Tag Archives: Democrat

News

Economists and investors are alarmed by Obama’s reckless and wasteful spending

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Reuters reports on a statement by 150 economists backing Republican demands for spending cuts.

Excerpt:

More than 150 economists back House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner’s call to match any increase in the debt limit with spending cuts of equal size, according to a letter released by the Republican leader’s office on Wednesday.

The letter will give Boehner an important talking point as he and his fellow House Republicans meet with President Barack Obama at 10 a.m. to discuss the debt limit and other fiscal issues.

“An increase in the national debt limit that is not accompanied by significant spending cuts and budget reforms to address our government’s spending addiction will harm private-sector job creation in America,” the letter said.

Signatories include Nobel laureate Robert Mundell of Columbia University and economists from schools like New York University and Georgetown University, as well as conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute.

The Treasury Department has warned that the country could face a default that could push it back into recession and roil markets across the globe if it does not raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit by Aug 2. Treasury has been tapping federal employee pensions and other funds to pay the nation’s bills since it reached the current debt limit on May 16.

Republicans say they will not back any increase that does not include steep spending cuts and other limits to ensure that debt stays at a manageable level.

The Republican-controlled House on Tuesday defeated a bill that called for a debt-limit increase without conditions.

This Wall Street Journal article quotes a few economists responding to the recent disappointing job report.

Excerpt:

–What appeared to be a sustainable level of job growth seems to have faded hard in May. Yes nonfarm payrolls increased for the month, but that increase is actually a net-negative considering population growth that adds 75,000 – 85,000 workers to the labor force in an average month. Job growth is (was?) the only thing going for consumer incomes and spending, and this most recent result will throw said spending, responsible for 70% of economic activity, into a questionable state. –Guy LeBas, Janney Montgomery Scott

–There is no way to put lipstick on that pig: That was an extremely weak employment report. Nonfarm payrolls rose at the slowest pace since last September and private payrolls (+83,000) even posted their smallest increase since last June. One important factor behind the sudden deterioration between April and May was the swing in retail employment. The latter fell by 9,000 in May after still rising 64,000 in April. That pattern corroborates our view that the unusually late Easter lifted payrolls in April and were a corresponding drag in May… One sector that has to be highlighted here is “leisure & hospitality”. After creating 132,000 jobs (44,000 per month) between January and April, the sector cut 6,000 jobs in May — a monthly swing of -50,000 jobs. The reasons for this could be manifold: Households had to cut back on spending for arts, entertainment etc. amid soaring gasoline prices, or they were reluctant to visit restaurants amid higher food prices. –Harm Bandholz, Unicredit

–The slowdown in the pace of growth has clearly rattled the confidence of small and medium size firms that have been responsible for much of the hiring over the past few months.. Beneath the headline the data was just as dreary. Goods producers essentially slammed the brakes on hiring, with manufacturers culling 5,000 workers from the payrolls. Seasonal adjustments at the BLS likely accounted for the increase in hiring in the food and beverage sector, thus negating whatever McDonalds effect on retail hiring that might have occurred. The only real positives in the report were hiring by health care firms and in business services which modestly decelerated below their respective three month averages of 40,000 and 56,000 respectively. –Joseph Brusuelas, Bloomberg

–It is fairly clear that in the face of increasing uncertainty, against the backdrop of a deep recession and shallow recovery, firms decided to stop hiring. The bigger question remains whether this is a temporary hold or the pause before renewed layoffs on a broad scale. Looking at the underlying metrics of the economy, the June employment report will likely be worse than May. Going past the next the several months the economy is in the nexus of a temporary squall today created by the supply chain disruption and higher food and energy prices. All else being equal these issues will resolve themselves and the economy should rebound later in the summer. All else is not equal, however, as China is slowing, QE2 is ending, and no one really knows what fiscal policy is beginning. In sum, these factors will build increasing headwinds to growth whose full effect on real activity is unlikely to be felt for several more months.–Steven Blitz, ITG Investment Research

–The critical importance of continued labor market improvement cannot be overstated, as the wage and salary income that a labor market recovery, even a sub-par one by historical standards, provides to consumers will be key in providing fuel for ongoing economic growth in 2011. Therefore, today’s payroll figures, along with other evidence pointing to labor market woes in May (higher initial unemployment claims and a reduction in small business hiring plans being the two most important) are bad news indeed. To be fair, all was not terrible in this report, as the average workweek held steady from an upward revised 34.4 hour level in April and the manufacturing workweek increased to a robust 40.6 hours. –Joshua Shapiro, MFR Inc.

We’re in serious trouble, and the Democrats are oblivious.

News

Obama administration paves way for false sexual harassment charges

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Famous conservative professor Mike Adams explains the problem at Townhall.

Excerpt:

[T]he Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has announced new guidelines that will force due process to take a back seat to political correctness. These guidelines will apply to sexual harassment and felony sexual assault cases.

[…]According to the new OCR guidelines, any college that accepts federal funding or federal student loans (close to 100% of our nation’s colleges) must now employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof in sexual harassment and sexual assault cases. This lowered standard replaces the traditionally accepted standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which, according to most triers of fact, is close to 100% confidence of guilt. In contrast, “preponderance of evidence” means the campus judiciary only needs to be 50.01% confident that a person is guilty of a given offense – even if that offense is rape, which, regardless of degree, is always a serious felony.

This mandate from the federal government will have profound real-life costs for real students. If we learned anything from the infamous Duke Lacrosse case it is this: Academia is quick to blame people for creating a “rape culture” on campus and slow to take responsibility for false accusations.

Unfortunately, Duke was not an isolated case. At Stanford, student jurors in sexual misconduct cases are actually given “training materials” that say things like, “Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence” and “An abuser almost never ‘seems like the type.'”

In other words, even highly respected universities like Stanford try to create unfair and partial juries prior to rape adjudications – in clear violation of the spirit of the 6th Amendment (Do you remember when liberals cared about the “spirit of the law”?). Adding a mere “preponderance” standard to such a toxic environment would be a recipe for disaster – disaster in the form of wrongful felony convictions.

The OCR mandates are not merely confined to actions. They apply to students’ speech, too. Columbia University already lists “love letters” as a form of sexual harassment. The University of California, Santa Cruz, classifies using “terms of endearment” as sexual harassment. (Who could have ever imagined that one could be endeared and harassed at the same time?). At Yale, “unspoken sexual innuendo such as voice inflection” is considered sexual harassment. The absurdities are seemingly endless in 21st Century “hire” education.

Studies have shown that the number of false rape accusations is near 50%.

Here’s a Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy.

Excerpt:

“Forty-one percent of all reports are false.”

This claim comes from a study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University. Kanin examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.

Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

Although Kanin offers solid research, I would need to see more studies with different populations before accepting the figure of 50 percent as prevalent; to me, the figure seems high.

But even a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.

False accusations are not rare. They are common.

If you would like to get an idea of how false rape accusations are handled by the police, here is an example. Here’s a very recent example.

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Polemics

What can Christians do to prevent abortion?

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WARNING: This post is extremely opposed to Democrats, feminists and the postmodern/relativist/universalist church. Please do not read if you are easily offended.

Consider this account of an abortion. (H/T Mary, The Other McCain)

Excerpt:

My biological father abandoned my mother while we were toddlers.  He was a charming rogue of a gambler who came and went in our lives, leaving a wake of debt and infidelity.  My mother had been encouraged to get an abortion (illegally) by more than one family member when she found out she was expecting me, (the middle child).  Thankfully she gave birth to me and later to my younger brother, and was a loving mother. When Daddy’s gambling debts caused her small teaching salary to be garnished, she filed for a divorce.  Even after the first divorce she had been a good mother, taking us to church, reading us the Bible in the morning before school, singing to us at night, and praying with us for our wandering father.  She was gentle and supportive and I always knew I could go to her for help.  When mother remarried my first stepfather, (who was an alcoholic) things became difficult.

A devastating trauma struck our family in the summer of 1971 when I was 13 years old. My younger brother was killed in a car accident on our way home from a camping trip with our grandparents. He was 10 years old. My grandfather was also killed, my grandmother lost a leg, and my sister and I were injured.  The car accident and family trauma triggered a chain of events that led to my mother and first stepfather to divorce.

My stepfather was committed to a mental hospital briefly, and mother had an emotional breakdown. My sister and I went to live with my aunt and uncle for some months.

When we returned home to my mother after the divorce, things were not the same. My mother seemed wounded and disillusioned with life.  Without the stability of the family, or the church, we all struggled to recover from my brother’s death. She was still working as a teacher but she was living with my second stepfather, though they were not married yet.  He is a man I have grown to love and respect over time, yet in the 1970’s, when he was living with my mother, he was a different person than he is today and we disliked each other.

My sister and I were left on our own most of the time.  Previously, I had been raised going to church, but after the accident we just never went back. My sister and I became angry and rebellious. My sister left home when she was about 16, and backpacked around the country with her boyfriend. There I was at age 15, my sister gone, and feeling like I was in the way. There was a sense of being an obstacle to my mothers’ relationship with this new man.

My friendships changed from the kids we knew at church to the kids who hung out at the local Teen Center. Some of them took drugs and drank.

[…]My mother signed over guardianship of me to Steven after I had moved to Boston. I remember my surprise when Steven told me she had signed the papers and trying to take this in mentally. A sense of vulnerability came over me, knowing that I was his ward, but we were not married. He had not expressed his intentions of a long-term relationship with me. He had mentioned that he wanted guardianship papers so I could travel across state lines when he was on tour. I had told him my mother would not sign me over to him. I asked him how he had got her to do it. He said, “I told her I needed them for you to enroll in school.” I felt abandoned by my mother as well as my father and stepfather. Steven was really my only hope at that point.

So now what do we learn from this? Who is responsible for Julia’s abortion according to these facts? And what should Christians do to prevent a situation like this from occurring again? Should we wait until the pregnancy happens, or is there a way to attack the root of the problem with pro-family policies and effective church involvement?

First of all, it’s important to point out that fatherlessness causes women to engage in early sex.

Consider these facts:

– Adolescent females between the ages of 15 and 19 years reared in homes without fathers are significantly more likely to engage in premarital sex than adolescent females reared in homes with both a mother and a father.

Source: Billy, John O. G., Karin L. Brewster and William R. Grady. “Contextual Effects on the Sexual Behavior of Adolescent Women.” Journal of Marriage and Family 56 (1994): 381-404.

– Children in single parent families are more likely to get pregnant as teenagers than their peers who grow up with two parents.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. National Health Interview Survey. Hyattsville, MD 1988.

– A white teenage girl from an advantaged background is five times more likely to become a teen mother if she grows up in a single-mother household than if she grows up in a household with both biological parents.

Source: Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe. “Facing the Challenges of Fragmented Families.” The Philanthropy Roundtable 9.1 (1995): 21.
(Source)

Fatherlessness has many causes, but the most obvious cause is that women freely choose to have sex with men who will not stick around to raise the children. That is why we have an out-of-wedlock birth rate of over 40% – women are consenting to sex with men who will have not demonstrated that they are willing and capable of committing to marriage and parenting. The choice of who to have sex with is, in virtually every situation, the woman’s decision. Women with low self-esteem are especially prone to avoid men who have strong moral character, and definite ideas about religion. They want to avoid being “controlled” or “rejected” when they act immorally. So they deliberately choose men who will not judge them or lead them spiritually. So the blame for fatherlessness lies solely on the woman – she chooses the man who she intends to have sex with.

Women cannot blame an irresponsible MAN for hurting them if they CHOOSE HIM and then he acts… IRRESPONSIBLY. He was irresponsible BEFORE the woman got there, and yet she still chose him of her own free will. Women are very well educated these days, and they have plenty of time to think about marriage. But what I have found is that they often resent the idea of using any criteria for men other than entertainment, feelings and peer-approval. How will they look in wedding pictures, they wonder?

We have already talked a lot about how women choose men using the 180-second rule, based on physical appearances and “confidence”. Women are not doing a good job of evaluating men for the role of husband and father. They are choosing based on shoes and voice and shoulders. So of course this is not going to work. Everything else in life requires lots of time spent reading, planning and testing if you hope to have success. But when it comes to men, many young, unmarried women choose irrationally and stupidly, based on selfishness and vanity. And the problem gets worse as successive generations are raised without fathers. Fathers matter. Fathers need to respected for the role they play in parenting.

Politics

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that leftist social engineers push sex education and welfare subsidies for women who chose to deliberately avoid men who are protectors and providers. However, women again do not escape blame here, since 77% of young, unmarried women voted for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls. Obama is a Democrat, and Democrats are the party of sex education, single mother welfare, no-fault divorce, and same-sex marriage. Democrats are the anti-marriage party, and young, unmarried women turn out in droves to vote for Democrats. And these policies cause the out-of-wedlock birth rate to skyrocket.

Naturally, the more that these young, unmarried women vote for bigger and bigger government to bail them out of their own irresponsible choices with men, the higher taxes will go, and the less money marriage-minded men will have. Men with less money DO NOT GET MARRIED. And the decline of boys in the schools isn’;t going to help them to find jobs, either. Instead of valuing good men, it seems as though young, unmarried women prefer to marry the government, since government mails out the checks but makes no moral demands. Parenting is left to taxpayer-funded day care and public schools – not fathers. We need to realize that fathers can only be effective when they have authority in the home, and this is usually related to the fact that they are primary breadwinners.

Postmodernism, moral relativism and universalism in the church

Another factor is the church. Julia’s mother was a very devout, spiritual and pious Christian. She attended church regularly, read the Bible and sung all the praise hymns. And how did this affect her decision making? Well – it didn’t. And the reason for this is two-fold. First of all, the church has stopped providing boundaries for behaviors and making moral judgments. Churches have embraced postmodernism (there is no truth), moral relativism (moral judgments are evil because people feel bad when they are judged) and universalism (believe anything you want as long as it makes you feel good). Christianity is no longer presented as being TRUE, with evidence and arguments (apologetics). Instead it is presented as something that makes people feel better, and you choose the religion you like.

The purpose of going to church for Julia’s mother was to have good feelings and a sense of community. She was not interested in discovering scientific and historical evidence that would make the moral rules of Christianity incumbent on her – she was not interested in moral obligations. Moral rules, like the rules around chastity and courtship, are “too strict”. It’s better to just take church as another way of feeling happy, and then do whatever you want. I once knew an adulterous woman who had sex with her boyfriends in the same house as her children, yet she loved to attend church and to sing Handel’s Messiah at Christmas – for the spectacle and the emotional high. Imagine what view of marriage her children got from that?

Anti-intellectualism in the church

In addition to the failure of the church to defend against postmodernism, moral relativism and universalism, there is the problem of the fundamentalist churches that just preach from the Bible without ANY idea of why the Bible should be taken as an authority. So, not only is the church disinterested in talking about the Big Bang, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, the habitability problem, irreducible complexity and so forth, but they are also disinterested in explaining moral issues like abortion and traditional marriage. When churched parents have discussions with their children, they use church merely as a way to boss the children around so that they have less trouble with the kids. They scare them with the Devil and Hell (which are both real) without ever explaining prescriptive moral obligations using evidence.

For example, Julia’s mother’s church and parents SHOULD HAVE explained to her the importance of chastity and courting using evidence from social science that shows how chastity improves marital stability and marriage quality – things like communication and fidelity. The bad effects of cohabitation and hooking-up should have been explained WITH EVIDENCE, like you find in Dr. Laura books or Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse books. I can walk into churches to hear some of the most famous preachers, like John Piper and Alistair Begg, and never once hear a single piece of real-world evidence. All I get is “the Bible says” and that has no effect on people who do not have reasons to accept the Bible as true, and an  understanding of how that truth is applied in the real world. Apparently, in many churches it is considered high-treason to ask – “are these things really true? And how do we see that they are true here in the real world, with publicly testable and observable data”? (Mark Driscoll is an exception, much as I disagree with his male-bashing, feminist bias)

Conclusion

So, in short, young, unmarried Democrat-voting women cause problems for their daughters by raising them without fathers, and the church’s refusal to engage in apologetics and to connect faith to public evidence just makes the problem worse. That’s where abortion comes from, and many, many pro-lifers need to get engaged on these problems instead of waiting until the woman is already pregnant. Yes, we need sonograms Yes, we need to cut public funding for Planned Parenthood. Yes, we need parental notification laws. But we also need to address the problem with pro-family policies and with apologetics and statistics in the church.

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