Many people are stunned by the data I shared early last year showing that ordinary people in the United States tend to be much richer than their peers in advanced European nations.
Here’s some more evidence, courtesy of the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Pope.
As you can see, the poorest people in America are about equal to the poorest people in Germany, France, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but Americans are ahead of their peers when looking at the top 90 percent of the population.
For the top 70 percent, Americans are comfortably ahead.
But not everybody agrees.
Here’s a tweet from John Burn-Murdoch of the U.K.-based Financial Times. He has a very negative portrayal of the United States (and the United Kingdom).
The tweet from Burn-Murdoch includes a link to an article he wrote.
Here are some excerpts.
…one good way to evaluate which countries are better places to live than others is to ask: is life good for everyone there, or is it only good for rich people? …If you’re a proud Brit or American, you may want to look away now. …Norway is a good place to live, whether you are rich or poor. …The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia. …transpose Norway’s inequality gradient on to the US, and the poorest decile of Americans would be a further 40 per cent better off while the top decile would remain richer than the top of almost every other country on the planet. …Until those gradients are made less steep, the UK and US will remain poor societies with pockets of rich people.
The United States is a poor society with some very rich people?!?
Is that possibly true?
As you might expect, that is utter hogwash. Here’s a chart, based on data from the Paris-based (and left-leaning) Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
It shows “actual individual consumption” in the OECD’s member nations, and people in the United States are far better off than people in any other nations.
Indeed, they have 50 percent more consumption than the average person in other OECD countries.
All you need to know is that Burn-Murdoch took some data about America’s poorest people and wants to mislead readers into thinking it also applies to the general population.
And he doesn’t even show his calculations. For what it’s worth, his numbers are not very consistent with some other data sources that are publicly accessible.
Professor Noah Smith also debunks the FT‘s report.
…when we look at how Americans in the middle of the distribution are doing, we see that America is not a “poor society” at all — in fact, it’s one of the richest on Earth. …the median American has a higher income than the median resident of almost any other country… Some people argue that because European countries buy health care for their citizens via the government — which is not counted in disposable income — that it’s not fair to use disposable income as the comparison measure here.But this isn’t right. The U.S. has a relatively low percentage of out-of-pocket health spending — our employers and our government pick up most of the tab. In fact, when we look at “adjusted disposable income”, which includes the value of government services like health care, we find out that the U.S. comes out even more ahead relative to other countries. …someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK. In other words, a working-class American on the edge of poverty makes as much as a middle-class person in some rich countries.
I’ll close by noting something else that was misleading in the FT report. Burn-Murdoch compares Norway to the U.S. and U.K., but that nation’s oil wealth makes it very unrepresentative.
Since the report concludes by endorsing more redistribution, it would be more honest and appropriate to compare American living standards to the performance of Europe’s other welfare states.
But Burn-Murdoch did not do that because his already flimsy case would look even weaker.
Also, note that he did not highlight Switzerland. After all, it is richer than Norway, even though it does not enjoy abundant natural resources.
P.S. Speaking of libertarians, the Burn-Murcoch story in the Financial Times begins with this passage.
Where would you rather live? A society where the rich are extraordinarily rich and the poor are very poor, or one where the rich are merely very well off but even those on the lowest incomes also enjoy a decent standard of living? For all but the most ardent free-market libertarians, the answer would be the latter.
At the risk of stating the obvious, libertarians want a society with the smallest-possible government. Limiting coercion (the non-aggression principle) is the main motive.
Libertarians will view the resulting distribution of income as just, but they also will point out that freer societies do a much better job of generating broadly shared prosperity than government-dominated societies.
The bottom line is that Burn-Murdoch is either extraordinarily ignorant about libertarianism or he suffers from Nancy MacLean levels of bad faith and dishonesty.
To begin Part III of this series (here’s Part I and Part II), let’s dig into the archives for this video I narrated back in 2007.
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At the risk of patting myself on the back, all of the points hold up very well. Indeed, the past 15 years have produced more evidence that my main arguments were correct.
The good news is that all these arguments helped produce a tax bill that dropped America’s federal corporate tax rate by 14 percentage points, from 35 percent to 21 percent.
The bad news is that Biden and most Democrats in Congress want to raise the corporate rate.
In a column for CapX, Professor Tyler Goodspeed explains why higher corporate tax rates are a bad idea. He’s writing about what’s happening in the United Kingdom, but his arguments equally apply in the United States.
…the more you tax something, the less of it you get. …plans to raise Corporation Tax and end relief on new plant and machinery will result in less business investment – and steep costs for households. …Treasury’s current plans to raise the corporate income tax rate to 25% and end a temporary 130% ‘super-deduction’ for new investment in qualifying plant and machinery would lower UK investment by nearly 8%, and reduce the size of the UK economy by more than 2%, compared to making the current rules permanent. …because the economic costs of corporate taxation are ultimately borne both by shareholders and workers, raising the rate to 25% would permanently lower average household wages by £2,500. …the macroeconomic effects of raising the Corporation Tax rate to 25% would alone offset 40% of the static revenue gain over a 10-year period, and as much as 90% over the long run.
To bolster his argument for good policy on that side of the Atlantic Ocean, he then explains that America’s lower corporate tax rate has been a big success.
Critics of corporate tax reform should look to the recent experience of the United States… At the time, I predicted that these changes would raise business investment in new plant and equipment by 9%, and raise average household earnings by $4,000 in real, inflation-adjusted terms. …By the end of 2019, investment had risen to 9.4% above its pre-2017 level. Investment by corporate businesses specifically was up even more, rising to 14.2% above its pre-2017 trend in real, inflation-adjusted terms. Meanwhile, in 2018 and 2019 real median household income in the United States rose by $5,000 – a bigger increase in just two years than in the entire 20 preceding years combined. …What about corporate income tax revenues? …corporate tax revenue as a share of the US economy was substantially higher than projected, at 1.7% versus 1.4%.
If you want more evidence about what happened to corporate tax revenue in America after the Trump tax reform, click here.
So let’s hope neither the United States nor the United Kingdom make the mistake of undoing progress.
P.S. The specter of a higher corporate tax in the United Kingdom is especially bizarre. Voters chose Brexit in part to give the nation a chance to break free of the European Union’s dirigiste approach. But instead of adopting pro-growth policies (the Singapore-on-Thames approach), former Prime Minister Boris Johnson opted to increase the burden of taxes and spending. Hopefully the Conservative Party will return to Thatcherism with a new Prime Minister (and hopefully American Republicans will return to Reaganism!).
In an ideal world, there would be no corporate income tax (or any income tax).
But I’ll gladly accept any movement in the right direction, which is why the reduction in the corporate tax rate was the crown jewel of Trump’s 2017 tax plan.
Today, let’s look at some new academic evidence on the issue. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, authored by Professors James Cloyne, Joseba Martinez, Haroon Mumtaz, and Paolo Surico, finds that lower corporate rates are especially beneficial for long-run prosperity.
We use…post-WWII U.S. data on output, taxes, productivity and R&D spending to estimate the dynamic effects of income tax changes…and focus on personal and corporate income tax changes separately. …In Figure 1, we present our first set of main results. The figure contains two columns. On the left, we show the IRFs to a reduction in the average corporate tax rate. On the right, we show the results for a reduction in the average personal tax rate. …The first row in Figure 1 reveals that, following a shock to corporate and personal income taxes,the average tax rates decline temporarily. …The second row in Figure 1 shows the impulse response functions for the percentage response of real GDP. … Looking at the first column it is clear that, despite the transitory nature of the corporate tax reduction, there are very persistent effects on real GDP, whose short-run increase of 0.5% persists throughout the ten year period shown in the figure. In other words, the corporate income tax cut has disappeared after 5 years, but the effect on the level of economic activity is still sizable and significant after 8 years. …A similar picture emerges for productivity, as shown in the third row of Figure 1. Both tax rate cuts boost productivity on impact, with the size of the initial response to a personal income tax cut being much larger than for a cut to corporate taxes. On the other hand, the effects of corporate tax cuts grow over time and remain significant even after 10 years.
Here’s the aforementioned Figure 1 from their research.
I’ll conclude by noting that permanent tax cuts are much better than temporary tax cuts.
But if taxes are being cut, regardless of duration, the goal should be to get the most bang for the buck. And there’s plenty of evidence (from the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom) that lowering corporate tax rates is a smart place to start.
P.S. It’s unfortunate that Biden wants a higher corporate tax burden in the United States. It’s even more disturbing that he wants a global tax cartel so the entire world has to follow in his footsteps. But he apparently does not understand the topic.
Concerning the French overspending problem Dan Mitchell states, “There are obvious lessons from Europe for the United States. If politicians don’t reform entitlement programs, we’re doomed to have our own fiscal crisis at some point in the not-too-distant future.”
This is very true. President Obama has overspent so much that our national debt will double under him and it will ruin our future. WHO WILL WE SEND OUR BILL TO? GERMANY WILL NOT PAY IT.
Though, to be fair, France hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s being bailed out (it’s probably just a matter of time).
If you want some good analysis of the situation in Europe, Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center hits the nail on the head in her column in today’s Washington Examiner.
France has yet to cut spending. In fact, to the extent that the French are frustrated with “budget cuts,” it’s only because the increase in future spending won’t be as large as they had planned. The same can be said about the United Kingdom. Spain, Italy and Greece have had no choice to cut some spending. However, in the case of these particular countries, the cuts were implemented alongside large tax increases. …This approach to austerity, also known in the United States as the “balanced approach,” has unfortunately proven a recipe for disaster. In a 2009 paper, Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at 107 attempts to reduce the ratio of debt to gross domestic product over 30 years in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They found fiscal adjustments consisting of both tax increases and spending cuts generally failed to stabilize the debt and were also more likely to cause economic contractions. On the other hand, successful austerity packages resulted from making spending cuts without tax increases. They also found this form of austerity is more likely associated with economic expansion rather than with recession. …While the debate over austerity continues, the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that austerity can be successful, if it isn’t modeled after the “balanced approach.” It’s a lesson for the French and other European countries, as well as for American lawmakers who often seem tempted by the lure of closing budget gaps with higher taxes.
There are obvious lessons from Europe for the United States. If politicians don’t reform entitlement programs, we’re doomed to have our own fiscal crisis at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Max Brantley is wrong about Tom Cotton’s accusation concerning the rise of welfare spending under President Obama. Actually welfare spending has been increasing for the last 12 years and Obama did nothing during his first four years to slow down the rate of increase of welfare spending. Rachel Sheffield of the Heritage Foundation has noted: […]
I have put up lots of cartoons from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. I think Max Brantley of the Arkansas Times Blog was right to point out on 2-6-13 that Hillary […]
I thought it was great when the Republican Congress and Bill Clinton put in welfare reform but now that has been done away with and no one has to work anymore it seems. In fact, over 40% of the USA is now on the government dole. What is going to happen when that figure gets over […]
Again we have another shooting and the gun control bloggers are out again calling for more laws. I have written about this subject below and on May 23, 2012, I even got a letter back from President Obama on the subject. Now some very interesting statistics below and a cartoon follows. (Since this just hit the […]
watch?v=llQUrko0Gqw] The federal government spends about 10% on roads and public goods but with the other money in the budget a lot of harm is done including excessive regulations on business. That makes Obama’s comment the other day look very silly. A Funny Look at Obama’s You-Didn’t-Build-That Comment July 28, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I made […]
I have written a lot about this in the past and sometimes you just have to sit back and laugh. Laughing at Obama’s Bumbling Class Warfare Agenda July 13, 2012 by Dan Mitchell We know that President Obama’s class-warfare agenda is bad economic policy. We know high tax rates undermine competitiveness. And we know tax increases […]
Dan Mitchell Discussing Dishonest Budget Numbers with John Stossel Uploaded by danmitchellcato on Feb 11, 2012 No description available. ______________ Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute has shown before how excessive spending at the federal level has increased in recent years. A Humorous Look at Obama’s Screwy Budget Math May 31, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I’ve […]
Sometimes it is so crazy that you just have to laugh a little. The European Mess, Captured by a Cartoon June 22, 2012 by Dan Mitchell The self-inflicted economic crisis in Europe has generated some good humor, as you can see from these cartoons by Michael Ramirez and Chuck Asay. But for pure laughter, I don’t […]
Another great cartoon on President Obama’s efforts to create jobs!!! A Simple Lesson about Job Creation for Barack Obama December 7, 2011 by Dan Mitchell Even though leftist economists such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers have admitted that unemployment insurance benefits are a recipe for more joblessness, the White House is arguing that Congress should […]
Dan Mitchell hits the nail on the head and sometimes it gets so sad that you just have to laugh at it like Conan does. In order to correct this mess we got to get people off of government support and get them in the private market place!!!! Chuck Asay’s New Cartoon Nicely Captures Mentality […]
Cato Institute scholar Dan Mitchell is right about Greece and the fate of socialism: Two Pictures that Perfectly Capture the Rise and Fall of the Welfare State July 15, 2011 by Dan Mitchell In my speeches, especially when talking about the fiscal crisis in Europe (or the future fiscal crisis in America), I often warn that […]
John Stossel report “Myth: Gun Control Reduces Crime Sheriff Tommy Robinson tried what he called “Robinson roulette” from 1980 to 1984 in Central Arkansas where he would put some of his men in some stores in the back room with guns and the number of robberies in stores sank. I got this from Dan Mitchell’s […]
I have put up lots of cartons and posters from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. Amusing Gun Control Picture – Circa 1999 April 3, 2010 by Dan Mitchell Dug this gem out […]
We got to cut spending and stop raising the debt ceiling!!! When Governments Cut Spending Uploaded on Sep 28, 2011 Do governments ever cut spending? According to Dr. Stephen Davies, there are historical examples of government spending cuts in Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and America. In these cases, despite popular belief, the government spending […]
I have put up lots of cartons and posters from Dan Mitchell’s blog before and they have got lots of hits before. Many of them have dealt with the economy, eternal unemployment benefits, socialism, Greece, welfare state or on gun control. On 2-6-13 the Arkansas Times Blogger “Sound Policy” suggested, “All churches that wish to allow concealed […]
Gun Free Zones???? Stalin and gun control On 1-31-13 ”Arkie” on the Arkansas Times Blog the following: “Remember that the biggest gun control advocate was Hitler and every other tyrant that every lived.” Except that under Hitler, Germany liberalized its gun control laws. __________ After reading the link from Wikipedia that Arkie provided then I responded: […]
On 1-31-13 I posted on the Arkansas Times Blog the following: I like the poster of the lady holding the rifle and next to her are these words: I am compensating for being smaller and weaker than more violent criminals. __________ Then I gave a link to this poster below: On 1-31-13 also I posted […]
Republicans seek 150 documents in which banks flagged suspicious financial activity by Biden family members and associates. Pictured: Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, attends a July 7 ceremony in which his father presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 17 recipients at the White House. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
House Democrats on Tuesday blocked an inquiry into 150 reports of suspicious financial activitysurrounding the international business dealings of Hunter Biden and other Biden family members, which Republicans said could compromise President Joe Biden.
Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee generally had a disciplined message in opposing oversight of potential conflicts of interest for the president, his son Hunter, and his brother Jim: What about Donald Trump?
Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., listed matters such as the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., the Constitution’s emoluments clause, and insinuations that Trump didn’t separate his many businesses from his work as president.
Connolly also brought up Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s president, which House Democrats used as the preface for the 45th president’s first impeachment, among other issues.
“What happened to investigations about Donald Trump?” Connolly asked, with a tone of outrage.
The Virginia Democrat added: “I don’t know that there is any kind of objective observer who would say there is nothing to see in the Trump years, that it was not a fertile ground for any kind of investigation.”
For about two hours, Connolly and other committee members debated a proposal from ranking member Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., to push the Biden administration to hand over about 150 documents held by the Treasury Department that are categorized as suspicious activity reports regarding Hunter Biden and other Biden family members.
By a voice vote, the committee opposed sending Comer’s resolution to the floor.
“I’m going to pose another question to my colleagues across the aisle,” Comer said during the debate. “Does anyone in the majority party dispute our allegations that Hunter Biden was influence peddling with our adversaries? I’m sure they will want to have time to speak to dispute that.”
The Kentucky Republican added: “We are investigating Hunter Biden because we fear that he has compromised Joe Biden, which is compromising our national security.”
In response, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said the “laser focus of the majority” includes “defending a woman’s right to choose against their [Republicans’] theocratic schemes.”
Raskin also talked about the “bipartisan” House select committee investigating the Capitol riot and what he called “Donald Trump’s incitement of domestic violent extremists.”
Raskin is a member of the House panel looking into the events of Jan. 6, 2021, along with six other Democrats and two Republicans, all appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
After 11 minutes of discussion Tuesday by other members, Comer spoke again.
“Again, I’m giving the Democrats on this committee every chance to say Hunter Biden was not influence peddling with our adversaries, and I’m hearing nothing but crickets,” Comer said. “The fact that we are hearing crickets shows that we need to provide oversight and we need to conduct investigations.”
During an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Biden again said that his son’s business activities overseas, including in China and Ukraine, never presented a conflict of interest.
“I love my son, No. 1. He fought—an addiction problem. He overcame it,” the president said of Hunter Biden in his interview with “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley. “He wrote about it. And no, there’s not a single thing that I’ve observed at all from that [sic] would affect me or the United States relative to my son Hunter.”
Republicans on the committee requested that the Treasury Department provide about 150 suspicious activity reports, called SARs, from banks about the Biden family’s financial activity. Such information had been available upon request to members of Congress, but the Biden Treasury Department reversed the policy and refused to comply with the request, Comer said.
“There are changes by Joe Biden to the ability of Congress to get suspicious activity reports,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., said during the debate. “I am a recovering banker. When we issue suspicious activity reports, it’s not just thrown out like a bag of shells. It’s done for a specific reason, because there are concerns about criminalities surrounding financial transactions.”
Donalds continued:
If Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family have more than 100 suspicious activity reports, Congress does need to know about this, because a funny thing is happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Joe Biden is president of the United States. His son—who is not a kid, he’s 50 years old—is running around the world cutting deals.
On May 25, Comer wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen requesting copies of all special activity reports generated because of the financial transactions of Hunter Biden and other Biden associates and family members.
Comer asked again July 6. However, on Sept. 2, the Treasury Department denied his requests for the information related to the Bidens.
House Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., called committee Republicans’ pursuit of information about the suspicious activity reports on the Biden family “nakedly partisan.”
Maloney then brought up the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the FBI’s investigation of whether Trump took classified information from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Trump has said he declassified the documents before leaving office, and the former president has not been formally charged with doing anything illegal.
“These same Republicans turned a blind eye when Donald Trump incited a deadly riot in the Capitol and illegally removed highly classified presidential records,” Maloney said. “Today, our Republican friends have chosen to spend our committee’s time on a resolution that seeks to smear President Biden by targeting his family.”
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The left praises democracy when elected but claims the right will destroy democracy when it loses. Pictured: Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discusses the 2016 election during her 2017 book tour. (Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers, NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border, and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.
As a result, the left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when it expects to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when it fears losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.
A cynic might suggest that those on the left praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.
After all, who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the over 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old 50-state union?
Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?
The Constitution also clearly states that “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” Who slammed through the impeachment of former President Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?
Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?
The left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.
Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?
New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December decided to ration new potentially lifesaving COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.”
The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny “equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof.” Who is behind the new racial discrimination?
In summer 2020, many local- and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity—if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.
Currently, the Biden administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law.
The Biden administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border—in hopes they will soon be loyal constituents.
The administration has not asked illegal entrants either to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated.
Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers.
At various times in our nation’s history—1832, 1861-65, and 1961-63—America was either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.
In the last five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy.
Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier to create a national hysteria about “Russian collusion.” Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and herself claimed Trump was not a legitimately elected president.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command. Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander in chief. Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.
Some of the nation’s top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress, again, mostly with impunity.
All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Trump.
The result is Third World-like jurisprudence in America aimed at rewarding friends and punishing enemies, masked by service to social justice.
We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat is not so much from loud, buffoonish, one-day rioters on Jan. 6. Such clownish characters did not for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause over 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property—all under the banner of revolutionary justice.
Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America’s institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.
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The Honorable Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Washington D.C.
Dear Representative Adam Kinzinger,
I noticed that you are a pro-life representative that has a long record of standing up for unborn babies! It was in the 1970’s when I was first introduced to the works of Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop and I wanted to commend their writings and films to you.
Washington, DC – Today, Congressman Adam Kinzinger (IL-16) joined his House Republican colleagues in a press conference urging Democratic leadership to allow a vote on the Born Alive protections. The proposal would protect babies who survive abortion and provide them with the same medical care that any other premature baby would receive. Yesterday, the Democrats blocked the proposed legislation—for the 17th time—from coming before the House for a vote.
Joining the Congressman and House Republican leaders at the press conference this morning was Jill Stanek, an Illinois nurse and pro-life advocate who has witnessed the devastating realities of these pro-abortion laws. The Illinois legislature is currently debating two abortion bills, similar to the extreme pro-abortion agendas in New York and Virginia.
It seems you have a grudge against President Trump while our freedoms under President Biden are being taken away. I recommend to you the article below:
Roger Kimball Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion
Mr. Kimball concludes his article with these words:
That’s one melancholy lesson of the January 6 insurrection hoax: that America is fast mutating from a republic, in which individual liberty is paramount, into an oligarchy, in which conformity is increasingly demanded and enforced.
Another lesson was perfectly expressed by Donald Trump when he reflected on the unremitting tsunami of hostility that he faced as President. “They’re after you,” he more than once told his supporters. “I’m just in the way.”
There were a few Republicans Thursday who surprised observers when they voted in support of holding former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress and referring him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
Prior to the vote, four Republicans were considered a lock to approve the criminal referral, according to Capitol Hill sources: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio.
Cheney and Kinzinger are on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and have for months stood alone as the only two House Republicans willing to speak out against former President Donald Trump’s continued lies about the 2020 election. They were the only two House Republicans to vote for the formation of the select committee on June 30.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed the select committee after Republicans rejected a bipartisan commission that would have been evenly split between five Democrats and five Republicans. Only 35 Republicans voted for that measure when itpassed the House of Representatives, and it was defeated by a GOP filibuster in the Senate.
From left: Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat, and Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois arrive for the House Select Committee hearing investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
More
Upton has served in the House for more than three decades, since 1987, and will face a primary challenge next year because of his willingness to stand up to Trump.
Gonzalez is retiring from Congress next year, after only four years in the House. “While my desire to build a fuller family life is at the heart of my decision, it is also true that the current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party, is a significant factor in my decision,” Gonzalez said in September when heannounced he would not seek another term.
The remaining five Republicans included three who voted for impeachment — Peter Meijer of Michigan, John Katko of New York and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington — and two House Republicans who did not vote to impeach Trump: Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
Trump seems never to have discerned what a viper’s nest our politics has become for anyone who is not a paid-up member of The Club.
Maybe Trump understands this now. I have no insight into that question. I am pretty confident, though, that the 74 plus million people who voted for him understand it deeply. It’s another reason that The Club should be wary of celebrating its victory too expansively.
Friedrich Hayek took one of the two epigraphs for his book, The Road to Serfdom, from the philosopher David Hume. “It is seldom,” Hume wrote, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Much as I admire Hume, I wonder whether he got this quite right. Sometimes, I would argue, liberty is erased almost instantaneously.
I’d be willing to wager that Joseph Hackett, confronted with Hume’s observation, would express similar doubts. I would be happy to ask Mr. Hackett myself, but he is inaccessible. If the ironically titled “Department of Justice” has its way, he will be inaccessible for a long, long time—perhaps as long as 20 years.
Joseph Hackett, you see, is a 51-year-old Trump supporter and member of an organization called the Oath Keepers, a group whose members have pledged to “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” The FBI does not like the Oath Keepers—agents arrested its leader in January and have picked up many other members in the months since. Hackett traveled to Washington from his home in Florida to join the January 6 rally. According to court documents, he entered the Capitol at 2:45 that afternoon and left some nine minutes later, at 2:54. The next day, he went home. On May 28, he was apprehended by the FBI and indicted on a long list of charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and illegally entering a restricted building.
As far as I have been able to determine, no evidence of Hackett destroying property has come to light. According to his wife, it is not even clear that he entered the Capitol. But he certainly was in the environs. He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He was a supporter of Donald Trump. Therefore, he must be neutralized.
Joseph Hackett is only one of hundreds of citizens who have beenbranded as “domestic terrorists” trying to “overthrow the government” and who are now languishing, in appalling conditions, jailed as political prisoners of an angry state apparat.
Let me recommend that you read this letter below from Senator Ron Johnson and his colleagues:
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), along with senators Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), sent a letter on Monday to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting information on the unequal application of justice between the individuals who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, and those involved in the unrest during the spring and summer of 2020. The senators sent 18 questions to the attorney general on what steps the DOJ has taken to prosecute individuals who committed crimes during both events, and requested a response by June 21.
“Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances,” the senators wrote. “This constitutional right should be cherished and protected. Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted. However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning.”
The full text of the letter can be found here and below.
June 7, 2021
The Honorable Merrick B. Garland
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Attorney General Garland:
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently dedicating enormous resources and manpower to investigating and prosecuting the criminals who breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We fully support and appreciate the efforts by the DOJ and its federal, state and local law enforcement partners to hold those responsible fully accountable.
We join all Americans in the expectation that the DOJ’s response to the events of January 6 will result in rightful criminal prosecutions and accountability. As you are aware, the mission of the DOJ is, among other things, to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. Today, we write to request information about our concerns regarding potential unequal justice administered in response to other recent instances of mass unrest, destruction, and loss of life throughout the United States.
During the spring and summer of 2020, individuals used peaceful protests across the country to engage in rioting and other crimes that resulted in loss of life, injuries to law enforcement officers, and significant property damage.[1] A federal court house in Portland, Oregon, has been effectively under siege for months.[2] Property destruction stemming from the 2020 social justice protests throughout the country will reportedly result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion in paid insurance claims.[3]
In June 2020, the DOJ reportedly compiled the following information regarding last year’s unrest:
“One federal officer [was] killed, 147 federal officers [were] injured and 600 local officers [were] injured around the country during the protests, frequently from projectiles.”[4]
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), “since the start of the unrest there has been 81 Federal Firearms License burglaries of an estimated loss of 1,116 firearms; 876 reported arsons; 76 explosive incidents; and 46 ATF arrests[.]”[5]
Despite these numerous examples of violence occurring during these protests, it appears that individuals charged with committing crimes at these events may benefit from infrequent prosecutions and minimal, if any, penalties. According to a recent article, “prosecutors have approved deals in at least half a dozen federal felony cases arising from clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Oregon last summer. The arrangements — known as deferred resolution agreements — will leave the defendants with a clean criminal record if they stay out of trouble for a period of time and complete a modest amount of community service, according to defense attorneys and court records.”[6]
DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. To date, DOJ has charged 510 individuals stemming from Capitol breach.[7] DOJ maintains and updates a webpage that lists the defendants charged with crimes committed at the Capitol. This database includes information such as the defendant’s name, charge(s), case number, case documents, location of arrest, case status, and informs readers when the entry was last updated.[8] No such database exists for alleged perpetrators of crimes associated with the spring and summer 2020 protests. It is unclear whether any defendants charged with crimes in connection with the Capitol breach have received deferred resolution agreements.
Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. This constitutional right should be cherished and protected. Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted. However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning. In order to assist Congress in conducting its oversight work, we respectfully request answers to the following questions by June 21, 2021:
Spring and Summer 2020 Unrest:
Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the unrest in the spring and summer of 2020? If so, how many times and for which locations/riots?
How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020 were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
How many individuals were incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement? What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
How many of these individuals were released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?[9]
How many DOJ prosecutors were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol Breach:
Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the January 6, 2021 protests and Capitol breach? If so, how many times and how many additional arrests resulted from law enforcement utilizing geolocation information?
How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
How many individuals are incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement? What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
How many of these individuals have been released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?
How many DOJ prosecutors have been assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
I want to recommend to you a video on YOU TUBE that runs 28 minutes and 39 seconds by Francis Schaeffer entitled because it discusses the founding of our nation and what the FOUNDERS believed:
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
________________
______________________
March 23, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view. Although we are both Christians and have the Bible as the basis for our moral views, I did want you to take a close look at the views of the pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff too. Hentoff became convinced of the pro-life view because of secular evidence that shows that the unborn child is human. I would ask you to consider his evidence and then of course reverse your views on abortion.
___________________
The pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff wrote a fine article below I wanted to share with you.
Nat Hentoff is an atheist, but he became a pro-life activist because of the scientific evidence that shows that the unborn child is a distinct and separate human being and even has a separate DNA. His perspective is a very intriguing one that I thought you would be interested in. I have shared before many cases (Bernard Nathanson, Donald Trump, Paul Greenberg, Kathy Ireland) when other high profile pro-choice leaders have changed their views and this is just another case like those. I have contacted the White House over and over concerning this issue and have even received responses. I am hopeful that people will stop and look even in a secular way (if they are not believers) at this abortion debate and see that the unborn child is deserving of our protection.That is why the writings of Nat Hentoff of the Cato Institute are so crucial.
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have. Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.
Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION
_____________________________________
Dr. Francis schaeffer – from Part 5 of Whatever happened to human race?) Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 5 | Truth and History
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – A Christian Manifesto – Dr. Francis Schaeffer Lecture
Francis Schaeffer – A 700 Club Special! ~ Francis Schaeffer 1982
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – 1984 SOUNDWORD LABRI CONFERENCE VIDEO – Q&A With Francis & Edith Schaeffer
http://www.NewsandOpinion.com | A longtime friend of mine is married to a doctor who also performs abortions. At the dinner table one recent evening, their 9-year-old son — having heard a word whose meaning he didn’t know — asked, “What is an abortion?” His mother, choosing her words carefully, described the procedure in simple terms.
“But,” said her son, “that means killing the baby.” The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. “But,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what month. It still means killing the babies.”
Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old’s clarity of thought and vision.
The boy’s spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.
“That,” he continued, “was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned.”
This passionate reverend used to warn: “Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being. That’s how the whites dehumanized us … The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do — and not even feel they’d done anything wrong.”
That preacher was Jesse Jackson. Later, he decided to run for the presidency — and it was a credible campaign that many found inspiring in its focus on what still had to be done on civil rights. But Jackson had by now become “pro-choice” — much to the appreciation of most of those in the liberal base.
The last time I saw Jackson was years later, on a train from Washington to New York. I told him of a man nominated, but not yet confirmed, to a seat on a federal circuit court of appeals. This candidate was a strong supporter of capital punishment — which both the Rev. Jackson and I oppose, since it involves the irreversible taking of a human life by the state.
I asked Jackson if he would hold a press conference in Washington, criticizing the nomination, and he said he would. The reverend was true to his word; the press conference took place; but that nominee was confirmed to the federal circuit court. However, I appreciated Jackson’s effort.
On that train, I also told Jackson that I’d been quoting — in articles, and in talks with various groups — from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he’d had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.
Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, “I’ll get back to you on that.” I still patiently await what he has to say.
As time goes on, my deepening concern with the consequences of abortion is that its validation by the Supreme Court, as a constitutional practice, helps support the convictions of those who, in other controversies — euthanasia, assisted suicide and the “futility doctrine” by certain hospital ethics committees — believe that there are lives not worth continuing.
Around the time of my conversation with Jackson on the train, I attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass. There, I met Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the “death with dignity” movement.
He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia into the American press.
“But then,” Humphry told me, “a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me.”
“What was that wonderful thing?” I asked.
“Roe v. Wade,” he answered.
The devaluing of human life — as the 9-year-old at the dinner table put it more vividly — did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word “baby” does not appear in Roe v. Wade — let alone the word “killing.”
And so, the termination of “lives not worth living” goes on.
______________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.—seen here at an event hosted by the National Action Network on Feb. 26, 2020, in North Charleston, South Carolina—this week co-signed with five other Senate Democrats a letter to the pro-life Heartbeat International with baseless accusations about its policies on the privacy of client information. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Vandals have targeted about 70 pro-life pregnancy resource centers since the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overruled Roe v. Wade, but Senate Democrats have unleashed their own attack on these pro-life centers, demonizing them as potential “surveillance infrastructure” to power “pregnancy- and abortion-related prosecutions.”
Seven prominent Democrats—including former presidential candidates Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. (a nominal independent who caucuses with Democrats)—sent a letter to Heartbeat International CEO Jor-El Godsey on Monday, demanding answers as to how the organization uses the data women provide to crisis pregnancy centers.
The letter insinuates that Heartbeat International might be using the data to target women and their health care providers for prosecution under laws restricting abortion.
The Democrats cite a report from The Alliance: State Advocates for Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, which suggests the crisis pregnancy center “industry is now functioning as surveillance infrastructure for the anti-abortion movement, amassing data that could be used in pregnancy- and abortion-related prosecutions post-Roe.”
“Heartbeat International—which is explicitly opposed to abortion rights—appears to be in a position to collect a significant amount of personal information from women about their pregnancies and potential plans for managing their care, but it is not under any legal obligation to maintain the confidentiality of this information, or keep it out of the hands of abortion bounty hunters,” the senators wrote.
The “bounty hunter” phrase is a derisive reference to Texas’ 2021 abortion law, which allows private individuals to bring lawsuits in state court against people who allegedly perform or abet certain abortions, offering a reward for successful suits.
The senators accuse Heartbeat International of “luring pregnant people … to affiliate [crisis pregnancy center] facilities by using a variety of false and misleading tactics,” such as suggesting that these pro-life centers provide “legitimate abortion and reproductive health care services” when they ostensibly do not. (Note the use of “pregnant people” there and the avoidance of the now supposedly offensive term “woman.”)
While the roughly 3,000 pregnancy resource centers across the U.S. do not offer abortion, they do provide various services, such as pregnancy tests, counseling on available options (including parenting, adoption, and abortion), ultrasounds, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, classes on prenatal care and parenting, maternal assistance with things such as diapers and baby clothes, post-abortion support, medical referrals, and more.
Over a five-year period beginning in 2016, pregnancy resource centers reportedly saved an estimated 828,131 lives, and in 2019 alone, they served almost 2 million people.
Vandals, many of whom are apparently associated with the group Jane’s Revenge, have carried out 70 attacks on these centers since May 3, according to Catholic Vote. Vandals have broken windows, sprayed graffiti reading “If abortion isn’t safe, you aren’t either,” and set fire to some of the centers.
The Democrats’ letter acknowledges that Heartbeat International and its affiliate pregnancy resource centers “claim to adhere to [federal regulations] to protect patients’ health information,” but it claims that the organization is not required to follow the federal law and does not disclose how it uses the data.
In a statement sent to The Daily Signal Tuesday, Godsey condemned the letter as “naked politics intended not to help women, but to influence elections.”
“It is important to note that not one of the senators listed in the letter condemned actual violence and vandalism against pregnancy help centers this summer,” Godsey added. “Instead, they’ve spent their time fabricating a narrative on unfounded speculation. Rather than finding ways to help women be able to choose something besides abortion, they have used their political powers to bully those who are helping women make life-affirming choices.”
Indeed, none of the signatories to the letter—Booker, Sanders, and Warren, along with Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut—responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the attacks against pro-life pregnancy resource centers by the time of publication.
“What we do is safe, secure, and legal,” Godsey said. “Heartbeat has been providing help for more than 50 years and never once did we receive any of these questions or concerns until recently, and then from those with a clear abortion agenda. It’s politics, and we regret only that it’s a distraction to our important work of helping women find alternatives to abortion.”
“Democrats are trying extremely hard to shut down organizations that exist to help women in need,” Anne O’Connor, the institute’s vice president of legal affairs, told The Daily Signal. “Life-affirming pregnancy medical centers and their 10,000 licensed medical professionals nationwide are providing free essential services, like prenatal vitamins, ultrasounds, [and] STI testing, to women facing unplanned pregnancy.”
“It’s bizarre that this bothers the likes of Elizabeth Warren so much,” O’Connor noted. “She says she is ‘pro-choice,’ but, really, she is just about one choice: abortion. If she really cared about women, she would be condemning the violence against life-affirming pregnancy centers, not trying to shutter their doors.”
“Life-affirming pregnancy centers keep all medical records confidential and secure per [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act], state medical record privacy laws, and standards in the medical profession,” O’Connor added. “Privacy and security of medical records is standard in the health industry, and life-affirming pregnancy centers are no different. Interestingly, Warren has not cited one incident supporting her outrageous claim that centers don’t protect their patients’ privacy.”
O’Connor characterized that omission as “proof that she is fabricating this false idea to promote her radical pro-abortion agenda.”
Connor Semelsberger, director of federal affairs for life and human dignity at the Family Research Council, compared the Democrats’ letter to the demonization tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
As I documented in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the center condemns conservative nonprofits like the Family Research Council as “hate groups,” placing them on a map alongside the Ku Klux Klan.
“We here at Family Research Council have been tracking not just attacks on pregnancy centers, but on churches as well, and to see the violent rise in damaging buildings and vandalism,” Semelsberger told The Daily Signal. He said the Democratic senators’ letter is “likely to increase attacks” against pregnancy resource centers.
“When an organization is painted in a negative light in this way as if they are doing something morally wrong or evil, that can paint a target on its back,” he added. “We at [the Family Research Council] know that particularly well. We saw a violent attack in our own building 10 years ago directly related to the Southern Poverty Law Center attacking [our] work on marriage and religious freedom as something evil and to be shunned.”
Three of the seven senators who signed the letter—Hirono, Booker, and Blumenthal—also cited the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s “hate group” accusation in attacking former President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees.
Semelsberger also dismissed the Democrats’ insinuations as entirely baseless.
While the letter warns about women getting prosecuted, Semelsberger noted that “none of the laws on the books in any way, shape, or form criminalize a mother seeking an abortion.”
Furthermore, he noted that crisis pregnancy centers have been collecting health information since 2017, and that up until June of this year, Roe v. Wade remained on the books, so “there was no enforcement” of the kind the Democrats suggest. “It would be very out of character to assume that this data that’s been collected for five years is going to law enforcement,” he said.
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Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
________________
______________________
September 25, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.
Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2021
Mr. Everette Hatcher III
Alexander, AR
Dear Mr. Hatcher,
Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter
Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.
As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.
Sincerely
Joe Biden
Mr. President, my wife was born in JEFFERSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Adrian Rogers tells a story about another lady that was born in that same hospital: “They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF?”
Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)
I was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan, and in his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):
(both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer mentioned Carl Sagan in their books and that prompted me to write Sagan and expose him to their views.
For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.
The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.
Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.
In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?
Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.
Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?
As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?
——-
End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, ArkansasMy wife was born in main hospital in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?”
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts
I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead.
To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video
The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture.
In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance.
Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
______________________________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
I have been writing President Obama letters and have not received a personal response yet. (He reads 10 letters a day personally and responds to each of them.) However, I did receive a form letter in the form of an email on April 16, 2011. First you will see my letter to him which was mailed around April 9th(although […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
When I think of the things that make me sad concerning this country, the first thing that pops into my mind is our treatment of unborn children. Donald Trump is probably going to run for president of the United States. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recently had a conversation with him concerning the […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
This time of year, at Turtle Bay in New York, the leaders of the world flock to the United Nations like homing pigeons for the annual gabfest at the meeting of the General Assembly. Leaders, great and small, get their chance to address the world. President Joe Biden will be one of them. His theme will reportedly be “democracies vs. autocracies.” Prepare to be underwhelmed.
For starters, remember that the best strategic leadership is words and deeds. Take Winston Churchill’s famous declaration, “we will fight them on the beaches.” This speech would be long forgotten, if the prime minister had not actually resolutely committed to fighting and winning the Battle of Britain.
Indeed, friends, allies, and enemies pay more attention to what our leaders “do” than what they “say.” Biden starts with a bit of a credibility deficit. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster. An open border has the world scratching its head. Biden looked flustered over the Taiwan crisis. He failed to deter Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and despite the massive American aid, Biden doesn’t seem to have real plan for a way forward.
This, however, is not the worst of Biden’s foreign policy. Beyond the shear ineptness and incompetence of his team lurks a deeper shortfall—a serious penchant to put politics ahead of good policy.
There used to be axion that politics ends at the water’s edge. The Biden administration has turned that principle of statecraft on it head. Throughout the Cold War, there was in fact a serious effort to fashion bipartisan foreign policy with a coalition of political leader across the Left and the Right. In the 1990s, however, the character of American political leadership began to significantly change. Political diversity atrophied in both parties to the point that forging a foreign policy consensus with leaders across both sides of the aisle became increasingly difficult.
Biden has taken this divide to the extreme. Instead of politics ending at the waters edge, our president sees foreign policy primarily as an extension of his domestic political agenda. Just look at the White House top priorities. They are not China, Russia, Iran or North Korea. They are climate change and a woke cultural agenda that mimics leftist radical social policies pushed here at home.
Climate change is a case in point. Biden’s climate policies are not an economic plan. They are not energy or environmental plan. They are certainly not a national security plan. They are a political agenda to further the radical transformation of America and secure progressive control of the country. Global climate policy exists only to reinforce his domestic agenda.
All this ought to raise all sorts of red flags for Biden’s UN speeches where he plans to take on the world’s bad boys. Domestically Biden has used the threat to democracy theme exclusively to go after his political opponents. Threats to democracy are anyone who disagrees with Biden policies. Detractors from the Biden agenda are axiomatically described as racists, fascists, white supremacists, and radicals. They hate women. They hate men who want to call themselves women. They are outraged by outrages like men competing in women’s sports, radical thugs rioting in American cities, and indifference to the life of the unborn. All these forms of “violence” are anti-Biden and thus, anti-democracy.
We should have every expectation that Biden will mirror this division of good and bad in his approach to foreign policy.
There is already ample evidence that the president’s administration has less than zero credibility when it comes to making distinctions between good and evil abroad. His approach to evil actors is actually to engage them and occasionally finger-wave and offer a bit of scolding. He is still desperate for an Iran Deal, despite ample evidence that this regime is as evil as it looks, even attempting to hire hunter-killer squads to hunt former U.S. officials. He is soft on China. Before the outbreak of the war Ukraine he looked like little more than a speed bump to Putin. He has coddles every leftist anti-American regime in Latin America.
Further, his leadership record so far is less than dismal. His summit of democracies was a lot. His summit of the Americas was an embarrassment. These were meant to be his signature achievements of democratic leadership.
Biden will make a speech at the UN. His cronies will praise. His allies will be polite. His enemies will deride it. In short order, we will all forget it and be faced with the reality that when it comes to defending democracy and battling authoritarianism, we have a White House with a deficit of both.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
John Stossel: Through 50 years of reporting on scares, only COVID proved true
By John Stossel
Published November 17, 2020 at 7:06pm
I hear that climate change will destroy much of the world.
“There will be irreversible damage to the planet!” warns a CNN anchor.
Joe Biden says he’ll spend $500 billion a year to fight what his website calls an “existential threat to life.”
Really?
I’m a consumer reporter. Over the years, alarmed scientists have passionately warned me about many things they thought were about to kill Americans.
Asbestos in hair dryers, coffee, computer terminals, electric power lines, microwave ovens, cellphones (brain tumors!), electric blankets, herbicides, plastic residue, etc., are causing “America’s cancer epidemic”!
If those things don’t get us, “West Nile Virus will!” Or SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola, flesh-eating bacteria or “killer bees.”
Experts told me millions would die on Jan. 1, 2000, because computers couldn’t handle the switch from 1999. Machines would fail; planes would crash.
The scientists were well-informed specialists in their fields. They were sincerely alarmed. The more knowledge you have about a threat, the more alarmed you get.
Yet, mass death didn’t happen. COVID-19 has been the only time in my 50 years of reporting that a scare proved true.
Maybe you accepted the phrase I used above: “America’s cancer epidemic.” But there is no cancer epidemic. Cancer rates are down. We simply live long enough to get diseases like cancer. But people think there’s a cancer epidemic.
The opposite is true. As we’ve been exposed to more plastics, pesticides, mysterious chemicals, food additives and new technologies, we live longer than ever!
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That’s why I’m skeptical when I’m told: Climate change is a crisis!
Climate change is real. It’s a problem, but I doubt that it’s “an existential threat.”
Saying that makes alarmists mad.
When Marc Morano says it, activists try to prevent him from speaking.
“They do not want dissent,” says Morano, founder of ClimateDepot.com, a website that rebuts much of what climate activists teach in schools.
“It’s an indoctrination that’s so complete that by the time (kids) get to high school, they’re not even aware that there’s any scientific dissent.”
Morano’s new movie, “Climate Hustle 2,” presents that dissent. My new video this week features his movie.
Morano argues that politicians use fear of global warming to gain power.
“Climate Hustle 2” features Sen. Chuck Schumer shouting: “If we would do more on climate change, we’d have fewer of these hurricanes and other types of storms! Everyone knows that!”
But everyone doesn’t know that. Many scientists refute it. Congress’ own hearings include testimony about how our warmer climate has not caused increases in the number of hurricanes or tornadoes. “Climate Hustle 2” includes many examples like that.
“Why should we believe you?” I ask Morano. “You’re getting money from the fossil fuel industry.” After all, Daily Kos calls him “Evil Personified” and says ExxonMobil funds him.
“Not at all,” he replies. “I’m paid by about 90% individual contributions from around the country. Why would ExxonMobil give me money (when) they want to appear green?”
Morano’s movie frustrates climate activists by pointing out how hypocritical some are.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio says he lives a “green lifestyle … (using) energy-efficient appliances. I drive a hybrid car.”
Then he flies to Europe to attend a party.
I like watching Morano point out celebrities’ hypocrisy, but think one claim in his movie goes too far.
“Stopping climate change is not about saving the planet,” says narrator Kevin Sorbo. “It’s about climate elites trying to convince us to accept a future where they call all the shots.”
I push back at Morano: “I think they are genuinely concerned, and they want to save us.”
“Their vision of saving us is putting them in charge,” he replies.
And if they’re in charge, he says, they will destroy capitalism.
—-
State of the Union 2013
Published on Feb 13, 2013
Cato Institute scholars Michael Tanner, Alex Nowrasteh, Julian Sanchez, Simon Lester, John Samples, Pat Michaels, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Michael F. Cannon, Jim Harper, Malou Innocent, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus and Neal McCluskey respond to President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address.
Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Lester Romero.
Today I am taking a look at the response of the scholars of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute scholars to the 2013 State of the Union Address.
Swept into office four years ago based, in part, on promises to slow sea-level rise, President Obama initiated a radical climate agenda. It seems we are seeing a rerun in 2013. It is worth asking what is different four years after his first State of the Union Address?
There have been four more years of no global warming. In 2010, there had been no significant world temperature increase for over a decade. The streak is now 16 years long. We have four years of costly lessons on the waste and inefficiency of green-energy subsidies.
The scientific basis for catastrophic climate change gets weaker and weaker. The economic argument for green subsidies has already collapsed. It is time for the administration to quit using both arguments to justify a regulatory and fiscal power grab.
– David W. Kreutzer, PhD, research fellow in energy economics and climate change, Center for Data Analysis
Is President Obama gutting the welfare reform that Bill Clinton signed into law? Morning Bell: Obama Denies Gutting Welfare Reform Amy Payne August 8, 2012 at 9:15 am The Obama Administration came out swinging against its critics on welfare reform yesterday, with Press Secretary Jay Carney saying the charge that the Administration gutted the successful […]
Senator Blunt Vows to Keep Pressure on President Obama Over Contraceptive Mandate Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Feb 13, 2012 http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/13/sen-blunt-vows-to-keep-pressure-on-obama-… | Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) introduced legislation to protect religious organizations from Obamacare’s overreach last summer. Now, as President Obama presses forward with his anti-conscience mandate, Blunt is prepared to keep the pressure on the […]
Max Brantley is wrong about Tom Cotton’s accusation concerning the rise of welfare spending under President Obama. Actually welfare spending has been increasing for the last 12 years and Obama did nothing during his first four years to slow down the rate of increase of welfare spending. Rachel Sheffield of the Heritage Foundation has noted: […]
Sen. Mitch McConnell: Americans Don’t Approve of Anything Obama Has Done Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Dec 8, 2011 In an exclusive interview at The Heritage Foundation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sharply criticized President Obama for engaging in class warfare and accused him of shifting the focus away from his own failed policies in […]
Obamanomics: A Legacy of Wasteful Spending Published on Aug 12, 2012 by CFPEcon101 This mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation highlights egregious examples of wasteful spending from the so-called stimulus legislation and explains why government spending hurts economic performance. **Links to additional reading material** Thomas Sowell, “Stimulus or Sedative?” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/03/09/stimulus_or_sedative_104… Veronique de […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. Is […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. The […]
Thomas Sowell (This letter was mailed before September 1, 2012) President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a […]
I have been writing letters to President Obama almost all of 2012. I have received several responses from the White House but none of the responses have been personal responses from the President. Below is a letter I wrote to the President and a form letter response that I got followed by links to other […]
Air conditioning will become much more expensive if the Biden administration is successful in pressing the Senate to ratify the Kigali Amendment, which would dramatically curb the use of hydrofluorocarbons. Pictured: A vintage 1960s ad for an air conditioner. (Photo: Debrocke/Classicstock/Getty Images)
After a hot summer with utility bills rising, reasonable people would think that President Joe Biden would want to keep air conditioning costs low for Americans.
But the Senate is poised to vote on a climate treaty that would raise those costs and put yet another notch in the belt of Biden’s whole-of-government, whole-of-the-economy climate agenda.
In his first week as president, Biden issued Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” Among the many regulatory actions it initiated, Biden’s order also directed his administration to pursue the Senate’s ratification of the Kigali Amendment to the U.N. Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
What does a treaty on the ozone layer have to do with global warming? Very little, but it offers a convenient cover to slip in costly climate policy that would drive Americans’ air conditioning costs even higher.
The Kigali Amendment mandates a phasing down of hydrofluorocarbons—the most common and affordable compounds used in the U.S. and globally for air conditioning, refrigeration, building insulation, semiconductor manufacturing, and even fire extinguishers. Hydrofluorocarbons also emit greenhouse gases (more on that later) and consequently have become a target of global warming alarmists for elimination, regardless of the costs or benefits of doing so.
Think just of where Americans use air conditioning— in houses, cars, businesses, offices, hospitals, and data centers—and the scope of the Kigali Amendment becomes clearer, to say nothing of the other uses of hydrofluorocarbons.
Ratification of the Kigali Amendment is an unmistakable item on the Biden administration’s climate “to do” list. But it adds up to trouble for Americans.
Here are six reasons why:
Doubling down: Congress passed legislation requiring the Environmental Protection Agency to develop regulations to reduce domestic production and use of hydrofluorocarbons. The law (the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act) was passed right before Christmas 2020 in a massive omnibus spending package and mirrors the Kigali Amendment requirements.
So, what is the harm in doubling down on the EPA’s regulations by ratifying Kigali? In doing so, the Senate would be ceding control to the U.N., turning oversight over to international bureaucrats, and removing flexibility to make adjustments in the future. Currently, Congress has little idea of the costs or impacts of this mandate besides theoretical guesstimates and what certain special interests have told them.
Those who push for ratification are stating a preference for oversight and ultimate implementation by the U.N. rather than Americans’ representatives in Congress.
Six years: The Constitution requires presidents to get the “advice and consent” of the Senate in order to ratify treaties. While President Barack Obama supported the Kigali Amendment in 2016 as part of his climate agenda, the Senate has declined to ratify it for these past six years. There is no rush or pressing need to ratify Kigali now.
People and businesses in those countries will have access to more affordable refrigerants and other hydrofluorocarbons for a decade longer than American residents and businesses.
With the second-largest economy in the world, China is outgrowing its label as a developing nation and the favorable terms and flexibility afforded to it by the U.N.
$957,235,348: A multilateral fund was created by parties to the Montreal Protocol to subsidize compliance by developing countries and fund related research and development. American taxpayers have paid more into this fund in the past 30 years than any other country, to the tune of nearly $1 billion. By ratifying the Kigali Amendment, American taxpayers will be subsidizing other countries’ compliance with the mandates in addition to the costs that will come with meeting the mandates themselves.
Fourfold: The Kigali Amendment mandates a rapid decrease in the consumption and production of the most widely used, affordable means of cooling.
Americans can expect repair and replacement costs for appliances, such as the air conditioners in their homes and cars, to increase. Ben Lieberman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes that “the price of the refrigerant used in home air conditioners shot up 4-fold, and as a result, certain repairs now cost hundreds [of dollars] more” since the EPA began implementing domestic regulations that took effect this yearand mirror Kigali.
Ironically, Biden recently directed millions of dollars to subsidize air conditioning for low-income families in the midst of a July heat wave. In the years to come, those very same units are likely to only get more expensive and out of the financial reach of the people he was intending to help.
0.05 to 0.06 degrees Celsius by the year 2100: That’s the more realistic reduction in global temperatures Americans can expect, assuming countries fully comply with the Kigali Amendment. Many have claimed that eliminating hydrofluorocarbons is necessary to fight climate change and can reduce global temperatures by “as much as 0.5 degrees Celsius.”
However, that estimate makes the most generous assumptions about compliance, likely double counts alleged temperature reductions from other countries’ other climate pledges, and relies on the most extreme (and implausible) climate scenario, which even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considers of low likelihood.
Rather than an easy environmental “win” for the Senate, ratifying the Kigali Amendment would create hotter, more expensive summers for Americans that will be very hard to undo.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
John Stossel: Through 50 years of reporting on scares, only COVID proved true
By John Stossel
Published November 17, 2020 at 7:06pm
I hear that climate change will destroy much of the world.
“There will be irreversible damage to the planet!” warns a CNN anchor.
Joe Biden says he’ll spend $500 billion a year to fight what his website calls an “existential threat to life.”
Really?
I’m a consumer reporter. Over the years, alarmed scientists have passionately warned me about many things they thought were about to kill Americans.
Asbestos in hair dryers, coffee, computer terminals, electric power lines, microwave ovens, cellphones (brain tumors!), electric blankets, herbicides, plastic residue, etc., are causing “America’s cancer epidemic”!
If those things don’t get us, “West Nile Virus will!” Or SARS, Bird Flu, Ebola, flesh-eating bacteria or “killer bees.”
Experts told me millions would die on Jan. 1, 2000, because computers couldn’t handle the switch from 1999. Machines would fail; planes would crash.
The scientists were well-informed specialists in their fields. They were sincerely alarmed. The more knowledge you have about a threat, the more alarmed you get.
Yet, mass death didn’t happen. COVID-19 has been the only time in my 50 years of reporting that a scare proved true.
Maybe you accepted the phrase I used above: “America’s cancer epidemic.” But there is no cancer epidemic. Cancer rates are down. We simply live long enough to get diseases like cancer. But people think there’s a cancer epidemic.
The opposite is true. As we’ve been exposed to more plastics, pesticides, mysterious chemicals, food additives and new technologies, we live longer than ever!
Advertisement – story continues below
That’s why I’m skeptical when I’m told: Climate change is a crisis!
Climate change is real. It’s a problem, but I doubt that it’s “an existential threat.”
Saying that makes alarmists mad.
When Marc Morano says it, activists try to prevent him from speaking.
“They do not want dissent,” says Morano, founder of ClimateDepot.com, a website that rebuts much of what climate activists teach in schools.
“It’s an indoctrination that’s so complete that by the time (kids) get to high school, they’re not even aware that there’s any scientific dissent.”
Morano’s new movie, “Climate Hustle 2,” presents that dissent. My new video this week features his movie.
Morano argues that politicians use fear of global warming to gain power.
“Climate Hustle 2” features Sen. Chuck Schumer shouting: “If we would do more on climate change, we’d have fewer of these hurricanes and other types of storms! Everyone knows that!”
But everyone doesn’t know that. Many scientists refute it. Congress’ own hearings include testimony about how our warmer climate has not caused increases in the number of hurricanes or tornadoes. “Climate Hustle 2” includes many examples like that.
“Why should we believe you?” I ask Morano. “You’re getting money from the fossil fuel industry.” After all, Daily Kos calls him “Evil Personified” and says ExxonMobil funds him.
“Not at all,” he replies. “I’m paid by about 90% individual contributions from around the country. Why would ExxonMobil give me money (when) they want to appear green?”
Morano’s movie frustrates climate activists by pointing out how hypocritical some are.
Actor Leonardo DiCaprio says he lives a “green lifestyle … (using) energy-efficient appliances. I drive a hybrid car.”
Then he flies to Europe to attend a party.
I like watching Morano point out celebrities’ hypocrisy, but think one claim in his movie goes too far.
“Stopping climate change is not about saving the planet,” says narrator Kevin Sorbo. “It’s about climate elites trying to convince us to accept a future where they call all the shots.”
I push back at Morano: “I think they are genuinely concerned, and they want to save us.”
“Their vision of saving us is putting them in charge,” he replies.
And if they’re in charge, he says, they will destroy capitalism.
—-
State of the Union 2013
Published on Feb 13, 2013
Cato Institute scholars Michael Tanner, Alex Nowrasteh, Julian Sanchez, Simon Lester, John Samples, Pat Michaels, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Michael F. Cannon, Jim Harper, Malou Innocent, Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Ilya Shapiro, Trevor Burrus and Neal McCluskey respond to President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address.
Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Lester Romero.
Today I am taking a look at the response of the scholars of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute scholars to the 2013 State of the Union Address.
Swept into office four years ago based, in part, on promises to slow sea-level rise, President Obama initiated a radical climate agenda. It seems we are seeing a rerun in 2013. It is worth asking what is different four years after his first State of the Union Address?
There have been four more years of no global warming. In 2010, there had been no significant world temperature increase for over a decade. The streak is now 16 years long. We have four years of costly lessons on the waste and inefficiency of green-energy subsidies.
The scientific basis for catastrophic climate change gets weaker and weaker. The economic argument for green subsidies has already collapsed. It is time for the administration to quit using both arguments to justify a regulatory and fiscal power grab.
– David W. Kreutzer, PhD, research fellow in energy economics and climate change, Center for Data Analysis
Is President Obama gutting the welfare reform that Bill Clinton signed into law? Morning Bell: Obama Denies Gutting Welfare Reform Amy Payne August 8, 2012 at 9:15 am The Obama Administration came out swinging against its critics on welfare reform yesterday, with Press Secretary Jay Carney saying the charge that the Administration gutted the successful […]
Senator Blunt Vows to Keep Pressure on President Obama Over Contraceptive Mandate Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Feb 13, 2012 http://blog.heritage.org/2012/02/13/sen-blunt-vows-to-keep-pressure-on-obama-… | Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) introduced legislation to protect religious organizations from Obamacare’s overreach last summer. Now, as President Obama presses forward with his anti-conscience mandate, Blunt is prepared to keep the pressure on the […]
Max Brantley is wrong about Tom Cotton’s accusation concerning the rise of welfare spending under President Obama. Actually welfare spending has been increasing for the last 12 years and Obama did nothing during his first four years to slow down the rate of increase of welfare spending. Rachel Sheffield of the Heritage Foundation has noted: […]
Sen. Mitch McConnell: Americans Don’t Approve of Anything Obama Has Done Uploaded by HeritageFoundation on Dec 8, 2011 In an exclusive interview at The Heritage Foundation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sharply criticized President Obama for engaging in class warfare and accused him of shifting the focus away from his own failed policies in […]
Obamanomics: A Legacy of Wasteful Spending Published on Aug 12, 2012 by CFPEcon101 This mini-documentary from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation highlights egregious examples of wasteful spending from the so-called stimulus legislation and explains why government spending hurts economic performance. **Links to additional reading material** Thomas Sowell, “Stimulus or Sedative?” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/03/09/stimulus_or_sedative_104… Veronique de […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. Is […]
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. The […]
Thomas Sowell (This letter was mailed before September 1, 2012) President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a […]
I have been writing letters to President Obama almost all of 2012. I have received several responses from the White House but none of the responses have been personal responses from the President. Below is a letter I wrote to the President and a form letter response that I got followed by links to other […]
Biden Announces Initiative to Combat ‘Through Line of Hate in America’
President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the “United We Stand” summit on countering hate-fueled violence at the White House in Washington, D.C., September 15, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
President Biden on Thursday doubled down on his administration’s assertion that white supremacy-inspired domestic terrorism is the greatest threat to America, announcing an initiative to combat “hate-fueled violence.”
During a theatrical summit titled “United We Stand,” themed to suggest that rightwing hate is rampant in the country, Biden said the White House is launching a new strategy to stop domestic terrorism, “prevent people from being mobilized to violence,” and “counter exploitation of the internet.”
He mentioned the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, when a rightwing activist plowed through a crowd of counter-protesters with his vehicle, killing a woman and wounding dozens more, as the reason he ultimately ran for president after he had no intention to do so. Last November, a Charlottesville jury ordered the organizers of the march to pay $25 million in damages to the victims, although it did not conclude that they were guilty of a federal conspiracy to orchestrate a racially-motivated attack.
Biden got a rise out of the audience by invoking former President Trump, who at the time of the incident commented that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Paraphrasing the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, Biden bemoaned that “we’ve never lived up to it but we’ve never walked away from it.”
Citing America’s legacy of violence against Native Americans, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, prejudice and discrimination against Irish and Italian immigrants, anti-semitism, and religious bigotry, Biden insisted that “there’s a through-line of hate” in America.
The “first of its kind” conference, according to Biden, was created at the urging of civil rights groups after the Buffalo shooting earlier this year, in which the gunman open fired in a grocery store located in a black-concentrated community. He was charged with one count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate, with the indictment claiming he acted “because of the perceived race and/or color of such person or persons” among the victims.
After the tragedy, mainstream media and Democrats attempted to implicate Republicans, suggesting that conservative ideology and institutions sparked and supported his murderous rampage. Rolling Stone published in a headline: “the Buffalo Shooter Isn’t a ‘Lone Wolf.’ He’s a Mainstream Republican.” A Washington Post piece alleged that “conservative media is familiar with Buffalo suspect’s alleged ‘[great replacement]theory.’”
“Hate’s been allowed to fester and grow,” the president declared Thursday. “Our own intelligence agencies have determined that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greater terrorist threat to our homeland today.”
Biden pivoted into the rise of gun violence across the country, assuring, “I’m not going to stop until we ban assault weapons.”
The left praises democracy when elected but claims the right will destroy democracy when it loses. Pictured: Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discusses the 2016 election during her 2017 book tour. (Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers, NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border, and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.
As a result, the left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when it expects to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when it fears losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.
A cynic might suggest that those on the left praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.
After all, who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the over 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old 50-state union?
Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?
The Constitution also clearly states that “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” Who slammed through the impeachment of former President Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?
Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?
The left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.
Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?
New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December decided to ration new potentially lifesaving COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.”
The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny “equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof.” Who is behind the new racial discrimination?
In summer 2020, many local- and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity—if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.
Currently, the Biden administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law.
The Biden administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border—in hopes they will soon be loyal constituents.
The administration has not asked illegal entrants either to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated.
Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers.
At various times in our nation’s history—1832, 1861-65, and 1961-63—America was either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.
In the last five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy.
Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier to create a national hysteria about “Russian collusion.” Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and herself claimed Trump was not a legitimately elected president.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command. Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander in chief. Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.
Some of the nation’s top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress, again, mostly with impunity.
All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Trump.
The result is Third World-like jurisprudence in America aimed at rewarding friends and punishing enemies, masked by service to social justice.
We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat is not so much from loud, buffoonish, one-day rioters on Jan. 6. Such clownish characters did not for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause over 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property—all under the banner of revolutionary justice.
Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America’s institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.
(C)2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
The Honorable Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Washington D.C.
Dear Representative Adam Kinzinger,
I noticed that you are a pro-life representative that has a long record of standing up for unborn babies! It was in the 1970’s when I was first introduced to the works of Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop and I wanted to commend their writings and films to you.
Washington, DC – Today, Congressman Adam Kinzinger (IL-16) joined his House Republican colleagues in a press conference urging Democratic leadership to allow a vote on the Born Alive protections. The proposal would protect babies who survive abortion and provide them with the same medical care that any other premature baby would receive. Yesterday, the Democrats blocked the proposed legislation—for the 17th time—from coming before the House for a vote.
Joining the Congressman and House Republican leaders at the press conference this morning was Jill Stanek, an Illinois nurse and pro-life advocate who has witnessed the devastating realities of these pro-abortion laws. The Illinois legislature is currently debating two abortion bills, similar to the extreme pro-abortion agendas in New York and Virginia.
It seems you have a grudge against President Trump while our freedoms under President Biden are being taken away. I recommend to you the article below:
Roger Kimball Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion
Mr. Kimball concludes his article with these words:
That’s one melancholy lesson of the January 6 insurrection hoax: that America is fast mutating from a republic, in which individual liberty is paramount, into an oligarchy, in which conformity is increasingly demanded and enforced.
Another lesson was perfectly expressed by Donald Trump when he reflected on the unremitting tsunami of hostility that he faced as President. “They’re after you,” he more than once told his supporters. “I’m just in the way.”
There were a few Republicans Thursday who surprised observers when they voted in support of holding former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress and referring him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
Prior to the vote, four Republicans were considered a lock to approve the criminal referral, according to Capitol Hill sources: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio.
Cheney and Kinzinger are on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and have for months stood alone as the only two House Republicans willing to speak out against former President Donald Trump’s continued lies about the 2020 election. They were the only two House Republicans to vote for the formation of the select committee on June 30.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed the select committee after Republicans rejected a bipartisan commission that would have been evenly split between five Democrats and five Republicans. Only 35 Republicans voted for that measure when itpassed the House of Representatives, and it was defeated by a GOP filibuster in the Senate.
From left: Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat, and Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois arrive for the House Select Committee hearing investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
More
Upton has served in the House for more than three decades, since 1987, and will face a primary challenge next year because of his willingness to stand up to Trump.
Gonzalez is retiring from Congress next year, after only four years in the House. “While my desire to build a fuller family life is at the heart of my decision, it is also true that the current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party, is a significant factor in my decision,” Gonzalez said in September when heannounced he would not seek another term.
The remaining five Republicans included three who voted for impeachment — Peter Meijer of Michigan, John Katko of New York and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington — and two House Republicans who did not vote to impeach Trump: Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
Trump seems never to have discerned what a viper’s nest our politics has become for anyone who is not a paid-up member of The Club.
Maybe Trump understands this now. I have no insight into that question. I am pretty confident, though, that the 74 plus million people who voted for him understand it deeply. It’s another reason that The Club should be wary of celebrating its victory too expansively.
Friedrich Hayek took one of the two epigraphs for his book, The Road to Serfdom, from the philosopher David Hume. “It is seldom,” Hume wrote, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Much as I admire Hume, I wonder whether he got this quite right. Sometimes, I would argue, liberty is erased almost instantaneously.
I’d be willing to wager that Joseph Hackett, confronted with Hume’s observation, would express similar doubts. I would be happy to ask Mr. Hackett myself, but he is inaccessible. If the ironically titled “Department of Justice” has its way, he will be inaccessible for a long, long time—perhaps as long as 20 years.
Joseph Hackett, you see, is a 51-year-old Trump supporter and member of an organization called the Oath Keepers, a group whose members have pledged to “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” The FBI does not like the Oath Keepers—agents arrested its leader in January and have picked up many other members in the months since. Hackett traveled to Washington from his home in Florida to join the January 6 rally. According to court documents, he entered the Capitol at 2:45 that afternoon and left some nine minutes later, at 2:54. The next day, he went home. On May 28, he was apprehended by the FBI and indicted on a long list of charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and illegally entering a restricted building.
As far as I have been able to determine, no evidence of Hackett destroying property has come to light. According to his wife, it is not even clear that he entered the Capitol. But he certainly was in the environs. He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He was a supporter of Donald Trump. Therefore, he must be neutralized.
Joseph Hackett is only one of hundreds of citizens who have beenbranded as “domestic terrorists” trying to “overthrow the government” and who are now languishing, in appalling conditions, jailed as political prisoners of an angry state apparat.
Let me recommend that you read this letter below from Senator Ron Johnson and his colleagues:
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), along with senators Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), sent a letter on Monday to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting information on the unequal application of justice between the individuals who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, and those involved in the unrest during the spring and summer of 2020. The senators sent 18 questions to the attorney general on what steps the DOJ has taken to prosecute individuals who committed crimes during both events, and requested a response by June 21.
“Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances,” the senators wrote. “This constitutional right should be cherished and protected. Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted. However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning.”
The full text of the letter can be found here and below.
June 7, 2021
The Honorable Merrick B. Garland
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Attorney General Garland:
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently dedicating enormous resources and manpower to investigating and prosecuting the criminals who breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We fully support and appreciate the efforts by the DOJ and its federal, state and local law enforcement partners to hold those responsible fully accountable.
We join all Americans in the expectation that the DOJ’s response to the events of January 6 will result in rightful criminal prosecutions and accountability. As you are aware, the mission of the DOJ is, among other things, to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. Today, we write to request information about our concerns regarding potential unequal justice administered in response to other recent instances of mass unrest, destruction, and loss of life throughout the United States.
During the spring and summer of 2020, individuals used peaceful protests across the country to engage in rioting and other crimes that resulted in loss of life, injuries to law enforcement officers, and significant property damage.[1] A federal court house in Portland, Oregon, has been effectively under siege for months.[2] Property destruction stemming from the 2020 social justice protests throughout the country will reportedly result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion in paid insurance claims.[3]
In June 2020, the DOJ reportedly compiled the following information regarding last year’s unrest:
“One federal officer [was] killed, 147 federal officers [were] injured and 600 local officers [were] injured around the country during the protests, frequently from projectiles.”[4]
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), “since the start of the unrest there has been 81 Federal Firearms License burglaries of an estimated loss of 1,116 firearms; 876 reported arsons; 76 explosive incidents; and 46 ATF arrests[.]”[5]
Despite these numerous examples of violence occurring during these protests, it appears that individuals charged with committing crimes at these events may benefit from infrequent prosecutions and minimal, if any, penalties. According to a recent article, “prosecutors have approved deals in at least half a dozen federal felony cases arising from clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Oregon last summer. The arrangements — known as deferred resolution agreements — will leave the defendants with a clean criminal record if they stay out of trouble for a period of time and complete a modest amount of community service, according to defense attorneys and court records.”[6]
DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. To date, DOJ has charged 510 individuals stemming from Capitol breach.[7] DOJ maintains and updates a webpage that lists the defendants charged with crimes committed at the Capitol. This database includes information such as the defendant’s name, charge(s), case number, case documents, location of arrest, case status, and informs readers when the entry was last updated.[8] No such database exists for alleged perpetrators of crimes associated with the spring and summer 2020 protests. It is unclear whether any defendants charged with crimes in connection with the Capitol breach have received deferred resolution agreements.
Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. This constitutional right should be cherished and protected. Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted. However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning. In order to assist Congress in conducting its oversight work, we respectfully request answers to the following questions by June 21, 2021:
Spring and Summer 2020 Unrest:
Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the unrest in the spring and summer of 2020? If so, how many times and for which locations/riots?
How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020 were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
How many individuals were incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement? What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
How many of these individuals were released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?[9]
How many DOJ prosecutors were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol Breach:
Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the January 6, 2021 protests and Capitol breach? If so, how many times and how many additional arrests resulted from law enforcement utilizing geolocation information?
How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
How many individuals are incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement? What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
How many of these individuals have been released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?
How many DOJ prosecutors have been assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
I want to recommend to you a video on YOU TUBE that runs 28 minutes and 39 seconds by Francis Schaeffer entitled because it discusses the founding of our nation and what the FOUNDERS believed:
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
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______________________
March 23, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view. Although we are both Christians and have the Bible as the basis for our moral views, I did want you to take a close look at the views of the pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff too. Hentoff became convinced of the pro-life view because of secular evidence that shows that the unborn child is human. I would ask you to consider his evidence and then of course reverse your views on abortion.
___________________
The pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff wrote a fine article below I wanted to share with you.
Nat Hentoff is an atheist, but he became a pro-life activist because of the scientific evidence that shows that the unborn child is a distinct and separate human being and even has a separate DNA. His perspective is a very intriguing one that I thought you would be interested in. I have shared before many cases (Bernard Nathanson, Donald Trump, Paul Greenberg, Kathy Ireland) when other high profile pro-choice leaders have changed their views and this is just another case like those. I have contacted the White House over and over concerning this issue and have even received responses. I am hopeful that people will stop and look even in a secular way (if they are not believers) at this abortion debate and see that the unborn child is deserving of our protection.That is why the writings of Nat Hentoff of the Cato Institute are so crucial.
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have. Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.
Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION
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Dr. Francis schaeffer – from Part 5 of Whatever happened to human race?) Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 5 | Truth and History
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – A Christian Manifesto – Dr. Francis Schaeffer Lecture
Francis Schaeffer – A 700 Club Special! ~ Francis Schaeffer 1982
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – 1984 SOUNDWORD LABRI CONFERENCE VIDEO – Q&A With Francis & Edith Schaeffer
http://www.NewsandOpinion.com | A longtime friend of mine is married to a doctor who also performs abortions. At the dinner table one recent evening, their 9-year-old son — having heard a word whose meaning he didn’t know — asked, “What is an abortion?” His mother, choosing her words carefully, described the procedure in simple terms.
“But,” said her son, “that means killing the baby.” The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. “But,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what month. It still means killing the babies.”
Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old’s clarity of thought and vision.
The boy’s spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.
“That,” he continued, “was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned.”
This passionate reverend used to warn: “Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being. That’s how the whites dehumanized us … The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do — and not even feel they’d done anything wrong.”
That preacher was Jesse Jackson. Later, he decided to run for the presidency — and it was a credible campaign that many found inspiring in its focus on what still had to be done on civil rights. But Jackson had by now become “pro-choice” — much to the appreciation of most of those in the liberal base.
The last time I saw Jackson was years later, on a train from Washington to New York. I told him of a man nominated, but not yet confirmed, to a seat on a federal circuit court of appeals. This candidate was a strong supporter of capital punishment — which both the Rev. Jackson and I oppose, since it involves the irreversible taking of a human life by the state.
I asked Jackson if he would hold a press conference in Washington, criticizing the nomination, and he said he would. The reverend was true to his word; the press conference took place; but that nominee was confirmed to the federal circuit court. However, I appreciated Jackson’s effort.
On that train, I also told Jackson that I’d been quoting — in articles, and in talks with various groups — from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he’d had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.
Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, “I’ll get back to you on that.” I still patiently await what he has to say.
As time goes on, my deepening concern with the consequences of abortion is that its validation by the Supreme Court, as a constitutional practice, helps support the convictions of those who, in other controversies — euthanasia, assisted suicide and the “futility doctrine” by certain hospital ethics committees — believe that there are lives not worth continuing.
Around the time of my conversation with Jackson on the train, I attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass. There, I met Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the “death with dignity” movement.
He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia into the American press.
“But then,” Humphry told me, “a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me.”
“What was that wonderful thing?” I asked.
“Roe v. Wade,” he answered.
The devaluing of human life — as the 9-year-old at the dinner table put it more vividly — did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word “baby” does not appear in Roe v. Wade — let alone the word “killing.”
And so, the termination of “lives not worth living” goes on.
______________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Protesters march toward the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 26 following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. (Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
Conventional D.C. wisdom says Republicans are about to pay a heavy political price for supporting the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. The prospects of a red wave election are deteriorating.
An “invisible army of women” are flocking to register to vote. Dobbs has fired up Democrats. President Joe Biden’s fortunes, miserable only a few months ago, have suddenly turned around. The Economist says that cheering on Dobbs was “one of the worst political decisions of recent memory.”
Even if all of this were true, and I’m highly skeptical it is, “cheering on” the Dobbs decision was completely worth it. Just as cheering the overturning of Dred Scott v. Sanford or Schenck v. United States was worth it. Not everything is about short-term partisan gain.
You might also cheer because if someone had told you 10, or even five, years ago that Roe would be overturned, you wouldn’t have believed them. Roe has been treated as a sacred text for over 50 years, not only by the press but by most of our institutions. The “right” to terminate life for convenience’s sake had been irrecoverably tethered to feminism and progress.
For millions, it probably remains the only SCOTUS decision they can name. And once the left procures a new “right,” it rarely relinquishes it. The prospect of there being six justices willing to uphold the Constitution in the face of this immense pressure was improbable, to say the least.
So, yes, cheer.
And, surely, once Roe was overturned, there would be a tumultuous political upheaval with a massive price tag? Even if we accept everything we’re hearing about the political fallout over Dobbs, the blowback is quite underwhelming. If a two-point swing in the presidential approval rating during a midterm election is the price for overturning Roe, then it was maybe the greatest bargain in history.
Just because Dobbs was “worth” celebrating doesn’t mean Republicans shouldn’t have been better prepared for the probable outcome. It always amazes me how timid and ineffective Republicans are at making the pro-life case, which makes me suspect many of them are unhappy that pro-life legislation is no longer just a theoretical proposition.
Full bans, without exemptions in cases of rape and incest—even if it is morally consistent—are probably never going to be popular nationally. But most Republican-run states allow for some level of first-trimester abortions, a position more in line with the mainstream than the Democrats’ maximalist position on abortion on demand, for any reason, until birth, funded by the taxpayers.
Few on the left, of course, need to worry about the consequences of their radical position because they are almost never asked to defend it. But, if, say, Gov. Ron DeSantis is the presidential nominee in 2024, he will be defending Florida’s 15-week ban against Biden’s NARAL-endorsed extremism. I’m not sure that works out exactly how Democrats imagine.
Democrats have been fooling themselves with faulty and push polling for years. Even if we conceded the tepid swing in national momentum toward Democrats is real, it could be attributable to any number of issues, including an easing of high gas prices. Yet I keep reading stories about how abortion has put Republican control of the Senate in jeopardy.
The GOP may or may not win back the Senate—I’m no prognosticator—but which specific Senate race has turned on Dobbs? In Pennsylvania, where even the Democratic Party’s existing senator still pretends to be pro-life, polls show Dr. Mehmet Oz tightening the race against John Fetterman. Herschel Walker seems to be gaining on Raphael Warnock. As is Adam Laxalt on Cortez Masto.
The evidence that Dobbs has been a critical factor in undermining Republican fortunes is unconvincing in other areas as well. A Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that only 8% of Democrats view “the end of national abortion rights” as their most important issue. Most other polling comes to similar conclusions. Were any of these people going to vote for Republicans to begin with?
Conservative enthusiasm remains high. Historically, midterms during the first term of a new president are tough on any administration. Despite the White House’s risible contention that the economy is humming, few people buy it. A new Marist poll finds that 62% of Americans believe we’re in a recession. The economy is, by far, the top concern of voters.
After decades of indoctrination on abortion “rights,” it’s also almost surely the case that a majority of Americans was under the impression that overturning Roe would mean a national ban on abortion. One recent poll found that 52% of registered Democrats still believe the Supreme Court outlawed abortions in the United States. The realization that this isn’t so may also temper any outrage over Dobbs. Then again, even if it didn’t, it would be worth it.
Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
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______________________
September 25, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view.
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.
Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2021
Mr. Everette Hatcher III
Alexander, AR
Dear Mr. Hatcher,
Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter
Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.
As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.
Sincerely
Joe Biden
Mr. President, my wife was born in JEFFERSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Adrian Rogers tells a story about another lady that was born in that same hospital: “They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF?”
Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)
I was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan, and in his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):
(both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer mentioned Carl Sagan in their books and that prompted me to write Sagan and expose him to their views.
For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.
The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.
Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.
In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?
Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.
Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?
As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?
——-
End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, ArkansasMy wife was born in main hospital in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?”
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts
I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead.
To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video
The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture.
In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance.
Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
______________________________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
I have been writing President Obama letters and have not received a personal response yet. (He reads 10 letters a day personally and responds to each of them.) However, I did receive a form letter in the form of an email on April 16, 2011. First you will see my letter to him which was mailed around April 9th(although […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
When I think of the things that make me sad concerning this country, the first thing that pops into my mind is our treatment of unborn children. Donald Trump is probably going to run for president of the United States. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recently had a conversation with him concerning the […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Democrats’ bill “weakens accountability at the Census Bureau by placing massive power in the hands of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats,” Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., tells The Daily Signal. (Photo illustration: Bill Oxford/Getty Images)
As the Census Bureau faces questions about a botched population count in 2020, the White House expressed conditional support Tuesday for legislation that would loosen the agency’s accountability to taxpayers and elected lawmakers.
The Office of Management and Budget released a statement of President Joe Biden’s administration policy in support of HR 8326, a bill dubbed the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act.
The bill, approved Tuesday by the House Rules Committee, would grant the Census Bureau’s director the sole authority to make operational, statistical, or technical decisions about the census. The bill also says the director would be removable only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The president nominates and the Senate confirms the Census Bureau director, who currently may be fired at will by the president as with any other political appointee.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, sponsored the bill.
“This legislation would safeguard the integrity of the Census Bureau and enhance the accuracy of census data,” the OMB statement says, adding:
The administration appreciates the Congress’ interest in improving the decennial census. Population data serves as the basis for political representation, determines how hundreds of billions of federal dollars are spent, and provides critical information to policymakers and business owners about their communities.
But Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation, warned that the measure would further insulate the Census Bureau from accountability if it becomes law. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
“It is another step down the road of empowering a government bureaucracy that is not answerable to voters and is unsupervised by the elected leaders of the executive branch,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “It is a dangerous and reckless bill that expands the administrative state at the expense of democracy, accountability, and fairness.”
The provision that would empower the Census Bureau director to make statistical, operational, or technical decisions has been a longstanding goal of the left, which wants to conduct “statistical sampling” that doesn’t include a finite count, said Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state who was co-chairman of the bipartisan U.S. Census Monitoring Board in 2000.
“When I was co-chairman of the board in 2000, we fought off the left’s efforts to use statistical analysis and instead insisted on counting real people and not statistics that were made up,” Blackwell, a Republican, told The Daily Signal.
“The statistical analysis is a sleight of hand to draw more favorable political districts for Democrats,” he said. “You would have to have the imagination of Walt Disney to think this is anything else.”
The Census Bureau’s Post-Enumeration Surveydetermined that the 2020 census undercounted six mostly conservative states and overcounted eight mostly liberal states. The errors potentially tilt both representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College in favor of Democrats.
The proposed changes could insulate the Census Bureau from accountability to the president required under current law. In the OMB’s statement, the Biden White House suggested it has concerns:
As HR 8326 proceeds through the legislative process, the administration looks forward to working with the Congress to ensure its provisions do not circumvent OMB’s role in formulating the president’s budget request and to avoid impinging on the president’s authority over executive branch agencies.
Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, says the increased power proposed for the Census Bureau director would undermine accountability for future problems.
“Democrats talk a big game about disinformation, but their so-called Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act is a prime example of it,” Comer told The Daily Signal.
“The bill will do nothing to make the census more fair and accurate. Instead, it weakens accountability at the Census Bureau by placing massive power in the hands of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats,” Comer said. “If Democrats are truly concerned about ensuring an accurate census, they would support adding a question on citizenship to guarantee a fair basis for the apportionment of congressional districts.”
The legislation also would establish a career deputy director to serve when the directorship is vacant. It would cap the number of Census Bureau political appointees at three, down from about two dozen now, and give civil service protections to more Census Bureau employees.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee approved the legislation in July, when Democrats sought to wrap the proposed changes around former President Donald Trump.
“After the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to weaponize the Census Bureau for political gain, it is clear we need stronger protections for this vital institution that impacts everything from congressional representation to the disbursement of public and private funding,” Maloney, the bill sponsor and Oversight Committee chairwoman, said in a public statement. “I’m proud that the committee took this important step to safeguard the integrity and independence of the Census Bureau.”
The legislative push to protect Census Bureau bureaucrats comes as the Post-Enumeration Survey found that the 2020 census undercountedthe population of Arkansas by 5.04%; Tennessee by 4.78%; Mississippi by 4.11%; Florida by 3.48%; Illinois by 1.97%; and Texas by 1.92%.
The survey also found that the 2020 census overcounted the population of Hawaii by 6.79%; Delaware by 5.45%; Rhode Island by 5.05%; Minnesota by 3.84%, New York by 3.44%; Utah by 2.59%; Massachusetts by 2.24%; and Ohio by 1.49%.
Because of the overcounts and undercounts, Florida lost out on two additional seats it should have gotten in the House and two Electoral College votes, while Texas lost one House seat and an electoral vote. Meanwhile, Minnesota and Rhode Island each kept a House seat that likely would have been lost under an accurate count, while Colorado gained a House seat it shouldn’t have gotten.
If passed by Congress and signed into law by Biden, the measure likely wouldn’t pressure bureaucrats to improve, Heritage’s von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal.
“This is a terrible bill that takes away all accountability and oversight of the Census Bureau and hands power to unelected bureaucrats,” von Spakovsky said.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
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The left praises democracy when elected but claims the right will destroy democracy when it loses. Pictured: Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton discusses the 2016 election during her 2017 book tour. (Photo: Bastiaan Slabbers, NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border, and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.
As a result, the left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when it expects to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when it fears losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.
A cynic might suggest that those on the left praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.
After all, who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the over 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old 50-state union?
Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?
The Constitution also clearly states that “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” Who slammed through the impeachment of former President Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?
Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?
The left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.
Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?
New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December decided to ration new potentially lifesaving COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.”
The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny “equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof.” Who is behind the new racial discrimination?
In summer 2020, many local- and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity—if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.
Currently, the Biden administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law.
The Biden administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border—in hopes they will soon be loyal constituents.
The administration has not asked illegal entrants either to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated.
Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers.
At various times in our nation’s history—1832, 1861-65, and 1961-63—America was either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.
In the last five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy.
Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier to create a national hysteria about “Russian collusion.” Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and herself claimed Trump was not a legitimately elected president.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command. Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander in chief. Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.
Some of the nation’s top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress, again, mostly with impunity.
All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Trump.
The result is Third World-like jurisprudence in America aimed at rewarding friends and punishing enemies, masked by service to social justice.
We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat is not so much from loud, buffoonish, one-day rioters on Jan. 6. Such clownish characters did not for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause over 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property—all under the banner of revolutionary justice.
Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America’s institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.
(C)2022 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
The Honorable Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Washington D.C.
Dear Representative Adam Kinzinger,
I noticed that you are a pro-life representative that has a long record of standing up for unborn babies! It was in the 1970’s when I was first introduced to the works of Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop and I wanted to commend their writings and films to you.
Washington, DC – Today, Congressman Adam Kinzinger (IL-16) joined his House Republican colleagues in a press conference urging Democratic leadership to allow a vote on the Born Alive protections. The proposal would protect babies who survive abortion and provide them with the same medical care that any other premature baby would receive. Yesterday, the Democrats blocked the proposed legislation—for the 17th time—from coming before the House for a vote.
Joining the Congressman and House Republican leaders at the press conference this morning was Jill Stanek, an Illinois nurse and pro-life advocate who has witnessed the devastating realities of these pro-abortion laws. The Illinois legislature is currently debating two abortion bills, similar to the extreme pro-abortion agendas in New York and Virginia.
It seems you have a grudge against President Trump while our freedoms under President Biden are being taken away. I recommend to you the article below:
Roger Kimball Editor and Publisher, The New Criterion
Mr. Kimball concludes his article with these words:
That’s one melancholy lesson of the January 6 insurrection hoax: that America is fast mutating from a republic, in which individual liberty is paramount, into an oligarchy, in which conformity is increasingly demanded and enforced.
Another lesson was perfectly expressed by Donald Trump when he reflected on the unremitting tsunami of hostility that he faced as President. “They’re after you,” he more than once told his supporters. “I’m just in the way.”
There were a few Republicans Thursday who surprised observers when they voted in support of holding former Trump adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress and referring him to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
Prior to the vote, four Republicans were considered a lock to approve the criminal referral, according to Capitol Hill sources: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio.
Cheney and Kinzinger are on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and have for months stood alone as the only two House Republicans willing to speak out against former President Donald Trump’s continued lies about the 2020 election. They were the only two House Republicans to vote for the formation of the select committee on June 30.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed the select committee after Republicans rejected a bipartisan commission that would have been evenly split between five Democrats and five Republicans. Only 35 Republicans voted for that measure when itpassed the House of Representatives, and it was defeated by a GOP filibuster in the Senate.
From left: Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat, and Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois arrive for the House Select Committee hearing investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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Upton has served in the House for more than three decades, since 1987, and will face a primary challenge next year because of his willingness to stand up to Trump.
Gonzalez is retiring from Congress next year, after only four years in the House. “While my desire to build a fuller family life is at the heart of my decision, it is also true that the current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party, is a significant factor in my decision,” Gonzalez said in September when heannounced he would not seek another term.
The remaining five Republicans included three who voted for impeachment — Peter Meijer of Michigan, John Katko of New York and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington — and two House Republicans who did not vote to impeach Trump: Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.
Trump seems never to have discerned what a viper’s nest our politics has become for anyone who is not a paid-up member of The Club.
Maybe Trump understands this now. I have no insight into that question. I am pretty confident, though, that the 74 plus million people who voted for him understand it deeply. It’s another reason that The Club should be wary of celebrating its victory too expansively.
Friedrich Hayek took one of the two epigraphs for his book, The Road to Serfdom, from the philosopher David Hume. “It is seldom,” Hume wrote, “that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Much as I admire Hume, I wonder whether he got this quite right. Sometimes, I would argue, liberty is erased almost instantaneously.
I’d be willing to wager that Joseph Hackett, confronted with Hume’s observation, would express similar doubts. I would be happy to ask Mr. Hackett myself, but he is inaccessible. If the ironically titled “Department of Justice” has its way, he will be inaccessible for a long, long time—perhaps as long as 20 years.
Joseph Hackett, you see, is a 51-year-old Trump supporter and member of an organization called the Oath Keepers, a group whose members have pledged to “defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” The FBI does not like the Oath Keepers—agents arrested its leader in January and have picked up many other members in the months since. Hackett traveled to Washington from his home in Florida to join the January 6 rally. According to court documents, he entered the Capitol at 2:45 that afternoon and left some nine minutes later, at 2:54. The next day, he went home. On May 28, he was apprehended by the FBI and indicted on a long list of charges, including conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, destruction of government property, and illegally entering a restricted building.
As far as I have been able to determine, no evidence of Hackett destroying property has come to light. According to his wife, it is not even clear that he entered the Capitol. But he certainly was in the environs. He was a member of the Oath Keepers. He was a supporter of Donald Trump. Therefore, he must be neutralized.
Joseph Hackett is only one of hundreds of citizens who have beenbranded as “domestic terrorists” trying to “overthrow the government” and who are now languishing, in appalling conditions, jailed as political prisoners of an angry state apparat.
Let me recommend that you read this letter below from Senator Ron Johnson and his colleagues:
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), along with senators Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), sent a letter on Monday to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting information on the unequal application of justice between the individuals who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, and those involved in the unrest during the spring and summer of 2020. The senators sent 18 questions to the attorney general on what steps the DOJ has taken to prosecute individuals who committed crimes during both events, and requested a response by June 21.
“Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances,” the senators wrote. “This constitutional right should be cherished and protected. Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted. However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning.”
The full text of the letter can be found here and below.
June 7, 2021
The Honorable Merrick B. Garland
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530
Dear Attorney General Garland:
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently dedicating enormous resources and manpower to investigating and prosecuting the criminals who breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. We fully support and appreciate the efforts by the DOJ and its federal, state and local law enforcement partners to hold those responsible fully accountable.
We join all Americans in the expectation that the DOJ’s response to the events of January 6 will result in rightful criminal prosecutions and accountability. As you are aware, the mission of the DOJ is, among other things, to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans. Today, we write to request information about our concerns regarding potential unequal justice administered in response to other recent instances of mass unrest, destruction, and loss of life throughout the United States.
During the spring and summer of 2020, individuals used peaceful protests across the country to engage in rioting and other crimes that resulted in loss of life, injuries to law enforcement officers, and significant property damage.[1] A federal court house in Portland, Oregon, has been effectively under siege for months.[2] Property destruction stemming from the 2020 social justice protests throughout the country will reportedly result in at least $1 billion to $2 billion in paid insurance claims.[3]
In June 2020, the DOJ reportedly compiled the following information regarding last year’s unrest:
“One federal officer [was] killed, 147 federal officers [were] injured and 600 local officers [were] injured around the country during the protests, frequently from projectiles.”[4]
According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), “since the start of the unrest there has been 81 Federal Firearms License burglaries of an estimated loss of 1,116 firearms; 876 reported arsons; 76 explosive incidents; and 46 ATF arrests[.]”[5]
Despite these numerous examples of violence occurring during these protests, it appears that individuals charged with committing crimes at these events may benefit from infrequent prosecutions and minimal, if any, penalties. According to a recent article, “prosecutors have approved deals in at least half a dozen federal felony cases arising from clashes between protesters and law enforcement in Oregon last summer. The arrangements — known as deferred resolution agreements — will leave the defendants with a clean criminal record if they stay out of trouble for a period of time and complete a modest amount of community service, according to defense attorneys and court records.”[6]
DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. To date, DOJ has charged 510 individuals stemming from Capitol breach.[7] DOJ maintains and updates a webpage that lists the defendants charged with crimes committed at the Capitol. This database includes information such as the defendant’s name, charge(s), case number, case documents, location of arrest, case status, and informs readers when the entry was last updated.[8] No such database exists for alleged perpetrators of crimes associated with the spring and summer 2020 protests. It is unclear whether any defendants charged with crimes in connection with the Capitol breach have received deferred resolution agreements.
Americans have the constitutional right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. This constitutional right should be cherished and protected. Violence, property damage, and vandalism of any kind should not be tolerated and individuals that break the law should be prosecuted. However, the potential unequal administration of justice with respect to certain protestors is particularly concerning. In order to assist Congress in conducting its oversight work, we respectfully request answers to the following questions by June 21, 2021:
Spring and Summer 2020 Unrest:
Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the unrest in the spring and summer of 2020? If so, how many times and for which locations/riots?
How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020 were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
How many individuals were incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement? What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
How many of these individuals were released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?[9]
How many DOJ prosecutors were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with protests in the spring and summer of 2020?
January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol Breach:
Did federal law enforcement utilize geolocation data from defendants’ cell phones to track protestors associated with the January 6, 2021 protests and Capitol breach? If so, how many times and how many additional arrests resulted from law enforcement utilizing geolocation information?
How many individuals who may have committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach were arrested by law enforcement using pre-dawn raids and SWAT teams?
How many individuals are incarcerated for allegedly committing crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
How many of these individuals are or were placed in solitary confinement? What was the average amount of consecutive days such individuals were in solitary confinement?
How many of these individuals have been released on bail?
How many of these individuals have been released on their own recognizance or without being required to post bond?
How many of these individuals were offered deferred resolution agreements?
How many DOJ prosecutors have been assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
How many FBI personnel were assigned to work on cases involving defendants who allegedly committed crimes associated with the Capitol breach?
I want to recommend to you a video on YOU TUBE that runs 28 minutes and 39 seconds by Francis Schaeffer entitled because it discusses the founding of our nation and what the FOUNDERS believed:
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
________________
______________________
March 23, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view. Although we are both Christians and have the Bible as the basis for our moral views, I did want you to take a close look at the views of the pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff too. Hentoff became convinced of the pro-life view because of secular evidence that shows that the unborn child is human. I would ask you to consider his evidence and then of course reverse your views on abortion.
___________________
The pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff wrote a fine article below I wanted to share with you.
Nat Hentoff is an atheist, but he became a pro-life activist because of the scientific evidence that shows that the unborn child is a distinct and separate human being and even has a separate DNA. His perspective is a very intriguing one that I thought you would be interested in. I have shared before many cases (Bernard Nathanson, Donald Trump, Paul Greenberg, Kathy Ireland) when other high profile pro-choice leaders have changed their views and this is just another case like those. I have contacted the White House over and over concerning this issue and have even received responses. I am hopeful that people will stop and look even in a secular way (if they are not believers) at this abortion debate and see that the unborn child is deserving of our protection.That is why the writings of Nat Hentoff of the Cato Institute are so crucial.
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have. Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.
Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION
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Dr. Francis schaeffer – from Part 5 of Whatever happened to human race?) Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 5 | Truth and History
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – A Christian Manifesto – Dr. Francis Schaeffer Lecture
Francis Schaeffer – A 700 Club Special! ~ Francis Schaeffer 1982
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – 1984 SOUNDWORD LABRI CONFERENCE VIDEO – Q&A With Francis & Edith Schaeffer
http://www.NewsandOpinion.com | A longtime friend of mine is married to a doctor who also performs abortions. At the dinner table one recent evening, their 9-year-old son — having heard a word whose meaning he didn’t know — asked, “What is an abortion?” His mother, choosing her words carefully, described the procedure in simple terms.
“But,” said her son, “that means killing the baby.” The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. “But,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what month. It still means killing the babies.”
Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old’s clarity of thought and vision.
The boy’s spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: “There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.
“That,” he continued, “was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned.”
This passionate reverend used to warn: “Don’t let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn’t a human being. That’s how the whites dehumanized us … The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do — and not even feel they’d done anything wrong.”
That preacher was Jesse Jackson. Later, he decided to run for the presidency — and it was a credible campaign that many found inspiring in its focus on what still had to be done on civil rights. But Jackson had by now become “pro-choice” — much to the appreciation of most of those in the liberal base.
The last time I saw Jackson was years later, on a train from Washington to New York. I told him of a man nominated, but not yet confirmed, to a seat on a federal circuit court of appeals. This candidate was a strong supporter of capital punishment — which both the Rev. Jackson and I oppose, since it involves the irreversible taking of a human life by the state.
I asked Jackson if he would hold a press conference in Washington, criticizing the nomination, and he said he would. The reverend was true to his word; the press conference took place; but that nominee was confirmed to the federal circuit court. However, I appreciated Jackson’s effort.
On that train, I also told Jackson that I’d been quoting — in articles, and in talks with various groups — from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he’d had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.
Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, “I’ll get back to you on that.” I still patiently await what he has to say.
As time goes on, my deepening concern with the consequences of abortion is that its validation by the Supreme Court, as a constitutional practice, helps support the convictions of those who, in other controversies — euthanasia, assisted suicide and the “futility doctrine” by certain hospital ethics committees — believe that there are lives not worth continuing.
Around the time of my conversation with Jackson on the train, I attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass. There, I met Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the “death with dignity” movement.
He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia into the American press.
“But then,” Humphry told me, “a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me.”
“What was that wonderful thing?” I asked.
“Roe v. Wade,” he answered.
The devaluing of human life — as the 9-year-old at the dinner table put it more vividly — did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word “baby” does not appear in Roe v. Wade — let alone the word “killing.”
And so, the termination of “lives not worth living” goes on.
______________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Unfortunately, the President is not trying to make things better. His appointments to the Fed suggest he doesn’t understand the need for good monetary policy.
For what it’s worth, I think Biden’s big challenge – both politically and economically – is that Americans are losing ground. Simply stated, prices are increasing faster than incomes.
But that isn’t stopping the Administration from trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.
Alan Rappeport of the New York Timesreported a few days ago that the Biden’s Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, is claiming that Bdenomics is a big success.
…the Biden administration is pivoting to recast its stewardship of the U.S. economy as a singular achievement. …The case was reinforced on Thursday by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen… Ms. Yellen said the legislation that Mr. Biden signed this year to promote infrastructure investment, expand the domestic semiconductor industry and support the transition to electric vehicles represented what she called “modern supply-side economics.” …After months of being on the defensive in the face of criticism from Republicans who say Democrats fueled inflation by overstimulating the economy, the Biden administration is fully embracing the fruits of initiatives such as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021.
The editors at the Wall Street Journal are not impressed.
Janet Yellen…tenure as Treasury Secretary hasn’t enhanced her reputation. …the White House is rolling her out in election season to portray the U.S. economy as a Valhalla of growth, fairness and optimism. …If you’re in a green business the White House likes, you’re in clover. If not, you’ll endure the costs of more regulation and taxes. In the Biden era, big government and big business are in political business together.…Ms. Yellen’s whoppers, …including a claim that “the causes of inflation are largely global.” …U.S. inflation has been substantially home-grown. …The Federal Reserve kept the money spigots open for too long, in part to finance the borrowing needed for all of the spending. …Ms. Yellen is also at pains to stress how much fairer the economy is since Mr. Biden took office… She fails to mention that the U.S. economy contracted by about 1% of GDP in the first six months of this year, even as real wages were falling. Real average hourly earnings declined 3% over the 12 months through July, and average weekly earnings by 3.6%. They’ve fallen 4.2% since Mr. Biden took office.
Meanwhile, the latest inflation data has not strengthened Biden’s case.
Jim Tankersley of the New York Timeswrote aboutthe issue yesterday.
Hotter-than-expected inflation in August was unwelcome news for President Biden, who has sought to defuse Republican attacks over rising prices in the run-up to November’s midterm elections. …Mr. Biden has claimed progress in the fight against inflation, including with the signing last month of an energy, health care and tax bill that Democrats called the Inflation Reduction Act.…But polls continue to show inflation is hurting Mr. Biden and his party… Mr. Biden threw a belated celebration at the White House on Tuesday to mark his signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. …But the country’s economic reality remains more muddled, as the inflation report underscored. Food prices are continuing to spike, straining lower-income families in particular. …Most importantly — and perhaps most damaging for Mr. Biden and Democrats — Americans’ wages have struggled to keep pace with fast-rising prices, an uncomfortable truth for a president who promised to make real wage gains a centerpiece of his economic program.
Let’s close with this chart, which shows what has happened to inflation-adjusted weekly earnings since Biden took office.
Yes, there was one recent month with good data, but that doesn’t seem like a big cause for celebration.
Dan Mitchell does a great job explaining the Laffer Curve
Free-market economics meets free-market policies at The Heritage Foundation’s Tenth Anniversary dinner in 1983. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and his wife Rose with President Ronald Reagan and Heritage President Ed Feulner.
Since the passing of Milton Friedman who was my favorite economist, I have been reading the works of Daniel Mitchell and he quotes Milton Friedman a lot, and you can reach Dan’s website here.
Mitchell in February 2011.
Wikipedia noted concerning Dan:
Mitchell’s career as an economist began in the United States Senate, working for Oregon Senator Bob Packwood and the Senate Finance Committee. He also served on the transition team of President-Elect Bush and Vice President-Elect Quayle in 1988. In 1990, he began work at the Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, Mitchell worked on tax policy issues and began advocating for income tax reform.[1]
In 2007, Mitchell left the Heritage Foundation, and joined the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow. Mitchell continues to work in tax policy, and deals with issues such as the flat tax and international tax competition.[2]
In addition to his Cato Institute responsibilities, Mitchell co-founded the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, an organization formed to protect international tax competition.[1]
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I enjoyed this article below because it demonstrates that the Laffer Curve has been working for almost 100 years now when it is put to the test in the USA. I actually got to hear Arthur Laffer speak in person in 1981 and he told us in advance what was going to happen the 1980’s and it all came about as he said it would when Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts took place. I wish we would lower taxes now instead of looking for more revenue through raised taxes. We have to grow the economy:
Mitt Romney repeatedly said last night that he would not allow tax cuts to add to the deficit. He repeatedly said it because over and over again Obama blathered the liberal talking point that cutting taxes necessarily increased deficits.
Romney’s exact words: “I want to underline that — no tax cut that adds to the deficit.”
The fact of the matter is that we can go back to Calvin Coolidge who said very nearly THE EXACT SAME THING to his treasury secretary: he too would not allow any tax cuts that added to the debt. Andrew Mellon – quite possibly the most brilliant economic mind of his day – did a great deal of research and determined what he believed was the best tax rate. And the Coolidge administration DID cut income taxes and MASSIVELY increased revenues. Coolidge and Mellon cut the income tax rate 67.12 percent (from 73 to 24 percent); and revenues not only did not go down, but they went UP by at least 42.86 percent (from $700 billion to over $1 billion).
That’s something called a documented fact. But that wasn’t all that happened: another incredible thing was that the taxes and percentage of taxes paid actually went UP for the rich. Because as they were allowed to keep more of the profits that they earned by investing in successful business, they significantly increased their investments and therefore paid more in taxes than they otherwise would have had they continued sheltering their money to protect themselves from the higher tax rates. Liberals ignore reality, but it is simply true. It is a fact. It happened.
Then FDR came along and raised the tax rates again and the opposite happened: we collected less and less revenue while the burden of taxation fell increasingly on the poor and middle class again. Which is exactly what Obama wants to do.
People don’t realize that John F. Kennedy, one of the greatest Democrat presidents, was a TAX CUTTERwho believed the conservative economic philosophy that cutting tax rates would in fact increase tax revenues. He too cut taxes, and he too increased tax revenues.
So we get to Ronald Reagan, who famously cut taxes. And again, we find that Reagan cut that godawful liberal tax rate during an incredibly godawful liberal-caused economic recession, and he increased tax revenue by 20.71 percent (with revenues increasing from $956 billion to $1.154 trillion). And again, the taxes were paid primarily by the rich:
“The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.”
So we get to George Bush and the Bush tax cuts that liberals and in particular Obama have just demonized up one side and demagogued down the other. And I can simply quote the New York Times AT the time:
WASHINGTON, July 12 – For the first time since President Bush took office, an unexpected leap in tax revenue is about to shrink the federal budget deficit this year, by nearly $100 billion.
A Jump in Corporate Payments On Wednesday, White House officials plan to announce that the deficit for the 2005 fiscal year, which ends in September, will be far smaller than the $427 billion they estimated in February.
Mr. Bush plans to hail the improvement at a cabinet meeting and to cite it as validation of his argument that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and ultimately help pay for themselves.
Based on revenue and spending data through June, the budget deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year was $251 billion, $76 billion lower than the $327 billion gap recorded at the corresponding point a year earlier.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated last week that the deficit for the full fiscal year, which reached $412 billion in 2004, could be “significantly less than $350 billion, perhaps below $325 billion.”
The big surprise has been in tax revenue, which is running nearly 15 percent higher than in 2004. Corporate tax revenue has soared about 40 percent, after languishing for four years, and individual tax revenue is up as well.
And of course the New York Times, as reliable liberals, use the adjective whenever something good happens under conservative policies and whenever something bad happens under liberal policies: ”unexpected.” But it WASN’T ”unexpected.” It was EXACTLY what Republicans had said would happen and in fact it was exactly what HAD IN FACT HAPPENED every single time we’ve EVER cut income tax rates.
The truth is that conservative tax policy has a perfect track record: every single time it has ever been tried, we have INCREASED tax revenues while not only exploding economic activity and creating more jobs, but encouraging the wealthy to pay more in taxes as well. And liberals simply dishonestly refuse to acknowledge documented history.
Now let’s take a look at the utterly fallacious view that tax cuts in general create higher deficits.
Let’s take a trip back in time, starting with the 1920s. From Burton Folsom’s book, New Deal or Raw Deal?:
In 1921, President Harding asked the sixty-five-year-old [Andrew] Mellon to be secretary of the treasury; the national debt [resulting from WWI] had surpassed $20 billion and unemployment had reached 11.7 percent, one of the highest rates in U.S. history. Harding invited Mellon to tinker with tax rates to encourage investment without incurring more debt. Mellon studied the problem carefully; his solution was what is today called “supply side economics,” the idea of cutting taxes to stimulate investment. High income tax rates, Mellon argued, “inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw this capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities. . . . The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up, wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people” (page 128).
Mellon wrote, “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower taxes.” And he compared the government setting tax rates on incomes to a businessman setting prices on products: “If a price is fixed too high, sales drop off and with them profits.”
And what happened?
“As secretary of the treasury, Mellon promoted, and Harding and Coolidge backed, a plan that eventually cut taxes on large incomes from 73 to 24 percent and on smaller incomes from 4 to 1/2 of 1 percent. These tax cuts helped produce an outpouring of economic development – from air conditioning to refrigerators to zippers, Scotch tape to radios and talking movies. Investors took more risks when they were allowed to keep more of their gains. President Coolidge, during his six years in office, averaged only 3.3 percent unemployment and 1 percent inflation – the lowest misery index of any president in the twentieth century.
Furthermore, Mellon was also vindicated in his astonishing predictions that cutting taxes across the board would generate more revenue. In the early 1920s, when the highest tax rate was 73 percent, the total income tax revenue to the U.S. government was a little over $700 million. In 1928 and 1929, when the top tax rate was slashed to 25 and 24 percent, the total revenue topped the $1 billion mark. Also remarkable, as Table 3 indicates, is that the burden of paying these taxes fell increasingly upon the wealthy” (page 129-130).
Now, that is incredible upon its face, but it becomes even more incredible when contrasted with FDR’s antibusiness and confiscatory tax policies, which both dramatically shrunk in terms of actual income tax revenues (from $1.096 billion in 1929 to $527 million in 1935), and dramatically shifted the tax burden to the backs of the poor by imposing huge new excise taxes (from $540 million in 1929 to $1.364 billion in 1935). See Table 1 on page 125 of New Deal or Raw Deal for that information.
FDR both collected far less taxes from the rich, while imposing a far more onerous tax burden upon the poor.
It is simply a matter of empirical fact that tax cuts create increased revenue, and that those [Democrats] who have refused to pay attention to that fact have ended up reducing government revenues even as they increased the burdens on the poorest whom they falsely claim to help.
Let’s move on to John F. Kennedy, one of the most popular Democrat presidents ever. Few realize that he was also a supply-side tax cutter.
“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now … Cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus.”
– John F. Kennedy, Nov. 20, 1962, president’s news conference
“Lower rates of taxation will stimulate economic activity and so raise the levels of personal and corporate income as to yield within a few years an increased – not a reduced – flow of revenues to the federal government.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 17, 1963, annual budget message to the Congress, fiscal year 1964
“In today’s economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarges the federal deficit – why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”
“It is no contradiction – the most important single thing we can do to stimulate investment in today’s economy is to raise consumption by major reduction of individual income tax rates.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 21, 1963, annual message to the Congress: “The Economic Report Of The President”
“Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk, investment and effort – thereby aborting our recoveries and stifling our national growth rate.”
– John F. Kennedy, Jan. 24, 1963, message to Congress on tax reduction and reform, House Doc. 43, 88th Congress, 1st Session.
“A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new conveniences, education and investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues.”
– John F. Kennedy, Sept. 18, 1963, radio and television address to the nation on tax-reduction bill
Which is to say that modern Democrats are essentially calling one of their greatest presidents a liar when they demonize tax cuts as a means of increasing government revenues.
So let’s move on to Ronald Reagan. Reagan had two major tax cutting policies implemented: the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) of 1981, which was retroactive to 1981, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Did Reagan’s tax cuts decrease federal revenues? Hardly:
We find that 8 of the following 10 years there was a surplus of revenue from 1980, prior to the Reagan tax cuts. And, following the Tax Reform Act of 1986, there was a MASSIVE INCREASEof revenue.
So Reagan’s tax cuts increased revenue. But who paid the increased tax revenue? The poor? Opponents of the Reagan tax cuts argued that his policy was a giveaway to the rich (ever heard that one before?) because their tax payments would fall. But that was exactly wrong. In reality:
“The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.”
So Ronald Reagan a) collected more total revenue, b) collected more revenue from the rich, while c) reducing revenue collected by the bottom half of taxpayers, and d) generated an economic powerhouse that lasted – with only minor hiccups – for nearly three decades. Pretty good achievement considering that his predecessor was forced to describe his own economy as a “malaise,” suffering due to a “crisis of confidence.” Pretty good considering that President Jimmy Carter responded to a reporter’s question as to what he would do about the problem of inflation by answering,“It would be misleading for me to tell any of you that there is a solution to it.”
Reagan whipped inflation. Just as he whipped that malaise and that crisis of confidence.
________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
________
The Laffer Curve, Part III: Dynamic Scoring
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This probably does not quite belong in my collection of “most depressing charts,” but it is definitely very bad news that taxes now impose a greater burden on the average American household than the combined cost of food, clothing, education, and health care.
The dismal numbers in this chart come from an article in Reason by Elizabeth Nolan Brown.
There are not numbers she pulled out of the air. They are from a new report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Here are some excerpts from Ms. Brown’s article.
New consumer spending data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) provides some sobering perspective on how much Americans are paying in taxes. …Overall, taxes accounted for about 25 percent of average consumer spending.…On average, each “consumer unit” paid more than $16,000 in taxes last year. This outpaces average spending on food, clothing, education, and health care combined. …This included $8,561.46 in federal income tax, $2,564.14 in state and local income taxes, $2,475.18 in property taxes, $5,565.45 in Social Security deductions, and $105.21 in other taxes.
Ms. Brown’s article says the total tax burden is more than $16,000 while my chart shows that the average tax burden is approaching $19,000. The difference is that she subtracts out so-called stimulus payments, but I think it is more accurate to view those as handouts rather than as tax rebates.
Household have to spend time, energy, and money to figure out their taxes. And they also pay indirectlybecause businesses have to pass on their even-higher tax compliance costs to households.
Finally, we should be asking ourselves whether we are getting the same value from coercive taxes that we get from our voluntary spending on food, clothing, education, and health care. All it takes is one trip to McDonald’s and my answer is no.
I’m thinking of inventing a game, sort of a fiscal version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
Only the way it will work is that there will be a map of the world and the winner will be the blindfolded person who puts their pin closest to a nation such asAustralia or Switzerland that has a relatively low risk of long-run fiscal collapse.
That won’t be an easy game to win since we have data from the BIS, OECD, and IMF showing that government is growing far too fast in the vast majority of nations.
We also know that many states and cities suffer from the same problems.
A handful of local governments already have hit the fiscal brick wall, with many of them (gee, what a surprise) from California.
The most spectacular mess, though, is about to happen in Michigan.
After decades of sad and spectacular decline, it has come to this for Detroit: The city is $19 billion in debt and on the edge of becoming the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy. An emergency manager says the city can make good on only a sliver of what it owes — in many cases just pennies on the dollar.
I could continue with a long list of profligate governments, but you get the idea. Some of these governments are collapsing at a quicker pace and some at a slower pace. But all of them are in deep trouble because they don’t follow my Golden Rule about restraining the burden of government spending so that it grows slower than the private sector.
Detroit obviously is an example of a government that is collapsing sooner rather than later.
Why? Simply stated, as the size and scope of the public sector increased, that created very destructive economic and political dynamics.
More and more people got lured into the wagon of government dependency, which puts an ever-increasing burden on a shrinking pool of producers.
Meanwhile, organized interest groups such as government bureaucrats used their political muscle to extract absurdly excessive compensation packages, putting an even larger burden of the dwindling supply of taxpayers.
But that’s not the main focus of this post. Instead, I want to highlight a particular excerpt from the article and make a point about how too many people are blindly – perhaps willfully – ignorant of the Laffer Curve.
Check out this sentence.
Property tax collections are down 20 percent and income tax collections are down by more than a third in just the past five years — despite some of the highest tax rates in the state.
This is a classic “Fox Butterfield mistake,” which occurs when someone fails to recognize a cause-effect relationship. In this case, the reporter should have recognized that tax collections are down because Detroit has very high tax rates.
The city has a lot more problems than just high tax rates, of course, but can there be any doubt that productive people have very little incentive to earn and report taxable income in Detroit?
And that’s the essential insight of the Laffer Curve. Politicians can’t – or at least shouldn’t – assume that a 20 percent increase in tax rates will lead to a 20 percent increase in tax revenue. They also have to consider the degree to which a higher tax rate will cause a change in taxable income.
In some cases, higher tax rates will discourage people from earning more taxable income.
In some cases, higher tax rates will discourage people from reporting all the income they earn.
In some cases, higher tax rates will encourage people to utilize tax loopholes to shrink their taxable income.
In some cases, higher tax rates will encourage migration, thus causing taxable income to disappear.
The Laffer Curve charts a relationship between tax rates and tax revenue. While the theory behind the Laffer Curve is widely accepted, the concept has become very controversial because politicians on both sides of the debate exaggerate. This video shows the middle ground between those who claim “all tax cuts pay for themselves” and those who claim tax policy has no impact on economic performance. This video, focusing on the theory of the Laffer Curve, is Part I of a three-part series. Part II reviews evidence of Laffer-Curve responses. Part III discusses how the revenue-estimating process in Washington can be improved. For more information please visit the Center for Freedom and Prosperity’s web site: http://www.freedomandprosperity.org
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
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Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute shows why Obama’s plan to tax the rich will not solve our deficit problem. Explaining in the New York Post Why Obama’s Soak-the-Rich Tax Policy Is Doomed to Failure April 17, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I think high tax rates on certain classes of citizens are immoral and discriminatory. If the […]
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Class warfare again from President Obama. Rejecting the Buffett Rule and Fighting Obama’s Class Warfare on CNBC April 10, 2012 by Dan Mitchell I’ve already explained why Warren Buffett is either dishonest or clueless about tax policy. Today, on CNBC, I got to debate the tax scheme that President Obama has named after the Omaha investor. […]
— the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia. …transpose Norway’s inequality gradient on to the US, and the poorest decile of Americans would be a further 40 per cent better off while the top decile would remain richer than the top of almost every other country on the planet. …Until those gradients are made less steep, the UK and US will remain poor societies with pockets of rich people.
Is that possibly true?But this isn’t right. The U.S. has a relatively low percentage of out-of-pocket health spending — our employers and our government pick up most of the tab. In fact, when we look at “adjusted disposable income”, which includes the value of government services like health care, we find out that the U.S. comes out even more ahead relative to other countries. …someone at around the 18th percentile of income in America in 2019 — a working-class person on the edge of being considered poor — lived in a household making $21,400 a year. That’s about the same as the median income of households in Japan, and about 84% of the median income of households in the UK. In other words, a working-class American on the edge of poverty makes as much as a middle-class person in some rich countries.
Lower corporate rates reduce double taxationwould lower UK investment by nearly 8%, and reduce the size of the UK economy by more than 2%, compared to making the current rules permanent. …because the economic costs of corporate taxation are ultimately borne both by shareholders and workers, raising the rate to 25% would permanently lower average household wages by £2,500. …the macroeconomic effects of raising the Corporation Tax rate to 25% would alone offset 40% of the static revenue gain over a 10-year period, and as much as 90% over the long run.
High corporate tax rates discourage investment.the average tax rates decline temporarily. …The second row in Figure 1 shows the impulse response functions for the percentage response of real GDP. … Looking at the first column it is clear that, despite the transitory nature of the corporate tax reduction, there are very persistent effects on real GDP, whose short-run increase of 0.5% persists throughout the ten year period shown in the figure. In other words, the corporate income tax cut has disappeared after 5 years, but the effect on the level of economic activity is still sizable and significant after 8 years. …A similar picture emerges for productivity, as shown in the third row of Figure 1. Both tax rate cuts boost productivity on impact, with the size of the initial response to a personal income tax cut being much larger than for a cut to corporate taxes. On the other hand, the effects of corporate tax cuts grow over time and remain significant even after 10 years.
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