The Right Lane update 3.22.13

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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DHS Refuses to Answer Congress on 1.6 Billion Bullet Purchase

Speaking at CPAC with Infowars and We Are Change reporter, Luke Rudkowski, Congressman Timothy Huelscamp revealed this week that the Department of Homeland Security has refused to answer questions from “multiple” members of Congress regarding its recent purchase of huge amounts of weapons and ammunition. “They have no answer for that question. They refuse to answer to answer that,” Huelscamp said. “I’ve got a list of various questions of agencies about multiple things. Far from being the most transparent administration in the world, they are the most closed and opaque,” the Congressman added. “They refuse to let us know what is going on, so I don’t really have an answer for that. Multiple members of Congress are asking those questions,” he added. “It comes down to during the budget process, during the appropriations process, are we willing to hold DHS’s feet to the fire?” “We’re going to find out… I say we don’t fund them ’til we get an answer. Those type of things really challenge Americans. They are worried about this administration,” Huelscamp urged.

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Paul: We Already Have ‘De Facto’ Amnesty for Immigrants

Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that current U.S. immigration policy amounts to “de facto amnesty,” as he responded to conservative criticism against amnesty for illegal immigrants. “I’ve got a news flash for those who want to call people names on amnesty. What we have now is de facto amnesty,” Paul, a Republican from Kentucky.  “We have 11 million people here that have been here, some of them for a decade or more. No one is telling them to go home. No one is sending them home.”  So what would Paul tell illegal immigrants? “I would say if you want to work, we’ll find a place for you, but that doesn’t mean that you get special privileges,” the potential presidential candidate said. “It just means we’ll get you a work visa. Work visas, really, we have plenty of work visas to give every year. We’re not giving them out because the process is too onerous. So we need to make the facility of getting a work visa much easier.” Paul said Wednesday that his immigration plan consists of conferring work visas on illegal immigrants and that he is “open to debate” about what comes next.

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Another Example of how the "collective mentality fails"; Principal Says Awards May Be ‘Devastating’ to Others

A Massachusetts principal has been criticized for canceling his school’s Honors Night, saying it could be ‘devastating’ to the students who worked hard, but fell short of the grades.

David Fabrizio, principal of Ipswich Middle School, notified parents last week of his plan to eliminate the event. “The Honors Night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade-point average,” Fabrizio penned in his first letter to parents, the station reported. Fabrizio also said he decided to make the change because academic success can be influenced by the amount of support a student receives at home and not all students receive the same level of emotional and academic support at home. An example where " denying exceptionalism" rooted in Socialist mentality is ruining our country.  It robs our children of learning that there are winners and losers in the real world.  Or differently said, they can depend upon the nanny state WHEN they fail.  Failure has real consequences.

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Obama quotes Alinsky in speech to young Israelis

In his address in Jerusalem today, President Obama channeled Saul Alinsky, citing the radical community organizer’s defining mantra as he urged young Israelis to “create change” to nudge their leadership to act. Obama in this (as he has done many times before) reveals his true ideology. Obama told a crowd of college students at Jerusalem’s main convention center that Israel “has the wisdom to see the world as it is, but also the courage to see the world as it should be.” One of Alinsky’s major themes was working with the world as it “is” to turn it into the world as “it should be.” In his defining work, “Rules for Radicals,” which he dedicated to “the first rebel,” Lucifer, Alinsky used those words to lay out his main agenda. He asserted radical change must be brought about by working within a system instead of attacking it from the outside. “It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system,” wrote Alinsky.

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Evolutionist: “Butterflies…Colorations Designed to Deflect Predators”

Evolutionists have such blind faith that they often don’t realize what they are saying or the difference between evolution and adaptation.  They deny the existence of a Great Designer and then turn around use terms like ‘designed to…’ Case in point is a recent study where the reporter wrote:

“Butterflies are vibrant and colorful insects, with colorations designed to deflect predators.”

Who designed their color patterns if they don’t believe in a Creator?  Somehow, the mindless, godless random chance mutations somehow miraculously designed the necessary genetic change that created the perfect color pattern to protect them from predation.  To be honest, this sounds more incredible and harder to accept than believing in a Creator God in the first place. However, their belief that nature can willfully design such responses has led to a study on hairstreak butterflies and jumping spiders.  The premise behind the study is that numerous butterflies have ‘evolved their particular wing coloration specifically to ward off predators.  Most evolutionists have believed that the driving force of the evolution of wing patterns has been due to the predation by birds. Based on that premise, research conducted at the University of Florida focused not on the effects of bird predation but on jumping spider predation on hairstreak butterflies.  Located on the lower back edge of the wings of hairstreak butterflies is a large dark spot, that many refer to as a false head.  Supposedly, that false head evolved in response to predation by birds, but now they believe they have evidence that it may have been due to small jumping spiders. Andrei Sourakov, lepidopterist and lead researcher on the study describes it this way:

“Everything we observe out there has been blamed on birds: aposematic coloration, mimicry and various defensive patterns like eyespots.  It’s a big step in general and a big leap of faith to realize that a creature as tiny as a jumping spider, whose brain and life span are really small compared to birds, can actually be partially responsible for the great diversity of patterns that evolved out there among Lepidoptera and other insects.”

They ran laboratory experiments where they exposed the red-banded hairstreak butterfly (Calycopis cecrops) to the jumping spider (Phidippus pulcherrimus).  Sixteen times the spider tried to attack the butterfly and the butterfly managed to escape every time because the spider attacked the false head instead of the real head of the butterfly.  The tests were repeated using eleven other butterflies and moths and not one of them managed to escape the attack of the jumping spider. Sourakov commented:

“From the video, you can see the spider is always very precise.  In one video, the spider sees a moth that looks like a leaf and it walks very carefully around to the head and then jumps at the head region. The spider has an innate or acquired ability to distinguish the head region very well and it always attacks there to deliver its venom to the vital center to instantly paralyze the prey. Most importantly, the spider is very small, so sometimes its prey is 10 times larger.” “The false head hypothesis in hairstreaks has been in circulation for a long time because people always speculated that their tails move around in order to fake out the predators, but there was little experimental evidence.”

“This clearly shows it’s possible that many spectacular patterns that we find in smaller insects may be due to spider pressure rather than bird pressure. The butterfly escapes from the spider – it’s a fairytale story.”

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64% of Immigration Reform Supporters Put Border Control First

Most voters like finding a way for illegal immigrants to stay in this country but not until the border is secured. However, they remain skeptical about the federal government’s interest in securing the border.  The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% of Likely U.S. Voters favor a plan that would legalize the status of those here illegally if they have otherwise obeyed the law – provided the border is really secured to prevent future illegal immigration. Twenty-six percent (26%) oppose this comprehensive immigration reform plan even with the promise of tougher border control. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided.

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Trust on Issues - Voters Again Trust GOP More Than Democrats on Economy

Voters continue to trust Democrats more than Republicans on nine of 15 major issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports, but the GOP has regained the trust advantage on the key issues of the economy and national security.  New Rasmussen Reports national telephone surveying finds that 45% of Likely U.S. Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats when it comes to handling the economy. Forty percent (40%) trust Democrats more. 

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Krauthammer: ObamaCare Will Hurt The Democrats

"And it points to the distinction between health insurance and real healthcare. You could have sham health insurance, which a lot of Americans are going to get. But if you don't have a doctor, if doctors refuse to treat because of the payment schedules that are obscenely low that no doctor will take. And already today, Medicare patients are turned away from a lot of doctors. If that becomes widespread there's going to be no real care. And I think the other point that's emerging as it begins implementation with all these regulations is that those of us who claimed early on that it was nationalizing healthcare, even though it's disguised as still a private system, we were absolutely right. There will be hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations, obscure, arcane, written by the bureaucrats only understood by them, and also administered by them. As are the waivers. All the power is in the hand of the government now and it's an arbitrary one. People are going to discover that it is a system run out of Washington, it is not a private system. And I would say, if you're going to go that way go the way of the British. Do it honestly, openly and simply own it instead of this pretend private healthcare system."

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‘Obama Socialism’ Homework Angers Students

Several students and parents at Kell High School in Marietta are upset about an assignment handed out by a social studies teacher on Monday. The assignment asked students to find evidence for a comparison of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin’s methods of changing Russia from a capitalist country to a command country to President Barack Obama’s methods of changing the United States from a capitalist country to a socialist country. Jay Dillon, spokesman for the Cobb County School District, told CBS Atlanta News that the teacher who handed out the homework assignment was a fill-in teacher. After the assignment was brought to the attention of Kell’s principal, the principal discussed the assignment with the teacher, and the assignment was withdrawn.

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It's Time To Bust Up the Big Banks    A Commentary By Scott Rasmussen  

Americans have a healthy respect for free market competition and are resistant to government interference -- even when they don't like what the market is up to. For example, 69 percent of Americans believe that large corporate executives are overpaid, but only 17 percent want the government to regulate their pay.  In that context, it's remarkable that 50 percent of voters nationwide favor a plan to break up our nation's megabanks. Just 23 percent are opposed.

There are more than 5,000 banks in the United States today, but 12 of them control 69 percent of the banking industry's total assets. Most Americans want these megabanks treated like any other. If a large bank reaches the point where it can no longer meet its obligations, just 25 percent support a bailout to keep it in business. But federal policy is just the opposite. The view from Washington, D.C., and Wall Street is that these firms must be propped up at all costs because their collapse would hurt the overall economy.

This provides what Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, calls "perverse market incentives." It lets big banks engage in risky behavior knowing they can't lose because the federal government will have taxpayers pick up the tab. Voters understand this. Two out of three recognize that most of the bailout money went to those who created the problem in the first place. That's one reason why 75 percent expressed anger at the bailed-out banks in 2011; 49 percent were "very angry." Those numbers put the banks at the same level as Congress in the court of public opinion.

That public anger led to passage in 2010 of the Dodd-Frank Act, a law that scored political points but didn't address the biggest problem. The limits of that law as far as the largest banks are concerned were highlighted in a recent Senate report showing the misbehavior of JP Morgan Chase while racking up record trading losses last year. It's hard to put much faith in regulatory answers given the revolving door between big banks and big government. For example, current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew received a $944,000 bonus for his work at Citigroup right after leaving the bank to join the Obama administration. Citigroup had the money because of a taxpayer bailout. His predecessors from both parties have similar ties.

Fisher acknowledges the good intentions of the Dodd-Frank law, but argues that it is "working against the core problem it seeks to address." That problem is that no bank should ever be in a position where it could be deemed too big to fail. The only solution is to break up the megabanks. The way to do that is to end the government subsidies the banks receive that guarantee their survival. Currently, even the worst run big bank can access money on better terms than better run smaller banks. Why? Because of the government guarantee. Take it away, and the big banks would be forced to compete on the same terms as other banks.

Bloomberg News estimates that the 10 biggest banks receive subsidies of $83 billion. Fisher and others agree that the size of the subsidies is roughly the same as the total profit reported by these banks.  Not surprisingly, in a nation where people hate crony capitalism, just 7 percent think these subsidies should continue. Seventy-six percent want them to end.  End the subsidies. Break up the banks.

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