Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Archive for the ‘Unconstitutional’ Category

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

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”

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

Senate Democrats Pass Bill Allowing Govt to Collect Addresses, ATM Records of Bank Customers

The Cyber Space Two Step: Privacy vs. Washington’s Big Brother Agenda

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

School condom distribution program includes first graders, denies parental notification

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

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Attacks on Freedom

The Original Tea Party

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The Civil War and Gilded Age

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Progressivism

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FDR’s State And LBJ’s Society

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Big Gov’t and Tea Parties

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The Constitution and Freedom

Woodrow Wilson and the roots of Progressivism

Barack Obama and “The Second Bill of Rights”

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

We the Serfs

WHO has changed how the constitution is interpreted?

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“Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced –a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.“   – From ICLEI‘s “Agenda 21“, signed by G.H. Bush, 1992

One reason that Portland is so hell-bent on pursuing unsustainable “sustainability” projects is that they’ve signed an ICLEI agreement to reduce carbon emissions by up to 80%, making themselves accountable to an international body of radical environmentalists who don’t have to live with the results at the local level.

Agenda 21 and the United Nations

Freedom Advocates explains the danger:

Right now, in your town and neighborhood, policies are being implemented that will ultimately eliminate your freedoms and destroy your way of life. You need to know what’s going on to stop this process. Many town officials are selling us out to global regional development with help from the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI): Local Governments for Sustainability. ICLEI is used as one of the mechanisms to undo the political recognition of unalienable rights.

ICLEI uses the false premise and outright lies of anthropogenic* global warming to change our way of life, for the worse!

ICLEI: Local Governments for Sustainability promotes Local Action 21, Local Agenda 21 and other United Nations programmes implemented through local town councils, planners, mayors and local governments.

Why should you care?

Social engineering and behavior modification are some of the true objectives being implemented under the guise of environmental and climate protection. This is accomplished by exploiting people’s desire to maintain a healthy and lasting environment in the name of “sustainability.” Here is an example of how ICLEI changes behavior, jut like another organization called “Fostering Sustainable Behavior”.

It is also ICLEI’s job to implement United Nation’s policies that restructure our representative form of government through global and regional development (< click and then view slide show). Policies and programs take control from our representative government and put it into the hands of regional, non-elected boards.  This allows elected officials to shirk their responsibilities. It turns us into a soviet system that is based on Regionalism.  It facilitates both communism and fascism. Representative government with defined limits is the basis of a free and just society.

Cool Mayors Fire-up Hot Debate

ICLEI methods include infiltrating local government. Organization representatives seek to be hired into local planning departments or they provide “toolkits” to staff. Too many elected officials such as Cool Mayors allow ICLEI to influence policy changes through the use of funding incentives and rewards. While some of these policies sound good on the surface, they result in consequences such as:

• High-density housing scams
• Traffic congestion
• Open space where access is not allowed
• Government “partnering” with favored private businesses and non-profit agencies, using your tax money
• Undermining Constitutional administration of government
• Managed control over your life
• Mismanagement of public utilities
• Prohibitions on natural resource management leading to increased fire hazards, lack of water, and private property restrictions,
• Increased taxes, fees, regulations and restrictions

Is ICLEI running your town or coming to a town near you?

Are your elected officials being lured into enacting ridiculous rules and regulations in exchange for funding?  Do your elected officials know that there are long term consequences to their irresponsible actions?

Currently there are more than 550 communities in North America paying membership dues to ICLEI.  Upon becoming a member of ICLEI, members become governed by ICLEI Charter. If your community is one of these, you are paying for the loss of your unalienable rights.

Has your town, city or county signed on with ICLEI?  Find out here.

Patriot and AFP activist Roxanne Ross wrote an editorial on page 7 of the August edition of the Northwest Connection about how the ICLEI agenda threatens Multnomah county.

ICLEI is behind national schemes, as well:

How Obama is Locking Up Our Land

And now: The stealth Obama ocean grab

David Horowitz on Democrats’ Shadow Cabinet and the Green Communists

Global Warming Alarmism is a Grave Threat to our Liberty

Environmentalism: The New Communism

It’s not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration’s neon green radicals are also training their sights on the deep blue seas. The president’s grabby-handed bureaucrats have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented control from states and localities over “conservation, economic activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes.”

Democrats have tried and failed to pass “comprehensive” federal oceans management legislation five years in a row. The so-called “Oceans 21″ bill, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sam Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of “ecosystem management.” Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply circumvented the legislative process altogether.

In late July, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member “National Ocean Council” with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: “We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today’s executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act.” And not a single hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the deliberative process? The oceans are dying!

The panel will have the power to implement “coastal and marine spatial plans” and to ensure that all executive agencies, departments and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap with existing regional and local authorities governing marine and coastal planning.

No wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population control freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich) and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best known as the immediate boss of disgraced green jobs czar/self-avowed communist Van Jones).

Read more at Michelle Malkin

How Obama is Locking Up Our Land

Global Warming Alarmism is a Grave Threat to our Liberty

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.” ~ Ronald Reagan

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Here come the food police – literally!

When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn’t know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat’s milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)

But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn’t the least bit tongue-tied. “She started back-talking to them,” recalls Palmer. “She said, ‘If you take my computer again, I can’t do my homework.’ This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven’t gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids.”

As part of a five-hour-plus search of her barn and home, the agents — from the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, Los Angeles County Sheriff, Ventura County Sheriff, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture — took the replacement computer, along with milk she feeds her chickens and pigs.
 
While no one will say officially what the purpose of this latest raid was, aside from being part of an investigation in progress, what is very clear is that government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening ever more frequently. Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.

What’s behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years — food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licenses required of retailers that sell to the general public. (For more on what’s behind the raids, see this new post.)

Read more at Grist

S510 Vote Delayed, But Not Defeated

Food freedom under attack

The FDA vs Raw Milk and the Constitution

Delia Lopez: Our government has gone Gestapo

The Oregon Consumers and Farmers Association endorses Delia Lopez for Congress

Next on the government takeover list: your private property!

Have you heard of the “Great Outdoors Initiative”? Chances are, you haven’t. But across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life.

Property owners have every reason to be worried. The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) is a pet project of green radicals, who want the decades-old government slush fund for buying up private lands to be freed from congressional appropriations oversight. It’s paid for primarily with receipts from the government’s offshore oil and gas leases. Both Senate and House Democrats have included $900 million in full LWCF funding, not subject to congressional approval, in their energy/BP oil spill legislative packages. The Democrats have also included a provision in these packages that would require the federal government to take over energy permitting in state waters, which provoked an outcry from Texas state officials, who sent a letter of protest to Capitol Hill last month:

“In light of federal failures, it is incomprehensible that the United States Congress is entertaining proposals that expand federal authority over oil and gas drilling in state water and lands long regulated by states… Given the track record, putting the federal government in charge of energy production on state land and waters not only breaks years of successful precedent and threatens the 10th Amendment to the United Sates Constitution, but it also undermines common sense and threatens the environmental and economy security of our state’s citizens.”

This power grab, masquerading as a feel-good, all-American recreation program, comes on top of a separate, property-usurping initiative exposed by GOP Rep. Robert Bishop and Sen. Jim DeMint earlier this spring. According to an internal, 21-page Obama administration memo, 17 energy-rich areas in 11 states have been targeted as potential federal “monuments.” The lives of coyotes, deer and prairie dogs would be elevated above states’ needs to generate jobs, tourism business and energy solutions.

Read more at Real Clear Politics

White House land grab

On July 21, when President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, he promised: “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.” How long will this Obama promise last? Well, The New York Times reports today that  “the Obama administration on Wednesday pumped $3 billion into programs intended to stop the unemployed from losing their homes,” including a program announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that “will draw on $1 billion authorized by the new financial overhaul law.” That’s right. The Dodd-Frank “no more taxpayer-funded bailouts forever” bill is not even a month old, and already President Obama is using it to turn your tax dollars into yet another bailout.

Faced with the utter failure of its TARP funded mortgage bailout, the Obama administration is now turning to the left’s old stand-in for housing market interference: the government-sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae is now working with the National Council of State Housing Agencies to let people buy houses with little or no down payment just like the GSEs did at the height of the housing bubble. And last week, Freddie Mac was also promoting no-down payment loans, this time through an array of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) programs. All this despite the fact that last week Fannie Mae announced it lost $1.2 billion in the second quarter of this year, and this week Freddie Mac announced a $4.71 billion loss. Both companies were also forced to ask for more Obama bailout cash, including $1.5 billion of your tax dollars for Fannie and another $1.8 billion for Freddie.

No wonder the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill did nothing about Fannie and Freddie; the Obama administration had every intention of continuing to use them to prop up the housing market. These programs will do nothing but delay the inevitable housing market correction. Instead of letting the market sort out what these homes are really worth, the Obama administration is only prolonging economic hardship by making it harder for new home buyers to afford a moderately priced home and making it harder for those who need to move for work to sell their current homes.

Read more at the Heritage Foundation

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

Financial Reform Bill: Big Brother’s Bureaucratic Absolutism

Gov’t pushing risky lending again?

The Dodd-Frank Assault on Economic Recovery

Bailout Bonanza: Why Dodd’s “Reform” Bill Makes the Problem Worse

Dodd Bill is Just the Beginning of ‘Too Big to Fail’

Making the Housing Crisis Worse

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

Troubled Asset Relief Program Inspector General Neal M. Barofsky has found that many of the General Motors and Chrysler dealerships ordered closed by the Obama administration, after last year’s bailouts, were victims of out-and-out, blatant, racial, gender and even political bias.

According to Barofsky’s report, 2,000 dealerships were forced to close, which cost 100,000 jobs.

(See the entire 45-page report here. Read all of it. It is very blunt.)

However, the businesses allowed to stay open “were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers, or were minority-or woman-owned dealerships.”

The report also indicates a political bias may have come into play, due to a disproportionate number of dealership closings in rural areas, even though the closures could “jeopardize the return to profitability” for both GM and Chrysler.

Barofsky states: “ultimately close to half of all of the GM dealerships identified for termination were in rural areas.”

Of course, in 2008, Obama lost the vote in the nation’s 1,300 rural counties by close to 80 percent.

Perhaps, most troubling of all was the statement made last week, to American Thinker magazine by Obama’s manufacturing czar, Ron Bloom, that the dealerships could have been kept open, “but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President’s mandate for ‘shared sacrifice.’”

With this report, we witness yet another example of institutional racism by the Obama administration. While we know that Obama is willing to sit by and allow the New Black Panthers to intimidate white voters to stay away from the polls on election day, we now see that he is also willing to take away one’s livelihood, based on the color of their skin.

Read more at Uncoverage

Dealer: Chrysler shutdowns are unfair

Obama closes successful dealerships for political reasons

The most dangerous president in history

People have no idea how much freedom they’ve lost…until they try to exercise even the most basic liberties!

A group of high school students attending a conservative leadership conference in Washington, D.C. said they were ordered by a security guard to stop singing the national anthem during a June 25 visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

“They told them to stop singing,” said Evan Gassman, a spokesman for the Young America’s Foundation. “I was taken aback. You wouldn’t expect a display of national patriotism to be censored.”

U.S. Park Police confirmed that the students were in violation of federal law and their impromptu performance constituted a demonstration in an area that must remain “completely content neutral.”

“The area they were standing in and singing is an area that is restricted for this type of activity,” said Sgt. David Schlosser. “The United States Park Police is absolutely content-neutral when it comes to any sort of demonstrations in these areas.”

Read more at Fox News