Current Events - March 28, 2013

PK'S NOTE: This week, everywhere, and I mean everywhere, in the news -- those with agendas -- the talk is about the Supreme Court and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I haven't put anything about it here because it doesn't interest me -- there are so many bigger, real problems than this. I don't care with whom you have a relationship as long as it doesn't hurt anyone (abuse in any form or involving children) and you don't use it as an activist cause. No one is stopping anyone from loving or being together and I personally don't care if it is man/woman, man/man, woman/woman. Keep it to yourself in any of these three situations and get on with working and being the best person you can be.  This will be the only article I'll post on the topic because I think it provides a good background:

Marriage Is Illegal . . . Without a License

By Congressman Steve King

A license is a permit to do that which is otherwise illegal. State governments issue licenses to protect certain activities in which that state government has a compelling interest. One must have a license to drive, to fly, to practice medicine, to conduct certain business, to teach school, to practice cosmetology, to join the bar and to own one. In order to get married, one must possess a marriage license.

Each license comes with a set of qualifications that must be proven in order to obtain it. Those qualifications always indicate the government’s compelling interest in the activity. To drive, one must prove he or she is a safe and capable driver. The government’ compelling interest is safety. To teach school, one must prove he or she is equipped to teach adequately, prepare children for the rigors of society, and handle unique challenges of certain students. The government’s compelling interest is to perpetuate what is best for the children.

To marry, two people must prove they are of opposite sex, not related, of age, and not married to anyone else. There is no requirement for proof of enduring love, comingling of finances, or even intent to cohabitate. To ask the government to certify any of those things would offend all Americans who jealously guard their individual autonomy. The government has a compelling interest in a legal record of procreation (this is further indicated by the doctrine of presumed paternity), and in creating a lasting environment where children will thrive. The fact that one must obtain a court order to divorce and the existence of tax-based incentives for marriage are other effects of the government’s interest in marriage.

Marriage is the stable platform from which families are launched. Government surely has a compelling interest in ensuring the stability of that platform, and even subsidizing the practice with tax incentives. Moreover, society has an interest in promoting procreation amongst married adults. Same-sex marriage does not present the possibility of natural procreation nor has same-sex parenting endured and thrived for millennia of human experience.

In our legal system, qualifications for licenses have long-standing foundation, and those qualifications are not considered discriminatory. They are considered to be necessary to pursue the interest of the public. In the case of marriage, those interests are all about children.

You do not need a license to begin a new friendship, start shopping at a new grocery store or pharmacy, or even begin a new dating relationship. Likewise, one does not need a court order to terminate any of those relationships. This fact indicates that there is something unique about marriage that necessitates government involvement. Insisting upon heterosexual marriage is therefore not discriminatory, nor does it constitute the government telling anyone whom to love. The argument for upholding the Defense of Marriage Act is rooted in the way marriage is historically treated by state laws. To understand why government is involved in marriage in the first place is to understand why government cannot validate same-sex marriage.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/344128/marriage-illegal-without-license-congressman-steve-king

PK'S NOTE: I include this because the commentary here is really on the state of the Supreme Court and how off track it and our society has gotten (and I love Mark Steyn):

Married by the Judge

By Mark Steyn

 Three weeks ago, I wrote:

An institution that predates the United States by several millennia will be defined for a third of a billion people by whichever way Anthony Kennedy feels like swingin’ that morning. The universal deference to judicial supremacism is bizarre and unbecoming to a free people.

Paul Mirengoff says today over at Powerline:

The fact that the Supreme Court may be about to pass judgment on the age-old definition of marriage is the reductio ad absurdum of American constitutional jurisprudence. That we have reached this point tells us that the Supreme Court has taken some terribly wrong turns.

The fact that, until very recently, marriage has universally been deemed to require an opposite sex component doesn’t mean that this component must be required forevermore. But a decent appreciation of democracy, human history, and the fallibility of the individual means that nine glorified lawyers shouldn’t be the ones who make the change. Nor should they be in a position where they might make it.

Amen. And no court with any understanding of accountable government or constitutional propriety would go along with it. It may well be that the tide has turned, and the American people are cool with gay marriage. In that case, their elected representatives should enact it into law (as the House of Commons at Westminster recently did). But the spectacle of a nation agog waiting for a puff of smoke from Justice Kennedy to see which way he’s going to blow is ridiculous. Why not ask Punxsutawney Phil?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/343984/married-judge-mark-steyn

U.S. Spends $1.18 Million on Puppets Amid Sequester

The recent canceling of White House tours in the name of sequester-related cuts understandably has disappointed children and families grousing. 

Canceling tours of “the people’s house” saves taxpayers an estimated $18,000 a week, or $936,000 a year.
Putting that figure in perspective, the U.S. federal government has spent more on puppets and puppetry-related expenses than it would cost to fund an entire year’s worth of White House tours. 
Yes, puppets.

From 2009 to 2013, the U.S. government has spent $1,188,382 on puppetry-related expenses. Some of the expenses include puppet shows for kids on educational topics. Others include puppet-based research. In 2010, the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation awarded the University of Central Florida a $199,754 research grant for “Efficient Control and Transmission of Digital Puppetry.” 

The UCF website explains the project thusly:

The purpose of this project is to improve the quality of experiences that can be provided by the puppeteering paradigm (more varied behaviors, enhanced quality of service, reduced latency), while simultaneously reducing the barrier to entry (cost and complexity of set-up, cognitive load on puppeteer, need for extensive training).

In February 2013, the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts invested $25,000 into something called “In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask,” a Minneapolis project that will “support the development of a new work by puppetry artists in the Sampo Box Program.”

In 2009, tax dollars also funded research involving “puppet choreography and automated marionettes” at Northwestern University to the tune of $358,410, or roughly 19 weeks worth of White House visitor tours.

No one is pummeling puppets; to be sure, some of these expenses have produced positive outcomes. But when the White House website ominously informs citizens that “due to staffing reductions resulting from sequestration, we regret to inform you that White House tours will be canceled,” it’s time to get real and pull back the curtain on the political puppet show in Washington.

If the feds have to cut federal “puppet expenditures” to keep the people’s house open, so be it.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/27/Under-Obama-U-S-Spends-1-18-Million-On-Puppets

The National Science Foundation awarded a grant for $876,752 to the University of Iowa to study whether there is any benefit to sex among New Zealand mud snails and whether that explains why any organism has sex.

Feds Spending $880,000 to Study Benefits of Snail Sex

The study, first funded in 2011 and continuing until 2015, will study the New Zealand snails to see if it is better that they reproduce sexually or asexually – the snail can do both – hoping to gain insight on why so many organisms practice sexual reproduction.

“Sexual reproduction is more costly than asexual reproduction, yet nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. Why is sexual reproduction so common despite its costs,” the study’s abstract asks.

“This project will use a different organism, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, a New Zealand snail, which has both sexual and independently-derived asexual lineages that make it ideally suited to address fundamental evolutionary questions of how genes and genomes evolve in the absence of sexual reproduction.”

In other words, the study seeks to see if there are genetic advantages to sexual reproduction that justify its evolutionary costs, advantages such as avoiding genetic mutations or gene loss.

So far, the grant has paid out $502,357, according to NSF, and could pay out the full $880,000 between now and 2015. The study is funded through what NSF calls a continuing grant meaning that it agrees with the researcher to fund a certain amount, but can end up spending more on the grant if NSF agrees that more money is warranted.

The broader aim of the study is to find out why sexual reproduction and males exist, arguing that sex is biologically inefficient for females. Because an asexual organism can simply clone itself faster than it can reproduce if it finds a mate, the study seeks to see if there are other benefits to sexual reproduction that outweigh this ‘cost’ of finding a mate.

In a University of Iowa press release announcing the grant, this is described as the “cost of males” – explaining that female organisms shouldn’t need to produce sons instead of daughters because producing daughters simply involves asexual duplication – which can then duplicate themselves – while male offspring cannot produce other male offspring unaided.

“[T]he commonness of sex is surprising because asexual females should be able to produce twice as many daughters as sexual females that make both male and female offspring,” the release says.

“Despite this and other costs, nearly all organisms reproduce sexually at least some of the time. This means that sex must be associated with profound advantages, while asexual reproduction must have significant evolutionary consequences.”

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/feds-spending-880000-study-benefits-snail-sex 

Insane Government Waste and Use of Taxpayer Money

The NRCC is out with its new "waste list" which totals more than $18 billion. So what exactly is the government spending your money on? How about:

-$1 million on a fruit fly sexual attractiveness study

-$1.3 million for old fashioned x-rays of prisoners. x-rays of prisoners 

-$1.5 million on designing a video game controller

-$100,000 on taxpayer funded comedy group tour in India

-$547,430 on a dancing robot that connects to an iPhone

-$25,000 funding a course about "How to be happy"

-$145,000 on a sculpture garden

-$25,000 on an Alabama Watermelon Queen tour

-$697,177 on a climate change musical

-$10,000 on talking urinal cakes (just in case the boys need some company or to prevent drunk driving)

-$35 million on an old fashioned trolly car

-$150,000 for a toy exhibit

-$320,000 for robot squirrels

-$1.4 billion in improper food stamps purchases which included alcohol, condoms, junk food and diapers

You can read the entire list here. 

We can pay to study the sexual attractiveness of fruit flies and robot squirrels but by all means please, lets cut the working hours for Border Patrol to save some money.
 
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/03/28/insane-government-waste-and-use-of-taxpayer-money-n1551772

A bipartisan abdication

Congress is making itself irrelevent

By George F. Will

“President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress, at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.” — Jim Webb

As America tiptoes toward a fourth intervention in an opaque and uncontrollable conflict — now Syria, after Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — Webb’s words require two minor modifications: Obama has demonstrated a power, not an authority; only the Constitution authorizes. And, as Webb understands, Obama has been able to do so only because Congress, over many years, has become too supine to wield its constitutional powers.

Webb, a Virginia Democrat who declined to seek a second Senate term, vents his dismay in the essay “Congressional Abdication” (in the current issue of the magazine the National Interest), a trenchant indictment of the irrelevance of an institution to which the Constitution gives “certain powers over the structure and use of the military.” The president, Webb says, is commander in chief but only in “executing policies shepherded within the boundaries of legislative powers.” Those powers have, however, atrophied from a disuse amounting to institutional malfeasance as Congress has forfeited its role in national-security policymaking.

Webb, who was a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam and Navy secretary for Ronald Reagan, remembers when Congress was “fiercely protective of its powers.” Webb vigorously opposed the invasion of Iraq before he entered the Senate, which he departed disgusted by Congress’s self-made irrelevance.

In December 2008, in its final hours, George W. Bush’s administration signed with Iraq a Strategic Framework Agreement that was, Webb says, “not quite a treaty,” which would require two-thirds approval by the Senate, but neither was it merely implementing current policy and law. It outlined the U.S. role in defending Iraq from internal and external threats, in promoting reconciliation and combating terrorist groups.

For more than a year the agreement was negotiated and finalized, but there was no meaningful consultation with Congress, no congressional debate on its merits and none sought by congressional leaders. In contrast to Congress’s passivity regarding policy toward what Webb calls “an unstable regime in an unstable region,” Iraq’s parliament voted on the agreement — twice. 

Last May, Obama visited Afghanistan to sign what the White House called “a legally binding executive agreement” concerning the structure of future U.S.-Afghan relations, U.S. commitments to Afghan security and an anticipated U.S. presence beyond 2014. The agreement calls Afghanistan a “Major Non-NATO Ally.” Congress was not formally consulted about this, but Afghanistan’s parliament voted on it.

Noting that, in foreign as well as domestic policy, Obama is “acutely fond of executive orders designed to circumvent the legislative process,” Webb recalls that in 2009 the administration said it would return from the United Nations’s Copenhagen conference on climate change with a “binding” commitment for an emission-reduction program. So Webb wrote to remind the president that “only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment.”

Webb notes that presidents now act as though they have become de facto prime ministers, unconstrained by the separation of powers. This transformation was dramatized in the Libya intervention: 

“Was our country under attack, or under the threat of imminent attack? No. . . . Were we invoking the inherent right of self-defense as outlined in the U.N. Charter? No. Were we called upon by treaty commitments to come to the aid of an ally? No. Were we responding in kind to an attack on our forces elsewhere, as we did in the 1986 raids in Libya after American soldiers had been killed in a Berlin disco? No. Were we rescuing Americans in distress, as we did in Grenada in 1983? No.” 

Instead, “we took military action against a regime that we continued to recognize diplomatically, on behalf of disparate groups of opposing forces whose only real point of agreement was that they wished to rid Libya of [Moammar] Gaddafi. This was not even a civil war” because there was “no cohesive opposition facing a regime.” The result? “Rampant lawlessness” perhaps related to the murder of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and “the regionwide dispersion of thousands of weapons from Gaddafi’s armories.” 

The question, Webb says, is whether in “a world filled with cruelty,” presidents should be allowed to “pick and choose when and where to use military force” by merely citing the “undefinable rubric of ‘humanitarian intervention.’ ”

Imperial presidents and invertebrate legislators of both parties have produced what Webb correctly calls “a breakdown of our constitutional process.” Syria may be the next such bipartisan episode. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-congress-is-making-itself-irrelevant/2013/03/27/530c7838-96ed-11e2-b68f-dc5c4b47e519_story.html

 PK'S NOTE: OMG. We live in an insane world. They're creating bubble children who don't know how to handle real life. 

Dodgeball ban at New Hampshire school district

A New Hampshire school district has banned dodgeball and other "human target" activities over concerns about violence and bullying.

The school board in Windham voted 4-1 last week to remove the game and nine others from the district's curriculum.

The Eagle-Tribune reports the board voted after a committee of physical education teachers studied the issue. A middle school parent complained his child was bullied during a dodgeball game.

The committee recommended eliminating the game, and others, including prison ball, slaughter, and bombardment.

"We spend a lot of time making sure our kids are violence free," Windham superintendent Dr. Henry LaBranche said. "Here we have games where we use children as targets. That seems to be counter to what we are trying to accomplish with our anti-bullying campaign."

School Board member Dennis Senibaldi cast the sole vote against the ban."We have rules that are set in place to deal with bullying," he said. "We don't need to ban an entire round of games just to enforce those rules."

The National Association for Sport and Physical Education said there are any number of reasons to drop dodgeball.

"It's an elimination game," said Andrew Mead, program manager at NASPE. "Games like dodgeball and tag don't keep kids involved and physically active. They objectify slower students who don't catch as well."

Senibaldi offered a solution. "We could just do it on a point system," he said. "So, no one gets knocked out right away."

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/03/28/dodgeball-ban-at-new-hampshire-school-district-after-bullying/?test=latestnews#ixzz2Or3069Sp

First Lady Turns Easter Egg Roll Into White House 'Fat Camp'

This year's White House Easter Egg Roll has been turned into a "fat camp" to inflict exercise and the First Lady's "Let's Move!" healthy meal plans on kids who want just want to celebrate the season on the South Lawn.

An e-mail from the "Let's Move!" campaign says the Easter Egg Roll has been turned into a "Let's Move! Social":

"We're excited to announce that our next White House Social will be a Let's Move! Social here, at the White House. On Monday, April 1st, 2013, the First Family will host the 135th annual White House Easter Egg Roll with the theme 'Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!'"

The First Lady's "followers" will be there to preach to kids about their eating habits:

"We are inviting Let's Move! followers on Twitter and Facebook and their children, ages 5 - 13, to join the fun on the South Lawn and of course to share their experience with their followers!"

There will even be a physical activity regime, something called "sports courts," and cooking demonstrations to "educate families," the White House Easter Egg Roll web page says:

"In addition to all the fun and games, the day's activities - which will include sports courts and cooking demonstrations - will help educate families on smart ways to incorporate healthy eating and exercise choices into their daily routines, which are key pillars of First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! initiative."

Don't be surprised to see the Easter Bunny handing out rabbit food to the little tykes. Remember, when she enlisted Big Bird to hawk bell peppers as a snack?

The e-mail announcing the morphing of the egg hunt into a fitness camp comes after the White House promised the event would go on as scheduled - after it took heat for suggesting it might be cancelled due to the nation's budget woes.

And, you thought the White House Easter Egg Roll was all about rolling eggs at the White House...or Easter.

http://cnsnews.com/blog/craig-bannister/first-lady-turns-easter-egg-roll-white-house-fat-camp
 

Mixed Messages at Ex-Im Bank

Information gap at US Export-Import Bank reveals potential mission creep, market intrusion

 A discrepancy exists between the public data published by a U.S. export support agency and the agency’s actual work, raising questions for the bank’s critics.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) approved financing to support the export of solar panels manufactured by SolarWorld in three separate deals between 2009 and 2012, according to the bank’s data. The bank even issued a press release touting a 2011 deal in support of SolarWorld’s exports.

However, Ex-Im never actually issued the financing to support the SolarWorld exports in the three deals in South Korea, India, and Canada, contrary to a previous report by the Washington Free Beacon. Internal Ex-Im researchers confirmed that the bank never issued the financing despite its being approved.

An Ex-Im spokesman said the bank does not keep track of the approved applications that are not ultimately fulfilled, and does not issue revised data, either.

“There is no business justification for expending bank resources to track what, anecdotally, is a relatively small number,” said Phil Cogan, press secretary for Ex-Im.

Ex-Im has come under fire in the past for being a source of “corporate welfare” and supporting politically well-connected businesses, and Congress fiercely debated whether to re-charter the bank last year.

Critics contend the information gap in the bank’s published data prevents the public from seeing whether it is fulfilling its congressional mandate.

“When taxpayer money is at risk, lawmakers should have access to the full array of information, especially if they reauthorize and expand the bank’s lending capacity,” said Heritage Action communications director Dan Holler, a critic of the bank throughout the reauthorization debate.

While Ex-Im did not end up financing the three deals listed in its data, it has supported SolarWorld by financing a 2011 deal.

SolarWorld was not the primary supplier or exporter in this deal, making it invisible in the bank’s public data. But the bank did issue a press release in 2012 touting the deal.

Even without Ex-Im support, the three SolarWorld deals in South Korea, India, and Canada went through, raising the question of whether the bank should have approved financing at all for them.

The bank’s charter lays out several constraints on the bank, one of which is the bank may not displace financing by the private sector.

The fact that the deals involving SolarWorld went through without Ex-Im help—even though the bank had approved financing for them—suggests it is approving financing for deals that could be privately financed, said Cato Institute Trade Policy analyst Sallie James.

“This suggests to me that other deals [that could have received private financing] could have gone through the cracks,” James said.

An applicant for Ex-Im financing might withdraw as a result of “the buyer getting a better price from a third country, or securing more attractive financing elsewhere, to the product economics changing,” Cogan said.
While it is possible that economic conditions could change enough to make an Ex-Im offer noncompetitive, the nature of the bank’s financing means its terms are generally below the market rate, said Claude Barfield, a former consultant to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Barfield also noted that it is hard to generalize from SolarWorld’s experience, as it does not have the data necessary for a comparison.

Cogan said the bank supplements the private sector by assuming the risk associated with foreign markets, which are often less developed than the American market, lowering the barriers American companies face in exporting their products and leading to more American jobs.

Cogan also said the bank takes several steps to involve the private sector in its loans: It typically sells loan guarantees, which are insurance for the private lender assuring they will be repaid, and its charter only allows it to finance up to 85 percent of the deal, mandating that private entities step in to finance the rest.
Critics of the bank remain opposed to its work.

“American taxpayers should not be serving as a backstop for loans to multi-million or multi-billion dollar companies seeking high risk loans to do business in unstable markets,” said Holler.

Cato’s James conceded that foreign subsides put America in a bind. If America does not help its businesses, it puts its businesses at a competitive disadvantage, but entering the subsidization competition leads to an “arms race” of sorts.

Holler set his sights on the bank’s next reauthorization battle.

“When the bank comes up for reauthorization in 2014, it should not be extended or expanded,” he wrote in an email. “Instead, Republicans in Congress would be wise to characterize the bank for what it is, a fund for corporate welfare. If the Democrats want to jeopardize taxpayer money to assist their corporate backers, so be it, but those who ran for office under the banner of conservatism should know better.”

http://freebeacon.com/mixed-messages-at-ex-im-bank/ 

PK'S NOTE: Who is Monsanto? http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Monsanto

Obama betrays America yet again by signing the ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ into law

Now Obama has signed the “Monsanto Protection Act” into law, stabbing America in the heart yet again and proving that no matter how convincing politicians appear on the campaign trail, they are still sociopathic liars in the end.

The Monsanto Protection Act, part of the HR 933 continuing resolution, allows Monsanto to override U.S. federal courts on the issue of planting experimental genetically engineered crops all across the country. Even if those experimental crops are found to be extremely dangerous or to cause a runaway crop plague, the U.S. government now has no judicial power to stop them from being planted and harvested.

As ibtimes.com reports, the bill “effectively bars federal courts from being able to halt the sale or planting of GMO or GE crops and seeds, no matter what health consequences from the consumption of these products may come to light in the future.” 

GMOs now evade all regulations: America has become a grand Monsanto experiment

A Food Democracy Now petition now states:

With the Senate passage of the Monsanto Protection Act, biotech lobbyists are one step closer to making sure that their new GMO crops can evade any serious scientific or regulatory review.

This dangerous provision, the Monsanto Protection Act, strips judges of their constitutional mandate to protect consumer and farmer rights and the environment, while opening up the floodgates for the planting of new untested genetically engineered crops, endangering farmers, citizens and the environment. 

Corporate-government conspiracy is fascism

This new law forces the USDA to automatically approve all GMO planting permits sought by Monsanto and other biotech firms, effectively granting Monsanto dominion over the U.S. government. This is the very definition of fascism, a form of tyrannical government where corporations conspire with the government to destroy or confiscate all rights, powers and assets, leaving the people impoverished and powerless.

What’s interesting about this development is that now even democrats are starting to wake up and see how evil Obama really is. As ibtimes reports:

“In this hidden backroom deal, Sen. Mikulski turned her back on consumer, environmental and farmer protection in favor of corporate welfare for biotech companies such as Monsanto,” Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, said in a statement. “This abuse of power is not the kind of leadership the public has come to expect from Sen. Mikulski or the Democrat Majority in the Senate.”

Of course, for those of us who have been paying attention and warning everyone else about the dangerous power grab taking place under the Obama regime, this is exactly the kind of behavior we expected to see. The Senate has abandoned law. It has abandoned the Constitution, the rights of the People and even due process. We are now living under a corporate fascist tyranny where companies like Monsanto, General Electric and GlaxoSmithKline control the government and dictate policy. They literally write the laws.

This Monsanto Protect Act, says the Center for Food Safety, is “an unprecedented attack on U.S. judicial review of agency actions” and “a major violation of the separation of powers.” (SOURCE)

But that’s what Obama has always been about. He’s the president who seized control of all farms, food and livestock across America. He’s the guy who claims the power the decide who to assassinate anywhere in America. His administration has routinely conspired with Monsanto to endanger the American people and turn America’s croplands into a grand, dangerous genetics experiment.

“Pandora’s Box is unlocked, Obama just propped open the lid, and there’s no way to cram the evil back in,” wrote The Daily Sheeple. “I’m personally pledging at least one article per week about Monsanto, their incestuous relationship with the government, and their toxic grip on agriculture. I urge everyone to raise a deafening public outcry — every voice adds to the noise that we can create.”

Who is to blame? Senators Barbara Mikulski and Roy Blunt, among others

The chair of the committee that secretly slipped this provision into the bill was Sen. Barbara Mikulski, an absolute traitor to America for allowing the Monsanto Protection Act to become law. She could have stopped it, yet she did nothing to oppose it. She actually helped sneak it into law.

Like nearly all U.S. senators, Mikulski is now operating as an outright enemy of the People while selling out to corporate interests who are peddling poison and death.

There is hardly a U.S. senator remaining who respects his or her oath of office. While Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are showing real courage in the face of federal tyranny and oppression — and Sen. Ron Wyden honestly tries to protect the people of Oregon from outrageous federal aggression — most senators are now little more than corporate puppets who obey the bidding of their masters.

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt actively conspired with Monsanto to write the provision

Mikulski wasn’t the only Monsanto sellout in the U.S. Senate, of course: Missouri senator Roy Blunt was also part of the conspiracy to stab America in the heart and poison our food. According to another article on ibtimes.com:

The provision’s language was apparently written in collusion with Monsanto. Lawmakers and companies working together to craft legislation is by no means a rare occurrence in this day and age. But the fact that Sen. Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, actually worked with Monsanto on a provision that in effect allows them to keep selling seeds, which can then go on to be planted, even if it is found to be harmful to consumers, is stunning.

Who opposed the Monsanto Protection Act? Democratic Senator John Tester. As the NY Daily News reports:

Opposing the inclusion of the rider was Sen. John Tester (D-Mont.), who told Politico that the deal worked out with Monsanto was simply bad policy.

“These provisions are giveaways, pure and simple, and will be a boon worth millions of dollars to a handful of the biggest corporations in this country,” Tester said.

Tester, of course, has been the voice of reason on several fronts in recent years, including the so-called Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2010 which granted the FDA vast new powers to terrorize gardeners and farmers across America. Sen. Tester proposed amendments that attempted to protect the freedoms of American farmers, but his efforts were of course thwarted by the evil corporate conspirators who now fill the U.S. Senate chambers.

http://www.infowars.com/obama-betrays-america-yet-again-by-signing-the-monsanto-protection-act-into-law/print/