What’s Wrong With This Picture?

I joined the outrage of the Catholic Bishops when they discovered that their best bud in government, Barack Obama, is no friend to the faith. I’m Lutheran, so I don’t have a problem with preventing conception, otherwise known as birth control. However, I do have a problem with the government requiring anyone to do something contrary to his faith-based convictions. As my pastor pointed out, if someone has a faith-based conviction that he should sacrifice his child by fire, then that conviction does not really pass muster in our society. There seems to be a difference of opinion about the future Islam promises to suicide bombers, but I think that in the US, we would not call that a religious conviction we must respect. However, I have not encountered many religious convictions of similar character.

In the big picture, it is not too common for religious conviction and national interests in the US to conflict. That conflict is deliberately and deliberatively prevented by the US Constitution. The Founders were so certain that they were crafting a document that contained all the powers they wanted the federal government to exercise that they thought it unnecessary to specifically list things it might not do, but the first ten amendments address the concerns of people who felt that a central government could not be trusted to limit itself unless its boundaries were clearly specified. The first amendment declared that the government was prohibited from interfering with the free exercise of religion. The first patriots wanted to be sure that no overzealous members of any religion would be permitted to force citizens to support it or follow it against their will. They likewise wanted to be sure that no overzealous government would be permitted to force citizens to forego the expression of their faith in word and deed.

The Obama administration has set a heavy government boot on the throat of Catholic institutions, and they will now be required not only to forego the expression of their faith in refusing to provide or recommend birth control, sterilization or abortion services to their employees. They will, despite the Constitutional protection they ought to find in the first amendment, be compelled to provide health insurance to their employees that includes birth control, sterilization and abortion services, and they must pay a premium that covers such services with no copay for the insured. One might have expected such oppressive regulation in the former USSR, but not in the United States of America.

There is some hope that in some court the Catholic Bishops will be upheld. There is still some hope that the Supreme Court will overturn the legislation enacting Obamacare. There is always hope. But this state of affairs ought not to be.

The pronouncements I hear from the Obama administration feel like assaults on the autonomy of the states and assaults on individual liberty. Obama’s “We Can’t Wait” initiative speaks volumes. He has no respect for the separation of powers. In fact, he has no respect for the Constitution that lays out the separation of powers in the government of the United States of America. He deliberately sidesteps the Constitution and claims that he is simply using power that is not specifically prohibited. This attitude is exactly the opposite of the Constitution’s statement that the government only has the powers listed. The logical construct based on that statement is that each arm of government has only the powers listed. The president may not step into nebulous gaps and invent powers not granted to him.

In trying to force Catholic agencies nationwide to comply with a healthcare regulation that demands they act against conscience the president is definitely breaking new ground. Let us pray that this new ground is discovered not to support his step. We must not let our freedom of religious expression be suppressed. I am not a Catholic, but I agree with them that they have the right to live by their convictions. I pray that my own convictions will never be assaulted similarly, but you never know. Who would ever have believed this could happen in the USA?

 

We are leaving Cat Island and on our way to Long Island in the Bahamas.
We are finally seeing some of the really remote spots.

Clean Stoves?

Please forgive me for digressing from the politics of this election year to a completely ridiculous political action not actually embedded in our election discourse.

When I heard that Hillary Clinton was in charge of giving $50 million to the UN, I was outraged. To give the UN any money for any purpose whatsoever is a big mistake. It all sounds very high-minded at the time, but we all know what happens to money that arrives in the UN. It sticks to the fingers of dictators and shysters around the world who spit in the eye of the USA and deprive their own people of any benefit from that money.

When I learned that the money was to be used for clean stoves, I was really mystified. Clean stoves? My stove could use a good cleaning, and it hadn’t occurred to me to simply replace it instead of cleaning it. Why would the UN get involved in that kind of an exchange?

Then I read that it was all about cookstoves which are actually wood fires built on a few stones under a shelter or outside. These stoves are alleged to cause disease from smoke inhalation, but worse, they cause climate change due to emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and black carbon. Wasn’t black carbon supposed to be the big cancer problem with grilled hamburgers a few years ago? and aren’t people still grilling hamburgers? This whole project sounds like a complete scam.

In 2004, my husband and I visited Papua New Guinea. During our three-week visit there, we observed the use of wood fires and stones to cook food which we ate. Some of the fires were, indeed, under a cooking shelter, where women stored their cookware and tools, just like any American cook would use a suburban kitchen. We sat in the shelters or near the fires and suffered no harmful consequences whatsoever from either the fires or the food. We know how this works. There is no emergency with cookstoves that requires the immediate injection of $50 million to replace these stoves around the world. It is a complete hoax.

Reid Detchon, vice president for energy and climate at the United Nations Foundation, said, with regard to this project, “You’re going to have to create a thriving cookstove industry that can supply both stoves and fuels that people want and need.” Here is the big problem. The stoves we saw were in use by people who really had no hard currency with which to buy either a stove or non-polluting fuel for it. They were not dissatisfied with their stoves, nor did they express any experience with ill health or bad weather associated with the stoves. (I dispute the whole allegation that a wood fire is polluting and some other kind of fuel is not. People have been using wood fires for a long time. It is hard to believe that after millions of years they have suddenly become a threat.) These people are healthier than most of the people I know who live in “civilization.” Show me one person in downtown Baltimore who could walk five miles barefoot over rocks and uphill with three watermelons in a bag hung from his/her forehead.

This article demonstrates yet one more evidence that we need to disengage from funding the UN. We have already given the UN more money than any other country. If they want $50 million for something, let them pull it out of our annual contribution to support the UN’s many delightful initiatives. Oh, maybe that wouldn’t work, since it is likely that all that money has already been siphoned off to decorate and delight dictators in Africa and South America. Hmmm.

The UN is not a good steward of the money it receives. The UN does not expect from any country what it feels it has the right to demand from the US. It is time for that whole charade to stop. We don’t need to support the replacement of cookstoves for people who do not want their cookstoves replaced and who do not have the means to pay for different cookstoves anyway. It is no help to people to give money to the UN, because the people never see any of that money. Let’s stop it now! Let’s stop the flow of bucks right here!

Why doesn’t the president defend citizens instead of enemies?

The latest news with regard to a plan to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, is that the burning was called off after the federal government intruded in what was a private expression of our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. What next?

The proposed book burning has been the hot topic of conversation in the news for days. A tiny church in Gainesville, Florida, planned to burn copies of the Quran as a protest to a plan to build a mosque within the footprint of the 9/11 assault on the United States by Muslim extremists in 2001. The idea that burning someone else’s holy book is a good way to accomplish anything is complete lunacy, but in the USA, our constitution guarantees us the freedom to speak our minds, even if the speech is lunacy. When some demented artist created a “work of art” consisting of a crucifix placed in a beaker of urine, the display was protected in the name of free speech, notwithstanding its outrageous insult to Christians. We have always had a right to free speech, and because our president pledges in his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States,” we expect the federal government to preserve, protect and defend our freedom of speech.

A lot of people who talked about the plan to burn copies of the Quran were diverted from the central issue to the dispute by the fact that Muslims around the world engaged in their own versions of free speech by burning American flags and shouting “Death to America.” Muslims in some places even presumed to threaten American lives if this event took place. While the threats were outrageous and even credible after our experience on September 11, 2001, the threats do not justify trampling on the constitutional right to free speech within the boundaries of the USA.

That being the case, I find it extremely troubling that the FBI showed up in Gainesville and held two meetings with the pastor. The FBI operates under the direction of the president of the United States and represents one of the forces he should bring to bear against assaults on freedom of speech. In this instance, however, the FBI acted in concert with Muslims around the world to restrain free speech. When the federal government behaves as if the constitutional freedoms of citizens take second place to the umbrage of people elsewhere, I am deeply disturbed. Where is the ACLU?

When President Barack Hussein Obama spoke with “Good Morning America” he said, “This country has been built on the notion of freedom and religious tolerance,” as if stopping this Quran-burning event was proper because of that notion. I contend that it is exactly that notion that requires us as a nation to protect the right of this church to burn Qurans if it wants to and to speak out against the proposal to build a mosque at Ground Zero if it wants to. The president is completely on the wrong side of this issue when he is on the side of suppressing free speech.

The president, however, would have us believe that he acted out of concern for our soldiers. We were supposed to believe that there would be attacks on our soldiers and maybe even on private citizens by outraged Muslims if this Quran-burning took place. For starters, our soldiers are at risk of being attacked by outraged Muslims every day in Afghanistan and Iraq, so this event could not be used to justify any concerns about endangering them. As for our private citizens, the might of the federal government is supposed to be used in protection and defense of our private citizens, and we are accustomed to believe that it will use its power against our enemies, not against us.

For the record, I would not choose to use my own freedom of speech to burn a Quran as a way of engaging in discourse about the mosque at Ground Zero. I would not choose to burn anybody’s holy book as an expression of my position in any disagreement. Nevertheless, I contend that in the USA, we know that book-burning is not warfare. It speaks to the warfare of ideas, but that really is the point. Ideas. We don’t expect guns and bombs to be brought to bear against people discussing differences of opinion, and when someone does bring arms forth on one side of the argument, we expect the federal government to defend whoever is attacked that way, not to attack the people engaged in the discussion.

The federal government as administered by Barack Hussein Obama is becoming autocratic and tyrannical and extremely intrusive into our freedoms. This president clearly believes that he was elected dictator, not president. The sooner we remove all the supports for his political power the better. This year we must elect representatives and senators who will reject the Obama agenda that ignores our constitution and tramples our freedoms. In 2012 we must elect a different president, a president who will actually live up to his oath of office and exercise his power against our enemies, not our citizens.

Where exactly do we draw the line?

I hear a lot lately about racism. That word figures prominently in what passes for analysis of the current political scene. Racism. Everybody who stands in certain positions relative to politics right now is accused of racism, and everybody who stands in certain other positions is presumed to be entitled to be angry about racial insults dating back to the era of slavery in the US.

Well, my question is this: if it is reasonable to say that the black people in the US today have every right to be outraged over the history of slavery and that they should be compensated and accommodated because their ancestors were for a time slaves, then where does it stop? My question is, since Angles, the ancestors of the English-speaking people who colonized the New World in the seventeenth century, were enslaved for generations by Roman citizens, isn’t it reasonable to say that the white people in this country who can be verified to be descendants of slaves have a right to be angry and outraged by that history? Is it not reasonable to say that anybody who can prove he or she is descended from a slave ought to have the right to be outraged by just about anything anyone else says? Shouldn’t all the people in the US get to work tracing their ancestry to find out if they have the right to outrage, compensation and accommodation due to slavery or perhaps some other horror we have not yet identified?

I think so. I really believe that we have not yet done enough to raise the consciousness of people about the way they have been demeaned and debased and oppressed and wounded by history. We must do more. I think it is high time that we raised the consciousness of the white people of this country to uncover all the terrible wrongs done to them by the Romans in the past and by their own countrymen/countrywomen (let’s keep the politicalspeak gender conscious) in merry old England and so forth. There have been a lot of wrongs done to a lot of people, and we are all descended from some of those people. Let’s get out all that dirty laundry and air it right now. It is time to drag out the truth of racism and slavery and bad language and disrespect and get it all out where we can view it non-stop.

While we are at it, let’s determine which countries in the UN we ought to charge with high crimes because of these outrages. Never mind that they happened anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years ago. A wrong is a wrong, and it must be paid for. The passage of time only deepens the insult and the wounds. Let’s go to the UN with our list of demands and start applying pressure to obtain reparations from the descendants of the oppressors to the descendants of the oppressed. I already know that Italy will owe us huge amounts of money due to all those Angle slaves, and there are countries in Africa who may be bankrupt after they pay reparations to the descendants of people they enslaved, many of which slaves they then sold without a moment’s thought to Portuguese slave traders for eventual sale in the US.

If we get started right now, we should be able to build a list of victims in the US whose ancestors were enslaved by somebody at some time within just a few months. If we do a really good job, we might be able to find slave ancestors for just about everyone. Then we could simply tell the UN that as a matter of justice and fairness to all, we will simply withhold the amount of US contributions to the UN up to the amount of reparations our people are due, and that should put an end to our UN contributions for at least a hundred years. That act, all by itself, ought to help world peace.

Don’t you think so?

Speaker Pelosi, Come and Get Me!

The latest word is that Nancy Pelosi believes there is a need to investigate the “funding” of the opposition to building a mosque at Ground Zero, the site of an unprovoked attack on innocent civilians by individuals who justified their aggression as an act of obedience to their Islamic faith. Ms. Pelosi appears to have the notion that people who oppose this insult to our country and to all the people who died there are employees of some organization that wants to offend Muslims.

If Nancy Pelosi wants to know why Americans oppose the building of a mosque at Ground Zero, she can put me at the top of her list. I will be happy to explain it to her.

We do not oppose the building of a Muslim mosque. We think Muslims have the same freedom of religion as everybody else. We do oppose the building of a Muslim mosque at Ground Zero, because it is an inappropriate site for a mosque.

Here is the situation. On September 11, 2001, 19 men in four airplanes set out to attack the United States in the name of Allah. They were all adherents of Islam, and they all believed that the US is the “Great Satan.” They believed that by destroying the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, they would be taking an important step in the full destruction of the Great Satan. They may have been delusional on all counts, but we all saw Muslims in the Middle East on television celebrating at the fall of the Trade Center towers, so the terrorists in the airplanes were not alone in a perception that they were doing something Muslims could be proud of. The towers of the World Trade Center did not fall down because of some natural event; they fell down because terrorists destroyed those towers in the name of Islam.

There are many followers of Islam who do not support such acts of terrorism. I have spoken to a number of such people through the years since September 11, 2001. I respect their concerns that Islam not be stained with the image of these men. However, the only reason this event happened is that the people who perpetrated this crime believed they were doing something consistent with their faith. “Islamic terrorism” is a phrase that will forever be associated with this event.

Furthermore, to add insult to injury, the history of Islam includes a practice of building mosques on the site of Islamic military victories.

Now, to the issue of today. Now, a group of Muslims wants to build a mosque at the site of Ground Zero, a site everyone associates with Islamic militarism. As if this were not enough, the Islamic cleric who is leading the drive to build this mosque in this place, is also leading a drive to establish Sharia law in the USA. Sharia law is the enactment of Islamic theology in society, and Sharia law is completely opposite to the law of this country, based on our constitution.

This is why we don’t want a mosque at Ground Zero. The people who want to build a mosque have every right to build that mosque. We are all fine with the building of a mosque, but not at Ground Zero.

The image of a mosque at that location is a finger in the eye of every family that lost a loved one in the carnage of September 11, 2001. It is a finger in the eye of every firefighter and policeman of the city of New York who died that day. It is a finger in the eye of the firemen and policemen and all the people who supported them with food and shelter in their work round the clock for days to help search for survivors and victims in the monstrous wreckage of the World Trade Center. It is a finger in the eye of every citizen of the USA who knew that but for the grace of God, it could have been any building in any town in this country, because we are all part of the Great Satan in the eyes of many Muslims. There are plenty of Muslims who do not feel that way, but this event and this place are inextricably linked to fanatical terrorists who acted, authorized or not, on behalf of Islam.

Let there be a new mosque in New York City, but not at Ground Zero. Not in view of Ground Zero. There are plenty of other places to build mosques. Let this congregation that wants a house of worship find some other place. That’s it. Let them freely seek a location that will be a place of peace and worship and fellowship for their people. I applaud that idea. Just not at Ground Zero.

Come ahead, Nancy. Ask me who funds my words and my thoughts and my actions. The answer is NOBODY! I am not funded by anybody. I speak out as a normal, free, American citizen who has the right to speak my opinion in public without any hindrance. Nobody paid me to say these words. I speak freely, just like any other American citizen has a right to do.

Come on, Nancy Pelosi. Come and get me. Ask me about the “funding” of my opposition to the building of a mosque at Ground Zero. Ask all of us. When you get the real answer, you will know fear. Special interest funding has no power like the power of free American voters at the ballot box. Fear that.

The Truth Comes Out

The truth always comes out. It may take a very long time. As the old saying goes, the wheels of God grind slowly. The truth is out now. From the Washington Examiner we read, “President Obama has abolished the position in his White House dedicated to transparency and shunted those duties into the portfolio of a partisan ex-lobbyist who is openly antagonistic to the notion of disclosure by government and politicians. Obama transferred “ethics czar” Norm Eisen to the Czech Republic to serve as U.S. ambassador.”
The article provides considerable detail on the man who will add the duty of transparency to his already packed schedule of responsibilities as a defender of the presidential agenda. I recommend that you read this article at least once and consider its long-range implications. We already have seen repeated examples of the real truth – this administration has absolutely no intention of being transparent. Every word spoken covers some hidden agenda. Over and over we see the press and the public shut out of events we ought to know about.
Here is my point. Government of the people, by the people and for the people is about to perish from the earth, because this kind of government must necessarily be transparent. Totalitarian governments always hide what they are doing and present us with propaganda officers instead of truth. Read this article and think about it. Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Obama-closes-curtain-on-transparency-468557-100595914.html#ixzz0wbEMrbWS

Please! Bring Me a Crying Towel!

I just read a statement from an interview with a family that has an annual income of $70,000 in which the couple says they are “never more than a paycheck or two from the streets.” ( From “Message in a Bathtub: Does the Death of the Middle Class Spell the End of the American Dream?”, by Jessica DuLong at the Huffington Post.) There is something terribly wrong when a couple that can hold down jobs that together earn $70,000 every year do not believe they could survive if those paychecks stopped. They suggest that they are almost in poverty with this income. The gist of the article is that this situation is the fault of our society, because there is such a large gap between the haves and have-nots. I say that the real problem is the lack of imagination these two people express.

The writer offers up statistics that talk about a flat income level for many workers over the past few years while executives are alleged to have continued on average to increase their income. So the real problem is a feeling that a couple who earns $70,000 has not had a raise for a few years and their feelings are hurt? My father had a job as a professional engineer. It was a lifetime career. Yet during the years in my life that would have cost him the most – my teen years, he never received a raise. None of his colleagues did, either. It was just a fact of life. I don’t remember my parents ever suggesting that the lack of a raise put us just a couple of paychecks from the street.

The real problem is not this couple’s income level. It is their attitude. They earn plenty of money for a couple, even for a couple with children. They are far from impoverished, except for their attitude.

The rest of the article pointed out that a lot of people want to “take back our country,” and there was a suggestion that such a move might invigorate our stagnating economy. That possibility is supposed to suggest that there might be hope for this poor couple. There is no question that the economy is in dire straits, but this couple with a $70,000 income is not suffering, except in their heads. They suffer from envy, and they suffer from making themselves into victims of some imagined wrong.

Nothing imprisons a person like making himself (or herself) into a victim. A victim has one job – telling a sad story over and over, hoping that someone will recompense the victim and avenge the wrong. It is truly sad that this couple has fallen victim to their own sad story of envy and bitterness. They have a good income, and they could have a good life. They might have a problem if one or both of them lost their current job, but it is completely ridiculous to wallow in that attitude. If they are living paycheck to paycheck, why is that? It isn’t because somebody else got a raise when they didn’t. It most likely is due to complete ingratitude for the income they now have. It is likely they have overstretched their credit obligations to a point that does, indeed, put them at risk. This situation is nobody’s fault but their own. $70,000 is a plenty fine income to support a family, and if they have financial stress, then they need to work on that problem. Throwing stones at people who got raises last year, no matter who they are, is not going to help this couple live within their means and be happy about it.

I think it is completely ridiculous that anyone expects any of us to whine along with this couple that has a completely livable income. If the author of the article thought she was bringing some national tragedy to light, she is in error. She has allowed herself, instead, to fall victim to the political agitation to stir up class warfare in a classless society. This is the USA. It doesn’t matter if somebody makes more and somebody makes less. This is the land of opportunity. People who want to move forward do not whine and cry that they are two paychecks from the street; they get out and work and believe in themselves and take charge of their own lives. They don’t expect other people to whine and cry with them.

Let’s stop throwing stones at the “rich” or the “top 1% of earners” or whatever is the buzz word of the day. Let’s manage our own money and take charge of our own lives and stop being crybabies, for goodness sake. $70,000! This is a good living!

Is Government God?

Sharron Angle has been quoted accusing our current government of trying to be God. Rather than take an opinion right off the bat I think I will look at what it might mean to be God, and what might motivate her to make such a statement.

Those of us who worship God know some of his characteristics and expectations. Let’s see how they stack up against the government.

We who worship God give him offerings, but when we do that, we know that we are only giving back to him what is his already. He created everything, and we possess things as stewards of God’s gifts to us. The government, on the contrary, has nothing unless we give it something. When the government gives us anything, it is something the government already took away from us. Usually, what we receive from the government is pitifully little in comparison with what we gave. This does not sound much like God.

The government, however, does mimic godlike behavior. The government wants worship. The current government is worshiped fervently by the sycophant media, which works very hard to keep the public informed of the government view of things and works equally hard to prevent our hearing of anything remotely critical of the government. When a heretic speaks out in opposition to the government view of anything, the government and the media join in labeling the dissent as racism, the new word for heresy.

The government truly does like offerings, too. Unlike God, however, the government does not rely on people to give of their own free will. The government makes laws that take money from people who have earned it, and gives it to people who did not earn it. Furthermore, the government is beginning to get the idea that it should decide how much money is enough for each person to possess. Knowing that too much money is bad for people, the godlike government then justifies taking all the rest for itself. Oppressive taxation makes all the citizens poor, but the godlike government must think that equality of poverty is preferable to prosperity.

The government tries to appropriate unto itself God’s omniscience, too. We have been told that the government knows what we should eat and what we should weigh. The government knows what every school should teach. The government knows what every kid should have for breakfast and for lunch, and any day now, the government will likely tell us there is no reason for the children to come home at all, because the government knows what they should eat for dinner and how many hours they should sleep. the government knows how much money insurance companies should pay out in claims and how much they should pay their employees. The government knows better than the automobile industry what kind of cars the manufacturers should make. The government knows that the earth is warming globally, despite the fact that no real scientific analysis confirms this allegation. The government knows that a blown oil well is the greatest catastrophe that has happened since the eruption of Krakatao, even after the well is capped and the spilled oil disappears.

In ancient Rome, the emperors demanded worship, and people complied in order to be politically correct. The whole idea was that Rome gave to the people everything they needed and demanded from them complete worship and compliance with government demands. People were supposed to give thanks to the government for their lives and their blessings.

During the past two years, we have heard our government pretend that it is the source of all things good. Our president has suggested that we expect our government to take care of us. He advocates that we turn to the government for our food, our housing, our transportation, our jobs (or our compensation for not having a job), and so forth. Our government wants us to look to it for everything. In other words, it isn’t enough that the media worships the government day and night; our government wants the rest of us to do the same.

I think Sharron Angle may be right. Our government is certainly trying to be the Most High, and it certainly wants worship and offerings. Maybe we need to think seriously about throwing this fake god off its high horse. Maybe it is time to elect some people to government who know that the role of government is to perform some duties defined by our constitution, and otherwise stay out of the way. We will reserve our worship for the real God.

What next?

I just read an article announcing that something called the Livable Communities Act of 2010 has passed the Senate Banking Committee on a 12-10 vote. I was appalled to discover that Barack Obama has motivated someone to create a bill that puts the federal government in charge of planning the way communities use their land. Isn’t it bad enough that even very small cities have zoning commissions that keep people from using their land the way they want to? It really is beyond the pale to think that the federal government is on the way to controlling the use of land it doesn’t even own.

In January, President Obama spoke to the US Conference of Mayors. He said, “It’s time to throw out old policies that encouraged sprawl and congestion, pollution, and ended up isolating our communities in the process. We need strategies that encourage smart development linked to quality public transportation, that bring our communities together.” What made him think that anybody wants him to run our communities? Our president is telling us that he thinks we do not have the right to live where we please, own cars if we please and work where we please. He wants to control all of these parts of our lives.

The worst news about this act is a comment from a blog post at whitehouse.gov. It turns out that the “strategies” Obama referred to when speaking to the mayors are the most oppressive initiative he has yet undertaken. Considering the massive debt he has incurred on behalf of all of us, considering the oppressive taxation he intends to impose when the hated Bush tax cuts expire, considering the unbelievable volume of jobs lost and the record unemployment coupled with the record utilization of food stamps, to say that this land use initiative is more oppressive than any of that is saying something. Judge for yourself.

In a July 9 blog post at whitehouse.gov you will find these words:

“Today, many Americans are car-dependent, living far from their workplaces in residential subdivisions that don’t have quality public transportation and traditional amenities like corner markets, schools, parks, and medical facilities.”

If you don’t find the term “car-dependent” scary, you need to re-read that sentence. The implication of the sentence is that it is morally wrong for you to need a car to get to work, to shop, to school, or to places of entertainment. The implication of these words is that the federal government wants us to live like third-world countries where everyone rides buses and bicycles. But that is not the end. The federal government wants to tell us that we are forbidden to live so far from work that we need cars. The federal government wants to control where we work and where we live and where we buy groceries. According to an article at http://cnsnews.com/news/article/70626 “The federal neighborhood planning initiative is designed to coax localities into restricting where people can live, work, and shop into small areas connected by public transportation.”

I don’t know about you, but this looks like the greatest intrusion into personal liberty by the federal government I have ever observed. It appears to me that the federal government has started down a path toward the complete control of our lives. The so-called Healthcare Reform Act made it clear that our current administration and Congress have no regard for the Constitution or for personal liberty. This act takes away still more of our liberty.

There are two bills with the same name making the rounds of Congress right now. Both HR4690 and S1619 travel under the title of Livable Communities Act. The senate bill was actually introduced in 2009. S1619 is the bill which was reported out of committee on August 3, 2010, and recommended for a vote in the full senate. I could not find any evidence of a schedule for the full senate vote on the bill, but I recommend we all pay close attention to this bill. It looks like just the sort of thing that might be slipped past our watchful eyes in the middle of the night. HR4690 has been referred to a number of committees. In normal times we would expect that to mean that it would be while before the bill makes it to the floor. These are not normal times.

Our socialist leaders are feeling the pressure of popular distrust of their ostensible good intentions. The election in November is likely to turn both the senate and the house on its head. When that happens watch out. We need to be alert to any effort of a lame duck session to pass bills like this one that may not have passed before the election. We must speak up and speak up and speak up. We do not want the federal government to assume control of our lives. We want the liberty our Constitution promises us. We want to decide for ourselves where we will live. We want to decide for ourselves where we will work. We want to decide for ourselves if we want to own and drive a car. We do not want to cede our personal liberty to the federal government.

In the former Soviet Union, the government told people what jobs they would have and where they would live. It appears to me that the Livable Communities Act is headed down that path. We must stop this act before it gets started.