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Our Lost Liberties

Cal Thomas  / @CalThomas / April 13, 2021

Razor wire-topped riot fencing stands in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, March 15. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images)

COMMENTARY BY

Cal Thomas@CalThomas

Cal Thomas is a syndicated columnist, author, broadcaster, and speaker with access to world leaders, U.S. presidents, celebrities, educators, and countless other notables. He has authored several books, including his latest, “America’s Expiration Date: The Fall of Empires and Superpowers and the Future of the United States.” Readers can email him at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.

If one can say the pandemic has had any positive side effect, it has been to help us focus on what the loss of liberties looks like. Such losses do not occur immediately but erode over time as people become increasingly comfortable with government claiming to know what is best for us.

The Biden administration is proceeding on a downward spiral that has ended in lost liberties in nations of the past by seizing increasing amounts of power for itself through a slew of executive orders, without the consent of the people, or Congress.

When announcing his gun control executive orders last week, President Joe Biden referenced the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. He claimed his orders do not infringe on that right, but added, “No amendment is absolute.” That is concerning.

He also announced the appointment of a Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A White House press release sought to obscure its real goal—court-packing: 

The Commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals. The topics it will examine include the genesis of the reform debate; the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.

The court’s role is stated in the constitutional system and in The Federalist Papers. In Federalist 81, Alexander Hamilton got to the heart of the argument when it came to an all-powerful Supreme Court that could override Congress, effectively making its own laws.

If the court were allowed such power, Hamilton said, it would produce serious negative outcomes: 

The authority of the proposed Supreme Court of the United States, which is to be a separate and independent body, will be superior to that of the legislature. The power of construing the laws according to the SPIRIT of the Constitution, will enable that court to mould them into whatever shape it may think proper; especially as its decisions will not be in any manner subject to the revision or correction of the legislative body. This is as unprecedented as it is dangerous.

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In a speech last week at Harvard, Justice Stephen Breyer, a Bill Clinton appointee, warned that the main reason the public has mostly trusted court rulings is the perception “the court is guided by legal principle, not politics.”

No wonder some on the far left are demanding that the 82-year-old justice retire so Biden can nominate someone more to their liking.

This effort to reshape the court in ways that would sustain liberal policies is an affront to the Constitution and “we the people.” As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, the commission contains 36 members “who tilt markedly to the political left.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was right in his reaction to the Biden commission: “This faux-academic study of a nonexistent problem fits squarely within liberals’ yearslong campaign to politicize the court, intimidate its members, and subvert its independence.”

President Franklin Roosevelt tried packing the court to advance his policies. Thankfully, he failed.

In a 2014 speech, the late Justice Antonin Scalia said: “The Constitution is not a living organism. It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.”

The Biden administration and the left want the power to make their own laws, without constitutional restraints. They believe the Constitution is what liberal judges say it is and their goal is to place more judges who share this belief on federal benches.

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By Adriana Cohen | Creators Syndicate

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/twitter-facebook-censorship-adriana-cohen

Adriana Cohen: Censorship of conservatives proves Twitter & Facebook are enemies of free speech, free press

Twitter is not keeping ‘all voices on the platform’ — far from it

Big Tech titans Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg better lawyer up.  These enemies of free speech and a free press will be hauled in to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee to explain their brazen censorship of conservatives. The ever-growing list of those censored includes the president of the United States, his White House press secretary and the New York Post, whose account was locked for posting a credible story about Joe Biden and his son during an election.

In light of Twitter’s unprecedented and willful censorship, Jack Dorsey could also be facing charges for lying to Congress in 2018.

FACEBOOK’S ZUCKERBERG, TWITTER’S DORSEY TO VOLUNTARILY TESTIFY BEFORE SENATE ON ALLEGED CENSORSHIP

While testifying before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Dorsey told lawmakers: “Let me be clear about one important and foundational fact: Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.”

That’s an outright lie, given the overwhelming and well-documented evidence of the social network’s extreme bias and disproportionate censorship against conservatives over the years.

The Media Research Center, a watchdog group, released a study earlier this month that showed Twitter and Facebook have censored President Trump and his campaign 65 times. His political opponent, Joe Biden, hasn’t been censored once.       

Hardly impartial, wouldn’t you say?       

Yet, that’s not what Dorsey told Congress. He said: “We believe strongly in being impartial, and we strive to enforce our rules impartially. We do not shadow ban anyone based on political ideology. In fact, from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.”       

Is that a joke?    

First off, scores of conservatives, including myself, are being shadow-banned on Twitter, something I testified about in 2018 before Congress alongside other leading conservative voices being wrongfully censored.     

So, no, Twitter is not keeping “all voices on the platform” — far from it. Recently it locked the White House press secretary’s Twitter account for simply posting a link to the New York Post’s verified story on Hunter Biden’s explosive emails.

Twitter locked the New York Post’s account for doing its job — reporting on a presidential candidate’s sketchy foreign business dealings and an alleged influence-peddling scheme. Amid other instances of censorship, Twitter also blocked the House Judiciary GOP from posting a link to the Post’s story to a government website.       

There’s nothing impartial about this un-American suppression of information, especially if one considers that Twitter and Facebook gave Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, legacy media outlets and scores of blue-check “journos” the green light to peddle stories about the fake dossier and Russia collusion hoax against President Trump and his administration the past four years. This five-alarm conspiracy theory has since been debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and various congressional probes.       

Twitter permitted China’s mouthpiece, the World Health Organization, to tweet last January that the coronavirus wasn’t transmittable between humans —  false information that put millions of lives at risk worldwide. And yet it routinely silences right-leaning accounts such as Dr. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, for what it considers to be misleading information about the virus.  

Atlas, the former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, was censored by the oligarchs at Twitter this month for simply questioning the efficacy of masks when data shows that infection rates soared in Japan, the Philippines, Hawaii, Miami and Los Angeles and elsewhere despite mask mandates.       

The frightening reality is the social media speech police won’t even allow health care medical experts, like Atlas, to question anything that strays from their narrow point of view. The rest of us must regurgitate the approved left-wing talking points or risk being silenced or deplatformed from these almighty digital monopolies.    

Congress must stop these rampant abuses once and for all.       

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Perhaps lawmakers will begin by holding Dorsey accountable by recommending perjury charges to the Department of Justice.       

Stay tuned.

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‘Plausible deniability’: Tony Bobulinski says Joe Biden knew about Hunter Biden’s China deal pursuits

By Jerry Dunleavy & Joseph SimonsonOctober 27, 2020 – 11:06 PM

Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Tony Bobulinski claimed Joe Biden’s brother, Jim, said that he and Biden’s son were relying upon “plausible deniability” as they pursued a lucrative deal with a Chinese Communist Party-linked company. 

During an hour-long interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News conducted exactly one week before Election Day, Bobulinski, a Navy veteran, insisted he had firsthand knowledge that the former vice president was aware of the Biden family’s Chinese endeavors, contrary to the 2020 Democratic nominee’s claims.

After meeting with Joe Biden the evening of May 2, 2017 at the Beverly Hills Hilton and then briefly again the following day after the former vice president spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference, Bobulinski said on Tuesday that he had a two-hour conversation with Biden’s brother at the Peninsula Hotel. Bobulinksi said he thought to himself, “How are they doing this? I know Joe decided not to run in 2016, but what if he ran in the future? Aren’t they taking political risk or headline risk? … How are you guys doing this? Aren’t you concerned that you’re going to put your brother’s future presidential campaign at risk? You know, the Chinese, the stuff that you guys have been doing already in 2015 and 2016 around the world?” 

Bobulonski said he asked Jim Biden directly, “How are you guys getting away with this? Like, aren’t you concerned?”

“He looked at me and he laughed a little bit and said, ‘Plausible deniability.’ … Anyone watching this interview can look up what plausible deniability, what he means, and the definition is very distinct,” Bobulinski said. 

Newly released  texts from Bobulinski back up his claims that Joe Biden met with him in 2017. At the time, Hunter, James, and their associates were pursuing a lucrative deal with a Chinese tycoon, complicating claims from the former vice president that he never discussed business dealings with his son.

The texts are part of a trove of hundreds of documents from Bobulinski  obtained by the  Washington Examiner, including dozens of WhatsApp messages, emails, letters, and business proposals. The records show that James Biden  planned outreach to a host of Democratic politicians and world leaders as the group pursued business deals with China in 2017, and that Hunter Biden aimed to avoid having to register as a foreign agent. Bobulinski has provided the records to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and to the FBI. Bobulinski did a sit-down interview with the bureau on Friday. His records are separate from those purportedly on Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

“So I initially was sitting — because I got there a little earlier — was sitting with Jim Biden and Hunter Biden. And Joe came through the lobby with his security and Hunter basically said, ‘Hey, give me a second, I’ll go over and give me 10 minutes to brief my dad and read him in on things.’ And so then Hunter and his father and security came through the bar and I was just stood up out of respect to shake his hand,” Bobulinski said. “And Hunter introduced me as, ‘This is Tony, Dad, the individual I told you about that’s helping us with the business that we’re working on and the Chinese.’ … You know, we didn’t go into too much detail on business because prior to Joe showing up, Hunter and Jim had coached me. ‘Listen, we won’t go into too much detail here. This is just a high level discussion and meeting.’ So it’s not like I was drilling down with Joe about cap tables and details.”

Carlson asked if it was clear to him that the Biden family had told Joe Biden about his business, and Bobulinski replied, “Crystal clear.” 

In September 2019, after being pressed by Fox News, Joe Biden  said, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” 

Joe Biden denied during the final debate last week that he has been involved in any family business dealings or any overseas deals, saying, “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.” 

“Yeah, that’s a blatant lie,” Bobulinski said. “When he states that that is a blatant lie. Obviously, the world is aware that I attended the debate last Thursday. And in that debate, he made a specific statement around questions around this from the president. And I’ll be honest with you, I almost stood up and screamed liar and walked out because I was shocked that after four days or five days that they prep for this, that the Biden family is taking that position to the world.” 

Bobulinski, a former Navy lieutenant who has done business around the world, is listed as one of the recipients of a May 13, 2017, email detailing a business deal between a Chinese company and Hunter Biden.

“I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings, which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family. I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to ‘the Big Guy’ in the much-publicized May 13, 2017, email is, in fact, a reference to Joe Biden,” Bobulinski said on Thursday, adding, “Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my chairman’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing.” 

The “big guy”  email is from Gilliar to Hunter Biden and others, sent May 13, 2017, and it says, “We have discussed and agreed the following renumeration packages.” The email noted that Hunter Biden would receive “850” ($850,000) and lists him as “Chair/Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC” — the China Energy Fund Committee.

“Hunter and everyone was in town and they wanted to coordinate me meeting with Joe. And so it was set up for the night of May 2 at the Beverly Hilton,” Bobulinski said on Tuesday. “I met first met with Hunter Biden and Jim Biden and just had a light discussion where they briefed me that, ‘Listen, you know, my dad’s on the way and we won’t go into too much detail on the business front, but we’ll just spend time talking at a high level about you, your background, the Biden family. And then, you know, he’s got to get some rest because he’s speaking at the conference in the morning.’ … Because they were sort of wining and dining me and presenting the strength of the Biden family to get me more engaged and want to take on the CEO role. And, you know, develop SinoHawk both in the United States and around the world in partnership with CEFC.” 

Carlson pressed him for further details about the purpose behind that discussion.

“As you can imagine, I’ve been asked by one hundred people over the last month, you know, ‘Why would you be meeting with Joe Biden?’ And I sort of turn the question around to the people that asked me why at 10:30 on the night of May 2, would Joe Biden take time out of his schedule to sit down with me in a dark bar at the Beverly Hilton sort of positioned behind a column so people can’t see us to have a discussion about his family and my family and business at a very high level where Jim Biden sat and Hunter Biden participated?” Bobulinski said. “And I’m irrelevant in the story. They weren’t raising money from me. There was no other reason for me to be in that bar meeting Joe Biden other than to discuss what I was doing with his family’s name with the Chinese CEFC.” 

During a brief second meeting with Joe Biden after the former vice president’s speech at the conference, Bobulinski said Biden “just sort of asked me to keep an eye on his son and his brother.”

“Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family nor in any overseas business whatsoever,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told the Washington Examiner last week. “He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him.” 

The former vice president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing by him or his son and dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as part of a “Russian plan.” Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe  said that “Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”

ELECTIONSPublished October 19, 2020Last Update 13 hrs ago

Ratcliffe says Hunter Biden laptop, emails ‘not part of some Russian disinformation campaign’

‘There is no intelligence that supports that,’ Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe says

 By Brooke Singman | Fox News

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Monday said that Hunter Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” amid claims from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff suggesting otherwise.

Ratcliffe, during an exclusive interview on FOX Business’ “Mornings with Maria,” was asked about the allegations from Schiff, D-Calif., who over the weekend said that the Hunter Biden emails suggesting Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had knowledge of, and was allegedly involved in, his son’s foreign business dealings.

“It’s funny that some of the people who complain the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing the intelligence,” Ratcliffe said. “Unfortunately, it is Adam Schiff who said the intelligence community believes the Hunter Biden laptop and emails on it are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

He added: “Let me be clear: the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we have shared no intelligence with Adam Schiff, or any member of Congress.”

Ratcliffe went on to say that it is “simply not true.”

WFP USA Board Chair Hunter Biden introduces his father Vice President Joe Biden during the World Food Program USA’s 2016 McGovern-Dole Leadership Award Ceremony at the Organization of American States on April 12, 2016, in Washington, D.C. (Kris Connor/WireImage)

“Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” Ratcliffe said, adding again that “this is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”

Ratcliffe’s comments come after Schiff over the weekend described the emails as being part of a smear coming “from the Kremlin,” amid claims the revelations are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

“We know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin,” Schiff said on CNN. “That’s been clear for well over a year now that they’ve been pushing this false narrative about this vice president and his son.”

A senior intelligence official backed up Ratcliffe’s assessment.

“Ratcliffe is 100% correct,” the senior intelligence official told Fox News. “There is no intelligence at this time to support Chairman Schiff’s statement that recent stories on Biden’s foreign business dealings are part of a smart campaign that ‘comes from the Kremlin.’ Numerous foreign adversaries are seeking to influence American politics, policies, and media narratives. They don’t need any help from politicians who spread false information under the guise of intelligence.”

Ratcliffe went on to say that the laptop is “in the jurisdiction of the FBI.”

“The FBI has had possession of this,” he said. “Without commenting on any investigation that they may or may not have, their investigation is not centered around Russian disinformation and the intelligence community is not playing any role with respect to that.”

He added: “The intelligence community has not been involved in Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

A senior Trump administration official, however, told Fox News that the FBI was not investigating the emails as Russian disinformation.

The FBI declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, as is standard practice.

Meanwhile, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is investigating Hunter Biden’s emails which reveal that he introduced his father, the former vice president, to a top executive at Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings in 2015.

Ratcliffe went on to say that his role as director of National Intelligence, which he assumed earlier this year, is “to not allow people to leverage the intelligence community for a political narrative that’s not true.”

“In this case, Adam Schiff saying this is part of a disinformation campaign and that the intelligence community has assessed and believes that — that is simply not true,” he said. “Whether its Republicans or Democrats, if they try to leverage the intelligence community for political gain, I won’t allow it.”

Meanwhile, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is investigating Hunter Biden’s emails. 

The emails in question were first obtained by the New York Post and, in part, revealed that Hunter Biden introduced the then-vice president to a top executive at Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma Holdings less than a year before he pressured government officials in Ukraine to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the company.

“We regularly speak with individuals who email the committee’s whistleblower account to determine whether we can validate their claims,” Johnson told Fox News. “Although we consider those communications to be confidential, because the individual in this instance spoke with the media about his contact with the committee, we can confirm receipt of his email complaint, have been in contact with the whistleblower, and are in the process of validating the information he provided.”

The Post report revealed that Biden, at Hunter’s request, met with Vadym Pozharskyi in April 2015 in Washington, D.C.

The meeting was mentioned in an email of appreciation, according to the Post, that Pozharskyi sent to Hunter Biden on April 17, 2015 — a year after Hunter took on his lucrative position on the board of Burisma.

“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the email read.

But Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates last week hit back against the New York Post story, saying: “Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as ‘not legitimate’ and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing. Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”

“The New York Post never asked the Biden campaign about the critical elements of this story. They certainly never raised that Rudy Giuliani—whose discredited conspiracy theories and alliance with figures connected to Russian intelligence have been widely reported—claimed to have such materials,” Bates continued. “Moreover, we have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.”

The Biden campaign also told Fox News Sunday that the former vice president “never had a meeting” with Pozharskyi.

Biden, prior to the emails surfacing, repeatedly has claimed he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and role on the board of Burisma, emerged during the Trump impeachment inquiry in 2019.

Biden once famously boasted on camera that when he was vice president and spearheading the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy, he successfully pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin, who was the top prosecutor at the time. He had been investigating the founder of Burisma.

“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,” Biden infamously said to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.

“Well, son of a b—,” he continued. “He got fired.”

Biden and Biden allies have maintained, though, that his intervention prompting the firing of Shokin had nothing to do with his son, but rather was tied to corruption concerns.

Meanwhile, the Post reported Wednesday the emails were part of a trove of data recovered from a laptop which was dropped off at a repair shop in Delaware in April 2019.

The Post reported that other material turned up on the laptop, including a video, which they described as showing Hunter smoking crack while engaged in a sexual act with an unidentified woman, as well as other sexually explicit images.

The FBI reportedly seized the computer and hard drive in December 2019. The shop owner, though, said he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello.

The Post reported that the FBI referred questions about the hard drive and laptop to the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, where a spokesperson told the outlet that the office “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.”

A lawyer for Hunter Biden did not comment on specifics, but instead told the Post that Giuliani “has been pushing widely discredited conspiracy theories about the Biden family, openly relying on actors tied to Russian intelligence.”

Giuliani did not respond to Fox News’ requests for comment.

Another email, dated May 13, 2017, and obtained by Fox News, includes a discussion of “renumeration packages” for six people in a business deal with a Chinese energy firm. The email appeared to identify Hunter Biden as “Chair/ Vice Chair depending on an agreement with CEFC,” in an apparent reference to now-bankrupt CEFC China Energy Co.

The email includes a note that “Hunter has some office expectations he will elaborate.” A proposed equity split references “20” for “H” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” with no further details.

Fox News spoke to one of the people who was copied on the email, who confirmed its authenticity.

Sources also told Fox News that “the big guy” was a reference to the former vice president. The New York Post initially published the emails, and others, that Fox News has also obtained.

While Biden has not commented on that email, or his alleged involvement in any deals with the Chinese Energy firm, his campaign said it released the former vice president’s tax documents and returns, which do not reflect any involvement with Chinese investments.

Fox News also obtained an email last week that revealed an adviser of Burisma Holdings, Vadym Pozharskyi, wrote an email to Hunter Biden on May 12, 2014, requesting “advice” on how he could use his “influence to convey a message” to “stop” what the company considers to be “politically motivated actions.”

“We urgently need your advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message / signal, etc .to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,”  Pozharskyi wrote.

The email, part of a longer email chain obtained by Fox News, appeared to be referencing the firm’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, being under investigation.

Brooke Singman is a Politics Reporter for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @BrookeSingman.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/politics/ratcliffe-hunter-biden-laptop-emails-not-russian-disinformation-campaign.amp

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Tucker Carlson: New emails reveal exactly what Burisma wanted from Joe Biden

Did Joe Biden subvert American foreign policy to enrich his own family?

 By Tucker Carlson | Fox News

Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from Tucker Carlson’s opening commentary on the Oct. 15, 2020 edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Tom Cotton said it best below:

We knew Joe Biden’s son Hunter pocketed $50,000 a month for a job with a Ukrainian gas company. Joe Biden allowed his son to make millions in Ukraine and China while Joe was Vice President. 

Now, the New York Post is reporting that Vice President Biden may have been introduced to some of the corrupt Ukrainian businessmen paying Hunter… at the same time Vice President Biden was supposed to be overseeing our policy towards Ukraine.

Not everything you hear is untrue and not every story is complex. At the heart of the growing Biden-Ukrainescandal, for example, is a very straightforward question: Did Joe Biden subvert American foreign policy in order to enrich his own family?

In 2015, Joe Biden was the sitting vice president of the United States. Included in his portfolio were U.S. relations with the nation of Ukraine. At that moment, Vice President Joe Biden had more influence over the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian economy than any other person on the globe outside of Eastern Europe.

Biden’s younger son, Hunter, knew that and hoped to get rich from his father’s influence. Emails published Wednesday by The New York Post, documents apparently taken directly from Hunter Biden’s own laptop, tell some of that story.

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” have obtained another batch of emails, some exclusively. We believe they also came from Hunter Biden’s laptop. We can’t prove that they did, we haven’t examined that computer. But every detail that we could check, including Hunter Biden’s personal email address at the time, suggests they are authentic.

TUCKER CARLSON: THE JOE BIDEN STORY FACEBOOK AND TWITTER DON’T WANT YOU TO READ

If these emails are fake, this is the most complex and sophisticated hoax in history. It almost seems beyond human capacity. The Biden campaign clearly believes these emails are real. They have not said otherwise. We sent the body of them to Hunter Biden’s attorney and never heard back. So with that in mind, here’s what we have learned.

On Nov. 2, 2015, at 4:36 p.m., a Burisma executive called Vadym Pozharskyi emailed Hunter Biden and his business partner, Devon Archer. The purpose of the email, Pozharskyi explains, is to “be on the same page re our final goals … including, but not limited to: a concrete course of actions.”

So what did Burisma want, exactly? Well, good PR, for starters. Pozharskyi wanted “high-ranking US [sic] officials” to express their “positive opinion” of Burisma, and then he wanted the administration to act on Burisma’s behalf.

“The scope of work should also include organization of a visit of a number of widely recognized and influential current and/or former US [sic] policy-makers to Ukraine in November, aiming to conduct meetings with and bring positive signal/message and support” to Burisma.

The goal, Pozharskyi explained, was to “close down for [sic] any cases/pursuits” against the head of Burisma in Ukraine.

BIDEN CAMP HITS BACK AT HUNTER BIDEN EMAIL REPORT

It couldn’t be clearer what they wanted. Burisma wanted Huter Biden’s father to get their company out of legal trouble with the Ukrainian government. And that’s exactly what happened. One month later to the day, on Dec. 2, 2015, Hunter Biden received a notice from a Washington PR firm called Blue Star Strategies, which apparently had been hired to lobby the Obama administration on Ukraine. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” have exclusively obtained that email.

“Hello all …” it began. “This morning, the White House hosted a conference call regarding the Vice President’s upcoming trip to Ukraine. Attached is a memo from the Blue Star Strategies team with the minutes of the call, which outlined the trip’s agenda and addressed several questions regarding U.S. policy toward Ukraine.”

So here you have a PR firm involved in an official White House foreign policy call. How could that happen? Good question. But it worked.

Days later, Joe Biden flew to Ukraine and did exactly what his son wanted. The vice president gave a speech slamming the very Ukrainian law enforcement official who was tormenting Burisma. If the Ukrainian government didn’t fire its top prosecutor, a man called Viktor Shokin, Biden explained, the administration would withhold a billion dollars in American aid. Now, Ukraine is a poor country, so they had no choice but to obey. Biden’s bullying worked. He bragged about it later.

The obvious question: Why was the vice president of the United States threatening a tiny country like Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor? That doesn’t seem like a vice president’s role. Well, now we know why.

Viktor Shokin has signed an affidavit affirming that he was, in fact, investigating Burisma at the moment Joe Biden had him removed. Shokin said that before he was fired, administration officials pressured him to drop the case against Burisma. He would not do that, so Joe Biden canned him

That’s how things really work in Washington. Your son’s got a lucrative consulting deal with a Ukrainian energy company, you tailor American foreign policy — our foreign policy– to help make him rich.  Even at the State Department, possibly the most cynical agency in government, this seemed shockingly brazen.

During the impeachment proceedings last fall, a State Department official named George Kent said it was widely known in Washington that the Bidens were up to something sleazy in Ukraine. 

“I was on a call with somebody on the vice president’s staff and … I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board” of Burisma, Kent recalled. This, he noted, could create a perception of a conflict of interest.

So how did the vice president’s office respond to this concern? According to George Kent, “The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son, Beau, was dying of cancer and there was no further bandwidth to deal with family-related issues at the time.”

Family-related issues? This was America’s foreign policy being tailored to Joe Biden’s son. Five years later, Joe Biden still has not been forced to explain why he fired Ukraine’s top prosecutor at precisely the moment his son was being paid to get him to fire Ukraine’s top prosecutor, nor has Joe Biden addressed whether or not he personally benefited from the Burisma contract.

But there are tantalizing hints. On Wednesday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani published what he said was yet another email from Hunter Biden’s laptop. It’s a note to one of his children. At the end of the email, there’s this quote: “But dont [sic] worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

WHILE CENSORING HUNTER BIDEN STORY, TWITTER ALLOWS CHINA, IRAN STATE MEDIA

What does that mean, exactly? Well, we don’t know. There may be more detail on the laptop, but unfortunately, we don’t have access to that. But the question remains, how has Joe Biden lived in extravagance all these years on a government salary? No one has ever answered that question. And the tech monopolies are working hard to make certain no one ever does.

Thursday morning, the New York Post published another story based on the emails. This one describes a business venture Hunter Biden was working on in China. One email describes a “provisional agreement that the equity will be distributed as follows … 10 held by H for the big guy?” 

The big guy? Is the big guy Joe Biden? If so, how much did Joe Biden get and how much of that came from the Communist Chinese government? Those are real questions, this man could be elected president in three weeks. But Twitter doesn’t want you to wonder. It won’t allow you to ask those questions. Twitter restricted the New York Post story as “unsafe,” like it was a lawn dart or a defective circular saw. And that was enough for the Biden campaign.

All day Thursday, they deflected questions about Joe Biden’s subversion of our country’s foreign policy by invoking Twitter’s ban on the New York Post story. So the tech monopoly censors information to help their candidate, that candidate uses that censorship to dismiss the story. One hand washes the other. 

It doesn’t matter who you plan to vote for Nov. 3, you should be terrified. Democracies cannot exist and never will be able to exist without the free flow of information. That is a prerequisite and without it, we’re done. But companies like Facebook and Google and Twitter do not care because they don’t believe in democracy. They worship power and they don’t need to be consistent. Melania Trump’s private phone conversations, the president’s stolen tax returns, they were happy to publish all of that. But if you criticize the Democratic candidate, their candidate, you are banned.

“Facebook and Twitter have policies to not spread things that are utterly unreliable, that have been debunked, and where their origin is untrustworthy,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said Thursday. “They’re practicing their own internal controls, as I wish they had over the past four years … An active Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 had an influence on that election. They are trying even harder in this election. I’m glad that they are managing the content on their own websites.” 

Chris Coons is a liar.

Not one word of this story has been debunked, not one word in those emails has been “debunked.” And if it is debunked, we’ll be the first to report it because we’re not liars. But did you catch the phrase he wanted you to hear: “Russian disinformation”? That’s what they’re claiming these emails are. And it’s all over the Internet, in fact-free, conspiracy-laden conjecture crazier than anything the QAnon people ever thought of.

But none of their garbage, their lunatic lies about Russia is ever censored by the tech monopolies. It’s not “unsafe” because it helps Joe Biden. Therefore, you can read it.

And where are the real journalists, now that we need them more than ever? They’re gone. They’re cowering. They’re afraid. They don’t want to upset power. Jake Sherman of Politico, who claims to be a news reporter, actually apologized on Twitter for asking the Biden campaign about Hunter Biden’s emails. These people are craven. They have no standards. They have no self-respect. Like their masters in Silicon Valley, they worship power alone.

—-

Twitter, Facebook Suppress New York Post Report on Hunter Biden

Andrew Kerr4 hours ago

Twitter on Wednesday afternoon began blocking tweets from being posted that contained links to the New York Post’s report on alleged emails that purportedly show Hunter Biden offered to introduce then-Vice President Joe Biden to an executive of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

“We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful,” Twitter told users who attempted to post a tweet containing a link to the Post’s story.

A Twitter spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the platform took action to limit the spread of the Post’s report because of the lack of authoritative reporting on the origins of the materials cited by the outlet.

“In line with our Hacked Materials Policy, as well as our approach to blocking URLs, we are taking action to block any links to or images of the material in question on Twitter,” the spokesperson said.

There’s no evidence at the moment the Post relied on hacked materials for its report.

According to the Post, the email was part of a “massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer” that was dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. The owner of the repair shop said the customer never came back to pay for the service and retrieve the computer, the Post reported.

The Post uploaded an invoice signed by the customer that states that equipment left with the repair shop “after 90 days of notification of completed service will be treated as abandoned.”

The repair shop owner later alerted the FBI to the existence of the laptop and its hard drive after it went unclaimed, both of which were seized by federal authorities in December, according to a federal subpoena obtained by the Post.

Before the laptop was seized, however, the shop owner reportedly made a copy of its hard drive and turned it over to a lawyer for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who in turn provided a copy of the hard drive’s contents to the Post.

The Daily Caller News Foundation has not confirmed the authenticity of the emails reported by the Post, and the Biden campaign issued a statement on Wednesday denying that Biden met with the Burisma executive in 2015 as alleged in the Post’s report.

Link to New York Post story blocked by Twitter. (Screenshot: Andrew Kerr)

Also on Wednesday afternoon, Twitter began blocking any tweet from being posted that contained links to one of the two documents the Post uploaded to document sharing platform Scribd.

One of the documents depicts an alleged email sent by Hunter Biden in April 2014 to his former business partner Devon Archer, and the other is an alleged email that Vadym Pozharsky, an advisor to Burisma’s board of directors, sent to Hunter Biden and Archer in May 2014.

Link to New York Post Scribd document titled, “Email from Vadim Pozharskyi to Devon Archer and Hunter Biden” blocked by Twitter. (Screenshot: Andrew Kerr)

story.

https://d-3624628980887906306.ampproject.net/2010010034001/frame.html

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of this original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailysignal.com/2020/10/14/twitter-facebook-suppress-new-york-post-report-on-hunter-biden/amp/

Link to New York Post Scribd document titled, “Email from Robert Biden to Devon Archer” blocked by Twitter. (Screenshot:Andrew Kerr)

Facebook spokesman Andy Stone, a former staffer for the Democratic House Majority PAC and former California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, announced earlier Wednesday it would reduce the distribution of the Post’s report despite the lack of any fact-checks against the story.

6 Highlights From the Pence-Harris Debate

Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / Jarrett Stepman / @JarrettStepman / October 08, 2020 / 182 Comments

During the vice presidential debate Wednesday night, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Vice President Mike Pence sparred over a variety of policies, revealing significant differences on several issues.

The debate, which was moderated by USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page, featured the two contenders discussing issues ranging from climate change and COVID-19 to abortion and the Supreme Court. 

Here are six highlights from the debate:

1) COVID-19

Harris aggressively attacked the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. After the opening question, she laid out what could be called a prosecutor’s case. How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>

“The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,” the California senator said. “And here are the facts: 210,000 dead people in our country in just the last several months, over 7 million people who have contracted this disease, 1 in 5 businesses closed. We are looking at frontline workers treated like sacrificial workers. We are looking at 30 million people who in the last several months had to file for unemployment.”

That was in response to a question from Page about what the Biden administration would have done differently than Trump to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Harris then went on to summarize the Biden-Harris plan. 

“Our plan is about what we need to do around a national strategy, for contact tracing, for testing, for administration of a vaccine, and make sure it’s free,” Harris said. 

Pence, who headed the White House coronavirus task force, defended the administration’s record. 

“I want the American people to know that from the very first day, President Donald Trump has put the health of America first,” the vice president said. “Before there were more than five cases in the United States—all people who had returned from China—President Donald Trump did what no other American had ever done. That was, he suspended all travel from China, the second-largest economy in the world.”

Pence added: “Joe Biden opposed that decision.”

“He said it was xenophobic and hysterical. I can tell you, having led the White House coronavirus task force that decision alone by President Trump gave us invaluable time to set up the greatest mobilization since World War II,” Pence said. “I believe it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.” 

As for the Biden plan, Pence said, the Trump administration was already doing much of what it recommends. He also took a shot at a Biden scandal that effectively ended his 1988 presidential bid. 

“The reality is, when you look at the Biden plan, it looks an awful lot like what President Trump and I and our task force have been doing every step of the way,” he said. “ … It looks a little bit like plagiarism, something Joe Biden knows a little bit about.” 

In September 1987, Biden came in for withering criticism for borrowing lines from a speech by then-British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution, knocking him out of the race when it was subsequently revealed to be part of a larger pattern of borrowing lines from other politicians without credit.

Asked about the race to develop a vaccine, Harris said she wouldn’t trust a Trump-endorsed vaccine, but would take one approved by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely,” Harris said. “But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it.”

Pence fired back that the California senator was politicizing the vaccine. 

“The fact that you continue to undermine public confidence in a vaccine, if a vaccine emerges during the Trump administration, I think, is unconscionable,” the vice president said. “Senator, I just ask you, stop playing politics with people’s lives. The reality is, we will have a vaccine by the end of this year, and it will continue to save countless American lives.”

2) Taxes and the Economy

Harris and Pence sparred over the tax cuts passed by Congress in 2017 and debated Biden’s tax plan.

Harris said that the Biden administration would repeal the 2017 tax cuts “on Day One,” and that they were passed to benefit the “rich.”

“Joe Biden believes you measure the health and strength of America’s economy based on the health and strength of the American worker and the American family,” Harris said. “On the other hand, you have Donald Trump, who measures the strength of the economy based on how rich people are doing.”

Pence defended the tax cuts and said: “Joe Biden said twice in the debate last week that he’s going to repeal the Trump tax cuts,” Pence said. “That was tax cuts that gave the average working family $2,000 with a tax break.”

In 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced federal income taxes and made various other changes to the U.S. tax code.

Following the tax cut, the American economy experienced record low unemployment, wage growth, and an overall increase in business investment, according to Adam Michel, a specialist on tax policy and the federal budget as a policy analyst in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Harris said that Biden’s tax plan would end tax breaks for the wealthy but wouldn’t raise taxes on American making under $400,000.

“He has been very clear about that,” Harris said, adding, “Joe Biden is the one who, during the Great Recession, was responsible for the Recovery Act that brought America back, and now the Trump and Pence administration wants to take credit for Joe Biden’s success for the economy that they had at the beginning of their term.”

According to The Washington Post, “most Americans received a tax” cut in 2017, not just the rich.

Biden’s tax proposal would raise taxes about $3 trillion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

“… The Biden tax plan would reduce [gross domestic product] by 1.47 percent over the long term,” according to the Tax Foundation’s General Equilibrium Model. “On a conventional basis, the Biden tax plan by 2030 would lead to about 6.5 percent less after-tax income for the top 1 percent of taxpayers and about a 1.7 percent decline in after-tax income for all taxpayers on average.”

According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Biden’s proposal “would increase taxes on average on all income groups, but the highest-income households would see substantially larger increases, both in dollar amounts and as a share of their incomes.”

3) Climate Change and Fracking 

Harris said a Biden administration would grow the economy through green energy, but she also denied past support for banning fracking. 

“Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. I will repeat that Joe Biden has been very clear that he thinks about growing jobs,” Harris said, adding, “Part of those jobs that will be created by Joe Biden are going to be about clean energy and renewable energy, because Joe understands that the West Coast of our country is burning, including my home state of California.”

Harris also spoke about climate-related problems in the Southeast and in the Midwest. 

“Joe sees what is happening in the Gulf states, which are being battered by storms. Joe has seen and talked with the farmers in Iowa, whose entire crops have been destroyed because of floods,” she said. “So, Joe believes again in science. … We have seen a pattern with this administration, which is, they don’t believe in science. Joe’s plan is about saying we are going to deal with it, but we are going to create jobs.” 

Pence addressed the issue of climate change, but also attacked the Biden campaign’s promises for the environment. 

“As I said, Susan, the climate is changing. We’ll follow the science,” he said. 

“With regard to banning fracking, I just recommend people look at the record. You yourself said repeatedly you would ban fracking,” Pence said of Harris. “You were the first Senate co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. 

“While Joe Biden denied support for the Green New Deal, Susan, thank you for pointing out the Green New Deal is on [the Biden-Harris] website. As USA Today said, it’s essentially the same plan as you co-sponsored with AOC.”

That was a reference to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the main sponsor of the Green New Deal in the House. 

“You just heard the senator say she was going to resubmit America to the Paris Climate Accord. The American people have always cherished our environment, and we’ll continue to cherish it,” Pence said. “We’ve made great progress reducing [carbon dioxide] emissions through American innovation and the development of natural gas through fracking. 

“We don’t need a massive $2 trillion Green New Deal that would impose all new mandates on American businesses and American families. … It makes no sense. It will cost jobs.”

4) China

Pence and Harris sparred over U.S. relations with China, including its role in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“China and the World Health Organization did not play straight with the American people,” Pence said. “They did not let our personnel into China … until the middle of February.”

The vice president defended the administration’s aggressive trade policy with Beijing. “But China has been taking advantage of the United States for decades, in the wake of Biden cheerleading for China,” he said.

Harris said that the Trump administration had “lost” the trade war with China. “What ended up happening because of a so-called “trade war” with China? America lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs,” she said.

Pence countered that a Biden administration would go soft on the communist country.

“Joe Biden has been a cheerleader for communist China over the last several decades,” he said. 

The vice president criticized the record of the administration of Biden’s boss, President Barack Obama, saying that it had dismissed the idea that manufacturing jobs could ever come back to America.

“In our first three years, this administration saw 500,000 manufacturing jobs created, and that’s the type of growth we’re going to see,” Pence said.

5) Supreme Court and Abortion

With the nomination of federal appeals court Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Page asked both candidates what they would want their respective states of Indiana and California to do if the high court were to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide and sent the matter back to the states to decide for themselves.

Neither candidate directly addressed the question, but both spoke of the abortion issue in the context of the Supreme Court. 

“The issues before us couldn’t be more serious,” Harris said. “There is the issue of choice, and I will always fight for a woman’s right to make a decision about her own body. It should be her decision and not that of Donald Trump and the vice president, Michael Pence.”

Pence reiterated his pro-life stance, and called out the Biden-Harris ticket. 

“I couldn’t be more proud to serve as vice president to a president who stands unapologetically for the sanctity of human life. I will not apologize for it,” he said. “This is another one of those cases where there is such a dramatic contrast. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support taxpayer funding of abortion all the way up to the moment of birth, late-term abortion.” 

Pence asked Harris at one point if she would support packing the courts, meaning increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to 10 or more, and then he accused her of not answering the question.

“Once again you gave a non-answer, Joe Biden gave a non-answer,” Pence said. “The American people deserve a straight answer.”

In his remarks, Pence noted the Supreme Court has had nine justices for the past 150 years.

6) Race Relations

The vice presidential candidates also had a heated exchange on race relations amid social unrest in major American cities. 

Harris called out Trump for what she claimed was his reluctance to condemn white supremacists, referring to last week’s presidential debate between Trump and Biden. 

“Last week, the president of the United States took a debate stage in front of 70 million Americans and refused to condemn white supremacists,” Harris said. “It wasn’t like he wasn’t given a chance. He didn’t do it, and then he doubled down. Then he said, when pressed, ‘Stand back, stand by.’ This is part of a pattern with Donald Trump.” 

She also cited the deadly 2017 Charlottesville, Va., Unite the Right rally. 

Pence countered by citing Trump’s comments regarding the Charlottesville violence. 

“This is one of the things that makes people dislike the media so much in this country, that you selectively edit so much,” Pence said, arguing that the media had distorted what Trump had said about there being “very fine people” on both sides in Charlottesville.

“After President Trump made comments about people on either side of the debate over monuments, he condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” the vice president said. 

“He has done so repeatedly. Your concern that he doesn’t condemn neo-Nazis, President Trump has Jewish grandchildren. His daughter and son-in-law are Jewish. This is a president who respects and cherishes all of the American people.”

Pence then went on offense about Harris’ prosecution record as a district attorney in San Francisco.  

“When you were D.A. in San Francisco, African Americans were 19 times more likely to be prosecuted for minor drug offenses than whites and Hispanics,” Pence said to Harris. “You increased the disproportionate incarceration. You did nothing on criminal justice reform in California. You didn’t lift a finger to pass the First Step Act on Capitol Hill.” 

The First Step Act is a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill signed into law by Trump in December 2018.

Harris didn’t directly defend her record as district attorney of San Francisco, but pivoted to her record as California attorney general. 

“Having served as the attorney general of California, the work I did is a model of what our nation needs to do and what we will be able to do,” she said, adding, “I was the first statewide officer to institute a requirement that my agents would wear body cameras and keep them on full time. We were the first to initiate that there would be training for law enforcement on implicit bias.”

——

I grew up and went to EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN SCHOOL in Memphis and ran some of our track meets at RHODES COLLEGE and I know that campus well and I even was contacted by a official at Rhodes with some recruiting material after a good performance in my sophomore year in my mile run there in 1978. Also during the late 1970’s I helped my friends Byron Tyler and David Rogers in a Christian Rock Saturday morning show on Rhodes’s radio station!!! My brother-in-law graduated from Rhodes but I graduated from University of Memphis in 1982.

—-

Amy Coney Barrett: A View from Rhodes College

By Tim H.

 | September 23, 202027 COMMENTS

President Trump is going to announce his nomination for the Supreme Court later this week, and all the talk is about Amy Coney Barrett, currently a Notre Dame professor of law and a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. As it happens, Amy was a classmate of mine at Rhodes College, a small (1,400 students at the time) liberal-arts school in Memphis. I didn’t know her well, but she was a friend of other friends, and we were acquainted a bit through being in a club together.

I can tell you a few things about her, though. For one thing, she did not have a wild reputation, so I think that if she’s nominated, the Senate hearings will have to find something else to complain about. She was an English major and served on the Honor Council, a student body that enforced our honor code against lying and cheating (a great feature of academics at Rhodes that allowed us take-home tests in many classes). We were both in Mortar Board, an honor society. She wasn’t a political activist and was never a member of the College Republicans (I was, and we had a much larger membership than the College Democrats).Amy at the homecoming game senior year

Popular, as far as I knew, and by our senior year, she shows up in the yearbook’s candid photos taken around campus.Candid photo in the social room (the ironing board refers to another picture)

I hadn’t thought about her for a long time, until three years ago when friends were pointing out she’d been nominated for the Seventh Circuit, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein grilled her over her religion, proclaiming that “the dogma lives loudly within you.” At the time, I thought that was a rough Senate hearing.

My daughter was a Notre Dame student, and two years ago, I stopped by to visit Amy at her home in South Bend and catch up. She had been listed as being on the president’s shortlist for a Supreme Court seat, and Kavanaugh was going through his own nomination process at that time.L to R: Me, Amy Barrett, and my daughter

My daughter had been treating the accusations against him as probably true by default and took an unconcerned view towards the behavior of the press. Amy knows Kavanaugh, spoke well of him, and described what it was like seeing the press contacting her and digging through rumors about him. That changed my daughter’s opinion of how these things go, she told me. I meant to ask her if she were named to the Supreme Court if she’d be willing to go through all of the hatred and attacks on her reputation that would surely be a part of it. But I can’t remember if I did. I reckon we’ll all find out soon enough, though.

As a footnote, if Amy is confirmed to the court, she would be the second Supreme Court justice to come from Rhodes. Our first was Abe Fortas (class of 1930), who was named by President Johnson in 1965. Fortas resigned in 1969 after a series of ethics scandals, but the college gives out the Abe Fortas Award for Excellence in Legal Studies each year. Quite understandable; we’re a small school, and we should still be proud one of our own was elevated to the Supreme Court. May Amy Barrett bring us more honor.Published in LawTags: SCOTUS; SUPREME COURT; Amy Coney Barrett

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—

Amy Coney Barrett (born January 28, 1972)^[1][2] is an American lawyer, jurist, and academic who serves as a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Barrett considers herself a public-meaning originalist; her judicial philosophy has been likened to that of her mentor and former boss, Antonin Scalia.^[3] Barrett’s scholarship focuses on originalism.

Amy Coney Barrett
Barrett in 2018
Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
Incumbent
Assumed office  November 2, 2017
Appointed by	Donald Trump
Preceded by	John Daniel Tinder
Personal details
Born	January 28, 1972(age 48) New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Spouse(s)	Jesse Barrett
Education	Rhodes College (BA) University of Notre Dame(JD)
Academic background
Academic work
Discipline	Jurisprudence
Institutions	Notre Dame Law School
Website	Notre Dame Law Biography

Barrett was nominated to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals by President Donald Trump on May 8, 2017 and confirmed by the Senate on October 31, 2017. While serving on the federal bench, she was a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School, where she has taught civil procedure, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation.^[4][2][5][6] Shortly after her confirmation to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, Barrett was added to President Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees.^[7]Trump reportedly intends to nominate her to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Supreme Court.^[8]

Early life and education

Barrett was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1972.^[2] She is the eldest of seven children, with five sisters and a brother. Her father Michael Coney worked as an attorney for Shell Oil Company, and her mother Linda was a homemaker. Barrett grew up in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, and graduated from St. Mary’s Dominican High School in 1990.^[9]

Barrett studied English literature at Rhodes College, graduating in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa membership.^[10] She then studied law at Notre Dame Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She served as an executive editor of the Notre Dame Law Review^[11] and graduated first in her class in 1997 with a Juris Doctor summa cum laude.^[12]

Career

Clerkships and private practice

After law school Barrett spent two years as a judicial law clerk, first for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1997 to 1998,^[13] then for Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1998 to 1999.^[13]

From 1999 to 2002, she practiced law at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C.^[11][14]

Teaching and scholarship

Barrett served as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at George Washington University Law School for a year before returning to her alma mater, Notre Dame Law School in 2002.^[15]At Notre Dame she taught federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation. Barrett was named a Professor of Law in 2010, and from 2014 to 2017 held the Diane and M.O. Miller Research Chair of Law.^[16] Her scholarship focuses on constitutional law, originalism, statutory interpretation, and stare decisis.^[12] Her academic work has been published in journals such as the Columbia, Cornell, Virginia, Notre Dame, and TexasLaw Reviews.^[15] Some of her most significant publications are Suspension and Delegation, 99 Cornell L. Rev. 251 (2014), Precedent and Jurisprudential Disagreement, 91 Tex. L. Rev. 1711 (2013), The Supervisory Power of the Supreme Court, 106 Colum. L. Rev. 101 (2006), and Stare Decisis and Due Process, 74 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1011 (2003).

At Notre Dame, Barrett received the “Distinguished Professor of the Year” award three times.^[15] She taught Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Evidence, Federal Courts, Constitutional Theory Seminar, and Statutory Interpretation Seminar.^[15] Barrett has continued to teach seminars as a sitting judge.^[17]

Federal judicial service

Nomination and confirmation

President Donald Trump nominated Barrett on May 8, 2017, to serve as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, to the seat vacated by Judge John Daniel Tinder, who took senior status on February 18, 2015.^[18][19]Judge Laurence Silberman, for whom Barrett first clerked after law school, swearing her in at her investiture as a judge on the Seventh Circuit.

A hearing on Barrett’s nomination before the Senate Judiciary Committee was held on September 6, 2017.^[20] During the hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein questioned Barrett about a law review article Barrett co-wrote in 1998 with Professor John H. Garvey in which she argued that Catholic judges should in some cases recuse themselves from death penalty cases due to their moral objections to the death penalty. The article concluded that the trial judge should recuse herself instead of entering the order. Asked to “elaborate on the statements and discuss how you view the issue of faith versus fulfilling the responsibility as a judge today,” Barrett said that she had participated in many death-penalty appeals while serving as law clerk to Scalia, adding, “My personal church affiliation or my religious belief would not bear on the discharge of my duties as a judge”^[21][22] and “It is never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they arise from faith or anywhere else, on the law.”^[23] Worried that Barrett would not uphold Roe v. Wade given her Catholic beliefs, Feinstein followed Barrett’s response by saying, “the dogma lives loudly within you, and that is a concern.”^[24][25][26] The hearing made Barrett popular with religious conservatives,^[11] and in response, the conservative Judicial Crisis Network began to sell mugs with Barrett’s photo and Feinstein’s “dogma” remark.^[27]Feinstein’s and other senators’ questioning was criticized by some Republicans and other observers, such as university presidents John I. Jenkins and Christopher Eisgruber, as improper inquiry into a nominee’s religious belief that employed an unconstitutional “religious test” for office;^[23][28][29]others, such as Nan Aron, defended Feinstein’s line of questioning.^[29]

Lambda Legal, an LGBT civil rights organization, co-signed a letter with 26 other gay rights organizations opposing Barrett’s nomination. The letter expressed doubts about her ability to separate faith from her rulings on LGBT matters.^[30][31] During her Senate confirmation hearing, Barrett was questioned about landmark LGBTQ legal precedents such as Obergefell v. Hodges, United States v. Windsor, and Lawrence v. Texas. Barrett said these cases are “binding precedents” that she intended to “faithfully follow if confirmed” to the appeals court, as required by law.^[30] The letter co-signed by Lambda Legal said “Simply repeating that she would be bound by Supreme Court precedent does not illuminate—indeed, it obfuscates—how Professor Barrett would interpret and apply precedent when faced with the sorts of dilemmas that, in her view, ‘put Catholic judges in a bind.'”^[30] Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network later said that warnings from LGBT advocacy groups about shortlisted nominees to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, including Barrett, were “very much overblown” and called them “mostly scare tactics.”^[30]

In 2015, Barrett signed a letter in support of the Ordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family that endorsed the Catholic Church’s teachings on human sexuality and its definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. When asked about the letter, she testified that the Church’s definition of marriage is legally irrelevant.^[32][33]

Barrett’s nomination was supported by every law clerk she had worked with and all of her 49 faculty colleagues at Notre Dame Law school. 450 former students signed a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting Barrett’s nomination.^[34][35]

On October 5, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11–9 on party lines to recommend Barrett and report her nomination to the full Senate.^[36][37] On October 30, the Senate invoked cloture by a vote of 54–42.^[38] It confirmed her by a vote of 55–43 on October 31, with three Democrats—Joe Donnelly, Tim Kaine, and Joe Manchin—voting for her.^[10] She received her commission two days later.^[2] Barrett is the first and to date only woman to occupy an Indiana seat on the Seventh Circuit.^[39]

Notable cases

Title IX

In Doe v. Purdue University, 928 F.3d 652 (7th Cir. 2019), the court, in a unanimous decision written by Barrett, reinstated a suit brought by a male Purdue University student (John Doe) who had been found guilty of sexual assault by Purdue University, which resulted in a one-year suspension, loss of his Navy ROTC scholarship, and expulsion from the ROTC affecting his ability to pursue his chosen career in the Navy.^[40] Doe alleged the school’s Advisory Committee on Equity discriminated against him on the basis of his sex and violated his rights to due process by not interviewing the alleged victim, not allowing him to present evidence in his defense, including an erroneous statement that he confessed to some of the alleged assault, and appearing to believe the victim instead of the accused without hearing from either party or having even read the investigation report. The court found that Doe had adequately alleged that the university deprived him of his occupational liberty without due process in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and had violated his Title IX rights “by imposing a punishment infected by sex bias,” and remanded to the District Court for further proceedings.^[41][42][43]

Title VII

In EEOC v. AutoZone, the Seventh Circuit considered the federal government’s appeal from a ruling in a suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against AutoZone; the EEOC argued that the retailer’s assignment of employees to different stores based on race (e.g., “sending African American employees to stores in heavily African American neighborhoods”) violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The panel, which did not include Barrett, ruled in favor of AutoZone. An unsuccessful petition for rehearing en banc was filed. Three judges—Chief Judge Diane Wood and Judges Ilana Rovner and David Hamilton—voted to grant rehearing, and criticized the panel decision as upholding a “separate-but-equal arrangement”; Barrett and four other judges voted to deny rehearing.^[11]

Immigration

In Cook County v. Wolf, 962 F.3d 208 (7th Cir. 2020), Barrett wrote a 40-page dissent from the majority’s decision to uphold a preliminary injunction on the Trump administration’s controversial “public charge rule“, which heightened the standard for obtaining a green card. In her dissent, she argued that any noncitizens who disenrolled from government benefits because of the rule did so due to confusion about the rule itself rather than from its application, writing that the vast majority of the people subject to the rule are not eligible for government benefits in the first place. On the merits, Barrett departed from her colleagues Wood and Rovner, who held that DHS’s interpretation of that provision was unreasonable under Chevron Step Two. Barrett would have held that the new rule fell within the broad scope of discretion granted to the Executive by Congress through the Immigration and Nationality Act.^[44][45][46] The public charge issue is the subject of a circuit split.^[44][46][47]

In Yafai v. Pompeo, 924 F.3d 969 (7th Cir. 2019), the court considered a case brought by a Yemeni citizen, Ahmad, and her husband, a U.S. citizen, who challenged a consular officer’s decision to twice deny Ahmad’s visa application under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Yafai, the U.S. citizen, argued that the denial of his wife’s visa application violated his constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse.^[48] In an 2-1 majority opinion authored by Barrett, the court held that the plaintiff’s claim was properly dismissed under the doctrine of consular nonreviewability. She declined to address whether Yafai had been denied a constitutional right (or whether a constitutional right to live in the United States with his spouse existed) because even if a constitutional right was implicated, the court lacked authority to disturb the consular officer’s decision to deny Ahmad’s visa application because that decision was facially legitimate and bona fide. Following the panel’s decision, Yafai filed a petition for rehearing en banc; the petition was denied, with eight judges voting against rehearing and three in favor, Wood, Rovner and Hamilton. Barrett and Judge Joel Flaumconcurred in the denial of rehearing.^[48][49]

Second Amendment

In Kanter v. Barr, 919 F.3d 437 (7th Cir. 2019), Barrett dissented when the court upheld a law prohibiting convicted nonviolent felons from possessing firearms. The plaintiffs had been convicted of mail fraud. The majority upheld the felony dispossession statutes as “substantially related to an important government interest in preventing gun violence.” In her dissent, Barrett argued that while the government has a legitimate interest in denying gun possession to felons convicted of violent crimes, there is no evidence that denying guns to nonviolent felons promotes this interest, and that the law violates the Second Amendment.^[50][51]

Fourth Amendment

In Rainsberger v. Benner, 913 F.3d 640 (7th Cir. 2019), the panel, in an opinion by Barrett, affirmed the district court’s ruling denying the defendant’s motion for summary judgment and qualified immunity in a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 case. The defendant, Benner, was a police detective who knowingly provided false and misleading information in a probable cause affidavit that was used to obtain an arrest warrant against Rainsberger. (The charges were later dropped and Rainsberger was released.) The court found the defendant’s lies and omissions violated “clearly established law” and thus Benner was not shielded by qualified immunity.^[52]

The case United States v. Watson, 900 F.3d 892 (7th Cir. 2018) involved police responding to an anonymous tip that people were “playing with guns” in a parking lot. The police arrived and searched the defendant’s vehicle, taking possession of two firearms; the defendant was later charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. The district court denied the defendant’s motion to suppress. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit, in a decision by Barrett, vacated and remanded, determining that the police lacked probable cause to search the vehicle based solely upon the tip, when no crime was alleged. Barrett distinguished Navarette v. California and wrote, “the police were right to respond to the anonymous call by coming to the parking lot to determine what was happening. But determining what was happening and immediately seizing people upon arrival are two different things, and the latter was premature…Watson’s case presents a close call. But this one falls on the wrong side of the Fourth Amendment.”^[53]

In a 2013 Texas Law Review article, Barrett included as one of only seven Supreme Court “superprecedents“, Mapp vs Ohio (1961); the seminal case where the court found through the doctrine of selective incorporation that the 4th Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures was binding on state and local authorities in the same way it historically applied to the federal government.

Civil procedure and standing

In Casillas v. Madison Ave. Associates, Inc., 926 F.3d 329 (7th Cir. 2019), the plaintiff brought a class-action lawsuit against Madison Avenue, alleging that the company violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) when it sent her a debt-collection letter that described the FDCPA process for verifying a debt but failed to specify that she was required to respond in writing to trigger the FDCPA protections. Casillas did not allege that she had tried to verify her debt and trigger the statutory protections under the FDCPA, or that the amount owed was in any doubt. In a decision written by Barrett, the panel, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, found that the plaintiff’s allegation of receiving incorrect or incomplete information was a “bare procedural violation” that was insufficiently concrete to satisfy the Article III‘s injury-in-fact requirement. Wood dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc. The issue created a circuit split.^[54][55][56]

Judicial philosophy and political views

Barrett considers herself an originalist. She is a constitutional scholar with expertise in statutory interpretation.^[10] Reuters described Barrett as a “a favorite among religious conservatives,” and said that she has supported expansive gun rights and voted in favor of one of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies.^[57]

Barrett was one of Justice Antonin Scalia‘s law clerks. She has spoken and written of her admiration of his close attention to the text of statutes. She has also praised his adherence to originalism.^[58]

In 2013, Barrett wrote a Texas Law Review article on the doctrine of stare decisis wherein she listed seven cases that should be considered “superprecedents”—cases that the court would never consider overturning. The list included Brown v. Board of Education but specifically excluded Roe v. Wade. In explaining why it was not included, Barrett referenced scholarship agreeing that in order to qualify as “superprecedent” a decision must enjoy widespread support from not only jurists but politicians and the public at large to the extent of becoming immune to reversal or challenge. She argued the people must trust the validity of a ruling to such an extent the matter has been taken “off of the court’s agenda,” with lower courts no longer taking challenges to them seriously. Barrett pointed to Planned Parenthood v. Casey as specific evidence Roe had not yet attained this status.^[59] The article did not include any pro-Second Amendment or pro-LGBT cases as “Super-Precedent”.^[30][31] When asked during her confirmation hearings why she did not include any pro-LGBT cases as “superprecedent”, Barrett explained that the list contained in the article was collected from other scholars and not a product of her own independent analysis on the subject.^[32][33]

Barrett has never ruled directly on a case pertaining to abortion rights, but she did vote to rehear a successful challenge to Indiana’s parental notification law in 2019. In 2018, Barrett voted against striking down another Indiana law requiring burial or cremation of fetal remains. In both cases, Barrett voted with the minority. The Supreme Court later reinstated the fetal remains law and in July 2020 it ordered a rehearing in the parental notification case.^[57] At a 2013 event reflecting on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, she described the decision—in Notre Dame Magazine‘s paraphrase—as “creating through judicial fiat a framework of abortion on demand.”^[60][61] She also remarked that it was “very unlikely” the court would overturn the core of Roe v. Wade: “The fundamental element, that the woman has a right to choose abortion, will probably stand. The controversy right now is about funding. It’s a question of whether abortions will be publicly or privately funded.”^[62][63] NPR said that those statements were made before the election of Donald Trump and the changing composition of the Supreme Court to the right subsequent to his election, which could make Barrett’s vote pivotal in overturning Roe v. Wade.^[64]

Barrett was critical of Chief Justice John Roberts’opinion in the 5–4 decision that upheld the constitutionality of the central provision in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in NFIB vs. Sebelius. Roberts’s opinion defended the constitutionality of the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act by characterizing it as a “tax.” Barrett disapproved of this approach, saying Roberts pushed the ACA “beyond it’s plausible limit to save it.”^{[64][65][66][67]} She criticized the Obama administration for providing employees of religious institutions the option of obtaining birth controlwithout having the religious institutions pay for it.^[65]

Potential Supreme Court nomination

Barrett has been on President Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees since 2017, almost immediately after her court of appeals confirmation. In July 2018, after Anthony Kennedy‘s retirement announcement, she was reportedly one of three finalists Trump considered, along with Judge Raymond Kethledge and Judge Brett Kavanaugh.^[16][68] Trump chose Kavanaugh.^[69]Reportedly, although Trump liked Barrett, he was concerned about her lack of experience on the bench.^[70] In the Republican Party, Barrett was favored by social conservatives.^[70]

After Kavanaugh’s selection, Barrett was viewed as a possible Trump nominee for a future Supreme Court vacancy.^[71] Trump was reportedly “saving” Ruth Bader Ginsburg‘s seat for Barrett if Ginsburg retired or died during his presidency.^[72] Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, and Barrett has been widely mentioned as the front-runner to succeed her.^{[73][74][75][76]}

Personal life

Judge Barrett with her husband, Jesse

Since 1999, Barrett has been married to fellow Notre Dame Law graduate Jesse M. Barrett, a partner at SouthBank Legal in South Bend, Indiana. Previously, Jesse Barrett worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorneyfor the Northern District of Indiana for 13 years.^[77][78][79] They live in South Bend and have seven children, ranging in age from 8-19.^[80] Two of the Barrett children are adopted from Haiti. Their youngest biological child has special needs.^[79][2][81]Barrett is a practicing Catholic.^[82][83]

In September 2017, The New York Times reported that Barrett was an active member of a small, tightly knit Charismatic Christian group called People of Praise.^[84][85] Founded in South Bend, the group is associated with the Catholic Charismatic Renewalmovement; it is ecumenical and not formally affiliated with the Catholic Church, but about 90% of its members are Catholic.^[85][86]

Affiliations and recognition

From 2010 to 2016, Barrett served by appointment of the Chief Justice on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure.^[15]

Barrett was a member of the Federalist Society from 2005 to 2006 and from 2014 to 2017.^[25][10][11] She is a member of the American Law Institute.^[87]

Selected publications

• Barrett, Amy Coney (2017). “Originalism and Stare Decisis”. Notre Dame Law Review. 92: 1921–1944.
• Barrett, Amy Coney; Nagle, John Copeland (2016). “Congressional Originalism”. University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. 19: 1–44.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2017). “Countering the Majoritarian Difficulty [review]”. Constitutional Commentary. 32: 61–84.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2014). “Suspension and Delegation”. Cornell Law Review. 99: 251–326.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2013). “Precedent and Jurisprudential Disagreement” (PDF). Texas Law Review. 91: 1711–1737.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2010). “Substantive Canons and Faithful Agency” (PDF). B.U. L. Rev.: 109–182.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2008). “Introduction [Symposium: Stare Decisis and Nonjudicial Actors]”. Notre Dame Law Review. 83: 1147–1172.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2008). “Procedural Common Law” (PDF). Virginia Law Review. 94: 813–888.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2006). “The Supervisory Power of the Supreme Court”. Columbia Law Review. 106: 324–387.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2005). “Statutory Stare Decisis in the Courts of Appeals”. The George Washington Law Review. 73: 317–352.
• Barrett, Amy Coney (2003). “Stare Decisis and Due Process”. U. Colo. L. Rev. 74: 1011–1074.
• Barrett, Amy Coney; Garvey, John H. (1998). “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases”. Marquette Law Review. 81: 303.

See also

References

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​Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in November 2017. She serves on the faculty of the Notre Dame Law School, teaching on constitutional law, federal courts, and statutory interpretation, and previously served on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Rhodes College in 1994 and her J.D. from Notre Dame Law School in 1997. Following law school, Barrett clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. She also practiced law with Washington, D.C. law firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin.

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April 13, 2021

Office of Barack and Michelle Obama
P.O. Box 91000
Washington, DC 20066

Dear President Obama,

I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters. 

I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it. 

Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:

: It was precisely the ability of a judge to understand the context of his or her decisions, to know what life was like for a pregnant teen as well as for a Catholic priest, a self-made tycoon as well as an assembly-line worker, the minority as well as the majority, that was the wellspring of objectivity.
     There were other considerations that made Sotomayor a compelling choice. She’d be the first Latina—and only the third woman—to serve on the Supreme Court. And she’d already been confirmed twice by the Senate, once unanimously, making it harder for Republicans to argue that she was an unacceptable choice.
     Given my high regard for Kagan and Wood, I was still undecided when Judge Sotomayor came to the Oval Office for a get-to-know-you session. She had a broad, kind face and a ready smile. Her manner was formal and she chose her words carefully, though her years at Ivy League schools and on the federal bench hadn’t sanded away the Bronx accent. I’d been warned by my team not to ask candidates their positions on specific legal controversies like abortion (Republicans on the committee were sure to ask about any conversation between me and a nominee to see if I had applied a “litmus test” in making my choice). Instead, the judge and I talked about her family, her work as a prosecutor, and her broad judicial philosophy.

78% of Pregnant Women Seeing an Ultrasound Reject Abortions

by Sarah Terzo | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 2/7/13 11:44 AM

Ultrasounds before abortions are routine in some abortion clinics. In others, they are performed only under certain circumstances.

Former Planned Parenthood worker Catherine Anthony Adair said the following in an interview:

At the time I worked for Planned Parenthood ultrasounds were only done if the woman was unsure of the dates of her last menstrual period, or if the doctor ordered one.

Women were not given the option of viewing the ultrasound.

In reality, ultrasounds before abortions are good medical practice. Besides verifying the length of the pregnancy, which determines what technique of abortion and what instruments are used, an ultrasound is one way to verify that a woman does not have a tubal or ectopic pregnancy. A woman may test positive for pregnancy, but really have a situation where the unborn baby is developing in the fallopian tubes and not in the womb. If this is not discovered, the tube can rupture, which is a major medical complication that can end in death. There have been a number of instances over the past several decades of women who have gone to abortion clinics, left thinking they were no longer pregnant, and then later died from a burst ectopic pregnancy. Some victims of this type of tragedy include Gladyss Delanoche Estanislao, 28; Sherry Emry and Yvette Poteat, both 26, and Angela Satterfield, 23. These women all died when abortion providers failed to diagnose their ectopic pregnancies.

In most cases, when ultrasounds are performed, women are not shown the images unless they specifically ask to see them, and sometimes not even then. Numerous former abortion providers have attested to this, including Dr. Joseph Randall, who was quoted saying:

They [the women] are never allowed to look at the ultrasound because we knew that if they so much as heard the heart beat, they wouldn’t want to have an abortion. (1)

The fact that Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups oppose any legislation that would allow a woman the option of seeing the ultrasound screen further attests to this pattern. Even in cases where the law states that the woman does not need to look at the ultrasound but must merely be given the option, Planned Parenthood has been contentious.

One pro-choice author, commenting on a proposed law in Louisiana which required a woman to see an ultrasound image of her baby before aborting it, called the ultrasound a “torture weapon” (2).

Referring to a bill supported by Rick Perry that would allow women who choose a chance to see an ultrasound of their unborn baby before going through with an abortion, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards said the following:

Why is Rick Perry so cruel to women? … Rick Perry is running for president, and if he wins, you can bet he’ll force this dangerous agenda on every woman in every state. If we don’t stand up to him now, women may suffer the consequences for years to come. (3)

In Planned Parenthood’s world, allowing a woman to see an image of her baby on the ultrasound screen is a “dangerous agenda.” Many women who have abortions do not know the truth about fetal development. To quote Catherine Anthony Adair again:

We never discussed fetal development. The baby was referred to as the ”contents of the uterus” or a “clump of cells.” on the rare occasion a woman asked about the size of the baby, I would tell her it was about the size of the tip of my pencil, regardless of how many weeks into her pregnancy she was.

Jewels Green, another former clinic worker, said:

When explaining the abortion, the word ‘baby’ was never used, rather ‘contents of the uterus’, ‘the pregnancy’, or “products of conception” were the preferred terms to refer to the fetus.

The language of abortion counselors is often crafted carefully to avoid any reference to the baby. Even the term “fetus” is not always used. A 2012 NPR radio program interviewed abortion workers at a facility in England. In the interviews, the clinic workers never mention the word “abortion.” Rather, abortions were referred to as “treatments” – e.g., “the treatment room,” “treatment counseling,” etc.

Ultrasounds cut through all this evasive rhetoric. They show the reality of the unborn baby. As for abortion providers’ statements that ultrasounds are “cruel” and “torture weapons,” anyone who has listened to women who regret their abortions has heard, over and over again, “I wish I’d had more information.” “If I’d known what abortion would really do to my baby, I wouldn’t have had one.”

Sometimes a woman who has had a past abortion gets pregnant again and is confronted with a picture of her new baby on an ultrasound screen. Then the lies are exposed, and she has to bear the full brunt of the knowledge of what she has consented to. Abortion providers may be able to avoid the truth when counseling women, but they will not be there to shield the woman from the truth for the rest of her life. Eventually, many of the women who are lied to in abortion clinics will learn the facts about fetal development, and the abortion providers will not be there to help them when this happens. Many times, the experience leads to depression and self-loathing.

So why do abortion providers avoid showing ultrasound images to women? Perhaps this is because up to 78% of women to see an ultrasound of their babies choose not to have abortions (4).

When abortion-minded women see ultrasounds of their babies at crisis pregnancy centers, amazing things happen. Here’s a story from one crisis pregnancy center worker in New Jersey. A woman (we’ll call her Gina) had been in the waiting room of the crisis pregnancy center while several of her friends encouraged her to keep the baby. When she came in for the appointment, however, she said:

No one can change my mind about getting an abortion! Not my friends in the waiting room and not that girl who just came in, and definitely not you.

The worker relates:

“I let Gina know that was not my intention to force her not to abort but rather to present her with her options so she could make the best, most well-informed decision.”

Gina and I met for about an hour and it was such a pleasant time. I got to know her and her family dynamics, life objectives, and relationship with the father of her baby. I reviewed information on abortion with her and invited her to listen as I discussed the options of parenting and adoption so that she could truly make the best decision for herself. She welcomed the opportunity and afterwards thanked me for helping her to think about the pregnancy from other perspectives. But even after our time together, Gina was firm in decision to abort.

Then Gina had an ultrasound, and it was life changing!

Immediately after looking at the monitor, Gina looked at our nurse and me and said, “Yo, that’s it! That’s my baby!” (This was the first time she identified “it” as a baby.) “I can do this!” It was such a turn of events…” (5)

Gina carried the pregnancy to term and kept her child.

The Woman’s Choice Network is a pro-life organization that helps women who are facing unplanned pregnancies and encourages them to choose life.

In 2011, the network assisted more than 1,500 women. Of the 172 who saw their sonogram when considering abortion, 123 continued the pregnancy.

“The sonogram is just the first step. It’s day one of a two-year journey. Most of the work we will do comes after the sonogram,” Ms. Scheuring said, citing baby supplies, mentoring, assistance finding child care and other help.”

…

“We really leave it up to them, and we do have an occasional woman who doesn’t want to look,” she said. “But almost every woman, most every boyfriend and almost every weepy grandma in the room looks at that screen. They want to see. And the most common response we hear is ‘We had no idea.’” (6)

It should be noted that this pro-life facility, like most pro-life facilities, offers women ongoing help after they decide to continue their pregnancies. This is in contrast to abortion clinics, which take the woman’s money, do the abortion, and send her home.

In another article, a married woman who became pregnant at age 39 after she had already had all the children she wanted weighed abortion and decided she would probably keep the baby. But:

Unfortunately, she says, her maternal instincts did not respond to reason: when a young friend placed her baby in her arms, she found herself looking with distaste into “a little scrunched face inspiring no tenderness, only intense tedium at the thought of tending him. What was I going to do with the baby I couldn’t return to his mother?” ….she was not sure – despite her reservations – what it would cost her emotionally to have an abortion if something were wrong. When told she had as much chance of having a miscarriage from the amniocentesis as she did, at her age, of having a Down syndrome child, she hoped for the miscarriage: “That is until, lying on the table where the procedure was to take place, I saw the ultrasound scan on a television monitor above me reveal the perfectly shaped head of the child I carried. I wanted that baby!” (7)

Pro-life author Randy Alcorn recounts the following story, told to him by pregnancy center workers, in his book Pro-Life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments:

Barb came to Cobb Pregnancy Services Tuesday wanting a verification of pregnancy so she could get an abortion. She was 16 weeks pregnant. Janet, her counselor, put in a video [The Eclipse of Reason] that showed the abortion procedure for a baby of this age. When Janet returned to the room, Barb was looking down and said “I can’t have no baby.”

Janet shared her regret concerning an abortion she’s lived with for more than 25 years. She then got permission to call me to do an ultrasound and show Barb her baby. The little girl was most cooperative to show even her mom’s untrained eye that she was alive, very active and doing well insider. She opened and closed her mouth, had hiccups, laid-back as if in a beach chair, stretching her little legs. She even held up hands so Barb could count her fingers

Barb was visibly touched. When the scan was over, I asked Barb what her plans were. She replied “I am going to have my baby.” I asked if the scan had made a difference, she said, “Big time. I just came in here to get a pregnancy verification so I could go have an abortion.” (8)

A woman who was considering abortion after a pregnancy resulting from rape agreed to a free ultrasound at a pregnancy center:

She was blinking. She was just hanging out, looking around, sucking on her thumb. … It was so realistic, so lifelike. It looks like you can just reach right in there and pick up the baby.

I know they have a heartbeat at 4 to 6 weeks, but it still doesn’t feel as real to you until you see a human. It amazed me.

She kept her baby.

“I never thought I could love or bond with a child [who] was conceived under such horrible circumstances, but that’s where we don’t give God enough credit,” Oliver said. “I look at her, and I don’t even see him. She’s beautiful and perfect.” (9)

Another crisis pregnancy center worker recalls a woman who came running into the pro-life center sobbing after a Planned Parenthood worker accidentally allowed her to see the ultrasound screen before her abortion. Immediately upon seeing her baby on the screen, the woman knew she could not go through with the abortion and sought refuge in the pro-life clinic (10).

On November 2, 2012 the organization 40 Days for Life, which arranges prayer campaigns and protests outside abortion clinics, told the following story:

A woman had made the long drive from another county for an abortion appointment. She was one of the first to arrive that day, walking past the vigil participants and into the building.

As she was leaving, the volunteers noted that she might have been inside long enough for the abortion. They also noted that she was crying, so one of them asked her, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I couldn’t do it,” the woman said. “They were doing an ultrasound, so I asked if I could see it. At first they refused, telling me ‘you don’t really want to see it.’ But I insisted ‘yeah, I do want to see it, because if I can see it … maybe I won’t do it.’”

She was right. Once she saw her nine week baby on the ultrasound screen, she knew that she couldn’t go through with the abortion. (11)

Ultrasounds are a liability to abortion clinics in another way as well. Clinic staff can be disturbed by the picture of the baby on the ultrasound screen. By now, many people in the pro-life movement have heard the story of Abby Johnson, the Planned Parenthood director who became pro-life after watching the abortion of a 13-week-old unborn baby on the ultrasound. A lesser-known story is that of Joan Appleton, who had a similar experience. When talking during a conference in Chicago, Illinois sponsored by the Pro-Life Action League about the reason she left her abortion clinic, she said:

And I too had seen an ultrasound abortion. It was, we did first trimester, this was late first trimester, probably early second trimester, really we could look to 13.7 weeks. Give or take. I can’t remember offhand what the specific problem was, but we wanted to do the abortion by ultrasound, to make sure that we did indeed get the entire, all the baby. The terminology was that we wanted to make sure we had the entire pregnancy. I handled the ultrasound while the doctor performed the procedure, and I directed him while I was watching the screen. I saw the baby pull away. I saw the baby open his mouth. I had seen Silent Scream a number of times, but it didn’t affect me – to me it was just more pro-life propaganda. But I couldn’t deny what I saw on the screen. After that procedure, I was shaking, literally, but managed to pull it together, and continue on with the day.

Unlike Abby Johnson, Appleton did not leave her job immediately – but this incident was pivotal in convincing her that abortion was wrong.

Dr. Stuart Campbell performed abortions for years, but the new, vivid, 3-D ultrasound images changed his mind:

Even a fetus lying there dead doesn’t convey the horror that one experiences seeing a baby moving its arms and legs, opening its mouth, sucking its thumb, and then thinking, gosh, somebody wants to, you know… It looks so vital. It has changed my view. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. (12)

Dr. Campbell no longer performs abortions.

Dr. Randall, quoted before, testified to the following:

I think the greatest thing that got to us was the ultrasound. At that time, the ultrasound, or soundwave picture which was moving, called a “real-time ultrasound,” showed the baby on TV. The baby really came alive on TV and was moving. And that picture, that picture of the baby on ultrasound bothered me more than anything else[.] … We lost two nurses. They couldn’t take looking[.]

He said this at the “Meet the Abortion Providers” conference sponsored by the Pro-Life Action League.

The phenomenon of abortion clinic workers leaving after seeing ultrasounds has been so prevalent over the past several decades that major medical publications have addressed the problem.

According to an article in ObGyn News:

[Abortion clinic] Staff members also may be affected by sonographic images and may need opportunities for venting their feelings and reconfirming their priorities[.] (13)

Alison Herwitt, NARAL Pro-Choice America’s director of government relations, told a reporter the following while discussing a bill that would allow government grants to crisis pregnancy centers to purchase ultrasound machines:

They don’t want them to go to Planned Parenthood, where they’ll get their full range of options. They just want them to go to crisis pregnancy centers, where women will be exposed to this weapon at taxpayers’ expense. (14)

Perhaps inadvertently, Herwitt has spoken the truth. Ultrasounds are a powerful weapon against the lies and deceit of the abortion industry.

1. “Pro-Choice 1990: Skeletons in the Closet” New Dimensions October 1990
2. Janet Hadley “Abortion: between Freedom and Necessity” (Great Britain: Virago Press, 1996) 150
3. Maggie Haberman “ Richards: Perry ‘so cruel’ to women” Politico, Sept 1, 2011
4. Adam Cohen“The Next Abortion Battleground: Fetal Heartbeats” Time Ideas October 17, 2011
5. Melissa Fischer “Gina’s Decision” Heartbeat Newsletter (First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, New Jersey) Summer 2012, p2
6. Ann Rodgers “Women’s center in Pittsburgh’s North Side welcomes ultrasound machine” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette August 18, 2012
7. Faith Abbott “a Tale of Two Women” Human Life Review, Spring 1993 in Tamara L Roleff. Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, Greenhaven Press, 1997) 111 to 112
8. Audrey Stout, Marietta Georgia, e-mail to Randy Alcorn February 12, 2000 Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000) 199
9. Karla Dial “Bringing Good Things to Life”Citizen June 2003
10. Roderick P Murphy. Stopping Abortions at Death’s Door (Southbridge, Massachusetts: Taig Publishing 2009) P194
11. 40 Days For Life Blog http://40daysforlife.com/blog/?p=3755
12. Stuart Campbell “The Hidden Wonders of New Life” The Tablet October 7 2004
13. ObGyn News, Quoted in Rachel M MacNair, PhD. Achieving Peace in the Abortion War (New York: iUniverse, 2009) page 59
14. Karla Dial “Bringing Good Things to Life

LifeNews.com Note: Sarah Terzo is a pro-life liberal who runs ClinicQuotes.com, a web site devoted to exposing the abortion industry. This originally appeared at Live Action News

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com

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The 2nd Amendment and the Individual Right to Gun Ownership

Back in 2012, I shared a video clip of Ice-T defending the 2nd Amendment, but that video is now dead, so I’m glad to see that Prager University has added his comments as a prologue to this defense of gun rights by Prof. Eugene Volokh.

Ice-T and Prof. Volokh make for a good combination, one dispensing common sense and the other sharing academic analysis.

In the case of Prof. Volokh, he walks through the language of the Constitution and succinctly explains why the 2nd Amendment clearly was designed to protect the individual right to keep and bear arms.

And that’s the view that consistent with the liberty-focused attitude of the Founding Fathers, who correctly saw government as a potential source of tyranny.

But there’s another part of the video that also deserves attention. Shortly before the 4:00 mark of the video, Volokh explains that the Founders gave people – through their legislators – the option of amending the Constitution (the great Thomas Sowell has made the same point).

And that does happen, sometimes with bad consequences.

But there’s been no serious effort to undo the 2nd Amendment for the simple reason that people value their constitutional liberties.

Indeed, states have been taking steps to expand and enshrine gun rights.

P.S. A British writer argued that defending gun rights was akin to defending slavery. In reality, the 2nd Amendment has been especially valuable for blacks.

Gun Control Humor

Time to add to the collection of humor about gun control.

We’ll start with this observation from Ron Swanson (who periodically makes cameo appearances since he was TV’s most famous libertarian) about the relationship between gun laws and crime rates.

Next is a cartoon strip with an amusing twist.

For what it’s worth, I buy t-shirts that already have the right message.

Here’s a hotel employee giving a much-needed wake-up call.

Our next item features a sensible observation from Elizabeth Warren, followed by an equally sensible observation from Dan Gannon.

Next, we have an example of the “slippery slope” in action.

By the way, the above image is real. The United Kingdom has some of the world’s silliest anti-gun policies, which were the gateway drug for absurd anti-knife laws (and even – I’m not joking – anti-teaspoon laws).

I’ve saved the best for last, as usual.

Here’s “Fauxcahontas” getting a clever response from Meme Cat.

Just in case you don’t get the joke, Senator Elizabeth Warren falsely claimed Indian ancestry, even using her fake-minority status to get preferential treatment.

P.S. I also recommend this mockery of Sen. Warren’s approach to class warfare.

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President Barack Obama announces the creation of an interagency task force for guns as as Vice President Joseph Biden listens on.Getty Images

Is Gun Control Dead?

In recent months, governments released prisoners and announced that some laws wouldn’t be enforced because of the coronavirus. Now, with protests against police misbehavior, we’re seeing governments fail to maintain law and order.

As suggested by this excellent Reason video, these developments bolster the case against gun control.

But does this mean politicians will be more supportive of the 2nd Amendment?

The answer (at least for anyone with an IQ above room temperature)should be yes.

From an economic perspective, one major goal is to change the cost-benefit analysis for criminals. If bad guys have to worry that good guys may be armed, that significantly increases the potential cost of illegal behavior.

A well-functioning system of law enforcement can help, of course, but that’s not a description of how things work in some communities – even in normal times, much less when there’s civil unrest.

But all this evidence and analysis doesn’t seem to matter for Joe Biden. A look at his campaign website shows support for a wide range of gun-control laws from the soon-to-be Democratic nominee.

…gun violence is a public health epidemic. …In 1994, Biden – along with Senator Dianne Feinstein – secured the passage of 10-year bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. As president, Joe Biden will defeat the NRA again. …As president, Biden will: …Ban the manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. …Regulate possession of existing assault weapons under the National Firearms Act. …Biden supports legislation restricting the number of firearms an individual may purchase per month to one. …End the online sale of firearms and ammunitions. …Give states incentives to set up gun licensing programs.

What’s especially discouraging is that Biden apparently hasn’t learned anything about so-called assault weapons since 1994.

In a 2019 column for Reason, Jacob Sullum dissected Biden’s incoherent views on the topic.

Joe Biden…is still proud of the ban on “assault weapons”… Biden argues that it made mass shootings less common…, citing a study reported in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery last January. But that is not what the researchers, led by New York University epidemiologist Charles DiMaggio, actually found.…The study…looked not at the number of mass shootings, as Biden claims, but the number of mass-shooting deaths as a share of all firearm homicides. The difference in total fatalities during the period when the ban was in effect amounted to 15 fewer deaths over a decade, or 1.5 a year on average, including mass shootings that did not involve weapons covered by the ban. …The causal mechanism imagined by Biden is even harder to figure out. He describes “assault weapons” as “military-style firearms designed to fire rapidly.” But they do not fire any faster than any other semi-automatic. …Under the 1994 ban, removing “military-style” features such as folding stocks, flash suppressors, or bayonet mounts transformed forbidden “assault weapons” into legal firearms, even though the compliant models fired the same ammunition at the same rate with the same muzzle velocity as the ones targeted by the law.

I wonder if Biden understands the policy he’s advocating.

Does he think that “assault weapons” are actual machine guns, capable of firing multiple rounds with one pull on the trigger (a remarkably common misconception among gun-control advocates)?

Or, if he understands that a so-called assault weapon is just like any other gun (firing one round each time the trigger is pulled), then why would he think anything would be achieved by banning some guns and leaving others (that work the same way) legal?

Perhaps most relevant, does he even care what the evidence shows?

The bottom line is that people are “voting with their dollars” for gun ownership for the simple reason that they know it’s unwise to trust government (either to protect them from crime or to respect their rights).

But that doesn’t mean their constitutional freedoms will be secure if Biden wins the 2020 election.

P.S. The good news is that there will be widespread civil disobedience if politicians push for new gun bans.

P.P.S. Another silver lining is that we’ll get more and more clever humor mocking gun control.

The Case Against Biden’s Class-Warfare Tax Policy, Part II

In Part I of this series, I expressed some optimism that Joe Biden would not aggressively push his class-warfare tax plan, particularly since Republicans almost certainly will wind up controlling the Senate.

But the main goal of that column was to explain that the internal revenue code already is heavily weighted against investors, entrepreneurs, business owners and other upper-income taxpayers.

And to underscore that point, I shared two charts from Brian Riedl’s chartbook to show that the “rich” are now paying a much larger share of the tax burden – notwithstanding the Reagan tax cuts, Bush tax cuts, and Trump tax cuts – than they were 40 years ago.

Not only that, but the United States has a tax system that is more “progressive” than all other developed nations (all of whom also impose heavy tax burdens on upper-income taxpayers, but differ from the United States in that they also pillage lower-income and middle-class residents).

In other words, Biden’s class-warfare tax plan is bad policy.

Today’s column, by contrast, will point out that his tax increases are impractical. Simply stated, they won’t collect much revenue because people change their behavior when incentives to earn and report income are altered.

This is especially true when looking at upper-income taxpayers who – compared to the rest of us – have much greater ability to change the timing, level, and composition of their income.

This helps to explain why rich people paid five times as much tax to the IRS during the 1980s when Reagan slashed the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

When writing about this topic, I normally use the Laffer Curve to help people understand why simplistic assumptions about tax policy are wrong (that you can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates, for instance). And I point out that even folks way on the left, such as Paul Krugman, agree with this common-sense view (though it’s also worth noting that some people on the right discredit the concept by making silly assertions that “all tax cuts pay for themselves”).

But instead of showing the curve again, I want to go back to Brian Riedl’s chartbook and review his data on of revenue changes during the eight years of the Obama Administration.

It shows that Obama technically cut taxes by $822 billion (as further explained in the postscript, most of that occurred when some of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent by the “fiscal cliff” deal in 2012) and raised taxes by $1.32 trillion (most of that occurred as a result of the Obamacare legislation).

If we do the math, that means Obama imposed a cumulative net tax increase of about $510 billion during his eight years in office

But, if you look at the red bar on the chart, you’ll see that the government didn’t wind up with more money because of what the number crunchers refer to as “economic and technical reestimates.”

Indeed, those reestimates resulted in more than $3.1 trillion of lost revenue during the Obama years.

I don’t want the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington to have more tax revenue, but I obviously don’t like it when tax revenues shrink simply because the economy is stagnant and people have less taxable income.

Yet that’s precisely what we got during the Obama years.

To be sure, it would be inaccurate to assert that revenues declined solely because of Obama’s tax increase. There were many other bad policies that also contributed to taxable income falling short of projections.

Heck, maybe there was simply some bad luck as well.

But even if we add lots of caveats, the inescapable conclusion is that it’s not a good idea to adopt policies – such as class-warfare tax rates – that discourage people from earning and reporting taxable income.

The bottom line is that we should hope Biden’s proposed tax increases die a quick death.

P.S. The “fiscal cliff” was the term used to describe the scheduled expiration of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. According to the way budget data is measured in Washington, extending some of those provisions counted as a tax cut even though the practical impact was to protect people from a tax increase.

P.P.S. Even though Biden absurdly asserted that paying higher taxes is “patriotic,” it’s worth pointing out that he engaged in very aggressive tax avoidance to protect his family’s money.

President Joe Biden Will Be Bad, but a President Kamala Harris Would Be Worse

Joe Biden has a very misguided economic agenda. I’m especially disturbed by his class-warfare tax agenda, which will be bad news for American workers and American competitiveness.

The good news, as I wrote earlier this year, is that he probably isn’t serious about some of his worst ideas.

Biden is a statist, but not overly ideological. His support for bigger government is largely a strategy of catering to the various interest groups that dominate the Democratic Party. The good news is that he’s an incrementalist and won’t aggressively push for a horrifying FDR-style agenda if he gets to the White House.

But what if Joe Biden’s health deteriorates and Kamala Harris – sooner or later – winds up in charge?

That’s rather troubling since her agenda was far to the left of Biden’s when they were competing for the Democratic nomination.

And it doesn’t appear that being Biden’s choice for Vice President has led her to moderate her views. Consider this campaign ad, where she openly asserted that “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

The notion that we should strive for equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity is horrifying.

For all intents and purposes,Harris has embraced a harsh version of redistributionism where everyone above average is punished and everyone below average is rewarded.

This goes way beyond a safety net and it’s definitely a recipe for economic misery since people on both sides of the equationhave less incentive to be productive.

I’m not the only one to be taken aback by Harris’ dogmatic leftism.

Robby Soave, writing for Reason, is very critical of her radical outlook.

Harris gives voice to a leftist-progressive narrative about the importance of equity—equal outcomes—rather than mere equality before the law. …Harris contrasted equal treatment—all people getting the same thing—with equitable treatment,which means “we all end up at the same place.” …This may seem like a trivial difference, but when it comes to public policy, the difference matters. A government shouldbe obligated to treat all citizens equally, giving them the same access to civil rights and liberties like voting, marriage, religious freedom, and gun ownership. …A mandate to foster equity, though, would give the government power to violate these rights in order to achieve identical social results for all people. 

And, in a column for National Review, Brad Polumbo expresses similar reservations about her views.

Whether she embraces the label “socialist” or not, Harris’s stated agenda and Senate record both reveal her to be positioned a long way to the left on matters of economic policy. From health care to the environment to housing, Harris thinks the answer to almost every problem we face is simply more government and more taxpayer money — raising taxes and further indebting future generations in the process.…Harris…supports an astounding $40 trillion in new spending over the next decade. In a sign of just how far left the Democratic Party has shifted on economics, Harris backs more than 20 times as much spending as Hillary Clinton proposed in 2016. …And this is not just a matter of spending. During her failed presidential campaign, Harris supported a federal-government takeover of health care… The senator jumped on the “Green New Deal” bandwagon as well. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution in the Senate that called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.” …she supports enacting price controls on housing across the country. …The left-wing group Progressive Punch analyzed Harris’s voting record and found that she is the fourth-most liberal senator, more liberal even than Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Similarly, the nonpartisan organization GovTrack.us deemed Harris the furthest-left member of the Senate for the 2019 legislative year. (Spoiler alert: If your voting record is to the left of Bernie Sanders, you might be a socialist.)

To be fair, Harris is simply a politician, so we have no idea what she really believes. Her hard-left agenda might simply be her way of appealing to Democratic voters, much as Republicans who run for president suddenly decide they support big tax cuts and sweeping tax reform.

But whether she’s sincere or insincere, it’s troubling that she actually says it’s the role of government to make sure we all “end up at the same place.”

Let’s close with a video clip from Milton Friedman. At the risk of understatement, he has a different perspective than Ms. Harris.

Since we highlighted Harris’ key quote, let’s also highlight the key quote from Friedman.

Amen.

P.S. It appears Republicans will hold the Senate, which presumably (hopefully?) means that any radical proposals would be dead on arrival, regardless of whether they’re proposed by Biden or Harris.

P.P.S. Harris may win the prize for the most economically illiterate proposal of the 2020 campaign.

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Will Biden’s Class-Warfare Tax Plan Lead to an Exodus of Job Creators?

After Barack Obama took office (and especially after he was reelected), there was a big uptick in the number of rich people who chose to emigrate from the United States. 

There are many reasons wealthy people choose to move from one nation to another, but Obama’s embrace of class-warfare tax policy (including FATCA) was seen as a big factor.

Joe Biden’s tax agenda is significantly more punitive than Obama’s, so we may see something similar happen if he wins the 2020 election.

Given the economic importance of innovators, entrepreneurs, and inventors, this would be not be good news for the American economy.

The New York Times reported late last year that the United States could be shooting itself in the foot by discouraging wealthy residents.

…a different group of Americans say they are considering leaving — people of both parties who would be hit by the wealth tax… Wealthy Americans often leave high-tax states like New York and California for lower-tax ones like Florida and Texas. But renouncing citizenship is a far more permanent, costly and complicated proposition. …“America’s the most attractive destination for capital, entrepreneurs and people wanting to get a great education,” said Reaz H. Jafri, a partner and head of the immigration practice at Withers, an international law firm. “But in today’s world, when you have other economic centers of excellence — like Singapore, Switzerland and London — people don’t view the U.S. as the only place to be.” …now, the price may be right to leave. While the cost of expatriating varies depending on a person’s assets, the wealthiest are betting that if a Democrat wins…, leaving now means a lower exit tax. …The wealthy who are considering renouncing their citizenship fear a wealth tax less than the possibility that the tax on capital gains could be raised to the ordinary income tax rate, effectively doubling what a wealthy person would pay… When Eduardo Saverin, a founder of Facebook…renounced his United States citizenship shortly before the social network went public, …several estimates said that renouncing his citizenship…saved him $700 million in taxes.

The migratory habits of rich people make a difference in the global economy.

Here are some excerpts from a 2017 Bloomberg story.

Australia is luring increasing numbers of global millionaires, helping make it one of the fastest growing wealthy nations in the world… Over the past decade, total wealth held in Australia has risen by 85 percent compared to 30 percent in the U.S. and 28 percent in the U.K… As a result, the average Australian is now significantly wealthier than the average American or Briton. …Given its relatively small population, Australia also makes an appearance on a list of average wealth per person. This one is, however, dominated by small tax havens.

Here’s one of the charts from the story.

As you can see, Australia is doing very well, though the small tax havens like Monaco are world leaders.

I’m mystified, however, that the Cayman Islands isn’t listed.

But I’m digressing.

Let’s get back to our main topic. It’s worth noting that even Greece is seeking to attract rich foreigners.

The new tax law is aimed at attracting fresh revenues into the country’s state coffers – mainly from foreigners as well as Greeks who are taxed abroad – by relocating their tax domicile to Greece, as it tries to woo “high-net-worth individuals” to the Greek tax register.The non-dom model provides for revenues obtained abroad to be taxed at a flat amount… Having these foreigners stay in Greece for at least 183 days a year, as the law requires, will also entail expenditure on accommodation and everyday costs that will be added to the Greek economy. …most eligible foreigners will be able to considerably lighten their tax burden if they relocate to Greece…nevertheless, the amount of 500,000 euros’ worth of investment in Greece required of foreigners and the annual flat tax of 100,000 euros demanded (plus 20,000 euros per family member) may keep many of them away.

The system is too restrictive, but it will make the beleaguered nation an attractive destination for some rich people. After all, they don’t even have to pay a flat tax, just a flat fee.

Italy has enjoyed some success with a similar regime to entice millionaires.

Last but not least, an article published last year has some fascinating details on the where rich people move and why they move.

The world’s wealthiest people are also the most mobile. High net worth individuals (HNWIs) – persons with wealth over US$1 million – may decide to pick up and move for a number of reasons. In some cases they are attracted by jurisdictions with more favorable tax laws… Unlike the middle class, wealthy citizens have the means to pick up and leave when things start to sideways in their home country. An uptick in HNWI migration from a country can often be a signal of negative economic or societal factors influencing a country. …Time-honored locations – such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands – continue to attract the world’s wealthy, but no country is experiencing HNWI inflows quite like Australia. …The country has a robust economy, and is perceived as being a safe place to raise a family. Even better, Australia has no inheritance tax

Here’s a map from the article.

The good news is that the United States is attracting more millionaires than it’s losing (perhaps because of the EB-5 program).

The bad news is that this ratio could flip after the election. Indeed, it may already be happening even though recent data on expatriation paints a rosy picture.

The bottom line is that the United States should be competing to attract millionaires, not repel them. Assuming, of course, politicians care about jobs and prosperity for the rest of the population.

P.S. American politicians, copying laws normally imposed by the world’s most loathsome regimes, have imposed an “exit tax” so they can grab extra cash from rich people who choose to become citizens elsewhere.

P.P.S. I’ve argued that Australia is a good place to emigrate even for those of us who aren’t rich.

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Question of the Week: Which Department of the Federal Government Should Be the First to Be Abolished?

I was asked last week which entitlement program is most deserving of reform.

While acknowledging that Social Security and Medicare also are in desperate need of modernization, I wrote that Medicaid reformshould be the first priority.

But I’d be happy if we made progress on any type of entitlement reform, so I don’t think there are right or wrong answers to this kind of question.

We have the same type of question this week. A reader sent an email to ask “Which federal department should be abolished first?”

I guess this is what is meant when people talk about a target-rich environment. We have an abundance of candidates:

• Department of Education
• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Energy
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Department of Transportation

But if I have to choose, I think the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be first on the chopping block.

Raze the building and put a layer of salt over the earth to make sure it can never spring back to life

I’ve already argued that there should be no federal government involvement in the housing sector and made the same argument on TV. And I’ve also shared some horror stories about HUD waste and incompetence.

• HUD engages in racism and social engineering.
• Urban renewal projects destroy neighborhoods and foment corruption.
• HUD subsidies are grotesquely wasteful.
• There are epidemic levels of waste, fraud, and abuse at HUD.

Heck, I even made HUD the background image for my video on the bloated and overpaid bureaucracy in Washington.

It’s also worth noting that there’s nothing about housing in Article I, Section VIII, of the Constitution. For those of us who have old-fashioned values about playing by the rules, that means much of what takes place in Washington – including housing handouts – is unconstitutional.

Simply stated, there is no legitimate argument for HUD. And I think there would be the least political resistance.

As with the answer to the question about entitlements, this is a judgment call. I’d be happy to be proven wrong if it meant that politicians were aggressively going after another department. Anything that reduces the burden of government spending is a step in the right direction

Milton Friedman on Spending

October 3, 2020 by Dan Mitchell

I identified four heroes from the “Battle of Ideas” video I shared in late August – Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. Here’s one of those heroes, Milton Friedman, explaining what’s needed to control big government.

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Why Milton Friedman Saw School Choice as a First Step, Not a Final One

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Kerry McDonald

EducationMilton FriedmanSchool ChoiceSchooling

Libertarians and others are often torn about school choice. They may wish to see the government schooling monopoly weakened, but they may resist supporting choice mechanisms, like vouchers and education savings accounts, because they don’t go far enough. Indeed, most current choice programs continue to rely on taxpayer funding of education and don’t address the underlying compulsory nature of elementary and secondary schooling.

Skeptics may also have legitimate fears that taxpayer-funded education choice programs will lead to over-regulation of previously independent and parochial schooling options, making all schooling mirror compulsory mass schooling, with no substantive variation.

Friedman Challenged Compulsory Schooling Laws

Milton Friedman had these same concerns. The Nobel prize-winning economist is widely considered to be the one to popularize the idea of vouchers and school choice beginning with his 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education.” His vision continues to be realized through the important work of EdChoice, formerly the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, that Friedman and his economist wife, Rose, founded in 1996.

July 31 is Milton Friedman’s birthday. He died in 2006 at the age of 94, but his ideas continue to have an impact, particularly in education policy.

Friedman saw vouchers and other choice programs as half-measures. He recognized the larger problems of taxpayer funding and compulsion, but saw vouchers as an important starting point in allowing parents to regain control of their children’s education. In their popular book, Free To Choose, first published in 1980, the Friedmans wrote:

We regard the voucher plan as a partial solution because it affects neither the financing of schooling nor the compulsory attendance laws. We favor going much farther. (p.161)

They continued:

The compulsory attendance laws are the justification for government control over the standards of private schools. But it is far from clear that there is any justification for the compulsory attendance laws themselves. (p. 162)

The Friedmans admitted that their “own views on this have changed over time,” as they realized that “compulsory attendance at schools is not necessary to achieve that minimum standard of literacy and knowledge,” and that “schooling was well-nigh universal in the United States before either compulsory attendance or government financing of schooling existed. Like most laws, compulsory attendance laws have costs as well as benefits. We no longer believe the benefits justify the costs.” (pp. 162-3)

Still, they felt that vouchers would be the essential starting point toward chipping away at monopoly mass schooling by putting parents back in charge. School choice, in other words, would be a necessary but not sufficient policy approach toward addressing the underlying issue of government control of education.

Vouchers as a First Step

In their book, the Friedmans presented the potential outcomes of their proposed voucher plan, which would give parents access to some or all of the average per-pupil expenditures of a child enrolled in public school. They believed that vouchers would help create a more competitive education market, encouraging education entrepreneurship. They felt that parents would be more empowered with greater control over their children’s education and have a stronger desire to contribute some of their own money toward education. They asserted that in many places “the public school has fostered residential stratification, by tying the kind and cost of schooling to residential location” and suggested that voucher programs would lead to increased integration and heterogeneity. (pp. 166-7)

To the critics who said, and still say, that school choice programs would destroy the public schools, the Friedmans replied that these critics fail to

explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn’t, why anyone should object to its “destruction.” (p. 170)

What I appreciate most about the Friedmans discussion of vouchers and the promise of school choice is their unrelenting support of parents. They believed that parents, not government bureaucrats and intellectuals, know what is best for their children’s education and well-being and are fully capable of choosing wisely for their children—when they have the opportunity to do so.

They wrote:

Parents generally have both greater interest in their children’s schooling and more intimate knowledge of their capacities and needs than anyone else. Social reformers, and educational reformers in particular, often self-righteously take for granted that parents, especially those who are poor and have little education themselves, have little interest in their children’s education and no competence to choose for them. That is a gratuitous insult. Such parents have frequently had limited opportunity to choose. However, U.S. history has demonstrated that, given the opportunity, they have often been willing to sacrifice a great deal, and have done so wisely, for their children’s welfare. (p. 160).

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Voucher Programs Today

Today, school voucher programs exist in 15 states plus the District of Columbia. These programs have consistently shown that when parents are given the choice to opt-out of an assigned district school, many will take advantage of the opportunity. In Washington, D.C., low-income parents who win a voucher lottery send their children to private schools.

The most recent three-year federal evaluationof voucher program participants found that while student academic achievement was comparable to achievement for non-voucher students remaining in public schools, there were statistically significant improvements in other important areas. For instance, voucher participants had lower rates of chronic absenteeism than the control groups, as well as higher student satisfaction scores. There were also tremendous cost-savings.

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has served over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools.

According to Corey DeAngelis, Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation and a prolific researcher on the topic, the recent analysis of the D.C. voucher program “reveals that private schools produce the same academic outcomes for only a third of the cost of the public schools. In other words, school choice is a great investment.”

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was created in 1990 and is the nation’s oldest voucher program. It currently serves over 28,000 low-income students attending 129 participating private schools. Like the D.C. voucher program, data on test scores of Milwaukee voucher students show similar results to public school students, but non-academic results are promising.

Increased Access and Decreased Crime

Recent research found voucher recipients had lower crime rates and lower incidences of unplanned pregnancies in young adulthood. On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

According to Howard Fuller, an education professor at Marquette University, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, and one of the developers of the Milwaukee voucher program, the key is parent empowerment—particularly for low-income minority families.

In an interview with NPR, Fuller said: “What I’m saying to you is that there are thousands of black children whose lives are much better today because of the Milwaukee parental choice program,” he says. 
“They were able to access better schools than they would have without a voucher.”

Putting parents back in charge of their child’s education through school choice measures was Milton Friedman’s goal. It was not his ultimate goal, as it would not fully address the funding and compulsion components of government schooling; but it was, and remains, an important first step. As the Friedmans wrote in Free To Choose:

The strong American tradition of voluntary action has provided many excellent examples that demonstrate what can be done when parents have greater choice. (p. 159).

On his birthday, let’s celebrate Milton Friedman’s vision of enabling parents, not government, to be in control of a child’s education.

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Over and over I have read that Hugh Hefner was a modern day King Solomon and Hefner’s search for satisfaction was attempted by adding to the number of his sexual experiences.

REMEMBERING GOD:THE KEY TO A PROFITABLE LIFE

The Futility of Pleasure Seeking

Ecclesiastes 2:1-11

Jerry A Collins

SCC

6/16/02

¨ Can anything on the earth really satisfy us?

Is there a difference between satisfaction and fulfillment?

Does God expect us to enjoy ourselves?

This may be hard to swallow but if you have set your heart on getting and enjoying the good life, it’s not worth it! Don’t waste your time dreaming about it or pursuing it. The beer commercials have got it all wrong. The endless commentary about investing on wall street is exhausting. John Gotti just died this week in prison of throat cancer. Princess Di lost her life very young. Hugh Hefner is an old man. Mick Jaggar is now Sir Mick. Brittany Speers has another record. Scotty Bowman just retired. Tiger Woods is playing in another major golf tournament. All of these people and many others are people we would define as living the good life. We idolize drunkenness, investing, power, glamour, sex, popularity, sensuality, success or prestige as evidence of the good life. King Solomon tried to find fulfillment from the good life too. He conducted an experiment to discover if there is anything of this world, to satisfy and fulfill the heart of a person. Before you take another step in this direction, consider the lessons Solomon learned from his experiment and search into personal and pleasure and the good life! He announces the goal and conclusion of his experiment in vss 1-2. Then he describes the means by which he sought and found pleasure himself in vss 3-10. Finally he relates this pursuit to the ultimate value of his accomplishments in vs 11. He begins with his conclusion.

1. PLEASURE HAS LITTLE VALUE 1-2

That it, while it may have some temporary, immediate value like relieving boredom and grief, it does not produce anything permanently or ultimately worthwhile. First, he states in vs 1 that in his quest to find something worthwhile in life he experimented with pleasure. What can I do that will make me happy all of my life? So he said to himself enjoy yourself. And that is what he did. He spent weeks, months and years on this quest. He went after laughter, pleasure, possessions, prosperity, power, prestige and sex. The palace halls were denied nothing, his courtiers and guests had the time of their lives and bountiful feasts according to 1 Kings 4:22-23 each day included 30 measures of fine flour, 60 measures of meal, 10 fat oxen, 20 oxen from pastures, 100 sheep, in addition harts, roebucks, gazelles and fattened fowl. This daily menu is estimated to have been able to feed at least 10 thousand people. Second, he states the result of this expansive search is that it was futile and meaningless. (1) All the laughter he enjoyed in this pursuit he calls madness. Laughter associated with pleasure and the good life is empty. Frivolity is foolish because the laughter deals only with the peripherals of life. there is not solid content to it (Ecc 7:6). It’s useless and a waste of time. (2) Of pleasure he asks What does it accomplish vs 2? What does it contribute to life? It only consumes resources we have worked hard for. The question implies a negative answer. This is the conclusion. It is not the conclusion of our world. Satan wants us to believe that it is better to mortgage our future for the present. How did he pursue pleasure and what did he learn?

2. PURSUING PLEASURE ONLY DELIVERS TEMPORARY SATISFACTION 3-10

First we learn that this experiment was exhaustive. He explored, enlarged, built, planted, made, possessed, collected, provided, did not refuse and exerted himself. No stone was left unturned in this experiment.

Second, it was not a mindless drive into hedonism. Wisdom he says guided him in vss 3 & 9 throughout the endeavor. With deliberateness, not blindly or in uncontrolled excess, he indulged himself. He is testing the effects of pleasure seeking and frivolity to see if it is worthwhile. This is a calculated experiment. with a purpose. He wanted to find out for himself if the things of this world can fill and empty heart vs 3. Life is short and how can we find satisfaction in that short span?

Third, he indulged himself in a variety of things. (1) He stimulated his body with wine v 3. He cheered himself with wine and he embraced folly or a foolish and frivolous lifestyle possibly associated with his wine drinking. Every Coors beer commercial is an example of this. It provides momentary satisfaction until the next weekend. (2) The good life included projects, parks and pools vss4-6. He tried his hand at architecture. His own house took 14 years to build and the Temple 7 years. He built houses for his wives. he engaged in agriculture developing luxuriant gardens and parks planted with orchards, filled with trees. He developed irrigation to provide for all of the landscaping. Building and landscaping provide momentary pleasure but then there are always things to fix, weeds to pull and new endeavors to grab our attention. (3) The good life included ownership and wealth 7-8. He had servants to wait on his every whim. He had ranches to provide diversion and investment in the raising of herds, flocks and livestock. He had bank accounts that provided him with all the money he would ever need. So great was Solomon’s fortune that silver and gold were regarded in Jerusalem as stones 1 Kings 10:27; 2 Chr 1:15. His annual income was over one million dollars in purchasing power. In fact he owned whatever he looked on and his look went everywhere. If it promised a fleeting moment of pleasure he tried it and he bought it. (4) The good life included entertainment and sex 8b-10. He hired his own private orchestra to soothe and entertain him on demand vs 8b. He also accumulated numbers of concubines, playmates all over the palace and in his harem to satisfy his sexual desires. Whatever caught his eye vs 10 he indulged in. If he saw a beautiful woman he added her to his harem. A fine thorobred to his stables. A newer model chariot he bought it. He indulged himself in every way and in everything. And he found pleasure in all of this and that alone was his reward. A momentary enjoyment that faded and passed until the next pleasure fix.

3. THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE IS FUTILE 11

After a close evaluation of this lifestyle and pursuit, though some satisfaction was gained, the real value of what was accomplished was (1) vanity (empty) (2) striving after wind (meaningless) (3) no profit in life (ultimately profitless). We may never have the opportunity fame like this. we may never be a king or have stardom or offered a million dollar signing bonus. But there are lessons here for us.

(1) We can learn from the failure of others while we listen to the wisdom of God’s Word. The good life is really not so good. There is no ultimate profit in it. God says you had your reward I have none to give you. We have to take this by faith.

(2) Achieving, having, experiencing will not deliver significance and worth. That is only find in Christ ritely related to God.

(3) Absolutely nothing this side of grave can fill emptiness deliver full satisfaction.

__________

Many of the sermons that I heard or read that inspired me to write Hugh Hefner were from this list of gentlemen:  Daniel Akin, Brandon Barnard, Alistair Begg, Matt Chandler, George Critchley,  Darryl Dash, Steve DeWitt, Steve Gaines, Norman L. Geisler, Greg Gillbert, Billy Graham, Mark Henry, Dan Jarrell, Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., R. G. Lee, C.S. Lewis Chris Lewis, Kerry Livgren, Robert Lewis,    Bill Parkinson, Ben Parkinson,Vance Pitman, Nelson Price, Ethan Renoe, Adrian Rogers, Philip Graham Ryken, Francis Schaeffer, Lee Strobel, Bill Wellons, Kirk Wetsell,  Ken Whitten, Ed Young ,  Ravi Zacharias, Tom Zobrist, and Richard Zowie.

__

In the next few weeks I will be posting some letters that I sent to Hugh Hefner that were based primarily on the sermon series BETTER THAN which is a study in the BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES done by our pastors at FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH in Little Rock in 2016.  Our teaching pastors here are Mark Henry,

Ben Parkinson

and Brandon Barnard.

Today’s letter is based on a sermon by Mark Henry.

January 17, 2016

Hugh Hefner
Playboy Mansion  
10236 Charing Cross Road
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1815

Dear Mr. Hefner,

I recently read the article, “Playboy at 60: Hugh Hefner Looks Back,” The legendary publisher looks back on the first 25 years of his culture-changing creation by Scott Huver, and it started off with these words:

Looking back over his 87 years – 60 of which have been defined by his creation, Playboy – Hugh Hefner admits it took being a workaholic during his media empire’s formative years to transform him into an icon of sexual liberation and sophisticated indulgence.

“I had been really consumed the first few years on the magazine – I had this phenomenal success on my hands,” Hefner remembers. “And I didn’t want to miss the party that I had created.”

You probably remember that last Sunday I wrote you about the sermon I heard at church from our series on the Book of Ecclesiastes. Today’s letter basically comes from this same sermon series because this week’s message from FELLOWSHIP BIBLE CHURCH dealt with the issue of work and what King Solomon had to say about it.

(Mark Henry pictured below)

Our teaching pastor Mark Henry in his sermon THE MIRROR OF WORK observed:

When you stare into the mirror of your work then you may ask “I AM SUCCESSFUL THEN WHY AM NOT HAPPY?” Many at the worship service today are very successful but do they still have this gnawing sense of emptiness and lack of satisfaction?  

The main character in the BOOK OF ECCLESIASTES is King Solomon who is outside of Jesus the wisest man in the Bible. This is a guy who amassed an incredible amount of wealth and power throughout his life and that set him on a journey in search of pleasure and happiness in the maze of life. What he discovered as he went down all of these different paths in search of pleasure and happiness in the maze of life, what he realized is THERE ALL ARE DEAD ENDS {IN LIFE UNDER THE SUN.} They just simply can not satisfy.

The simple message Solomon keeps bringing us back to is “JESUS IS BETTER THAN…”   Anything else we try to fill our lives up with is just going to be less than and that includes our work. 

Ecclesiastes 2:18-26English Standard Version (ESV) 

The Vanity of Toil

¹⁸ I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, ¹⁹ and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. ²⁰ So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, ²¹ because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. ²² What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? ²³ For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity.

²⁴ There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment^[a] in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, ²⁵ for apart from him^[b] who can eat or who can have enjoyment? ²⁶ For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.

Solomon is not just talking about our jobs. He is also talking about everything we do in life which includes building a family, parenting kids, pursuing relationships, working on our communities and his  conclusion is that it is all vain toil. What Solomon is doing here is giving us a view of work UNDER THE SUN. It is a view where you see work as frustrating, hard and aggravating.  

Solomon is sitting back and looking at his whole life’s work UNDER THE SUN and he is saying it is just vanity. Ecclesiastes 2:23 “For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity.” In other words, our hearts can’t rest because we still haven’t found what we are looking for. We got a six figure salary and it is still not enough. A hundred promotions later we still will be hungry for more. We never achieve a lasting identity.

Your accomplishments will never answer your deepest questions. WHO AM I? WHY AM I HERE? DO I MATTER? AM I SIGNIFICANT?  Solomon is saying you will not find those answers on the back of your paycheck.

Madonna in an interview with VOGUE noted: 

“And all of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy. I’m always struggling with that fear. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being and then I get to another stage and think I’m mediocre and uninteresting. And I find a way to get myself out of that. Again and again. My drive in life is from this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that’s always pushing me, pushing me. Because even though I’ve become Somebody. I still have to prove that Somebody. My struggle has never ended and it probably never will.”

The need to achieve that Madonna talks about is very common unfortunately in our hearts but in Jesus there is a way out of this performance driven cycle. In Jesus you are here because a loving God created you with his own hands for his glory and your joy. The point of life is knowing God and resting in his perfect love for you. The more we see life from ABOVE THE SUN the more we see that we don’t have to try and get our identity from our work because we already have one [in Christ.]

___

HUGH you have tried looking at life UNDER THE SUN but shouldn’t you now take time to take a long look at the possibility of life ABOVE THE SUN?

Francis Schaeffer has correctly argued:

The universe was created by an infinite personal God and He brought it into existence by spoken word and made man in His own image. When man tries to reduce [philosophically in a materialistic point of view] himself to less than this [less than being made in the image of God] he will always fail and he will always be willing to make these impossible leaps into the area of nonreason even though they don’t give an answer simply because that isn’t what he is. He himself testifies that this infinite personal God, the God of the Old and New Testament is there. 

Instead of making a leap into the area of non-reason the better choice would be to investigate the claims that the Bible is a historically accurate book and that God created the universe and reached out to humankind with the Bible. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop concerning the accuracy of the Bible.

TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnote #95)

Two things should be mentioned about the time of Moses in Old Testament history.

The form of the covenant made at Sinai has remarkable parallels with the covenant forms of other people at that time. (On covenants and parties to a treaty, the Louvre; and Treaty Tablet from Boghaz Koi (i.e., Hittite) in Turkey, Museum of Archaeology in Istanbul.) The covenant form at Sinai resembles just as the forms of letter writings of the first century after Christ (the types of introductions and greetings) are reflected in the letters of the apostles in the New Testament, it is not surprising to find the covenant form of the second millennium before Christ reflected in what occurred at Mount Sinai. God has always spoken to people within the culture of their time, which does not mean that God’s communication is limited by that culture. It is God’s communication but within the forms appropriate to the time.

The Pentateuch tells us that Moses led the Israelites up the east side of the Dead Sea after their long stay in the desert. There they encountered the hostile kingdom of Moab. We have firsthand evidence for the existence of this kingdom of Moab–contrary to what has been said by critical scholars who have denied the existence of Moab at this time. It can be found in a war scene from a temple at Luxor (Al Uqsor). This commemorates a victory by Ramses II over the Moabite nation at Batora (Luxor Temple, Egypt).

Also the definite presence of the Israelites in west Palestine (Canaan) no later than the end of the thirteenth century B.C. is attested by a victory stela of Pharaoh Merenptah (son and successor of Ramses II) to commemorate his victory over Libya (Israel Stela, Cairo Museum, no. 34025). In it he mentions his previous success in Canaan against Aschalon, Gize, Yenom, and Israel; hence there can be no doubt the nation of Israel was in existence at the latest by this time of approximately 1220 B.C. This is not to say it could not have been earlier, but it cannot be later than this date.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Everette Hatcher, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org, cell ph 501-920-5733, Box 23416, LittleRock, AR 72221

PS: This is the 14th letter I have written to you and again I have taken an aspect of your life and responded with what the Bible has to say on that subject. In this letter I also quoted your good friend Madonna. A little tidbit about Madonna and her former husband Guy Ritchie. They ran around with Prince William and Prince Harry quite often. Just recently in my old hometown of Memphis a girl by the name of Lizzy Wilson was married to the royals’ good friend Guy Pelly and they all came to Memphis for the wedding. Back in the 1980’s I used to get to visit at Hardware Shows with Lizzy’s grandfather Kemmons Wilson who was a founder of HOLIDAY INNS. Actually a relative of mine still works for the Wilson family trust and could have attended the wedding if he had chose to but he was not into royal watching.

Hugh Hefner getting to grips with Madonna at the launch party for the Music album in 2000.

Big day: Prince William and Harry and Guy Pelly attending friend Thomas-van-Straubenzee’s wedding

Royals down South! Prince William and Prince Harry traveled to Memphis, Tenn. the weekend of May 2 for friend Guy Pelly‘s wedding to Lizzy Wilson.

Guy Pelly and Elizabeth Wilson arrive for their wedding rehearsal dinner at the Rendezvous BBQ restaurant

Wearing a country-style checkered shirt, William arrives for dinner with his entourage in Memphis

__

(Below: The handsome prince arrived at Rendezvous restaurant for a rehearsal dinner)

_________

Featured artist is Ahmed Mater

Ahmed Mater was born in 1979 in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and lives and works in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Among the most influential contemporary artists from Saudi Arabia, Mater has been integral to the establishment of the country’s artists on the global scene.

Trained as a medical doctor, Mater has been working primarily in photography and video since 2010. Focused on issues surrounding contemporary Islamic culture and its relationship to globalization and consumerism, his projects have included the documentation of the development of Mecca and abandoned desert cities. In 2003, Mater co-founded the nonprofit enterprise Edge of Arabia, which has become a major platform for international exhibitions of art from Saudi Arabia. Along with his wife, the artist Arwa al-Naemi, Mater runs the Studio Pharan salon in Jeddah.

Links:
Artist’s website
@AhmedMater on Twitter

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October 11, 2017 – 4:54 am

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MY 4 POSTCARDS IN 2016 FROM VEGAS TO HUGH HEFNER (PART 2)

October 10, 2017 – 4:48 am

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October 9, 2017 – 3:29 am

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The last 3 letters I wrote to Hugh Hefner compared him to King Solomon in Ecclesiastes and his search for the meaning of it all!!! (Part 2)

September 28, 2017 – 7:33 pm

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_

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‘Roe v Wade’ Film Aims to Accurately Portray History of Landmark Decision

In a Feb. 23 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Loeb said despite the film’s subject matter, it is not a “conservative,” “religious,” or even a “pro-life” film.

CNA StaffNewsFebruary 25, 2021

WASHINGTON — The co-writer and star of a new film chronicling the courtroom drama of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case said in a recent interview that the film aims to be a truthful and historically accurate account of how the landmark decision came to be, and stars actors with varying views on the topic of abortion. 

Roe v Wade, co-written and co-directed by Loeb and Cathy Allyn, is set to premiere at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Feb. 28. 

Nick Loeb, a businessman-turned-filmmaker and actor, plays the part of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a prolific abortion doctor who later converted to Christianity and became pro-life. 

In a Feb. 23 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Loeb said despite the film’s subject matter, it is not a “conservative,” “religious,” or even a “pro-life” film. 

“What we tried to do is really just lay out the facts of how Roe v. Wade came to be and how it was decided. People can take one view or another. I‘ve had a lot of people who think it’s in the middle,” he commented to The Hollywood Reporter. 

Still, Loeb himself is pro-life and the personal journey of Loeb’s character, Nathanson, is one of powerful pro-life conversion.

“Why some folks may think it‘s a conservative film or why it aligns with those views is because the protagonist actually converts. He starts off pro-choice and becomes pro-life through his journey. It’s a true story,” Loeb commented. 

Nathanson personally performed an estimated 5,000 abortions and oversaw tens of thousands more, including one on his own pregnant girlfriend in the 1960s. 

Nathanson was previously a strong proponent of legalized abortion, and has been accused of inflating statistics on illegal abortions in the U.S. In 1969, he helped to found the lobbying organization now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. 

He left the practice of abortion in the early 1970s, and became a Christian and a pro-life activist until his death in 2011.

Loeb said he experienced an evolution of his own views on abortion similar to that of Nathanson. As a young man, he was pro-choice; in his 20s, he had two partners who obtained abortions. 

“[I]t really had an emotional impact on me. As I‘ve gotten older, the more regret I have. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had them,” he commented. 

“Learning more about the science behind it and when a human being is actually created, I slowly started to change my views. I went on the same journey as Bernard [Nathanson] and that’s why I was really interested in playing this role.”

Several of the film’s other stars are also known to be pro-life, such as Jon Voight, who stars as Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger. 

In 2020, Roe v. Wade premiered at the Vienna Independent Film Festival, where Voight took home the award for best supporting actor, the Federalist reported. 

Loeb said not all the actors in the film are pro-life, but at least one of the actors — whom he declined to name — converted from pro-choice views to pro-life over the course of filmmaking. 

Loeb said writing the film took extensive research into the Roe v. Wade case, and it was important to him to have a female co-writer, rather than him alone. 

“The case gets thrown around all the time without a full understanding of how it came to be and what happened. I really want people to understand, whether they‘re pro-choice or pro-life, that when a woman gets pregnant, there’s a baby there,” he concluded.

“It‘s not a clump of cells or a gob of goo. There’s a real living being that has a heartbeat in the first couple of weeks that you can hear. People should understand that so they don’t take abortion so lightly.”

The film is set to be available in April on Amazon Prime and iTunes.

Loeb’s comments are not the first time he has spoken in defense of unborn children. 

In 2016, Loeb and his then-fiance Sofia Vergara created and froze several embryos through IVF. When the couple separated, Loeb sued for custody of the embryos in order to implant them in a surrogate mother. A Louisiana court dismissed that lawsuit earlier this month. 

In 2019, Loeb told the National Catholic Registerthat Facebook had blocked his team from promoting a previous Hollywood Reporter article on the film.

March 22, 2021

Office of Senator Ed Markey, Massachusetts
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senator Markey,

I noticed that you signed a 2017 letter strongly supporting the filibuster. 
Why are you thinking about abandoning that view now?

Does your change of view have anything to do with Biden now being in office?

Democrats distance themselves from previous pro-filibuster stance, citing GOP obstruction

More than half of current Senate Democrats and VP Harris signed 2017 letter supporting filibuster when GOP was in control

By Tyler Olson | Fox News

As progressives push hard for Democrats to eliminate the legislative filibuster after gaining control of the Senate, House and the presidency, many Democratic senators are distancing themselves from a letter they signed in 2017 backing the procedure.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Chris Coons, D-Del., led a letter in 2017 that asked Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to preserve the legislative filibuster. As it’s existed for decades, the filibuster requires 60 votes in order to end debate on a bill and proceed to a final vote.

“We are writing to urge you to support our efforts to preserve existing rules, practices, and traditions” on the filibuster, the letter said.

Besides Collins and Coons, 59 other senators joined on the letter. Of that group, 27 Democratic signatories still hold federal elected office. Twenty-six still hold their Senate seats, and Vice President Harris assumed her new job on Jan. 20, vacating her former California Senate seat.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., speaks as the Senate Judiciary Committee hears from legal experts on the final day of the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 15, 2020. Coons has softened his support for the legislative filibuster in recent years after leading an effort to protect it in 2017. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

But now, the momentum among Senate Democrats is for either full abolition of the filibuster or significantly weakening it. President Biden endorsed the latter idea Tuesday, announcing his support for a “talking filibuster.”

KAMALA HARRIS SUPPORTS CHANGE TO FILIBUSTER IN SENATE TO LIMIT MINORITY PARTY POWER

“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” Biden told ABC. “You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”

The legislative filibuster has been a 60-vote threshold for what is called a “cloture vote” — or a vote to end debate on a bill — meaning that any 41 senators could prevent a bill from getting to a final vote. If there are not 60 votes, the bill cannot proceed.

The “talking filibuster” — as it was most recently seriously articulated by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., in 2012 — would allow 41 senators to prevent a final vote by talking incessantly, around-the-clock, on the Senate floor. But once those senators stop talking, the threshold for a cloture vote is lowered to 51.

Harris’ office confirmed to Fox News Wednesday that she is now aligned with Biden on the filibuster issue. She’d previously taken an even more hostile position to the filibuster, saying she would fully “get rid” of it “to pass a Green New Deal” at a CNN town hall in 2019.

The legislative filibuster has been a 60-vote threshold for what is called a “cloture vote” — or a vote to end debate on a bill — meaning that any 41 senators could prevent a bill from getting to a final vote. If there are not 60 votes, the bill cannot proceed.

The “talking filibuster” — as it was most recently seriously articulated by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., in 2012 — would allow 41 senators to prevent a final vote by talking incessantly, around-the-clock, on the Senate floor. But once those senators stop talking, the threshold for a cloture vote is lowered to 51.

Harris’ office confirmed to Fox News Wednesday that she is now aligned with Biden on the filibuster issue. She’d previously taken an even more hostile position to the filibuster, saying she would fully “get rid” of it “to pass a Green New Deal” at a CNN town hall in 2019.

Coons, who led the 2017 letter along with Collins, has also distanced himself from his previous stance.

Vice President Kamala Harris attends a ceremonial swearing-in for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., as President Pro Tempore of the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 4, 2021. Harris has changed her stance on the legislative filibuster since signing a letter in 2017 backing it. (Michael Reynolds/Pool via AP) (AP)

BIDEN SUPPORTS CHANGING SENATE FILIBUSTER 

“I’m going to try my hardest, first, to work across the aisle,” he said in September when asked about ending the filibuster. “Then, if, tragically, Republicans don’t change the tune or their behavior at all, I would.”

Fox News reached out to all of the other 26 Democratic signatories of the 2017 letter, and they all either distanced themselves from that position or did not respond to Fox News’ inquiry.

“Less than four years ago, when Donald Trump was President and Mitch McConnell was the Majority Leader, 61 Senators, including more than 25 Democrats, signed their names in opposition to any efforts that would curtail the filibuster,” a GOP aide told Fox News. “Other than the occupant of the White House, and the balance of power in the Senate, what’s changed?”

“I’m interested in getting results for the American people, and I hope we will find common ground to advance key priorities,” Sen. Tim Kaine. D-Va., said in a statement. “If Republicans try to use arcane rules to block us from getting results for the American people, then we’ll have a conversation at that time.”

Added Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va: “I am still hopeful that the Senate can work together in a bipartisan way to address the enormous challenges facing the country. But when it comes to fundamental issues like protecting Americans from draconian efforts attacking their constitutional right to vote, it would be a mistake to take any option off the table.”

“Senator Stabenow understands the urgency of passing important legislation, including voting rights, and thinks it warrants a discussion about the filibuster if Republicans refuse to work across the aisle,” Robyn Bryan, a spokesperson for Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said.

FILE – In this Oct. 26, 2018, file photo, Sen.Bob Casey, D-Pa., speaks to reporters in the studio of KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh. Casey has reversed his stance on the legislative filibuster since signing a 2017 letter in support of it. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Representatives for Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., pointed to recent comments he made on MSNBC.

“Yes, absolutely,” Casey said when asked if he would support a “talking filibuster” or something similar. “Major changes to the filibuster for someone like me would not have been on the agenda even a few years ago. But the Senate does not work like it used to.”

MCCONNELL SAYS SENATE WILL BE ‘100-CAR PILEUP’ IF DEMS NUKE FILIBUSTER

“I hope any Democratic senator who’s not currently in support of changing the rules or altering them substantially, I hope they would change their minds,” Casey added.

Representatives for Sen. Angus King, I-Vt., who caucuses with Democrats, meanwhile, references a Bangor Daily News editorial that said King was completely against the filibuster in 2012 but now believes it’s helpful in stopping bad legislation. It said, however, that King is open to “modifications” similar to a talking filibuster.

The senators who did not respond to questions on their 2017 support of the filibuster were Sens. Joe Manchin. D-W.Va.; Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Michael Bennet, D-Colo.; Martin Heinrich, D-N.M.; Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio; Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii; Cory Booker, D-N.J.; Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.; Maize Hirono, D-Hawaii; John Tester, D-Mont.; Tom Carper, D-Del.; Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.; Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.; Jack Reed, D-R-I.; Ed Markey, D-Mass.; Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.; and Bob Menendez, D-N.J.

Some of these senators, however, have addressed the filibuster in other recent comments.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., on Wednesday was asked if she supported changing the filibuster threshold by CNN and said she is still opposed to the idea. “Not at this time,” Feinstein said.

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020, during the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Hirono has changed her opinion on the legislative filibuster since signing a 2017 letter supporting it. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

Sen. Maize Hirono, D-Hawaii, meanwhile said last week she is already for getting rid of the current 60-vote threshold and thinks other Democrats will sign on soon.

“If Mitch McConnell continues to be totally an obstructionist, and he wants to use the 60 votes to stymie everything that President Biden wants to do and that we Democrats want to do that will actually help people,” Hirono said, “then I think the recognition will be among the Democrats that we’re gonna need to.”

The most recent talk about either removing or significantly weakening the filibuster was spurred by comments from Manchin that appeared to indicate he would be open to a talking filibuster. He said filibustering a bill should be more “painful” for a minority.

Manchin appeared to walk back any talk of a talking filibuster on Wednesday, however.

“You know where my position is,” he said. “There’s no little bit of this and a little bit — there’s no little bit here. You either protect the Senate, you protect the institution and you protect democracy or you don’t.”

Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., both committed to supporting the current form of the filibuster earlier this year. Sinema was not in the Senate in 2017.

Senate Minority Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said their comments gave him the reassurance he needed to drop a demand that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., put filibuster protections into the Senate’s organizing resolution.

But with Manchin seeming to flake at least in the eyes of some, other Democrats are beginning to push harder for filibuster changes.

—

I read about your views on abortion:

Massachusetts needs to ‘be the leader’ in support of abortion rights, Sen. Ed Markey says in debate

Updated Oct 05, 2020; Posted Oct 05, 2020 

On abortion rights, Markey said now is the time for Massachusetts “to be the leader in ensuring we put on the books” a women’s right to choose.

Senator, I wanted to talk to you about why I am pro-life.

Carl Sagan stated, “So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg–despite the fact that it’s only potentially a baby–why isn’t it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?”

Newsweek answered the question life begins long ago (see below). 

Carl Sagan was the Humanist of the year in 1981. 

A Christian Manifesto
by Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer

This 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.

Dr. C. Everett Koop, in our seminars for Whatever Happened to the Human Race, often said that (speaking for himself), “When I graduated from medical school, the idea was ‘how can I save this life?’ But for a great number of the medical students now, it’s not, ‘How can I save this life?’, but ‘Should I save this life?’”

Believe me, it’s everywhere. It isn’t just abortion. It’s infanticide. It’s allowing the babies to starve to death after they are born. If they do not come up to some doctor’s concept of a quality of life worth living. I’ll just say in passing — and never forget it – it takes about 15 days, often, for these babies to starve to death. And I’d say something else that we haven’t stressed enough. In abortion itself, there is no abortion method that is not painful to the child — just as painful that month before birth as the baby you see a month after birth in one of these cribs down here that I passed — just as painful…

The January 11 Newsweek has an article about the baby in the womb. The first 5 or 6 pages are marvelous. If you haven’t seen it, you should see if you can get that issue. It’s January 11 and about the first 5 or 6 pages show conclusively what every biologist has known all along, and that is that human life begins at conception. There is no other time for human life to begin, except at conception. Monkey life begins at conception. Donkey life begins at conception. And human life begins at conception. Biologically, there is no discussion — never should have been — from a scientific viewpoint. I am not speaking of religion now. And this 5 or 6 pages very carefully goes into the fact that human life begins at conception. But you flip the page and there is this big black headline, “But is it a person?” And I’ll read the last sentence, “The problem is not determining when actual human life begins, but when the value of that life begins to out weigh other considerations, such as the health or even the happiness of the mother.”

We are not just talking about the health of the mother (it’s a propaganda line), or even the happiness of the mother. Listen! Spell that out! It means that the mother, FOR HER OWN HENDONISTIC HAPPINESS — selfish happiness — can take human life by her choice, by law. Do you understand what I have said? By law, on the basis of her individual choice of what makes her happy. She can take what has been declared to be, in the first five pages [of the article], without any question, human life. In other words, they acknowledge that human life is there, but it is an open question as to whether it is not right to kill that human life if it makes the mother happy.

And basically that is no different than Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, killing who they killed for what they conceived to be the good of society. There is absolutely no line between the two statements — no absolute line, whatsoever. One follows along: Once that it is acknowledged that it is human life that is involved (and as I said, this issue of Newsweek shows conclusively that it is) the acceptance of death of human life in babies born or unborn, opens the door to the arbitrary taking of any human life. From then on, it’s purely arbitrary.

 I understand many humanists support financially NARAL. Did you know that the founder of NARAL left the abortion business because as technology advanced he discovered that the unborn baby experienced pain?  Here is a little more about Dr. Bernard Nathanson:

Bernard Nathanson: A Life Transformed by Truth

by  Robert P. George

In 1985, Nathanson employed the new fetal imaging technology to produce a documentary film, “The Silent Scream,” which energized the pro-life movement and threw the pro-choice side onto the defensive by showing in graphic detail the killing of a twelve-week-old fetus in a suction abortion. Nathanson used the footage to describe the facts of fetal development and to make the case for the humanity and dignity of the child in the womb. At one point, viewers see the child draw back from the surgical instrument and open his mouth: “This,” Nathanson says in the narration, “is the silent scream of a child threatened imminently with extinction.”

Publicity for “The Silent Scream” was provided by no less a figure than President Ronald Reagan, who showed the film in the White House and touted it in speeches. Like Nathanson, Reagan, who had signed one of the first abortion-legalization bills when he was Governor of California, was a zealous convert to the pro-life cause. During his term as president, Reagan wrote and published a powerful pro-life book entitled Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation—a book that Nathanson praised for telling the truth about the life of the child in the womb and the injustice of abortion.

My last question to you today is WHAT ABOUT UNBORN WOMAN’S RIGHTS? Don’t little baby girls who are just months away from being born have the right to life? This letter has been about politics but the spiritual answers your heart is seeking can be  found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.  Without the Bible then we are left with Schaeffer’s final conclusion,“If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.”

Sincerely, 

Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com

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