Posts Tagged ‘Houston Voters’
« Older Entries |On Obamacare – just say no
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
WorldNetDaily.com
Posted: March 13, 2010
When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, he chose the Bible that Abraham Lincoln used on which to take the oath of office.
A little over a year later, as President Obama strong-arms House and Senate Democrats to pass a health-care bill that will nationalize 17 percent of our economic lives – a bill that Americans don’t want – we ought to recall Lincoln’s famous words at Gettysburg.
Dedicating the final resting place for those who fought there, Lincoln appealed that we not let up in the struggle for “government
of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Democrats may soon show, if we let them, that the American ideal of representative government – government of a nation, in Lincoln’s words, “conceived in Liberty” – is lost.
Bending rules into a procedural pretzel, Democrats will attempt to pass one of the largest government takeovers of private American lives in history without a single Republican vote and, against the will of the people. Obama will sign it into law.
Democrat pollsters Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen write in the Washington Post, “… a solid majority of Americans oppose the massive health-care reform plan.”
Pollster.com, which reports an average of all polls, shows that now for the first time disapproval for President Obama exceeds approval – 48.8 to 47.5 percent.
According to Gallup, just 21 percent of Americans are satisfied with the direction of the country, down 10 points from spring of last year when the health-care reform push began.
And, per the latest from the Pew Research Center, only 13 percent of Americans view health care as “our most important problem.”
But this isn’t about logic. Mr. Obama and his colleagues on Capitol Hill perceive a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grasp the holy grail of the left and realize the dream of transforming America into a European-style welfare state. Democracy – what the American people actually want – is just not going to stand in the way.
It isn’t just about Republican opposition. Nancy Pelosi must persuade, bribe and threaten to get 216 House Democrats to support this despite having 253 sitting House Democrats.
Speaking the other day in Missouri, Obama mocked Republicans who want to stop this train and begin the process over.
But Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and one of the nation’s wealthiest men – himself a Democrat – said the same thing in an interview on CNBC.
Buffett said we should “start over.” And he said, correctly, that the main health-care problem is runaway costs and that the bill the president is pushing “unfortunately … doesn’t attack the cost situation that much.”
Yet, in his remarks in Missouri, the president said, “Let me tell you, we’ve incorporated almost every serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain rising health-care costs. There’s not an idea out there that we have not worked on, that we have not included in this proposal.”
At the recent White House health-care summit, Rep. Paul Ryan challenged with clarity the massive accounting gimmicks and hallucinatory economic assumptions Democrats have used to present this massive budget-busting disaster of a bill as a prudent deficit-cutting measure.
Ryan, speaking for Republicans, showed that the 10-year costs are in reality $2.3 trillion, rather than under a trillion as claimed. It’s all been ignored.
In the one laboratory experiment we have – Massachusetts – which enacted a state plan similar to what Democrats want for the nation, premiums are now the highest in the nation, and per-capita health expenditures are 27 percent higher than the national average.
Every freedom-loving American patriot who cares about our future should be on the phone today to their senators and congressmen saying “stop.”
Star Parker is is an author and president of CURE, Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education. Her books include “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialism, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Texas Social Studies Curriculum Vote Bring Out Worst in AP Bias, Labeling
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
Texas Social Studies
April Castro and the headline writers at the supposedly “objective” Associated Press are obviously not pleased with changes the Texas State Board of Education made to the Lone Star State’s social studies curriculum.
Castro’s report (HT to an NB e-mailer) makes almost no attempt to hide her clear disdain. She includes references to a “far-right faction” (a “faction” that happened to constitute a two-thirds majority!) and “ultraconservatives,” while uniformly describing leftists as mere Democrats, and generally comes across as a sore loser in solidarity with the poor, outvoted libs.
You’ll also see in the excerpt that follows that the story’s headline is disgracefully over the top:
Texas ed board vote reflects far-right influences
AUSTIN, Texas — A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.
Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic,” and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.
“We have been about conservatism versus liberalism,” said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. “We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it’s appropriate.”
…. Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board’s most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of “whitewashing” curriculum standards.
By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding “American exceptionalism” and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.
Castro should have been asking why the items described in the excerpt, plus the following cited by the AP writer in unexcerpted paragraphs, haven’t been in the social studies curriculum all along:
- “… the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics.”
- former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
- “a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class.”
Apparently the ultimate insult occurred when “Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.”
Oh the humanity.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
—Tom Blumer is president of a training and development company in Mason, Ohio, and is a contributing editor to NewsBusters
Texas Social Studies
Tags: Election 2010, Houston Voters, Public Education, Texas Textbooks
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Leftists Defend The Right to Race-Based Abortions
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
David Horowitz’s Newsreal
1921 diagram from the Eugenics Record Office
The virtue of hate crime legislation is a given on the Left. Criminals deserve stiffer punishments if they select victims based on race or sex, end of story.
But what if one of those criminals chose to abort a pregnancy based on the race or sex of the fetus? Oh, that would be a sacred right.
This is not hyperbole. Consider the depravity of this recent headline on Salon’s Broadsheet blog: Banning Race-Based Abortions is Wrong.
My body, my choice to abort based on race?
The Broadsheet piece by Tracy Clark-Flory is a reaction to the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, a proposed law that would outlaw abortion based on race, color, or sex in the state of Georgia.
The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act would apply to abortion “the same standards of nondiscrimination” that govern employment, education, government and housing, said Georgia state Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Republican who introduced the bill last month with bipartisan support.
If enacted, the bill would make it illegal to knowingly solicit, perform or accept funding for race- or sex-selected abortions.
So how does this translate into an assault on reproductive freedom? Clark-Flory explains:
Roger Evans, Planned Parenthood’s senior director for litigation and law, told me over the phone that his main objection is to “the notion that the government has a role in deciding what are fair reasons and unfair reasons for a woman to have an abortion.” First it’s race and sex — but what next?
Ah, yes, the slippery slope argument. First they come for our right to selectively abort female fetuses, and the next thing you know, it’ll be redheaded fetuses. Pretty soon we’ll have no right to abort eight-month-old fetuses that kick too much in the middle of the night.
She continues:
On a more practical level, though, the bill “makes it exceedingly difficult for physicians or counselors to talk with women who have concerns or ambivalence about what to do,” he explains. “If [the patient] mentions the prohibited subject, it puts doctors in the position of saying, ‘I can’t talk to you about what you’re thinking’” — not to mention the position of refusing to perform an abortion on that patient for fear of being thrown in prison.
When a patient is desperate to get one of those racially undesirable fetuses out of her womb, the doctor will apparently have to say, “Sorry, ma’am, the wingnut antis have forced Planned Parenthood to stop knowingly abetting eugenics. You’ll have to go elsewhere for your race-based abortion. Hey, you’re not filming this for Lila Rose, are you?”
Clark-Flory insists the proposed legislation would require doctors to “cross-examine their patients so as to be sure a woman’s decision to abort isn’t motivated by sex or race.” Rubbish. In all likelihood, the law would simply add another form to the pile of clinic paperwork completed by each patient: sign here if your abortion was not coerced and is not motivated by race, sex, or color.
Tracy Clark-Flory isn’t the only one distressed about potentially losing the right to fetal discrimination. Staff writers at Double X are concerned about this bill “further stripping away women’s reproductive rights.” And leftist cheerleader Alan Colmes is promoting the lie that the bill would “require doctors to ask women why they want abortions and to record their answers.” What, suddenly Alan’s forgotten about the constitutionally protected right to privacy?
In the 1920s, the Eugenics Movement was in full swing in the United States. Terms like “compulsory sterilization” and “racial betterment” were acceptable in polite conversation, and eugenicists promoted anti-miscegenation laws to preserve the purity of human stock.
Less than 100 years later, the Left hopes to defeat a ban on race- and sex-based abortions and Democratic leaders argue that federal abortion funding will cut health care costs. (Babies from poor families can be awfully expensive – best to weed them out before birth.)
With such extreme rhetoric surfacing, is it any wonder that young Americans are trending anti-abortion? (more…)
Tags: Abortion, government control, Houston Voters
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Good News, D.C. Unemployment’s Up
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
- BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
- MARCH 12, 2010
Oh, wait. Actually, they say it’s good news, and that’s why it’s bad news.
By JAMES TARANTO
This headline in the Washington Post seemed like a pleasant surprise: “Rise in Washington Area Unemployment Seen as Good Sign for Economy’s Recovery.”
The logic seems unassailable: The District of Columbia is the hub of the political class. Higher unemployment in Washington and vicinity thus means fewer parasites feeding off the productive economy, which augurs well for recover[y]. But we wouldn’t have expected to read it in the Washington Post.
Turns out we would have been right, for it turns out the story actually says that higher unemployment in Washington is a sign of prosperity in Washington:
Unemployment rates rose in the District, Maryland and Virginia in January, a shift that economists said could be a positive sign for the economy because it suggests that discouraged job-seekers are feeling more optimistic about their prospects and have resumed looking for work.
So what looks to the Post like good news that looks like bad news is actually bad news that looks like good news.
Tags: economy, Election 2010, Houston Voters, unemployment
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Democrats just four votes shy of passing Obamacare
Friday, March 12th, 2010
March 12, 6:53 PM
Right Side Politics ExaminerDan Spencer
n the setup to the following interview with New York Democrat Congressman Anthony Weiner, Megyn Kelly reveals that the Fox News political team now calculates that Democrats are just “four votes shy” of being able to pass their unpopular Obamacare bill through the House.
For more info: Democrats were against reconciliation ‘nuclear option’ before they were for it
Tags: Election 2010, Houston Voters, national healthcare, socialized medicine
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
Texas Approves Curriculum Revised by Conservatives
Friday, March 12th, 2010
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: March 12, 2010
AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
The vote was 11 to 4, with 10 Republicans and one Democrat voting for the curriculum, and four Democrats voting against.
The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has been diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.
In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.
Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 160 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a board of teachers.
Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”
“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely many changes will be made.
The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for publishers of textbooks, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because the leader of the conservative faction, Dr. Don McLeroy, lost in a primary to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — have announced they are not seeking re-election.
There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.
The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.
“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”
They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schalfly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
Dr. McLeroy pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent approach. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.
“Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.”
Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians were interned in the United States as well as the Japanese during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.
Tags: Conservatives, Election 2010, Houston Voters, Texas Text Books
Posted in National Issues, News releases | No Comments »
48 out of 50 States Have Lost Jobs Since Democrats’ Stimulus Passed
Friday, March 12th, 2010
Committee On Ways & Means Republicans Ranking Member, Dave Camp
Friday, March 12, 2010
While the White House claims their stimulus bill “has already created or saved up to 2 million jobs,” the table below compares the White House’s original projections of state-by-state job creation with the actual change in state payroll employment through January 2010, using the latest data from the U.S. Department of Labor. Only North Dakota, Alaska and the District of Columbia have seen net job creation since stimulus, and even those levels fall far short of what the White House forecast.
To see how the Democrats’ stimulus has failed your state, see the table below.
| State |
Administration Claims of Change in Jobs Through December 2010 |
Actual Change in Jobs Through January 2010 |
| Alabama | +52,000 | -67,800 |
| Alaska | +8,000 | +2,200 |
| Arizona | +70,000 | -104,600 |
| Arkansas | +31,000 | -22,300 |
| California | +396,000 | -558,800 |
| Colorado | +59,000 | -83,500 |
| Connecticut | +41,000 | -45,200 |
| Delaware | +11,000 | -12,500 |
| District of Columbia | +12,000 | +4,800 |
| Florida | +206,000 | -240,400 |
| Georgia | +106,000 | -131,000 |
| Hawaii | +15,000 | -15,500 |
| Idaho | +17,000 | -18,400 |
| Illinois | +148,000 | -188,600 |
| Indiana | +75,000 | -81,600 |
| Iowa | +37,000 | -36,000 |
| Kansas | +33,000 | -47,700 |
| Kentucky | +48,000 | -32,100 |
| Louisiana | +50,000 | -40,900 |
| Maine | +15,000 | -13,500 |
| Maryland | +66,000 | -53,200 |
| Massachusetts | +79,000 | -81,000 |
| Michigan | +109,000 | -96,200 |
| Minnesota | +66,000 | -60,500 |
| Mississippi | +30,000 | -28,400 |
| Missouri | +69,000 | -71,900 |
| Montana | +11,000 | -8,800 |
| Nebraska | +23,000 | -19,400 |
| Nevada | +34,000 | -66,700 |
| New Hampshire | +16,000 | -5,400 |
| New Jersey | +100,000 | -85,500 |
| New Mexico | +22,000 | -20,600 |
| New York | +215,000 | -160,900 |
| North Carolina | +105,000 | -89,300 |
| North Dakota | +8,000 | +800 |
| Ohio | +133,000 | -194,800 |
| Oklahoma | +40,000 | -50,000 |
| Oregon | +44,000 | -52,000 |
| Pennsylvania | +143,000 | -126,200 |
| Rhode Island | +12,000 | -13,900 |
| South Carolina | +50,000 | -28,500 |
| South Dakota | +10,000 | -7,100 |
| Tennessee | +70,000 | -85,200 |
| Texas | +269,000 | -221,600 |
| Utah | +32,000 | -24,400 |
| Vermont | +8,000 | -4,900 |
| Virginia | +93,000 | -65,200 |
| Washington | +75,000 | -83,900 |
| West Virginia | +20,000 | -22,200 |
| Wisconsin | +70,000 | -101,800 |
| Wyoming | +8,000 | -12,600 |
Tags: Barack Obama, Congress, economy, Election 2010, government control, Houston Voters, unemployment
Posted in National Issues, The U.S. Government | No Comments »
