Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Posts Tagged ‘Social Engineering’

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

Perhaps the most difficult economic lesson is that we live in a world of scarcity and everything has a cost. Scarcity exists whenever human wants exceed the means to satisfy those wants. For example, Rolls-Royce produces less than 4,000 cars a year, but it’s a safe bet that more than 4,000 of the Earth’s 6.5 billion people want a Rolls-Royce. That means Rolls-Royces are scarce. But it’s not just Rolls-Royces that are scarce. It’s clothing, food, land and most anything a human would want. There’s not enough to meet every single want.

Scarcity means there’s no free lunch. Having more of one thing requires having less of another. You might say, “Williams, that’s where you’re wrong. Someone gave me this newspaper and I’m reading your column for free!” Not true. If you weren’t spending time reading my column, you might have spent the time reading something else, chatting with your wife or children, or going out for a jog. You’re reading my column for a zero price but you’re not doing so at zero cost. You have to sacrifice something. There are zero-price services such as “free libraries,” “free public schools,” “free transportation” and free whatever. It doesn’t mean costs are not being borne by somebody.

Read more World Net Daily

Walter Williams: Good Intentions

Give Capitalism a Chance

Keynes vs. Hayek: The Great Debate Continues

This was originally published in 1979.  We are much further down this road now, and are moving at a faster pace.

Why did Rome decline and fall? In my belief, Rome fell because of a fundamental change in ideas on the part of the Roman people—ideas which relate primarily to personal responsibility and the source of personal income. In the early days of greatness, Romans regarded themselves as their chief source of income. By that I mean each individual looked to himself—what he could acquire voluntarily in the marketplace—as the source of his livelihood. Rome’s decline began when the people discovered another source of income: the political process—the State.

When Romans abandoned self-responsibility and self-reliance, and began to vote themselves benefits, to use government to rob Peter and pay Paul, to put their hands into other people’s pockets, to envy and covet the productive and their wealth, their fate was sealed. As Dr. Howard E. Kershner puts it, “When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare.” The legalized plunder of the Roman Welfare State was undoubtedly sanctioned by people who wished to do good. But as Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house to do me good, I would run for my life.” Another person coined the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Nothing but evil can come from a society bent upon coercion, the confiscation of property, and the degradation of the productive.

Someone once remarked that the Welfare State is so named because, in it, the politicians get well and you pay the fare! There is much truth in that statement. In Rome, the emperors were buying support with the people’s own money. After all, government can give only what it first takes. The emperors, in dishing out all these goodies, were in a position to manipulate public opinion. Alexander Hamilton observed, “Control of a man’s subsistence is control of a man’s will.” Few people will bite the hand that feeds them!

Civil wars and conflict of all sorts increased as faction fought against faction to get control of the huge State apparatus and all its public loot. Mass corruption, a huge bureaucracy, high taxes and burdensome regulations were the order of the day. Business enterprise was called upon to support the growing body of public parasites.

In time, the State became the prime source of income for most people. The high taxes needed to finance the State drove business into bankruptcy and then nationalization. Whole sectors of the economy came under government control in this manner. Priests and intellectuals extolled the virtues of the almighty emperor, the Provider of all things. The interests of the individual were considered a distant second to the interests of the emperor and his legions.

Rome also suffered from the bane of all welfare states, inflation. The massive demands on the government to spend for this and that created pressures for the creation of new money. The Roman coin, the denarius, was cheapened and debased by one emperor after another to pay for the expensive programs. Once 94% silver, the denarius, by 268 A.D., was little more than a piece of junk containing only .02% silver. Flooding the economy with all this new and cheapened money had predictable results: prices skyrocketed, savings were eroded, and the people became angry and frustrated. Businessmen were often blamed for the rising prices even as government continued its spendthrift ways.

Read more at the Freeman

Rome and the Great Depression

When Will the U.S. Go the Way of Rome?

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

The Obama administration is, once again, entangled in controversy over sex education.

Yet this time, it is not about what the administration is trying to implement, but about what it is withholding – and apparently for political reasons.

A taxpayer-funded study that indicates parental and adolescent support of abstinence education is not being released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as it does not support the administration’s objective – or that of vocal “safe sex” activists – of eliminating all abstinence-education funding.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), a division of HHS, funded a survey of 1,000 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 and their parents, in order to measure parent-adolescent communication and adolescent attitudes toward sex and abstinence.

The American Public Health Association’s (APHA) website reveals the only is results of the survey:

“Adjusting for all other factors in the model, parent and peer factors are more consistently associated with differences in adolescent attitudes about sex and abstinence than are measures of adolescent exposure to sex and abstinence topics in a class or program.

Additionally, parent attitudes are more important in influencing adolescent views than the level of parent communication with their adolescent.”

The executive summary revealed that:

• 70 percent of parents agreed with the statement: “It is against your values for your adolescents to have sexual intercourse before marriage.
• 70 percent of parents agreed with the statement: “Having sexual intercourse is something only married people should do.”
• Adolescents had similar responses for the two questions.

During an APHA conference, researcher Lisa Rue, Ph.D., who specializes in adolescent behavior, was intrigued by the study and requested the full report. She was summarily denied access.

Rue then resorted to submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was also denied because it was “pre-decisional and deliberative” – even though it was presented in public twice.

Read more at CitizenLink

Science or Ideology? What Lies Behind the Abstinence Education Debate

Teen Pregnancy Hype

Sexually explicit reading assignments: is your child’s innocence being stolen?

A Report on the U.N.’s Shocking Sexuality Guidelines

School condom distribution program includes first graders, denies parental notification

View on YouTube

Record number of black Republicans running for office

Black conservative tea party backers take heat

Stop The Haters: Black Conservatives Respond

‎”If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

Leftists at Think Progress are getting themselves into a tizzy over this clip of Glenn Beck exposing a Center For American Progress report that calls for the elimination of several education programs which teach history, civics, economics, and the constitution:

View on YouTube

The Liberty Tree Lantern illustrates how the proof is in the details:

The Special Interest Group with very high influence at the top levels of  the U.S. Government called the Center for American Progress, funded by George Soros, has developed and submitted a document called “Education Transformation – Doing What Works”.

Page 13 of the report is titled “Programs Recommended for Elimination” Amongst others the following are some of the programs that this special interest group is calling for the U.S. Government to eliminate from our children’s education.  The following comes from the report:

Small niche programs: There are numerous small education programs that are limited in scope and people served. Often these programs represent sole-source grants or congressional earmarks, which should be limited. It was beyond the purview of this report to determine whether recipients meet the requirements of sole source grantees, which requires that they be unique among other potential grantees and possess capacity for innovation and cost-effectiveness. But the question is whether these arrangements work, are superior to other options, and represent the highest value for the public investment. Based on these concerns, the following programs should be eliminated:

•  Academies for American History and Civics, authorized under the American History and Civics Education Act of 2004, provides workshops for both veteran and new teachers of American history and operates Congressional Academies to instruct high school students. This is a small program with no supporting evaluation or performance reports. The teacher workshops are not coordinated with ESEA Title II professional development programs, which support increases in the number of highly qualified teachers and principals, or based on the needs of states and localities and those of teachers and students.
•  We the People, authorized under ESEA, Title II, Part C, Subpart 3, Sections 2341- 2346, is a noncompetitive, direct earmark grant to the Center for Civic Education to operate an instructional program for elementary, middle, and high school students on the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, called “We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution.” The program has had a positive evaluation.10 Yet the Center for Civic Education’s curricula and materials serve a small number of students annually. The Obama administration proposed elimination of the program in the FY 2010 budget because it is too small to have an impact on history and civics achievement nationally.
• Excellence in Economic Education, authorized under ESEA Title V, Part D, Subpart 13, is a small grant to a national nonprofit education organization that is meant to promote economic and financial literacy among students in kindergarten through grade 12. The FY 2010 appropriation was $1,447,000.  
• Teaching American History, authorized under ESEA Title II, Part C, Subpart 4, provides grants to local education agencies to improve teachers’ knowledge of traditional U.S. history. A 2005 evaluation found that grants funded projects in districts with high-need students, and participants reported positively on the effectiveness and quality of projects. But the evaluation also concluded that the projects may not have reached teachers typically considered most in need of additional professional development. The evaluation also found that the training provided did not always match research-based definitions of effective professional development, and that internal evaluations lacked the rigor to measure projects’ effectiveness accurately.11 The FY 2010 appropriation was $118.95 million. This program is subject-specific with limited reach and lacks demonstrated effectiveness. It should be eliminated.

Okay, so now America is not going to teach our children American History, Civics, U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and Economics and financial literacy.  Does anybody else have a problem with this?

The Shocking Origins of Public Education

The Fourth Purpose: The Enigma of Public Schools

The Cartel: Education + Politics = $

Prior to 1913, there was no federal income tax. The states had rights and representation in Washington DC, there was no Federal Reserve Bank, and the federal government lived under the enumerated powers afforded within the US Constitution. What a difference one year can make…

Almost a hundred years later, it’s clear that the policies established in 1913 must be revoked in order to restore power to the people and the states. But can the American people stuff the Genie back in to the bottle?

The History of the US Tax System can be summed up in one paragraph…

Prior to the enactment of the income tax, most citizens were able to pursue their private economic affairs without the direct knowledge of the government. Individuals earned their wages, businesses earned their profits, and wealth was accumulated and dispensed with little or no interaction with government entities.

Passage of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution would forever change life in America and not for the better.

The 16th – The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

It’s hard to imagine how the aforementioned amendment could have been written any broader, or why 36 states would agree to such an open ended federal power to strip citizens of their rightful earnings via taxation without representation and with literally no boundaries or limits to how far the federal government could ultimately go in their effort to buy the votes of some with the assets of others.

Since 1913, the federal tax code has been used as a primary tool of leftist social engineering in which the people have been forced to fund a government they no longer recognize and no longer support. The US Congress has a mere 11% approval rating today and the Executive branch is supported only by the 28% of citizens who benefit personally by the robbing of fellow citizens.

The states are now fiscal dependents of the federal government and the federal government is a twenty trillion pound ape trampling through the rose garden of American life, and nobody seems to have any clue how to rein it all in.

Further, thanks to the passage of the 17th Amendment, also passed in 1913, the states no longer have representation in Washington DC. Once again, what seemed like a simple sentence and a good idea to some at the time has since been used by the federal government to eliminate state’s sovereignty and rights.

Read more at American Thinker

The Income Tax and Government Spending

It’s Time To Repeal the 16th Amendment

How the 17th Amendment has led to unrestrained federal powers

Repeal the 17th Amendment

It is a common assumption in today’s world that capitalism is, at best, out of control and, at worst, outright evil. Everyone knows that it causes most of our financial, economic, and social problems, and that we need a referee — the government — to make sure that all is fair and that we innocent citizens are not taken advantage of by predatory companies and capitalists.

The fact, of course, is that everyone is wrong.

My urgent goal in writing The Case for Legalizing Capitalism was to create a one-stop refutation of all anticapitalist arguments, using plain economic logic and applying free-market (i.e., classical liberal) arguments and economic laws to today’s political scene, across the entire political-economic spectrum. In short, the goal was to condense the world of the Mises Institute into one book.

My main message is that most of our economic problems derive from previous government intervention in the economy. In its attempts to “help” us, the government has managed and regulated the economy, and passed laws that sounded constructive but that in fact hurt the economy and us.

Political economic reality is replete with the law of unintended consequences. Our economic problems are the natural result of political forces, not the natural result of (supposedly evil) market forces. We have voted our current problems into existence by electing politicians who promised to help us by means of economic intervention and regulation.

As Austrians know, most people believe we have free markets, but we have no such thing. This is true regardless of the fact that politicians of all stripes — and most of the media — claim that we do. The government has its hand in every company and every industry in the nation, controlling what things are produced and by which means. Indeed, it even manipulates market prices and production directly.

Read more at the Ludwig von Mises Institute

Keynes vs. Hayek: The Great Debate Continues

Is capitalism evil?

Is Europe’s financial crisis a referendum on Capitalism?

Does Obama intend to destroy capitalism?

The 5 Big Lies About American Business: Combating Smears Against the Free Market Economy

It’s no secret what the average American family does when income drops: Spend less and save more.
 
In fact, we’ve seen just that during these last two recessionary years. The personal saving rate, barely 1 percent of income in the first quarter of 2008, reached 5 percent last year and remains above 3 percent.
 
Businesses are doing the same thing. The Washington Post reported recently that non-financial companies are carrying some $1.8 trillion on their books, about 25 percent more than at the start of the recession.
 
This is partly because of federal meddling in the economy. With Obamacare heading their way, opaque financial regulations about to take force and lawmakers still contemplating a cap-and-trade law, companies figure some cash on hand can’t hurt—if only to pay for new government-mandated rules. But they’re also holding on to some cash because that’s the logical approach thing to do when dealing with economic uncertainty.
 
So why this hasn’t this wisdom trickled up to national leaders?
 
Our federal government is on a sending spree unheard of since World War II, when Washington poured resources into a two-front battle the country couldn’t afford to lose.

Read more at CNS News

Inflation: The Last Gasp of the Obama Economic Crisis

CBO: Mounting U.S. Debt Makes Fiscal Crisis More Likely

Author and blogger Barbara Curtis is raising the alarm for parents:

My daughter Samantha went through this last year in our neighboring Clarke County – writing letters to the principle, school board, newspapers. She went door to door with a petition and when people would look at her like she was a crazy book banner – she would ask them to listen a minute while she read aloud something from one of the questionable books.

They listened. They signed.

Many parents have their heads in the sand. Even if they look at their children’s reading lists, recommended reading has changed so radically since you and I were in school – even considering the generations – that you would be appalled to find out what kids are required to read.

Citizen Magazine reports:

“Some of the material being recommended for use in schools by national gay-activist groups includes what I would consider Triple X-type material,” said Candi Cushman, education analyst for CitizenLink. “These depictions are so extreme that you wouldn’t expect to find them anywhere but a porn store.”

Students may be forced to confront these texts as mandatory reading in a literature or socialstudies class. Or they may be suggested by teachers, or available as options. Sometimes, such material appears on summer reading lists either as required or available reading.

Often, objectionable books simply occupy shelf space in school libraries. In any event, the insistence of many public educators to bring brazenly sexual, often homosexual-themed, books and stories into the mainstream is a growing threat to the moral maturation of American highschool students.

This material doesn’t just yield the relatively harmless peccadilloes of a previous generation of scandalizing literature, such as the occasional profanity in Catcher in the Rye. Much of the modern variety appears to have no other purpose than to centralize homosexuality or to sensationalize edgy heterosexual practice in ways that young readers can’t easily forget.

“Parents have the right to object to sexually explicit material that their child isn’t emotionally or psychologically ready to handle, and many students are being inundated by this stuff,” Cushman said. Urging parents to intervene against such assignments isn’t a common message these days. “Parents are told that they have no control over their kids in the public schools, that states will decide these things,” said Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, a Cincinnati-based affiliate of Focus on the Family. “And that kind of thinking is gaining even more speed.”

Read more at Citizen Magazine

‘Safe Schools’ Czar Recommends Child Porn For Classroom Reading

Graphic booklet sent home with Portland schoolkids shocks parents

A Report on the U.N.’s Shocking Sexuality Guidelines

School condom distribution program includes first graders, denies parental notification

U.N. Agency Calls for Teaching Children 5-to-8 Years of Age about Masturbation

“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.  The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in an perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”  – Mission Statement, John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board, 1906

The Daily Caller reports:

If Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, kids would be spending a lot more time at school — and a three-month summer would be a thing of the past.

Duncan joked with attendees at a luncheon at the National Press Club Tuesday in Washington that he would like schools to stay open 13 months out of the year. Then he told the audience of over 100 that he seriously supports longer school hours.

“In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year,” Duncan said. “This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that. But you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, ESL classes.”

You have to ask yourself why? And the answer is so ridiculous that once you see through the smokescreen you see that this is about control of your children. They don’t trust you to raise your children. They know better.

So why does Mr. Duncan think we need longer school days and years?

Daily Caller reports:

“As you guys know, our world has changed, our economy has changed,” said Duncan. “The days of telling kids to go home at 2:30 and having mom there with a peanut butter sandwich, those days are gone. Whether it’s a single parent working one, two, three jobs or two parents working, the hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are a huge anxiety, and that’s why we have to keep our schools open longer.”

So let me get this straight. Many parents can’t be home with children when they come home at 2:30 and that’s bad so instead of giving parents tax breaks or incentives to stay home with their children they decide to spend more taxpayer money to keep schools open 12 months a year and 12 hours a day making it harder for parents to be able to afford to stay home because they have to pay for all these programs.
The question must be asked whether parents staying home with children is a societal good. And if so shouldn’t the federal government be doing more to encourage it, rather than making it harder.

But when they say more time at school, they actually mean less time with family.  This is their end game. Remember “It Takes a Village.”  Well, the village looks an awful lot like the federal government. And a lot less like Mom with a peanut butter sandwich.

Read more at Creative Minority Report

H/T Barbara Curtis at MommyLife.net

The Shocking Origins of Public Education

Mama Grizzlies: Obama Wants More Time With Your Cubs

Stealth Education Overhaul

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

Daycares Don’t Care: How Can a Daycare Love?

Hey mama grizzlies, it appears as if the White House wants more time with your cubs. Yep, I guess Barack and his socialistic cabal have had a rough go at “fundamentally transforming our nation” in dealing with the increasingly-jaundiced thinking adults who’ve lost the Obama buzz, still dig America, love God and our Constitution, and ask questions (and crap like that). So, like good brainwashers who cannot bamboozle adults, they go in for our babies.

Yep, for the sake of socialism and with an eye to “changing our traditions, our history,” as Michelle Obama said, BHO’s boy Arne Duncan is tabling a plan for parents to give “them” more time with our tots. That means “alone time,” as in big chunks of alone time with the teachers whom “they” have fed a steady diet of “America sucks and socialism is yummy” sauce.

It’s the same stack of teachers the NEA has greatly encouraged to read Saul Alinsky’s commie rag, Rules for Radicals. And you won’t have to worry about them being physically harmed while they’re away from your gaze, Mr. and Mrs. Grizz, because radical gay activist Kevin “Fistgate” Jennings will make sure your kids are okay. Especially your teenage boys.

This past week, Secretary of (Re)Education Arne Duncan said at the National Press Club that he’d like to have schools open 12 to 14 hours a day and 11 to 12 months out of the year. Dr. Evil couched his desires for huge chunks of time spent with your children in the most flowery of language, musing aloud that he wanted to have your children for an extended period to help them “compete internationally.”

Really, Arne? Correct me if I’m wrong, but we used to compete internationally … as in run the flippin’ planet … didn’t we? That is until dipsticks like you and your progressive posse decided to toss God, the Constitution, common sense, a clear delineation between right and wrong, and discipline out of school and replace it with Muslim sensitivity training classes, books about Penguins sodomizing each other, and social justice as you passed out condoms to first graders and provided secret abortions for 13-year-old girls. It’s funny that America never had a problem excelling until secular progressives, with their Marxist bent, became the pace car for the public school system.

The ambitious Obama administration, mama grizzly, is not content with trying to rule our freedom of speech (especially squelching critiques of their feckless policies), but they also want to put the joystick of our economy, our car companies, our health care, our self reliance and independence, our retirement, and now our kids into their sweaty palms because, you see, they’re wiser than we are in regard to what our kids need to know about how the world should tick—thus Duncan’s talk about more time to uh … um … “educate” your cubs.

Read more at Townhall.com

Stealth Education Overhaul

Trusting obama with our kids

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

It’s official: The Chevrolet Volt, the new plug-in electric hybrid car from General Motors, will cost $41,000—that’s a four-seat hatchback for about the base price of a BMW 335i. To be sure, a $7,500 federal tax credit cuts that to $33,500, and electricity is cheaper per mile than gas. But barring some huge oil price spike or stiff new gas tax, it would take more than a decade to offset the higher purchase price. Some will pay a premium for the frisson of going green or being the first “early adopter” on the block. Still, this little runabout is a rich man’s ride.

And that’s my problem with the Obama administration’s energy policy, or at least with his lavish subsidies for the Volt, Nissan’s all-electric Leaf (likely sticker price $33,000), and Tesla’s $100,000 all-electric Roadster: Where does the federal government get off spending the average person’s tax dollars to help better-off-than-average Americans buy expensive new cars?

Read more at Slate

Fossil fuels power the economic engine that ensures justice and opportunity in America today. Policies that make energy less reliable and affordable reduce business revenues and profits, shrink investment and innovation, imperil economic recovery, and hobble job creation, civil rights, and the pursuit of happiness and the American dream.

Whether they take the form of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, restrictions on drilling and coal mining, or EPA rules under its claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” human health and welfare, anti-energy policies frustrate the natural desire of poor and minority Americans to improve their lives.

As to coping with higher temperatures, restrictive energy policies send electricity prices skyrocketing, making it harder for low-income households to afford air conditioning, and putting lives at risk. They send poor families back to pre-AC misery of bygone eras, like the 1896 heat wave that killed 1,300 people in New York City’s sweltering tenements. In wintertime, they make heating less affordable, again putting lives at risk.

I recently documented the connection between energy policies and civil rights. My “Justice through Affordable Energy for Wisconsin” report focuses on the Dairy State, where I grew up. However, its lessons apply to every state, especially the 26 that get 48-98% of their electricity from coal or have a strong manufacturing base. (The full report can be found at www.CFACT.org)

Energy is the foundation for America’s jobs, living standards, and everything we make, grow, eat, wear, transport and do. Climate change bills, energy taxes and renewable energy mandates deliberately restrict supplies of reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy – sending shockwaves through the economy.

Read more at Townhall.com

Obama’s “green” vision distorts his perception of reality

ICLEI: Has Your Local Government Already Succumbed to this Dangerous EnviroStatist Activist Group?

Global Warming Is a Religion