Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Constitution’ Category

To reform the culture, take back our children’s education from the socialist indoctrinators! 

Can all of America’s political problems be solved by returning to constitutional, limited government? The answer given by many conservatives and libertarians is a resounding yes. Reading the Founding Fathers, the answer would generate a more complex answer.

In the Federalist Papers, the authors dedicate considerable space to history’s failed experiments in self-government. John Adams wrote in 1798, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

What Adams suggests is the people’s character impacts our government’s character. The early generations of Americans were independent-minded folks. Help for those in need came from the church, the family, or the community. Citizens expected only a few limited functions to be performed by the state.

In 21st century America, we expect the government to provide Social Security retirement and disability, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, and Pell Grants. Parents expect their children to have a free public education through thirteen years of school.

Two tactics for dealing with this are popular. The first, the rationalistic approach, tries to challenge people with a debate about numbers and the effectiveness of government solutions. The second, the pragmatic approach, avoids taking on any popular program, other than fleeting attempts to reform Social Security. The last administration chose the latter tactic.

The pragmatic approach fails because the areas most in need of the reform are politically difficult to address. The rationalistic approach fails because it doesn’t address the culture. For example, many elderly Americans rely on Medicaid to take care of their long-term-care expenses once their net worth has dropped to nothing. The key problem here, however, is the culture that considers it acceptable for us to allow our parents to go into poverty so the government can step in.

Conservatives talk about the church and the community returning to its proper role of caring for the poor, but this effort is easier said than done. Pastors complain about the poor viewing churches as welfare agencies. Judging by donation reports, churches would be overwhelmed if they had to take on all the people dependent on the government. We cannot effect a permanent reduction in the size and scope of government, or meaningful government reform, unless we change our culture’s demand for the government to provide our every need.

Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly identified how cultural issues impact voting with her politically incorrect declaration: “Seventy percent of unmarried women voted for Obama. And this is because, when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have Big Brother government to be your provider.”

The statement angered liberals and embarrassed some conservatives, but CNN’s 2008 exit poll does show that 74% of unmarried women with children, and 69% of unmarried women without children, voted for Obama. In fairness, however, 68% of unmarried men with children also voted for Obama. And 56% of unmarried men without children voted for Obama; compare that to the 53% of married men who voted for McCain.

The poll also showed those who attended religious services at least weekly voted for McCain, while those who attended less frequently or not at all voted for Obama. A more religious, more marriage-minded America would have voted quite differently.

In the end, the majority of the world has little in common with the libertarian archetypes of Howard Roark or John Galt. We will either have strong families, strong houses of worship, and strong communities, or we will have strong government to take the place of all three.

This isn’t to say government must or can solve our culture’s problems. However, those on the right who think conservative goals for limited government can be achieved through passing economic legislation are spitting in the wind. We will never have a limited government until we have a culture that allows for one.

To change our culture, we must take a more holistic approach to the issues America faces. Even more than conservative candidates and activists, we have a great need for conservative writers, artists, schoolteachers, Boy Scout and American Heritage Girls troop leaders, ministers, and volunteers in organizations that seek to strengthen marriages.

Read more at Pajamas Media

TEA-Party Hypocrisy: How Much Socialism Is Acceptable?

Religion and Morality: Indispensable Supports

Principium Imprimis – First Principles

Think about it. Out of all the world regimes over the past century, which ones do you think would be most opposed to homeschooling? Nazi Germany, communist Russia, and nations enforcing Islamic Sharia Law first come to mind. And what is the common tie to all of these? Control. Unfortunately, with socialist agendas sweeping the globe, the mindless conformity of youth through indoctrination at government-run schools to the government’s point of view on social, political, and moral issues is a top priority of many nations falsely aspiring for a global community of “tolerance.”

But today, the suppression of parental rights to teach and influence their own children isn’t restricted to overtly fascist regimes. Take a look at Sweden, home of Ikea and Volvos. A couple months ago in June, attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund and the Home School Legal Defense Association filed Johansson v. Sweden with the European Court of Human Rights so that that the Swedish government will return a seven-year-old homeschooled boy to his parents. Dominic Johansson was forcibly seized by Swedish authorities from his parents in June 2009 after they had boarded a plane in their move to India. The reason? He was homeschooled. No warrant was issued before taking him into state custody, and the family was charged with no crime. Young Dominic was abducted because officials deemed home instruction to be an unsuitable method of raising a child, insisting that the government knows better about how to rear children.

Dominic is now in foster care and attends a government school. Heartbreakingly, his parents are only allowed to see their son for one hour every five weeks. To “justify” their action, Swedish authorities cited the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and quite shockingly, the White House and some members of Congress have expressed interest in ratifying this authoritarian treaty so that this type of government control could be exercised on our shores.

Despite the proliferating homeschooling movement in the U.S., with between two and four million children now being taught from home, the education and judicial systems have had a hard time leaving the influence of youth to their parents. Case in point: In the Matter of Kurowski and Kurowski, a legal matter that demonstrates how the courts have leaned toward state influence over parental influence when it comes to the education of children. Following a divorce, the father of 10-year-old homeschooled Amanda Kurowski had second thoughts about his former wife homeschooling their daughter, even though she performed well both socially and academically. The father contended that his daughter’s strong Christian beliefs needed to be sifted and challenged in a public school setting, and the lower court agreed in July 2009, issuing an order for her to enroll in a government-run school and discontinue homeschooling.

Now, of course, sometimes divorced parents do not agree on details of how to raise their child. Courts may rightly be called to resolve such disputes. But a judge must exercise the right standards when called upon to break a deadlock. When a dispute between these parents arose over homeschooling, the court looked past traditional arguments and made the chilling observation that Amanda’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view.” In other words, the court was attempting to say that it knows better than a parent when a child is getting too much religious teaching. Such reasoning goes to show that, even in the U.S., it has become a main priority of public schools to challenge and convert students’ thinking to reflect that of the state, rather than those espoused at home.

Read more at Advancing Religious Liberty

Court orders Christian homeschooled girl to attend public school

California Court Rules Homeschooling Illegal

Swedish court refuses to return homeschool boy to family

US grants home schooling German family political asylum

The Shocking Origins of Public Education

Threat to Parents’ Rights a Bigger Issue than Rights of a Child

In April, 2002, Minnesota parents concerned about curriculum content in a freshman class at Big Lake High School were invited to sit in on the class and see the content for themselves. That is, until principal Darrel Easterly found out. Suddenly, the morning of their scheduled visits, several moms learned that they had been banned from the school due to “privacy laws.” Mary Stultz, one of the moms, was stunned. “I was in total shock and spent the morning talking to a lawyer,” Stultz told writer Laura Adelmann at the time.

Another mom called Big Lake Superintendent Bob Lageson, who assured her it “should never happen again.” Yet, within weeks, the local school board was meeting to discuss adopting a policy requiring parents to make an appointment three days in advance of a visit, and granting to the principal wide discretion to prevent parents from entering the building even then.

After an unprecedented public outcry, the school board softened the three day requirement for parents of students to merely “as much advance notice as possible” – but they passed the new restriction. They even granted to the principal authority to detain unauthorized visitors until law enforcement arrives, citing criminal trespass laws.

Today, the current student handbook (pp.7-8) declares that “Big Lake High School does not allow students to bring guests or visitors to classes,” which includes parents. Even more importantly, the events that unfolded in Big Lake have played out numerous other times as well, throughout the country. And the courts have consistently upheld such decisions.

The proposed Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution can halt the erosion of parental rights nation-wide, and restore to parents the right to visit their child and see what is being taught. This will not allow individual parents to shape curriculum for an entire school, but it will allow any parent to remain informed of classroom content, and hopefully to opt their child out of material they find offensive.

Please act to protect the right of concerned parents to monitor their child’s education. Sign the petition and get more information at ParentalRights.org.

Parents of 50 Million U.S. Children Soon to Lose Parental Rights

When one judge overturned the will of more than seven million Californians last week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, he listed 80 supposed “findings of fact” (FF) as evidence that Proposition 8 violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Many of those 80 findings are not facts at all. They’re lies or distortions.

Before we address the top ten false “facts” asserted by Judge Vaughn Walker, there is one real fact in his opinion that defeats the entire case for his opinion. Here it is:

“The evidence at trial shows that marriage in the United States traditionally has not been open to same-sex couples.”

Since that fact is unquestionably true, how can Judge Walker honestly declare that Proposition 8 violates the Fourteenth Amendment? Certainly no one in 1868 intended the Fourteenth Amendment to redefine marriage. Only the most tyrannical form of judicial activism can get Judge Walker to his conclusion.
 
Second, Prop. 8 doesn’t violate the Fourteenth Amendment because every person in America already has equal marriage rights. We’re all playing by the same rules — we all have the same right to marry any non-related adult of the opposite sex. Those rules do not deny anyone “equal protection of the laws” because the qualifications to enter a marriage apply equally to everyone — every adult person has the same right to marry.
 
What about homosexuals? That leads us to Judge Walker’s first false “fact.”
 
1. “Sexual orientation is fundamental to a person’s identity and is a distinguishing characteristic that defines gays and lesbians as a discrete group.” (FF 44) This is the most important of the false facts because Walker’s entire case collapses without it. The “fact” is false because it ignores the difference between desires and behavior.
 
Having certain sexual desires — whether you were “born” with them or acquired them sometime in life — does not mean that you are being discriminated against if the law doesn’t allow the behavior you desire. Good laws discriminate against behavior. They do not discriminate against people. If Walker’s false “fact” was a real fact, we’d have to redefine marriage to include not just same-sex couples, but also relatives, multiple partners, children or any other sexual relationship people desire. After all, those are “sexual orientations” too.
 
In other words, there should be no legal class of “gay” or “straight,” just a legal class called “person.” And it doesn’t matter whether persons desire sex with the same or opposite sex, or whether they desire sex with children, parents, multiple partners or farm animals. What matters is whether the behavior desired is something the country should prohibit, permit or promote. And that’s a job for the people, not judges.

Read more at One News Now

The Agenda to Silence Christians

Self-defense is the ultimate “feminine protection.” Of course, gun-control nuts try to argue that the morally superior position is cowering in the corner, sans wallet, trying to dial 911 before you get shot.

The Oregonian reports:

Authorities arrested a would-be robber after he was turned away by a woman with a gun at a Vancouver Izzy’s Pizza restaurant Friday.

Wilbur Haisley, of Seattle, entered the restaurant on Northeast 78th Street shortly before 8 p.m. Friday, according to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. A caller told authorities he had run up to a woman and demanded money.

But when the victim pulled a 9mm handgun from her waist, Haisley ran the other way. Sheriff’s deputies located him a short time later and arrested him for attempted robbery. Haisley was taken to the Clark County Law Enforcement Center, where he remained Saturday morning.

The victim had a legal concealed handgun license and will not face charges, according to the sheriff’s office.

She wasn’t a “victim”, precisely because she was able to defend herself!  Here’s what REAL victims look like:

Teacher shot and killed at Washington school

We have a foreign invasion underway and our president does NOTHING but posts signs and sue the very people who are trying to protect us. How is this not TREASON?

The Washington Times reports that the state of Arizona has essentially ceded parts of the southern border to Mexican drug cartels in what — we hope — is a tactical retreat:

The federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a local sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state.

The signs were posted by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) along a 60-mile stretch of Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend, a major east-west corridor linking Tucson and Phoenix with San Diego.

They warn travelers that they are entering an “active drug and human smuggling area” and they may encounter “armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed.” Beginning less than 50 miles south of Phoenix, the signs encourage travelers to “use public lands north of Interstate 8″ and to call 911 if they “see suspicious activity.”

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, whose county lies at the center of major drug and alien smuggling routes to Phoenix and cities east and west, attests to the violence. He said his deputies are outmanned and outgunned by drug traffickers in the rough-hewn desert stretches of his own county.

“Mexican drug cartels literally do control parts of Arizona,” he said. “They literally have scouts on the high points in the mountains and in the hills and they literally control movement. They have radios, they have optics, they have night-vision goggles as good as anything law enforcement has.

And blogger the Hyacinth Girl has experienced the warnings firsthand:

On a recent trip to Phoenix, I pulled off the I-8 to let the dogs out and let the kid get her wiggles out. I’d stopped at this place before; it has some abandoned buildings I like to look at. About ten minutes after I’d stopped, a sheriff’s SUV pulled up and a very nice lady sheriff asked me politely but with some urgency if I could gather my wayward puppies and child and leave immediately.

I asked her why, as I’m pretty familiar with Arizona and the freedom within its borders. She explained that it was too close to sunset for us to be on that particular side of the freeway, as the drug and human traffickers would be out very soon. “They’ll shoot you if they don’t know you,” she said, “Even if you’re just here with you kid and obviously not a threat.”

Needless to say, I gathered everyone, and even though Mr. HG needed some convincing on account of his problems with authority, we got out of there posthaste.

But hey, at least they didn’t ask her for her identification or something.

Two months ago, Arizona governor Jan Brewer cut a campaign ad standing in front of one of the warning signs, calling on President Obama to “do your job” to secure the border.

Well, the Obama administration is doing something. Namely, suing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for failing to turn over documents as part of a DOJ inquiry into whether Arpaio’s intense illegal-immigration operations were discriminatory toward Hispanics.

Read more at the National Review

Arizona Sheriff: Border Patrol Has Retreated from Parts of Border Because It’s ‘Too Dangerous’

Arizona Sheriff: ‘Our Own Government Has Become Our Enemy’

The Obama White House has created an uncertainty surplus as investors and corporations wonder what kinds of anti-business regulation the president might end up supporting.

This uncertainty is why we hear so much speculation about the economy moving toward recovery but not fast enough to create new jobs. Job creation requires investment and investment requires confidence. Even Wall Street adores certainty, and uncertainty over Obama’s intentions is causing businesses to sit on their cash instead of plowing it back into the economy.

As of the end of March, non-financial companies in the U.S. were holding on to $1.84 trillion in cash, a staggering 26 percent increase from a year earlier. Even companies with good earnings are reluctant to convert those earnings into capital investment and hiring until they get a clear sense of the regulatory climate that’s going to take root under Obama. And companies looking for signs of a pro-growth regulatory regime won’t find any comfort in the president’s apparent fondness for net neutrality regulation of the broadband Internet. Call it rent control for the Internet.

Like rent control, the changes being pushed like net neutrality by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski with White House backing are almost confiscatory when it comes to broadband networks that are the backbone of the Internet in America.

Mr. Genachowski’s “Third Way” plan for net neutrality regulation would force broadband operators to sell capacity on their networks to other companies, including rivals, at prices and conditions dictated by government regulators. You know where that leads: innovation is killed; stagnation and capacity shortages ensue.

By reclassifying broadband from an information service to a telecom service, the FCC would give itself sweeping powers to micro-manage America’s broadband networks. Unlike the Bell telephone networks of yesteryear, these broadband networks were not built with government subsidies in the form of monopoly markets and guaranteed returns. They were built and financed by their entrepreneurial owners, at their own risk.

Read more at Fox News

New U.S. Push to Regulate Internet Access

The Internet “Kill Switch”

US Cybersecurity Czar wants online “identity cards”

Listen on YouTube

From the Right Scoop:

An excellent monologue from Mark Levin talking about how we must be active in politics in order to take back our country. He says we can’t just sit on the sidelines and expect to win the biggest elections of our lifetimes, in 2010 and 2012, and we can’t leave these great Tea Party candidates hanging out to dry. We must be politically active to restore our country to the principles on which it was founded.

You know, personally, I felt like Levin was playing off of the big rally this weekend, even though he never mentioned it directly. He has always been critical of Beck who tends to take a somewhat ‘hands off’ approach to politics and I think there is something to be said for that. But in this monologue I think Levin was saying ok, this rally thing was good, but we must turn this into a political movement or else we lose.

Now to just differentiate for a second, Beck believes that if you live up to a high standard by turning back to God and letting Him guide you, then you will pick candidates who reflect the Godly principles of how you live. I think he’s right and I don’t think Levin would disagree at all. But Levin looks at the practical side as well and emphasizes that you must do the hard work of getting candidates elected in order to affect change. I think he’s right as well. In fact I think they are both right and that both philosophies need each other to get maximum effectiveness of political change.

But let me add that I don’t believe that Beck would just have you change your lives for nothing. I think he too believes you must be politically active as well, or else we lose. The main difference in the two of them really is nothing more than emphasis. Beck is emphasizing the ‘God side’ while Levin is emphasizing the ‘activist side’.

But try not to look at this as Beck vs Levin and visa versa. They both have the same goal in the end of seeing this country turned back to God and the founding principles on which this great nation was established.

Activism or Awareness? A False Choice

Join the fight to take back our nation!

Restoring Honor Rally – August 28, 2010

Watch Entire Event Here

Learn more about America’s Christian Heritage and how to reclaim it here.

I must confess, I got jealous looking at all my friends’ Facebook pictures of the 8/28 rally in D.C.  Would have loved to have been there!  Here is one of my favorites, taken by my friend Serenity:

The foreign press – unlike our “mainstream” media - doesn’t have a dog in this fight, so it’s refreshing to see how honest their coverage can be.  

The Telegraph reports:

A crowd of several hundred thousand conservatives gathered in Washington yesterday to pay tribute to the sacrifice of America’s armed forces and to call for a return to America’s founding principles, in a show of strength that significantly exceeded most expectations. NBC News estimated there were around 300,000 attendees, two hundred thousand more than the 100,000 originally expected, while the event’s organisers put the figure at half a million. Whatever the final figure, this is without doubt one of the biggest rallies Washington has seen in the 21st Century. Even the leading standard bearer of the Left in the US media, The New York Times, admitted that “by any measure it was a large turnout. The crowd stretched from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.” Or as The Washington Post put it, there was “a sea of people.”

Boosted by the presence of charismatic former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the “Restoring Honor” event organised by talk show host Glenn Beck was a huge success, and a tremendous demonstration of the power of conservatism in America today. It was all the more remarkable for the fact that this was a distinctly non-party political rally which did not feature a single serving politician. The Republican Party itself had no involvement in the proceedings. It was an impressive display by a broader conservative movement that has gained tremendous momentum over the past 18 months. Although this was not a Tea Party rally, large numbers of Tea Party supporters took part, reflecting the rise of a rapidly growing movement spurred by widespread public disillusionment with the Big Government agenda of the Obama administration.

The large numbers who turned out defied an intensely hostile and negative media campaign that attacked the decision to hold the event on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” as a cynical political gimmick. They proved their critics spectacularly wrong. Significantly, Dr. King’s niece, Alveda King, spoke at the rally, which she described earlier as “a celebration of who we are as a nation and a chance to stop for a moment, reflect, reorganize, and re-energize. It’s a chance to think about character; both our character as a nation and our character as individuals.”

Yesterday’s Washington rally was in many ways an historic event, one that successfully honored the patriotism, sacrifice, and the principles that have made the United States the great nation it is. It was a symbol of the strength not only of conservatism but of democracy and freedom in America, and a powerful salute to the men and women of America’s military who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and the wider war against al-Qaeda.

H/T Barbara Curtis

Contrast this pic of the Glenn Beck rally:

…and the pathetic counter-rally organized by Al Sharpton, to smear the attendees as a bunch of “angry white people”:

Isn’t that an inviting landscape?  They look ready to grab the first person who dares to disagree and drag him off to the principal’s office.  I’ve seen constipation commercials with cheerier faces. 

Which side is the “angry” side, again?

From the Associated Press:

The United States lists its legal challenge to Arizona’s immigration enforcement measure on a list of ways the government is protecting human rights. It’s part of a report to the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights.

In a letter Friday to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Brewer says it is “downright offensive” that a state law would be included in the report.

Arizona’s law requires police enforcing other laws to investigate the immigration status of people they suspect are illegal immigrants. Critics say it will target minorities, but Brewer says it prohibits human rights abuses.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is demanding that a reference to the state’s controversial immigration law be removed from a State Department report on human rights.

Hot Air observes:

Not only is it internationalism run amuck, it’s both ridiculous and hypocritical at the same time.  We submitted the report to the HRC out of some idiotic notion of equality with all nations, which might make sense if the HRC was comprised of free nations that allow their citizens to fully participate and freely speak in their politics.  The members of the council to which the Obama administration submitted that letter include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China, and other paragons of human rights.  Apparently, Kim Jong-Il and the DPRK were too busy to get named to the council.

The Obama administration has opposed the Arizona bill, but not even Eric Holder could make a legal case that it violated human rights.  Instead, the DoJ attacked it on federal supremacy in immigration affairs, essentially a technicality, by claiming that Arizona had tried to pre-empt federal immigration-control efforts.  If the Obama administration really believed that this is a human-rights “concern,” then why didn’t they bother to make that claim in federal court?  Instead, Obama and Clinton just decided to use it as a cheap moral-relativist point in their new version of an apology tour.

Obama administration indicts America: State Department reports on U.S. ‘human right violations’

Hillary Clinton Stands By Decision to Include Arizona in U.N. Human Rights Report

From the Constitutionalist Today:

I got asked yesterday, “What happens to the Tea Party after Election Day?” It’s a great question as the loudest drum beat has been leading us to 2 November, 2010. The first reaction is to say it depends on who wins and it is becoming clear the Progressives will lose on many fronts. For the thousands in Colorado who have come to meetings, gone to rallies, town halls, written countless letters and made calls to elected officials on issues ranging from health care to out of control spending, it has been a long road. Many will look at 2 November as the culmination of all their efforts, but it’s a dangerous conclusion to reach as the real work begins the morning after no matter who we send to Washington or Denver.

If the GOP takes over the US House, possibly the Senate, and makes major gains in Denver you’ll see those who really haven’t been active beyond the lure of a few rallies go back to sleep. Even some hard core Tea Party members will want to take a breather. After two years of fighting it’s not a bad thing, but that rest will be short lived.

Tea Party members understand an unchallenged GOP will not seriously carry the fight of limited government. It won’t be the Lindsey Grahams displaying the political courage to defend what will be described as draconian spending cuts. That will be left to the true conservatives. Bad things are coming from Washington and they can not be stopped unless those we elect are truly prepared to make the political sacrifices needed to reverse the damage of the last 18 months. Politicians taking the hard stands will be under enormous pressure from a defeated Progressive Party and the propaganda driven press who paint their efforts as destructive and extreme. Where does the political courage to fight come from? It comes from those that send politicians to Washington and Denver. The first time a conservative stands up with a meaningful reduction they better see a field of Gadsden flags behind them or it will be our failure, not theirs, if they never try it again.

It will take the Tea Party having the courage to defend those who we demand make the hard choices because with real cuts comes real pain. We must be willing to not just educate the public on why this pain is required, but we must be willing to endure the pain ourselves. It’s one thing to just tell government to cut programs; it’s another to actually do without what they provide.

After Election Day, the People must retake the reins of government. That requires active involvement at all levels. It involves making the effort to actively support and hold accountable those we elect in November. No one can do this alone and, thankfully, we are not alone. The working Tea Party groups, The 9-12 Project, CCM, AFP, Liberty on the Rocks and the many other liberty groups are the business end of the Tea Party movement. Join them. Work to advance the victories of Election Day or they will be lost forever. Americans stood up to an out of control government and are on the verge of victory. What we do with it will set the course of the nation for decades. Our involvement has given the Republic a second chance, we may not get another.

A Tea Party Manifesto: Take Over The GOP

GOP needs to move beyond ‘Default Mode’

The real costs of Social Security far exceed the taxes collected: The compulsory pay-as-you-go retirement system has denied people the choice of using those funds for private investment, diminished the culture of responsibility and strengthened the redistributive state. People have become more dependent on government, and the retirement decision has become politicized. Social Security now accounts for 20% of the U.S. budget, with expenditures of $686 billion last year.

Reforms in 1977 and 1983 increased payroll taxes and the retirement age, but made no fundamental changes to the system in terms of empowering workers by allowing them to put part of their Social Security taxes in personal accounts.

The U.S. system has accumulated surpluses, but they have been used to expand the size and scope of government. The so-called trust fund has no real assets, only IOUs that taxpayers must eventually pay.

In contrast, Chile’s Social Security Reform Act of 1980 allowed workers to opt out of the defined benefit plan and set up personal accounts. Today Chilean workers are no longer burdened with payroll taxes and no longer dependent on government for their retirement income.

The lack of private property rights in Social Security means that individuals have no secure claim to future benefits and cannot pass them on as part of their estates.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress has the power to change promised benefits or other terms of the “social contract” — that is, Congress has the power to break the contract and to renege on past promises.

Indeed, Social Security statements now state: “Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time. The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2037, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 76% of scheduled benefits.”

What kind of a contract is that? Would anyone voluntarily sign such an uncertain agreement? Of course not! That’s why Social Security is compulsory.

The deal is bound to get worse. This year OASDI will run a deficit of $41 billion, with a smaller deficit in 2011, and surpluses in 2012-14. Beginning in 2015, revenues will be insufficient to pay full benefits, according to the just-released Social Security Trustees’ Annual Report to Congress, and the cash-flow deficit will rapidly increase.

Read more at the CATO Institute

Is the Welfare State a Ponzi Scheme?

The Entitlement Rip-Off

In the Red: Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year

300 Million, Social Security, and Solvency

Obama’s Pension Grab

U.S. Will be Like Greece in ‘Seven to 10 Years,’ Say Congressmen, Experts

Social Security Reform: A Free-Market Alternative

States are starting to fight back against unconstitutional power grabs.  God bless Texas!

The state’s slogan is “Don’t mess with Texas.” But the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doing just that, and at stake is whether the Obama administration can impose its global-warming agenda without a vote of Congress.

President Obama’s EPA is already well down the path to regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, something the act was not designed to do. It has a problem, however, because shoehorning greenhouse gases into that 40-year-old law would force churches, schools, warehouses, commercial kitchens and other sources to obtain costly and time-consuming permits. It would grind the economy to a halt, and the likely backlash would doom the whole scheme.

The EPA, determined to move forward anyway, is attempting to rewrite the Clean Air Act administratively via a “tailoring rule,” which would reduce the number of regulated sources. The problem with that approach? It’s illegal. The EPA has no authority to rewrite the law. To pull it off, the EPA needs every state with a State Implementation Plan to rewrite all of its statutory thresholds as well.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Chairman Bryan W. Shaw saw the tailoring rule for what it really is: a massive power grab and centralization of authority. They are fighting back, writing to the EPA:

“In order to deter challenges to your plan for centralized control of industrial development through the issuance of permits for greenhouse gases, you have called upon each state to declare its allegiance to the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently enacted greenhouse gas regulations – regulations that are plainly contrary to U.S. laws. … To encourage acquiescence with your unsupported findings you threaten to usurp state enforcement authority and to federalize the permitting program of any state that fails to pledge their fealty to the Environmental Protection Agency. On behalf of the State of Texas, we write to inform you that Texas has neither the authority nor the intention of interpreting, ignoring or amending its laws in order to compel the permitting of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Texas leaders are doing what Congress so far has been unable to do (a Senate vote to stop the EPA’s global-warming power grab got just 47 votes on June 10): take on the EPA. Good thing, because Texas would be hit especially hard by these regulations.

Federalist principles have allowed Texas to become the strongest state in the union. The Lone Star State leads the nation in job creation, is the top state for business relocation and has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state and is the top state for wind generation. President Obama said he wants to double U.S. exports in five years; he could look to Texas, as we are the top exporting state in the country. The Obama administration could learn a lot from Texas.

Instead, it is attempting to ride roughshod over Texas, and it goes beyond the greenhouse-gas issue.

Read more at the Washington Times

There go the 4th and 5th Amendments!

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.

It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno’s privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the “curtilage,” a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government’s intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno’s driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month’s decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people’s. The court’s ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Read more at Yahoo News

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An Action Alert from ParentalRights.org:

If your children attend public school, you are among those parents whose rights will end the moment your child enters the school. That’s because in 2005 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found in Fields v. Palmdale School District “that the Meyer-Pierce right [of parents to direct the upbringing of their children] does not exist beyond the threshold of the school door.”

You read that right. Parental Rights “[do] not exist beyond the threshold of the school door.”

“We conclude that the parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on the subject [of sexuality] to their students in any forum or manner they select” (emphasis added).

Of course, most parents contend they don’t have a choice in where their children are schooled. Either economic constraints or personal circumstances leave them with no practical alternative to the local public school. And that leaves no parental rights at all.

Please act to reverse this assault by big government courts against parental rights. Sign the petition and get more information at ParentalRights.org.

Then, please pass this on. Every parent of a public school student needs to know the extent to which the courts have robbed them of their rights. Add this message to your Facebook account, or it on virtually any other social network.

Looking Ahead

This is the first of several court cases we plan to review for you in the coming weeks. The courts’ disregard for the traditional formative role of parents in a child’s life needs to be brought to light. And while the Parental Rights Amendment will not give parents any greater power to control the school’s choice of curriculum, it will protect their right to pull their individual child out of any program of an outrageous or offensive nature, like the program in the Palmdale case. (To read more from this case, click here.)

Sincerely,

Michael Ramey
Communications Director

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