The Right Lane update 5.06.13

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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Radicalized U.S. Students

Are you thinking Muslim? You would be wrong.  I'm talking about students that spent their early life in public schools and now U.S. colleges.  The total radicalization of your children has been thorough and complete.  Here is a recent example.  An 11th grade student was given her term paper assignment.  The title of the assignment is "The American Dream - Fact or Fiction?"  I don't have space here to outline the complete assignment.  I can say the "instructions" require the student to explain negative conclusions provided in the assignment.  What was so alarming was the student saw nothing wrong at first - a continuation of her school experience.  Her parents were furious to say the least.  Once they sat the daughter down and had a deep discussion, her eyes were opened.  However, they did not prevail with the school (at least at this writing).

A Recent Pew research survey found 43 percent of people age 18-29 said they had a positive view of socialism!  Does that disturb you?  It does me!

I have gotten involved with social media sites frequented by this age group.  What you will read there will shock you.  I post questions to get into dialogue.  The reaction and responses are extreme and far left.  The writing is "matter of fact" - meaning it is deeply ingrained thought.   The reaction to my writings are that I'm one that has been indoctrinated into "wrong and antiquated" beliefs; those that have been "proven wrong" through the process of those that choose "critical thinking" on (...you name it...).

As much as we should be concerned about radicalized Muslims on American soil, I say we should be more concerned about or own young being radicalized by Left leaning teachers throughout lower and higher education.

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The case of the economic suicide by E.J. Dionne

The following was written today by columnist E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.  He represents the mainstream of Liberal thought and adherence to Keynesian Economics.  Read, understanding he BELIEVES every word he says!

WASHINGTON – The policy mystery of our time is why politicians in the United States and across much of the democratic world are so obsessed with deficits when their primary mission ought to be bringing down high and debilitating rates of unemployment.

And since last week saw a crossparty celebration of the opening of George W. Bush’s presidential library, I’d add a second mystery: Why is it that conservative Republicans who freely cut taxes while backing two wars in the Bush years started preaching fire on deficits only after a Democrat entered the White House?

Here is a clue that helps unravel this whodunit: Many of the same conservatives who now say we have to cut Social Security to deal with the deficit supported Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security – even though the transition would have added another $1 trillion to the deficit. The one thing the two positions have in common is that Bush’s proposal would also have reduced guaranteed Social Security benefits.

In other words, deficits don’t really matter to many of the ideological conservatives shouting so loud about them now. Their central goal is to hack away at government.

This goes to the larger argument about jobs and deficits. For a brief time after the Great Recession hit, governments around the world, including President Barack Obama’s administration, agreed that the immediate priority was restoring growth. Through deficit spending and other measures, the 20 leading economies agreed to pump about $5 trillion into the global economy.

Obama and Democrats in Congress enacted a substantial stimulus. The package should have been bigger, but Obama – thinking he would have another shot later at boosting the economy – kept its size down to win enough votes to get it through Congress.

The second chance didn’t come because conservatives stoked antigovernment deficit mania – and never mind that the deficit ballooned because of the downturn itself, the stimulus needed to reverse it, and those fiscally improvident Bush-era decisions.

Then along came academic economists to bless the anti-deficit fever with the authority of spreadsheets. In a 2010 paper cited over and over by pro-austerity politicians, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff argued that when countries reached a debt level above 90 percent of their GDP, they almost always fell into slow growth or contraction.

Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens compactly takes the story from there: “The implication was that deep retrenchment was the only route back to prosperity. Now, economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say the results reflected a data ‘coding error’ and some questionable aggregation. The assumption that high debt always equals low growth is not sustained by the evidence.”

While Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged their error, they dismissed the controversy in a New York Times op-ed as an “academic kerfuffle” and insisted that their findings had often been “exaggerated or misrepresented” by, among others, politicians. (They also complained about the “hate-filled, even threatening, email messages” they received. I’d be happy to share my email with them. Friends, if you have the good fortune to be engaged in public debates, you get a lot of angry missives these days.) The two economists would have added to their credibility by showing a bit more humility about their data problem. But the damage was done.

Europe and the United States moved prematurely to austerity. Tens of millions of people have suffered from joblessness or lower real incomes. Reinhart and Rogoff didn’t force these decisions, but they abetted them.

Now, through the sequester cuts, we are compounding the problem. It’s outrageous that Congress and the administration are moving quickly to reduce the inconvenience to travelers – people fortunate enough to be able to buy plane tickets – by easing cuts in air traffic control while leaving the rest of the sequester in place. What about the harm being done to the economy as a whole? What about the sequester’s injuries to those who face lower unemployment benefits, who need Meals on Wheels, or who attend Head Start programs?

Instead, we should be using this period of low interest rates to invest in our infrastructure. This would help relieve current unemployment while laying a foundation for long-term growth. But anti-government slogans trump smart-government policies. For reasons rooted in both ideology and the system’s bias against the less privileged, we hear nothing but “deficits, deficits, deficits” and “cuts, cuts, cuts.”

To paraphrase a French statesman from long ago, this is worse than a crime. This is a mistake. Its costs are being borne by good people who ask only for the chance to do productive work.

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If you cannot mount a fact based argument against the above, you MUST do your homework.  He is wrong on so many levels that doing your own research and using facts should be easy.  Have fun!

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Heritage: Amnestied Illegals Will Get $9.4T in Benefits; Increase Debt $6.3T'   By Elizabeth Harrington

Granting amnesty to illegal immigrants would cost $6.3 trillion, according to a new report by the Heritage Foundation. “Unlawful immigration and amnesty for current unlawful immigrants can pose large fiscal costs for U.S. taxpayers,” states the report by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine, Ph.D. Not only would the federal deficit increase, but the cost of benefits and services to millions of newly minted citizens would reach nearly $10 trillion. “Over a lifetime, the former unlawful immigrants together would receive $9.4 trillion in government benefits and services and pay $3.1 trillion in taxes,” the report states.  “They would generate a lifetime fiscal deficit (total benefits minus total taxes) of $6.3 trillion.” Rector and Richwine took into account direct benefits, such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation, as well as means-tested welfare benefits, public education costs and population-based services in reaching their findings.

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More Government Waste: U.S. Spending $100K to 'Increase Knowledge of Ethical Behavior'--Among ATV Drivers   By Melanie Hunter

The federal government will spend $100,000 over five years on a Bureau of Land Management program to "increase knowledge of ethical behavior" among people using off-road vehicles.

“The purpose of this project is to increase knowledge of and conformance with the Utah Ride On Campaign message, and reduce incidents involving property and natural resource damage, unsafe practices, visitor conflicts and enhance access to public lands by improving recreationists’ behavior knowledge of ethical behavior among recreationists on BLM lands,” the grant description said. And, we will furlough employees necessary to our National Defense!?

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Abortion Horror Hits Michigan When Decapitated Head Found Left in Womb   by Dave Jolly

By now you’ve seen and heard about the House of Horrors as it has been referred to in the news.  Abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell of Philadelphia ran a clinic in the poorer area of the city and preyed upon thousands of young women who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.  He has been charged with the death of one woman and four newborns, although reports from different sources clearly indicate that he has killed many more than four live born babies. Last July we learned about 24 year old Tonya Reaves who went to a Chicago area Planned Parenthood clinic to have an abortion.  Not only was her unborn murdered at the clinic, so was Tonya.  She was hemorrhaging after the procedure but the staff at the clinic failed to call for help until several hours later.  But by the time help arrived and she was transported to a hospital, it was too late.  Her one year old son will never know his mother and it seems no one at the clinic was ever punished for their neglect. Other women have died at the hands of abortion doctors and clinic workers, but that rarely ever makes the news.  In fact, Tonya Reaves death at the Chicago Planned Parenthood clinic happened on the same day that James Holmes went into the theater in Aurora, Colorado and opened fire.  We heard lots about that, but virtually no media covered the murder of Reaves because it would paint a negative image on abortion and they can’t let that happen, can they? Now we are hearing about another abortion horror story, only this time it’s coming from Muskegon, Michigan.  Dr. Robert Alexander, the abortionist in question, has had several of his patients sent to the emergency room after botched abortions.  According to one OB/GYN who has seen several of Alexander’s victims:

“Dr. Alexander perforated the woman’s uterus so badly that it was hanging on by two blood vessels.  The decapitated head of a fetus was in the woman’s abdomen and the large intestine had been grasped and pulled away from its blood supply and into the vagina. The woman required a hysterectomy, colonoscopy [colectomy?], and several units of blood to save her life.”

The worse part of this is that there were multiple complaints filed against Alexander for his negligence, but those complaints were not taken seriously by the Michigan Board of Medicine.  We are led to believe that pro-abortion folks are all about "women's health".  Yeas, right!

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Sen. Graham: Benghazi Testimony 'Going to Make You Mad' By: Todd Beamon

Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Saturday that once Americans hear the testimony of three State Department survivors of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya next week, “it’s going to make you mad. It’s going to make you upset. Come Wednesday, you’re going to start hearing the truth about Benghazi,” the South Carolina Republican told former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on his Fox News program. “Our people were abandoned. They were denied assistance,” Graham said in an interview via satellite from Greenville, S.C. “And what you were told by this administration after the fact was a complete political smokescreen.” On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — chaired by GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of California — will hold widely anticipated hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks at the consulate in Benghazi. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, including two former Navy SEALS, died in the assaults.

The career State Department employees — self-described Benghazi “whistleblowers” — are scheduled to testify. Their names were disclosed in news reports earlier on Saturday. They are Gregory N. Hicks, a foreign-service officer and former Deputy Chief of Mission-Chargé d’Affairs in Libya; former Marine Mark I. Thompson, the State Department’s acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism; and Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer and former Regional Security Officer in Libya. Nordstrom was the top security officer in Libya in the months leading up to the attacks. Graham told Huckabee that Hicks was Stevens’ deputy and that “he was on the phone with Chris right before he died.” The senator added he and Hicks have been discussing Benghazi for about two months. “He’s going to give you a chilling story of what it was like and how little help he received — and he’s going to tell you how he felt when he heard Susan Rice write this off to a spontaneous riot caused by a hateful video,” Graham said. Everybody there knows that was a complete political smokescreen.”

Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, went on five Sunday morning talk shows five days after the attacks and said that the incident began as a peaceful protest against an anti-Muslim film that was later “hijacked” by militants. “This is not the fog of war,” Graham said, referring to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s explanation of her department’s inability to obtain reliable information as the assaults were unfolding. “She was not confused by the fog of war. “This White House, seven weeks before an election, tried to continue the narrative that [Osama] bin Laden’s dead, al-Qaida’s receding in terms of influence and power — and Benghazi destroyed that narrative and that story line.” Graham told Huckabee that he, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire — all members of the Senate Armed Services Committee — have relentlessly pressured President Barack Obama to make Benghazi survivors available to Congress for questioning. “People are scared to come forward. The president needs to make sure that those who come forward are going to do so without fear of losing their job or any reprisals,” the senator told Huckabee. “This administration’s been trying to hide the story of Benghazi, and finally it’s going to come out.” He said he was “dumbfounded” to hear Obama say earlier this week that witnesses were not being withheld from Congress, noting that initial statements taken from survivors two days after the assaults were still being held by the FBI.

Graham told Huckabee that he would remain vigilant on Benghazi until the Obama administration is “held accountable for the fact that four people were allowed to die. “Seven-and-a-half hours, they were under attack. Nobody could come to their aid — and on 9/11, of all days, our consulate became a death trap. “Richard Nixon was held accountable for Watergate,” he said. “This administration needs to be held accountable for Benghazi and the story of four Americans who were abandoned by their government when they needed their government the most.”

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