How Radical Professors Indoctrinate Students

I'm going to tell you more about a book I believe is important for parents who have children who are college students. It's called One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine our Democracy by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. The authors investigated 12 major universities and describe a dozen courses at each one, quoting from course catalogues, syllabi, and the professors’ own writings.

At Columbia Teachers College, students learn that non-Socialist societies are the root cause of all violence. A course description at the University of California/Santa Cruz declares, “The goal of this seminar is to learn how to organize a revolution." Another course takes identity politics to a whole new level with the assertion that race, class, gender, and religion all “constitute significant forms of oppression.”

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Physicians sue Obama for health-care 'snitch' program

White House accused of 'unlawfully collecting information on political speech'

One Nation Under God

In a new book called One Nation Under God, author Dee Wampler debunks the myths about church and state that are so often used to marginalize the opinions of religious people. Over the past three decades, the First Amendment has been twisted to remove God from public life. Our country is moving from separation of church and state to separation of the people from God. If that trend is not stopped, we’ll have no rights given by God, only rights given by the government. And what government has given, it can take away.

One especially interesting chapter examines the life and beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, supposedly the leading exponent of the so-called separation of church and state. Author Dee Wampler proves that Jefferson did not mean what the secularists want him to have meant. Two days before he wrote that letter, Jefferson attended church in the House of Representatives and he attended that church “constantly” for the next seven years.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

The 5000 Year Leap

A remarkable book was published in 1981 called The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World by Cleon Skousen.

Skousen explains the 28 principles of freedom that inspired our Constitution, and became the foundation of our great nation. Let me tell you about some of these principles.

A free people cannot survive under self-government unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. The most promising method of securing a virtuous people is to elect virtuous leaders. Without religion, the government of a free people cannot be maintained. The proper role of government is to protect equal rights, not to provide equal things. The God-given right to govern is vested in the sovereign authority of the whole people. Life and liberty are secure only so long as the rights of property are secure. The highest level of prosperity occurs when there is a minimum of government regulations. Only limited and carefully defined powers should be delegated to government, all others being retained by the people.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Does Saying Hello Require a Hug?

I was intrigued by a recent front-page news article in the New York Times entitled "For Teenagers, Hello Means 'How About a Hug?'" This article said that high schoolers are regularly saying hello to each other with a hug. The most popular is the basic friend hug.

Hugging appears to be a grassroots phenomenon and not an imitation of a character or custom on TV or in the movies. The hug has become the customary social greeting when teenagers meet or part.

The hugs that I find even more curious than what teenagers are doing is the way hugging has become a regular social custom at political meetings. It used to be that the typical greeting with officeholders was a handshake. Now I find that a hug seems to be expected by almost every politician I meet. I noticed that even President Barack Obama hugged a female supporter at one of his recent town meetings.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

The Government's Interest in Marriage

The institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is under attack from various sources. The gay-rights attack on marriage gets the most publicity and has been successful in five states. The feminists were the chief lobbyists for the unilateral divorce laws that were passed by all 50 states during the 1970s.

There's another group that attacks the notion that government should set standards for marriage, require the issuance of a marriage license for the union to be legal, and confer special privileges and tax breaks on a man and a woman who are legally married. Some libertarians believe that marriage should be a private contract between two people and that marriage is none of the government's business.

The purpose of government exercising this control over who may be married is primarily society's way of establishing clear responsibility for caring for helpless infants.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Disposable Marriage Is a Tragedy

A distinguished African-American female attorney named Leah Ward Sears stepped down last month as Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court after 17 years of service. At the time of her resignation from the court, she made a remarkable statement:

"No-fault divorce's broad acceptance as an unquestioned social good helped usher in an era that fundamentally altered the seriousness with which marriage is viewed. It effectively ended marriage as a legal contract since either party can terminate it, with or without cause." It should be called unilateral divorce.

Continuing with Judge Sears' statement: "This leaves many people struggling to remake their lives after painful divorces that they do not want. It also left many parents cut off from ... the lives of the children they love. ... The legal system turns fathers into mere visitors of their own children. ... I believe the United States ... [is] engaged in an unintended campaign to diminish the importance of marriage and fatherhood."

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Stem cell cure not ready to be tested

You cannot blame this delay on the Bush administration:

In a setback for Menlo Park-based Geron [in California], the company announced today that federal authorities have placed on hold its groundbreaking test in people of a spinal-cord injury treatment it developed from human embryonic stem cells.

Officials at Geron, which has yet to give its treatment to people, were vague about the reason for the hold, saying only that it involved the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's pending review of new animal study data the company had submitted.

The problem is that the technology for cures is decades away:

"The routine utilization of human embryonic stem cells for medicine is 20 to 30 years hence," embryonic stem cell research advocate William Haseltine and then-chief executive officer of Human Genome Sciences told Agence France Presse in 2001. "The timeline to commercialization is so long that I simply would not invest," he added.

Some ES cell researchers believe "three to five decades" is a realistic timeline, while British fertility expert Lord Robert Winston said in a 2005 lecture,"I am not entirely convinced that embryonic stem cells will, in my lifetime, and possibly anybody's lifetime for that matter, be holding quite the promise that we desperately hope they will."

The Imperial College, London University professor insisted research "should be conducted, and I believe is totally ethical." But, he added, "One of the problems is that in order to persuade the public that we must do this work, we often go rather too far in promising what we might achieve . . ."

We need about 20 years of animal research before anyone gets too excited.

New Documentary Explores Human Cost of Global Warming Propaganda

. . . Colleen Holmes, executive director with Eagle Forum, attended the screening at ATR and expressed concern over the direction of U.S. policy. "The people who form the backbone of our nation, small business owners and hard working, middle and lower income Americans know this policy will directly affect them by killing jobs and increase their taxes and energy costs, yet the liberal elites ignore their concerns and treat them with contempt," she said. "The film addresses that very well."

Read entire article

College Is Not for Remedial Classes

President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan continually preach that they want everybody to go to college. But the numbers of students who have to take remedial classes in college before they enroll in real college classes is appalling. More than 60% of students enrolling at two-year colleges, and nearly 30% of students starting four-year colleges, have to take remedial courses, according to Dr. Michael Kirst, a Stanford University professor.

We are now beginning to see many articles that advise students not to bother going to college. They say that four-year college degree has come to cost too much, so it's a bad deal for the average student, the employer, and the taxpayers. A student who finally gets a degree graduates with a tremendous debt and is unlikely ever to recoup the cost of his college tuition. Employers who require their job applicants to have a college degree are putting their faith in a system whose standards are slipping badly.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

American Children Take the Most Drugs

In June, a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee told the FDA to approve three more antipsychotics for pediatric use. If the FDA accepts this recommendation, as it is expected to do, prescriptions of these drugs to children will no longer be "off-label," and drug companies will legally market these products for use on young children. Critics of this new recommendation claim that the advisory committee looked at studies that followed too few patients and some of them for only three to six weeks, but children could be taking the drugs for years or even decades.

A study reported in the journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health compared how doctors in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands prescribe psychotropic drugs to children. Between 1999 and 2000, 6.7% of Americans under the age of 20 took at least one psychotropic drug, while just 2.9% of Germans and 2% of Dutch in that age group took one of those drugs.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Violent Video Games: Danger to Children

Arthur Ally is a financial planner who runs a pro-family mutual fund called the Timothy Plan, which refuses to invest in companies that produce violent video games. Mr. Ally believes these games are very harmful to children.

Arthur Ally says that parents should carefully monitor the games their kids are playing. He posted on his website a detailed guide to help parents evaluate the content of video games. His website is called TimothyPlan.com. Many states have passed laws to restrict the sale of violent video games to children unless they have their parents' consent, but supremacist judges have declared such laws unconstitutional and ruled that extremely graphic violence deserves the same First Amendment protection as Shakespeare's plays.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Founders of Feminism Were Anti-Marriage

It's important for Americans to realize that the founders of the feminist movement were very anti-marriage. Betty Friedan started the feminist movement in the late 1960s with her book The Feminine Mystique, which created the myth that suburban housewives were suffering from "a sense of dissatisfaction" with their alleged-to-be-boring lives.

Women's studies courses require students to accept as an article of faith the silly notion that gender differences are not natural or biological but are social constructs. This leads feminists to seek legislative corrections for problems that don't exist. Television is constantly peddling the falsehood that women's lives are full of misery and threats from men.

Despite the false messages of the colleges and the media, most American women are smart enough to reject the label feminist, and only 20% of mothers say they want full-time work in the labor force.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Eagle Forum Urges Grassroots Not to Fall for Co-Op Compromise

Washington, D.C. - Eagle Forum, a conservative public policy organization
founded by Phyllis Schlafly, urges grassroots Americans not to fall for the
Obama Administration's recent hints that they may drop the public option
from the health care bill and replace it with a "co-op compromise" that is
more popular with some House Blue Dog Democrats and moderate Senate
Democrats.

Read entire Press Release

Why Women Are Unhappy

The National Bureau of Economic Research released a study showing that women's happiness has measurably declined since 1970. This study covers the same time period as the rise of the so-called women's liberation or feminist movement.

One theory advanced by the authors, who are University of Pennsylvania economists, is that the women's liberation movement "raised women's expectations" (in other words, sold them a bill of goods), making them feel inadequate when they fail to have it all. A second theory is that the demands on women who are both mothers and jobholders in the labor force are overwhelming.

Another theory could be that the feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success in life is beyond their reach.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Law textbook has feminist errors

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Christina Hoff Sommers ... criticized Nancy K.D. Lemon, a lecturer in domestic-violence law at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law, for publishing errors in the popular textbook she edits, Domestic Violence Law, and for not taking seriously her continuing criticisms of the book. "One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack," Sommers charged. Following is Lemon's response to those criticisms and Sommers's rebuttal.

Lemon persists in her errors. Sommers has the facts.

Judicial supremacy at work

A Slate article explains the errors of judical supremacy:

Justifying his ruling in the face of Congress' exclusive constitutional power over when, which, and how foreign nationals may enter the United States, Judge Ricardo Urbina reasoned that "our system of checks and balances is designed to preserve the fundamental right of liberty." He saw his order as necessary to that end. But if he's right, then the judiciary itself is the unchecked branch of government. And while judges have expanded their power before in our history, never have the claims to supremacy of some of them been so extreme. ...

The present expansion of judicial power began after World War II, ... the courts quickly moved beyond saying what the law is, in the Marbury court's phrase, to devising elaborate enforcement schemes that brought judges, among other things, into the business of supervising school districts and effectively determining how federal and state prisons must be designed.

All Children Are Above Average

A long-running radio variety program is about a town called Lake Wobegon where "all children are above average." That is statistically impossible, of course, but the Lake Wobegon effect seems to have been adopted by schools and colleges through what is called grade inflation.

In the 1930s, the average Grade Point Average in all universities was 2.35. Now the average is 3.30. Does that mean college students are smarter than they were in the 1930s? Some think so, but most scholars think not. The average SAT score for all incoming college students has declined steadily over the past 30 years, even as grades continue to rise. Many college students today do very little work for those high GPAs. Gone is the expectation that students will do two or three hours of outside work for every hour they spend in class. On average, full‑time seniors at four‑year colleges spend only 14 hours a week studying; that's only half as much time as students studied 40 years ago.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

66% Oppose Mexican Trucks On U.S. Highways

Public Schools Go National

Public schools traditionally were a responsibility of the individual states without any federal control. That started to change way back under the Eisenhower Administration with small appropriations of federal taxpayers' money. That trickle of money has now grown into a mighty river of tax dollars, and along with the money goes federal control.

The Obama administration and the teachers unions have been pressuring the schools to adopt national standards. 46 states announced in June that they will draft a set of national standards for all public schools. The National Governors Association appointed a secret panel of experts who are now at work creating the standards. By the end of the summer, the panel plans to announce standards in reading and math for each grade from kindergarten to 12th grade, and also the requirements for high schoolers to graduate. The standards will avoid directives on how reading or math should be taught, and what specific books children must read.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Study Shows Homeschool Students Out Score Public School Peers

The National Home Education Research Institute found that homeschoolers scored 34-39 percentile points higher on the norm on standardized achievement tests than their public educated peers.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which commissioned the nationwide study in 2007, reports that the homeschool national average ranged from the 84th percentile for language, math, and social studies to the 89th percentile for reading.

Medicare’s fiscal health rapidly declining

Secretary of the Treasury Geithner askd Congress to increase the federal debt limit this week. The U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services announced in March of 2008 that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund now spends more than its income: "from 2009 through 2017, about $342 billion will need to be transferred from the Federal treasury to cover beneficiaries’ hospital insurance costs."

Obama Economics 101: Let Private Industry Compete with Poorly-Run Government Agencies

Obama suggests that his Health Care reform plan would allow private health insurance agencies to compete with government-run health insurance options similar to how the post office competes with FedEx and UPS. In this YouTube video, Obama also jokes about how inefficient the post office is compared to FedEx and UPS.

Rethinking Psychotropic Drugs for Kids

Between 2002 and 2007, prescriptions of all psychotropic drugs to children under age ten increased 45%. Fortunately, this trend is starting to turn around. Last year, prescription rates increased only 3.5%. Doctors and consumers have become more suspicious of the companies selling psychotropics, as several have been accused of improperly marketing these profitable drugs.

The class of psychotropic drugs called antipsychotics have especially come under suspicion in recent years. The drop in prescriptions of antipsychotics to children results partly from reports of serious and even fatal side effects.

Stories of side effects and deaths spurred 16 states to initiate an investigation of the pediatric use of psychotropics, under the slogan “too many, too much, too young.”

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Obama Wants Total Government Control Over Health Care, Says Conservative Leader Phyllis Schlafly

The White House deal with Big Pharma undermines democracy

Aug. 10, 2009 | I'm a strong supporter of universal health insurance, and a fan of the Obama administration. But I'm appalled by the deal the White House has made with the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying arm to buy their support.

Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House confirmed it has promised Big Pharma that any healthcare legislation will bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. That's basically the same deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it's proven a bonanza for the drug industry. A continuation will be an even larger bonanza, given all the boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade. And it will be a gold mine if the deal extends to Medicaid, which will be expanded under most versions of the healthcare bills now emerging from Congress, and to any public option that might be included. (We don't know how far the deal extends beyond Medicare because its details haven't been made public.)

Let me remind you: Any bonanza for the drug industry means higher healthcare costs for the rest of us, which is one reason why critics of the emerging healthcare plans, including the Congressional Budget Office, are so worried about their failure to adequately stem future healthcare costs. To be sure, as part of its deal with the White House, Big Pharma apparently has promised to cut future drug costs by $80 billion. But neither the industry nor the White House nor any congressional committee has announced exactly where the $80 billion in savings will show up nor how this portion of the deal will be enforced. In any event, you can bet that the bonanza Big Pharma will reap far exceeds $80 billion. Otherwise, why would it have agreed? Read more here.

What Came Out of the North American Leaders' Summit?

The annual North American Leaders' Summit, attended by President Barak Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon, concluded on Monday, August 10.

The three leaders pledged strong commitments to cap and trade of greenhouse gases in keeping with the "global warming" THEORY to be fulfilled during the upcoming United Nations meeting. While the U.S. House has passed a bill that would create massive new taxes and further harm the economy, the Senate has yet to take up the bill.

Read more

Getting Paid for Volunteering

The Serve America Act, passed by Congress this year, will triple the number of Americans serving in AmeriCorps and similar programs over the next eight years. The act reauthorizes the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 and creates several new programs directed at schoolchildren, at a cost to the taxpayers of $6 billion.

The bill creates a new Education Corps for full‑time volunteers to work in schools. Other programs make grants available for schools and community organizations to involve high school students and high school dropouts in community service. The Summer of Service program will award $500 for college tuition or loans to middle or high school students who spend 100 hours volunteering.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Obamacare usurps parental rights

Chuck Norris writes:

Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is about the government's coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development.

It's outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading "home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children." The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

The bill says that the government agents, "well-trained and competent staff," would "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains ... modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices," and "skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development."

Are you kidding me?! With whose parental principles and values? Their own? Certain experts'? From what field and theory of childhood development? As if there are one-size-fits-all parenting techniques! Do we really believe they would contextualize and personalize every form of parenting in their education, or would they merely universally indoctrinate with their own?

It will not be just education. These government agents will be telling you how to rear your kids.

Tribute To Phyllis Schlafly,Founder Of The Eagle Forum Talks About The Supreme Court

Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute - Founder Of The Eagle Forum, Phyllis Schlafly

Feminists Demand and Receive

President Obama has repeatedly expressed his concern about our rising unemployment. When Obama announced his Stimulus appropriation, he promised millions of "shovel-ready" jobs. his proposal conjured up visions of crews in hard hats repairing our nation's infrastructure, roads, bridges.

But the feminists demanded that half the Stimulus jobs be given to women, demanding jobs for "human infrastructure" and "human bridges," which were euphemisms for social service, health-care, child care, and librarian jobs.

Unemployment figures show that men are continuing to lose jobs and that women are getting the jobs created by the Stimulus bill. Obama gave two of his economists the task of calculating the gender ratio of jobs to be created by the Stimulus legislation. They reported that women had only 20 percent of jobs lost in the great depression, but would get 42 percent of Stimulus-created jobs.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

United Nations Meeting, Guadalajara, Mexico

"Protectionist" typically describes opposition to free trade, but when it describes those opposed to Mexican trucks having free access to American roads, it means to protect American families from corruption and bribery. Allowing Mexican trucks and truckers free reign on American roads is not about free trade at all; rather, it is about ignoring the rule of law — even the NAFTA rules.

Read more

Morning Bell: The White House Strikes Back

An overwhelming majority of Americans (72%) don’t believe President Barack Obama will keep his promise to overhaul the health care system without adding to the federal deficit, according to a study released yesterday by the Quinnipiac University. According to Gallup: “Americans are being asked to approve major new health care expenditures at a time when they are not yet convinced that the last massive outlay of government money — the stimulus — has made an impact.”

Yet the White House and their allies are trying to convince the media that the anger at townhalls across the county is being manufactured by special interests in Washington. At a press conference, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called the protests “phony”, holding up a swatch of Astroturf to illustrate his point. And the White House is telling supporters “to punch back twice as hard” at anybody who dares to question their policies. Unfortunately, some Obama supporters are taking that call literally.

Read more

Government Health Care Isn't Safe

President Barack Obama made a false claim in his recent speech to the American Medical Association about a single-payer health care system. Obama falsely asserted that "there are countries where a single-payer system works pretty well." In fact, no government has ever been able to run a health-care system as well as private enterprise.

Canada is a model of how not to run health care. It is fortunate that Canada is so close to the United States because Canadians rely on American medicine for serious surgery. The Toronto newspaper reported that the physician shortage is so acute that some towns hold lotteries to win a ticket granting access to the local doctor. De facto rationing in Canada is practiced by waiting lists rather than by using its realistic name.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

The Public Plan Deception - It's Not About Choice

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann Talks About Obamacare

Poll: Americans Want Health Care Town Halls in their Communities

Contrary to charges from Democrats that the recent spate of contentions
congressional town hall meetings are the result of “Astroturf” and
“manufactured anger,” a new CNN poll finds a huge majority of Americans
would likely attend such a meeting on the issue of health reform if one
was held in their community.

Read more

Americans Return to Tougher Immigration Stance

More want immigration decreased than kept the same or increased

by Lymari Morales

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- With some U.S. lawmakers and immigration rights activists stepping up calls for the Obama administration to pursue immigration reform, Gallup finds Americans less favorable toward immigration than they were a year ago. Half (50%) say immigration should be decreased, up from 39% last year. A third (32%) say immigration levels should be kept the same, down from 39%, and 14% say they should be increased, down from 18%.

Lifetime Achievement Luncheon honoring Phyllis Schlafly.

REGISTER NOW!
Lifetime Achievement Luncheon
honoring Phyllis Schlafly

Monday, August 10, 2009 at 1pm
National Press Club
Washington, D.C.

This luncheon featuring conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly is now open to all who would like to attend. The luncheon is free, but you must register by Thursday, August 6. Space is limited.

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

Don't Apologize for Hiroshima

Today is the 64th anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, the attack that ended World War II. The liberals want us to hang our heads in shame for that event. However, the atom bomb made it possible for thousands of fine young American men to come home, grow up to live normal lives, marry and raise families, instead of dying a tortured death in Japan.

What the Hiroshima bomb accomplished was to stop the official U.S. plan to launch an island-by-island invasion of Japan. It was estimated that a half million Americans would be slaughtered because Japan was prepared to defend its homeland with 2 million troops and 5,000 kamikaze planes, all sworn to fight to the death. The atom bomb saved those lives, as well as those of about 400,000 prisoners of war held by the Japanese, whom Japan had planned to execute immediately in the event of an American invasion.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Listen to Phyllis on the "Crosstalk America" radio show at 2pm today

Phyllis Schlafly will be a guest on Crosstalk America with Jim Schneider today at 2:00pm Central time. You can listen online.

You can also call in with questions: 800-733-9829.

Phyllis will discuss her most recent column Reading the Fine Print in the Health Care Bill, which highlights problems of the Obamacare and gives page numbers.

You can read the entire bill here.

Massachusetts: A Model Not to Copy

President Obama's health-care plan is modeled after the Massachusetts plan which, when adopted, many applauded as innovative and destined for success. In fact, the Massachusetts plan has been a massive failure and is a model for what not to do.

State government spending on health care in Massachusetts has increased and currently is one-third above the national average. Insurance premiums have been increasing at nearly double the national average.

The costs to the taxpayers are rising, too, and one tax increase has not satisfied the appetite of the hungry plan. Yet, it is estimated that 200,000 are still uninsured. Even though Massachusetts has more doctors per capita than any other state, waiting periods to see physicians have grown. The average wait is now 63 days to see a family doctor, and 50 days to see a specialist. If you want to see the busiest, most popular physicians, the wait can be up to a year.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Conservatives Aren't Keeping Silent

Dana Loesch, a St. Louis blogger and conservative radio host who will be speaking at the How to Take Back America Conference, recorded a press conference where Rep. Russ Carnahan(D-MO) refused to answer the reporters questions about public opposition to out-of-control government spending and instead promoted the "successes" of the "cash for clunkers" program.



To find out about opportunities to talk to your representatives or future press conferences your representatives might hold, call your representative's office. Look up here.

Subscribe to Eagle Forum's email list to find out about official Town Hall meetings scheduled in your area.

Rep. Akin's Freedom Conference

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) hosted a Freedom Conference today in St. Louis, MO. Some of the staff attended and got some great talking points to help understand the two pieces of legislation moving through Congress: "Cap & Trade" and Obamacare.

Chris Horner, a Senior Fellow Competitive Enterprise Institute, gave the audience a great question to ask members of Congress about how Cap & Trade will affect Global Warming.



Other speakers included:

Garrett Hawkins, National Legislative Programs Director, Missouri Farm Bureau
Julie Eckstein, Project Director, Center for Health Transformation
Missouri State Senator Tom Dempsey

Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution

Health care "reform" is being marketed as reducing costs. However, the main goals of "reform" are actually to increase control by government bureaucrats and provide free guaranteed care to nonworking Americans and illegal aliens.

Employer mandates are included in most plans despite small businesses' forecast that this is a job-killer and would force them to spend money they don't have. Once employers realize that paying a fine is cheaper than providing health insurance, look for millions of Americans to lose the benefits with which they are now very content. Requiring every American to buy health insurance that provides benefits people may not want or need will force healthy young people to subsidize unhealthy older people. When people are required to pay for more coverage than they want or need, they usually try to get their money's worth, which means long waiting lists to see the doctor.

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Obama's Health Care Reform in Trouble

Barack Obama's high-speed train to Socialism was knocked off track by a surprising source: the Congressional Budget Office (known as the CBO). Just as the Senate Health Committee was about to begin voting on Chairman Ted Kennedy's health care plan, CBO released a report that this plan would cost at least a trillion dollars and still leave 36 million people uninsured. The CBO report says that the number of people with coverage through their employer would decline by about 15 million, and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million.

But Obama plowed ahead, saying "The cost of inaction is greater," and accusing his critics of "fear tactics" about "socialized medicine." In passionate rhetoric to the American Medical Association, Obama warned that "If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of General Motors."

Listen to my entire radio commentary on this topic.

Government health care would be wrong even if it “controlled costs.”

My conservative friends — and even a few media liberals — are agreed: The bloom is off the Obama rose. He’s not the Obamessiah, just another 50-percent president. He tried to do too much too fast, and his numbers are sinking. The Europeanization of health care is dead. Fuhgeddabouddit.

I wouldn’t be so sure. President Obama has no choice but to move fast, in part because the image he presented during the campaign — a post-partisan, post-racial, post-anything-unpleasant-and-controversial, pragmatic centrist — was a total crock. He has a vast transformative domestic agenda and — because most of its elements are not terribly popular — he has to accomplish it at speed, or he won’t get it done at all.

Health-care “reform”? As we’ve seen this past week in the House of Representatives, put not your trust in “Blue Dog Democrats.” And, as we’ll no doubt see in the weeks ahead in the Senate, put not your trust in “moderate Republicans” whose urge to “reach across the aisle” is so reflexive it ought to be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The president needs to get something passed. Anything. The details don’t matter. Once it’s in place, health-care “reform” can be re-reformed endlessly. Indeed, you’ll be surprised how little else we talk about. So, for example, public funding for abortions can be discarded now, and written in — as it surely will be by some judge — down the road. What matters is to ram it through, get it done, pass it now — in whatever form. Read more here.