Is Going Green Going Into The Red?
As you may know, most of the new bills coming out of Congress are all about "going green" and saving the planet by attempting to prevent climate change.
Well, I honestly believe (and so do most professional scientists now) that this whole global warming, climate change, or whatever the latest popular terminology is can be chalked up as complete boloney.
You see, most of the data that Congress uses to justify their position came from the Climate Research Unit. Well, according to Fox News most, if not all, of the data that has come from them may now be found as worthless and unreliable.
I'm not the best writer in the world and because I have such a biased opinion on the matter (that is, I believe in common sense) I thought I would recommend an article to you by a friend of mine over at Political Math. I think you'll find his views more on the liberal side of things but at least he uses critical thinking skills to make his decisions and always backs up his statements with hard data.
You can find the Political Math article here.
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Vote Clears Way for Illinois Abortion Notification Law
The AP released a news article stating that the State of Illinois Medical Disciplinary Board has decided not to extend a 90-day grace period put into place in August.
Illinois' law had been passed in 1995 that forced abortionist doctors to provide parents with a 48 hour notice of girls 17 and younger who intended to get abortions. That law, however, was never enforced because of constant court actions to prevent it. Organizations such as The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois intends to ask for a new temporary restraining order to keep the state from enforcing the law.
This is where things start to get a little interesting. You see, as a Libertarian I believe that individual right to privacy is an important natural right and should be observed at all times. However, we are dealing with the murder of an innocent baby for no other reason than the immature and irresponsible nature of a teenager who made a foolish choice.
I think that is why I call myself a Conservative Libertarian because Morals must come into play at some point and we aren't the Wild Wild West and so no baby should suffer such a fate. How about this, lets encourage these teenagers to have the children and put them up for adoption and possible force child support on them to help pay for the baby until it has been adopted by another family. That way our taxes are mitigated and the teenager(s) learn a continious lesson on what they have done.
Now, some of you out there might say something along the lines of, "...if we start charging teenagers money for babies they won't want they will force the abortion upon themselves without the aid of medical professionals, wont they?". I can see that as a legitimate concern for some of you out there but you are forgetting that I'm treating the forced and intentional abortion of a child as MURDER. The punishment for finding out that a teenager forced the abortion would be tried as such in a court of law and so it would highly encourage teens not to perform such an act.
I'd love to hear what all of you have to say about this. Don't be shy, no matter what side of the fence you are on let your comments rip. But I remind you, please use fact-based evidence to backup any statement you might make.
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Obama Administration Using Cloward-Piven Strategy To Topple U.S.
If you haven't heard of the Cloward-Piven's Strategy then you are probably confused as to why Obama and his administration are doing some of the things they are doing. However, once you've been schooled on the subject everything will become much clearer to you.
To give you a quick background on the Cloward-Piven's Strategy I recommend you take a look at this video provided by Glenn Beck as it is the best one I've found as of yet. If you can find a better one please let me know by using the comments section below.
Now that you have a basic understanding of the strategy I highly recommend you dive down into the details by reading the following article provided by DiscoverTheNetworks.org. Click on their name to learn even more about the strategy and other topics of interest.
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."
Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in the form of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.
Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."
Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.
In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.
All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections.
The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system. Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries.
Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his "Shadow Party," through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.
What do you think of this strategy? Do you think, as I do, that Obama and his administration are in fact really trying to pull this off?
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Tom Harkin Hearts Cass Sunstein – WTF!?
It was a sad day for us on September 10th, 2009; fitting seeing that it was only a day before the anniversary of 9/11 and I'm guessing not a coincidence seeing that most people were concentrating on annual memorials of that day. It is sad that it is probably Cass Sunstein who will probably do more damage to us than the terrorists did on 9/11 as the new Regulation Czar.
I have posted Senator Harkin's response to a letter I had sent him demanding that he NOT vote to confirm Cass Sunstein. I hope that fellow American's will wake up and smell the horse shit that Congressman like Harkin keep throwing at us on a daily basis. I have posted Harkin's letter in its entirety below; look for my response and more information on Cass Sunstein at the end of the letter:
Thank you for contacting me to share your views regarding President Obama's decision to nominate Cass Sunstein as head of the White House Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). As you may know, with my support, Mr. Sunstein was confirmed by the Senate on September 10, 2009.
In his new position, Mr. Sunstein will oversee the OIRA, which works with federal agencies to ensure that their rules and regulations comply with federal laws and administration policy. As a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for nearly three decades, Mr. Sunstein has made a name for himself as one of the nation's most respected scholars and a supporter of objective, evidence‐based regulation. He is widely respected by liberals and conservatives alike, and his nomination is strongly supported by diverse groups, including a bipartisan group of former OIRA administrators, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the American Farm Bureau Federation. I am pleased the Senate confirmed Mr. Sunstein for this important position.
Again, thanks for your input on this matter. Please don't hesitate to contact me in the future with any questions or concerns you may have.
Sincerely,
Tom Harkin
United States Senator
Yuck, I cant believe that Senator Harkin has done this. What part of Cass Sunstein is INSANE doesn't he understand!? You can bet that this Senator will NOT be getting my vote in 2010 and I will do whatever I can to convince as many other Americans as I can to do the same because this man has truly lost his way in the world of reality.
For more information on who Cass Sunstein is and why I loath him so much (and why you should too!) please review the following and watch the video's below:
(The following courtesy of GlennBeck.com)
Regulatory Czar - Cass R. Sunstein
Title: Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Salary: unknown
Reports to: Office of Management and Budget head Peter Orszag
Appointed: January 2009
Nomination was sent to Senate on April 20, 2009 - no action yet taken
Agency that might have handled similar issues: OMB
• Will be responsible for reviewing draft regulations and assessing their costs and benefits
• Is a Harvard Law School professor; prior to that, was a professor at the Univ. of Chicago Law School (1981-2008)
• Academic specialties: constitutional law, administrative law, and regulatory policy
• Obama: "Cass is not only a valued advisor, he is a dear friend"
• Known for advancing a field called "law and behavioral economics" that seeks to shape law and policy around the way research shows people actually behave; though embraced by conservatives, critics say it fails to account for the sometimes less-than-rational aspects of human behavior.
• In his 2002 book, Republic.com, discussed the drawbacks of limitless choices on the Internet that allow people to seek out only like-minded people and opinions that merely fortify their own views; he talked about the idea of the government requiring sites to link to opposing views. He later came to realize it was a "bad idea."
• In his 2004 book, Animal Rights, suggested that animals ought to be able to bring suit, with private citizens acting as their representatives, to ensure that animals are not treated in a way that violates current law.
• In a 2007 speech at Harvard he called for banning hunting in the U.S.
• The American Conservative Union started a website, Stop Sunstein, in an effort to keep him out of the White House.
What are you thoughts on Cass Sunstein's appointment and the fact that Senator Harkin voted for him?
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Story of Stuff – More Indoctrination Of Our Kids
Education is an important part of our children's lives and God knows that if we could all afford it we would send each and every one of them to the private school of our choosing. However, because good 'ol Uncle Sam deems it appropriate to tax nearly 50% of our income away each year we just can't afford that now... can we?
Well, lucky for us it too was Uncle Sam who stepped in and fostered public education so our kids would have a place to learn their ABC's. But, for those paying attention, we know that wasn't the only reason progressives want to teach our children, is it?
Well, the progressives are beginning to indoctrinate our children at younger and younger ages now and one facet of that "learning" is the use of video. A new video now being played at schools all across America lays out the "story of stuff". This video is a loving, anti-capitalist, tale that has virtually none of the facts correct. I've posted the video below for you to see (careful, you might want a vomit bag present) -- when you are done watch the debunking of the video in which the commentator investigates the footnotes used in the "story of stuff" video.
What do you think about this video and that of the debunking? Let me know by commenting below.
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Personal Hero Profile Series: Milton Friedman – Part 5 of 5
I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal. - Milton Friedman
Here is the final rendition to our 5 part Personal Heroes Profiles Series with Milton Friedman. This next video is the last section of the 1980 Donahue show interview starring Friedman. Thank you for visiting my blog and for learning more about my personal hero, Milton Friedman.
BONUS VIDEO: Friedman puts forward a compelling case for the legalization of drugs:
Since this is the last section of the series I thought it appropriate to provide a little more video on what Friedman thought of Libertarianism and to show you how I feel on the subject as well. I agree with virtually everything that Friedman says in these videos and I hope you will to.
Friedman on Libertarianism (1 of 4): What are the elements of the libertarian movement and how does one of its most illustrious proponents, Milton Friedman, apply its tenets to issues facing the United States today? Friedman discusses how he balances the libertarians' desire for a small, less intrusive government with environmental, public safety, food and drug administration, and other issues. Recorded February 10, 1999.
NOTE: If you would rather watch the 4 videos back-to-back you can do so here.
Friedman on Libertarianism (2 of 4):
Friedman on Libertarianism (3 of 4):
Friedman on Libertarianism (4 of 4):
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Personal Hero Profile Series: Milton Friedman – Part 4 of 5
I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. - Milton Friedman
We now continue with part 4 of our 5 part Personal Heroes Profiles Series starring Milton Friedman. This next video is yet another continuation of the 1980 Donahue show:
BONUS VIDEO: Friedman explores the unsettling dynamics set into motion when government imposes itself into the health care system. (1978) Kind of erie watching this video clip and seeing everything he worried about coming to frution today.
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Personal Hero Profile Series: Milton Friedman – Part 2 of 5
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
We continue with part 2 of our Milton Friedman Personal Hero Profile Series. This video is a continuation of Friedman's interview on the Donahue show:
BONUS VIDEO: In his book "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962) Milton Friedman (1912-2006) advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market as a means of creating political and social freedom. An excerpt from an interview with Phil Donahue in 1979.
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Personal Hero Profile Series: Milton Friedman – Part 1 of 5

Milton Friedman (1912 - 2006)
Milton Friedman, a man who won the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic science, was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1977 until Nov. 16, 2006 when he passed away at the age of 94. The Paul Snowden Russel Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1946 to 1976, and a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1937 to 1981. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988 and received the National Medal of Science that same year.
Friedman was one of the twentieth century’s most influential champions of individual liberty and free markets. An early associate of FEE, Friedman accomplished more than any other to teach the public the merits of deregulation, privatization, low taxes, and free trade. His work influenced President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as well as eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union economic systems.
Friedman was born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants to the United States. He later became the foremost expert on theoretical economics in the second half of the 20th century where he was credited with overturning the dominant Keynesian paradigm regarding the tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. His contributions, although controversial, to monetary theory, policy, and history in such books as Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money (1956) and A Monetary History of the United States, (1867-1960 and co-written with Anna Schwartz, 1963) were extraordinary.
I think you can easily see now why I've chosen Friedman as one of my personal heroes. That is why I will be posting a video, and short short description thereof, each day for the next 4 days on Milton Friedman and hopefully you will dig deeper into his life and his work just as I have.
In this first video Milton Friedman provides a direct and to-the-point defense of capitalism and free trade on the Donahue show in 1980. He explains how governmental regulations, no matter how well-intended, are inevitably infiltrated by business interests which use governmental power to stifle competition. He also explains the economics of why drug prohibition doesn't work to control drugs. Enjoy and don't forget to come back and see the remaining four videos coming out daily!
For more information about Milton Friedman I would recommend you take a look at the following links:
- The Freeman - Milton Friedman (1912-2006)
- Wikipedia - Milton Friedman
- The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice
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