in rejecting Christianity, those following Enlightenment philosophies rejected original sin. In rejecting sin, French revolutionaries tragically and foolishly assumed that the origins of human misery in history could be remedied entirely by human action (humanism), that the origin of the corruption in political life was not in the soul but in defective and unjust social structures, particularly in Christianity – a religion holding that because of original sin human nature and humanity was in a fallen state of nature and must be redeemed.

The diabolical strategy of the French Revolutionaries was to demolish the social institutions, eliminate the social orders, exterminate Christianity, and upon its ashes build by force an entirely new secular order based upon humanism and rationalism, where all problems that have plagued mankind from antiquity would magically vanish.

Yet Burke tells us that the Enlightenment Age summary rejection of sin could not prevent the revolution’s maniacal bent toward chaos and genocide. On this point Wiker wrote of Burke:

For those who reject the sacred, nothing is sacred – not the desecrated churches; not the guillotined priests and nuns; not the massacred women and children; not property, tradition, customs, manners, or laws. Nothing is holy; anything may be destroyed for the sake of the revolutionary utopia. This spirit of profanation filled the populace with a “black and savage atrocity of mind,” which superseded “in them the common failings of nature as well as all sentiments of morality and religion.” This bold spirit of profanation, they believed, would usher in a new, just social order.

Burke’s prescient worldview came from years of cloistered study, scrupulous and often unpopular observations (i.e., his support of the Irish Catholics over British hegemony, freedom for the American colonists, favoring limited monarchy checked by a strong Parliament) and a profound reverence for the lessons of history against the savage beauty of human nature – all this emanates from Burke’s conservatism.

It was Burke’s conservatism that made him understand in the midst of the French Revolution the fatal flaw of the Enlightenment Age – an over-reliance on reason and rationality at the expense of other human traits. It was Hume who famously said that “Reason is merely the slave of the passions” and along with Kant argued that reason is instrumental in bringing about our desires, but is not the fundamental driving force of mankind, let alone the universe at large.

The French Revolution is not some bygone series of unfortunate events. The same depraved spirit that gave humanity Darwinian evolution, the genocide of Marxism and Hitler’s anti-Semitic, anti-Christian pogroms is now being manifested in the Age of Obama through utopian socialism, welfare-state progressivism and liberalism.

Like the atheists and secular humanists of the Age of Enlightenment, Obama arrogantly decreed that America is no longer a Christian nation. He is evidently dismissive of America’s constitutional principles and clearly hates the historical role America has played in the world, which places him at constant odds with American constitutionalism and exceptionalism. Obama hates our Judeo-Christian heritage and detests America’s historical allies.

Thus, during these perilous times of great societal upheaval and despair during the Age of Obama, I repeatedly return to the writings of Burke and find his prophecies as fresh, his analysis as agonizingly accurate as they were 220 years when he originally wrote them. Only the characters and countries have changed.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He hosts a radio program Thursdays at 11 a.m. Eastern on 1620 AM in Atlanta. It can be heard online at the Radio Sandy Springs website. His weekly podcasts are available Mondays at The Conservative Beacon. Washington is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

Our nation’s schools have long been factories of boredom, centers of academic incompetence. High school graduation rates have been in a fairly steady decline. At its peak in 1969, the rate was 77 percent. By 2007 it was 68.8 percent.

In mid-August, The Wall Street Journal reported that “New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level courses, despite modest gains in college-readiness among U.S. high school students in the last few years.”

What caught my eye was a quote from Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, who said that “if our kids aren’t dropping out physically, they are dropping out mentally.”

The subject of education is important because they are the generation to which the future of the nation must be entrusted and “A recent study found the U.S. ranks only 12^th in the percentage of adults aged 25 to 34 who hold college degrees.”

The failure of our nation’s schools, to my mind, coincides with the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, and which began operating on May 16, 1980.

The word “education” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution and, until the Department of Education came along, it was the responsibility of States and local communities. A government that has managed Conrail since 1976 without once making a profit should not have been trusted with the nation’s educational system.

I opposed No Child Left Behind when former President Bush proposed it and, like former President Reagan, I have long believed the Department of Education should be ended and that responsibility be returned to the States and local communities. The DOE exists today as little more than an obstacle to learning in the classroom and a giant funding machine.

The DOE is pretty much owned by the National Education Association which is not an “association”, but a powerful union, the largest with an estimated 3.2 members. The Democrat Party is heavily indebted to it for funds and campaign workers.

It is doubtful that most Americans know that, for the past several months, the NEA’s website has recommended that its members read “Rules for Radicals” by the late Saul Alinsky, a dedicated communist. If NEA members adopt its political agenda, the enemy will literally be in our nation’s classrooms.

It has not gone unnoticed that Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”, otherwise known as the “Stimulus Act” enabled the education lobby to suck up billions more from taxpayers.

The Act allocated $5 billion to early learning programs, including the failed Head Start and Early Head Start, child care and programs for children with special needs. It also allocated $77 billion for “reforms” to allegedly strengthen elementary and secondary education, including $48.6 billion to “stabilize” state education budgets. It was a Full Employment Act for teachers and school administrators.

Apparently those billions were not enough because on August 11, President Obama signed a bill authorizing an additional $10 billion to states for education salaries. The Senate was so concerned the money might be spent for other purposes it included a provision that the money could not be used for anything else.

It apparently was not enough because in July the NEA president, Dennis Van Roekel, was calling for a complete overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act, one that is entirely test-based without any notice of the fact that individual children learn at different rates. He didn’t much like the Obama Race to the Top program where schools competed for grants if they demonstrated any improvement in learning and graduation rates. Another $3.4 billion in grants is at yet unspent. Roekel didn’t like the idea of competition.

Clearly, schools that are graduating students ill-prepared to go onto college and that continue to experience high dropout rates are doing something wrong. Putting kids into teach-to-the-test straight jackets is not working.

In a new book by Dr. Tim Elmore, “Generation iY: Our Last Change to Save Their Future”, the author who founded a non-profit organization, Growing Leaders, writes that “I have spoken to employers who told me they will never hire another new graduate. I have heard teachers say they can hardly wait for retirement since they can’t do a thing about kids today. I’ve had parents confide in me that they don’t know what to do with their kids except scream at them.”

Statistics published by UNESCO and the CIA reveal that, while American students spend twelve years in school, ranking them first out of a hundred, they rank fifteenth out of twenty-seven in terms of literacy. Their math and science scores are poor. They poll at 35%, fifth out of seventeen, for their dislike of school, and 61%, second out of seventeen, find school boring.

The schools are failing, the students are being cheated of the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to become productive adults, and the U.S. government thinks that, if it just spends a few more billions, this will change. It won’t.

The federal government must get out of the education business, must devolve responsibility back to the states and local communities, and they in turn should refuse to deal with teachers unions in order to regain control over the education of the nation’s most precious resource, its children.

Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, science and business writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

In the intervening two years, a great deal has happened to not only cement those views into public policy but force American taxpayers to fund this deadly agenda, regardless of their religious or moral views on abortion. His message is that there is no fundamental right to life.

Architects of the culture of death such as the National Women’s Law Center salivate over and are emboldened by Obama’s fascination with “reproductive rights.” When the news came out that http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703908704575433714132688140.html “Wisconsin is pushing to expand a controversial program that uses federal Medicaid funds to provide free birth-control pills, vasectomies and other forms of contraception to low-income people, an effort made possible by the federal health-care overhaul,” the NWLC went ballistic because the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Richard Doerflinger observed that such a proposal is guided by “a very dismissive view of women.”

The NWLC was pleased to immediately attack the USCCB, http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/aug/10082010.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=@sacnsint suggesting it was out of touch with women and was using its influence to further oppress them. Clearly, truth is not part of the NWLC game plan.

In reference to the same program, Matt Sande, legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, an American Life League Associate group, pointed out, http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/wisconsin_considers_plan_to_expand_family_planning_program_to_teen_boys “Providing free, taxpayer-funded birth control to 15-year-old boys and girls behind parents’ backs is horrible public policy, and we urge the finance committee to block expansion of this offensive program.”

Indeed, Sande and Doerflinger are right. Contraception is dangerous to women, deadly to preborn children and destructive to the human family, each member of which possesses human rights that should be protected by the federal government. Instead, the Obama administration has made a full-time practice of doing all it can to drive wedges between human persons and their rights.

Recently, the pro-death and badly misnamed Catholics for Choice has taken aim at the same teachings of the Church that so enraged the NWLC this week. In an article titled “Religious Freedom & Catholic Health Care,” it opined, http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/healthcare/religiousfreedomcatholicheathcare.asp

Unfortunately, Catholic health care institutions do not provide women with all basic and essential reproductive health services. Catholic health care in the US is regulated by the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (the Directives), which were issued not by doctors, ethicists or regulatory authorities, but by the nation’s Catholic bishops. These directives forbid services that contradict church [sic] positions, namely, prohibiting reproductive health options such as:

· abortion

· contraceptive sterilization

· in vitro fertilization and

· prescribing or dispensing contraceptives and contraceptive devices such as IUDs and diaphragms, emergency contraception, and condoms.

It is pitiful that our nation has reached a place where anyone and everyone can take aim at the Catholic Church, her bishops and her teachings while being in complete agreement with the radical agenda of the most anti-life president we have ever had.

Since when is killing a child or polluting the body of a teen with artificial hormones a “service”?

If American Catholics cannot persevere under the guidance of Church teaching because the government is controlling health care, then where are we to go?

My recommendation is that we go in protest to the Congress and to the American people, because this president’s idea of human rights is killing our future.

© Judie Brown

There is concern that Obama’s DOJ, under the leadership of Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, might not be enforcing the new

The MOVE Act, which was passed last October, is supposed to ensure that servicemen and women serving overseas have plenty of time to get in their absentee ballots. However, if the DOJ does not enforce this law by holding the states to compliance, thousands of ballots from US military personnel serving overseas, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, may not arrive back in the home state of the soldier, sailor, Airman, or Marine, in time to be counted in the November 2^nd Mid-Term Election.

Eric Eversole, director of the Military Voter Protection Project, a new organization devoted to ensuring military voting rights has said: “It is an absolute shame that the section appears to be spending more time finding ways to avoid the MOVE Act, rather than finding ways to ensure that military voters will have their votes counted… ” Mr. Eversole continued: “The Voting Section seems to have forgotten that it has an obligation to enforce federal law, not to find and raise arguments for states to avoid these laws.” (SOURCE)

The MOVE act requires states to send absentee ballots to overseas military troops 45 days before an election, but a state can apply for a waiver if it can prove a specific “undue hardship” in enforcing it.

Senator Jon Cornyn, Republican of Texas, was one of the co-sponsors of the Move Act. On July 26^th he wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder and complained that he is concerned that the DOJ is allowing states to opt out of compliance with the Move Act. In a statement to Fox News Senator Cornyn said: “Military voters have been disenfranchised for decades, and last year Congress acted.” Cornyn went on to say: “But according to recent information, the Department of Justice has expressed reluctance to protect the civil rights of military voters under the new law. All our men and women in uniform deserve a chance to vote this November, and the Obama administration bears responsibility for ensuring that they have it.”

Cornyn continued: “For far too long in this country, we have failed to adequately protect the right of our troops and their families to participate in our democratic process. The MOVE Act was supposed to end this sad history. The right to participate in democratic elections is fundamental to the American experience.” (SOURCE)

At least seven states, plus the District of Columbia and the US Virgin Islands, have filed requests for waivers with the USDOJ. If those waivers are granted those states will not have to send ballots to their servicemen and servicewomen overseas on time. That means, even if they DO receive their ballots and get them filled out and mailed back, they will not arrive in their home states in time to be counted.

The list of states, Districts, and US Territories asking for waivers: Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, the Virgin Islands, Washington, and District of Columbia. (SOURCE) (We believe this list to be incomplete as some news organizations are reporting as many as twelve states; others are reporting ten states, etc.)

Understand, it is the Department of Defense, which will make the final decision on whether the waivers will, or will not, be granted. BUT, it is the job of the Department of Justice to see that the law is enforced.

With the democrats set to receive a well deserved drubbing this November, it will not be surprising if those waivers are granted.

The MOVE ACT contains a waiver provision, which allows states to exempt out of the requirements by demonstrating an extreme emergency. BUT, that state must also submit a plan that provides sufficient time for military voters to have their vote counted.

Where is the outrage from the citizens of those states? Isn’t it past time to fire off a letter, an e-mail, or just pick up the phone and call the Secretary of State’s office in that state — or the state Board of Elections, and demand that they get those ballots to those US citizens who are putting their lives on the line – daily — to protect the right to vote for ALL Americans, including themselves.

There is something very wrong about disenfranchising a soldier serving his/her country overseas, especially in a time of war. As my father would have said: “If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can get a ballot to a soldier in the field and back in time to be counted.”

This is wrong, folks. Just plain WRONG!

J. D. Longstreet

J. D. Longstreet blogs daily at INSIGHT on Freedom at: http://www.csadispatch.blogspot.com/

E-Mail: longstreet1862@gmail.com