Feds retaliate against Texas’ 10th Amendment efforts

/4 Comments/in , /by

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has spent much of the past three years loudly and defiantly fighting against what he views as Washington meddling in state affairs, often refusing to cooperate with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and becoming a leader in the battle against President Barack Obama’s health care plan.

Other Republican governors pursuing a similar tactic may want to take note of what’s happened in Texas amid Perry’s hard-fought battle: An obstinate refusal to cooperate has resulted in more, not less, federal oversight.

“We’re very conservative and we’re very stubborn,” said Bill Miller, a lobbyist in Austin for HillCo who has represented both Republicans and Democrats. He described the Texas mindset this way: “We’re not going to be smart. We’re going to be pure. It’s a point of pride and if there’s something else we’re proud of, it’s our pride.”

One area where Texas has fought ferociously with the feds has been on environmental regulations. Yet as the state challenged EPA rules in court over the past three years, the federal agency simply side-stepped the state to work directly with industry.

A similar scenario is playing out with Obama’s health care overhaul in Texas, where nearly a quarter of the population, or 6.2 million people, are uninsured. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has given the law the green light, it’s highly likely that Texas won’t have time to build a key program, forcing the federal government to design and manage it until the Lone Star State steps up.

Read more HERE.

World’s First Genetically Modified Babies Born in US; have three Parents

/2 Comments/in /by

Last night’s disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.

So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three ‘parents’.

Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey.

The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive.

Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults –two women and one man.

Read more HERE.

Feds want to force O-B-E-S-E Americans into Counseling

/0 Comments/in , , /by

If you’re a US citizen, there’s a one-in-three chance that you’re also obese. Now after failed attempt after failed attempt at slimming down citizens, a federal panel is pushing to force overweight Americans into counseling.

The US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) introduced their latest plans to help push down the obesity rate in America this week, and their newest effort calls for more than just urging people to exercise. The federal panel of medical experts is asking primary care physicians to put obese Americans into intensive counseling programs in order to combat the epidemic.

“Obesity is a very serious health problem in the United States, and in the past 30 years, obesity rates have dramatically increased,” Task Force member Dr. David Grossman, a pediatrician at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, says in the USPSTF press release put out on Monday. “The good news is that is that even modest weight loss can reduce health risks for people who are obese. And, there is strong scientific evidence that shows that intensive programs with 12 to 26 sessions in the first year can help people manage their weight.”

While experts have long argued for urging obese Americans into specialized programs to push healthier habits on them, the USPSTF is asking physicians to place any patient with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more into counseling. Currently more than one-third of adults meet that criterion, with non-Hispanic black adults more than 44 percent likely to be considered obese.

According to a report compiled earlier this year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 percent of the US population will be obese within the next two decades. At the time of that publishing, the Institute of Medicine’s Shiriki Kumanyika told Reuters that “People have heard the advice to eat less and move more for years, and during that time a large number of Americans have become obese.” Advice, many argue, hasn’t been enough, though.

Read more HERE.

PBS: Re-Educating America’s Schoolchildren

/0 Comments/in , /by

By Mary Grabar and Tina Trent

When most people think of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s education programs, they remember the gentle Mr. Rogers welcoming children to his home, or documentaries offering exciting encounters with whales and other exotic creatures.

These shows still exist. But CPB today produces lessons that glorify the Black Panthers and riots and protests of the 1960s, present rocker Patti Smith as a “patriot” for singing songs that condemn President George W. Bush, vilify Wal-Mart, and sanctify environmentalist Rachel Carson. Although their educational materials claim to be objective, the truth is that their unrelenting ideological slant that promotes the politics of protest and civil disobedience is aimed at re-educating children into becoming far-left activists.

But whenever there are attempts to cut federal funding to CPB, the corporation points to its “educational programming” as proof that the approximately $450 million it receives annually from federal taxpayers is being put to good use. Big Bird and other members of the cast of Sesame Street show up in Congress to tell members of the educational value of CPB-funded programs.

The same justification is offered by state affiliates. For example, in 2011, Georgia Public Broadcasting’s marketing vice president, Nancy Zintak, defended their executives’ salaries by explaining that “80,000 Georgia teachers have downloaded data more than 5 million times from GPB’s educational website.”[1] [1]

Georgia taxpayers directly fund half of GPB’s annual $29 million budget. Millions more are funneled through the state’s public university budgets.

Teachers across the nation do turn to Public Broadcasting for videos, classroom projects, and even entire course syllabi. National statistics are elusive, but those 80,000 Georgia teachers downloading Public Broadcasting educational materials represent 63% of all public and private K – 12 educators in the state. If Georgia’s teachers are typical of educators in other states, it is clear that most K – 12 schools rely on PBS to teach subjects ranging from arithmetic to World History.

My Verdict: Obamacare UNCONSTITUTIONAL!

/32 Comments/in , , /by

Today’s shocking Obamacare decision caused me to reminisce about my time on the federal bench ten years ago.  When I was a United States Magistrate Judge, I took the same oath of office that every federal judge and justice in the country swears to.  I swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. . .”

That oath is anchored to the phrase, “Constitution of the United States.”  If the Constitution changes over time by an activist majority of the Supreme Court, then my oath was essentially an oath to the Supreme Court, not to the Constitution.  Of course, that’s not what the Founders intended.  The Supreme Court was never designed to be the pinnacle of federal power.

But that’s where we are today.  Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005, wrote the 5-4 opinion saving Obamacare and causing President Obama to declare “victory” and pundits to say that his administration has been “vindicated.”  Incredibly, Roberts determined that the government, under its taxing power, has the right to “impos[e] a tax on those who do not buy [a] product,” in this case, health insurance.*

From the bench today, Justice Kennedy issued a scathing denuciation of Robert’s reconstruction of Obamacare:  “The majority rewrites the statute Congress wrote … What Congress called a penalty, the court calls a tax.”  He concluded, “The law is “invalid in its entirety.”

The chief justice’s rescue of the individual mandate is a massive expansion of federal power, now permitting the federal government to regulate, by taxation, its citizens’ “failure to act” or passivity.  I challenge you to go back to the first 150 years of U.S. jurisprudence and find any Supreme Court opinion that would suggest such a construction of Congress’s power to tax and spend under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

In his powerful dissent, Justice Scalia agreed that this power grab was unconstitutional:

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.

And then the zinger:

Whatever may be the conceptual limits upon the Commerce Clause and upon the power to tax and spend, they cannot be such as will enable the Federal  Government to regulate all private conduct and to compel the States to function as administrators of federal programs.

In other words, when the federal government is allowed to tax non-activity, what powers are left to the states and the people under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments?  Not much.

But even more basically, Roberts and the four more liberal members of the bench are all starting with the assumption that the federal government can tax and spend for things outside of its enumerated powers, misconstruing the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution.  James Madison apparently disagreed, suggesting the clause “amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section.”

Not anchoring the general welfare clause to the enumerated powers enables virtually unlimited federal spending/taxation power and is completely contrary to the whole nature of the Constitution: a document designed to restrain the federal government, retaining all unspecified powers to the states and people.

The Roberts decision reflects that any faith in the Supreme Court to solve our nation’s problems is misplaced.  We must engage like never before.  Reject the LSM, rely on solid Internet news sources, support a Tea Party congressional candidate, engage in vote integrity efforts, and reflect upon the moral crisis we’re facing.   A massive victory in November will put today’s defeat in the proper dustbin of history.  But unless we rapidly correct the downward spiral, there won’t be much left for future generations.

***

Author’s note:  To his credit, Chief Justice Roberts did reject the Commerce Clause as constitutional authority for Obamacare.

PHOTO CREDIT: DonkeyHokey

CNN ratings hit 21 year low; Anderson Cooper, Piers Morgan in the tank

/0 Comments/in /by

After several months of bad ratings news for CNN, official quarterly numbers confirm that the cable news network has hit 21-year lows in both viewers and adults 25-to-54.

The primetime lineup of Anderson Cooper 360 and Piers Morgan, specifically, saw big drops during the prime 8-10 p.m. hours that have averages down to 446,000 total viewers and a mere 129,000 with adults 25-54. Those numbers mark 35 and 41 percent drops from the second quarter in 2011.

Daily ratings stumbled to their lowest in more than a decade (2001), with 319,000 the average total viewers and 129,000 adults 25-54 — 35 and 45 percent drops, respectively.

In individual primetime broadcasts, Anderson Cooper’s 8 p.m. outing was down 23 percent in the demo. Piers Morgan took a steeper drop of 33 percent in adults 25-54.

Read more at the Hollywood Reporter HERE.

Is the Country Unraveling?

/0 Comments/in /by

The Thrill Is Gone

The last thirty days have made it clear that Barack Obama is not going to win the 2012 election by a substantial margin. The polls still show the race near dead even with over five months, and all sorts of unforeseen events, to come. But after the Obama meltdown of April and May, I don’t think he in any way resembles the mysterious Pied Piper figure of 2008, who mesmerized and then marched the American people over the cliff. Polls change daily; gaffes and wars may come aplenty. But Barack Obama has lost the American center and now he is reduced to the argument that Mitt Romney would be even worse than he has been, as he tries to cobble together an us-versus-them 51% majority from identity groups through cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, granting blanket amnesty, ginning up the “war on women,” and flipping on gay marriage.

Mythographer in Chief

The Obama memoir is revealed not really to be a memoir at all. Most of his intimate friends and past dalliances that we read about in Dreams From My Father were, we learn, just made up (“composites”); the problem, we also discover, with the president’s autobiography is not what is actually false, but whether anything much at all is really true in it. If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother’s terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything. For months the president fought the Birthers who insist that he was born in Kenya, only to have it revealed that he himself for over a decade wrote just that fact in his own literary biography. Is Barack Obama then a birther?

Has any major public figure (57 states, Austrian language, corpse-men, Maldives for Falklands, private sector “doing fine,” etc.) been a more underwhelming advertisement for the quality of a Harvard education or a Chicago Law School part-time billet? Has any presidential candidate or president set a partisan crowd to laughing by rubbing his chin with his middle finger as he derides an opponent, or made a joke about killing potential suitors of his daughters with deadly Predator drones, or recited a double entendre “go-down” joke about a sex act?

From Recession to Recovery to Stasis

As we see in New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, the cure for the present economic malaise is not rocket science — a curbing of the size of government, a revision of the tax code, a modest rollback of regulation, reform of public employment, and holding the line on new taxes. Do that and public confidence returns, businesses start hiring, and finances settle down. Do the opposite — as we see in Mediterranean Europe, California, or Illinois over the last decade — and chaos ensues.

Obama took a budding recovery in June 2009, and through massive borrowing, the federal takeover of health care, new expansions of food stamps and unemployment insurance, the curtailing of oil and gas leasing on public lands, new regulations, and non-stop demagoguery of the private sector slowed the economy to a crawl. His goal seems not to restore economic growth per se but to seek an equality of result, even if that means higher unemployment and less net wealth for the poor and middle classes. Obama hinted at that in 2008 when he said he would raise capital gains taxes even if it meant less revenue, given the need for “fairness.” Indeed, equality is best achieved by bringing the top down rather than the bottom up. Nowhere is the Obama model of massive borrowing, vast increases in the size of the state, more regulations, and class warfare successful — not in California or Illinois, not in Greece, Spain, or Italy, not anywhere.

Read more at PJ Media HERE.

VIDEO: Muslims, shouting “Allahu Akbar” Stone, Curse Christians

/6 Comments/in , /by

You’ve got to see this video. It’s long, but you cannot believe that this happened in the U.S. Problems start at :54 and “stoning” begins at 9:00.

Why GOP Might Accommodate Obama Yet Again

/10 Comments/in /by

Barack Obama’s invocation of executive privilege to keep subpoenaed documents from congressional committees investigating Fast and Furious came as rather a shock to many DC observers. It wasn’t that pundits were surprised the “most transparent administration in history” had chosen to OFFICIALLY cover up the Fast and Furious affair.  After all, no one actually believed Obama’s phony openness claims in the first place.

What really confounded Administration friends and foes alike was the fact that Obama invoked the privilege in the face of such an extensive body of disapproving legal precedent. “Where there is reason to believe…documents sought may shed light on government misconduct, ‘the privilege is routinely denied…’” wrote the DC District Court of Appeals in the Clinton era US v Espy case. How could a former instructor of law make such an obvious and fundamental legal “error?”

It’s a safe bet that Eric Holder and Barack Obama worked out the executive privilege idea well in advance of the Attorney General’s scheduled meeting with Darrell Issa. It was, after all, a worst case, fallback scheme the pair undoubtedly agreed must be implemented should Oversight Committee chair Issa refuse Holder’s last-minute attempt to buffalo the Congressman and Republican leaders into accepting the AG’s testimony in lieu of subpoenaed documents.

In fact, the privilege claim was only invoked after a year of stonewalling had failed, threatening to result in an embarrassing contempt charge that even the 90% of national media types who had buried the Fast and Furious story would eventually be forced to report. Yet, although political fallout resulting from the contempt vote and the illegally advanced privilege claim would be swift, it would be NOTHING compared to the nuclear blast resulting from a release of documents that proved Obama and Holder had been in on the implementation and ensuing cover-up of the Fast and Furious debacle from the very beginning. Documents yielding such a revelation obviously had to be denied the Committee and the American public at all costs, as a loss in November might be accompanied by a stretch in Leavenworth.

Though Barack Obama knew a political firestorm would accompany his claim of executive privilege, it was a decision he was forced to make.

 Read More at Western Journalism. By Doug Book.