Category Archives: Government

Open Letter to Senator Tom Udall

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My dear Senator Udall,

You say, “I firmly believe that reproductive health care is a personal matter that should be left to individuals, their families, their doctors, and their religious counselors.” That sounds good, but in actuality it ignores the fact that a new life in already in this world, growing as we all do from day to day in this life.  Reproductive health care must begin with that new life in the womb, to nurture and provide a wholesome,supportive environment.  Your position, ignores each individual’s right to their own life.  Your position abandons your responsibility while giving to a doctor or a religious counselor a sacrosanct role. Mother, father, counselor, minister; none of these, has the authority to take a human life because tragic, untimely or inconvenient circumstances surround the new life coming into this world, and present in the womb.  It is not a question of choice.  We are not given the choice of taking another’s life.  When we choose to take a life, we kill what God has begun.  You do not have that authority, nor does a mother, father, doctor, priest or counselor.  Words do not change truth.  Truth is staring you in the face and your look the other way, when you support legislation that treats life as some material commodity rather than the holy gift of God that it is.
In closing, I refer you to Archbishop Chaput’s words:
“America is not a secular state. As historian Paul Johnson once said, America was ”born Protestant.” It has uniquely and deeply religious roots. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But the United States was never intended to be a ‘’secular” country in the radical modern sense. Nearly all the Founders were either Christian or at least religion-friendly. And all of our public institutions and all of our ideas about the human person are based in a religiously shaped vocabulary. So if we cut God out of our public life, we cut the foundation out from under our national ideals.”
“As Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George said recently, too many Americans have ”no recognition of the fact that children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can’t be something you start playing off pragmatically against other issues.”

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Americans United for Life is working hard getting the word out:

With the Sotomayor confirmation hearings set to begin on July 13, we need “all hands on deck” to show the Senate and the nation that Judge Sotomayor’s radical record — including her longtime participation in a pro-abortion advocacy group — makes her unfit for the highest court in the land.

Michelle Malkin writes Racism Rejected:

President Obama applauds the decision as a victory for equality under the law. Not.The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

SCOTUS Blog background here. More background here and here.

Tom Goldstein: “Ricci result: Kennedy finds a violation of Title VII. An outright reversal 5-4…the plaintiff firefighters won. New Haven violated the law by throwing out the test.”

Sotomayor = Not so wise now.

As Israel Goes, So Goes…….?

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“I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

Growth in Israel is part and parcel of life.  Curtailing growth casts the shadow of death over any nation.  As Israel goes so goes those who are blessed by her:

Charles Krauthammer sees this with clarity and writes:

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more “dictating” to other countries. We should “forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions,” he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

What’s the issue? No “natural growth” means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.

To what end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements — and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.

That was envisioned in the Clinton plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why turn towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations.

The entire “natural growth” issue is a concoction. It’s farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert’s peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave — before he’ll do anything to advance peace.

Israel brought growth and fruitfulness to a land long neglected.  The money that poured into the hands of Hamas and Fatah after the Oslo accords was used to wage war and build a terror machine that continues to impoverish the people of the region under Palestinian control.  What would the situation be now, if instead of terror, these funds actuality funded schools, roads,  courthouses, hospitals, and charitable institutions that truly relieve the suffering of their people.  No nation, no one, can help the Palestinians until they set aside hatred to love their own people.

Krauthammer writes:

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

Pvt. Long vs Dr. Tiller Murders – In Obama-speak

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Obama is said to be a master of the word and speech.  If this is true, then we must suppose his limp response to the murder of Pvt. William Long is very meaningful.  The President had at his disposal all the elegant and convincing verbage we have come to expect from him (whether he means it or not.) It is due from the Commander-in- Chief, when one of his troops is murdered. Contrasting Obama’s response with the response he gave when George Tiller, a late term abortionist (with much blood on his own hands,) was murdered; using words like “heinous” and expressing “anger” and “outrage,” Obama was quick to respond and dramatically vocal.  The absence of such sentiment, and the three day delay in any response, speaks volumes. We have to ask: Where do Obama’s loyalties lie?
Obama’s passive voice, the dispassionate euphemism, the blameless, faceless, semantic nicety; that is a far cry from a cry of truth.  We get abstractions from a man avoiding the reality of a jihadist convert killing one of our troops, one of Obama’s own charges  serving loyally and dutifully. No calling out his killer here, just “a sensless” act.  By who? and why? we may ask?  Obama doesn’t seem to want us to notice that someone, a jahadist, pulled the trigger killing one soldier and gravely wounding another,  18-year-old Private Quinton Ezeagwula.

Michelle Malkin puts it in words for all of Obama’s failure to react.
The Anchoress writes:

And yet, here we are, watching thousands of words being written about the grotesque murder of George Tiller, all of which dutifully identify his killer by name, race, religion and ideology, (Scott Roeder, white, Christian, anti-government, and anti-abortion) while the sad story of Pvt. William Long is quietly put to rest, with little-to-no-mention of the shooter:

[NPR’s] news reader, Nora Raum, outlined the incident and stated that the shooting appeared to have “religious motivations.” She did not name the suspect, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, or tell NPR listeners what those religious motivations might be. In other words, it could have been a radical Unitarian who gunned down the soldiers, or possibly a violent Presbyterian.

The story about Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad grows more interesting by the day:

A joint FBI-Homeland Security intelligence assessment…said officers found maps to Jewish organizations, a child care center, a Baptist church, a post office and military recruiting centers in the southeastern U.S. and New York and Philadelphia.

And:

An FBI joint terrorism task force based in the southern U.S. reportedly had been tracking Muhammad after he traveled to Yemen and was arrested and jailed there for using a Somali passport, an official told The Associated Press. The probe had been in its early stages and based on Muhammad’s trip to Yemen, ABC News reported.
…At Tuesday’s court hearing, Deputy Prosecutor Scott Duncan said Muhammad told investigators that “he would have killed more soldiers had they been in the parking lot.”

The press duly (and briefly) reports, then re-focuses on Tiller, and the evil “Christianists” who are all responsible for his murder. Meanwhile, Obama is keeping silence, even foregoing the perfect opportunity to memorialize his soldier.

When George Tiller was murdered, Obama spoke out, and then he mobilized his justice department, to deploy guards at abortion clinics. Sort of like a Commander-in-Chief might do, if he feels his beloved country is under attack. When Pvt. William Long was murdered, Obama said and did…nothing.

Lady Justice Winks – No Blindfold!

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Hot Air writes concerning Sotomayor inconvenient statement of her judicial stance:

And so the retreat begins, as predicted yesterday in Politico’s story about Democratic strategists nudging The One to walk back her comment and make it go away. Obama weighed in on this himself just a few minutes ago, saying he’s sure she would have “restated” what she said if she could do it again; Gibbs makes essentially the same point. Nice try, but their problem here is that she wasn’t speaking off the cuff at the time. It came in the course of a speech, something to which a federal judge would devote care in composing. Either she’s a sloppy writer, even on matters of great cultural sensitivity like race, or she meant exactly what she said. And somehow I find it hard to believe she’s a sloppy writer.

Lady Justice no longer wears a blindfold, but the American people must, not to see the irony and pathetic stance of this kind of justice and this administration. For Obama appeals to the great American heart in his heralding the success story of Sotomayor.  However, there is another classic American story, as engaging as Sotomayor’s for true grit, that the American people should get to heqr at the Senate confirmation hearings and that is the story of Frank Ricci.

Charles Krauthammer hopes for a moment of illumination for America’s voters,  just to be clear:

Ricci is a New Haven firefighter stationed seven blocks from where Sotomayor went to law school (Yale). Raised in blue-collar Wallingford, Conn., Ricci struggled as a C and D student in public schools ill-prepared to address his serious learning disabilities. Nonetheless he persevered, becoming a junior firefighter and Connecticut’s youngest certified EMT.

After studying fire science at a community college, he became a New Haven “truckie,” the guy who puts up ladders and breaks holes in burning buildings. When his department announced exams for promotions, he spent $1,000 on books, quit his second job so he could study eight to 13 hours a day, and, because of his dyslexia, hired someone to read him the material.
He placed sixth on the lieutenant’s exam, which qualified him for promotion. Except that the exams were thrown out by the city, and all promotions denied, because no blacks had scored high enough to be promoted. Ricci (with 19 others) sued.

Case dismissed by the three-member circuit court panel including you guessed it Sotomayor.  Ricci promotion denied thanks in large part to ‘empathetic’ Sotomayor.  No American success story for the white guy, because he’s white.

Krauthammer: On the Ricci case. And on her statements about the inherent differences between groups, and the superior wisdom she believes her Latina physiology, culture and background grant her over a white male judge. They perfectly reflect the Democrats’ enthrallment with identity politics, which assigns free citizens to ethnic and racial groups possessing a hierarchy of wisdom and entitled to a hierarchy of claims upon society.Sotomayor shares President Obama’s vision of empathy as lying at the heart of judicial decision-making — sympathetic concern for litigants’ background and current circumstances, and for how any judicial decision would affect their lives.Since the 2008 election, people have been asking what conservatism stands for. Well, if nothing else, it stands unequivocally against justice as empathy — and unequivocally for the principle of blind justice.Empathy is a vital virtue to be exercised in private life — through charity, respect and lovingkindness — and in the legislative life of a society where the consequences of any law matter greatly, which is why income taxes are progressive and safety nets built for the poor and disadvantaged.But all that stops at the courthouse door. Figuratively and literally, justice wears a blindfold. It cannot be a respecter of persons. Everyone must stand equally before the law, black or white, rich or poor, advantaged or not.Obama and Sotomayor draw on the “richness of her experiences” and concern for judicial results to favor one American story, one disadvantaged background, over another. The refutation lies in the very oath Sotomayor must take when she ascends to the Supreme Court: “I do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich. … So help me God.”When the hearings begin, Republicans should call Frank Ricci as their first witness. Democrats want justice rooted in empathy? Let Ricci tell his story and let the American people judge whether his promotion should have been denied because of his skin color in a procedure Sotomayor joined in calling “facially race-neutral.”Make the case for individual vs. group rights, for justice vs. empathy. Then vote to confirm Sotomayor solely on the grounds — consistently violated by the Democrats, including Sen. Obama — that a president is entitled to deference on his Supreme Court nominees, particularly one who so thoroughly reflects the mainstream views of the winning party. Elections have consequences.Vote Democratic and you get mainstream liberalism: A judicially mandated racial spoils system and a jurisprudence of empathy that hinges on which litigant is less “advantaged.”

Our Lady of Guadalupe – Defection of Latin Heart

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How the world has changed. The Hispanic community used to care about Life issues.  I’m lost as to what “empathy” actually means in today’s Obama-speak. The GOP wants to please Hispanics and Hispanics want to please Obama and swallow his policies and now SotoMayor because she’s a Hispanic.  What price integrity?

Hot Air covers the politics of it:

GOP officials say they realize the party needs to improve its standing among Hispanic voters in order to have any hope of winning a national election, and they admit that trashing the first Latina nominee to the court could cement stereotypes or further alienate minorities…

I’m trying to come to grips with the duplicity in the Latino community in regard to their recent voting history; their love affair with Obama to be concise.  How does the head come to be divided from the heart, or at least from who used to own their hearts.  People of Spanish decent in this nation have strongly held and loudly proclaimed devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.  How this same people can live with that heart-set, while abiding a mind-set of choice and abortion flies in the face of integrity.  What has been the price of their defection?  Have they been won away from Our Lady of Guadalupe whose mantle they still claim as their own?

Counting on Our Lady’s for favor, love and protection under the mantle of her Son, while secretly voting with the Enemy whose head she will crush defies both logic and presumes a certain gullibility on God’s and Our Lady’s part. Here’s the crux of the matter.  Our Lady of Guadalupe is the pregnant Mother of God.  Have Latinos abandoned her for politico advantage, monetary benefit, educational expediency, life style convenience, a “good” life apart from the heart of this very pregnant Virgin.  For under her heart is the womb and nesting place of Jesus.

They have abandoned the heart of their Mother?  What else is one to think, when, while still blessing their homes and churches with her image, they none-the-less carry Obama’s torch and wave the banner of Choice.  Should her name be invoked as “Our Lady of Choice” or “Our Lady of Abortion,” for either of these, ‘choice’ or ‘abortion’ rank, by the hispanic vote, higher than the Infant she carried to term and into Life?  Poorly formed, ignored or silenced consciences, do not speak well for the once Christian people. In name only, may replace ‘In God We Trust’  as the banner over this proud inheritance.

As God’s eyes watched over the Babe in Our Lady of Guadalupe’s womb, they now watch over choices we make in life and in death.  God’s eyes watch over the womb of our Nation, which is 1/3 empty.   Should Our Lady of Guadalupe, now the patroness of the Americas and Life, not look to the Latino as her particular people, having chosen them to announce her under that title?  She has carried them.  Will they no longer claim her by their actions, affiliations and votes. The choice they now make and live, they will carry into life, death and the hereafter, as all life’s choices tend toward eternity.

Michelle Malkin cares about jurisprudence is anyone listening?