The Right Lane update 2.24.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Is Obama Scared of Sequester Because If It Happens No One Will Notice?

·       Barack Obama is warning America of the devastation that the sequester will visit upon the country, including Furloughs of 800,000 civilian Pentagon employees;

·       Meat inspector furloughs from which food shortages will result;

·       Air Traffic Controller furloughs resulting in three-hour waits at airports to clear security;

·       Reductions in embassy protection and border patrols;

·       Cutting the Persian Gulf Naval presence from two aircraft carriers to one;

·       Diminished emergency services;

·       fewer police and firefighters on the streets;

·       Reduced military readiness;

·       Criminals going free because federal prosecutors will have to close cases;

·       Thousands of teacher and educator layoffs

·       Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids;

·       Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings;

·       and Job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research.

And soon we’re likely to hear that global warming will accelerate and comets will strike the Earth if Republicans don’t acquiesce to Obama’s demands for more taxes. He has hinted that planes will fall from the sky:

“Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country,” Obama continued. “Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.”

How much is to be “cut”? $85 billion on a budget of $3.6 trillion. That’s 2.4%. As of August household income was down 8.2% under Obama and the country had to make do. Now Obama tries to tell us that government can’t do with 2.4% less? Seriously?  He has been lying about the sequester since the debates. The sequester was Obama’s team’s idea:

Page 326 (July 26): At 2:30 p.m., [White House Budget director Jack] Lew and [White House legislative affairs director Rob] Nabors went to the Senate to meet with [Senator Majority Leader Harry] Reid and his chief of staff, David Krone. “We have an idea for a trigger,” Lew said. “What’s the idea,” Reid asked skeptically. “Sequestration.”

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Paroled sex offenders disarming tracking devices By Paige St. John, Los Angeles Times

Thousands of high-risk parolees are removing GPS monitors, often with little risk of serving time, because jails are too full to hold them. Some have been charged with new crimes. The government cannot and will not protect you or your children. Thousands of paroled child molesters, rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in California are removing or disarming their court-ordered GPS tracking devices — and some have been charged with new crimes including sexual battery, kidnapping and attempted manslaughter. The offenders have discovered that they can disable the monitors, often with little risk of serving time for it, a Times investigation has found. The jails are too full to hold them.  "It's a huge problem," said Fresno parole agent Matt Hill. "If the public knew, they'd be shocked." More than 3,400 arrest warrants for GPS tamperers have been issued since October 2011, when the state began referring parole violators to county jails instead of returning them to its packed prisons. Warrants increased 28% in 2012 compared to the 12 months before the change in custody began. Nearly all of the warrants were for sex offenders, who are the vast majority of convicts with monitors, and many were for repeat violations. The custody shift is part of Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature's "realignment" program, to comply with court orders to reduce overcrowding in state prisons. But many counties have been under their own court orders to ease crowding in their jails.

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Girl, 13, accused of stabbing peer for bag of chips

FRESNO, CA -- A California middle-school student in Armona has been charged in the stabbing of another student..  A 13-year-old girl from Armona, located in the South Valley, has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon. The Kings County District Attorney's Office says she also faces another charge for using a knife. Kings County Sheriff's deputies say the girl stabbed a 13-year-old boy after he stole a bag of chips from her lunch. She claims she only meant to "poke" him and was joking around. The girl is expected to be arraigned on the charges Monday morning in Kings County Juvenile Hall.  Any doubt that there is a coarsening of our society?  Could the media (hours a child sits in front of the TV) be contributing to this?  Did 13 year old kids stab one another over chips when you were growing up?

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A side of Lincoln you might not know  Walter E. Williams is a professor at George Mason University

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” has been a box-office hit and nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrayed our 16th president.  I haven’t seen the movie; therefore, this column is not about the movie but about a man deified by many.  My colleague Thomas DiLorenzo, economics professor at Loyola University Maryland, exposed some of the Lincoln myth in his 2006 book, “Lincoln Unmasked.”  Now comes Joseph Fallon, cultural intelligence analyst and former U.S. Army Intelligence Center instructor, with his new e-book, “Lincoln Uncensored.” Fallon’s book examines 10 volumes of collected writings and speeches of Lincoln’s, which include passages on slavery, secession, equality of blacks and emancipation.  In an 1858 letter, Lincoln said, “I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists.”  In a Springfield, Ill., speech, he explained, “My declarations upon this subject of negro slavery may be misrepresented, but can not be misunderstood. I have said that I do not understand the Declaration (of Independence) to mean that all men were created equal in all respects.”   Debating with Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of ... making voters or jurors of Negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

You say, “His Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves! That proves he was against slavery.”
Lincoln’s words: “I view the (Emancipation Proclamation) as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.” He also wrote: “I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition.”  At the time Lincoln wrote the proclamation, war was going badly for the Union.  London and Paris were considering recognizing the Confederacy and considering assisting it in its war effort.  The Emancipation Proclamation was not a universal declaration.  It detailed where slaves were freed, only in those states “in rebellion against the United States.” Slaves remained slaves in states not in rebellion – such as Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware.  The hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. Lincoln’s own secretary of state, William Seward, said, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”  Lincoln did articulate a view of secession that would have been welcomed in 1776: “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. ... Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it.  Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”  But that was Lincoln’s 1848 speech in the U.S. House of Representatives regarding the war with Mexico and the secession of Texas.

Why didn’t Lincoln feel the same about Southern secession? Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs.  During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859.  What “responsible” politician would let that much revenue go?

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Ted Cruz Responds to ‘New McCarthy’ New Yorker Article: ‘Curious’ They Would ‘Dredge Up a 3-Year-Old Speech & Call it News’

Sen. Ted Cruz’s office told TheBlaze it was “curious” that the New Yorker would dig up a years-old speech for the purpose of dubbing him “our new McCarthy.” Nevertheless, Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said the Texas Republican’s “substantive point” about Harvard Law School being home to Communists “was absolutely correct.” Cruz, the New Yorker reported, said in a 2010 speech that President Barack Obama “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School” because “there were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were 12 who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Cruz attended Harvard Law after Obama. “It’s curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it ‘news,’” Frazier said in a statement to TheBlaze late Friday. “Regardless, Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.” A Harvard Law School spokesman had told the New Yorker they were “puzzled by the senator’s assertions” and “unaware of any basis for them.” Charles Fried, a Republican who served as President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general and taught Cruz at Harvard Law, also disputed the notion. The New Yorker had said it was possible Cruz had been referring to the left-leaning critical legal studies, “a method of critiquing the political impact of the American legal system”: Professor Duncan Kennedy, for instance, a leader of the faction, who declined to comment on Cruz’s accusation, counts himself as influenced by the writings of Karl Marx. But he regards himself as a social democrat, not a Communist, and has never advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government by Communists.

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U.S. sends troops to Niger for drone missions By David S. Cloud and Kathleen Hennessey, Los Angeles Times

President Obama says the 100-troop deployment will help France in its effort to drive militants out of northern Mali.

About 100 U.S. troops have deployed to the West African country of Niger to help establish a drone base for surveillance missions, in the latest step by the United States to aid French forces battling Islamic militants in neighboring Mali.  In a letter to Congress on Friday, President Obama said the deployment would "provide support for intelligence collection and will also facilitate intelligence sharing with French forces conducting operations in Mali, and with other partners in the region." The last 40 American troops in the deployment arrived in Niger on Feb. 20 with the consent of the government, Obama said. A senior U.S. officer described the troops as a security unit that will protect crews flying and maintaining U.S. Air Force drones now operating from an airfield near the capital, Niamey. The force includes drone pilots, intelligence liaison officers and aircraft maintenance personnel, the officer said. "We're basing drones there to help the French, and this deployment is the security element," the officer said.

He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss details of the operation publicly.

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Brewer: Border not Secure, Drug Cartels 'Ready to Come Across' By Matthew Auerbach

Gov. Jan Brewer, R-Ariz., says she has first-hand evidence Mexican drug cartels are on the verge of breaching her state’s border. “I was just down there last week,” Brewer said in an interview on Fox News.
“I was with the National Guard. I was in a Blackhawk. I saw them on the other side, the drug cartels, ready to come across in the middle of the night. It is not secure.” Brewer said the border is not secure, the fences aren’t completed and there isn’t enough law enforcement on the ground. Brewer says any immigration reform legislation will stall until the situation is rectified. “The ranchers will tell you, if you sit down and talk to them, that they’re fearful, that the border patrol is too far north,” she said.  “They need to get closer to the border because they let them go so far, and then they just sort of blend in, and they’re destroying their land and destroying their cattle, they’re destroying their water.  They’re frustrated. And I believe that until the ranchers, law enforcement, is satisfied and they tell us that this border is secured, there’s not going to be a whole lot of movement.”

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Erskine Bowles on Sequester: ‘Dumb, Stupid, Inane’ By Melanie Hunter

Former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles on Tuesday said the across-the-board sequester cuts, which are scheduled to take effect on March 1, are “dumb.” “They are dumb, and they are stupid, stupid, stupid. They’re stupid, because first of all, they are inane. There’s no business in the country that makes its cuts across the board. You go in there, and you try to surgically cut those things that have the least adverse effect on productivity,” Bowles said at a Politico Playbook breakfast. “Second, we’re cutting those areas where we actually need to invest – education, infrastructure, research – and third, we don’t make any cuts in those things that are growing faster than the economy. That’s stupid, stupid, stupid,” Bowles said. The sequester consists of automatic spending cuts – defense and non-defense spending – that will cut about $44 billion in federal spending and is expected to cost about $1 trillion over the next decade if allowed to go into full effect. House Speaker John Boehner said Friday that the sequester will take place next month unless Congress agrees to balance the federal budget over the next decade. “And yet it sounds like you think that when the sequester kicks in, that may be a window to do something big. You were White House chief of staff during the government shutdown. Tell us what’s going to happen March 1 when those sequester cuts kick and why you think that might be a chance to do something big,” Politico’s Chief White House Correspondent Mike Allen told Bowles. “When you guys have to go out here to Reagan Airport and wait in line three hours to get through security, you’re gonna be pissed, and so is everybody else. And you could use lots of different stories just like that, and when that happens, they’re going to come back to Congress and say, ‘We’re sick of this intransigence. Let’s get together. Let’s do something smart. Let’s put the partisanship aside. Let’s pull together, and let’s fix this debt,’” Bowles said

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Liberal Hypocrisy: Hurting Minorities While Claiming To Help Them by David L. Goetsch

The maxim, if you want to FEEL good be a liberal but if you want to DO good be a conservative, has never rung so true. It is disturbing to realize how far liberal Democrats have been able to advance their leftwing agenda by whispering pleasing but false promises in the ears of poor minorities while simultaneously stabbing them in the back. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that contemporary liberalism—so-called progressivism—has done more to harm poor minorities than anything since slavery. In fact, for poor minorities in America, progressivism is little more than a new form of slavery.

Examples abound concerning liberal policies and programs that purport to help poor minorities when in fact they do more harm than good. One such example is the left’s commitment to continually raising the minimum wage in spite of indisputable evidence that doing so creates high unemployment, especially among young blacks and other minorities. Ever higher minimum-wage rates simply freeze young minorities out of the workplace just when they are seeking that all-important first job. Unable to get a job, too many are left spending their idle time on the streets where the criminal element quickly recruits them for nefarious activities that lead to no good. Those poor minorities who refuse to take up a life of crime are still prime targets for another group: liberals looking to expand the ranks of entitled minorities who look to government for their sustenance. Either route is destructive for the individuals in question and for our country.

Another liberal policy that claims to help minorities but in fact hurts them is affirmative action. There are two ways in which affirmative action harms minority students. First, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr. document in their new book Mismatch, affirmative action hurts otherwise qualified minority applicants for college admission by placing them in institutions where they are over their heads academically. These minority students are qualified for college admission and, if placed in institutions appropriate to their academic levels, could succeed. However, placing them in classes with the top students in the world puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

Minority students who are accepted at top-tier universities because they are minorities rather than because their test scores and preparation merit admission fail in high numbers because they are mismatched—not because they are minorities. This phenomenon is no different than a good high school athlete failing in a top tier college program when he could have succeeding at a smaller school. Not every high school football player can play for the University of Alabama. Not every student, regardless of race, can attend America’s top ten universities, but because of affirmative action many minorities who would have succeeded in a good state university are being set up for failure by those who use affirmative action to enroll them in world-class universities where they simply cannot compete.

The latest social issue that is compelling liberals to “help” minorities is gun violence. Their answer, of course, is gun control—more laws that will disarm law-abiding citizens while emboldening violent criminals. Writing for Townhall, conservative economist, professor, and commentator, Thomas Sowell, states: “Although gun control is not usually considered a racial issue, a wholly disproportionate number of Americans killed by guns are black. But here, as elsewhere, liberals’ devotion to their ideology greatly exceeds their concern about what actually happens to flesh and blood human beings as a result of their ideology.”

Sowell accurately states that factual studies over the years in the United States and abroad have repeatedly shown that gun-control laws do not reduce gun violence. Cities in the United States with the toughest gun-control laws have murder rates far above the national average. In fact, the highest murder rates in the world are in countries that have 100 percent gun bans. Consider just a few examples. Measured by murders per 100,000 people, Honduras has a murder rate of 91.6, Jamaica’s is 52.2, South Africa’s is 31.8, the Dominican Republic’s is 25.0, Russia’s is 10.2, and Pakistan’s is 7.8. By way of comparison, the murder rate per 100,000 people in the United States is 4.2, a number that will only increase with stricter gun-control laws.

Additional liberal programs that hurt those they claim to help fall under the broad rubric of welfare, but space limitations require that this be the topic of another column. To conclude this column, the reason liberal policies and programs always seem to backfire and hurt those they purport to help is because liberals either do not understand human nature or simply ignore it. This is unfortunate because as any good leader can tell you, failing to factor human nature into your decisions is what gives rise to the law of unintended consequences, and this law is the Achilles heel of liberal programs and policies—a fact that hurts poor minorities.

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Here’s What President Obama Won’t Tell You About His Sequester, the Republican Plan for Smarter Spending Cuts, & Senate Democrats’ Inaction by Speaker Boehner Press Office

You’re going to see President Obama at campaign-style rallies again this week, demanding higher taxes and blaming Republicans for his ‘sequester’ mess. Here’s what he won’t be telling you:

This is President Obama’s sequester. “The idea for sequestration did come from the White House, as news accounts made clear at the time,” reports the New York Times. As Speaker Boehner wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “it is a product of the president's own failed leadership.”

Republicans passed a bill with smarter spending cuts (twice), but the president’s Senate hasn’t passed it (or any other replacement bill). Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget in four years either. The House voted to replace the president’s sequester in May 2012 and again last December. Each bill targeted waste and fraud, and would help put us on a path to balance the budget in 10 years.

Government spending is the problem. No one should be talking about raising taxes when the FAA spends $500 million a year on consultants; the EPA has sent more than $100 million in grants to foreign countries; the IRS has a $4 million-a-year TV studio; and more.

Veteran journalist Bob Woodward says the president is “moving the goal posts” when calling for even higher taxes. And claiming otherwise is a “classic case of distortion and confusion.” President Obama got more than $600 billion in tax hikes last month (with no spending cuts). We don’t need higher taxes; we need to address Washington’s spending problem.

The president’s relentless campaigning has left him “virtually absent” from the legislative process. If the president were serious about replacing his sequester, he’d cancel his “endless campaign” events this week and devote his schedule to pressing his Democratic-controlled Senate to finally pass something.

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