First, lets see where he stands on social issues, then we’ll go to fiscal issues.

Life News reports:

Abortion activist Hillary Clinton today tapped pro-abortion Virginia Senator Tim Kaine has her vice-presidential running mate.

The Virginia politician is on record as trying to have it both ways — saying he is both a “traditional Catholic” and a strong supporter of abortion. Kaine has a pro-abortion record and the potential Clinton running mate is not following anyone. As LifeNews previously reported, Kaine said he is a “strong supporter of Roe v. Wade”  despite supposedly being a “traditional Catholic.”

[…]Leading pro-life groups know Kaine is pro-abortion.

“Like Hillary Clinton, Sen. Tim Kaine supports the current policy of abortion on demand,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Like Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kaine is so extreme on abortion he opposes even the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, legislation to protect unborn children from abortion after 20 weeks, when they are capable of feeling excruciating pain during dismemberment or other late abortion methods.”

As a U.S. senator, Kaine has voted against the pro-life position every chance he got. Sen. Kaine voted to allow government funding of abortion providers, and he voted against legislation to require an abortionist to notify at least one parent before performing an abortion on a minor girl from another state.

Kaine took his most extreme pro-abortion action yet with his recent co-sponsorship of the so-called “Women’s Health Protection Act” (S.217), known to pro-lifers as the “Abortion Without Limits Until Birth Act.” This bill would nullify nearly all existing state and federal limitations on regulation of abortion, and prohibit states from enacting meaningful pro-life laws in the future. This revamped version of the long-stalled “Freedom of Choice Act” is a priority of the pro-abortion forces in Washington, D.C.

“Sen. Kaine is good at hiding behind his Catholic background – but no one should be fooled,” Tobias said. “His record, and his openly declared legislative goals, are as pro-abortion as they come.”

[…][Kain says] “So for example, Monday, the Supreme Court’s likely to decide a really important case about abortion rights. Which is many states including Virginia have tried to basically take out the constitutional right that gives women the ability to choose by putting these onerous regulations on clinics, health clinics where abortions are provided. We fought those off in Virginia when I was governor because you have to let people make their own moral judgments.”Kaine is a longtime abortion advocate who has sought to appear moderate on abortion. But he was pro-abortion enough for Democrats for Life to yank its endorsement of him. His spokesman and website are now identifying him as a pro-choice Democrat.

Kaine says on his own web site that he doesn’t want to put any limits on the Roe v. Wade decision that allowed virtually unlimited abortions throughout pregnancy for any reason and has resulted in 55 million abortions.

“I strongly support the right of women to make their own health and reproductive decisions and, for that reason, will oppose efforts to weaken or subvert the basic holding of Roe v. Wade,” Kaine says, adding that he doesn’t support “criminalizing women’s reproductive decisions.”

“Tim Kaine will do nothing more than rubberstamp President Obama’s expanding abortion agenda,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of the Susan B. Anthony List in 2012 when Kaine was running for the Senate.

Kaine avoided directly giving his stance on abortion, in order to appear more conservative. However, his refusal to defend life in his political career tells the voters that Kaine supports abortion.

Whenever you are trying to evaluate whether a candidate is conservative or liberal, it’s best to use rating systems from groups like Heritage Action or the American Conservative Union.

Here is his rating from Heritage Action, which is part of the Heritage Foundation:

He’s to the left of the average Democrat in the very liberal U.S. Senate.  It you check the Heritage Action page, it actually shows all of his votes and explains why he got the 2% rating.

The American Conservative Union has an article discussing the voting record of Clinton, Sanders, Warren, Obama and Kaine.

They write:

“Another interesting fact in our analysis is the stark reminder that Sec. Hillary Clinton is no moderate.   While many in the media portray her as more centrist than self-described Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or fringe activist Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Clinton’s lifetime rating of 8.13% is within two percentage points from those extremists.  And shockingly, all three of these presidential hopefuls are even more liberal than President Barack Obama’s Lifetime Rating of 10% from when he served in the U.S. Senate.  If America wants a third Obama term, three candidates will not disappoint.

“Finally, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is the only Member of Congress with a 0% ACU Lifetime Rating. Kaine is not the moderate Democrat that he likes to pretend he is.  We can only conclude that the former Democratic National Committee Chairman plans to serve one-term representing the Commonwealth of Virginia before he returns to lead the fringe portion of the liberal activist base.”

Finally, here is Citizens Against Government Waste:

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) today released its congressional rating of the presumptive Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).

Sen. Kaine has served in the U.S. Senate since 2013. He holds a lifetime CCAGW rating of 7 percent, making him one of the Senate’s most “hostile” members toward taxpayers. In 2014, Sen. Kaine earned a dismal zero percent rating. CCAGW’s Congressional Ratings, which have been issued annually since 1990, identify which members of Congress voted to protect taxpayers and which voted against their interests on spending and taxes.

CCAGW President Tom Schatz said, “Sen. Kaine has spent his time in the Senate supporting the big-spending agenda of President Obama, so he makes for an ideal running mate for the fiscally reckless Hillary Clinton. Sen. Kaine’s miserable 7 percent CCAGW lifetime rating is worse than Mrs. Clinton’s 8 percent lifetime score, which included two years – her first and last – at zero percent. By comparison, President Obama’s lifetime CCAGW rating was 16 percent and Vice President Joe Biden’s lifetime rating was 21 percent. In other words, a President Clinton and a Vice President Kaine could be twice as damaging to the fiscal interests of the United States than the current administration, and would be highly likely to make the government bigger and more intrusive than any administration in history. That is certainly something to keep in mind as the presidential campaign goes into full swing after the Democratic convention next week.”

As Governor of Virginia, he was also far to the left, especially on social issues. Although the Democrats might like to present him as a moderate, he is no such thing. And you discover that if you are willing to do the work of looking at voting records. No one can hide from their voting record.

Another day, another defensive handgun use to stop a criminal from committing a crime.

Daily Wire reports:

A would-be San Antonio intruder died at the scene of the home he was trying to break into Thursday morning after being shot by the homeowner.

Police said the criminal was a man in his 40’s attempting to burglarize the home at around 9:30 a.m. The homeowner, a man in his late 70’s, and his wife heard a commotion and went to investigate.

Police spokesman Doug Greene told KSAT12 that “the homeowner and his wife warned the man to leave, but when he broke the front door handle, the homeowner fired a shot through the door, striking the man in the chest.”

“He was really trying to make a strong effort to get into the house,” Greene said. “They felt the need to defend themselves and their property.”

Paramedics arrived shortly after the shooting and performed live-saving measures but were unable to revive the suspect.

Police told reporters that the homeowner is not expected to face any charges in the incident. Detectives also said they recovered a vehicle near the scene that may have belonged to the suspect, but they are still working to accurately identify the man.

The homeowner’s neighbor, Carl Rick Jr. told the reporter that he wasn’t surprised the homeowner made it out without a scratch.

“They picked the wrong man because Bill was ex-Special Forces Lt. Colonel. He was at one time dropped behind enemy lines in North Vietnam.”

It’s very important that everyone remember what the second amendment is used for in the United States. The second amendment allows law-abiding people to purchase firearms in order to defend themselves from criminals.

Although there is opposition to gun ownership in certain circles, the academic literature is quite clear and decisive. Legal ownership of firearms reduces rates of violent crime. Whenever laws that allow law-abiding citizens to carry firearms for self-defense, violent crime rates decrease. Whenever laws are passed that restrict law-abiding citizens from owning and carrying firearms for self-defense, violent crime rates increase.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

• The Lott book was published by the University of Chicago Press (now in its 3rd edition)
• The Malcolm book was published by Harvard University Press

Here is a paper by Dr. Malcolm that summarizes one of the key points of her book.

Excerpt:

Tracing the history of gun control in the United Kingdom since the late 19th century, this article details how the government has arrogated to itself a monopoly on the right to use force. The consequence has been a tremendous increase in violent crime, and harsh punishment for crime victims who dare to fight back. The article is based on the author’s most recent book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002). Joyce Malcom is professor of history at Bentley College, in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is also author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (Harvard University Press, 1994).

Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: “Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.” The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain’s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban.

And the result of the 1997 gun ban:

The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose—by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.

[…]According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.

I think that peer-reviewed studies – from Harvard University, no less – should be useful to those of us who believe in the right of self-defense for law-abiding people. The book by economist John Lott, linked above,compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, but both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

Friday – that means you get good news, courtesy of the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Excerpt:

As part of a settlement with a Christian student group, officials with North Carolina State University have revised the school’s solicitation policy so that it no longer unconstitutionally censors the free speech of students. In light of the policy change, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing the student group, Grace Christian Life, withdrew their lawsuit against the university on Tuesday.

Last month, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina issued a preliminary injunction that halted the university’s former policy, which required a permit for nearly any kind of non-commercial student speech or communication anywhere on campus.

“Students of any religious, political, or ideological persuasion should be able to freely and peacefully speak with their fellow students about their views without interference from university officials who may prefer one view over another. NC State did the right thing in revising its policy to reflect this instead of continuing to defend its previous policy, which was not constitutionally defensible,” said ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer.

ADF-allied attorney Edmund LaCour of Bancroft PLLC served as co-counsel in the lawsuit, Grace Christian Life v. Woodson, and argued before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina in favor of the preliminary injunction that the court granted. The settlement essentially incorporates the terms of the injunction and requires the university to adopt a policy that protects the First Amendment freedom of all students to engage in speech throughout the campus without prior permission from the university.

The university only selectively enforced its permit policy and did so against Grace Christian Life, a registered student organization, when officials told members of the group that they needed a permit to speak with other students in the student union.

You can learn more about the ADF by reading about them on their web site.

Well, that’s your good news for Friday. ADF is one of the best Christian organizations for solving the real problems that Christians actually face. I really am grateful for their work defending religious liberty. Somebody has to hold the line against the efforts by those on the secular left to deny basic rights to Christians, such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and conscience protection. It seems like it is open season on Christians, these days. Hardly a day goes buy where some organization or other (often taxpayer-funded!) is trying to intimidate Christians from exercising their Constitutional rights. Well, if nobody shows up to fight a battle, then the other side wins. If we don’t have groups like the ADF showing up to fight for us, we will lose these legal battles. Make sure that you honor those who are fighting for you and for your freedom to be who you are.