President Barack Obama boldly proclaims, “The buck stops here!” But, whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush.

The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama “inherited” the big federal budget deficits and that he has to “clean up the mess” left in the economy by the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced, but it will not stand up under scrutiny.

No President of the United States can create either a budget deficit or a budget surplus. All spending bills originate in the House of Representatives and all taxes are voted into law by Congress.

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress before Barack Obama became president. The deficit he inherited was created by the Congressional Democrats, including Senator Barack Obama, who did absolutely nothing to oppose the runaway spending. He was one of the biggest of the big spenders.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so it was called “the Clinton surplus.” But Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, for the first time in 40 years. It was also the first budget surplus in more than a quarter of a century.

The only direct power that any president has that can affect deficits and surpluses is the power to veto spending bills. President Bush did not veto enough spending bills but Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress were the ones who passed the spending bills.

Today, with Barack Obama in the White House, allied with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in charge in Congress, the national debt is a bigger share of the national output than it has been in more than half a century. And its share is projected to continue going up for years to come, becoming larger than national output in 2012.

Having created this scary situation, President Obama now says, “Don’t give in to fear. Let’s reach for hope.” The voters reached for hope when they elected Obama. The fear comes from what he has done since taking office.

“The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place,” he said recently. “In November, you’re going to have that choice.”

Another political fable is that the current economic downturn is due to not enough government regulation of the housing and financial markets. But it was precisely the government regulators, under pressure from politicians, who forced banks and other lending institutions to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.

These risky loans, and the defaults that followed, were what set off a chain reaction of massive financial losses that brought down the whole economy.

Was this due to George W. Bush and the Republicans? Only partly. Most of those who pushed the lowering of mortgage lending standards were Democrats — notably Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd, though too many Republicans went along.

At the heart of these policies were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who bought huge amounts of risky mortgages, passing the risk on from the banks that lent the money (and made the profits) to the taxpayers who were not even aware that they would end up paying in the end.

When President Bush said in 2004 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be reined in, 76 members of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the contrary. These included Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel.

If we are going to talk about “the policies that created this mess in the first place,” let’s at least get the facts straight and the names right.

The current policies of the Obama administration are a continuation of the same reckless policies that brought on the current economic problems– all in the name of “change.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still sacred cows in Washington, even though they have already required the biggest bailouts of all.

Why? Because they allow politicians to direct vast sums of money where it will do politicians the most good, either personally or in terms of buying votes in the next election.

Cheaters may not prosper, but according to a new ABC story, they do graduate.  As technology evolves so has intellectual dishonesty.  According to writer Dominick Tao, the Internet has become a haven for students who are both browsing-and sharing-ways to outsmart their teachers.  Helped by everything from invisible ink pens to YouTube videos, this moral indifference is spreading faster than the products that fuel it.  In a shocking national poll, more than 70 percent of collage students admitted to cheating at least once.  When it comes to personal integrity, these young adults just don’t get it.  Considering the culture they live in, who can blame them?  They’ve been taught by Congress, Wall Street, and Hollywood that the ends justifies the means.

Unfortunately, this collapse of values at college has even wider implications.  Not only are we raising a generation of moral relativists, but we have done so while witnessing what this deep-seated corruption can do to our country.  It levels corporations, tarnishes our political process, and breeds an incredible mistrust between voters and their elected leaders.  Until we get down to the business of instilling a sense of honesty and ethics into society, we are only cheating ourselves.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) spoke on abstinence programs at the uber-liberal “Netroots Nation” blogger conference. The Speaker called abstinence-only programs “dangerous” to America’s youth and said that the only solution is to elect more pro-abortion politicians.

She went on to criticize the proposed federal regulations on conscience protections as also being “dangerous” and said that if “you don’t like abortion you should love contraception.” Amazingly, she goes on to say she is speaking as both a mother of five and a “devout Catholic,” despite the fact that her beliefs on abortion and contraception directly contradict the teachings of the Catholic Church.

As a politician, Rep. Pelosi has every right to disagree with the Church’s teachings on abortion and contraception, just as doctors, nurses and pharmacists should have every right to live by their respective church teachings and not be forced to perform abortions or distribute drugs that would violate their beliefs.

America does not need more pro-abortion politicians. It needs leaders who respect freedom of conscience.

What do homeschooling and drunk driving have in common? A lot, according to a German judge who made the comparison when he sentenced parents to three months in jail for educating their children at home. Juergen and Rosemarie Dudek, both Christians, are one of the estimated 400 couples in Germany who secretly homeschool their kids despite an antiquated ban on the practice instituted by Adolf Hitler 70 years ago. The decision, which smacks of Nazi-era oppression, will be appealed to a higher court, where the ruling will likely stand. German courts have repeatedly upheld homeschooling as a form of “child abuse,” a conclusion echoing that of a California court last February when a three-judge panel struck down the rights of homeschooling parents in that state. While the California ruling was later vacated, both have something in common–the desire to use public education as a vehicle for indoctrinating children in the liberal views of the state.

Eight days shy of the eviction deadline imposed by the city of Philadelphia, the Cradle of Liberty Boy Scout Council is striking back. On Friday, Scout officials filed suit in federal court to end a longstanding struggle with the city over a building that the council built and has occupied since 1928 for $1 a year. In a public war over the Scouts’ membership policy which bars homosexuals from joining, Philadelphia’s leaders have threatened to pull the rug out from under the Cradle’s headquarters.

City officials say their demands are entirely justifiable under a 26-year-old city ordinance that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation. As Philly’s mayor sees it, the Scouts have three choices. They can vacate the premises by May 31, open their doors to gay members and staff, or pay $200,000 in annual rent.

Cradle of Liberty elected the fourth option–suing for their right to privately assemble on public property as other organizations have done without reproach. The city’s demands would be somewhat understandable in a politically correct environment had it not welcomed other religious and civic groups to use Philly facilities at minimal charge. The Scouts will argue–and rightly so–that have been unfairly targeted for eviction.

Considering that the Cradle of Liberty spent $1.5 million renovating the space in the mid-’90s and pays about $60,000 a year in upkeep, it would be in the city’s best interest to maintain the tenancy. Philadelphia has also benefited from 80 years of the Scouts’ influence on young boys in a city where gangs and violence rates soar. It’s incredibly ironic that the city is begging for million of state dollars to combat urban problems, while at the same time trying to force out one of the greatest crime deterrents in all of Philadelphia–a character-building youth program that serves 70,000 boys.

The focus may rest squarely on the City of Brotherly Love now, but the case has national implications for religious freedom. If the city is successful in bringing the Scouts to their knees, other towns will be emboldened to do the same. But if the Cradle of Liberty prevails, fewer people will be willing to challenge the Scouts’ rights to adhere to a traditional moral code.

Parents “do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children.”

So wrote a California judge in a case that has ominous potential for the estimated one million-plus American families who have opted out of the public education monopoly and choose to educate their children at home.

Although the ruling is being appealed to the California Supreme Court, as it now stands, the 166,000 California children who are home schooled are truant, and their parents are criminals. Welcome, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, to a “strange new chapter” in the “annals of judicial imperialism.”

No Teaching Credentials? No Home Schooling.

For background, you should know that although California’s compulsory education law requires that all children between the ages of six and 18 attend a full-time day school, the state law also contains provisions for parents to legally teach their children at home. Under these provisions, homeschooling by unlicensed moms and dads has flourished in California, as it has across the nation.

But all this began to change when the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services recently investigated a claim of abuse by a homeschooled child. Lawyers representing the child invoked the California compulsory education statute to send the child to a public school and a judge eventually agreed, ruling that homeschooling by an unlicensed parent teacher is illegal. Thus, writes the Journal, “a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the registration of all parents who crack a book for their kids.”

The long and short of it: A California court has ruled that if you haven’t spent four years attending a teaching college and getting the proper licenses from the state, you can’t homeschool your children.

Another Case of a Special Interest Using the Courts to Do What It Can’t at the Voting Booth

The merits of homeschooling speak for themselves. Homeschooled children dominate academic competitions and get superior scores on standardized tests. They excel at all the things compulsory education laws are meant to promote, such as school attendance, academics and civic education.

But the California homeschooling decision is important in another respect — even those of us who don’t homeschool our kids should be outraged and concerned.

The decision represents yet another case of a special interest — in this case, the education unions and bureaucracy — using the courts to get what they can’t get through the popular vote.

This is yet another example of judicial supremacy: Rule by an out-of-control judiciary rather than the will of the people. It joins court rulings such as the removal of “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance on a long list of usurpations of the freedom and self-determination of the American people.

What You Can Do About It

The good news is that citizen activism can be a powerful tool in fighting judicial supremacy.

A good example is the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a group fighting for the rights of homeschooling parents in California and states across the nation.

They initiated a petition drive in the wake of the California decision that attracted a quarter of a million signatures in 10 days. The effort was so successful that they’ve stopped gathering signatures. But you can still learn more and help their cause by going to HSLDA.org.

And don’t stop there. Homeschool regulations are overwhelmingly developed at the state-government level. Call or write your state representatives and let them know that this is one case of judicial supremacy that will not stand.

The clock is ticking on the deal that Democrats and Republicans have struck over the President’s judicial nominees, which calls for three appeals courts nominees to be approved by Memorial Day.

For the past 16 months Senate Democrats have been on a course of approving a record-low number of nominees in the final two years of a President’s term. Now they appear to have maneuvered the White House into agreeing to a compromise where two of the three nominees in the deal would, in fact, be the Democrats’ own picks. One of them, Helene White, is Sen. Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) “cousin-in-law,” whose nomination to the bench was blocked by Republicans more than a decade ago. Determined to move her forward, Levin blocked four nominees for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals until the President agreed to nominate White.

Now Sen. Levin wishes to count White toward the three-judge target by Memorial Day. Because the Sixth Circuit would still have a small Republican-nominated majority even with the addition of White and another nominee President Bush actually wants, Levin can posture, as he did to the New York Times yesterday, that it would “not be appropriate” to take the political balance of the Sixth Circuit into consideration. GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee respond that the Memorial Day compromise lets the obstructing Senate majority approve two Democratic choices and leave a long list of Presidential nominees waiting in a limbo that has lingered for years.

The whole process is a spectacle unworthy of the Senate. Judicial choices will always matter, but that they matter so much is a result of the fact that judges now routinely legislate from the bench. Our founders did not want a partisan judiciary. We have one, and it’s high time our timorous politicians emerge from behind the black robes of policy-making judges and reclaim their legislative authority, even if that means having to vote on tough issues they would rather kick over to the unelected branch.

Last week, a federal appeals court refused to uphold the parental and religious rights of two Massachusetts couples–David and Tonia Parker and Rob and Robin Wirthlin–whose young children were exposed to books that promoted homosexual “marriage” in their elementary school. I met and interviewed the Parkers and the Wirthlins for FRC’s Liberty Sunday broadcast from Boston in October 2006 (and our “Critical Mass” DVD includes their stories). It’s amazing how cavalierly the court’s decision dismisses the evidence that school officials engaged in the deliberate indoctrination of children. The school sought to coerce its students into accepting values that are way outside the mainstream and in direct contradiction to those of their parents. Yet the same courts that are trying to reinvent the family are encouraging the public schools to act as their surrogate. A lawyer for the parents has vowed to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. They could also sue in state court, given the blatant violation of a state law which mandates that parents be notified before any discussion of “human sexuality issues.” Of course, since it was Massachusetts’ Supreme Court that legalized same-sex “marriage,” you can imagine what the families’ chances of winning would be! The federal court recommended the parents “seek recourse” through the legislative process. But that is small comfort considering that when pro-family forces do succeed, as they did in Boyd County, Kentucky, judicial activists simply rewrite the democratic decisions to suit their political agenda. When family values clash with homosexual activism in the public schools, rulings like this one prove that parents’ rights continue to be wronged.

Additional Resources
FRC “Critical Mass” DVD
FRC pamphlet “Homosexuality in Your Child’s School”

Posted 03/11/08
From Family Research Council

The latest victim of Planned Parenthood’s exploitation appears to be none other than the California government. A former Vice President of Finance for the L.A. affiliate, P. Victor Gonzales, has filed a whistleblower suit in federal court, claiming that Planned Parenthood committed years of fraudulent overbilling against government-funded programs. Gonzales submitted documents spanning the late 1990s to 2004, including a series of audits, which suggest that the nation’s biggest abortion merchant may have swindled upward of $180 million from California taxpayers. Gonzales says he was fired in 2004 after repeated attempts to address the “illegal accounting, billing, and donation practices of Planned Parenthood” with his supervisors. According to Gonzales’s attorney, Planned Parenthood manipulated its status as a charitable organization in order to buy contraceptives at a discounted rate, then billed the state’s Medi-Cal program for 12 times as much as it paid. The Los Angeles Times obtained copies of the 2004 audit, which substantiates over $5.2 million in overbillings at the San Diego branch during fiscal year 2003 alone. In total, the overcharging is said to exceed $10,000,000 a year. In addition to the birth control scam, Gonzales also claims that the Los Angeles branch violated the IRS code that prohibits political advocacy from charitable organizations by forwarding about $12,000 a month to the Sacramento branch for “lobbying” expenses. At least one PPLA executive used a corporate credit card to make Victoria’s Secret and private video purchases on the government’s dime. And the list of alleged abuses goes on. Although the suit was filed in 2005, it was made public on Friday–much to the dismay of the PP spokesmen, who were already facing a public relations nightmare after tape recordings revealed that employees agreed to accept racially-motivated donations. We can only hope that California responds swiftly to investigate this charge of gross exploitation of taxpayer dollars. Regardless of the outcome, we urge the state to move quickly, as Virginia has done, to de-fund Planned Parenthood and end its relentless cycle of exploitation against women, children, and taxpayers!

The House Foreign Affairs Full Committee is scheduled to vote on the PEPFAR/Global AIDS Reauthorization bill this Thursday. The current draft by Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) strips out the pro-abstinence and pro-faithfulness values that have made the program successful, especially in Africa. The new bill would change PEPFAR into a massive $10 billion per year giveaway that will be tilted toward abortion merchants and promoters.

Rep. Lantos and the Democratic Leadership have taken a program started by President Bush to protect future generations in Africa and are trying to change it into one that would instead help to eliminate future generations in Africa. Page eleven of the current draft being circulated reveals their true goal by claiming that pregnancy and sex within marriage are serious threats to women’s health!! The Democrats’ solution is to eliminate the successful “ABC” model of promoting abstinence, being faithful and, only when necessary, using condoms. The Lantos approach instead requires full integration of AIDS with abortion traders and could even require the provision of abortion, all paid for by American taxpayers. Furthermore the draft bill removes the Prostitution Pledge, essentially giving the U.S. government’s stamp of approval for prostitution.

Click on the link below for a full list of the offices of the House members on the Foreign Affairs Committee and please take a moment to call and tell them to protect the values written into the current PEFAR legislation: protection of pro-abstinence and anti-prostitution requirements. Tell them that the successful PEPFAR program should not be hijacked to spread U.S. taxpayer-funded abortion around the world.

The United States Must Not Export Death!