Lawmakers are working to block an unprecedented power grab by the Environmental Protection Agency to use the Clean Water Act (CWA) and control land alongside ditches, gullies and other ephemeral spots by claiming the sources are part of navigable waterways.
These temporary water sources are often created by rain or snowmelt, and would make it harder for private property owners to build in their own backyards, grow crops, raise livestock and conduct other activities on their own land, lawmakers say.
“Never in the history of the CWA has federal regulation defined ditches and other upland features as ‘waters of the United States,’” said Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), the ranking committee member, and Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio), chairman of the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.
“This is without a doubt an expansion of federal jurisdiction,” the lawmakers said in a May 31 letter to House colleagues.
The unusual alliance of the powerful House Republicans and Democrat to jointly sponsor legislation to overturn the new guidelines signals a willingness on Capitol Hill to rein in the formidable agency.
“The Obama administration is doing everything in its power to increase costs and regulatory burdens for American businesses, farmers and individual property owners,” Mica said in a statement to Human Events. “This federal jurisdiction grab has been opposed by Congress for years, and now the administration and its agencies are ignoring law and rulemaking procedures in order to tighten their regulatory grip over every water body in the country.”
“But this administration needs to realize it is not above the law,” Mica said.
The House measure carries 64 Republican and Democratic cosponsors and was passed in committee last week. A companion piece of legislation is already gathering steam in the Senate and is cosponsored by 26 Republicans.
“President Obama’s EPA continues to act as if it is above the law. It is using this overreaching guidance to pre-empt state and local governments, farmers and ranchers, small business owners and homeowners from making local land and water use decisions,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in announcing their measure in March. “Our bill will stop this unprecedented Washington power grab and restore Americans’ property rights.”
“It’s time to get EPA lawyers out of Americans’ backyards,” Barrasso said.
Today Justice Roberts engaged in one of the most politically motivated acts of judicial activism in the history of the court.
The Commerce Clause, whose “interpretation” expanded in 1942 as a result of a political threat from FDR to pass a judicial act to add a dozen or so members to the court and appoint them with political cronies if the court didn’t start ruling in his favor, finally had a line drawn in the sand with this ruling. Every lawyer knows that the expanding Commerce Clause interpretation lacked a certain legitimacy because of this history and even some more liberal inclined legal scholars have been coming to terms with this reality. Government expansionists have wiped their feet on that interpretation and as is so often the case, they were given an inch and took a mile.
Today, Justice Roberts along with four other Justices (Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) properly ruled that using the Commerce Clause to compel entrance into a market goes too far and that the Commerce Clause does not allow the government to compel market activity. This is good but is rendered almost hollow by what Roberts did as I will explain below.
Keep on mind that Ginsburg, Kagan, Breyer and Sotomoyor would have a Commerce Clause unlimited in power meaning that government can compel you to do most anything from the womb to the tomb. Anyone who tells you that the left does not want a leviathan state ….
So Roberts, in a nakedly political move to save ObamaCare, decided to rewrite the law and convert the mandate penalty into a tax. [/SARCASM ON] You see, Congress is stupid and in spite of the fact that they write and modify tax law every year, obviously somehow with this law, Congress had somehow forgotten to write it as a tax, or even call it a tax, but lucky for us we have Justice Roberts to come along and rewrite the law to teach those silly dopes in Congress how to write tax law [/SARCASM OFF]. Of course it is a responsibility of the court to ascertain and apply the legislative intent of the law as best the court can, GREAT! Except that the problem is that the President and members of Congress said repeatedly that the mandate penalty is NOT a tax.
When the Court asked for briefs on the ObamaCare law (ACA) they asked for briefs on the mandate, the denial of all Medicaid funds if states didn’t comply, the Commerce Clause etc. The Court did NOT ask for brief’s on the tax law implications of ObamaCare. This shows that web sites that watch the Supreme Court such as Prof. Volohk are very likely correct in their assertion that Roberts’ interpretation came very late in the process and in fact he probably changed his vote at near the last moment.
Tax law has to come in certain forms, either as a direct tax (called a capitation tax), an excise tax, or an income tax. The Constitution, in Article I Section 2, puts limits on the types of taxes that can be levied and there is plenty of case law defining these issues, all of which was ignored by Justice Roberts (by Amendment the income tax is an exception to Article I Section 2). In the opinion Roberts could not even tell us what kind of tax the ObamaCare mandate is. Is it a direct tax which must be apportioned equally, but look who is exempt; or is it an excise tax? In some ways the Roberts decision seems to act like it is parts of both.
[Editor’s Note: Some readers do not understand the tax law problem I was referring to so I will elaborate. Is the mandate an income tax? No. Is the mandate an excise tax? Well an excise tax is a fee for service so the answer is no. Is it a direct tax (capitation tax) no, because it is not equally apportioned among the states and the people (just look at who gets exempt for starters, states that get waivers ets etc). In short, as a tax it is not a constitutional one and goes against all previous tax precedent.]
There is also the issue of the Anti-injuction Act. The Anti-injuction Act says that the Court may not rule on a tax, no plaintiff has standing in court, until they are actually hit with paying the tax, thus preventing the Court from ruling on the matter further. Roberts, somehow in his ruling out of thin air, rules that it is not a tax for the purpose of the Anti-injuction Act, but is a tax when it comes to the health insurance mandate and penalty, even though Congress specifically said it was not a tax. So for part of the ruling it is a tax and for the other part is is not a tax. This is insanity. Again, the fact that Roberts and the Court did not ask for briefs on this subject indicates that this scheme to save ObamaCare was invented at the last minute out of thin air.
Roberts’ ruling uses twisted logic to get from Point A to Point B. This is a ruling with a goal in mind and an attempt to justify it after the decision was made. Charles Krauthammer wrote that what Roberts pulled out of his hat is a dodge.
The Chief Justice (Roberts) was hell-bent to find a way to make this law applicable, so he just decided, you know what, as a tax increase it works… – Rush Limbaugh.
According to Roberts, the government is not punishing you and mandating you to enter the market, thus penalizing inactivity, instead they are merely taxing inactivity and somehow that makes it OK. This amounts to a distinction without a difference. Why? Now the penalty is low, but when the penalty for those who do not buy the government mandated insurance goes up to thousands of dollars a year in (2018) and the costs of health insurance are already skyrocketing because of ObamaCare, what are low income people going to do? Go to jail for not paying their (as now defined by Roberts) ObamaCare taxes? In every way that matters in the application of the ObamaCare law per the Roberts ruling it is a mandate with a penalty and the IRS will not be forgiving. The IRS has no enforcement mechanism for ObamaCare now, but does anyone expect that to last? Roberts actually has the gall to make the case that since the penalty is low it is not a “real” mandate.
The Secretary of Health and Human services can essentially regulate health care to the point of virtually nationalizing it over time. In practice the government’s power to reach into our lives is greatly expanded in spite of the feckless words in the ruling that limit the Commerce Clause. It is Roberts’ job to uphold the basic tenant of limited government. The power grab in ObamaCare is off the charts which is why even the liberal minded Justice Kennedy made it clear that such a grab is unconstitutional in its entirety.
The Roberts’ ruling is lawless. If his goal was to galvanize traditional America for Romney, he did it.
See what I mean –
UPDATE: After the Supreme Court Ruling on Obamacare What is Next? – LINK
[Editor’s Note – I can see the objections now: Chuck, sure you have legal training, but you are not a lawyer and some of the people you have quoted are not lawyers (such as Limbaugh and Krauthammer). In coming weeks there will be law review and professorial articles critiquing this ruling in detail. Time will tell if I am correct in my analysis, but my record of accuracy in such articles leaves me confident.]
UPDATE II – Dissents Back Political Arena Editor’s Analysis
Editor’s Note – I deliberately did not read far into the dissent because I wanted to form my own view of the ruling and also because I was so steamed after reading Roberts’ incoherent pretzel logic that I had to walk away. The Weekly Standard has a nice summary of the ruling with some notes in plain English to make it easier to understand. Of course the entire ruling and dissents can be seen at the pdf link at the top of the page.
Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito Dissent: ‘We Cannot Rewrite the Statute to Be What It Is Not’
“Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling.”
Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito forcefully disagree with Roberts in their dissent. “[W]e cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not,” the four Justices write. “[W]e have never—never—treated as a tax an exaction which faces up to the critical difference between a tax and a penalty, and explicitly denominates the exaction a ‘penalty.’ Eighteen times in §5000A itself and elsewhere throughout the Act, Congress called the exaction in §5000A(b) a ‘penalty.'”
The dissenting Justices also argue that “judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling,” since the Constitution requires tax bills to originate in the House of Representatives, “the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off.”
The dissent goes to to destroy in details the pretzel logic and lack of legal reasoning and precedent of the Roberts ruling. Continue reading HERE.
“The Roberts ruling is so incoherent and full of internal contradictions that I would be embarrassed to put my name on it.”
UPDATE IV – First Paragraph of the dissent:
The first paragraph in the dissent hits it out of the park –
The case is easy and straightforward, however, in another respect. What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States.
[Street Translation via the Editor – There are generally accepted limits on government power that have been repeated in the Founding Documents and in 220 years of law that tell us countless times that government power is limited. The fact that ObamaCare goes in excess of those limits is a no brainer. – Amen]
UPDATE V– Curt Levey: Top 10 Lessons from the Roberts ObamaCare Ruling – LINK
UPDATE VI – Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly on the Supreme Court: There is no silver lining (video) – LINK
UPDATE VII – Explanation of the ObamaCare Ruling for the Non-lawyer – LINK
UPDATE VIII – Mark Steyn: A lie makes Obamacare legal – LINK
UPDATE IX– Prof. Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress’s Power to Tax – LINK
Since FDR’s court packing threat the Commerce Clause interpretation has gone off the deep end. Everyone who has studied law seriously knows that the “modern” expansionist view of the commerce clause started to become interpreted that way not because the court had a legal epiphany, but rather they feared the Democratic Party would pack the court with 18 or so new justices all of whom would be political hacks. These new interpretations that were done under duress took the entire notion of limited government and tossed it out the window. I am glad to see Justice Scalia come to this point of view.
With a Supreme Court decision on the fate of President Obama’s health care law expected in the next two weeks, every wisp of a hint about the justices’ thinking is getting the scrutiny usually reserved for CAT scans.
Justice Antonin Scalia picked the right moment, then, to deliver more than 500 pages of hints, in a book to be published next week. He wrote it with Bryan A. Garner, and it is an overview and summation of the justice’s approach to making sense of statutes and the Constitution.
It is also studded with telling asides and intimations about past and future decisions.
Justice Scalia writes, for instance, that he has little use for a central precedent the Obama administration has cited to justify the health care law under the Constitution’s commerce clause, Wickard v. Filburn.
In that 1942 decision, Justice Scalia writes, the Supreme Court “expanded the Commerce Clause beyond all reason” by ruling that “a farmer’s cultivation of wheat for his own consumption affected interstate commerce and thus could be regulated under the Commerce Clause.”
That position is good evidence, particularly when coupled with Justice Scalia’s skeptical questioning at the arguments in the health care case in March, that the administration will not capture his vote.
Justice Scalia’s treatment of the Wickard case had been far more respectful in his judicial writings. In the book’s preface, he explains (referring to himself in the third person) that he “knows that there are some, and fears that there may be many, opinions that he has joined or written over the past 30 years that contradict what is written here.” Some inconsistencies can be explained by respect for precedent, he writes, others “because wisdom has come late.”
“Worse still,” he writes, he “does not swear that the opinions that he joins or writes in the future will comply with what is written here,” for the first two reasons “or because a judge must remain open to persuasion by counsel.”
Mr. Garner, a prominent lexicographer and authority on usage, also collaborated with Justice Scalia on an earlier book, “Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges.” He said the timing of the new one was happenstance.
The recent recession wiped out nearly two decades of Americans’ wealth, according to government data released Monday, with middle-class families bearing the brunt of the decline.
The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992.
The data represent one of the most detailed looks at how the economic downturn altered the landscape of family finance. Over a span of three years, Americans watched progress that took almost a generation to accumulate evaporate. The promise of retirement built on the inevitable rise of the stock market proved illusory for most. Home-ownership, once heralded as a pathway to wealth, became an albatross.
The findings underscore the depth of the wounds of the financial crisis and how far many families remain from healing. If the recession set Americans back 20 years, economists say, the road forward is sure to be a long one. And so far, the country has seen only a halting recovery.
“It’s hard to overstate how serious the collapse in the economy was,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics. “We were in free fall.”
The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class. Only roughly half of middle-class Americans remained on the same economic rung during the downturn, the Fed found. Their median net worth — the value of assets such as homes, automobiles and stocks minus any debt — suffered the biggest drops.
Minorities, this is what the “enlightened academic left” thinks of you. And this is not just a few radicalized pinheads in Minnesota, this type of senseless race bating, victimology, and stereotyping is typical of “black studies” and other neo-Marxist grievance studies programs in public school and universities in almost every state.
The left needs racial division and must pit one group against another for people to buy their ideology. This goes double for leftist academics who get millions of dollars spent of grievance studies programs, various grievance studies centers, publications etc.
Remember the Un-Fair Campaign, that august collection of enlightened and thoroughly non-racist individuals who believe that whites have an irrevocable privilege that gives them an advantage in society (and that, by extensions minorities will always need special favors to get a leg up)? Well, if you don’t, for the purposes of this story, it may be advisable to rewatch this ad of theirs:
As you can see, the Un-Fair Campaign is aptly named. Their perspective on race is deeply unfair. Fortunately, at least one group has set out to make a video that rebuts the above, and shows how the perspective involved is unfair not just to whites, but to minorities as well. The resulting effort may cause you to spontaneously break out into applause:
What with the refusal of the University of Minnesota-Duluth, one of the Un-Fair Campaign’s biggest institutional sponsors, to defund the organization, this variety of outraged mockery is perhaps the best response.
My friend Scott Ott and his friends at Trifecta had the most thoughtful response to this issue we have yet seen:
The Heritage Foundation has a piece out that explains just a sampling of the blatant violation of Separation of Powers committed by the Obama Administration.
Even though the Democrat-controlled Senate rejected the President’s cap-and-trade plan, his Environmental Protection Agency classified carbon dioxide, the compound that sustains vegetative life, as a pollutant so that it could regulate it under the Clean Air Act.
After the Employee Free Choice Act—designed to bolster labor unions’ dwindling membership rolls—was defeated by Congress, the National Labor Relations Board announced a rule that would implement “snap elections” for union representation, limiting employers’ abilities to make their case to workers and virtually guaranteeing a higher rate of unionization at the expense of workplace democracy.
After an Internet regulation proposal failed to make it through Congress, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would regulate the Web anyway, even despite a federal court’s ruling that it had no authority to do so.
Although Congress consistently has barred the Department of Education from getting involved in curriculum matters, the Administration has offered waivers for the No Child Left Behind law in exchange for states adopting national education standards, all without congressional authorization.
Likewise, the Administration has often simply refused to enforce laws duly enacted by Congress:
Since it objects to existing federal immigration laws, the Administration has decided to apply those laws selectively and actively prevent the state (like Arizona) from enforcing those laws themselves.
Rather than push Congress to repeal federal laws against marijuana use, the Department of Justice (DOJ) simply decided it would no longer enforce those laws.
DOJ also has announced that it would stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act or defending it from legal challenge rather than seeking legislative recourse.
On Tuesday, the President invoked executive privilege to avoid handing over some 1,300 documents in an ongoing Congressional investigation. The Supreme Court has held that executive privilege cannot be invoked to shield wrongdoing. Is that what’s happening in this case? “Congress needs to get to the bottom of that question to prevent an illegal invocation of executive privilege and further abuses of power. That will require an index of the withheld documents and an explanation of why each of them is covered by executive privilege—and more,” Heritage legal scholar Todd Gaziano writes.
Earlier this year the President crossed the threshold of constitutionality when he gave “recess appointments” to four officials who were subject to Senate confirmation, even though the Senate wasn’t in recess. Gaziano wrote at the time that such appointments “would render the Senate’s advice and consent role to normal appointments almost meaningless. It is a grave constitutional wrong.”
There is no telling where such disregard may go next, but the trend is clear, and it leads further and further away from the constitutional rule of law.
Niall Ferguson is an award winning historian and economic historian who’s work is recognized around the world. This very web site contains several pieces of his work.
The economic historian, who is affiliated to Oxford and Harvard Universities, says wise young voters should insist politicians pay off debts as soon as possible for the benefit and security of their own financial interests.
Speaking at the Reith Lectures on Tuesday, Professor Ferguson will argue the “young should welcome austerity,” adding they “find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests.”
In his first lecture, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, Prof Ferguson will insist the current public debt “allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.”
“It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” he says in an article ahead of the lecture.
He adds: “If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.”
Professor Ferguson argues the true size of government debt in Western democracies is many times larger than “deeply misleading” figures issued in the form of bonds because they do not record unfunded liabilities of social security and health care schemes.
“The last corporation to publish financial statements this misleading was Enron,” he wrote.
“These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure,” he said.
He argues one of the ways out of the current economic “mess” would be for “a heroic effort of leadership” to persuade all generations to “vote for a more responsible fiscal policy.”
The White House tried to blunt Wednesday’s contempt of Congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder with claims that Republicans were trying to focus on something other than the economy and jobs.
“At the beginning of this year, Republicans announced that one of their chief legislative and strategic priorities was to investigate the administration and damage the president politically,” press secretary Jay Carney told reporters today. “We are nine days away from the expiration of federal transportation funding which guarantees jobs for almost a million construction workers because Congress has not passed a transportation bill. We are 10 days away from student loan rates doubling, potentially impacting over 7.4 million borrowers.”
And that’s what President Obama focused on today as he notched yet another speech on student-loan rates into the schedule.
But the Carney spin came on the same day that the House passed the Domestic Energy and Jobs Act, a package of seven bills focused on spurring job growth and lowering energy costs while embracing the country’s energy resources.
That legislation passed 284-163 despite a veto threat two days ago from Obama.
Go to the mall at 4pm on a weekday and subject yourself to the product of our public schools… we have all seen this. It is one of those things that everyone knows and few talk about.
I recently finished a new degree and I was shocked at how ignorant and miseducated the public schoolers were. So are many professors.
PRINCETON, NJ — Americans’ confidence in public schools is down five percentage points from last year, with 29% expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. That establishes a new low in public school confidence from the 33% measured in Gallup’s 2007 and 2008 Confidence in Institutions polls. The high was 58% the first time Gallup included public schools, in 1973.
In addition to public schools, this year’s Confidence in Institutions survey finds record lows, all by one percentage point, in Americans’ confidence in the church or organized religion (44%), banks (21%), and television news (21%).
Gallup has asked Americans to say how much confidence they have in a variety of U.S. institutions since 1973, including annually since 1993.
None of this comes at a surprise, even the low numbers on organized religion as the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has taken a very heavy toll the Vatican’s credibility.
This is just a few small excerpts from the speech which can be seen in it’s entirety HERE. Most people who are not engaged in such battles have no idea how almost universal the left’s contempt for free speech is from the Whit House all the way to college campuses and classrooms.
On campus the left moves to silence conservatives, libertarians, Christians and Jews every day. Many groups are set up to help put an end to such censorship such as the Student Press Law Center, The ACLJ, the Rutherford Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Alliance Defense Fund, Campus Watch, Campus Reform, Students for Academic Freedom etc. All of them have one thing in common; more cases and complaints than they have the resources to deal with.
Senator McConnell (excerpts):
You’ve all heard about the Idaho businessman who’s become a personal target of the President for speaking out on behalf of candidates and causes the President opposes. Shortly after being publicly singled out by the President’s campaign, people were digging through his divorce records, cable television hosts were going after him on air, and bloggers were harassing his kids.
Charles and David Koch have become household names, not for the tens of thousands of people they employ, not for their generosity to charity, and not for building up one of the most successful private corporations on the planet; but because of their forceful and unapologetic promotion and defense of capitalism.
In return for their decades of work, one of the President’s top aides exposed them to public scrutiny by insinuating that they’d done something shady on their taxes. And earlier this year, the President’s own campaign manager sent a mass email to the campaign’s supporters, notifying them of a Koch-backed event, presumably to incite just the kind of mob that showed up.
The results have been predictable. The Koch brothers, along with Koch employees, have had their lives threatened, received hundreds of obscenity-laced hate messages, and been harassed by left-wing groups. One e-mail carried a typical message. It read: “Choose your expiration date.”
If the President of the United States opposed these kinds of tactics, all he’d have to do is condemn them. Instead, he’s joined the effort.
President Obama has publicly accused the Kochs of being part of a, quote, “corporate takeover of our Democracy,” whatever that means. And not only did his campaign publish a list of eight private citizens it regards as enemies — an actual old-school enemies list — it recently doubled down on the effort when some began to call these thuggish tactics into question.
None of this should be surprising for a former community organizer who told a radio audience shortly before the 2010 mid-term election that Latino voters should vote with the idea of punishing their enemies and rewarding their friends. But all of it should be surprising to a former community organizer who happens to be President.
What’s more, the tactics I’m describing extend well beyond the campaign headquarters in Chicago. To an extent not seen since the Nixon administration, they extend deep into the administration itself.
News reports suggest that top White House officials have long participated in a weekly conference call with a left-wing organization in Washington whose stated purpose is to track conservative media voices, seize on potentially offensive content, and then use it to mount corporate intimidation campaigns aimed at driving these voices clear out of the public square.
Earlier this year, dozens of Tea Party-affiliated groups across the country learned what it was like to draw the attention of the speech police when they received a lengthy questionnaire from the IRS demanding attendance lists, meeting transcripts, and donor information. One of the group’s leaders described the situation this way: “[groups like ours] either drown … in unnecessary paper work … or you survive, and give them everything they want, only to be hung.”
~
Among others examples, Justice Thomas cites the case of a Los Angeles woman who was forced to resign from a job she’d held for 26 years managing a family-owned restaurant because protesters kept showing up at the restaurant shouting “shame on you” at customers. According to press reports, the police had to show up in riot gear one night just to quell the mob.
The woman’s supposed crime: writing a $100 check in support of California’s Prop 8.
~
Over at the White House, the President’s lawyers recently circulated a draft executive order that would have required anyone bidding for a government contract to disclose political donations, including those of affiliates and subsidiaries, officers and directors in excess of $5,000. The message of the order was clear: if you want a government contract, you better support our causes, or at least keep your mouth shut when it comes to the causes we oppose.
~
It should go without saying that the political Left has always faced an uphill climb in a country in which there are two self-identified conservatives for every self-identified liberal. America is not Western Europe. In order to succeed in this environment, liberals have generally resorted to one of the three tactics I’ve already identified: obscuring their true intent, pursuing through regulation and the courts what they can’t through legislation, or muzzling their critics.
Most people have no idea what is going on at our public universities.
A hundred million secular Marxists didn’t suddenly become libertarians in 1989 when the wall fell. They had to go to work somewhere and many went to work at public schools and universities and they brought their twisted philosophy with them.
Persecution of Christian, Jewish, conservative, libertarian and traditional students on campus is so common and prevalent that there are multiple legal groups fighting it including the Alliance Defense Fund, The Rutherford Institute, the ACLJ, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the Student Press Law Center and believe it or not, many of these cases are so egregious that the ACLU has even been stepping up to defend such persecuted students. These civil rights groups are overwhelmed with requests for help. The problem is that bad. Just because you don’t run into these radical leftists or hear about them in your daily lives does not mean they aren’t there.
[Full Disclosure: FIRE and the ACLU helped in a case I was involved in at Indiana University – Editor.]
Having worked for the campus in a job where I ended up in every office at one time or another I know first hand that about half of the professors in the liberal arts department either have pictures of Karl Marx on their wall and/or have his book prominently displayed. Books by Adam Smith, Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman…. good luck.
Western Ky. Univ. Turns Blind Eye To Vandalized Pro-Life Display
‘Kids for Christ’ club silenced because they were “religious,” no longer silenced (In Oklahoma of all places).
Honor Student Denied Credit Because Community Service Event Was Religious
Christian Club Told It’s Not Religious; Forced To Have Non-Christian Leaders (In North Carolina)
The elite media will often report news like this on their web site so they can say they reported it, but don’t expect it to be highlighted in the evening broadcast…
(CBS News) The National Debt has now increased more during President Obama’s three years and two months in office than it did during 8 years of the George W. Bush presidency.
The Debt rose $4.899 trillion during the two terms of the Bush presidency. It has now gone up $4.939 trillion since President Obama took office.
The latest posting from the Bureau of Public Debt at the Treasury Department shows the National Debt now stands at $15.566 trillion. It was $10.626 trillion on President Bush’s last day in office, which coincided with President Obama’s first day.
The National Debt also now exceeds 100% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, the total value of goods and services.
Mr. Obama has been quick to blame his predecessor for the soaring Debt, saying Mr. Bush paid for two wars and a Medicare prescription drug program with borrowed funds.
The federal budget sent to Congress last month by Mr. Obama, projects the National Debt will continue to rise as far as the eye can see. The budget shows the Debt hitting $16.3 trillion in 2012, $17.5 trillion in 2013 and $25.9 trillion in 2022.
Federal budget records show the National Debt once topped 121% of GDP at the end of World War II. The Debt that year, 1946, was, by today’s standards, a mere $270 billion dollars.
Mr. Obama doesn’t mention the National Debt much, though he does want to be seen trying to reduce the annual budget deficit, though it’s topped a trillion dollars for four years now.
As part of his “Win the Future” program, Mr. Obama called for “taking responsibility for our deficits, by cutting wasteful, excessive spending wherever we find it.”
His latest budget projects a $1.3 trillion deficit this year declining to $901 billion in 2012, and then annual deficits in the range of $500 billion to $700 billion in the 10 years to come.
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton Comments: The FY2007 Budget which was the last one mostly controlled by the Republicans had a yearly deficit of less than $200 billion.]
If Mr. Obama wins re-election, and his budget projections prove accurate, the National Debt will top $20 trillion in 2016, the final year of his second term. That would mean the Debt increased by 87 percent, or $9.34 trillion, during his two terms.
Currently, as the chart shows, debt per American is at (or around) $50,000. Just four years ago, in 2008, the year President Obama was first elected, debt per person was at $35,000.
In 2037, if things stay relatively the same, debt per American will be at $147,000.
In that year, according to Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee, “the federal government will spend $2.7 trillion per year in interest payments alone, representing more than a quarter of our entire budget that year and greater than the total federal budget in 2003.”
Per American family, on average, debt will stand at $382,000 in 2037, only 25 years from now. That figure constitutes an increase of $287,000 per family.
The CBO’s numbers were released yesterday as part of its “long-term outlook.” The non-partisan governmental organization warns, “waiting to address the long-term budgetary imbalance and allowing debt to mount in the meantime would be detrimental to future generations.”
And this is just debt and obligations that are on the books. With of budget trickery and the fact that the CBO uses static models with assumptions that are handed to it by politicians the actual figure is worse.
President Barack Obama’s re-election turns on his ability to convince voters that
1) Obama inherited a “Great Recession,”
2) every “independent” economist supported the “stimulus,”
3) “bipartisan” economists agree that Obama’s stimulus worked,
4) as actor Morgan Freeman puts it, racist Republicans say, “Screw the country … we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here” — nothing to do with deeply held policy differences.
(1) Take this “Great Recession” business.
Remember the “misery index”? The term, popularized by former President Jimmy Carter, used to mean inflation plus unemployment. Unfortunately for John Kerry, by the time he ran for president in 2004, the misery index stood at 7.4 midway into the election year, the same as when George W. Bush won the presidency in 2000. What to do? Change the definition. Kerry invented a new misery index, one that included only high-rising costs like college tuition, health care and gas prices.
Similarly, “bad economic times” used to mean, above all, high unemployment. Within a year of Obama’s presidency, unemployment climbed to 10.2 percent. Within three years of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment reached 10.8 percent. Under Obama, inflation has been — at least so far — rather modest. Early in Reagan’s presidency, inflation reached 13.5 percent. Rather than describe this era as the “Great-Recession-turned-around-by-Reagan’s-pro-growth-policies,” many pundits and scribes dismiss this period of extraordinary growth as the “me decade” or the “decade of greed.”
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments: Excuse me Larry, but under Clinton the Consumer Price Index was changed so that government would never have to face the misery index and a proper measure of inflation again. They removed “Food & Fuel” from the index, you know, because nobody ever buys that stuff anyways, and they weighted the formula towards housing….. that’s right folks, housing.
When the economy turns south or hits a bump new housing starts talk and housing prices fall, thus showing negative inflation. So when the economy is in trouble and inflation is going up, the government reads it as zero inflation. If we still measured inflation like we used to it would be about 9.3% every year for three years. Of course, every shopper knows this as they see the prices for themselves.]
(2) “There is no disagreement,” said then-President-elect Barack Obama, “that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jump-start the economy.”
What?! More than 200 economists, including several Nobel laureates, signed on to a full-page ad placed in major newspapers by the libertarian Cato Institute. Eventually, over 130 more economists became signatories to the ad.
It read: “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true. Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.
“More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today.
“To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”
(3) Obama surrogate Steve Rattner recently said that Obama’s stimulus worked — as confirmed by “bipartisan” economists. As proof, Rattner offered the findings of “bipartisan economists Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder,” who “agree that … we would have had unemployment substantially higher than what we’ve had over the last two years.”
“Bipartisan”?
Blinder, a Democrat, served as a member of the Clinton administration and later advised presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry. As for Zandi, he did serve as a presidential campaign advisor to John McCain. Like Blinder, Zandi is a self-described Democrat.
As to the alleged unanimous expert opinion on the effectiveness of Obama’s stimulus, Stanford economist John Taylor debated this on NPR with Zandi. Taylor’s analysis, shared by many other economists: “I just don’t think there’s any evidence. When you look at the numbers, when you see what happened, when people reacted to the stimulus, it did very little good.”
(4) Democrats never tire of trotting out Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said his “single most important political goal” was to make Obama “a one-term president.” Horrors! Why, doesn’t this just make McConnell the very personification of sinister! Republican opposition for the sole purpose of bringing down Obama, the first black president, yada, blah, etc.
Apparently, it is outside the brain capacity of people like Morgan Freeman to understand something: One way to defeat bad, leftist Democrats’ policies is to defeat bad, leftist Democrats, who seek to implement those bad, leftist policies. It’s not complicated.
Nothing personal.
[Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton comments: On September 11th, 2001 famed Democrat Strategist James Carville said that he hopes President Bush fails.]
To those of us who have been paying attention to the antics of the EPA under this administration this is no surprise. By the rational currently being used by the EPA they could ban all cars and justify it by saying that if cars put just one life at risk they must be strictly regulated or banned. The same can be said of anything. Of course, just like health care and other regs, Obama donors get a waiver.
For the last three years, the Environmental Protection Agency has justified new air quality regulations — unprecedented in stringency and cost — on the assumption that even trace levels of particulate matter can cause early death.
A recent EPA report states that by 2020, the EPA’s rules “will prevent 230,000 early deaths.” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has gone so far as to testify before Congress that the new regulations would provide health benefits as valuable as a cure for cancer. If true, this is compelling. Unfortunately, such rhetoric is built on implausible assumptions, biased models, statistical manipulations and two cherry-picked studies.
Unwinding this tangled web is tedious but necessary to prevent the EPA from becoming a national economic planning agency that transforms our economy and undermines our form of democratic government, in which elected representatives — not federal technocrats — have the authority to make the country’s major policy decisions.
On Wednesday, a U.S. House subcommittee will conduct a hearing to examine the real costs and benefits of the EPA’s environmental regulations, with invited testimony from one of my former colleagues at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
As I noted in my latest report for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “EPA’s Pretense of Science,” the EPA now justifies almost every major new air quality rule on the basis of models indicating implausibly exaggerated health risks from fine particulate matter, rarely considered a killer by physicians or toxicologists.
Extrapolating from assumptions, the EPA in 2009 decided that no risk is too low, improbable or uncertain that it is not worth responding to with regulation. With a straight face, the EPA’s leadership now maintains that there is no safe level of ambient fine particulate matter — however near to zero — at which risk of “early” death ceases. Statisticians call this analytic approach a “no threshold linear regression to zero.”
The Clean Air Act requires that national air quality standards be set at levels adequate to protect human health with a margin of safety and regardless of cost. That’s a very cautious rubric. But through the no-safe-threshold assumption, the current EPA goes further: to zero risk. This methodological change leads the EPA to the implausible finding that mortal risks increase to the extent that ambient levels of fine particulates exceed natural background levels of 1 microgram per cubic meter. The current federal standard is 15 micrograms per cubic meter.
School is letting out around the United States, but for George Soros, education never stops. Soros has given more than $400 million to colleges and universities, including money to most prominent institutions in the United States. He also helped establish Central European University (CEU) which, in turn, uses its resources to promote his personal goal of an “open society.”
Imagine that, a whole university funded by one of the most controversial figures in the world. Soros has used that $400 million worldwide to indoctrinate students and teach them to promote liberal, and in some cases extremist, causes. But don’t expect the American news media to make it a big issue, even though they have done so for the Koch brothers.
CEU, which is essentially Soros’s own university, has received $250 million from the liberal billionaire. The Founder and Chairman of the Board is none other than Soros. More than half of CEU’s 20 member board are closely tied to the liberal financier. President of the Soros-funded Bard College Leon Botstein is Chairman of the Board.
While the Left shrivels at the thought of the Koch brother’s donations to universities, Soros gave more than 50 times as much. Bard College was the American institution that received the most from Soros (more than $75 million). Grants to Bard for “community service and social action” included a Palestinian youth group and an initiative to educate prisoners across the country.
All of the Ivy League universities, along with a variety of state schools, private institutions, and even religiously-affiliated institutions, were also funded by Soros.
The Koch brothers were vilified by the American political left for donating almost $7 million to universities while their beloved Soros gave more than 50 times that amount to the same type of groups.
Soros’s Center for American Progress, which received $7.3 million from his foundations, posted a report on their Think Progress blog titled “Koch Fueling Far Right Academic Centers at Universities across the Country.” In the article, the Koch-hating leftist Lee Fang lists universities that received money from the Kochs to include George Mason University, Utah State, and Brown. Totaling nearly $7 million, grants as small as $100,000 were criticized. A donation of $1.5 million to Florida State University supposedly gave the Kochs “a free hand in selecting professors and approving publications.”
Alternet, funded by Soros complained about a “shady deal” that helped the Kochs fund Florida State University. Colorlines, also funded by Soros, said of the same donation: “FSU Trades Academic Freedom for Billionaire Charles Koch’s Money.”
This information is all part of an extensive new Special Report on Soros by the Business and Media Institute (a sister organization of CNSNews.com). The report, “George Soros: Godfather of the Left,”also detailed Soros’s many controversial dealings around the world.
There has been no shortage of partisan teaching in the news lately, but Professor Philippe Bourgois of The University of Pennsylvania may have just brought proselytizing from the lectern to a new low.
Bourgois, a Professor of Anthropology at Penn, gave a public lecture recently slandering police officers, conservatives, doctors and America itself, all while encouraging and complimenting the teachings of Karl Marx. The rant took place in front of students on the campus of Bryn Mawr College, located west of Philadelphia. The talk was a panel discussion entitled ‘The Transformation of Poverty Governance’ and revolved around how America is handling it’s welfare state.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
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