• Taxes
  • “Obama will ask the wealthiest two percent of families to give back a portion of the tax cuts they have received over the past eight years to ensure we are restoring fairness and returning to fiscal responsibility.”
  • “ask”? Really? That means they can say no correct?
• Foreign Policy
  • Afghanistan and Pakistan: send more troops, send more money, fight the drug trade. If they don’t do what the US government wants… threaten them.
  • Iran: they do what the US government wants or “economic pressure and political isolation” increase. Meaning people will starve like when that happened to Iraq and the Iranians will radicalize against the US more and more.
  • Israel: Continue sending them money. Ignore any violation of the Palestinians rights.
  • Spend a bunch of money on things that spending money on doesn’t help.
• Family
  • Force businesses to pay employees a minimum amount.
  • Force businesses to provide paid sick days.
  • “Encourage” states to offer paid-leave programs.
• Civil rights
  • Expand racist hate crime laws
  • Spend tax payer money on training ex-addicts
  • Further infringe on business owner’s property rights
  • Oppose a ban on same sex marriage but not support it.
  • Work towards a separate but equal status for gays
  • Spend money on trying to stop the spread of AIDS

There are plenty of other things I can point out but these grabbed my attention. Change indeed.

http://www.catholicexchange.com/…

In a decision that foreshadows the possible fate of Fr. Alphonse de Valk, Canada’s leading pro-life voice among Catholic clergy, the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal has forbidden evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson from expressing his moral opposition to homosexuality. The tribunal also ordered Boisson to pay $5,000 “damages for pain and suffering” and apologize to the “human rights” activist who filed the complaint.

The complaint stems from Canada’s debate leading up to state legislation recognizing so-called same-sex marriage. In 2002, the pastor wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper in which he denounced the homosexual agenda as “wicked” and stated that: “Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.”

The activist subsequently filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission — a quasi-judicial body that investigates alleged discrimination within the Canadian province. The government tribunal published its decision [http://albertahumanrights.ab.ca/Lund_Darren_Remedy053008.pdf] on May 30.

While agreeing that Boisson’s letter was not a criminal act, the government tribunal nevertheless ordered the Christian pastor to “cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals.” Moreover, the tribunal’s decision “prohibited [Boisson] from making disparaging remarks in the future” about the activist who filed the complaint and witnesses who supported the complaint. Many of Canada’s religious leaders and civil libertarians have expressed concern that the government’s human rights tribunals are interpreting any criticism of homosexual activism as ‘disparaging’.

The tribunal also ordered Boisson to provide the complainant with a written apology for his letter to the editor. This last requirement threatens civil liberties in Canada, said Ezra Levant, a Jewish-Canadian author and lawyer. Levant, himself the target of an Alberta Human Rights Commission investigation, is facing the possibility the state may order him to apologize as well.

What a bunch of horseshit. People like to point to Canada and many of the EU nations as a bastion of civil liberties. With any amount of research you can see that it’s only the liberties of the secular statists who are protected. This is outright censorship and should be condemned. If people want to combat what some could consider hate speech they should work to ostracize those who speak it. Don’t purchase the media publishing it. Don’t use the threat of violence to get people to not speak… use a superior position to make their ideas appear incorrect.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/…

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Texas ruled that Child Protective Services (CPS) abused its discretion by seizing 468 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints ranch in Eldorado. Eugene Volokh has a roundup of the legal analysis.

CPS invited some mental health workers to the various shelters to help care for the hundreds of children. The mental health workers were disturbed by what they saw of CPS’s treatment of the women and children, and their written reports corroborate the bitter complaints of the FLDS mothers. I don’t think the news media has given this aspect of the story the attention it deserves — so here are some excerpts from the various reports that have been made public:

• “Women were constantly lied to about where their children [were] and when they could see their lawyers and about when they would be reunited with their children.”
• “Constant reminders that the adult women were only guests and that they were not in charge of the children and what CPS did to them. [The children] belonged to CPS now and they could talk, interrogate, separate and treat them any way [CPS] wanted. This included physical exams and x-rays without [parental] supervision.”
• “I sat with Audrey while three of her children were removed for six hours of questioning.”
• “The children arrived healthy and happy and left sick and crying.”
• “The door to the room was almost constantly open. Even when the women closed the door to reduce noise during naptime or to dress themselves or the children, it was almost immediately opened again [by a CPS worker].”
• “The women were lied to and denied access to their attorneys.”
• “At least 5 mothers reported that at night CPS [workers] circled their beds, held flashlight in their faces & then would sit inches away from them as they tried to sleep. Mothers reported that they were scared CPS would take their children during the night.”
• “The CPS workers were openly rude to the mothers and the children, yelled at them for trying to wave to friends and family members in surrounding shelters, threatened them with arrest if they did not stop waving to others, continually reminded them that the women were guests only and could be made to leave if they did not cooperate, threatened the mothers with never seeing their children again if they did not cooperate, and ignored requests for anything.”
• “The children were amazingly clean, happy, healthy, energetic, inquisitive, well behaved, and self-confident; while the mothers were consistently calm, patient, and loving with their children.”
• “Living conditions in the coliseum were not conducive to good health for anyone, and the presence of hostile CPS workers who spied on them constantly, kept them awake at night by shining lights in their faces and talking and laughing created enormous stress for the mothers and children. None of them slept well or enough.”
• “Try to imagine all these children from age 1 to 12 years, left in that coliseum [separated from their mothers] with only CPS and [police officers] to care for them. The only others were mothers whom CPS decided were under 18 and kept in their custody along with their children. The floor was literally slick with tears in places. A baby was left in a stroller without food and water for 24 hours and ended up in the hospital. A 4 year old boy was so terrified that he snuck away and hid and was only found after the coliseum had been emptied the next day.”
• “I witnessed a young mother named Rosinith be required by CPS to board the bus back to the ranch, though her young child was in the hospital with 104 degree fever and even though the child’s physician had personally requested the mother’s presence at the hospital. This event haunts me still, and I cannot imagine such a heartless act.”
• “By the second day, I was ready to run in front of the CNN cameras to shout that there was a travesty happening inside those walls…. Of course I was cautioned not to interfere in a ‘crime scene investigation.’”
• “I have always been proud to be an American and a Texan but this incident is not what America or Texas stands for and something must be done to undo the horrible injustice that has been done.”

CPS denies the allegations of mistreatment. But the excerpts above are eyewitness reports from objective/disinterested social workers that CPS invited into the shelters.

Justice is still not served. Not until restitution is paid and those who brought this about are punished directly. Now we need the state to return the children kidnapped from Strong City. Jeff Bent, Wayne Bent aka Michael Travesser son, was on Free Talk Live yesterday for those interested.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

The North Carolina State Bar has charged Nifong, the district attorney in Durham County, with several violations of the state’s rules of professional conduct, all tied to his handling of the lacrosse case.

Oh how I love it. From what I’ve read so far I hope this guy gets disbarred and the lacrosse players all bring civil cases against him.

http://www.nypost.com/…

When the whole Don Imus thing was going on Al Roker had this to say.

To summarize:

I, for one, am really tired of the diatribes, the “humor” at others’ expense, the cruelty that passes for “funny”. Don Imus isn’t the only one doing this, but today he’s the one in the hot seat.

It seems the other day while commenting on the controversial 2012 Olympic symbol he said: “Well, we asked you to weigh in on our Web site in an informal poll; those of you who could get up off the floor after shaking around were able to actually log in . . .” It appears this pissed some people off. I’m not going to claim that this is directly comparable to what Imus did… but it’s close. Especially given the comment he gave posted above. I can only hope more of these types of situations occur in the hope that this PC BS is realized and dropped.