News for 09/05/2009- Parents Who Object Aren’t Smart Enough To Raise Kids and Other Affronts to American Citizens

Why Parents Don’t Trust the Educator-in-Chief and His Comrades from Michelle Malkin for CNS News
http://cnsnews.com/ne…
They think we’re crazy. “They” are the sneering defenders of Barack Obama who can’t fathom the backlash against the president’s nationwide speech to schoolchildren next Tuesday. “We” are parents with eyes wide open to the potential for politicized abuse in America’s classrooms.

Ask moms and dads in Farmington, Utah, who discovered this week that their children sat through a Hollywood propaganda video promoting the cult of Obama. In the clip, a parade of entertainers vow to flush their toilets less, buy hybrid vehicles, end poverty and world hunger, and commit to “service” for “change.” Actress Demi Moore leads the glitterati in a collective promise “to be a servant to our president.” Musician Anthony Kiedis pledges “to be of service to Barack Obama.” The campaign commercial crescendos with the stars and starlets asking their audience: “What’s your pledge?” http://www.youtube.co… (here is the video in question)

This same “Do Something” ethos infected the U.S. Department of Education teachers guides accompanying the announcement of Obama’s speech—until late Wednesday, that is, when the White House removed some of the activist language exhorting students to come up with ways to “help the president.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan had disseminated the material directly to principals across the country—circumventing elected school board members and superintendents now facing neighborhood revolts. O’s bureaucrats can whitewash offending language from the Sept. 8 speech-related documents, but they can’t remove the taint of left-wing radicalism that informs Obama and his education mentors. A spokesman maintained that the speech is “about the value of education and the importance of staying in school as part of his effort to dramatically cut the dropout rate.” But the historical subtext is far less innocent.

The Green “Trojan Horse” from Investors Business Daily
http://www.ibdeditori…
Van Jones, a special adviser to the president, revealed his Trojan-horse strategy during a 2008 interview on leftist Uprising Radio in Los Angeles. “The green economy will start off as a small subset” of a “complete revolution” away from “gray capitalism” and toward “redistribution of all the wealth,” he said. “And we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.” A self-described “communist,” Jones caught heat recently for calling Republicans “a**holes.” He’s also a 9/11 “truther” as it turns out, one of many red flags in a radical past that, remarkably, didn’t disqualify him from shaping domestic policy in this White House. Jones apologized for his “inappropriate” remarks concerning Republicans while distancing himself from the nutty people calling for an investigation of the Bush administration for bombing the Twin Towers on 9/11. Jones signed a petition pushing for such a witch hunt, even though the Ivy League lawyer claims he didn’t know what he was signing. But he hasn’t been made to answer for his communist beliefs, which are even deeper than first thought.

Trying to change the subject, Jones insisted his work at the White House is “entirely focused on one goal: building clean-energy incentives which create 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and use renewable resources.” That doesn’t tell the full story. As the president’s “green-jobs czar,” it’s clear Jones has a hidden agenda. Judging from his own words, his environmental concerns appear to be a front for creating a massive new welfare program — complete with paid job training and counseling — for criminals. Jones has a shockingly soft spot for felons. Before joining the White House, he agitated against “the punishment industry,” which he claims profits from a “racist war” against people of color. He has called U.S. prisons “slave ships on dry land” and has served on panels calling for an end to prisons and the freeing of all inmates. The former Oakland, Calif., community organizer has said he wants to “build a pipeline from the prison economy to the green economy,” including hiring parolees to weatherize homes and offices. He secured grants to start a Green Job Corps in Oakland.

In his 2006 memoir, President Obama proposed government-subsidized green jobs “to hire and train ex-felons on projects” such as “insulating homes and offices to make them energy-efficient.” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who worked with Jones in California as a congresswoman, has already put such plans in motion. Jones’ “green jobs, not jails” program is but a “radical kernel” of what Jones says he wants to reap. He intends to use the green movement as a Trojan horse to socialize the entire economy. “Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to ‘eco-capitalism’ where at least we’re not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet,” Jones said. “Will that be enough? No, it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether.”

Beyond our system of capitalism to communism, is what he means. Though Obama’s father was a Marxist, there’s no indication the president subscribes to Jones’ vision. But Obama and Jones share a common background in the same Marxism-steeped faith: Black Liberation Theology, which we first warned voters about years ago. The father of the movement — James Cone — believes that by merging Marxism with the Gospel, African-Americans will be liberated. “Together,” Cone said, “black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us a way to build a completely new society.” Cone mentored Obama’s longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a big fan of Marxist regimes. Wright has made a number of comments over the years that have been described as anti-capitalist and anti-American, and that suggest he believes deep conspiracies drive American politics. We also warned that it’s dangerous for a presidential aspirant to surround himself throughout his career with a coterie of radicals. They could wind up in the White House making policy. Van Jones is Exhibit A.

Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent from CNS News

http://www.cnsnews.co…

Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), has advocated a policy under which the government would “presume” someone has consented to having his or her organs removed for transplantation into someone else when they die unless that person has explicitly indicated that his or her organs should not be taken. Under such a policy, hospitals would harvest organs from people who never gave permission for this to be done.

Outlined in the 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the main reason that more people do not donate their organs is because they are required to choose donation. Sunstein and Thaler pointed out that doctors often must ask the deceased’s family members whether or not their dead relative would have wanted to donate his organs. These family members usually err on the side of caution and refuse to donate their loved one’s organs. “The major obstacle to increasing [organ] donations is the need to get the consent of surviving family members,” said Sunstein and Thaler. This problem could be remedied if governments changed the laws for organ donation, they said. Currently, unless a patient has explicitly chosen to be an organ donor, either on his driver’s license or with a donor card, the doctors assume that the person did not want to donate and therefore do not harvest his organs. Thaler and Sunstein called this “explicit consent.” They argued that this could be remedied if government turned the law around and assumed that, unless people explicitly choose not to, then they want to donate their organs – a doctrine they call “presumed consent.” “Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate,” they explained.

The Trouble With Textbooks- a look at how Textbook Publishers are Shaping America by Incorrectly Reporting History from Fox News
http://www.foxnews.co…

Hard-edged propaganda now suffuses America’s history textbooks. A thorough cover-to-cover reading of almost any high school history text leaves you with the impression that the United States is at best embarrassing, and at worst a menace to world peace.Did shielding children from scary words like “mailman” turn them into better students? Compare the test scores in your kids’ school district to those from 1960, and judge for yourself. Or consider this: When asked about the Vietnam War recently, almost a quarter of students described it as a conflict between North and South Korea.

Yet even flat ignorance is better (and certainly more amusing) than the hard-edged propaganda that now suffuses history textbooks. A thorough cover-to-cover reading of almost any high school history text leaves you with the impression that the United States is at best embarrassing, and at worst a menace to world peace. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two gets almost us much emphasis as the American liberation of Europe. Non-American cultures, by contrast, receive every benefit of every doubt. Try to find a high school textbook that even mentions the widespread practice of slavery among American Indians. Good luck. Even September 11, an event hardly shrouded by the haze of time, gets a rewrite. In Prentice Hall’s textbook on contemporary American history, for instance, the 19 hijackers are not identified as Islamic extremists. Students are left to guess why they did it.

Don’t take my word for it. Make a pledge to yourself to look through your children’s textbooks this year. Take a look at what’s there, but also at what’s missing. If you find bias or distortions, don’t be silent. Raise holy hell. Someday your kids will thank you for it. Check out the Fox Special: “FOX News Reporting: Do You Know What Textbooks Your Children Are Really Reading?” on Friday, September 4 from 9 – 10 p.m. ET on FOX News Channel. The special re-air throughout the weekend including on Saturday at 4 and 10 p.m. ET and again on Sunday at 1 a.m., 3 and 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. ET.

The Constitution and American Sovereignty by Mr. Black at WeThePeople

http://wethepeople.or…

“WOULD WE be far wrong,” President Lincoln asked in a special message to Congress in 1861, “if we defined [sovereignty] as a political community without a political superior?” Maybe that’s not exhaustive, but it comes on good authority. And notice that for Lincoln, sovereignty is a political or legal concept. It’s not about power. Lincoln didn’t say that the sovereign is the one with the most troops. He was making a point about rightful authority….

The Constitution provides for treaties, and even specifies that treaties will be “the supreme Law of the Land”; that is, that they will be binding on the states. But from 1787 on, it has been recognized that for a treaty to be valid, it must be consistent with the Constitution—that the Constitution is a higher authority than treaties. And what is it that allows us to judge whether a treaty is consistent with the Constitution? Alexander Hamilton explained this in a pamphlet early on: “A treaty cannot change the frame of the government.” And he gave a very logical reason: It is the Constitution that authorizes us to make treaties. If a treaty violates the Constitution, it would be like an agent betraying his principal or authority. And as I said, there has been a consensus on this in the past that few ever questioned. Let me give you an example of how the issue has arisen. In 1919, the United States participated in a conference to establish the International Labour Organization (ILO). The original plan was that the members of the ILO would vote on labor standards, following which the member nations would automatically adopt those standards. But the American delegation insisted that it couldn’t go along with that, because it would be contrary to the Constitution. Specifically, it would be delegating the treaty-making power to an international body, and thus surrendering America’s sovereignty as derived from the Constitution. Instead, the Americans insisted they would decide upon these standards unilaterally as they were proposed by the ILO. In the 90 years since joining this organization, I think the U.S. has adopted three of them.

Today there is no longer a consensus regarding this principle of non-delegation, and it has become a contentious issue. For instance, two years ago in the D.C. Court of Appeals, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental group, sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), claiming that it should update its standards for a chemical that is thought to be depleting the ozone layer. There is a treaty setting this standard, and the EPA was in conformity with the treaty. But the NRDC pointed out that Congress had instructed the EPA to conform with the Montreal Protocol and its subsequent elaborations. In other words, various international conferences had called for stricter emission standards for this chemical, and Congress had told the EPA to accept these new standards as a matter of course. The response to this by the D.C. Court of Appeals was to say, in effect, that it couldn’t believe Congress had meant to do that, since Congress cannot delegate its constitutional power and responsibility to legislate for the American people to an international body. This decision wasn’t appealed, so we don’t yet have a Supreme Court comment on the issue.

The delegation of judicial power is another open question today. There’s no doubt that the U.S. can agree to arbitrations of disputes with foreign countries, as we did as early as the 1790s with the Jay Treaty. But it’s another thing altogether to say that the rights of American citizens in the U.S. can be determined by foreign courts. This would seem to be a delegation of the judicial power, which Article 3 of the Constitution says “shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” This became an issue last year in the case of Medellin v. Texas, which considered an International Court of Justice ruling that Texas could not execute a convicted murderer, because he had not been given the chance to consult the Mexican consulate before his trial, as he had the right to do under an international treaty. The Supreme Court, after much hand-wringing, concluded that it didn’t think the Senate had intended to give the International Court of Justice the power to decide these questions of American law as applied by American courts. I would go further and say that no matter what the Senate intended, this is not a power which can be delegated under the Constitution. But it is no longer clear that a majority on the Supreme Court would agree.

Or consider the Spanish judges who want to arrest American politicians if they venture into Europe, in order to try them for war crimes. This is preposterous. It is akin to piracy. And not only has our government not protested this nonsense, but it has contributed to building up an international atmosphere in which this sort of thing seems plausible—an atmosphere where the old idea of a jury of one’s peers and the idea of Americans having rights under the Constitution give way to the notion of some hazy international standard of conduct that everyone in the world can somehow agree upon and then enforce on strangers….

It is important to think about these issues regarding sovereignty today, because it is possible to lose sovereignty rather quickly. Consider the European Union. The process that led to what we see today in the EU began when six countries in 1957 signed a treaty agreeing that they would cooperate on certain economic matters. They established a court in Luxembourg—the European Court of Justice—which was to interpret disputes about the treaty. To make its interpretations authoritative, the Court decreed in the early 1960s that if the treaty came into conflict with previous acts of national parliaments, the treaty would take precedence. Shortly thereafter it declared that the treaty would also take precedence over subsequent statutes. And in the 1970s it said that even in case of conflicts between the treaty and national constitutions, the treaty would take precedence. Of course, judges can say whatever they want. What is more remarkable is that all the nations in the EU have more or less grudgingly accepted this idea that a treaty is superior to their constitutions, so that today whatever regulations are cranked out by the European Commission—which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bureaucracy—supersede both parliamentary statutes and national constitutions. And when there was eventually a lot of clamor about protection of basic rights, the court in Luxembourg proclaimed that it would synthesize all the different rights in all the different countries and take care of that as well…..