Obama’s Pre-K Power Grab

by Phyllis Schlafly

June 26, 2013

Under the media’s radar, Obama has been aggressively promoting one of his fiscally extravagant projects announced in his 2013 State of the Union Address: “preschool available to every single child in America.” The plan for the federal government to take over the care of preschool children, a longtime goal of the feminists that used to be called universal child care, is now (probably to sound academic) called Pre-K.

The Obama Administration downplays the $75 billion initial cost of Pre-K by claiming it can be covered by raising the federal tax on cigarettes from $1.01 to $1.95. But cigarette taxes were hiked just a few years ago, and this massive sales tax falls harder on low-income Americans.

The game plan is to bait the states into accepting this expensive Pre-K plan by offering them bundles of new federal money, such as $308 million in grants dangled in front of Texas for just one year, requiring only a one-tenth match by the state. Of course, big blue-state California would receive the most funding, $334 million in the first year.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan was asked if he could re-direct existing federal education funds to cover the cost of Pre-K. No, Obama wants “a massive influx of resources” instead of using existing funds more efficiently.

Duncan has become a peripatetic salesman for Obama’s “Pre-K for All” initiative, traveling to make his sales talk personally to Republican governors in Georgia, Michigan and Virginia, with Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio and Minnesota on his future travel schedule. The game plan is to sell Republican governors on agreeing to take the money and then to lobby Republican Members of Congress to vote for the necessary tax increase.

Four years ago, the Obama plan to take control of education received a windfall, $4.3 billion from the Stimulus fund without strings. That money was used largely to finance another Obama plan, Race to the Top, which in turn was used to coopt the states into signing on to the unpopular national standards called Common Core.

The presumed goal of pre-kindergarten classes is to close or narrow the academic gap between poor and privileged kids when they enter kindergarten. However, the billions of dollars spent for that purpose for many years have done nothing to achieve that goal.

The principal reason for the gap is the difference between kids who live with their own mother and father and those who don’t. There are no plans to reduce the tremendous financial incentives of taxpayers’ money doled out that discourage marriage and incentivize illegitimacy.

In 2010 the Department of Health and Human Services released its long-awaited Head Start Impact Study, which tracked the progress of Head Start kids through kindergarten and first grade. HHS reported little or no positive effect, and even some harmful effects, but Obama wants a massively expanded Head Start program anyway.

Education Liberty Watch reported a study in which “researchers concluded that pre-school has a positive impact on reading and mathematics scores in the short term and a negative effect on behavior. While the positive academic impacts mostly fade away by the spring of the first grade, the negative effects persist into the later grades.”

The longtime political campaign to impose universal taxpayer-paid daycare originated from the feminist notion that the patriarchy oppresses women by expecting them to care for their own babies. Feminists insist that child care is demeaning to educated women and must be taken over by the taxpayers in order to liberate women from patriarchal oppression.

The feminists made a major effort to achieve universal child care with the Mondale Child Development bill in 1971. After a tsunami of public opposition, it was famously vetoed by President Nixon because it would have committed “the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”

The feminists are still whining in 2013 speeches, commentaries and TV interviews about Nixon’s 1971 veto. A feminist article in the New York Times this year claimed that Obama’s Pre-K proposal is a resurrection of Mondale’s bill.

Supporters of expanding government-funded preschool programs argue that “a commitment to pre-kindergarten is a commitment to national security,” because pre-K programs will supposedly increase high school graduation rates, decrease crime, and combat obesity, thus removing many obstacles that keep people out of the military. But Pre-K supporters do not provide any evidence for that theory.

The Obama Administration’s real motives in funding pre-K are based on the leftist plan to take over what has traditionally been the duty of families. Duncan warned about the “challenge” of our culture (horrors!) “where people … prefer … the grandmother, the neighbor” to the government when deciding to whom their young children should be entrusted.

We Should Reform Child Support

by Phyllis Schlafly

June 19, 2013

President Obama’s Father’s Day speech included one provocative yet very declarative sentence: “We should reform our child support laws to get more men working and engaged with their children.” Obama didn’t elaborate, but we can build on what he said because, yes indeed, child support laws urgently need “reform.”

Many fathers work long hours and make incredible sacrifices for their families. Child support formulas are based on the ridiculous notion that a father would make those same sacrifices for an ex-wife who is living with her new husband or boyfriend and for children he never or seldom sees.

Many fathers would happily do more to support their children if they got to see their kids more and were more engaged in their lives. But current child support laws have reverse incentives: the more the mother prevents such contact, the more child support she receives.

Child support is not even really child support because the mother has no obligation to spend the money on the kids, and faithful payment of child support does not buy the father time with his kids. The purpose of child support is to allow the mother to maintain a household and standard of living comparable to the father’s.

Because of perverse incentives, a so-called “no fault divorce” is often followed by a bitter child custody dispute with bogus allegations of domestic violence or child abuse, and the winner can get a huge child support windfall. Usually the family court judge cannot tell who is telling the truth.

Reform should eliminate these bad incentives. No parent should collect money for denying kids the opportunity to see the other parent, and payments should not exceed reasonable documented child expenses. If both parents are willing and able to manage joint child custody, there should be no necessity for child support payments.

As annoying as the IRS is, it follows accounting rules and taxes only actual income. But a family court judge can ignore current income (or lack thereof) and instead calculate child support on past income or on imputed future income.

A California wife, under community property laws, is entitled to 50 percent of her husband’s income and 50 percent of her own income. But if she divorces him and gets custody of their two kids, she then gets 40 percent of his income plus 100 percent of her own income.

We can no longer ignore how taxpayers’ money is incentivizing divorce and creating children who never or seldom “engage” (Obama’s word) with their fathers. We can no longer ignore the government’s complicity in the predictable social costs that result from more than 17 million children growing up without their fathers. Fatherless boys and girls are much more likely to run away, abuse drugs, get pregnant, drop out of school, commit suicide, or end up in jail.

The root of the family court evil is the redefinition of a legal doctrine called the Best Interests of the Child. This phrase originally meant the presumption that courts should generally stay out of family decisions because, as the Supreme Court wrote in 1979, “natural bonds of affection lead parents to act in the best interests of their children.”

Some states say “best interests” and some say “best interest,” but it means the same thing. That’s just a buzzword to conceal the transfer of parental rights to judges.

This phrase is now used as an affirmative grant of power to family court judges to overrule parents on all child-related issues. Three things are wrong with the current interpretation of Best Interests of the Child.

First, it is contrary to the rule of law by giving judges extraordinary discretion to enforce their own prejudices and to micro-manage lives. They punish parents for things that were never written down as crimes or offenses.

Second, the “best interests” standard undermines parental rights. Instead of saying that parents are the final authorities, as the family unit was understood for centuries, it allows judges to make routine child-rearing decisions.

Third, courts have no competence to determine a child’s best interests, so they rely on poorly trained evaluators who make unscientific recommendations about custody and visitation. There is rarely any evidence that a court-defined schedule is better than joint child custody.

Reform should get family courts out of the practice of pitting parents against each other, entertaining criminal accusations without evidence, assessing onerous support payments, sending dads to debtors’ prison, and appointing so-called “experts” to make parenting decisions. Instead, the courts should protect the rights of both parents.

In past Father’s Day messages, Obama has blamed fathers for abandoning their responsibilities, but this year’s message had no such comment. Perhaps Obama has learned that many fathers are locked out of their rights and responsibilities by family courts.

Arp Report

Filer, Idaho

Dear Patriots: 

            The solution to our country’s many problems is to return to the original intent of the Founding Father’s God-inspired US Constitution.  The Constitution including The Bill of Rights limited government not the people.  After the Constitution was ratified a burst of freedom brought great prosperity to America in only a couple years that even surprised the Founders.  The world was asking, “What happened in America to bring about the prosperity?”

             The Constitution gives the federal government very limited power.  The EPA, Department of Education and many other unconstitutional bureaucratic agencies need to be abolished.  The president is issuing unconstitutional Executive Orders which are causing major losses of personal freedom and economic havoc.  The dollar has been devalued in 100 years to less than 3% of its 1913 value by the unconstitutional Federal Reserve System.

            In the Northwest Ordinance, the Founders wanted religion, morality and knowledge to be taught in schools.  The Supreme Court had ruled many times that America was a Christian Nation.  However, they ruled without precedent in 1962 and 1963 to remove prayer and Bible reading from public schools.  This was a major factor in the moral cesspool that exists today. 

            Founder, George Mason warned that if we became a wicked nation, then Providence would punish America with natural disasters.  Storm damage continues to rise as we mock God and His Commandments for Christian living.

            We are turning over our national sovereignty to the Communist controlled United Nations.  Agenda 21 (sustainable development) is designed to control all human activity on the planet.  The EPA is implementing regulations through endangered species, wetlands, etc. to limit our energy and private property rights.  The man-caused global warming hoax (see www.petitionproject.org) is being used reduce our standard of living to third-world status.

            Get informed by researching www.thenewamerican.com and www.eagleforum.org and demand that our elected officials obey the Constitution.

A concerned citizen,

Adrian L. Arp, Ph.D.   

Obama’s Syria Policy Looks a Lot Like Bush’s Iraq Policy

Lake Jackson, Texas

President Obama announced late last week that the US intelligence community had just determined that the Syrian government had used poison gas on a small scale, killing some 100 people in a civil conflict that has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. Because of this use of gas, the president claimed, Syria had crossed his “red line” and the US must begin to arm the rebels fighting to overthrow the Syrian government.

Setting aside the question of why 100 killed by gas is somehow more important than 99,900 killed by other means, the fact is his above explanation is full of holes. The Washington Post reported this week that the decision to overtly arm the Syrian rebels was made “weeks ago” – in other words, it was made at a time when the intelligence community did not believe “with high confidence” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.

Further, this plan to transfer weapons to the Syrian rebels had become policy much earlier than that, as the Washington Post reported that the CIA had expanded over the past year its secret bases in Jordan to prepare for the transfer of weapons to the rebels in Syria.

The process was identical to the massive deception campaign that led us into the Iraq war. Remember the famous quote from the leaked “Downing Street Memo,” where representatives of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration discussed Washington’s push for war on Iraq?

Here the head of British intelligence was reporting back to his government after a trip to Washington in the summer of 2002:

“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

That is exactly what the Obama Administration is doing with Syria: fixing the intelligence and facts around the already determined policy. And Congress just goes along, just as they did the last time.

We found out shortly after the Iraq war started that the facts and intelligence being fixed around the policy were nothing but lies put forth by the neo-con warmongers and the paid informants, like the infamous and admitted liar known as “Curveball.” But we seem to have learned nothing from being fooled before.

So Obama now plans to send even more weapons to the Syrian rebels even though his administration is aware that the main rebel factions have pledged their loyalty to al-Qaeda. Does anyone else see the irony? After 12 years of the “war on terror” and the struggle against al-Qaeda, the US decided to provide weapons to the allies of al-Qaeda. Does anyone really think this is a good idea?

The Obama administration promises us that this is to be a very limited operation, providing small arms only, with no plans for a no-fly zone or American boots on the ground. That sounds an awful lot like how Vietnam started. Just a few advisors. When these few small arms do not achieve the pre-determined US policy of regime change in Syria what is the administration going to do? Admit failure and pull the troops out, or escalate? History suggests the answer and it now appears to be repeating itself once again.

The president has opened a can of worms that will destroy his presidency and possibly destroy this country. Another multi-billion dollar war has begun.

Ron Paul

Who Is Ron Paul?

National Missing Children’s Day 2013

fbi.gov

Adji Desir	Alexis S. Patterson	Aliayah Lunsford	Amber Elizabeth Cates	Amir Jennings	Asha Jaquilla Degree
Ashley Summers	Bethany Leanne Markowski	Bianca Lebron	Bryan Dos Santos-Gomez	Christina Lynn Adkins	Crystal Ann Tymich
Daniel Barter	Diamond Yvette Bradley	Hailey Dunn	Haleigh Cummings	Jaliek L. Rainwalker	Kara Kopetsky
Kristin Denise Smart	Kyron Richard Horman	Lindsey Baum	Michaela Joy Garecht	Rachel Louise Cooke	Reachelle Smith
Rolando Salas Jusino	Shaina Ashley Kirkpatrick	Shausha Latine Henson	Sierra Mae Lamar	Steven Earl Kraft, Jr.	Tabitha Danielle Tuders

Looking for Our Children
National Missing Children’s Day 2013

Earlier this month in Cleveland, three young women were freed from years of captivity after a concerned neighbor responded to an urgent call for help.

We need your help, too, in rescuing the many kids who remain far from home today. Please take a minute to look at all the faces above and on our Kidnapping and Missing Persons webpage and see if you can identify Crystal, Jaliek, Rolando, or any of the other children listed with their stories.

Also take a look at the faces of the children who have been kidnapped by a parent—Mohammad Hussain Metla, Jr. and the many other kids.

And we hope you’ll visit our Violent Crimes Against Children page to learn all you can about what a dangerous world it can be for our kids…and our Resources for Parents page to learn how to protect them in today’s world.

Last: Join us in honoring the law enforcement officers and others recognized as part of National Missing Children’s Day, including FBI Special Agent John D. Wydra, Jr. of our Charlotte Division. Our partners at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children also recognized a dozen FBI employees for going “above and beyond the call of duty for safely recovering missing child or successfully resolving a child sexual exploitation case.”

Government Spying: Should We Be Shocked?

Lake Jackson, Texas

Last week we saw dramatic new evidence of illegal government surveillance of our telephone calls, and of the National Security Agency’s deep penetration into American companies such as Facebook and Microsoft to spy on us. The media seemed shocked.

Many of us are not so surprised.

Some of us were arguing back in 2001 with the introduction of the so-called PATRIOT Act that it would pave the way for massive US government surveillance—not targeting terrorists but rather aimed against American citizens. We were told we must accept this temporary measure to provide government the tools to catch those responsible for 9/11. That was nearly twelve years and at least four wars ago.

We should know by now that when it comes to government power-grabs, we never go back to the status quo even when the “crisis” has passed. That part of our freedom and civil liberties once lost is never regained. How many times did the PATRIOT Act need renewed? How many times did FISA authority need expanded? Why did we have to pass a law to grant immunity to companies who hand over our personal information to the government?

It was all a build-up of the government’s capacity to monitor us.

The reaction of some in Congress and the Administration to last week’s leak was predictable. Knee-jerk defenders of the police state such as Senator Lindsey Graham declared that he was “glad” the government was collecting Verizon phone records—including his own—because the government needs to know what the enemy is up to. Those who take an oath to defend the Constitution from its enemies both foreign and domestic should worry about such statements.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers tells us of the tremendous benefits of this Big Brother-like program. He promises us that domestic terrorism plots were thwarted, but he cannot tell us about them because they are classified. I am a bit skeptical, however. In April, the New York Times reported that most of these domestic plots were actually elaborate sting operations developed and pushed by the FBI. According to the Times report, “of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since 9/11 on American soil, 14 were developed in sting operations.”

Even if Chairman Rogers is right, though, and the program caught someone up to no good, we have to ask ourselves whether even such a result justifies trashing the Constitution. Here is what I said on the floor of the House when the PATRIOT Act was up for renewal back in 2011:

“If you want to be perfectly safe from child abuse and wife beating, the government could put a camera in every one of our houses and our bedrooms, and maybe there would be somebody made safer this way, but what would you be giving up? Perfect safety is not the purpose of government. What we want from government is to enforce the law to protect our liberties.”

What most undermines the claims of the Administration and its defenders about this surveillance program is the process itself. First the government listens in on all of our telephone calls without a warrant and then if it finds something it goes to a FISA court and get an illegal approval for what it has already done! This turns the rule of law and due process on its head.

The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing. We need to turn the cameras on the police and on the government, not the other way around. We should be thankful for writers like Glenn Greenwald, who broke last week’s story, for taking risks to let us know what the government is doing. There are calls for the persecution of Greenwald and the other whistle-blowers and reporters. They should be defended, as their work defends our freedom.

Ron Paul

Who Is Ron Paul?