FJM Blog

By Ken Blackwell

A key element of President Obama’s plan for a government takeover of health care is to create what he calls “the government option.” He wants his government option to compete with private insurers. Congressman Mike Pence (R-Ind.) says that this government option will compete with private insurers the way an alligator “competes” with ducks. It’s a pretty safe bet that the ducks always lose.

House Democrats are working up a slightly different plan. It’s part of the bill they’re moving through Congress very quickly and trying to pass before the August recess. They know that the more Americans find out about plans for their government takeover of health care, the more resistance they will face. Former Sen. Tom Daschle, the President’s first choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services before tax problems ended his nomination, is said to be very worried that if a bill is not sent to the President’s desk before the August recess, the whole plan might have to be re-framed.

Given this mad dash to enact a bill, a statement President Obama made the other night is truly stunning. He was on a conference call with liberal bloggers. One of these bloggers—clearly a backer of ObamaCare—brought up an article in Investors Business Daily that claims under Section 102 of the House health care bill (H.R.3200) would outlaw private insurance. The blogger wanted the President to give a strong rebuttal to the IBD article’s claims, but what he got instead was this incredible statement: “I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about.”

What? He’s “not familiar” with the central provision of the bill he’s flogging Congress to pass? He’s “not familiar” with the section of the House Bill that those who are familiar with say will regulate private insurers out of business?

The Heritage Foundation is familiar with Section 102. They’ve partnered with the respected health consulting organization The Lewin Group to research how many Americans would be forced into the “government option.” Here’s what they found:

• Despite Administration assurances to the contrary, 83.4 million people would lose their private insurance coverage.

• Nearly 90 million who are currently covered by an employer-sponsored health plan would be shifted into the government plan.

• Contrary to what the Obama campaign said about costs and taxes, average Americans would see their premiums rise as much as $460 yearly.

President Obama’s candid admission that he was “not familiar” with a central provision of a major bill being marked up by his closest allies in Congress is truly amazing. If not exactly the alligator Congressman Pence was describing in referring to “government options,” this section could be described as an anaconda. It might not immediately eat up its competitors, but it would squeeze the life out of them by excessive regulations they cannot afford to put in place and survive. Only after squeezing the private insurers to death does this Section 102 anaconda swallow them up. Under this provision, your “private insurer” would remain as private as GM and AIG are today.

Some things just don’t work in politics. If you’re in the middle of an intense presidential campaign and there’s an economic meltdown, beginning in the mortgage industry, it does not work to say you don’t know how many houses you own. My friend John McCain found that out to his sorrow.

To say you’re “not familiar” with a major legislative provision of your own Administration’s Number One priority is infinitely worse. It seems to indicate a troubling approach to transforming one of the most expensive and essential elements of American life: The way we, and those we love, get medical care.

The President is blessed by an almost supernatural calm. His disposition gives assurance in any crisis. Yet in this case, his calm is like that of Capt. Edward Smith of the White Star Line. Captain Smith was completely unflappable as his great ship sped across the silent seas. He was totally confident that he could speedily bypass any threat from an iceberg on that moonless night in April, 1912. Mr. Obama’s government takeover of health care may be headed for a collision more shattering even than that of the Titanic.

The wise word to the President is the same as those to Capt. Smith: SLOW DOWN. Proceed with caution. And take the time to understand your own plan, one you are pressing upon the American people with an intensity and insistency we’ve rarely seen in recent history.

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Black Activist Speaks Out Against Proposed Unequal Allocation of Health Resources

For Release: July 23, 2009
Contact: David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 or e-mail dalmasi@nationalcenter.org

Washington D.C.: An examination of the 1018-page “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009″ (H.R. 3200) - the official Obama health care bill - finds several cases in which grant money for medical training can be awarded solely on factors of race and class.

Project 21 member Bishop Council Nedd II, an Anglican bishop and director of the Ecumenical Institute for Health Policy Research based at Valley Forge Christian College, is condemning the addition of racial preferences to the President’s legislation.

“The U.S. Supreme Court just struck down racial preferences. So why does a newly-introduced bill want to perpetuate something that has just been declared unconstitutional?” asked Project 21’s Nedd.  ”Racial preferences will not improve health care. They will increase tensions when some people are being unfairly put at the front of the line.”

Between pages 878 and 909 of H.R. 3200, in an area related to grants for medical training, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is empowered to grant preference in awarding training grants.  For the specialties of “family medicine, general internal medicine, general pediatrics, geriatrics and physician assistantship” (pages 878-882); “medical residents on community-based settings” (pages 883-886) and “general, pediatric and public health dentists and dental hygienists” (pages 887-891), it is written that “the Secretary shall give preference to… entities that have a demonstrated record of… training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds.”

Further, the bill amends the Public Health Service Act to give preferences in “advanced education nursing grants” to programs that “increase diversity among advanced education nurses” (pages 892-895).  Grants for “enhancing the public health workforce” similarly give preference to “entities that have a demonstrated record of… training individuals who are from underrepresented minority groups or disadvantaged backgrounds” (pages 907-909).

A PDF version of H.R. 3200 can be found at http://tw8.us/qW.

Nedd added: “By making racial preferences a shortcut to federal funding, schools will reduce their quest for the best and turn it into a hunt for the right racial numbers. This, in the long run, will hurt the quality of our nation’s health care. We need to stop the social experimentation and focus on cost and performance.”

Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization supported by the National Center for Public Policy Research, has been a leading voice of the African-American community since 1992.  For more information, contact David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or Project21@nationalcenter.org, or visit Project 21’s website at www.project21.org/P21Index.html.

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Directionless Group Pushes Plan Opposed by Majority of Constituency

For Release: July 21, 2009
Contact: David Almasi at 202/543-4110 x11 or Project21@nationalcenter.org
 
 
Contending with political realities such as the election of the first
black president, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) is understandably struggling to justify its
continued existence.  At its centennial convention, it clearly moved in
the wrong direction by allying with environmental lobbyists to promote
economically devastating climate policy opposed by the majority of
black Americans.
 
“I’m all in favor of the nation’s oldest
civil rights group redefining its mission and agenda; however this
indicates that the NAACP continues to struggle with current realities
that face the nation’s black communities by promoting policies they are
opposed to,” said Project 21 member Joe Hicks, who is also a PajamasTV
commentator.  ”If this group simply wants to be defined as another
left-wing organization touting the weak science on climate change, then
it is destined to face ever-growing irrelevancy.”
 
Project
21 fellow Deneen Borelli added: “It’s outrageous for the NAACP to place
liberal ideology over the welfare of the nation.  By aligning with the
environmental activist lobby, the NAACP is now an official member of
‘Club Green’ - the exclusive club of elites waging war against fossil
fuels.  Tragically, the cover charge for their membership - job losses,
reduced standard of living and high energy costs - will be borne
disproportionately by the very people the NAACP claims to represent.”
 
At its New York City convention earlier this month, the NAACP entered
into a partnership with the National Wildlife Federation to “ensure
that the response to climate change can take a higher ground than
business as usual.”  President Obama, during his speech to the group,
sought to equate his energy policy with civil rights.  Additionally,
NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous now characterizes the group as “a
multiracial, multiethnic human rights organization.”
 
The
NAACP’s newfound zeal for promoting further environment-based
regulation of the American economy, however, is opposed by the vast
majority of black Americans.  In a recent poll of 800 black Americans,
there was significant concern that climate change regulations - much
like the Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” legislation passed by the U.S.
House of Representatives in late June - would have a harmful and
disproportionately negative impact on black America.
 
For
example, the poll found that 76 percent felt Congress should make
economic recovery rather than climate change its top priority and that
56 percent believe Washington policymakers do not adequately consider
the quality of life of black Americans when addressing climate policy.
 When asked how much they would pay for gas and electricity to reduce
greenhouse emissions, 76 percent said they would be unwilling to pay
more than $50 a year while 52 percent were unwilling to pay anything at
all.
 
According to research from The Heritage Foundation,
regulations created by the Waxman-Markey bill would raise electricity
costs by 90 percent, gas by 58 percent, and natural gas by 55 percent
by 2035 (an average of $1,241 more for a family of four by that time).
 Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office reported in 2007 that
“most of the cost of meeting a cap on CO2 emissions would be borne by
consumers, who would face persistently higher prices for products such
as electricity and gasoline… [and] poorer households would bear a
larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households would.
 
Hicks added: “The NAACP shows how out of touch it has become by
advocating Obama Administration policies on so-called climate change
that impact the very population that claim to represent - poor, black
Americans.  Adding an increased burden of higher coast for essential
things like gasoline and electricity at a time of economic hardship
demonstrates that they have no independent course of leadership, but
instead is blindly following this administration’s disastrous lead.”  
 
The survey mentioned previously was conducted for The National Center
for Public Policy Research by Wilson Research Strategies and has a
margin of error of +/- 3.4%. It can be viewed at: http://www.nationalcenter.org/BlackOpinion.html.
 
Project 21, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization sponsored by the
National Center for Public Policy Research, has been a leading voice of
the African-American community since 1992.  For more information,
contact David Almasi at (202) 543-4110 x11 or Project21@nationalcenter.org, or visit Project 21’s website at http://www.project21.org/P21Index.html.
 

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By Harry R. Jackson, Jr.

Last week, Senator Dick Durbin made comments that should have won him the “Most Racially Insensitive Remarks of the Year Award.” His statements were made in a committee markup. An audio recording of the heated exchange between Senator Durbin (D-IL) and Senator Brownback (R-KS) revealed the unfortunate bias of the Senator from Illinois. Senator Durbin justified the fact that 41% of pregnancies in DC are terminated by abortion by essentially saying, “It’s a black thing!” His exact words are listed below:

Durbin: In terms of safe, legal and rare, to the Senator from Kansas, I will tell you two things. First, it is a fact that a disproportionately large number of African Americans seek abortion in America, not just in the District of Columbia, but all across the nation.

Brownback: 41 percent?

Durbin: No, but it’s also a fact that a disproportionately large number of African Americans live in the District of Columbia.

Brownback: 41 percent?

Durbin: I’m telling you, look at the numbers.

Brownback: I’m telling — I’m just asking you, aren’t there enough [abortions] here?

Durbin: Look at the numbers, and you will find this to be true.

Brownback: This — this is not high enough?

The problem with Durbin’s flippant, patronizing remarks were that they were classic statements of a bureaucrat that does not care about the welfare of people in the District of Columbia.

Many concerned residents of DC believe that there is a culture of death in the city. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the rate of abortion in DC is twice the national average. In addition, DC also has the highest HIV/ AIDS rate in the nation. Although the city has shaken its 80s and 90s moniker of “Murder Capital of the World,” there still needs to be special care given to the preservation of all human life – especially black life in DC. As I listened to Senator Durbin’s remarks, I could not help but think that if there were more white or Hispanic fetuses aborted, he would have been more alarmed. Like other kinds of black-on-black crimes, there seemed to be no remorse on the side of the political power structure.

Brownback said that before the federal ban against funding abortions was in place, DC shifted over $1 million from an AIDS fund to an abortion fund. Brownback’s amendment to preserve the ban on taxpayer-funded abortions in DC failed in committee, marking a low in the concern for life among those given oversight to the District’s affairs.

Let’s take a moment to trace the racial trends to which Durbin alluded. Let’s see if his logic holds water. Blacks account for over a third of all abortions in the nation, though they represent 12 percent of the population. Nationally, whites account for 58% of the abortions in the nation. This means that whites and other groups abort the remaining two thirds of babies nationally. Roughly speaking, approximately 1500 black babies are aborted each day in the nation. This is compared to approximately 3,000 babies aborted each day by others.

Returning to DC statistics, the 2006 abortion numbers show that blacks decided to terminate 78% of the pregnancies ended by abortion, while only 18.2% of the abortions were performed on white fetuses instead of the 26% national proportionality equations would suggest. Many concerned Americans want to know why so many black babies die. A National Public Radio program in November 11, 2007 showed that during the decade before, Washington, DC had one of the highest rates of teen pregnancies in the nation. At the time of that report, the decadal teen pregnancy rate had dropped from 1 in 6 teenage girls pregnant in 1996, to 1 in 16 by 2007. On that program Brenda Rhodes Miller, Executive Director of the D.C. Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, talked about progress that had been made and work still left to be done.

The DC Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in April 1999 as a result of the work of the Mayor’s Committee on Reducing Teenage Pregnancies and Out-of-Wedlock Births. The leadership of this organization is comprised of many card-carrying Democrats. This means that lowering abortion rates can be a bi-partisan effort. The Board of Directors of DC Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy is composed of local and national community leaders who are committed to improving the lives and well being of teens. Current board members include former DC city council members and noteworthy citizens, including both ministers and secular leaders.

One can only wonder how much higher the abortion level in the District might be if there had not been a moratorium on funding abortions. DC is clearly in a precarious place concerning this issue. Other regions are taking important leadership steps that DC might follow. Arizona, for example, just passed legislation that includes guidelines for abortions: a one-day waiting period, parental notification for minors seeking abortion, and doctor’s disclosure about the risks and alternatives.

All of us can make a difference in this emotionally charged debate. As citizens, we must continue to actively, boldly and compassionately work to reduce abortions. I believe it’s possible to decrease the number of abortions by 50 percent over the next ten years.

In conclusion, Durbin got it all wrong. He is supporting continuing a culture of death in the nation’s capital. We, however, must abort abortion.

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By Star Parker

What is now being billed as health care reform is but the latest chapter in a process I described in an earlier column as “Back on Uncle Sam’s Plantation.”

Rather than moving dysfunctional America off the welfare state, as we did with welfare reform in 1996, we are now moving the free, functioning, and once prosperous part of our nation onto the welfare state.

Bills out of committees in both the House and the Senate contain all the elements of President Obama’s dream to get as many Americans onto the government health care plantation as possible.

We’ve got creation of the new government run insurance plan that supposedly will create new competition. We’ve got fines on employers who don’t provide insurance and fines on individuals who don’t buy it.

And we’ve got the trillions of dollars in new spending to subsidize insurance purchases for low to middle income Americans and expand Medicaid to get more low income Americans into it.

And, of course, we’ve got the massive new government bureaucracy to oversee it all.

Obama continues to tell the many millions of Americans currently insured through their employer not to worry, that “If you like your health care plan you can keep that…”

But we know this is a slight of hand. Many employers will gladly pay the fine and purge their employees into the government plan. And how will private plans possibly compete with the government plan when politicians can reach into taxpayer pockets anytime they want to keep on subsidizing it?

The Lewin Group estimates that a hundred twenty million Americans may be driven into the government plan.

And the idea that a government plan will keep, in the words of our president, “insurance companies honest”?

We’ve already got half the country on government health care through Medicare and Medicaid.

Harvard’s Malcom Sparrow, a specialist in health-care fraud, estimates annual Medicare fraud at $85 billion.

The Government Accountability Office estimates Medicaid fraud at around $33 billion annually.

So that’s $120 billion a year in government health care fraud! This is who will keep private companies ”honest?”

It defies logic and experience that we will save money and deliver better health care by expanding government control and spending.

Congressional Budget Office head Douglas Elmendorf confirms as such. CBO now estimates this proposed reform will require a trillion dollars in new expenditures and that rather than lowering the “cost curve”, “the curve is being raised.”

Despite all this, this horrible legislation may pass. Why?

We now have the political reality of decisive Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress and a Democrat president that wants this.

And whereas business fought Hillary care, they are now cooperating. With Democrats decisively running the show, they can buy political support with bribes and threats.

Pharmaceutical firms and insurance firms like the idea of new expanded taxpayer subsidized markets.

And doctors? The American Medical Association initially refused to endorse health care reform that included a government plan.

Now suddenly they are on board. The AMA has come out in support of the House bill with a government plan. What happened? The House agreed to get rid of planned cuts in doctor’s Medicare reimbursements.

Halfway into 2009, Americans have turned more control of their lives over to government and politicians than ever before in history.

This proposed health care reform, through subsidies and expansion of Medicaid, would put tens of millions of new Americans on welfare. The result is predictable. Many more citizens with incentives to stay poor and dependent.

The rest of us will transfer a major part of our freedom to manage our own private lives over to bureaucrats.

I’m praying for a miracle that will wake up a slumbering nation.

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By Herman Cain

While President Obama continues to give speeches that make health care reform sound like a beauty queen, the legislation moving through Congress resembles Medicare’s ugly twin sister.

The Medicare system is a bureaucratic morass of price controls, restrictions on medical services, hospitals, doctors and patients. If in doubt, just ask any doctor or patient or hospital administrator. The system is also operating in the red.

Now add to that scenario an employer mandate, an individual mandate, penalties for not obeying the mandates, a government health insurance option, surtaxes on upper income individuals, and a new bureaucracy to insure that this nightmare works smoothly and we have Medicare’s ugly twin sister.

Despite the real facts about the uninsured, access to health care, the major determinants of health outcome and the experiences of countries inflicted with socialized government-controlled medicine such as Canada and England, President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress are still trying to force a shotgun wedding between the public and government-controlled health care.

There are not 46 million chronically uninsured people in this country. Ten million are not citizens, 17 million make $50,000 a year or more and millions of people choose not to buy health insurance. Even the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation put the number of chronically uninsured Americans who do not qualify for existing government programs between eight and 14 million people.

No one is denied access to health care in this country, even though access to health care is not the major determinant of health outcome. Former Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher pointed out in a recent interview that access to health care is only a 15 percent determinant of health outcome, whereas human behavior (choices) determines 40-to-50 percent of a person’s health.

President Obama and the Democrats believe that with their superior leadership they will be able to do what Canada, England and other countries could not do. Namely, they could not control costs without health care rationing and lower quality of care.

To make matters worse, Congress cannot determine how much this wedding is going to cost. The latest guesstimate is between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, with some of the money to pay for this disaster coming from cutting the costs of Medicare, because the maid of honor (Medicare) is too fat.

Congress has promised to put Medicare on a diet in the past with no success, but the president and the Democrats keep telling us that they can do it this time. They just have not told us which set of smoke and mirrors they will use this time.

It is completely outrageous for Congress to propose this $1.5 trillion “Health Care De-form” plan. The mandates in the legislation will simply make our current health care system worse, while making the delivery of health care more costly and inefficient. Just ask the Canadians and the British!

No matter how much lipstick they try to put on this “pig”, it is still ugly.

The 1,000-plus page legislation that the Democrats are trying to steamroll through Congress (again) also contains a sneaky provision to make it illegal to purchase private health insurance. We have no idea how many more sneaky provisions are buried in this legislation.

There are many practical and sensible alternatives for making health care more affordable and accessible if those are the objectives, but they are not. If they were, then the president and the Democrats would not be ignoring all the signs that their bill is not a marriage made in heaven with the public.

It would be a living hell – and she’s not even pretty.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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By Ken Blackwell

Recently, liberals set off some Bastille Day fireworks. Conservatives have often teased liberals, saying their hearts are really in France. Of course, that was before the Right’s man, Nicolas Sarkozy, waltzed into the Elysée Palace as France’s new President. Then, U.S. conservatives decided perhaps our oldest ally was not so bad after all.

Well, Tina Brown, editor of the liberal blog, The Daily Beast, let go with some real cherry bombs. She loudly proclaimed it’s time for President Obama to let Hillary shed her—burqa! Wow! These folks fight fierce.

Brown is charging that President Obama has turned Hillary into his “foreign policy wife.”

And Brown even charged that the President has checkmated both Clintons. By naming Hillary as his Secretary of State, Obama effectively clipped Bill’s wings, too. The way Tina Brown describes the Clintons’ unenviable fate, they don’t sound like Mr. Obama’s political pals—they sound like his hostages.

I could certainly understand why Obama chose Hillary as Secretary of State. He could rely on her to give him foreign policy “heft,” the kind of gravitas that Joe Biden was supposed to provide but never really has.

Which one would you prefer to send on a sensitive mission abroad—steely, disciplined Hillary or the perennially quotable, always notable Biden? Biden reminds me of what Churchill once said about our Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles: He is a bull who carries his own china shop with him.

So Hillary at Foggy Bottom made sense for Obama. What I can’t understand is why she ever took it. She had just been powerfully re-elected as New York’s junior senator. Husband Bill had managed to avoid the spotlight of unfavorable publicity. She would certainly have been a strong contender to catch the falling flag from an obviously weakened Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as Majority Leader. Or, she could have borne aloft the banner of big-government liberalism as Ted Kennedy battles cancer. Even long-time Senate lions like Bob Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) are suddenly looking frail.

Hillary could have championed any issue she wanted from her secure Senate perch. Nationalized health care? She was perfectly positioned to lead the charge. Defending Judge Sonia Sotomayor? Hillary was a senator from jurist’s home state—and the judge is a feminist to boot.

But, instead, Hillary seems to have become President Obama’s feminist to boot. Tina Brown charges that Hillary has been “a Saudi wife,” and an abused one at that. Hillary didn’t get her man, Richard Holbrooke, as her number two at the State Department.

She even had to suffer the indignity of not having her Harvard friend, Joe Nye, named as U.S. Ambassador to Japan. When Fritz Mondale was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Japan, he described his duty as an honorable vacation.

Hillary had to swallow the White House’s man for Tokyo. And, this one had to hurt:

Obama tapped John V. Roos, stiff-arming the internationally respected Prof. Nye.

According to OpenSecrets blog, Mr. Roos and his wife were once major Clinton donors but last round Roos “bundled” at least $500,000 for the Obama campaign. Ouch! Talk about adding diplomatic insult to Hillary’s recent elbow injury.

President Obama famously told his Cairo University audience last month that the U.S. would champion the right of Muslim women to wear the burqa in the West–as if that’s the most pressing human rights problem for women or Muslims anywhere. That statement was quickly countered by France’s Sarkozy. He said the burqa is “not welcome” in his republic. This latest internecine row among American liberals, however, puts all of Obama’s comments in an entirely new light. Has the President put Hillary in a policy burqa? And will she be content to remain there? Stay tuned. It’s going to be fascinating.

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By Devon Carlin

Americans are bombarded with save-the-earth pleas to reduce their “carbon footprint.”  In this latest environmental fad, Americans are urged to alter their lifestyles to combat global warming.

Reducing a carbon footprint can entail driving less or buying a hybrid-fuel car, using organic cleaning products or sorting recyclables.  Green crusaders promote wind and solar power as alternatives to natural gas, coal and oil.

It all seems simple enough, but it’s hardly the whole story.  As Kermit the Frog sings, it’s not easy being green.

In his latest eye-opening book, Green Hell: How the Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life (Regnery), Junkscience.com founder Steve Milloy exposes the agenda of the environmentalists and what it could mean for America’s future.  Green goals, Milloy says, are actually quite unfriendly to those who genuinely want to protect the planet while living a comfortable existence.

Milloy contents that if environmentalists (or “greens,” as Milloy calls them) had their way, the world would be a very different place.  Americans would be living in the close quarters of multi-family units in densely-packed cities, without cars and with restrictions on their rights to reproduce.  Energy use would also be regulated to the point of rationing - if someone exceeds his limit, he might find himself shut off from the power grid by bureaucratic decree.

Milloy notes: “You may be tempted to dismiss all this as a gross exaggeration.  But this is how the greens themselves describe their intentions…  Their words alone reveal their true intent: to curtail, to ration, to force, to deny, to compel and to squeeze.”  He stands by his contention with 492 well-researched footnotes.

It’s not just words, but deeds.  The green agenda already impedes Americans’ lives and liberties:

*    Environmentalists once promoted bottled water as safe and healthy alternative.  Now greens are wage war against it in places such as San Francisco and New York City, with San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome decrying the “waste and pollution” he says is created by bottled water.

*    Canadian tar sands contain enough oil to rival traditional worldwide reserves, but 2007 regulations on “greenhouse gas” emissions prohibit tar sands-derived fuel from being used by the federal government (and, by extension, government contractors).

*    A ban on oil shale development expired in 2008, but this promising alternative to traditional drilling, which has enormous potential, is stalled by legal challenges from environmental activists.

With Barack Obama in the White House, implementation of the green agenda could go into overdrive. As a candidate, Obama said “we can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times… and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK…  That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”

He’s been even more blunt about the effects of  ”cap-and-trade” regulations on energy derived from coal: “[I]f somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

There’s an enormous difference between someone doing their part for the planet by recycling or using public transportation and the excessive regulatory regime promoted by environmentalists.  Yet many express approval of environmental special interests without knowing the full extent of their agenda.  Green Hell exposes the difference between false perceptions and reality, and explains how the environmentalist agenda threatens the underpinnings of capitalism.

Milloy cites poll data showing Americans’ true beliefs about environmental priorities to demonstrate that these sentiments rarely match the rhetoric of the green movement.

In Green Hell, Milloy presents his skepticism in a cogent and compelling way while exposing the lesser-known and most radical facets of environmental movement.  The end result is a provocative and impressive resource everyone should read.

#  #  #

Devon Carlin is a research associate for the Project 21 black leadership network.  Comments may be sent to Project21@nationalcenter.org.

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By Eric Wallace, PhD

Watching the US Senate confirmation hearings as Senators questioned the judicial philosophy of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor reminded me of the recent issue of Freedom’s Journal Magazine entitled “Our Criminal Justice System: Cultivating Reform or Breeding Crime?” What follows are selected quotes from featured articles, which give readers relevant data concerning the social epidemic plaguing many of our minority communities; as well as to provide valuable insight into why so many view the Criminal Justice System (CJS) with a critical, yet subjective eye.

“Our imprisoned population of 2.3 million pushes us well beyond every other country, including China and Russia. A recent report from the Pew Center on the States revealed that one out of every 100 people in America is in prison or jail. For blacks, the ratio is even more sobering. One in every 9 black men ages 20-34 lives behind bars. If present trends of incarceration continue, one out of every three black males will spend time behind bars in their lifetime. This trend must stop.” Mark Early, President of Prison Fellowship from the article entitled Transforming Our Corrections System

“While blacks account for a mere 12 percent of the U.S. population, roughly 41 percent of the two million prison inmates are black. As of December 31, 2005, approximately 8.2 percent of black males between 25 and 29 were in state or federal prisons, versus 2.6 percent of Hispanic males and 1.1 percent of white males in the same age group.” Jimmie Hollis, with Project 21, from the article Black on Black Crime.

“In New York, African Americans and Latinos made up approximately 25 percent of the total population in the 1990s; but by 1999, as Dr. Marable reports, 83 percent of all prisoners and 94 percent of all individuals convicted on drug offenses in that state were from these two groups. There’s no doubt that many of those arrested and convicted were guilty as charged. But there’s also a pattern of racial bias, confirmed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which found that while African Americans make up about 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they accounted for 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all drug convictions and 75 percent of all prison admissions for drug offenses.”  By Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr. in Criminal Justice Reform.

Consequently, these statements (and others like them) are rapidly causing many to, at best, suspiciously question the “jurisprudence” of the CJS; or, at worst, to conclude that her legal duty has been reduced to nothing more than another form of oppression or modern day slavery. These statistics, if misread or misunderstood, might reasonably lead one to argue (as our president has) that we need more judges who will interpret law with ‘empathy’—or, at least, that those appointed express diversity of ‘life experiences’ or ability to make a decision from the ‘heart’. Unfortunately, these standards (or lack thereof) have, for far to long, undermined the minority community—often causing more harm than good. The reality is, the disproportionate conviction rates and sentencing are directly connected, in many cases, to judges (and others) who interpret the law subjectively. The law is not bias, people are—we all have biases. Add to the mix the mainstream media’s depiction and glorification of the ‘thug lifestyle’—many of these biases will continue to grow.

Therefore, what’s in one’s heart (their life experiences) often reflects these biases or fears. Judges are not immune to negative stereotypes. For example, we’ve all experienced the fear of having someone who is different from us to walk towards or behind us. Blacks and Whites alike have expressed contempt for young people who dress or look a certain way, listen to a certain type of music, or exhibit unfamiliar mannerisms.

However, the remedy is not more ‘ethnic’ judges to swing a bias justice system toward their community. Justice is not served by equalizing the balance of bias judges but by judges who will uphold the law regardless of the ethnicity of the person standing before them. The law is colorblind. It does not see black and white, red or yellow. Judge Sotomayor has proven that she does not understand this concept when she says her judgment would be better than a white male judge. No her judgment would just be bias in another direction. This was proved when she voted to throw out the test scores of the white fire fighters.

Obama’s standards for judges are also what got many blacks lynched post civil war when what was in judges hearts was hatred toward them. What their limited experience told them was that blacks were liars and cheats and deserved to be incarcerated. Obama and Sotomayor may do well to look to the foundation from which our law is based that admonishes us to lay our biases aside and, “ ‘Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly (Lev. 19:15; See also Deut 1:16; 16:18). We need judges to follow the law not their heart (biases).

Tags: Uncategorized by Dr. Eric Wallace
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