Category Archives: Taxpayers
How Many of You Knew Al Queda’s Co-founder Attended the University of Arizona?
In his Front Page article “The Muslim Student Association and the Boston Terrorist Connection,” Daniel Greenfield chronicles the radical role of Muslim Student Associations on America’s tax-funded public university campuses. He also tells us the University of Arizona, in Tucson, helped educate the co-founder of Al Qaeda, definitely not good billboard advertising fodder for UA. And student clubs like the MSAs are funded by your tax dollars.
Al-Awlaki wasn’t even the highest ranking Al Qaeda leader to have been an MSA president. That honor went to Wa’el Hamza Julaidan, a co-founder of Al Qaeda and MSA president at the University of Arizona. The highest profile MSA president to have gone down was MSA national President Abdurahman Alamoudi, currently serving out a 23-year prison sentence.
Both the national and the local Muslim Students Association groups had long histories of being involved in terrorism, of raising money for terrorists and of promoting terrorism. Nor was the Dartmouth MSA a moderate oasis in a sea of radicalism. Not only were the Dartmouth MSA officers taking sides in the religious war consuming Syria, but Charles C. Johnson found that the Dartmouth MSA “routinely advertises speeches and seminars taught by radical imams.”
The MSA’s track record in turning out terrorists is indisputable. As are its links to imams and sheiks who preach Jihad. Maybe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev never did more than take part in MSA soccer games alongside MSA officers and did not absorb any of their views. Perhaps he never attended an MSA-sponsored lecture by an imam or sheik who discussed the finer points of which infidels you can kill. But considering the MSA’s murderous track record, it is far more likely that he did.
The Dartmouth MSA was eager to associate with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when he was only a terrorist in training, but is now just as eager to write him off as a soccer buddy. But Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the MSA shared more than an interest in soccer. They also shared an interest in Jihad.
Maricopa County Residents Scammed by Supervisors
“When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” Benjamin Franklin
The American Post-Gazette reports …
When are the adults going to take over? Even the judges are figuring out the Supervisors’ little scam, and are refusing to allow more million dollar settlements to Conley Wolfswinkel and Mary Rose Wilcox. After it was clear that the judge was not going to approve convicted felon and Don Stapley business partner Conley Wolfswinkel’s lawsuit against the county over “stress” from Arpaio and Thomas prosecuting him, Wolfswinkel went to the county supervisors and demanded a payout. They awarded him $1.4 million this morning, the largest settlement yet. Next up for a generous settlement offer of YOUR money will be disgraced former Don Stapley, who was so corrupt he didn’t dare run for reelection last year.
Here are other settlements that have already been awarded, a waste of OUR taxpayer money, courtesy of the supervisors, who are always eager to give their pals and themselves handouts in the name of making Arpaio look bad -
* Supervisor Andrew Kunasek; $123,000.
* Retired Judge Barbara Rodriguez Mundell; $500,000
* Susan Schuerman, executive assistant for former Supervisor Don Stapley; $500,000
* Retired Judge Anna Baca; $100,000
* Retired Judge Kenneth Fields; $100,000
* Steve Wetzel, Maricopa Chief Information Officer; $75,000
An Interview with The Arizona Conservative
Isn’t the Conservative movement all about legislating morality?
In a word – no. All legislation, all lawmaking is someone’s morality. Those who say we’re imposing our morality on them are trying to impose their morality on us.
The Conservative movement is about advocating commonsense principles which have stood the test of time and which offer society the greatest opportunities of health and well-being.
Americans have the freedom to do a lot of things which were once considered harmful to the person, to others – and immoral. Rather than ask themselves “Can I do xyz,” people should ask themselves “Should I do xyz,” and “what are the consequences?” They don’t need government to decide that or ask for them. If everyone did this more often, we’d have fewer social problems, less crime, fewer divorces, less gambling addiction, less drug and alcohol addiction, less crime, and fewer socially transmitted diseases. And the bottom line is that we would then see healthier families, neighborhoods and communities, and far less government spending on trying to pick up the broken pieces. It’s a matter of personal accountability.
Aren’t we as a nation progressing by doing away with so-called “archaic” morality laws?
We are not progressing as a nation, period. American society is in a tailspin. We are going in reverse; progressives just aren’t willing to admit it. It is not possible to progress given the current direction and worldview of those shaping the culture.
C.S. Lewis wrote: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.”
We have removed the Judeo-Christian morality as the source of morality and decision making at the highest levels of state and federal government. But we act shocked when someone commits a horrible crime. We’ve said “no more of that old morality, we’ll take it from here.” But they’re taking it all in the wrong direction.
Sign of violence seen at a Mesa movie theater
So we’re teaching children – through government and the influence of the mass media culture – that it’s not only okay, but preferential, to kill the defenseless and treat people with incivility. Look at the titles of movies and TV shows: Everybody Hates Chris, Kill Bill, The Weakest Link. And we’re surprised children are killing children? You can’t expect a high level of civility when the foremost messages presented to the public are negative and destructive.
And then there are the special interest pressure groups raising huge sums of money to buy politicians and demand judges fabricate special privileges radically altering society. Anyone who opposes them, no matter how civil the opposition, is demonized and called “hater.” Many of them are threatened. The radicals are demanding opponents lose their jobs just for having a different viewpoint. This is disturbing. And it’s not the recipe for a civil society.
The real story of “progressivism” can best be described as man’s inhumanity to man.
Should Conservatives support influential Republicans who are supporting amnesty and same-sex “marriage”? They don’t have anywhere else to go, do they?
No, no and yes they do.
We as a nation should never abandon the rule of law. If we do, we get chaos – everyone just doing their own thing. It will be a nation in great conflict. Every self-respecting, orderly nation must control its borders. Mexico certainly does, though it criticizes those in the U.S. who demand we control ours.
It is not fair to legal immigrants for people to walk across the border illegally, going around the U.S. points of entry, and then demanding legal recognition and taxpayer benefits. Most people who immigrated here oppose illegal entry. Democrats only want to use these people’s votes: let them in, legal recognition and control over them and then demand their votes at election time.
Only about 2 percent of the population struggles with same-sex attraction, less than that in Arizona. Why should a tiny segment of the population be allowed to re-define marriage and subject more children to fatherlessness or motherlessness? The kids are not all right with this. In states where same-sex “marriage” is legal, very, very few homosexuals get married. For the most radical of the homosexual activists, it’s not really about marriage. It’s about destroying the traditional notion of family and marriage. We re-define marriage only at our own peril and a monumental loss of freedom. We opt for adult happiness over the well-being of children at our own peril and reap the social whirlwind. Homosexuality is not genetic, and same-sex “marriage” is not a civil right. That’s offensive to the people who truly suffered the indignation of slavery and denial of civil and human rights.
Republican leaders who want to join others by walking over the social cliff and into the moral abyss are absolutely undiscerning of what the end results will be. Conservatives must never acquiesce, must never join them or approve of this. There are more than enough conservative Republicans, independents and members of the Constitution Party to uphold principles and policies that will point this nation in the right direction.
Senator Harry Reid, other Democrats and many media and educational elites claim Conservatives are polarizing the nation. Is this accurate, and did conservatives create the culture war?
This is pure propaganda intended to direct attention away from those pushing for the most radical departure from U.S. history and tradition. The biblical explanation for this is calling evil good and good evil.
For most of America’s history, Judeo-Christian morality was the dominant worldview. But when those disagreeing with that worldview – John Dewey, Roger Baldwin, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and others – moved the nation in a different direction, Christians and Conservatives were slow to defend the nation’s traditional ideals. By the time Dr. James Dobson, President Ronald Reagan and many others began to respond, the moral center had collapsed. Christians had been lulled to sleep by how things had always been; they were the frogs in the pot who were boiled before they what hit them.
Now the Conservative movement is organized and defending the worldview that enabled America’s greatness and freedom. But the recent decades of indoctrination by educators and the mass media culture, along with the government’s shift to the secular humanist religion and animosity toward Judeo-Christian morality have taken a terrible toll on the country. It will be a long, hard climb to get out of this mess. It will not happen through politics. It will take a cultural shift. Everything else flows through the culture, and our culture is weak, decadent and in turmoil. We cannot allow leftists to steal our children’s hearts and minds and turn them against us. Every year millions of our kids are graduating from indoctrination in school and college and moving us further away as a nation from where we need to be. Our focus needs to be on salvaging our youth and saving this nation from the policies and worldviews that are poisoning our culture. We must change the direction our young people are being led into following. It’s that simple. If we do not accomplish this, our culture will only continue to deteriorate.
Salmon Not Lured by Leaders’ Party Line
By Tony Perkins, Family Research Council
Following the rules may not matter to the President’s party–but writing them certainly does. Why? Because, as Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) explains, that’s where the real legislating is done. “If you let me write the procedure and I let you write the substance,” said Democratic Congressman John Dingell (D-Mich.), “I’ll [beat] you every time.” Congressman Salmon harkened back to that quote in a bold new op-ed for the Washington Times, where he challenges the conservatives to rise up and “dare to be fiscally responsible.”
Salmon, who returned to Congress this year after serving three terms in the mid-90s, says he was driven back to Washington by America’s shocking financial situation. A situation, he points out, that is more dysfunctional than ever. Back in the day, Rep. Salmon explains, conservatives were willing to challenge the GOP leadership when they got “off track.” The strategy was simple. “One tactic we used was to vote against House rules on specific bills that did not uphold conservative principles.”
Essentially, the rules–like the one governing whether members could add amendments to the government’s short-term funding bill–decide how long the bill’s debate is and how many attachments will be allowed. For reasons unknown to most voters, members will support a rule to a bad bill and then vote against the actual legislation. Congressman Salmon wants to know why “a self-described fiscal conservative would enable the passage of the bad bill by supporting the rule?”
From now on, he writes, “I will vote against the rule for bills that increase spending without offsetting spending cuts and encourage my other conservative colleagues to do the same. Similarly, if House leadership brings any more bills to the floor without first securing the support from the majority of the GOP conference, I will take the same action. If enough of my conservative colleagues in the House join me, we can unilaterally put an end to the growth of government…”
Republicans need to start a revolution, Salmon says–and we agree. This is one of the most conservative Houses of Congress ever–but its power is being squandered by GOP leaders who are unwilling to take the necessary risks to limit government and save America. More members need to rise up–as Rep. Salmon and 15 others did in the CR debate–and challenge a GOP leadership that is more focused on preserving the majority than using it to get America back on track. Voters have had enough of Republicans babysitting the nation’s decline. It’s time to move from a party who’s scared to a party who dared.
Conservatives must dare to be fiscally responsible
By U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, (Arizona-Republican)
If there’s anything I have learned since returning to Congress, it’s that talk is still cheap, progress is still slow, and our liberties continue to erode every day.
When I last served in the House during the 1990s, it was common to say that we needed to control spending to protect future generations. Since I left, I have watched the national debt pile up under President George W. Bush, and then explode to unprecedented levels under President Obama. Indeed, both political parties are responsible for this. Our fiscal situation has now become so dire that it’s no longer just about protecting future generations — it’s about protecting the person retiring tomorrow.
This is what compelled me to return to Washington and get back in the fight to restore fiscal sanity.
Since being sworn in, I’ve had the opportunity to survey our problems from the inside out for more than two months. It’s not pretty. America now owes more in debt than the total of our national gross domestic product, and Congress is more dysfunctional than ever.
Sadly, far too many politicians in Washington lack the courage to do something to fix our problems. They are worried about the political implications of making the hard choices we so desperately need to cut spending and shrink government.
That’s unfortunate, and it needs to change.
During my previous tenure in Congress, House Republicans passed several pieces of meaningful legislation. We enacted welfare reform, pro-growth tax cuts, and achieved the holiest of grails — a balanced budget. In fact, by the time I left Congress in 2001 to honor my term-limits pledge, we had a budget surplus of more than $240 billion.
These successes were not easy to achieve. They came about because House conservatives were willing to confront GOP leadership when they occasionally got off-track rather than standing firm on the principles of economic freedom.
One tactic we used was to vote against House rules on specific bills that did not uphold conservative principles.
This is how it works: Before a bill can be considered in the House, there must first be a vote on the rule. The rule dictates how much time is spent on debate, how many amendments will be allowed, etc. Since the majority party is in charge of the House schedule, they are the ones who create the rules. The vote to pass these rules is almost always party-line affairs and usually goes unchallenged.
It’s not uncommon for strong, fiscally conservative Republicans in the House to support the rule on an ugly bill that grows government, but then vote against the underlying bill.
Yet it shouldn’t be that way. Why should a self-described fiscal conservative enable the passage of a bad bill by supporting the rule? If they oppose the underlying bill, then they should vote against any procedural move — including the rule — that enables the bill’s passage.
As Rep. John D. Dingell, Michigan Democrat, once said, “If you let me write the procedure, and I let you write the substance, I’ll [beat] you every time.”
More recently, had House conservatives voted against certain rules, they could have defeated several big-government bills that passed under a Republican House.
It’s time to shake things up and return the Republican Party to its roots of smaller government and less spending.
From this point forward, I will vote against the rule for bills that increase spending without offsetting spending cuts and encourage my other conservative colleagues to do the same. Similarly, if House leadership brings any more bills to the floor without first securing the support from the majority of the GOP conference, I will take the same action. If enough of my conservative colleagues in the House join me, we can unilaterally put an end to the growth of government that is moving us closer to Greece-like fiscal calamities.
Why would I be willing to challenge my Republican leadership? Because my allegiance will always be to the Constitution and the American people first and foremost, not to my political party.
The United Kingdom Special Forces have a motto — “who dares, wins.” It’s time for conservative Republicans in Congress to dare. The future of our nation depends on it.
SHOCKING MUST READ: Don’t Let Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Advocates Institute Cultural Madness and Turn America on its Head
Sky Fall: Gender Ideology Comes to the Schoolhouse
In our discussions with advocates of redefining marriage, we often hear that defenders of marriage and sexual difference are overreacting to cultural and legal changes. “You run around yelling that the sky is falling,” we’re told. “We’ve had same-sex marriage for a decade now in Massachusetts, and guess what: The sky is not falling.”
This is not an argument, of course, but an attempt to end any discussion of what it would mean to remove sexual distinctions from the law. As it did to James Bond’s psychiatric evaluation in the recent hit movie, the mention of the phrase “sky fall” is supposed to terminate the proceedings.
No serious participants in the current marriage discussion are running around like Chicken Little. Defenders of marriage are concerned primarily about the long-term implications of redefining the institution. We might not expect the redefinition of marriage to alter cultural practices dramatically right away. After all, it took nearly two generations to realize the full effects of the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. But strange things are nevertheless happening in Massachusetts, where sexual difference was eliminated from marriage laws in 2003.
Two years ago, the Massachusetts legislature enacted a statute prohibiting, among other things, discrimination in public schools on the basis of “gender identity.” The law defines gender identity as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behavior,” which is not determined by “the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth.”
On the basis of that statute, the Massachusetts Department of Education (MDOE) has now eradicated sexual distinctions from public schools. MDOE’s new directive requires schools to let children use bathrooms and play on sports teams according to the gender they personally identify as theirs, not their anatomical sex. The directive also admonishes schools to eliminate sex and gender distinctions in graduation garb, physical education, and other practices.
Under Massachusetts law, the connection between gender identity and sexual distinction is now considered a historical accident, the result of arbitrary (at best) or mistaken documentation at birth. MDOE’s directive explains:
One’s gender identity is an innate, largely inflexible characteristic of each individual’s personality that is generally established by age four, although the age at which individuals come to understand and express their gender identity may vary based on each person’s social and familial social development. As a result, the person best situated to determine a student’s gender identity is that student himself or herself.
Because the child is solely responsible for identifying his or her own gender, the regulations require school officials to seek the student’s permission before disclosing the student’s gender identity to his or her parents.
That’s not all. The regulations suggest that students who don’t endorse a fellow student’s gender identity may be subject to punishment. After condemning bullying, the directive endorses a memorandum that a Massachusetts school principal sent to teachers instructing them to discipline students who intentionally refer to a transgender student by his or her given name, or the pronoun corresponding to his or her anatomical sex. Such behavior “should not be tolerated.”
MDOE justifies these regulations on pedagogical grounds: “All students need a safe and supportive school environment to progress academically and developmentally.” By “all students” MDOE must mean all students who share MDOE’s conception of sex and gender as an individual choice.
It is not difficult to imagine who will embrace MDOE’s conception. The regulations state, “A student who says she is a girl and wishes to be regarded that way throughout the school day and throughout every, or almost every, other area of her life, should be respected and treated like a girl” (emphasis ours). The caveat that the student might want to be treated like a boy for some purposes seems an implicit admission that gender identity is not, in fact, an inflexible characteristic, as MDOE insists, but rather can adjust over time. And the directive states that the law “does not require consistent and uniform assertion of gender identity” (emphasis original).
While we doubt that teenage boys will take much interest in the provenance of gender personality, it’s not a stretch to suppose that they will welcome its implications for co-ed activity.
Perhaps this is why many parents in Massachusetts find these regulations shocking. We must confess that we are not so surprised. Massachusetts lawmakers have for many years been eradicating sexual distinctions from the law. This result seems to us the logical consequence of those efforts.
Redefining marriage to eliminate sexual complementarity as an essential characteristic doesn’t automatically commit a state to forcing girls to share locker rooms with boys. But there is a logical connection. One of the premises justifying the redefinition of marriage also grounds these new regulations, that is, the view that sexual difference is irrelevant to the practice of marriage.
But if sexual difference is irrelevant to marriage, then how can it be relevant to any practices? Once the state has determined that sexual difference is no longer a legitimate reason to extend special recognition to man-woman monogamy, there is no reason in principle to maintain sexual distinctions in less intimate practices. If one’s anatomical reality isn’t relevant to one’s marriage, it’s even less obvious why it should be relevant to one’s bathroom choice.
To be sure, there are prudential implications of eradicating sexual distinction from education laws. But if letting people identify their own gender is a matter of justice, then it’s the job of law to solve the practical problems of implementation. (That is a key lesson of civil rights legislation.)
Though future practical problems might seem obvious, the law makes it far from clear that there are any. If a boy who identifies as a girl really is a girl, as the law declaims, then any perceived harms resulting from his presence in a girls’ locker room are illusory. No wonder the Commonwealth exhorts school officials to discipline students who object to the arrangement.
There are other indications that those who perceive inherent differences between men and women will increasingly be marginalized from public life in Massachusetts. A few months ago, a federal court in Massachusetts ruled that the United States Constitution requires the Commonwealth’s Department of Corrections to pay for a sex-change surgery requested by an inmate who is serving time for murder. It is cruel and unusual punishment, the court reasoned, to force the prisoner to keep his anatomy intact while he is incarcerated.
This ruling might seem unrelated to removing sexual distinctions from law, but for the court’s reasoning. The court discredited the Commonwealth’s expert witnesses, who expressed doubt that a sex-change surgery is medically necessary, and who recommended treating the prisoner’s psychological and emotional disorders instead.
The court ruled that these recommendations are “not within the range that would be acceptable by prudent professionals.” In other words, the court decided that no prudent professional would deny sex-change surgery to a male prisoner who identifies himself as a woman.
The lesson is clear. If you think male and female are two distinct sexes determined by your anatomy at birth, then don’t bother serving as an expert witness in the United States District Court in Massachusetts. Nor can you in good conscience send your children to public school in the Commonwealth. A view of human nature that until very recently was understood to be obvious is becoming a source of disqualification from participating in public life.
As lawyers, we perceive the logic of this latest regulatory innovation. But as fathers, we think that those who are dismayed by MDOE’s regulations are the only Massachusetts residents who can plausibly claim to be in their right minds. If the sky is not falling then it is at least showing ominous fissures.
Adam MacLeod is an associate professor at Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law and a 2012-2013 Visiting Fellow of the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Andrew Beckwith is Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the Massachusetts Family Institute.
