I’m shocked. Or not.

After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress’ pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify “earmarks”-lawmakers’ requests for specific projects and contracts for their states-in documents that accompany spending bills.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.

Smaller government is the only way this kind of abuse can be reduced, not just a change in party power. The more Washington does — the more responsibility we hand over to them — the more money they get. The more money, the more abuse of it. Divide up some of that power into 50 pieces (commonly referred to at “states”), and you have more accountability and less abuse, mostly because when you centralize things in Washington, abusers have one-stop shopping for largesse.

Technorati Tags: Democrats, earmarks, smaller government, federalism

The economic growth in Q1 of this year was paltry.

The economy nearly stalled in the first quarter with growth slowing to a pace of just 0.6 percent. That was the worst three-month showing in over four years.

Chris at AMERICABlog quickly blames it on “GOP policies”. Fair enough, only if you credited GOP policies for this:

The economy’s 0.6 percent growth rate in the opening quarter of this year marked a big loss of momentum from the 2.5 percent pace logged in the final quarter of last year.

If not, blaming Republicans now is just disingenuous.

Chris, still cherry-picking, notes, “As a side note to the GOP, France was twice this number.” But let’s not forget that the 2.5% growth in Q4 beat France’s annual growth of 2%. And if you prefer France’s unemployment rate of 8.7%, feel free to move there. Or vote Democrat.

Technorati Tags: economy, AMERICABlog, France, unemployment

The right to freely exercise one’s religion outside of the 4 walls of a place of worship was affirmed by the Texas legislature. It’s unfortunate that it had to be affirmed at all, but in today’s church-and-state climate, it’s necessary.

The House embraced legislation Monday that seeks to clarify the rights of Texas public school students to offer public prayers at football games or graduation, hand out religious messages or hold religious meetings during the school day if they want.

Supporters said the Schoolchildren’s Religious Liberties Act, which passed on a 110-33 vote, would protect districts from lawsuits by setting guidelines for students’ religious expression while protecting students from being admonished, for example, if they talk about Jesus in an assignment about Easter.

You can’t keep people insulated from each other, and this bill takes the common sense step of acknowledging that.

“Freedom of religion should not be taken as freedom from religion,” Gov. Rick Perry said. “This was a vote for tolerance of diverse views in our education system so that students are not admonished for wishing a soldier overseas a ‘Merry Christmas’ or for any other harmless forms of expression.”

Precisely. The “diversity” crowd is the very group trying to remove diversity in the public square.

The bill has its opponents, who, as usual, use exaggerated language when describing religious speech.

“The intent of this bill is to enable people to impose their religious beliefs on people, and I stand four-square against that,” said Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, who is a Quaker.

“I was one of those students of a minority religion who was frequently subjected to unwanted … advice and insults when I was in the public schools. I do not believe the intent of the author [to avoid lawsuits]. I believe the intent of the author is to facilitate imposing certain religious values on students regardless of their religious faith.”

Sorry, but freedom from getting unwanted advice is not in the US Constitution. Those who insult you because of your faith should be punished by their parents or, for adults, marginalized, but it’s still not a legal issue, and it doesn’t mean that because some kids were mean to you in school that now all kids must be silenced on religious issues. Bathwater, meet baby.

And rather than dream up your own view of what the bill’s author intended, let’s just ask him.

Author Charlie Howard, R-Sugar Land, said repeatedly that the bill “does not allow anything that isn’t in the current law.”

What the bill does is specify that “a school district shall treat a student’s voluntary expression of a religious viewpoint, if any, on an otherwise permissible subject in the same manner the district treats a student’s voluntary expression of a secular or other viewpoint” as long as the expression isn’t obscene or vulgar and doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals or religious beliefs.

Further, the bill says students may not be penalized for expressing religious views in classwork, and they may organize religious meetings and use school facilities like any noncurricular group.

Not sure why homosexuality was specifically singled out, but this is a good step in the right direction.

Plano ISD has been at the center of this debate since 2003, when school officials told a student he could not hand out candy cane pens with a religious message during a holiday party.

Rep. Burnam can hand-wring all he wants about how hearing religious speech is somehow imposing values onto him (is he that impressionable?), but if we can’t give away pens in the name of religious freedom, things really are upside down.

Technorati Tags: religious freedom, Texas, Charlie Howard, Rick Perry, Lon Burnam, church and state, First Amendment, education

While some schools are showing Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” without rebuttal, a university class is demonstrating that perhaps the global warming alarmists can’t handle balance.

Nick Shipley, an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University freshman, had just spent a week of classes watching two films with polar-opposite conclusions about global warming.

“After watching ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ I was relatively convinced,” Shipley said one day last month in class. “(Al Gore) did a good job in presenting his points very methodically one after the other. They all build up to essentially prove his point.

“After watching ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle,’ my thinking completely changed,” he said. “I kind of did a complete flip-flop.”

It appears that the reason we have more global warming alarmists, especially on college campuses, is that the liberal activists and media are simply not…well….fair and balanced.

To be fair, both sides do their share of exaggeration, but both sides should still be allowed evaluation.

[James] Wanliss [space physicist who teaches the class] said he doesn’t necessarily subscribe to either film, but believes his students — and the public — should remain skeptical of theories such as Gore’s explanation of global warming.

Other Embry-Riddle scientists are less outspoken than Wanliss, but one — John Olivero, professor and chairman of the department of physical science — allowed that skepticism is an essential tool of the scientific method.

“Science lives with internal conflict all the time,” Olivero said. “Part of what we have to do is continually challenge each other.”

That process, they say, leads scientists closer to truths that may be elusive for lifetimes.

The truths of global warming are, if not inconvenient, incomprehensible, Wanliss argues.

“The atmosphere is incredibly complicated, and we know very little about it,” he said. “We are studying a system which is so big . . . we don’t know what all the variables are.”

Pointing to quotes in magazine articles, Wanliss says Gore and the producers of the “Swindle” film are purposefully overstating their science as a means to a political end.

And yet the Left talks of their foes in Holocaust-denial terms. The stifling of dissent in Al Gore’s America.

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change, Al Gore, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, James Wanliss, John Olivero

Time magazine reminds us of a little history.

When the Supreme Court struck down Texas’s law against sodomy in the summer of 2003, in the landmark gay rights case of Lawrence v. Texas, critics warned that its sweeping support of a powerful doctrine of privacy could lead to challenges of state laws that forbade such things as gay marriage and bigamy. “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are … called into question by today’s decision,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, in a withering dissent he read aloud page by page from the bench.

Rick Santorum was one of those critics.

“If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual sex within your home,” Santorum said at the time, “then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

As [Boston Globe columnist Jeff] Jacoby noted, Santorum was given “holy hell” and handed “nail-spitting” by some critics.

Where are the folks now who gave conservatives such a hard time? Given what Time is reporting, they’re probably being very, very quiet.

It turns out the critics were right. Plaintiffs have made the decision the centerpiece of attempts to defeat state bans on the sale of sex toys in Alabama, polygamy in Utah and adoptions by gay couples in Florida. So far the challenges have been unsuccessful. But plaintiffs are still trying, even using Lawrence to challenge laws against incest.

The key phrase is “so far”. I’m glad to hear that lower courts are now expanding the Lawrence decision, but these attempts at overturning state laws (joined by the ACLU, unsurprisingly) are unprecedented, and the outcome is by no means assured.

The issue does not appear to have been challenged in federal court previously, though the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2005 that a Wisconsin law forbidding incest among blood relations (but not including step-relations) did not conflict with Lawrence’s ruling. But in upholding prison sentences for a brother-sister couple in that case, the court acknowledged that the language in Lawrence is all but certain to prompt more challenges to prosecutions for sex-related crimes on privacy grounds.

Hey there, liberals. Pandora left this box for you. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Rick Santorum, Jeff Jacoby, Supreme Court, Lawrence v Texas

From watching the Republican debate, Mark Kilmer at Redstate notes some nuttiness on the part of the host.

Chris Matthews was moderating, and he used his forum to blast the Bush Administration in front of a group of Republicans who needed to keep their distance from that Administration. (NOTE: It was the same with Clinton (Bill) when he left office with half the contents of the White House in tow.) He asked Jim Gilmore if President Bush should shakeup his Administration. It’s not a question for a Presidential candidate, one who would serve after the Bush Administration had left town, but it was part of Matthews’ prank. He later asked Gilmore if he would keep Karl Rove in his Administration.

Is this the kind of shenanigans that Democrats allege would happen on Fox News, and why some of them decided to opt out? Fox-sponsored debates have had, as other debates have had, multiple questioners asking their own questions, and not just questioners from Fox. This one, however, essentially was a platform for Matthews to get in his digs. If MSNBC ever hosts a Democratic debate, it’s a safe bet that none of them will opt out. It’s not, by any means, a complaint about bias. It’s simply that Fox doesn’t drink the KoolAid ™ that apparently MSNBC has a fridge full of.

But we’re Republicans. We can take it. >grin<

Technorati Tags: MSNBC, Fox News, Chris Matthews, Democrats, Republicans, media bias

Shire Network News #89 has been released. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary segment.

Hi, I’m Doug Payton, and this is “Consider This” for Shire Network News.

First off, I’d like to apologize for the sound of my segment last week. I try to make it obvious when I’m quoting someone else by giving it that AM radio sound; a bit tinny. Well, apparently, I accidentally applied that to the whole segment. As an effect, tinny is OK. After a few minutes, it’s grating. Anyway, just wanted to make sure the blame was placed properly. It wasn’t Brian of London’s fault. It was Dick Cheney.

Moving on…

You know how you’re always being told to “vote your conscience”? Well, there’s a coalition of religious leaders out there that doesn’t want you to do that anymore. Well, it’s a religious coalition at least according to Reuters. You know Reuters. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”? Yeah, that Reuters. I’ll get back to that characterization in a moment, but first, here’s what the group “Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice” got Reuters to report.

“With the April 18 Supreme Court decision banning specific abortion procedures, concerns are being raised in religious communities about the ethics of denying these services,” the group said in a statement.

“They are imposing their points of view,” Barbara Kavadias, director of field services for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told reporters in a telephone briefing.

I have news for these folks. Every decision by the Supreme Court is an imposition on somebody. There are two parties involved, so someone doesn’t get their way. I daresay the KKK thinks civil rights laws are an imposition on them, but I also daresay this religious coalition approves of this imposition of a point of view. Whether or not something is an imposition has no bearing at all on its fitness as a law or a legal decision.

Next we get some serious name-calling and sexism. No proper left-wing rant would be complete without it.

She noted that the five Supreme Court justices on the majority in the 5-4 decision were all Catholic men — Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia.

All were appointed by conservative Republican presidents who oppose abortion, including President George W. Bush.

If this religious coalition were conservative or Republican, this would be hate speech. As it is, they can get away with this characterization.

Basically, they want Catholic men to vote the conscience of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, not their own. But I would point out that the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice does not sit on the Supreme Court. Those that do sit there were appointed by duly-elected Presidents, who themselves were elected by the people. So by extension, you are not allowed to vote your conscience, at least if it is at odds with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

And let’s not forget that this law that the Supreme Court upheld was voted for by 281 House members and 64 Senators from both parties, both genders, and a combination of religious persuasions, who themselves were elected by the people they represent. So by extension…well, OK, you know the drill.

But wait, there’s more! Not only are government officials not allowed to represent their constituents in this matter, neither are private citizens and businesses.

The group also complained about Catholic-owned hospitals that refuse to sterilize women who ask for it, refuse to let doctors perform abortions and do not provide contraception.

“Doctors, pharmacists and nurses are also increasingly exercising a so-called ‘religious or moral objection,’ refusing to provide essential services and often leaving patients without other options,” the group said in a statement.

Catholic doctors and Catholic-owned businesses should not, according to this religious coalition, be allowed to stay true to their religious convictions. Quite an ironic statement to make. If they’re so concerned about this, instead of imposing their views (sound familiar?) on others, they’re more than free to open their own “Abortions R Us” and provide those options. In the meantime, whining about religious freedom doesn’t really give much weight to their views about a court that decides constitutional issues.

OK, so about this “religious coalition”. In paragraph 11 of the story, Reuters finally gets around to telling us the make-up of this religious coalition.

The group includes ordained Protestant ministers, a Jewish activist, an expert on women’s reproductive rights and several physicians.

So we have Protestant ministers (no clue how many), one Jewish activist (so that you can call it a “coalition”), an expert on women’s reproductive rights (again, one, and not apparently representing a specific religion), and “several” (however many that is) physicians (who, again, aren’t representing a religion). Given their group’s name, and how Reuters initially refers to them as a “coalition of religious leaders”, there does seem to be two things at work here. Number 1, there’s a desire for the group to appear as though it represents a broad range of religious beliefs, when in reality it includes only left-wing Protestants and a single left-wing Jewish activist (not “leader”). Number 2, Reuters seems more than happy to promote this misconception until the very last minute, over halfway into the story, just before the point where they start talking about other groups’ reactions to these statements. Nope, no agenda there.

OK, full disclosure. I’m an evangelical, Protestant Christian who finds more in common with those 5 Catholic men than this “coalition of religious leaders”.

Brian, take it away.

Technorati Tags: Shire Network News, podcast, abortion, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, Protestant, Judaism, Catholic

Left-wing activists are trying to keep religious ideas from informing anyone’s opinion or public behavior.

A coalition of religious leaders took on the Catholic Church, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Bush administration on Tuesday with a plea to take religion out of health care in the United States.

They said last week’s Supreme Court decision outlawing a certain type of abortion demonstrated that religious belief was interfering with personal rights and the U.S. health care system in general.

The group, calling itself the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, said it planned to submit its proposals to other church groups and lobby Congress and state legislators.

I think these folks would be really surprised to learn how the religious beliefs of our Founding Fathers informed their lawmaking.

And it’s not just judicial opinions they’re trying to censor.

The group also complained about Catholic-owned hospitals that refuse to sterilize women who ask for it, refuse to let doctors perform abortions and do not provide contraception.

“Doctors, pharmacists and nurses are also increasingly exercising a so-called ‘religious or moral objection,’ refusing to provide essential services and often leaving patients without other options,” the group said in a statement.

They don’t want religious organizations to be able to practice their religious beliefs, at least (for now) where those beliefs contact the public. Keep ’em in the closet.

As usual, a history lesson would go a long way.

“And now, to make it worse, the government is codifying these refusals, first through legislation and now with the recent Supreme Court decision, where five Catholic men decided that they could better determine what was moral and good than the physicians, women and families facing difficult, personal choices in problem pregnancies,” it added.

What lovely anti-Catholic bias and sexism going on from these “tolerant” Leftists. But let’s not forget that the 281 House members and 64 Senators were a combination of religions and genders, and that they were democratically elected by the people. Doesn’t matter to these folks; any vote for a law that can be traced back to the beliefs of Catholic men should not be counted.

For the two-fer, we have some media bias at work here as well. As noted above, this group is initially characterized as “a coalition of religious leaders”, giving it the appearance of broad support in the religious community. Not until the 11th paragraph do we get a hint of the size and makeup of the group. “The group includes ordained Protestant ministers [how many?], a Jewish activist [one], an expert on women’s reproductive rights [one, and religious leader?] and several physicians [how many? religious leaders?].” The initial description of the group is charitable in the extreme, but something we’ve come to expect from our ever-vigilant, left-wing media.

(Hat tip: James Taranto.)

Technorati Tags: religious freedom, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, abortion, Supreme Court, media bias

Shire Network News #88 has been released. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary segment. Actually, this is the full text of what I was going to say, until I timed it and it came to over 6-1/2 minutes. SNN commentaries are generally kept to something under 3 minutes, so this one was way too long. As it is, the version I wound up using was still over 4 minutes. Apologies for the lack of humor in what is normally a satire show, but this subject is rather seasonal, and I wanted to make some points during the time of year where folks would be more inclined to really listen to it. Hopefully, the next segment will be less dour.

Hi, I’m Doug Payton, and this is “Consider This” for Shire Network News.

This past week in the US, the deadline came for settling up our income tax bill with the government. Normally, people either fill out their own tax forms, sometimes with the help of computer software, or they take it to a tax preparer. But Jim Geraghty, writing in the New York Sun, reports that John Edwards, Democratic candidate for US President, thinks that the Internal Revenue Service itself ought to be able to fill out your tax forms. Now, in addition to the huge conflict of interest issue this brings up, there are some practical considerations. Here’s how it’s described:

For Americans whose employers and financial institutions send all of their relevant tax data to the government, the IRS would calculate their bills and mail them completed returns, which he called “Form 1.” Filers could sign the form and return it, or reject it and file their own return if they disagreed with anything in the IRS’s calculations. Form 1 would not be an option for taxpayers with more complicated returns.

First of all, the IRS would only be relieving the burden of those with the absolutely simplest returns, and generally those with lower incomes. Sure, no pandering there, right? Secondly, who would pay for this new governmental feature? We would, likely in higher taxes. Even if this was all or mostly computerized, the government is notorious for winding up paying more for stuff than it costs in the private sector.

So now we’d have another income redistribution program of sorts. We’d all be paying an inflated cost for those who can’t seem to figure out what John Edwards admits are the simplest tax situations. This says more about the complexity of the tax system than anything else I can remember. The problem with the tax system isn’t that people who have the simplest situations have to pay others to figure it out for them. The root cause, if you will, is the complexity itself. But Edwards would rather make this onerous tax code easier for you to bear than deal with tax reform. Say, how about we go back to the old Roman empire days when tax collectors just came by and told you how much to pay? Simple, convenient, and certainly free from graft, right? Right?

And then just a few years down the road, of course, we’d hear liberals defending this program as a basic human right. If the government pays for it, we simply can’t do without it.

Matt Stoller, of the left-wing blog MyDD, is quite proud to pay his taxes, whatever the amount. Now in fairness, he, too, doesn’t like having less money to spend and is upset at the complexity. But he’s simply overjoyed to send in that check and calls it “the price of democracy”. Well, nobody’s denying that taxes are the price we have to pay, but let’s not forget that you can be overcharged for things, and that you can be force to buy things you don’t think are helpful to our democracy. Of course, in saying that, I’m proclaiming my hatred of democracy. Matt said so.

The right-wing likes to pretend as if taxes are a burden instead of the price of democracy. And I suppose, if you hate democracy, as the right-wing does, then taxes are the price for paying for something you really don’t want. Personally, I find banking fees, high cable and internet charges, health care costs, and credit card hidden charges much more abrasive than taxes, because with those I’m just being ripped off to pay for someone’s summer home.

What Matt conveniently fails to point out is that costs for those items, even to some extent, health care costs, are all voluntary, whereas taxes are not. You’re not required by law to purchase them. If you decided you don’t want to pay your taxes, however, you’ll likely find your wages getting garnished at best, or find yourself behind bars at worst.

And your taxes can be just as busy paying the mortgage for some bureaucrat’s summer home.

He’s also got a problem with understanding how we ever managed without an income tax.

Patriotism is about recognizing that we are all connected in a fundamental moral and physical sense, that the war in Iraq is our war, that poverty in New Orleans is our poverty, that public funding to cure cancer comes from each of us and not just the scientists who have made it theirs. The tax burden we face is a very small price to pay for the privilege of taking responsibility for our own freedom and our own society. And the hatred of taxes on the right comes from a hatred for this responsibility. It’s childish and immoral and unAmerican.

Yes, we do own all these things about our country, but then how did we pay for the War of 1812, and the Great Chicago Fire, and any of those medical breakthroughs that were discovered before the 16th Amendment in 1913? Truly amazing.

Tariffs were the general means for the government to raise money, and what’s interesting is that the tariff increases for the War of 1812 are credited with the strengthening of US industry. Has the income tax ever really done that? The city of Chicago was rebuilt mostly by private donations from around the nation, as well as business leaders, not government, going around the country getting other businesses to invest in Chicago. Hopefully, it’s obvious to Mr. Stoller that Chicago has indeed come back from that in a big way, and before the federal income tax.

Were these folks unAmerican for working it out for themselves rather than begging from Washington, DC for money? Or is it just right-wing, anti-democratic, unpatriotic and unAmerican to speak ill of taxes, to consider them burdensome? Then we need to consider the folks who said these things and what we should think of them.

“It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part.”
…
“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
…
“If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds… [we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account”
…
“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”
…
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending,
on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
…
“The power to tax involves the power to destroy.”
…
“No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil.”

I think I’d like to be counted with “unpatriotic”, “unAmerican” “childish” “right-wingers” like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, or Calvin Coolidge, among many others. Yes, democracy-haters all, right Matt? More likely, they had a healthy skepticism of government–any government–and its power to destroy.

Back to you, Brian.

Technorati Tags: Shire Network News, podcast, taxes, John Edwards, Matt Stoller, MyDD, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall, Calvin Coolidge

If you are requested to do something that goes against your religious beliefs, and you refuse, but you refer those who asked to someone who will, are you guilty of anything? Perhaps not here in the US, but in Canada, the same-sex marriage legislation’s draconian measures consider you so.

A Canadian Christian civil marriage commissioner in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Orville Nichols, could face up to $5000 in fines for having referred a homosexual couple to a different commissioner.

Human Rights Commission lawyer Janice Gingell asked the tribunal to find that Nichols contravened the code and order him to pay $5,000 in compensation to the complainant.

The 70 year-old Mr. Nichols used a clearly religious-based conscience argument for his refusal, saying his faith guides his daily life, that he prays and reads the Bible every day. He told the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal that his faith “takes first place” in his life. He said, “I couldn’t sleep or live with myself if I were to perform same-sex marriages.”

The other commissioner to whom the two men were referred performed the ceremony on the same date they requested of Mr. Nichols.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists as its first “fundamental freedom” the freedom of conscience and religion”. But for those pushing this agenda, the plain language of a Charter or a Constitution is not worth the paper it’s written on, and your “fundamental rights” are not recognized. Americans should take note.

Technorati Tags: Canada, Orville Nichols, Janice Gingell, christianity, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, religious freedom