Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Posts Tagged ‘Legislation’

News Wednesday afternoon that an armed gunman had entered the cable TV headquarters of Discovery Communications in Silver Spring, Maryland and begun taking hostages alarmed people throughout the Washington, D.C. area and around the country. As law enforcement officials negotiated with the suspect, posts on social media outlets inevitably began arguing over the ideological motivations of the hostage-taker, James J. Lee. Conservatives were quick to point out the suspect’s radical environmentalist manifesto, while left-leaning sources disclaimed any connection. News a few hours later that the suspect had been shot and killed by police spawned a round of smug black humor, concluding that he had been successful in accomplishing one of his chief demands, a smaller world population.

The immediate verdict from the online world seems to be that Lee was simply insane, even as differently motivated voices tried to pin the source of his insanity on each other. If we take a step back, though, we can look at the demands he made — which law enforcement officials said “mirrored” those in his online manifesto — and see the wider context of Lee’s beliefs.

His focus on population control is clear from the beginning. Lee demands that the Discovery Channel and its affiliates must “Focus…on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue pollution and are pollution.” On the topic of immigration, he recommends that we “find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that” and in order to safeguard the future of wildlife, he writes that doing so “means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”

While his rhetoric is crude and offensive, that doesn’t mean his ideas don’t have wider currency. From the time of Paul Ehrlich’s infamous 1968 manifesto The Population Bomb to the work of groups like Zero Population Growth (first re-branded as simply “ZPG” and currently known as “Population Connection”), the specter of unsupportable population growth has been one of the environmental movement’s greatest scare stories. It’s the kind of all-encompassing disaster that was supposed to be hard to ignore — even if you didn’t care about the environment, the pitch goes, you have to be worried about overpopulation! You don’t want millions of people to starve to death or see wars spawned by a fight over food and scarce natural resources, do you?

But how does a concern over famines and resources depletion translate into the vicious anti-human ideology of a James Lee? The answer is clear — combine one old theory about the inherent limitations of mankind with one new theory about the alienation of human beings from the rest of the natural world. Lee provides us with all of the leads we need when he demands that the Discovery Channel “develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences.”

Read more at American Spectator

The Malthusian Delusion and the Origins of Population Control

James Lee Discovery Channel bomber – Al Gore disciple

My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn – James Jay Lee’s bible

John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet

Call for two-child limit on families from the Government’s leading green adviser

Fewer Children to Save the Planet?

Environmentalism Is the New Religion

Inhofe: Some Senators Share Holdren’s View That Born Babies Are Not ‘Human Beings’

People asks: How many kids are too many?

Last Thursday, a who’s who of the progressive movement met for a conference call organized by Families USA and hosted by the advocacy group for government-run health care, The Herndon Alliance. The Alliance’s partners include AARP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, MoveOn and La Raza, among many others. Democratic pollsters John Anzalone, Celinda Lake and Stan Greenberg were the call’s main event, and they were there to deliver some bad news.  Politico reports:

“Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear and rhetoric cooled. … The presentation also concedes that the fiscal and economic arguments that were the White House’s first and most aggressive sales pitch have essentially failed.”

Health care is not the only issue where the left is retreating in the face of strong disapproval from the American people. Versionista, a Portland, Oregon-based company that tracks changes to the White House website, reported last week that the Obama administration had made “whole-cloth” changes to its “Energy & Environment” issues page. Out are any references to a cap on carbon emissions and a campaign pledge to spend $150 billion on clean energy technologies. In its place the new White House site includes a three-minute Earth Day-themed video from President Barack Obama. And across the country, leftist Senate candidates in Missouri, Kentucky and Indiana have all come out against President Obama’s impending trillion dollar tax hike, due in January.

As satisfying as it is to see Obamacare’s supporters come to terms with the failure of their grand plan, it is not enough for conservatives to just say “no.” Conservatives must have real plans for reform if the American people choose to empower them. The Heritage Foundation’s Solutions for America chapter on Getting Health Care Reform Right recommends:

Repeal Obamacare: There is a precedent for repealing highly unpopular and misguided laws: the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988. Recently, over 70% of Missouri residents rejected a key provision of Obamacare­—the requirement that individuals purchase a health insurance plan designed and approved by government bureaucrats. The House of Representatives even voted recently to repeal one provision of Obamacare that will impose draconian paperwork requirements on millions of small businesses. The easiest way to address all these grievances: repeal Obamacare.

Promote Personal Control Through Tax Equity: Today, workers who purchase coverage through their employer receive an unlimited tax break on the value of their health care benefits. However, those who purchase coverage on their own receive no comparable tax break. Ideally, the current tax exclusion should be replaced (or at the very least capped) with a system of universal tax credits for taxpayers. Medicaid and SCHIP spending should also be redirected to help low-income individuals and families purchase private health insurance

Read more at the Heritage Foundation

Warning for Republicans: Don’t underestimate Barack Obama

Half-Measures Won’t Work Against Tyranny

View on YouTube – Part 1

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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?

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

The summer of 2010 is turning out to be a hot one – and not just because of the weather. The duration and depth of the recession, exacerbated by the high-tax, big-spending policies of the Obama administration, has led Americans to take a closer look at those who purport to “lead” us. We don’t much like what we see.

The problem? It’s the sense of entitlement, stupid. Democrats, who are in control of Washington, have long decried the excesses of “the rich.” President Obama has repeatedly called for “sacrifice,” meaning tax increases for those earning over $200,000 per year. In the meantime, his wife describes traveling to Denmark at taxpayer expense to lobby for the US Olympics as a “sacrifice” – long before setting off on the first of the eight vacations she is enjoying this summer (including one at a five-star Spanish resort).

 In a democratic republic, government employees are supposed to be the people’s servants, not their masters. Unfortunately, America is now ruled by a government class occupied by too many who are too far removed from the lives of those they are supposed to serve. Some, like Daschle and Geithner, benefit from a special set of rules reserved for the powerful and connected. Others – like the President– make plenty of money from the easy celebrity won through pursuit of public office. Yet others (like Rangel) use the power of their government positions to raise money for their own personal projects.

Read more at Townhall.com

America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution

Class War: How public servants became our masters

U.S. Military Serving as Chauffeurs, Babysitters for the Pelosi Kids: Receipts That Will Blow Your Mind

One of the simplest ways of measuring political ideology is the famous baseball diamond. The bottom corner is labeled “Statist” while the other vertices, going clockwise, are “Left,” “Libertarian,” and “Right.” The lower-left and lower-right sides of the diamond measure Personal Freedom and Economic Freedom respectively. Bill Kristol is about halfway up the first base line, Lindsey Graham is somewhere near the pitcher’s mound, Tom Coburn is hugging the Green Monster, Ron Paul is in far center field, and so forth.

Where does that put Barack Obama?

The answer seems to be squarely in the statist corner, perhaps somewhere behind the catcher, so far back that the fans seated in the first row behind home plate could touch him. The man doesn’t seem to have an ounce of economic or personal freedom in his body.

It’s sometimes hard to understand the philosophy of someone like Dennis Kucinich, who lovingly trusts the government with his money but not his civil liberties. But with Obama, it’s coldly, calculatedly, simplistically logical. He trusts the state over the individual in every aspect of American life. Period.

This administration just rammed through a bill forcing everyone to purchase health insurance. Its bureaucrats are hard at work on a campaign to make Americans less fat. Its ideological peers in Congress just passed a financial reform bill requiring government diversity czars at every major private bank. Its Department of Justice has gone after, among other targets, a school district in New York because a male student was being bullied for dressing like a girl.

The president doesn’t seem to believe the private sector deserves any breathing room. There’s no nook or cranny of American life that’s beyond regulation.

Read more at the American Spectator

Attacks on Freedom

Love of Liberty vs Love of Government

Won’t protect our borders. Won’t protect our electrical grid. Building a mosque at Ground Zero. The Ruling Class has not only forgotten 9/11…they’re setting us up for another one.

The U.S. Senate has dropped a House-approved plan that would prepare the United States to defend itself from an attack from any electromagnetic pulse source – whether it would be from a natural solar flare or the detonation of a space-located nuclear weapon by enemies intent on destroying America’s infrastructure, according to a representative who has raised alarms over EMP.

U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., said it is “unfortunate.”

“While one part of the federal government was warning us of possible solar electromagnetic-pulse damage to our electric grid, a key Senate commission approved a bill to ignore this threat,” he said.

“It’s particularly ironic since the Senate amended a bill, H.R. 5026, approved unanimously by the House that would specifically protect the grid against solar EMP and other physical threats,” he said.

WND has reported for years on the devastating danger from an EMP attack that could be launched by a second-rate missile system against America.

The concern is that any nuclear detonation that could be launched into the atmosphere anywhere from 25 to 250 miles above the United States could decimate the nation’s electric grid, essentially transporting it instantly back to an era of mechanical machines and agriculture.

Read more at World Net Daily

Is your family prepared for an emergency?

We’ve gone as a nation, in less than two years, from Hope and Change to “hope we can change the stuff we hoped for.” Still, a question — one of pointed interest to Republicans — looms: change to what? Meaning, what are you all going to do, assuming you take the House and/or the Senate, to fix the problems you identified as reasons for throwing out the Obamacrats? People who push themselves as political saviors, like the Democrats two years ago, come to think of it, eventually find they have to start saving. It can be messy.

A Washington Post story by Perry Bacon Jr. underscores the GOP challenge: to wit, “Rep. Ryan pushes budget reform, and his party winces.”

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin’s First District, one of the smartest men in politics insofar as I can tell, goes around touting his brilliantly conceived free-market, limited-government approach called “Roadmap for America’s Future.” Whose main defect appears to be that in facilitating economic recovery it would change the ways Americans interface with federal social programs and the tax system that supports them. The prospect of that seems to disturb colleagues; thus … well, hear out Bacon: “[M]any Republican colleagues … even as they praise Ryan for his doggedness, privately consider the Roadmap a path to electoral disaster.”

In other words, do the right thing and the wrong things happen to you. Voters fume and rage. Some undertake to eject you from office, forcing you to resume the practice of estate law in Pascagoula or Pomona.

Read more at Townhall.com

Reservations with Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap”

Have the Republicans Learned Their Lesson?

Four months after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously declared “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,”a congressional panel has released the first chart illustrating the 2,801 page health care law President Obama signed into law in March.

Developed by the Joint Economic Committee minority, led by U.S Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the detailed organization chart displays a bewildering array of new government agencies, regulations and mandates.

“For Americans, as well as Congressional Democrats who didn’t bother to read the bill, this first look at the final health care law confirms what many fear, that reform morphed into a monstrosity of new bureaucracies, mandates, taxes and rationing that will drive up health care costs, hurt seniors and force our most intimate health care choices into the hands of Washington bureaucrats,”said Brady, the committee’s senior House Republican. “If this is what passes for health care reform in America, then God help us all.”

Brownback, the committee’s ranking member, added, “This updated chart illustrates the overwhelming expansion of government control over health choices and the bewildering complexity facing everyone affected by this law. It doesn’t take long to see how the recently signed health care bill causes a hugely expensive and explosive expansion of federal control over health care. Personal choices that should be between a doctor and a patient will quickly be strangled in a never ending web of bureaucracy.”

Read more at the New Patriot Journal

ObamaCare Looks Worse Upon Further Review

Obamacare’s disastrous effects are already showing

The Problems with Socialized Health Care

Government caused the problem, so of course the solution is… more government and violation of 4th Amendment rights.   How about we register and fingerprint the POLITICIANS who were responsible for the mortgage crisis, starting with Chris Dodd and Barney Frank?

Mortgage loan originators will have to be fingerprinted and sign up to a central registry to do business in future, according to final rules issued on Wednesday by the Federal Reserve and other regulators.

The rules are part of the Secure and Fair Enforcement for Mortgage Licensing Act of 2008, also called the S.A.F.E. Act.

They were issued by the Fed, Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, Office of Thrift Supervision, Farm Credit Administration and National Credit Union Administration.

Mortgage brokers came under tough scrutiny in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis, with some lawmakers and regulators sharply critical of underwriting standards and practices that were seen as so loose they helped foster a housing price bubble.

Read more at Reuters

Dodd-Frank Finance ‘Reform’ Sows Seeds of Next Financial Crisis

How Government Caused The Mortgage Crisis

Obama seizing control of Wall Street

This is not an isolated incident. It’s a coordinated effort to isolate anyone who won’t toe the ideological line.

They want to dominate all professions that have influence on social policy – science (Darwinism, global warming, abortion), education (indoctrination, historical revisionism), law (judicial activism, constitutional revisionism), and now psychology (normalizing deviant behaviors, destroying and redefiining the family as a societal construct).

A federal judge has ruled in favor of a public university that removed a Christian student from its graduate program in school counseling over her belief that homosexuality is morally wrong. Monday’s ruling, according to Julea Ward’s attorneys, could result in Christian students across the country being expelled from public university for similar views.

“It’s a very dangerous precedent,” Jeremy Tedesco, legal counsel for the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, told FOX News Radio. “The ruling doesn’t say that explicitly, but that’s what is going to happen.”

U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh dismissed Ward’s lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University. She was removed from the school’s counseling program last year because she refused to counsel homosexual clients.

The university contended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association code of ethics.

“Christian students shouldn’t be expelled for holding to and abiding by their beliefs,” said ADF senior counsel David French. “To reach its decision, the court had to do something that’s never been done in federal court: uphold an extremely broad and vague university speech code.”

Read more at Fox News

University expels Christian student for not supporting homosexuality

Christian student fights for her beliefs

Want to Teach? Toe the Ideological Line!

Lesbian opposes special protections for any group, including homosexuals

One News Now reports:

A counseling student has filed suit against a university in Georgia because she claims the school is forcing her to abandon her Christian beliefs in order to receive a degree.

Jennifer Keeton, 24, is pursuing her master’s degree in counseling at Augusta State University. But after her professors learned of her biblical beliefs — specifically her views on homosexual conduct — from both classroom discussions and private conversations with other students, the school imposed a “remediation plan.”
 
“It’s in essence [telling her] ‘you do not have the correct beliefs, we are going to re-educate you into the correct beliefs,’” explains David French, senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund. “And unless she completes this — quote — ‘remediation plan’ to their satisfaction, then she can be thrown out of [the school's counseling program].”

French tells OneNewsNow there are some absurd elements to the plan. “Such as admonishing her to go to — quote — a ‘gay-pride parade’ and write about her feelings after she’s been,” he describes. “In other words, [the school's plan would be] deliberately exposing her to behavior that she finds immoral in the hope that she’ll accept it. It’s ridiculous.”
 
French calls it “pure thought reform” and accuses Augusta State of outlining “a program of indoctrination” for Keeton.
 
“Jennifer is not interested in being indoctrinated, she wants to be educated,” states the attorney. “She wants to learn about the counseling profession, she wants to be a good counselor — but being a good counselor does not require that one surrender their most fundamental religious beliefs.”
 
And so French says Keeton is filing suit [PDF] to get the school to respect her First Amendment rights. “A public university student shouldn’t be threatened with expulsion for being a Christian and refusing to publicly renounce her faith, but that’s exactly what’s happening here,” he concludes.

Augusta State Univ. to Counseling Student: Change Beliefs or Get Out

The Agenda to Silence Christians

The High Cost of College and What it Does to Your Children

How Radical Professors Indoctrinate Students

Britian’s National Health Service forced to make sweeping cuts to services: restrictions on the most basic treatments for sick and injured

President Obama signed into law Wednesday the massive 2,400-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – the most consequential piece of legislation affecting the financial sector since the Great Depression.

Touted as a much-needed solution for Wall Street greed, President Obama said, “Because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes. There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”

Yet, before the ink had dried, the first signs of the law’s negative effects emerged.

The three largest credit-rating agencies – Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings – immediately alerted bond issuers not to use their ratings, as they assess their legal exposure created by the bill.

This will affect the $1.4 million bond market, made up largely of consumer loans.

New bond sales – required by law to include credit rating information in all mortgage, auto, student loan and credit card loan documentation — will come to an abrupt halt.

Unfortunately, most Americans are unaware of the new law – much less how it will directly affect their daily lives.

The bill was passed with nearly unanimous opposition by Republicans, citing the bill will hurt families still hurting from the recession.

“Millions of Americans are struggling to find jobs,” said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., “And yet all they see in Washington are Democrats passing massive bills that, at their core, seem to have one thing in common: more job loss.

“The White House will declare this bill a victory. But for millions of Americans struggling to find work, for millions of small-business owners bracing themselves for all the new regulations they’ll have to deal with, for ordinary Americans who just wanted to see an end to the bailouts, this bill is no victory.”

House Republican leadership has called for the financial law’s repeal.

“The real pain caused by this bill will be felt on Main Street,” said Republican Study Committee chairman Tom Price, R-Ga. “Ordinary companies will now face much higher costs if they try to hedge against common business risks like rising energy prices.  And the new agency, supposedly charged with protecting consumers, will actually make even credit-worthy families and businesses unable to access the credit they need to invest in their futures.

“Dodd-Frank would not have prevented the current financial crisis, and it will not stop the next one. This is not financial reform.  House Republicans introduced a plan over a year ago to fix the financial sector with common sense reforms aimed at the actual root causes of the crisis. Democrats instead chose to give Washington unprecedented control over Americans’ economic choices while ensuring the practice of taxpayer bailouts continues uninterrupted.”

Derek V. Baker, director of congressional affairs for Americans for Limited Government, said, “Only in Washington can a bill be signed in to law in response to one of America’s greatest financial collapses with two of the prime culprits of the collapse on hand to receive praise for their efforts. Though there are multiple reasons for the housing market collapse and subsequent financial meltdown that ensued, it is a fact that the government policies aggressive pursued and implemented by Sen. Dodd and Rep. Frank to rig the market and force lenders to meet artificial loan thresholds and quotas were a driving force behind the 2008 financial crisis as well.

“And yesterday, they got rewarded for their efforts with an ‘attaboy’ from the president of the United States.”

Read more at CitizenLink

Dodd-Frank Finance ‘Reform’ Sows Seeds of Next Financial Crisis

The Dodd-Frank Assault on Economic Recovery