A top priority of Democrats nationwide is to try to expand early voting even beyond the more than 40-plus million votes that were cast on days other than Election Day in 2012 or by mail. The present system balkanizes and deprives our nation of the unifying value of one Nation on Election Day.

The Democrats know that their massive use of early voting was a major factor that enabled them to pile up the winning votes to reelect Barack Obama. Obama enthusiastically supports early voting; he urged 10,000 fans at his campaign speech in Urbandale, Iowa to vote right now “starting Sept. 27 … you don’t have to wait until Nov. 6 to vote.”

On the first day of the new Congress, the House Democrats showed what they think is really important by pushing (fortunately, unsuccessfully) for a new federal law that would require 10 hours a day of early voting for 15 days before any federal election. The bill also would have invented a new voting “right” that no one has to stand in line more than one hour.

Republicans think the goal of voting reform should be honest elections, not convenience, plus maintenance of safeguards against voter fraud and coercion of voters. Republicans want to make sure that only U.S. citizens can vote, that Voter-ID is used in every state, and that ballots from our armed forces abroad are really counted.

Early voting bypasses many safeguards for voting integrity such as having Poll Watchers from both political parties to monitor everything going on to deter polling-place monkey business. It’s expensive and nearly impossible to secure Poll Watchers for the many days of early voting that were allowed in Ohio (35 days) and other swing states.

Early voting is a liberal gimmick that disenfranchises Election Day voters by determining the outcome before Election Day and, contrary to liberal propaganda, early voting decreases overall voter turnout. Early voting increased substantially in Ohio in 2012, but overall turnout decreased significantly.

Early voting violates federal law, which for more than a century has required national elections to occur on the same day. Early voting adds heavy costs to the taxpayers and to the candidates because it significantly lengthens the campaign.

Early voting is unfair because it prevents voters from changing their minds up until Election Day. Early voting encourages uninformed voting because many voted before the presidential debates were held.

Early voting makes campaigns more expensive; it lengthens the time period for advertising. It harms third-party candidates who lack a political organization to get out early voters.

Early voting is a misnomer. More precise names would be premature voting, uninformed voting, or political machine voting.

What if jurors were allowed to decide they are tired of a lengthy trial and want to vote to convict a defendant midway through the trial and go home? Isn’t it just as important for voters to hear all the facts about candidates before voting?

Absentee voting provides another big opportunity for election fraud because it deprives many voters of our precious secret ballot. Here is one way that absentee voting works.

An Arkansas state legislator, Rep. Hudson Hallum, bribed voters with money and food to cast their absentee ballots for him, obtained and distributed ballots to those voters, and then collected them in unsealed envelopes. If the ballots were marked for Hallum’s opponent, Hallum pitched them. Hallum pled guilty to election fraud.

Mail-in ballots are subject to the same problem. Most of them are probably not secret ballots but are cast without traditional safeguards of secrecy and freedom from coercion, and you don’t know who is looking at them before they are dropped in the ballot box

Obama’s margin of victory was only a few hundred thousand votes in the four swing states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia and New Hampshire. That was far less than the number of mailed-in ballots cast.

Another easy way this racket works is to take absentee ballots to nursing homes and assisted-living institutions. The campaign worker “helps” the physically or mentally disabled senior citizens choose for whom they want to vote, marks the ballot, and then turns it in.

The Democrats’ party line is that voter fraud is a myth, but that illusion was dispelled by another stunning case of fraud by a prominent incumbent. The son and field director of U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, who has been in office for 22 years representing Virginia’s Washington suburbs, was filmed by videographer James O’Keefe advising an undercover reporter how to bypass Virginia’s Voter-ID law. The method was exquisitely ingenious: it called for creating fake utility bills on the internet to substitute for Voter-ID.

Political Parties Need Rebranding & New Leadership

Dozens of explanations have been offered by people who think they are savvy about politics to explain why Mitt Romney lost and Barack Obama was reelected despite his many unlawful actions and the high unemployment figures. My view is that the two major political parties need rebranding and new leadership.

Obama’s massive negative TV advertising rather successfully branded Romney and the Republican Party as rich guys who can’t empathize with ordinary hard-working Americans. In fact, Obama grew up enjoying a pampered lifestyle attending elite schools and colleges he didn’t pay for, and now is rich, too, with his wealth and lifestyle coming from the taxpayers.

Nevertheless, when the pollsters asked the question, “Who is more in touch with people like you?” Romney lost to Obama by ten points. Why is it that Romney didn’t seem to relate to middle-class Americans? We can’t blame only Romney’s country-club persona for the psychological barrier between him and the bloc of middle-class Americans whose votes he lost. We must also blame the Republican CEOs’ devotion to policies that allowed, even encouraged, several million well-paying manufacturing jobs to go overseas, leaving behind empty buildings in crucial swing states.

Romney didn’t have a message for those Americans, nor did Republican Senate candidates, nor did the Republican Party. So the people who were an essential part of Ronald Reagan’s spectacular victories returned to the Democratic Party, assuming that Republicans care more about their devotion to so-called “free trade” with cheating Communist countries than to protecting good American jobs and a strong American manufacturing base.

You would think that Romney and the Republican Party would have learned a lesson from the insensitive way John McCain brushed off the suffering of those whose good jobs were moving overseas. McCain went to Detroit and callously said in debate: Those jobs are gone forever; just go to a community college and get retrained.

The basic Romney-Republican economic message was cutting taxes and regulations to enable people to prosper as entrepreneurs, innovators, and employers. That’s fine, but it doesn’t relate to the millions of men who lost $50,000 jobs and then had to take minimum-wage or part-time jobs that don’t pay enough to support a family.

Romney and Republicans also lost the votes of the Millennial generation, some of whom were turned off by our meddling nation-building in faraway lands. Other votes of Americans that should have gone to Republicans were lost because the RINO (Republicans in Name Only) Establishment, rather than grassroots Republicans, selected the wrong candidate and dictated wrong policies. Insulting the Libertarians, such as by not allowing the Ron Paul delegates to have their Convention votes recorded, was a crucial mistake, and the small Libertarian vote in some states probably was the margin of defeat of several Republican Senate candidates.

While Republicans were proclaiming that 2012 was the most important election of our lifetime, 5 million fewer Americans than in 2008 voted either for the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate. Maybe they decided there isn’t any difference between the two major parties, and on the crucial economic issue of loss of good middle-class jobs, there apparently isn’t.

The Republican Party doesn’t need only a change in marketing. It also needs a change in policies in order to respect the jobs of middle-class Americans and the choices of grassroots Republicans.

It’s time to change Republican economic policy so the Party can be rebranded as the party of family, good jobs, and superior weaponry that keeps America safe without war. Safe without war and Reagan-style peace through strength can help to win back thousands of non-voters.

The leaks coming out of the RINO Establishment (which made so many 2012 mistakes) now impudently try to instruct Republicans whom they want as representatives: (1) let the RINOs select Republican primary nominees instead of letting grassroots voters decide who they want to represent them, and (2) blame the defeat on those who talk about social issues. Let’s remember that it was grassroots Republicans, not the Establishment, that chose winners Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The Republican Establishment is also trying to make us believe that Republicans can win by offering amnesty to illegal aliens. That’s a deadend road that translates into more Democratic, not Republican, votes.

The Democratic Party should be rebranded as the Party of atheism, amnesty, abortion, and debt. For confirmation of those goals, just read the Democratic Party Platform adopted this year in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Voters should watch again that portion of the Democratic National Convention when a voice vote was taken three times on including a reference to God in the Democratic Party Platform, and three times at least half the Delegates loudly shouted No. Barack Obama confirmed the Democratic Party’s rejection of God in his 2012 Thanksgiving Day address. For the fourth straight year, he omitted thanking God, merely reminding us to thank “each other.”

There’s plenty of hope for the Republican Party because 30 of the 50 governors are Republican, 24 states are completely under Republican control, and Republicans still have the majority of the House of Representatives. It’s time for grassroots Republicans, with the help of our Tea Party allies, to take control of their Party and set it on a winning path.

Beware: Amnesty Won’t Elect Republicans

The Republican strategists who confidently predicted that their candidate, Mitt Romney, would win the 2012 election are already pontificating about what Republicans must do to win in 2016. After their disastrous defeat, strategy and policy mistakes, and expensive super PAC advertising that failed to win votes, why should anybody take their advice again?

The elitists now tell us that amnesty for illegal aliens, a.k.a. “immigration reform,” is the key to future Republican nirvana. That’s wrong-headed advice.

Barack Obama sealed his victory in the battleground states: Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, and New Hampshire, but those states have very few Hispanics, and illegal immigration was not a significant issue. Obama won narrowly in Florida, another battleground state, but the Hispanic vote there is Cuban and Puerto Rican and they don’t care about immigration laws.

Most polls show that Romney’s pro-enforcement policies were more popular than Obama’s pro-amnesty views. Let’s look at some numbers.

In regard to the entry of illegal aliens, a CBS poll in August found that 63% of voters believed that Arizona’s immigration enforcement laws are either “about right” or “didn’t go far enough.” This was confirmed by a Breitbart News election-night poll reporting that 61% of voters favored Arizona-style immigration laws, including 63% of independents, 53% of blacks, and even 40% of Democrats.

The notion that the main reason Hispanics vote Democratic is their support of amnesty for illegal aliens and their resentment against Republicans who oppose it is a big political lie. The reason Hispanics vote Democratic is that two-thirds of Mexican immigrant families, although they are hard workers, are in or near poverty and 57% use at least one welfare program, which is twice the rate of native-born non-Hispanic households.

That’s not a constituency for whom promises of amnesty for more poor immigrants would persuade them to vote for the Party that is branded as supporting tax cuts for the rich, limited government, and spending reductions. Nor does it mean that Hispanics are a voting bloc eager to vote for a white Cuban, Marco Rubio, instead of the Party that is offering them cash, health care, and other benefits.

The elitists are trying to wrap their fallacious argument in Ronald Reagan, but that won’t wash. Reagan was persuaded to sign a major amnesty bill for the then-illegal aliens, but it’s well known that the resultant amnesty was rife with fraud and did not produce Republican votes.

In Reagan’s 1980 victory, he received 35% of the Latino vote, and in his landslide of 1984 he received 37%. After Reagan’s generous 1986 amnesty, George H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory produced only 30% of the Latino vote.

Another myth about Hispanic voters is the notion that social issues will get them to vote Republican because they are Christian and pro-family. The Hispanic illegitimacy birth rate is 53%, about twice that of whites, and a Pew Research Center poll now reports that the majority of Hispanics support gay marriage.

An American National Elections Study asked a question about free market vs. government solutions. Only 17.9% of Hispanics responded “the less government the better,” and 83.3% said a strong government involvement is required to handle economic problems.

The pro-amnesty crowd waged an expensive campaign this year to defeat the famous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, but he nevertheless won his reelection. He said he wants to talk “man to man” with Obama and explain that granting amnesty to illegal aliens is unfair to legal immigrants.

Policymakers should read the studies by Cuban exile scholar Jose Azel that probe into Hispanic attitudes and history. He concludes that the sociopolitical heritage from Spain and the post-colonial experience of Latin America have led Latinos to view government very differently from the principles of limited government enunciated and adopted by our Founding Fathers.

There isn’t any real evidence of Mexican assimilation to parallel the Irish and Italian assimilation in the 20th century. Irish and Italian assimilation absolutely depended on stopping the entry of more new foreigners, as the United States did in the 1920s.

The voting bloc that Mitt Romney ignored, but which Republicans must recapture if they ever want to win again, is the blue-collar men without a college degree who had well-paid manufacturing jobs until the free traders shipped those jobs overseas. They used to be called Reagan Democrats and they were an essential part of the big victories won by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Republicans need a new strategy to recapture those good middle-class jobs. We don’t need them merely for Republican votes; we need them also to restore our manufacturing capacity for economic, national security, and family-support reasons.

ObamaCare Battle Isn’t Over Yet

Those who thought ObamaCare was set in concrete by Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision last June have discovered that states have the option of whether or not they will create a health insurance exchange, which is the key to participating in the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Obama’s belief that the public would warm up to his signature legislation once it became the law of the land has proven false. The current Kaiser Family Foundation poll reports that only 38% of the public approves of ObamaCare.

Sixteen states, including Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio and Missouri, have given notice to the federal government that they are refusing to set up a health exchange, which means it falls to the federal government to set up exchanges for those states. Only 17 states have committed to set up a health exchange as ObamaCare expected, while the other states are still wrestling with their decision. Republicans and Tea Parties are encouraging them not to set up an exchange.

Among the good reasons for states to say No is that an exchange would cost each state between $10 million and $100 million a year, and that would require unwelcome tax increases. Ohio estimates that setting up its exchange will cost $63 million plus $43 million to run annually.

A state-created exchange provides a mechanism for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to impose one-size-fits-all rules on insurance products sold in the state. It also makes it easier for the federal government to regulate individuals and businesses in that state, collecting fines and taxes from some in order to give subsidies to others. Nevertheless, you can be sure that the blame will fall on state officials when ObamaCare increases insurance premiums and denies care to the elderly.

State-created exchanges will bring us higher taxes, fewer jobs, and fewer doctors and health care providers. To add insult to injury, ObamaCare’s mandates will drastically infringe on our religious freedom.

If enough states refuse to create a federally controlled exchange, that will give the federal government the go-ahead to take on the task of building the exchanges. The feds would then have to figure out who is eligible and for what, a calculation that requires ascertaining family income, the number of family members, and who may be eligible for different levels of benefits.

One positive effect of states’ refusal to set up exchanges is that this might be a good way to reduce federal spending and debt. If all states declined, it is estimated that the federal deficit could be reduced by about $700 billion over ten years.

Can the federal government, big as it is, cope with this task? It can’t be easy, and it could take at least two or three years to build the technology since they are starting with Medicaid’s 1980s technology.

Another way states can throw a roadblock in ObamaCare and also reduce their own spending is by making a second decision not to sign on to ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid. The Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision assured the states of their right to say No to participation in this Medicaid expansion.

Medicaid costs are already bankrupting state governments and increasing costs of private insurance. At the same time, Medicaid payments for services rendered are so low that patients have trouble finding physicians and other health providers who will accept them.

It’s been estimated that ObamaCare’s Medicaid provision could cost the states as much as $53 billion over the first ten years, and neither the states nor the federal government has the money to expand Medicaid. Medicaid is already layered with waste and fraud, plus the failure to convince us that it is a cost-effective way to deliver health care.

ObamaCare is a massive and costly double-barreled entitlement expansion. Overnight, ObamaCare will add 30 million people to the government’s entitlement rolls, an overwhelming task even for the Obama Administration.

Tell your state legislators to reject their state’s health-insurance exchange and also to reject an expansion of Medicaid. We simply cannot afford either liberal boondoggle.

The esteemed commentator Thomas Sowell said it best: “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication AND a government bureaucracy to administer it.” It doesn’t make sense.

Good Advice from Ronald Reagan

Be of good cheer. We can save America from Obama’s rush to Socialism. Here is still-valid advice from Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1975 Conservative Political Action Conference:

We have been through a disastrous election. It is easy for us to be discouraged, as pundits hail that election as a repudiation of our philosophy and even as a mandate of some kind or other. But the significance of the election was not registered by those who voted, but by those who stayed home. . . .

It is possible we have been persuasive to a greater degree than we had ever realized. Few, if any Democratic Party candidates in the last election ran as liberals. . . . Bureaucracy was assailed and fiscal responsibility hailed. . . . Make no mistake, the leadership of the Democratic Party is still out of step with the majority of Americans. . .

I don’t know about you, but I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, “We must broaden the base of our Party” — when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents. . . .

Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?

Let us show that we stand for fiscal integrity and sound money and above all for an end to deficit spending, with ultimate retirement of the national debt. Let us also include a permanent limit on the percentage of people’s earnings government can take without their consent. . . . Let us explore ways to ward off Socialism. . . .

A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers. . . .

It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way.

Hope for the Future

If Republicans want to win future elections, they will have to field candidates who confidently defend U.S. jobs, the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism, parents’ rights in education, traditional marriage, and the sanctity of human life.

The conservative movement was built by local study groups in the 1960s. Those study groups built a grassroots constituency that defined conservatism and taught it to those who sought to be elected our representatives. The grassroots were then ready to choose and elect Ronald Reagan.

Conservatives today should not waste time speculating about who they will support for President in 2016. Instead we should build a powerful grassroots movement that trains leaders on every level of government to articulate authentic, pro-American conservative principles. Then we will be in position to name our nominee.

Republican conservatives have recovered again and again after various elitists led us down the road to defeat with candidates who were aptly described as “me too” or “moderates” in aping the liberals, especially in policies supporting big government, globalism, and internationalism.

The State of Kansas has given us a stunning example of how conservatives can retake our Party. Kansas is a very red state, but RINO Republicans have long controlled the legislature and blocked conservative legislation. In the 2012 Kansas Republican Primary, conservatives won an overwhelming victory, taking over the State Senate by defeating eight long-serving, powerful RINOs.

As a result of the 2010 and 2012 elections, 24 states are now controlled by Republicans. That gives us a great opportunity to pass laws that will stop vote fraud in future elections. Conservatives, let’s get to work!

Americans may be tired of an exhausting national campaign, but let’s not forget that the stakes have never been higher. As Yogi Berra said, When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

If Barack Obama is reelected, he will merely click the repeat button to give us another dose of his first term, sending us down the road to European socialism, dependency on government, and imposing incredible debt on our children and grandchildren. Taking the fork in the road will give Mitt Romney and a new Republican Senate the opportunity to take us into a new era of rejecting dependency on government.

That’s our choice of what kind of America we want for ourselves and our children because it’s becoming clearer all the time that Obama’s road means a growing percentage of Americans dependent on government for living expenses, housing, medical care, and even food. The Congressional Research Service has just issued a new report that total annual spending on means-tested welfare programs has hit an incredible $1 trillion a year, not including entitlement programs to which people contribute, such as Social Security and Medicare.

There are 83 federal welfare programs that make up this single largest budget item, more than we spend on national defense. In 2011, federal and state welfare spending averaged $61,194 per poor household per year.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who ordered the budget figures to be released, said, “No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends, but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty.” A major reason to take the right fork in the road is the fact that Obama gutted the welfare reform provision to get people out of poverty when he summarily and unlawfully abolished the successful Work requirement which was required by the law passed by the Republican Congress in 1996 and signed by Bill Clinton.

The biggest increase in welfare spending is for food stamps, which are now feeding 46,681,833, including 1,634,000 non-citizens. Sessions says that the Obama administration has allowed this program to increase mightily through misleading promotion and a disregard for self-reliance.

Foreign policy is another major reason to take the fork in the road. The scandal of the Obama Administration’s refusal to defend our U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, despite desperate appeals to send help, proves that it was a hollow victory to kill Osama bin Laden because his acolytes are alive and still killing Americans.

The pathetic job market is a major reason to take the fork in the road. Obama’s much- touted “plan for jobs and middle-class security” is to send two million kids to community colleges. They will be looking for private enterprise jobs that don’t exist, and the only new jobs this will cause is hiring more government teachers.

In the last presidential debate, Barack Obama taunted Mitt Romney with this accusation: “Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.”

Some Obama staffer too young to remember any of those years must have given those words to Obama. They make no sense.

The 1980s were actually years of our most successful foreign policy. Those were the Ronald Reagan years when he labeled the USSR the Evil Empire and then won the Cold War (in the famous words of Margaret Thatcher) “without firing a shot” based on our military superiority and his determination to build an anti-missile defense.

The 1950s were the high-water mark for the American nuclear family. Social and economic policies favored it, and no one had to apologize for it. Since then, illegitimate births have increased to 41 percent a year, causing all the taxpayer costs and social problems that result from that unhappy figure.

The 1920s (known as the Roaring Twenties) were years of sustained economic prosperity, industrial and technological progress, and cultural dynamism. Obama, on the other hand, is taking us back to the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression, when the progressives started to falsely tell us that government can solve all our economic problems.

The only question voters need ask themselves in deciding whether to take the fork in the road is: are you and our country better off now than four years ago? For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the answer is a resounding “no.”

Further Reading:

• Election Central 2012

Political pundits have been warning about an October Surprise that could affect the outcome of the presidential election. But this year’s October Surprise may have been the 9/11 murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens plus three other Americans, and President Obama’s deceitful, cowardly response.

The fallout is the collapse of the false narrative that the assassination of Bin Laden brought finality to Muslim threats, the proof of the failure of President Obama’s Middle East policy, and the coverup. A coverup is a bad act or false statement followed by an effort to conceal or mislead public knowledge.

Obama got away with his war on Libya without congressional approval because no Americans were killed. Now four Americans have been killed.

The 9/11 attack in Benghazi, Libya was a preplanned, calculated, organized, military-style assault on U.S. territory and personnel. But the Obama Administration persisted for two weeks in spinning the fairy tale that it was just the spontaneous outburst of a mob angry about an anti-Muslim video.

On Sept. 16, the Obama Administration sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice onto five Sunday TV programs to redundantly present the party line that the torching of the consulate and murder of the U.S. Ambassador were merely an angry mob reaction to an anti-Islam video made in the U.S. Rice called the event “spontaneous, not a premeditated response” that seemed “to have been hijacked” by “extremists who came with heavier weapons.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney insisted on Sept. 14 that the attack was all about an anti-Muslim video, saying, “We have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack.” He spent eight days denying the obvious before he admitted that the label of terrorism was “self-evident.”

When Obama spoke to the United Nations on Sept. 25, he announced “the vision we will support.” Expressing “outrage” at the anti-Islam video (which he mentioned six times), but not at the terrorists or violent enemies of the United States, Obama proclaimed that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

In an emotional pitch to the UN, Obama announced that it’s the world’s duty to condemn the video. Obama and Administration spokesmen almost sounded like they were empathizing with the rioters, and that it must be our fault for allowing a video to be shown that hurt the rioter’s feelings.

Mitt Romney challenged Obama on the Libyan attack in the second presidential debate on Oct. 16. Obama responded by claiming he had called it a “terror” event the day after it happened, after which moderator Candy Crowley showed her bias by immediately backing up his statement.

Fact checkers emphatically pointed out Obama had made a vague reference to unspecified “acts of terror” in his Sept. 12 Rose Garden remarks, but he absolutely did not apply the “T” word to the fatal Benghazi attack. It took Obama two weeks to admit that we had suffered another deliberate enemy attack, meanwhile whining that suggestions that he would “mislead is offensive.”

Obama spent more time discussing the evils of the video than castigating any particular violent attack from the Muslim world. He said Ambassador Stevens was “killed” in Benghazi without mentioning who murdered him, much less labeling them as terrorists.

Obama is deeply committed to the myth of a liberating “Arab Spring” and “the forces of change” to bring about democracy in the Middle East. He seems oblivious to the reality of how his policy of dislodging dictators friendly to the United States, such as in Egypt and Libya, has resulted in rule by Islamist forces who attack and kill Americans.

The evidence is overwhelming that Ambassador Stevens and his tiny security staff had made repeated requests to the Obama Administration for enhanced security and more security staff. Fox News reported 230 prior security incidents in Libya.

Assistant Secretary of State Charlene Lamb, who was in charge of diplomatic security, testified on Oct. 10 that she had placed “the correct number of assets in Benghazi at the time of 9/11 for what had been agreed upon.” That doesn’t square with the denials of repeated requests for enhanced security measures and staff.

Obama revealed his messianic self-importance in this interview given on New Hampshire Public Radio on Nov. 21, 2007: “The day I’m inaugurated, not only the country looks at itself differently, but the world looks at America differently…. If I’m reaching out to the Muslim world, they understand that I’ve lived in a Muslim country, and I may be a Christian, but I also understand their point of view.”

We hope congressional investigations will keep digging. We still want to know, what did Obama and other Administration officials know and when did they know it.

Further Reading:

• White House told of militant claim two hours after Libya attack: emails
• Election Central 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, October 23, 2012
CONTACT: Ruth Reynolds, 314-721-1213
Email: Ruth@eagleforum.org

Phyllis Schlafly, President of Eagle Forum and author of the recent New York Times bestseller, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom, has produced a ‘5-minute video that compares Todd Akin and Claire McCaskill on a variety of issues important to the voters of Missouri.  The video includes interviews with Focus on the Family founder, Dr. James Dobson, and former Arkansas Governor and Fox Program Host, Mike Huckabee.  Mrs. Schlafly is urging Missouri citizens to watch the video and post it on their Facebook page, send it to family and friends, and to those in a viewer’s network.

Said Mrs. Schlafly: “The Senate election in Missouri this year may shift the balance of power in the U.S. Senate – whether America continues the liberal policies of Barack Obama and Claire McCaskill, or whether it reflects Missouri values in the economy, education, the protection of marriage and the middle-class.  I produced thIS video over the past few weeks because I believe if the people of Missouri understand the sharp contrast between Claire McCaskill and Todd Akin, Todd Akin will this election, and it will help shape Missouri and America for years to come.

Click Here to Watch Phyllis Schlafly’s New Video about the Missouri Senate Race: 

If you would like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Phyllis Schlafly, please contact Ruth Reynolds at 314-721-1213, or email her at Ruth@eagleforum.org.

Activist Checklist

Educating Religious Voters

• Sit down with friends and acquain tances in your home, at church, or during Bible study sessions and discuss the threat secular politicians and their policies pose to religious liberty.
• Provide photocopies of the Religious Freedom and Americans of Faith Are Under Attack flyer or this brochure to friends, family and coworkers. Urge them to tell their friends and acquaintances about how our religious freedom is under attack.
• Write letters to the editor of your lo­cal newspaper about the threat to religious freedom from an out of control federal government. It’s important to spread the word!
• Hand out photocopies of the Religious Freedom and Americans of Faith Are Un­der Attack flyer at community events, in shopping center parking lots or leave them on wind shields of cars parked at local churches. IMPORTANT: Always get ap­proval before distributing flyers on private property.
• Offer to speak about the importance of voting at community events like home owners’ and condo association meetings. Make sure they recite the Pledge of Alle­giance before starting the meeting!
• Post comments on your favorite public affairs blogs or forums describing the many different instances where big­ government is attacking our freedom of religion.

Voting

• Make sure everyone you know is reg­ istered to vote. Information on registering in your state can be found very easily on the internet.
• Familiarize yourself with the early and absentee voting procedures for your state. A table with the dates and require­ ments is included with this kit. Feel free to reproduce it.
• Urge everyone you know who is eligible to vote early to do so. You never know what might prevent someone from casting a ballot on Election Day.
• On Election Day call everyone you know and remind them to vote. Volunteer to drive anyone to the polls who needs a ride.

Religious Freedom and Americans of Faith
Are Under Attack from the Obama Administration

On Attacks on the Religious Freedom of Members of the Military and Veterans:

• In July of 2011, Barack Obama’s Department of Veterans Affairs banned any mention of Jesus Christ at the Houston National Cemetery. The ban was ultimately reluctantly lifted.
• Also in 2011 the U.S. Air Force Academy ended its support for Operation Christmas Child because the group is Christian and headed up by Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son.
• In 20P Walter Reed Army Medical Center revised its rules to read: “No religious items (i.e. Bibles, reading materials and/or facts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit.” The policy was later very reluctantly rescinded in the face of extreme public pressure.
• This year the Air Force bowed to the wishes of the “Military Order of Atheist and Freethinkers” and removed the Latin word for God, “Dei,” from the logo of the Rapid Capabilities Office.
• Also this year the U.S. Army warned Catholic Chaplains to not read a letter from Archbishop Timothy Broglio opposing the Department of Health and Human Services’ contraceptive/abortifacient mandate.

On Compelling Religious Americans and Organizations to Violate Their Beliefs:

• One of President Obama’s first acts was to compel U.S. taxpayers to fund non-governmental organi­zations that paid for abortions oversees.
• Mr. Obama has ordered doctors and nurses who work at federally-funded hospitals to perform abor­ tions.
• President Obama recently ordered that religious organizations and companies pay for insurance poli­ cies for their employees that cover abortions and contraceptives even if such an action violates their religious beliefs.

On Militant Secularism in the Federal Government Bureaucracy:

• In 2009 Barack Obama forced Georgetown University, a Catholic institution, cover a symbol for the name of Jesus that would have appeared behind him while he was giving a speech at that famous col­ lege.
• Also in 2009 the Department of Homeland Security produced a report on “right-wing extremism” that warned of a national security threat from pro-life terrorists.
• Starting that same year, Obama dropped the practice of holding a public event at the White House to commemorate the National Day of Prayer.
• Obama has consistently battled to shut down the District of Columbia’s school voucher program after being pressured to do so by militant secularists.
• President Obama nominated militant homosexual activist and anti-religious zealot Kevin Jennings to head up the Department of Education’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools.
• In 2010, Obama’s Pentagon disinvited Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham from its National Day of Prayer event.
• The Obama Administration was the very first one in American history to meet and plot political strategy with lobbyists for the atheist Secular Coalition for America.
• In October of 2010 Obama began dropping the phrase “by their Creator” when quoting from the Declaration of Independence, which changes its meaning. The Founding Fathers believed that our rights come from God, not government.

As we approach a major national election, we hear warnings about many kinds of vote fraud and possible recounts that might delay confirmation of who are the victors. We also hear from deniers who insist that vote fraud is a figment of the imagination of Republicans. It isn’t; vote fraud is real.

Many instances of registration fraud schemes were carried out by ACORN, and some members were even tried and convicted. Although ACORN announced it was closing its doors, it reemerged under new names.

It’s common knowledge that there are more registered voters in Philadelphia than there are people living in Philadelphia, because dead and moved-away voters have not been stricken from the list. Similar accusations have been made in a dozen other states.

In Minnesota, we were entertained for weeks with news of the recounting of votes in the 2008 Minnesota election for U.S. Senate. Al Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes out of three million cast.

After all was said and done, Minnesota discovered that 289 convicted felons had voted illegally in Hennepin County, 52 had voted illegally in Ramsey County, and many others voted illegally who were dead or who voted multiple times. That is reason enough for the U.S. Senate to use its constitutional power in Article I, Section 5 to unseat Franken.

In a shocking case this fall, a good-looking Arkansas state legislator, Rep. Hudson Hallum, pled guilty to election fraud by bribing voters to vote their absentee ballots for him. He had applied for and distributed the absentee ballots, and the voters then gave the ballots to him in unsealed envelopes. If they were marked for Hallum’s opponent, they were pitched.

The wide use of absentee and mail-in ballots has destroyed our traditional American secret ballot. This is a major loss of an important American right and an open door to election fraud.

It’s important to know that it’s much easier to prevent vote fraud beforehand than it is to overturn an election suspected of being plagued with fraud. Can individual citizens do something to prevent vote fraud, or can we count on the government to protect us from the cheaters?

There are things you can do right now, before the election. You can volunteer to be a poll watcher, sometimes called poll observers or challengers or checkers, and usually at least one watcher is allowed to be close enough to the election officials to be able to compare the voter’s signature with the verification record.

State laws vary about the rights and duties of poll watchers and how many can be in a polling place. You can get some helpful advice and good instructions by contacting www.truethevote.org.

Most state legislatures will go into session early next year, and now is the time they are planning the bills they want to pass. At the top of their list should be a photo ID law if they are not among the 17 states that already have such a law. There is no question about the constitutionality of voter ID because the Supreme Court upheld the Indiana voter ID law in 2008.

The left squeals in pain about photo ID laws, claiming they are a conspiracy of Republicans to suppress vote turnout, especially of minority voters. There’s no evidence to support that claim and, in fact, voter turnout has actually increased in Indiana and Georgia where photo ID has been implemented.

A citizen who lacks photo ID can prove identity with other documents. These include a state-issued ID, credit card, utility bill, bank statement, student ID, a government check or paycheck showing the voter’s name and address, birth certificate, or a passport.

Minorities are actually among those most eager to implement photo ID. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young said, “You cannot be part of the mainstream of American life today without a photo ID.” The sponsor of Rhode Island’s photo ID law was Harold Metts, who is the only African-American in the state senate.

Just think of all the many occasions when we all must show photo ID: when stopped by the police for a traffic violation, to make a credit card purchase, to check in for any medical treatment, to check into a hotel room, or to board an airplane. Isn’t it just as important to assure that only American citizens are allowed to vote, and to prevent non-citizens from canceling out your vote, and to prevent crooks from voting twice or voting in the name of a dead person who is still registered?

When your vote is nullified by illegal votes, you are cheated just as much as if you were denied the right to vote.

Further Reading:

• Election Central 2012

Some Issues in the 2012 Election

On October 31, 2008, Barack Obama said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States.” It’s now clear that his goal is not merely to “spread the wealth around,” as he told Joe the Plumber. Obama’s goal is to transform America from “one nation under God (as we proudly proclaim in our Pledge of Allegiance) to a totally secular country where we are allowed to recognize No Higher Power than the Federal Government. Obama has told us that “government is the only thing we all belong to.”

I urge you to read and distribute my newest book, co-authored with the distinguished scholar George Neumayr, called No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom. In many years of volunteering in political action, I never dreamed that religious freedom could ever be on the chopping block in America as a political issue. But it is one of the major issues in the 2012 election.

Obama is carrying on a tremendous war against religious liberty. He is trying to redefine the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment (the way Americans have understood it for more than two centuries) to mean “freedom of worship” only inside a church, but excluding any reference to religion in any public place or school.

With public opinion polls running about even for the Obama-Romney race, people keep asking what a second term for Obama will mean to the United States. He gave us a significant clue when (not realizing his mike was on), he told the Russian President that, after reelection, he will have “more flexibility” to give the Russians what they want on anti-missile defenses. If he would reduce our anti-missile defenses, then there is no limit to the damage he can and will do to American security.

Obama will also have “more flexibility” to limit our religious freedom. We can expect him to finish his job of “fundamentally transforming” us into a totally secular state where we will be denied the First Amendment’s “free exercise” of religion we have always known.

He will have “more flexibility” to take us deeper into debt, to borrow more billions from China, to issue hundreds of illegal executive orders in violation of congressional law, to impose same-sex marriage on our country and the military, to create millions more Americans dependent on government, and to take us down the road to European socialism.

Contrast in Platforms on Social Issues

The 2012 Republican Platform is a reliable statement of what grassroots voters care about. The Republican platform writers were upfront about social issues, decisively ignoring Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ foolish attempt to call a “truce” about social issues. The grassroots are smart enough to have figured out that social issues (a) motivate voters and (b) cause the enormous spending and debt that Barack Obama has piled up, a fact that establishment gurus and typical campaign strategists like to ignore.

Recognizing how social issues motivate their members, the Democrats embraced them in their platform. The Democratic platform states: “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion [note: the Democrats no longer say "rare"], regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.” Most Democratic Convention speakers, regardless of their assigned topic, proclaimed their fidelity to abortion rights.

The Republican platform is very different: “We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortions or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage.”

For the first time, the Democrats’ platform strongly supports same-sex marriage. It states: “We support marriage equality and support the movement to secure equal treatment under law for same-sex couples.”

The Republican platform, on the other hand, states: “Congressional Republicans took the lead in enacting the Defense of Marriage Act, affirming the right of States and the federal government not to recognize same-sex relationships licensed in other jurisdictions. We reaffirm our support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.”

Amazing Vote at Democratic Convention

When the Democratic Party Platform came to the Convention floor for approval, it omitted the name of God (which had been in previous Democratic Party Platforms). A motion was made on the Convention floor to put God back into the Platform, a motion that required a two-thirds majority to pass.

The chair called for a voice vote, and the Ayes and Nays sounded equal. The chairman looked baffled and called for a second vote. Again the Ayes and Nays sounded equal. Looking flustered, the chairman called for a third vote which again sounded equally divided, or even a bigger and louder No vote. The chairman then read a pre-scripted ruling from the teleprompter, which was obviously false. He ruled that the motion received a two-thirds affirmative vote and was adopted, and rapidly moved on to other Convention business.

It’s important for all Americans to know that at least half of the Democratic National Convention delegates thus voted to ban “God” from their Party platform.

Obama Sabotages Welfare Reform

President Obama on July 12 ended welfare reform, the crowning achievement of the Republican Congress of 1996. That reform succeeded in reducing the welfare rolls by almost half, and was so popular with the American people that Bill Clinton felt compelled to sign it.

The magic bullet that achieved this authentic reform was requiring able-bodied adults to work, or at least prepare for work, as a condition of receiving taxpayer handouts. This requirement imposed on welfare recipients was not only good for the taxpayers, it was good for the recipients because it put them on the path to self-sufficiency and a decline in child poverty.

The welfare system that was formerly called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was retitled Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The change wasn’t merely semantic; the plan was really to make welfare temporary, helping families to give up dependency on government.

Before 1996, there was nothing temporary about welfare. It was a permanent subsidy for a lifestyle that subsidized illegitimacy and avoidance of responsibility for individual behavior. Contrary to claims of those who opposed the new system, the dramatic success of the Republican welfare reform was due not to giving more flexibility to state governments, but was due to putting tough restrictions on spending the money by the states.

Obama’s goal is to “spread the wealth” to produce more dependency on government. As he probably learned at the Socialist Workers conference he attended while at Columbia, and then as a student of Chicago radical Saul Alinsky, the best way to do that is to load more people onto the welfare rolls.

In gutting the Republican welfare reform, Obama ignored the fact that the work requirement written into the TANF law is “mandatory.” He just went ahead and issued a waiver anyway, claiming it is OK under Section 1115 of the Social Security Act. However, the TANF law states that waivers cannot be issued unless they are specifically listed in Section 1115. Welfare’s “work” requirement is not listed.

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who worked on writing the 1996 welfare reform, says the “mandatory work requirements” which are contained in Section 407 were deliberately not listed in Section 1115 and therefore cannot legally be waived. He reminds us that before 1996, Democrats had evaded work requirements by allowing such prevarications as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest to qualify as “work.”

Under the Republican welfare reform, every state must make 40% of welfare recipients work at least 30 hours a week, or look for work, or take on-the-job-training, vocational schooling or some job-readiness training.

Our nearly trillion-dollar-a-year 70-plus programs of cash and benefits handouts to people living below a designated poverty line are a fiscal issue caused largely by the social issues of marriage-absence and illegitimacy. Yet President Obama unilaterally and illegally increased this spending by gutting the work requirement for welfare recipients, which is our only real hope of reducing the fiscal cost.

It’s a failure of leadership that Republicans are not loudly denouncing Obama’s costly illegal action. They should also be demanding that Congress extend the work requirement to many other welfare-type handouts such as food stamps, public housing, and cell phones. We now have 45 million, one in seven Americans, receiving food stamps. This high number is concealed from the taxpayers by giving recipients electronic debit cards so that others going through the line at the supermarket cash register can’t detect who is being fed by the taxpayers.

Democrats Have No Plan to Create Jobs

Obama’s expensive Stimulus plan failed, and now he offers no plan to create more jobs, or to build individual independence and self-reliance. We hope for a change in November.

The current unemployment figure is 8.1%. And 40.7% of those have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Those numbers tell only a small part of Obama’s failure to deliver on his promises. The real unemployment figure is closer to 19% because the official count doesn’t include (a) the 8 million unemployed who have given up and stopped looking for a job, and (b) the people who have had to settle for part-time work, and (c) those who had to take lower-paid jobs well below their qualifications, and (d) the 11 million who are out of the workforce collecting Social Security disability checks. The plight of young Americans is even worse. For 18- to 29-year-olds, the unemployment rate is 12.7%.

The majority of jobs lost during our current depression were well-paying jobs, while the majority of jobs that Obama brags about increasing are lower-paying jobs.

The National Employment Law Project reports that occupations in construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13, accounted for 60% of job losses and only 22% of job growth. Meanwhile, 58% of the job growth Obama bragged about was lower-paying jobs with hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83.

The jobs with the fastest growth were retail sales, where the median wage is $10.97 an hour, and food preparation jobs that pay $9.04 an hour. Some of these jobs are taken by entry-level workers, but many others are taken by older Americans laid off from well-paying jobs.

A Labor Day weekend report also came from the Department of Agriculture telling us that 46,670,373 Americans are now receiving food stamps at an annual cost to the taxpayers of $71.8 billion. Do we really believe that more than 46 million Americans would go hungry without a government handout?

One of Obama’s much talked-about solutions for the jobs problem is to send more kids to college. But most recent college graduates cannot get jobs that require a college degree or justify the enormous debt they incur in order to attend college.

The jobs aren’t there that justify either individual or taxpayer debt to increase college attendance. The Labor Department predicts that, of the top ten occupations expected to provide the most jobs between now and 2020, three will require no more than a high school education, and five others won’t even require a high school diploma.

Even those jobs would be welcomed by unemployed Americans, but many of those fastest growing jobs are taken by immigrants, legal and illegal. Obama’s refusal to enforce the laws against illegal aliens and his prosecution of states trying to do what his administration is failing to do, plus his illegal order to give work permits to 1.7 million young illegal aliens, add up to a direct attack on the job opportunities of millions of Americans.

Social Issues Cost a Lot of Tax Money

Those who say we can just concentrate on fiscal issues and ignore social issues are refusing to face the reality that federal spending is driven by social issues, especially the low marriage rate and the high illegitimacy rate. The Census Bureau reports that the poverty rate of single-parent households is 27.3%, but the poverty rate of married couples is only 6.2%.

The current depression has not only changed the kind of jobs that people take but is changing the American character from self-reliance to dependence on government. During the Great Depression of the 1930s when there were no entitlements, Americans didn’t look to government for handouts and they grew up to become the Greatest Generation.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, entitlement payments in 1960 amounted to $24 billion (in current dollars), but by 2010 had climbed to $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services. In 1960, entitlement payments were well below a third of federal government expenditures, about the same proportion as in 1940. But now, entitlements amount to two-thirds of federal spending, with all other government functions reduced to one-third. These handouts are financed by borrowing from Communist China, leaving a colossal debt to hang around the necks of our children and grandchildren.

America is now a very different country from what it used to be. That enormous growth of entitlements over the last 50 years has transformed not only the purpose of government, but also the American character.

Bad Facts About Obama’s Prospects

Unemployment remains the prime political issue, but a tsunami of legal and illegal immigrants is still allowed to take jobs away from U.S. citizens. Barack Obama’s extravagant spending is hanging an albatross around the necks of our children and grandchildren.

Our future of constitutional government will be endangered if Obama has the opportunity to name the next two Supreme Court justices. He says prime qualifications for his judicial nominees will be (not devotion to the Constitution as written but) support for abortion rights and “empathy.”

Obama showed his contempt for our legislative process by his effort to get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), despite his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Obama showed his contempt for our constitutional legislative process by issuing an executive order to implement the DREAM Act, which Congress has refused to pass. That act will effectively give amnesty to a million and a half young illegal aliens.

Obama’s illegal waivers of the work requirement for welfare payments are yet another egregiously unlawful action. The Attorneys General of nine states issued a joint statement detailing 21 illegal or unconstitutional actions of Obama. It looks like he wants to make Congress irrelevant and have the Executive Branch create and promulgate all legislation.

Despite the consistent majority opposition of the American people, Obama continues to push for implementation of ObamaCare, and continues to demand that schools, colleges and hospitals built and maintained by Christian denominations pay for procedures and drugs they believe are immoral, or else pay exorbitant fines that spell speedy bankruptcy.

Obama is pushing hard for a federal takeover of what public schools are teaching our kids by promoting a dumbed-down curriculum called Common Core. He is baiting the states to sign up by giving waivers to 26 states that excuse them from the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law. His lawyers carried a case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to try to force a Lutheran school to rehire a teacher the school had fired. Fortunately, the Supreme Court slapped down the administration attorneys with a rare 9-0 decision.

Obama continues to reduce U.S. production of energy by prohibiting expanded drilling for oil on our own lands and regulating coal mines out of existence. To add insult to injury, he gave a big hunk of U.S. taxpayers’ money to Brazil to finance that country’s drilling for oil.

Beware of the Lame Duck Session

When Congress goes back into session after the November 6 election, Congress will have a month to create a lot of mischief. Congressmen who were defeated will still be able to vote, and they probably will never again have to face the voters.

It was in a Lame Duck session in 1994 that Congress put us into the World Trade Organization. That Lame Duck session took place after the dramatic Republican victory of November 1994 but before the new Members of Congress took office in January. Almost a third of those who voted for the WTO had already been rejected by their constituents. Passing WTO makes much of our international trade subject to decisions by a bunch of anti-American foreign bureaucrats who rule against us most of the time. So we must be on guard for Lame Duck mischief this year, especially in regard to United Nations treaties.

Obama continues to try to cut holes in our sovereignty by pushing ratification of many United Nations treaties. This includes the ridiculous UN treaty on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the dangerous Law of the Sea treaty, and the UN treaty on ownership of guns that threatens our Second Amendment. Obama’s failure to adequately defend our consulate in Libya where our Ambassador was brutally killed is a tremendous international embarrassment.

When we list the areas that Barack Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” as he promised before his 2008 election, let’s not overlook his plans for education. They are as fundamentally transformational, costly and dictatorial as ObamaCare.

It’s well known that public schools are not graduating students as well-educated as before, that Americans score poorly on international tests, and that billions of federal dollars showered on public schools have not achieved any of the designated goals, which were to raise test scores and to eliminate the gap between higher income and lower income students. The Obama progressives want us to believe that the remedy is to turn over total control to the federal government.

That’s illogical and unacceptable, but it fits right in with Obama’s attitude that there is no higher power than the federal government. If Obama is reelected, he will be able to accomplish this task with help from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a graduate of Chicago politics.

So the Obama Administration has latched onto a national education curriculum called Common Core that was launched by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers in 2009. Those organizations have very official names as though they are government agencies, but they are actually private groups financed by foundations such as Gates and various corporations.

Their plan is to induce all elementary and secondary schools to accept a comprehensive national education system that will enforce a national curriculum. National standards will be locked in by the tests students must take called assessments, which in turn are tied to teacher evaluation. The standards instruct the teachers what to teach so their pupils can pass the tests and teachers can get positive evaluations.

This process bypasses parents and state and local school boards, and will fundamentally transform education by dictating what every child will learn and not learn. Of course, the Obama crowd loves this because a takeover of the education system could be as consequential as the takeover of banks “too big to fail,” or of General Motors, or of the health care industry with ObamaCare.

No Child Left Behind was a step in this direction, but it allowed the states to set their own standards. Common Core, on the other hand, requires all states to adopt the same federally endorsed standards.

This will be achieved by carrot-and-stick methodology. The carrot is the offer of federal money, such as Race to the Top money granted if, and only if, the states first adopt the Common Core standards. The stick is the threat to withhold federal funds from states that don’t obey.

Cato Institute researchers have concluded that despite the claim that the adoption of Common Core standards is technically voluntary, “adoption will almost certainly be de facto involuntary, and the standards themselves ultimately federal.”

What some opponents are now calling “Obama Core” ought to be held unconstitutional because the federal government has no power over education under the Constitution. Furthermore, Obama Core is unlawful since it violates federal laws that specifically prohibit the federal government from having any sayso over curriculum or tests.

The essence of Obama Core is control of curriculum because that is where minds are molded and stimulated to higher levels of learning, and character is formed. The standards for Math and English Literature are the only two subjects that have so far been released, and even those were made public only after the majority of states had signed up to use Obama Core.

Many parents will recognize the Math standards as what is called Fuzzy Math, i.e., teaching very little arithmetic or standard algorithms, and class time wasted in having kids describe how they got their answers instead of teaching them the best way to get correct answers. The English and Literature standards are worse because they omit traditional and classical literature, confine kids to boring informational readings such as instruction manuals, and fail to teach cursive writing.

The so-called standards are set low enough for most students to pass the tests. Education commentators say that the graduation standards do not prepare students for college work, and some admit that the goal is only to move kids to two-year community colleges with open admission.

The Obama Core advocates are even planning to impose their standards on private schools. As the school choice movement grows, the attempt will be made to force any private or charter school that accepts public funds to adopt Common Core standards and have their students take the national tests.

Obama Core is a comprehensive plan to dumb down schoolchildren so they will be obedient servants of the government and probably to indoctrinate them to accept the leftwing view of America and its history.

Further Reading:

• Election Central 2012