Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

Posts Tagged ‘Tyranny’

This is a fantastic documentary!  I highly recommend that you get a copy and show it to your church, small group, and friends, whether believers or not!

View on YouTube – Part 1

View on YouTube – Part 2

View on YouTube – Part 3

View on YouTube – Part 4

View on YouTube – Part 5

Can Christians be Capitalists?

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

Money, Greed, and GodThe Ugly Side of “Social Justice” Theology

Evangelical Left Twists the Gospel in ‘Social Justice’ Fervor

Barack Obama’s Marxist Spiritual Advisor

Is Socialism Biblical?

The Base Metal of Christian Socialism

TRUE Social Justice: Transforming Lives In Need

THIS is the kind of frightening ignorance we have to rescue our country from, and the reason why some are arguing that we’ll never get government off our backs until we bring back the culture of personal responsibility.   

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this was a prank call.  But sadly, it wasn’t.  Wow!  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!

View on YouTube

Healthcare or a Hummer? Life’s Tough Choices

Voter: Obama Is Going To Pay For My Gas And Mortgage!

Back on Uncle Sam’s Plantation

Something for nothing? Think again

Walter Williams: Good Intentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more at Pajamas Media

TEA-Party Hypocrisy: How Much Socialism Is Acceptable?

Religion and Morality: Indispensable Supports

Principium Imprimis – First Principles

Charlotte Iserbyt served as Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration, where she first blew the whistle on a major technology initiative which would control curriculum in America’s classrooms. She has written a book called “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America”, which is now available as a free e-book download.

View on YouTube

The Shocking Origins of Public Education

The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher

Abolish the Unconstitutional Department of Education

Do You Know What Textbooks Your Children Are Really Reading?

How Radical Professors Indoctrinate Students

Want to Teach? Toe the Ideological Line!

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

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

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

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

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

Read more at Advancing Religious Liberty

Court orders Christian homeschooled girl to attend public school

California Court Rules Homeschooling Illegal

Swedish court refuses to return homeschool boy to family

US grants home schooling German family political asylum

The Shocking Origins of Public Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While the furor over the proposed mosque at Ground Zero has New York Gov. David Paterson offering public land as a peace offering, a more familiar symbol — the cross — is systematically being uprooted around the country.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled August 18 that placing crosses where Utah state troopers died violates the Establishment Clause.

In California’s Mojave National Preserve, the site of a seven-foot, metal-pipe cross first erected 75 years ago by World War I veterans is bare.
 
In 2001, the American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of Frank Buono, an ACLU member, atheist and former National Park Service employee living in Oregon. Mr. Buono said the cross offended him when he returned for visits. Congress authorized a transfer of the property to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The case reached the Supreme Court, which reversed an appellate court’s order and kicked it back to the lower court on April 28. Writing for the court majority (and the vast majority of Americans), Justice Kennedy said: “Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten.”
 
Ten days later, someone cut down the cross, which had been covered by a plywood box lest Mr. Buono see it and start melting.
 
When another cross appeared a few days later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s Justice Department ordered the Park Service to remove it.
 
Over in Monterey, California, someone in September 2009 tore down a 40-year-old cross on Del Monte Beach that commemorated the city’s 200th birthday where Spanish explorer Don Gaspar de Portola and Father Juan Crespi landed. City officials voted to allow private funders to replace it, but the ACLU objected. After a year of legal threats, the cross will be rebuilt instead at the Diocese of Monterey’s San Carlos Cemetery.
 
“In truth, it is no defeat for Christianity,” the Monterey Herald smirked in a March 2 editorial. “It is a victory for those twin freedoms — freedom of religion and freedom from religion.” Right. Dispatching a historic cross to a cemetery is nobody’s defeat. Someone should tell the ACLU folks before they pop more champagne.
 
The paper did admit that the vandal who cut down the cross won “a minor victory.” What would a major victory look like? A torched church?

Read more at One News Now

Federal Appeals Court Rules Against Utah Memorial Crosses Along Highway

Justice Department forbids restoration of stolen Mojave Cross

The Judiciary’s Culturally Sanctioned Allergy to Christianity Flourishes

There is a little piece making its way around the Internet. It has turned viral mostly because many see so much truth in it.

“If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.  If a liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants guns outlawed.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.  If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants meat products banned.

If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.  If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he tries to better his situation.  A liberal wants to know who is going to fix it for him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.  Liberals want those they don’t like to be silenced.

If a conservative is a nonbeliever, he doesn’t go to church.  If a liberal is a nonbeliever he wants any mention of religion silenced, unless, of course, the religion is from another culture.

If a conservative needs health care he shops for it, or looks for a job that will provide it.  A liberal demands that the rest of us provide for it.

A conservative will read this and will forward it, so his friends can have a good laugh.  A liberal will read this and delete it, because he’s offended.”

There is a widely held perception that liberals want governments to control almost everything. Conservatives don’t.

Astute readers are already lining up defenses based on hypocrisy. Be careful, the exceptions are not as exceptional as they may appear.

Liberals, for example, don’t believe the government should ban abortions and gay marriage, and conservatives call for restrictions. It appears hypocritical on its face, but is it?

Liberals frame these issues in terms of “choice” and “consent,” but continue to demand governmental intervention to validate their choice. In fact, liberals wish to use the governmental purse and the authority of governmental courts to push these issues on everyone irrespective of the stated wishes of the majority expressed through the ballot box.

Read more at the WCF Courier

Big Brother out of control

New Threats To Freedom

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?

Dick Morris writes in the New Patriot Journal:

“The prospect we now face is not the intermittent up-and-down fluctuations of unemployment we have had since the Great Depression.  Thanks to Obama’s policies, we’re confronting the possibility of an unemployment rate that never comes down, just as they have in Europe.  If we stay on Obama’s course, lower joblessness in the United States will be a thing of the past.”

The recent rise in unemployment back up to 9.6% and the loss of 54,000 jobs in August, suggests that our prediction is – dismally – coming true.
    
The Obama stimulus plan has finally kicked in: The higher spending he brought to our nation and the debt levels that are accompanying it are the result.
    
Why is unemployment remaining so high?  Because the totality of Obama’s policies are dragging us into a depression.

•  The prospect of dramatically higher taxes next year is freezing consumer spending, particularly in the upper income ranges which spend a third of America’s consumption.

•  The huge changes that are looming in medical care brought about by Obama’s health care legislation are freezing new employment and expansion in the medical sector which accounts for 16% of GDP.

•  The financial reform legislation has so raised the prospect of a federal takeover of any bank that makes “imprudent” loans that financial institutions are afraid to lend, freezing new job creation.

•  The looming possibility of cap-and-tax legislation in the name of halting climate change is freezing any expansion in the manufacturing and energy sectors since these policies will force jobs to move overseas to locations that do not impose such a tax (e.g. India and China).

•  The massive expansion in the deficit and in the resulting debt has so eroded confidence in our nation’s future that Americans are now saving 6% of their income, up from 1% in the past, sapping consumer spending.

•  The threat of new rules for union elections that will spread private sector unionization is freezing business expansion plans.
      
Obama’s rush to spend, regulate, re-engineer, redistribute, and tax have stopped any recovery and are sending us back into recession.  In her wonderful book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes notes how FDR’s policies in the late 1930s did the same thing.  She notes how the imposition of the Social Security tax in 1937 (benefits did not start until 1941) and the rapid wage hikes that accompanied the passage of the Wagner Act (steel worker wages rose 40% in 1937) sent a recovering nation back into a new depression that lasted until the war started in 1939.

In his haste to re-make America and to bring us the “fundamental change” he promised as he campaigned for president in 2008, Obama has torpedoed the recovery and sent us back into a double dip recession.
    
The answer is to cut spending back to pre-Obama levels, reduce taxes and eliminate the threat of tax increases, zero fund the changes Obama has legislated in health care (and repeal them in 2013), eliminate the threat of cap-and-tax, and lay the basis for solid economic growth.
          
We have left the recession that started in 2007 and entered a new recession caused by Obama’s policies.

Economy Caught in Depression, Not Recession

The Audacity of Failure

Today the Labor Department released the September jobs report, showing nonfarm payrolls decreased again by 54,000 and that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 9.6%.

By every objective measure, President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package has been a complete failure. When President Obama was selling his stimulus plan to the American people, he promised it would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. At the time, employment stood at about 134.3 million, according to the Labor Department’s most commonly used measure. That established an Obama jobs target for December 2010 at 137.8 million. According to the latest jobs report, total U.S. employment stood at 130.3 million in August, which means the cumulative Obama jobs deficit stands at 7.5 million.

Despite the mounting evidence of failure, the Obama administration is still completely unapologetic. Defending her tenure as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer told journalists at the National Press Club Wednesday: “The current recession has been fundamentally different from other postwar recessions. … Precisely because such severe financial shocks have been rare, there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact. To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did, and why they cut labor so much more than they normally would, given the decline in output.” But after first admitting that the experts don’t understand the current crisis, she then confidently asserts:

It is clear that the Recovery Act has played a large role in the turnaround in GDP and employment. In a report that Jared Bernstein and I issued during the transition, we estimated that by the end of 2010, a stimulus package like the Recovery Act would raise real GDP by about 3½ percent and employment by about 3½ million jobs, relative to what otherwise would have occurred…. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, CEA’s own estimates, and estimates from a range of respected private sector analysts suggest that the Act has already raised employment by approximately two to three million jobs relative to what it otherwise would have been.

Got that? Romer first admits that her magic Keynesian formulas were completely useless in predicting how bad the recession would be, and then she turns right around and uses those exact same formulas to justify the success of the stimulus. If that bootstrapping weren’t audacious enough, Romer then went on to claim that “the United States still faces a substantial shortfall of aggregate demand” and that “structural changes in the composition of our output or a mismatch between worker skills and jobs” having nothing to do with continued high unemployment. So instead of changing course, Romer wants us to double down with a second round of economic stimulus.

How much more stimulus does the Obama administration want to spend? Romer wouldn’t say, and the White House is desperate to avoid calling any new action “stimulus,” but The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has crunched the numbers and come up with a ballpark size of how big the original economic stimulus package would have to have been if we take the left’s Keynesian economics as gospel: “Full employment is perhaps 4.5-5%. If we assume that stimulus benefits increase linearly, that means we would have needed a stimulus of, on the low end, $2.5 trillion. On the high end, it would have been in the $4-5 trillion range.”

Even the Obama administration doesn’t want to add another $5 trillion to our $13.5 trillion national debt. That is why the Obama administration is pushing a $921 billion tax hike set to take effect on January 1, 2011. There is only one word for proposing $981 billion in taxes to pay for trillions in failed stimulus spending in the midst of 9.6% unemployment: audacity.

Today the Labor Department released the September jobs report, showing nonfarm payrolls decreased again by 54,000 and that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 9.6%.

By every objective measure, President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package has been a complete failure. When President Obama was selling his stimulus plan to the American people, he promised it would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. At the time, employment stood at about 134.3 million, according to the Labor Department’s most commonly used measure. That established an Obama jobs target for December 2010 at 137.8 million. According to the latest jobs report, total U.S. employment stood at 130.3 million in August, which means the cumulative Obama jobs deficit stands at 7.5 million.

Despite the mounting evidence of failure, the Obama administration is still completely unapologetic. Defending her tenure as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer told journalists at the National Press Club Wednesday: “The current recession has been fundamentally different from other postwar recessions. … Precisely because such severe financial shocks have been rare, there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact. To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did, and why they cut labor so much more than they normally would, given the decline in output.” But after first admitting that the experts don’t understand the current crisis, she then confidently asserts:

It is clear that the Recovery Act has played a large role in the turnaround in GDP and employment. In a report that Jared Bernstein and I issued during the transition, we estimated that by the end of 2010, a stimulus package like the Recovery Act would raise real GDP by about 3½ percent and employment by about 3½ million jobs, relative to what otherwise would have occurred…. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, CEA’s own estimates, and estimates from a range of respected private sector analysts suggest that the Act has already raised employment by approximately two to three million jobs relative to what it otherwise would have been.

Got that? Romer first admits that her magic Keynesian formulas were completely useless in predicting how bad the recession would be, and then she turns right around and uses those exact same formulas to justify the success of the stimulus. If that bootstrapping weren’t audacious enough, Romer then went on to claim that “the United States still faces a substantial shortfall of aggregate demand” and that “structural changes in the composition of our output or a mismatch between worker skills and jobs” having nothing to do with continued high unemployment. So instead of changing course, Romer wants us to double down with a second round of economic stimulus.

How much more stimulus does the Obama administration want to spend? Romer wouldn’t say, and the White House is desperate to avoid calling any new action “stimulus,” but The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has crunched the numbers and come up with a ballpark size of how big the original economic stimulus package would have to have been if we take the left’s Keynesian economics as gospel: “Full employment is perhaps 4.5-5%. If we assume that stimulus benefits increase linearly, that means we would have needed a stimulus of, on the low end, $2.5 trillion. On the high end, it would have been in the $4-5 trillion range.”

Even the Obama administration doesn’t want to add another $5 trillion to our $13.5 trillion national debt. That is why the Obama administration is pushing a $921 billion tax hike set to take effect on January 1, 2011. There is only one word for proposing $981 billion in taxes to pay for trillions in failed stimulus spending in the midst of 9.6% unemployment: audacity.

Read more at the Heritage Foundation

Economy Caught in Depression, Not Recession

Why Obamanomics Has Failed

The Jobless Obama “Recovery”

Repeating FDR’s Mistakes

Give Capitalism a Chance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And blogger the Hyacinth Girl has experienced the warnings firsthand:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more at the National Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more at Fox News

New U.S. Push to Regulate Internet Access

The Internet “Kill Switch”

US Cybersecurity Czar wants online “identity cards”

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

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Keynes vs. Hayek: The Great Debate Continues

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From the Right Scoop:

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

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

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

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

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

Activism or Awareness? A False Choice

Join the fight to take back our nation!