Sasser said based on the school superintendent’s letter, if a
principal in the district ever bans the words ‘Christmas’ or ‘Easter’,
it will clearly be hostility and not for some other educational or legal
reason.
http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/school-district-rescinds-easter-ban.html
Obama Proclaims Caesar Chavez Day(today)
As a senator, Barack Obama made a call in 2008 for a national holiday in
Chávez's honor, saying: "Chávez left a legacy as an educator,
environmentalist, and a civil rights leader. And his cause lives on. As
farm workers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair
treatment and fair wages, we find strength in what César Chávez
accomplished so many years ago. And we should honor him for what he's
taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more
prosperous nation. That's why I support the call to make César Chávez's
birthday a national holiday. It's time to recognize the contributions of
this American icon to the ongoing efforts to perfect our union."
(Senator Barack Obama March 31, 2008)[3] Grassroots organizations
continue to advocate to create a national holiday. On March 30, 2011,
President Obama reiterated his support for the cause: "César Chávez's
legacy provides lessons from which all Americans can learn."
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
March 29, 2013
Presidential Proclamation -- Cesar Chavez Day
CESAR CHAVEZ DAY, 2013
- - - - - - -
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PROCLAMATION
Every year, Americans all across our country pause on March 31 to
remember a man who made justice his life's calling. Growing up the son
of migrant farm workers who lost everything in the Great Depression,
Cesar Chavez knew hard work and hardship from an early age. He labored
long hours for little pay, taking odd jobs to help his family get by and
forgoing a formal education to follow the crop cycles. But where others
might have given up or given in, Cesar Chavez never lost hope in the
power of opportunity. He lived each day by a belief as old as America
itself -- the idea that with courage and determination, any of us can
reach beyond our circumstances and leave our children something better.
More than anything, we remember Cesar Chavez for lending voice to
the voiceless. When no one seemed to care about the invisible farm
workers who picked our Nation's food, beset by poverty and cheated by
growers, a courageous man dedicated to dignity stood up and spoke out.
Alongside Dolores Huerta and fellow organizers, he rallied a generation
of workers around "La Causa," marching and fasting and boycotting for
fair pay and protections on the job. They fought through decades of
setbacks and fierce resistance. But through every trial, Cesar Chavez
refused to curb his ambitions or scale back his hope. Step by step,
march by march, he helped lead a community of farm workers to make the
change they sought.
Cesar Chavez's legacy lives on at Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz,
his home and workplace, which I was proud to designate a National
Monument last October. It also lives on in those who remember his
central teaching: that when workers are treated fairly and humanely, our
country grows more just, opportunity becomes more equal, and all of us
do better. Because even with the strides we have made, we know there is
more left to do when working men and women toil in poverty without
adequate protections or simple respect. We know there is more to do when
our broken immigration system forces workers into a shadow economy
where companies can ignore labor laws and undermine businesses following
the rules. Fixing those problems means securing what Cesar Chavez
fought for at La Paz. It means taking on injustice, making sure hard
work is rewarded, and bringing more Americans into a rising middle
class.
In 1966, when Cesar Chavez was struggling to bring attention to his
cause, he received a telegram from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "As
brothers in the fight for equality, I extend the hand of fellowship and
goodwill," he wrote. "We are with you in spirit and in determination
that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized." It is a story
that reminds us how here in America, we are bound together not by the
colors of our skin or the languages we speak, but by the values we share
and the brighter future we seek for our children. So today, as we honor
a man who risked everything to stand up for what he believed in, let us
reflect on our common cause and recommit to moving forward together --
as one Nation and one people.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of
America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and
the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2013, as
Cesar Chavez Day. I call upon all Americans to observe this day with
appropriate service, community, and education programs to honor Cesar
Chavez's enduring legacy.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this
twenty-ninth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand
thirteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the
two hundred and thirty-seventh.
BARACK OBAMA
Just
in case you are not familiar with Chavez, here is synopsis. You will
note that he started his organizing with Saul Alinsky!
Example: After he
seized power, Che put to death five hundred “enemies” of the revolution
without trial, or even much discrimination. Castro, no humanist himself, did his best to neutralize Guevara by
appointing him Minister for Industry. As could be expected, Che applied
Soviet policies to the Cubans: agriculture was destroyed and ghost
factories dotted the landscape. He did not care about Cuba’s economy or
its people: his purpose was to pursue revolution for its own sake,
whatever it meant, like art for art’s sake. Indeed, without his ideology, Che would have been nothing more than
another serial killer. Ideological sloganeering allowed him to kill in
larger numbers than any serial killer could imagine, and all in the name
of justice. Five centuries ago, Che probably would have been one of
those priest/soldiers exterminating Latin America’s natives in the name
of God. In the name of History, Che, too, saw murder as a necessary tool
of a noble cause.
http://teapartyorg.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=4301673:Topic:1395634&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_topic
Does HHS Secretary Sebelius understand the concept of insurance?
Apparently not, according to Megan McCardle writing in the Daily Beast.
This is what Sebelius said about those of us who purchase health insurance plans that don't cover routine health issues:
At a White House briefing Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said some of what passes for health insurance
today is so skimpy it can't be compared to the comprehensive coverage
available under the law. "Some of these folks have very high
catastrophic plans that don't pay for anything unless you get hit by a
bus," she said. "They're really mortgage protection, not health insurance."
McCardle sets her straight:
She said this in response to a report
from the American Society of Actuaries arguing that premiums are going
to rise by 32% when Obamacare kicks in, as coverage gets more generous
and more sick people join the insurance market. Sebelius' response is
apparently that catastrophic insurance isn't really insurance at
all--which is exactly backwards. Catastrophic coverage is "true
insurance". Coverage of routine, predictable services is not insurance
at all; it's a spectacularly inefficient prepayment plan.
Now,
it occurred to me that Sebelius might be thinking about the scam
insurance that is all too often sold to naive, mostly
lower-middle-class folks who labor in the service industry. That stuff
isn't insurance at all; it's a fraud, and the people who sell it will
richly deserve any justice that is meted out to them in either this life
or the next. But that stuff doesn't protect your mortgage, either;
they're almost-worthless discount plans or very-limited-coverage
insurance sold by fly-by-night operations who tend to evaporate as soon
as claims have to be paid. So I don't think that's what she's talking
about; I think she's talking about catastrophic plans.
Nor
do I think that Sebelius is responding awkwardly to a report that the
administration would like to wish away. I think she's sincerely
confused about the difference between insurance, and prepayment. Which
explains a lot about the new health law.
People
our age paying for contraception coverage is loony. We don't need it,
nor want it. But this is what happens when government gets into the health insurance
business. And when you have a Secretary of Health and Human Services
who has no clue what insurance is really for, you end up with Obamacare
and a boondoggle of immense proportions.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/03/does_hhs_secretary_sebelius_understand_the_concept_of_insurance.html#ixzz2P9WZbN8E
The PLO Rewrites History
Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama visited Israel last week. While there, he took a quick trip to
Ramallah ("Height of God") to hold talks with Palestinian Authority
(PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. During the press conference after the
meeting, Obama said:
"Palestinians
deserve an end to occupation and the indignities that come with it"
[through an] "independent, viable and contiguous Palestinian state as
the homeland of the Palestinian people alongside the Jewish state of
Israel."
"Put simply, Palestinians deserve a state of their own."
During the same press conference, Abbas said:
"...
Palestinians want a two-state solution, 'Palestine and Israel, [but
that] peace should not be made through violence, occupation,
settlements, arrests, siege,' [and the denial of the rights of
refugees]."
Abbas also said that a Palestinian unity deal would be a key to peace.
Irony
of Ironies! The PA now talks "peace." While the PA is not technically
the same as the Palestinian Liberation Authority (PLO), the two are
tightly interwoven. The PLO is
the main umbrella organization of the Palestinian national movement and
a leading practitioner of terrorism. The PLO founded the PA under the
terms of a series of 1990s peace pacts. So, now we have Obama supporting
the PLO.
A
little history is in order here. The PLO was created on June 2, 1964 in
Cairo by the Arab League. In its charter is this statement (in Article
18): "The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and
Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history or with the true basis of sound statehood." [emphasis mine]
Further,
you will find in the PLO's Statement of Proclamation of the
Organization "... the right of the Palestinian Arab people to its sacred homeland Palestine
and affirming the inevitability of the battle to liberate the usurped
part from it, and its determination to bring out its effective
revolutionary entity and the mobilization of the capabilities and
potentialities and its material, military and spiritual forces."
[emphasis mine]
Is the PLO trying to rewrite history? YES!
There
is not, nor ever has there been, a Palestinian people, state, language,
culture, or history. The present-day "Palestinians" are Arabs, with
Arabic culture, history, and language. They came from Arab states into
what we now know as Israel about one hundred years ago. In contrast, the
Jews have been in Israel for over 5,000 years. Following the Six-Day
War (June 5-10, 1967, in which Israel thoroughly routed a coalition of
nine Arab states and took possession of Judea and Samaria), the Arabs in
Judea and Samaria suddenly became Palestinians. Walid Shoebat, a former
PLO terrorist, said that overnight (June 4, 1967) he became a
Palestinian.
The concept of Palestine was a Roman invention. The Jews in Israel attempted to gain independence from the Roman Empire in the second century A.D. The attempt ended at a Masada
in Judea. Roman emperor Hadrian was angry with the Jews and wanted to
destroy the name of Israel and Judea so that there would be no memory of
the country that belonged to the Jewish rebels. He decided to rename
the Roman province, so he found in ancient history a name that appeared
appropriate. Hadrian discovered that an extinct people, unknown in Roman
times, called "Philistines", once lived in that area and were enemies
of the Israelites. He invented the new name: "Palæstina", the Latin
spelling of "Philistine."
There
is no mention of the name Palæstina in history prior to the Romans
renaming the province of Judea. The name does not appear in any ancient
document, is not written in the Bible, either in Hebrew Scriptures or
the Christian Testament, nor in Assyrian, Persian, Macedonian,
Ptolemaic, Seleucian, or other Greek sources.
Reference
to the "Palestinian" people was never mentioned, not even by the Romans
that invented the term. Muslims claim that the prophet Mohammed once
traveled to Jerusalem (not mentioned in the Qur'an), but there is no
reference to any Palestinian people in the Qur'an.
The PLO may try to rewrite ancient history, but it cannot rewrite recent history.
The PLO has a long recent history of terrorism and violence. Under Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), the PLO led Palestinians into the Al-Aqsa Intifada,
a war with Israel that lasted nearly five years and claimed thousands
of lives on both sides. Here is a (partial) list of PLO (or its
offshoots) violence:
• Late 1950s: Arafat co-founds Fatah, whose sole purpose is to gain control of Palestine from Israel through terrorism
•
March 18, 1968: Fatah terrorists in Israel set a land mine which later
blew up a school bus, killing two children and injuring 28 others
• July 1968: Fatah joins the PLO and becomes its dominant member
• February 1969: Yasser Arafat becomes PLO chairman
•
May 8, 1970: PLO terrorists attacked an Israeli School bus, killing
nine children and three adults, and crippling nineteen for life
• September 1972: Black September attack at the Olympic Games in Munich, Germany
• October 7, 1985: four PLO terrorists hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, and killed one Jewish tourist
• July 2000: PLO head Yasser Arafat rejected
a peace settlement that would have resulted in a Palestinian state --
it's interesting to note that in order to counter the perception that
Arafat was the obstacle to peace, the PLO began to publish a
"revisionist" view of what took place during the peace process
• September 2000: Arafat launched the Al-Aqsa Intifada, and continued to fund, incite, and support terrorism
•
March, 2002: PLO terrorists killed five students and wounded
twenty-three other people during an attack on a pre-military high school
in Atzmona, Israel
• March 14, 2004: suicide bombers associated with Fatah kill nine and injure nineteen in Ashdod, Israel
Killing
children. Classy bunch, the PLO. And as if the above actions weren't
despicable enough, the PLO has recruited children to attack Israeli
targets, with some of the attacks being suicidal.
The PLO itself was removed from the U.S. State Department's terrorist organization in 1994, but several PLO factions are still on that list, including:
• Palestine Islamic Jihad -- Shaqaqi Faction -- operating in Gaza with minimal presence in the West Bank and Israel
• Palestine Liberation Front -- Abu Abbas Faction -- based in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories
• Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- operating in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza
•
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command --
political Leadership headquartered in Damascus, with bases in southern
Lebanon and a presence in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and
Syria, and a small presence in Gaza
What's most interesting is from where these groups receive external aid: Syria and Iran.
Right now, March 26, 2013, the PA continues to call for the destruction of Israel. Is Obama so naïve as to think a Palestinian state will stop terrorist violence?
This
is the organization Obama supports through his call for a Palestinian
state. Does Obama's duplicity ever end? And, while sequestration is
going on, Obama released $500 million to the PLO.
But that's just my opinion
When Men Forsake God, Tyranny Always Follows
The
prophetic words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resonate like thunder across
the history of man. "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has
happened." Thus summarized the Nobel laureate, Orthodox Christian
author, and Russian dissident the main reason why the communist
revolution was able to enslave, terrorize, and murder tens of millions
of innocent people. An atheistic mentality and a long process of
secularization gradually alienated the people from God and His moral
laws. This led them away from truth and authentic liberty and
facilitated the rise of tyranny.
Godlessness
is always the first step to the concentration camp. Tragically, that
same process is now at work in America and many other parts of the
world. Too many refuse to see it or believe it.
America
has long been a beacon of freedom for millions of souls who came here
seeking liberty and opportunity. It achieved this unique place in
history by recognizing the authority of God and his moral laws and
declaring that men have the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. Founded by faithful and God-fearing men who
despised government tyranny and sought religious freedom and individual
liberty, America incorporated these universally true principles in its
Declaration of Independence and Constitution. These ideals eventually
became the bedrock upon which all our laws, government, and institutions
were originally built.
America's
Founding Fathers understood and proclaimed that all rights come from
God alone, not governments. They insisted that government must always
serve man and that man was created by God to be free. Their deep faith
and reverence of the Almighty inspired and guided their actions and
motivated their decisions. It is this belief and trust in God's
authority and wisdom that ultimately transformed America from a tiny
British colony with a handful of refugees to the mighty economic and
military superpower and an oasis of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity
for tens of millions of immigrants.
The
Founding Fathers, like Solzhenitsyn, understood the dependence of
freedom on morality. A virtuous and faithful people who placed God at
the center of their lives and the foundations of their institutions
helped America become that shining city on a hill "whose beacon light
guides freedom-loving people everywhere," said President Ronald Reagan.
"We've staked the whole future of American civilization not on the
power of government," wrote James Madison, "far from it. We have staked
the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of each
and all of us...to govern ourselves according to commandments of God.
The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which the Constitution is founded."
This
same theme is found throughout the writings of the Founders. John
Adams clearly understood that our "Constitution was made only for a
moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of
any other." "He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life
is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country," observed
Samuel Adams. Patrick Henry wrote that "virtue, morality, and religion
... is the armor that renders us invincible[.] ... [I]f we lose these,
we are conquered, fallen indeed[.] ... [S]o long as our manners and
principles remain sound, there is no danger."
Solzhenitsyn
warned that by forgetting God, America and the West faced a "calamity
of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness" that
would weaken their foundations and make them vulnerable to moral decay
and internal collapse. Only by
turning back to God from the self-centered and atheistic humanism where
"man is the touchstone [measure] in judging and evaluating everything on
earth" would the West have any hope of escaping the destruction toward
which it inevitably moves.
Unfortunately,
America did not heed Solzhenitsyn's warnings. In the last several
decades, America has been rapidly transformed from a God-fearing and
worshiping nation into a secularist and atheistic society, where
communist and atheistic ideals are glorified and promoted, while
Judeo-Christian values and morality are attacked, ridiculed, and
increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our
nation. Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many
so-called "liberal" and "progressive"
elites, God and His moral laws have been progressively erased from our
public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of
delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.
"Those
people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants,"
warned William Penn. Throughout history, the most serious threats to
man's freedom always arise when men refuse to acknowledge that God is
ultimately the source and protector of real and lasting liberty and
freedom. When that timeless truth is erased from men's consciousness,
when God's wisdom and laws are forgotten, when morality is no longer a
virtue to be treasured and emulated, when human life is no longer
sacred, and man becomes the only standard of all that is true, then
genuine freedom will begin to vanish from any group, institution,
community, or society. Carnality, greed, selfishness, and worldly
pleasure and power become the main goals of human existence. The moral
and ethical clarity, conviction, and courage required to defend freedom
and protect genuine liberty ultimately disappear, to be replaced by the
most cruel, unethical, tyrannical, and godless ideologies.
It
is no coincidence that advocates and followers of Fascism, Nazism, and
Communism -- all secular, immoral, atheistic, and godless ideologies --
enslaved and murdered the greatest number of people in the history of
mankind. All produced some of the most cruel, violent, and evil tyrants
this world has ever known -- despots who persecuted their own citizens,
slaughtered the innocent, destroyed their own people, and brought
calamities to other nations. All subjugated the liberty and property of
men to the absolute power and control of the state. All were enemies
of God and blasphemers of His Holy Scriptures. All viciously persecuted
the most devout and religious members of their societies, primarily the
religious Christians and Jews who righteously and faithfully followed
the Lord.
This is the lesson the 20th century
expended so much blood to teach us. It appears that without a marked
change in course, the Western world is going to have to learn it again.
Forward, and downhill
It is commonplace for liberals to sneer at “slippery slope” arguments
– the fear that some infringement upon liberty will lead to further
loss of freedom down the road. (For some reason, there seems to be
little fear that “slippery slopes” can lead in the other direction.)
Talk about the assault weapons ban leading to more stringent gun
control, for example, and gun-control zealots will laugh at your silly
concerns. Of course they don’t have a further agenda, once
they get the American people accustomed to the latest Bill of Rights
haircut! They’ll stop with a 15-round limit on magazine size, and
banning rifles with two scary-looking features. Or 10 rounds and one
scary-looking feature. Whatever. Just rest assured that nobody’s going
to be pushing anybody down any well-greased inclines toward
destinations that would be politically unreachable today.
In truth, slippery-slope concerns are perfectly reasonable. They are
a standard part of the “progressive” battle plan. A core tenet of
progressivism is to take incremental, but irreversible, steps toward the
total State. They hope that each new expansion of government will
swiftly acquire a dependent constituency that will fight much harder to
protect their favorite programs than weary taxpayers will struggle to
terminate them. Diffuse taxation pays for specific benefits. Who knows
where each dollar paid to the tax man goes? But everyone receiving a
dollar from Uncle Sugar most certainly knows where it comes from.
Also, the Left labors very hard to push the idea that government
spending and regulation are the only way society can express proper
concern about any given problem. Anyone who tries to roll back spending
or regulatory power will therefore be accused of not “caring” about
some vital issue, or actively “hating” some group of people. Knowing
that all motion toward a state of higher liberty will be denounced as
heartless disdain or disgusting greed, why shouldn’t we be concerned
that movement toward the larger State is a downhill slide that will be
very difficult to slow, let alone reverse?
Our highly legalistic society is very big on the idea of building
from precedent. It happens constantly in both the courts, and political
debate. Every loss of liberty becomes a building block for the next
expansion of government power. If the State can do this, why not this?
If one thing can be forbidden, or compelled, why not the next? This
strategy has proven effective at swaying both judges and voters.
And government programs grow through failure. The
importance of this process to the psychology of Big Government cannot be
underestimated. An efficient program that delivers solid results under
budget is going to find its budget cut. An agency that “solves”
whatever problem it was formed to address will find itself stripped down
or eliminated. The canny bureaucrat therefore presents his department
as perpetually under-funded, while trying to grapple with ever more
formidable challenges. Every agency is a plucky underdog doing a
fantastic job on a shoestring budget against insurmountable odds… and
there is always so much more work to be done. If there is any
threat of a program’s original goals being met, it will suddenly
contract an acute case of mission creep, discovering new problems it can
address. This is a fertile environment for slippery-slope thinking.
Government programs routinely end up exerting levels of authority, and
spending sums of money, that would have astounded their original
creators.
The purpose of the Constitution was to establish a set of inalienable
rights that would never be infringed at all, and thus could not be
rolled downhill. There are supposed to be some aspects of individual
freedom that are forever off the table, no matter how urgently
benevolent politicians and super-intelligent regulators want to violate
them for the “greater good.” Once concessions have been made from an
absolute right, it is no longer absolute, and its further dissolution
becomes negotiable. It is now common for these concessions to be
extracted through executive action and judicial decisions, rather than
using the amendment process provided by the Constitution. But for an
example of a very slippery slope that began the “right” way, with a
Constitutional amendment, compare the current state of the income tax to
the promises made at its inception. How much government power grew
from the concession that income could be directly taxed – just a tiny
little bit, mind you, and only from the vast income of millionaires, never the hard-won paychecks of the working man?
Today it seems as though we’re surrounded by issues that would have
been dismissed as the fanciful delusions of slippery-slope paranoia only
a few years ago. And of course, we are once again promised there will
be no further developments, no efforts to take a political crusade in
directions that today’s voters would never approve of. There seems to
be little interest in exhuming the ignored warnings of yesterday’s
critics, to measure the accuracy of concerns that were waved away. What
receives less respect in today’s culture than the wisdom of previous
ages? Tradition is inertia, mindless obedience to hollow ritual! And
yet, those who insist on moving rapidly “forward” seem unable to
consider the danger of racing down a decline marked with points of no
return.
http://www.redstate.com/2013/03/29/forward-and-downhill/
