America Badly Needs Leaders
by Star Parker

As negotiations in Washington on this year’s budget (already halfway into the year that this budget is for) come to a head, the rumor mill points to a Washington-as-usual result. That is, split the differences down the middle.

But, as King Solomon taught us, resolving a dispute by splitting the difference is not always a sign of virtue.

Republicans want to cut $61 billion from a budget of almost $4 trillion with a deficit of $1.6 trillion.

Current interest payments on the national debt, some $200 billion, dwarf these proposed cuts that Democrats are labeling “extremism.”

From a purely political perspective, there are reasons to expect Republican feet to start turning to clay.

First, Democrats and Republicans know that in the 1995 showdown that resulted in shutting down the government, Democrats and Bill Clinton came up the political winners. Although circumstances are very different today from then, that history certainly looms large in political minds.

Second, it’s a good bet that current polling gives pause to many Republicans. Polls show that although in the abstract Americans are concerned about the size of government and runaway spending and debt, when you get down to specific programs, there is little positive sentiment for making significant cuts in the big areas that would make a difference.

And third, there is a critical difference today between the two parties. Ideological differences pose a much greater internal problem today to the Republican Party than to the Democrats.

Republicans have today within their ranks some individuals that actually stand for something. Democrats, who have fair party unanimity in their comfort level to go on growing government and aborting our children forever, relish watching internal Republican tensions and potential splits over principle.

So taking things to the brink is just fine with Democrats. They don’t see any big problem to begin with and by the calculations noted above, Republicans would bear all the political costs.

And they may be right.

Even the Wall Street Journal editors are urging on Republicans to compromise, arguing that getting any cuts at all is an achievement these days and that they should move on and gird for the next big battle.

But the key assumption that always enables putting off until tomorrow is the assumption that there will be a tomorrow.

Or, in the words of Lincoln, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

The real question is how deeply every single politician who supposedly represents our interests in Washington believes we are in crisis. How much do they believe that, ultimately, things will go on and be just fine no matter what we do?

The polls that show weakness in public sentiment for real reforms and substantial cuts in government should not be taken by politicians as justification for caving in but as a message for the need for real leadership today.

Too many Americans are just not getting it. And how could they? Most folks are busy with their work and families. How can they possibly understand what lurks behind the huge budget numbers they read about, what sprawling government really means, and why it is sucking out our vitality, undermining our freedom, and destroying our nation.

Great political role models today are two freshman politicians from Florida – Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl) and Congressman Allen West (R-Fl).

Both have publicly drawn lines in the sand on the budget and debt limit debate and both have had the courage to speak about entitlement reform despite representing a geriatric state.

Democrats are drawing a target on the back of West, a conservative black elected in a liberal white district. West is a man of real courage driven not by fear but by conviction and patriotism.

Freedom is not an entitlement. Without this kind of leadership, we will be toast.

If We Want to Promote Freedom, How About Starting at Home?
by Star Parker

Watching the wave of unrest in the Middle East, there are lessons to consider regarding how we view the world and how we manage our lives here at home.

I’d call it getting perspective on what you can control and what you can’t.

It should be pretty clear that the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt came as complete surprises.

No one predicted them.

Is this because no one was paying attention? Of course not.

We’ve got armies of analysts – “experts”- who do nothing but study countries. Not just in the government, but also in the private sector – at consulting firms and investment firms.

Despite the fact that we’ve got “experts” galore doing nothing but studying particular regions and countries, they rarely, if ever, make a correct prediction if it means that tomorrow will be fundamentally different from yesterday.

We can depend on them for plenty of conventional wisdom drawing on reams of information from what’s already happened. But can we turn to them for the entirely new, for the unanticipated, for the inconceivable? Forget it.

It should be obvious that 10 years, 25 years, 50 years from now the world will be as different from today as today is from 10 years, 25 years, or 50 years ago.

And it should be equally obvious that we have no “experts” that know what those great changes will be and what they will mean.

Yet we continue to allow ourselves to be persuaded that we can know what cannot be known and that experts can provide us information to control the world and the future. This delusion is true whether we are talking about managing foreign affairs or domestic affairs.

Washington is filled with “experts” who are more than ready to tell us the future and how to control it, whether we are talking about health care, retirement, energy, environment, or what have you. The fact that they are wrong 100% of the time never seems to discourage us from going down the same path again and again.

On the other hand, there are things we can do that are far more useful ways to use our brains.

We can identify the correct principles by which to live and allow those to guide how we conduct our affairs.

Getting back to the Middle East, the most effective thing we could have been doing, and can do now, is set an example.

If we want to promote freedom, how about starting at home?

The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal publish annually an Index of Economic Freedom in which they rank 179 nations by economic freedom – size of government, regulations, tax and trade policy, monetary policy, etc.

The Index rankings correlate almost perfect with prosperity. The more a nation is economically free, the more prosperous it is likely to be.

When the Index was published in 2010, it showed that the nation with the biggest drop in economic freedom among the world’s 20 largest economies was our country – the USA.

The drop was so large that the US was re-categorized from the top tier of “free” economies and dropped to the second tier of “mostly free.”

It turns out that the most important thing we could have been doing – staying free ourselves – we haven’t been doing.

If we’d been doing what we should have, we’d set an example for others, we’d have better judgment regarding what is wrong with them, and we’d be more prosperous and therefore stronger and more influential

If we can’t solve our own problems, how can we solve those of others? If we don’t know what freedom is here, how can we know what it is elsewhere?

It’s time to get perspective about what we can do, what we can’t do, and get our own house in order.

House Health Care Repeal More Reality TV than Theater
by Star Parker

Democrats who are calling the House’s decisively passed repeal of Obamacare — the so-called ” Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care” act — theater are hallucinating.

Perhaps it was theatrical to include in the name of the repeal act “job killing”, though that is what it is.

But I prefer melodrama to dishonesty. Calling Obamacare — government mandates, subsidies, price controls, taxes, and rationed care — “patient protection” and “affordable” is the height of dishonesty.

The House repeal vote was important because the House is the legislative body closest to the people, and the people voted unequivocally last November to repudiate socialized medicine.

It is the beginning of responsible government to start representing what the American people want and repeal is what Americans voted for.

Although repudiation of Obamacare was the most tangible message of the 2010 elections, there were other important messages.

Most Americans are sick of the socialist direction in which our great nation has been moving. They are sick of dishonesty and word games emanating from Washington and politicians. And they are sick of special interest groups in Washington sucking the oxygen out of all opportunities for good public policy.

The “Affordable Health Care” Act, besides being bad health care policy, has all the above characteristics — duplicitous Washington accounting games that pretend to save money by spending it subsidizing all the nation’s health care, taking what was already broken in the way we deliver health care — most of it already being controlled by government and third party payers — and giving us more of it rather than less, and accomplishing all this by working with the big health care special interests — insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.

But what makes me most heartsick is to watch our great and free nation transformed into a second rate welfare state.

Again, even before the “Affordable Health Care” act, our health care system was already largely taken over by government. Ninety percent of our health care bills are paid by third parties, and between Medicaid, SCHIP, and Medicare, well over half of American health care was already directly controlled by government.

What else do you have to know about what was wrong? Yet, Obamacare’s answer was to give us more of all of it.

I challenge any sitting Democrat who continues to push socialized medicine on us to move into any of our inner cities and find out first hand about life on the government plantation.

Twelve percent of the nation’s population is black, but 30 percent of the 60 million on Medicaid are black.

They live under the hallucination perpetuated by Washington that they have health coverage. Yet 40 percent of our doctors refuse Medicaid patients because they are not adequately reimbursed. And study after study shows that the health care they do get is substandard. That Medicaid patients are, for instance, far more likely to not survive an operation, compared to someone with private insurance.

Obamacare’s answer to this is to expand the income level qualifying for Medicaid and put another 20 million on it, with the same pretense about being “covered.”

At the same time, as Dennis Smith, former Director of Medicaid at HHS, points out, the new qualifying structure of Medicaid has the same characteristics as did welfare that led to wholesale breakdown of black families.

An individual earning $10,800 qualifies for Medicaid. For two individuals, that is $21,600. But qualifying income for a family of two is $20, 107. So efficient incentives are built in to discourage marriage among low-income earners, a reality in all likelihood already contributing to their shaky economic status.

The House repeal of Obamacare was not theater. It was reality TV.

The follow up act must be to reform health care with real freedom and capitalism.

The Constitution, Yes, But There’s More
by Star Parker

I salute the Republicans of the 112th Congress for their initiative to restore the U.S. Constitution to its legitimate place of prominence in our public discourse.

Reading it aloud at Congress’s opening session and requiring members to cite Constitutional authority when introducing new legislation are great ideas.

It will help highlight that the real debate is about the underlying defining principles of our nation that the constitution exists to protect.

Democrats mocking these gestures show their disdain for those underlying principles. When Congressman Henry Waxman says “Whether it’s constitutional or not is going to be whether the Supreme Court says it is,” it’s like my saying that whether or not I steal from my neighbor depends on my calculation of whether or not I’ll get caught.

The constitution is our operating manual defining the functions and bounds of our federal government. It was meticulously designed by our founders so that we would have government consistent with the values and principles of our nation.

It’s in those values and principles where our “eternal truths” lie. Not in the constitution constructed to secure them. If the drafters didn’t see it this way, they wouldn’t have provided provisions to amend and change it.

It’s in our increasingly tenuous sense of what the truths are that precede the constitution, or the questioning by some if indeed there are any eternal truths, where our problems lie.

The purpose of government, stated in the Declaration of Independence, is to “secure” our “Rights”, including those of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

But how can we understand and use our constitution if we can’t agree on what “life” is or what “liberty” is?

Consider one of the most repugnant decisions to ever emerge from the U.S. Supreme Court – the Dred Scott decision.

The decision relegated blacks to subhuman status and precluded the possibility that they could be considered US citizens protected by the constitution.

The issue was not whether the constitution was taken seriously. The issue was how prevailing values dictated understanding of who people and citizens are. And so, per our Supreme Court in 1857, a class of human beings in our country was relegated to chattel.

The Roe v Wade decision in 1973, which gave open license to kill our unborn children, stemmed not from indifference to the constitution, but from how we choose to relate to and define what life is – or the extent to which we even care.

Recently a federal judge in California overturned as unconstitutional an initiative passed by California voters to define marriage as between a man and a woman. Lawyers who supported the suit to overturn the initiative included conservative and libertarian lawyers who would claim to support our constitution as constructed by our founders. What they don’t support is an understanding of the definition of marriage being between a man and a woman as a pre-existing truth that the state should be free to codify in its constitution.

Supposedly among the truths that our constitution secures is our right to our private property.

But what can that possibly mean if the federal government can define what health insurance is and force under law every American citizen to buy it?

It is a strange understanding of “life” and “liberty” that will allow this to occur. If government can dictate to this extent how I live and what I do, I begin to feel like they own me. I start feeling like Dred Scott must have felt.

So, yes, let’s put the spotlight back on our constitution. But let’s not lose perspective that our understanding and interpretation of it will be just as good as our agreement on and understanding and appreciation of the underlying values it’s there to secure and protect.

Charlie Rangel Is a Symptom of a Bigger Problem
by Star Parker

Charlie Rangel, convicted of eleven ethics violations – the most ever found against any member of Congress – was resoundingly re-elected, getting 80% of his district’s vote.

After 40 years representing these folks, you can’t conclude he was an unknown commodity. Granted, the conviction occurred after the election, but the charges were well publicized.

Has Charlie Rangel’s leadership produced life so grand in Harlem that flagrant and persistent unethical behavior by their Congressman means nothing to its residents?

The national poverty rate is around 14%. In the 15th district of New York, Charlie Rangel’s district, it’s 24.3%. The child poverty rate is 30.9%.

Whatever it is that Harlem voters find so attractive about Mr. Rangel, it’s hard to conclude that quality of life is something they feel they owe to him.

But let’s think about this in a broader context.

Charlie Rangel is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

There are now 41 House members who belong to the Caucus. In the most recent elections, 37 of them ran as incumbents and all regained their seats handily. The four seats that were vacated were easily captured by new black Democrats.

That’s a 100% return rate. These Black Caucus Democrats recaptured their seats getting an average 75% of their district’s vote.

In a year when 62 Democrats were defeated – a 25% reduction in the bloc of 252 Democrats in the current Congress – the reduction of the bloc of 41 black Democrats was zero.

The average poverty rate in the districts of Congressional Black Caucus members is 20.3% – six points higher than the national average. The average child poverty rate in these districts is 28.8%.

So, as in Charlie Rangel’s case, it’s hard to conclude that these Black Caucus Democrats are being sent back to Washington by large voting margins, year after year, because they are delivering such fine lives to their constituents.

A problem here is that elections in Black Caucus districts are not exactly what might be described as free and open.

About three quarters of these districts are Majority Minority districts, hard wired to guarantee election of blacks. The remaining districts are also gerrymandered through various schemes flowing from collusion of political parties and state legislatures.

The initial provision of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, to deal with voting problems was structured to counter schemes going on in the South – literacy tests, etc – rigged to keep blacks from registering and voting.

But by the 1970’s, this provision morphed into district gerrymandering. What was initially meant to protect the voting rights of blacks evolved into provisions to guarantee the election of blacks.

The result of this overall process is a bloc of politically manipulated districts which, coupled with other institutional biases protecting incumbents, virtually guarantees the election of black Democrats.

You might say that rigged elections might be justified if it meant better lives for black constituents.

But given that these districts are largely characterized by persistent poverty and some of the worst public schools in the country, this is a conclusion that’s hard to reach.

Earlier this year, the New York Times profiled the prodigious money raising prowess and dubious ethics of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The Times editorialized, “Of all the money machines shaving ethical corners, few rival the Congressional Black Caucus…..the caucus spends far more on gala entertainments and golf outings than on the scholarships that billboard its charity drives.”

Political markets are like commercial markets. The absence of competition results in shoddy products.

When we send American soldiers into harm’s way abroad to fight for free elections, perhaps we should spend more time considering the quality of our own democracy at home.

Defining the conservative versus liberal divide
by Star Parker

Now that President Obama is getting ready to make his second Supreme Court nomination, the usual banter is taking place about the court and judicial philosophy.

The Supreme Court, of course, profoundly influences the character of our country.

Although, for instance, many look back on the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal programs as the beginning of the real growth of the American welfare state, it is really key Supreme Court decisions during that time that enabled all of this. Court decisions changing the interpretation of “general welfare”, interstate commerce, and the authority of the federal government to tax changed the game and opened a new era of big government.

At the beginning of the 1930’s, the federal government’s take of national GDP was a little over ten percent. By the mid-1940’s it was over twenty percent, and the trend has been only upward since.

Although much of the discussion about judicial philosophy contrasts how conservative and liberal judges relate to the constitution, I think the real key to conservative and liberal divergence is the world view these judges already have when they sit down to interpret the constitution.

The statement of vision defining American values appears in the Declaration of Independence. Understanding that vision is where I think the most fundamental conservative versus liberal divide exists.

Consider how President Obama relates to the Constitution, as he wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope – “Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth….”

Our president is a moral relativist. So we may expect that he doesn’t take very seriously the idea, as state in the Declaration of Independence, that there are absolutes. That we have God given rights that precede government and that the job of government is to secure them.

Rather than seeing government’s job as securing our rights, the liberal sees it to invent them. The politician – or the empathetic judge – defines what is moral and just.

There’s a lot of speculation about what is driving the tea party movement and why, as reflected in the latest survey by the Pew Research Foundation, Americans’ trust in government is at an all time low.

I think most fundamentally it’s discomfort with this moral relativism that is driving the pervasive unrest.

The whole unique idea of American government – the idea of human liberty – was that there are absolute truths and that individual citizens can and must be protected from arbitrary rulers – whether it is a king or a political class with arbitrary powers.

President Obama said the other day regarding the kind of court nominee he will seek, “…I want somebody who is going to be interpreting our Constitution in a way that takes into account individual rights…”

What in the world can this possibly mean from our president who has just signed into law a health care bill which will force every single American citizen to buy a government defined health care insurance policy? A health care bill that opens the door to unprecedented government control over how private individuals manage their health care and the most private decisions they make over their own lives.

Or what can it possibly mean coming from our president who opposed the Supreme Court’s decision a few years ago banning partial birth abortion – which is pure and simple torture and murder of a live infant?

The real differences over liberal and conservative judges is most fundamentally about the world in which Americans will live. Whether we live and will live in a nation in which there are absolute truths or one in which we are at the hands of political arbitrariness in which our lives and property are up for grabs.

Our country is being governed today by those with the latter view of the world and, fortunately, more and more Americans are deeply concerned.

After Massachusetts, What’s Next for the GOP?
by Star Parker

Have you ever watched as a dear friend becomes smitten with someone you know is not for them?

You listen as they swear how Mr. or Ms. Right has finally arrived, wondering how they cannot see the obvious. Your only option is to watch and wait for the inevitable, knowing that when it’s over you’ll be there to help pick up the pieces.

So, yes, independent voters, who were key to electing Barack Obama, are now falling out of love with him. But, I ask, what were you folks thinking a year ago?

You didn’t realize that the post-racial candidate with the magic wand was a classic, boilerplate liberal? You were so sick of Republicans that you didn’t bother to think about it? But you do know about these rebound relationships, don’t you?

It’s not like we haven’t had our experience with liberalism. That experience made the liberal label so politically deadly that liberals renamed themselves “progressives.”

So, what can we expect now in the wake of the miracle in Massachusetts?

Democrats are between a rock and hard place because Barack Obama is not going to change. This is a date that you know after five minutes is not going to work and you have the whole evening ahead of you. In this case, it’s three more years.

Pundits are talking about the Bill Clinton model. When Bill Clinton I was repudiated by voters, he morphed into Bill Clinton II.

But Bill Clinton is a not an ideologue. Bill is a pragmatic man. He’ll do whatever it takes to keep the party going.

It’s hard to fathom Obama doing the equivalent of signing welfare reform, promoting a free trade treaty like NAFTA, or cutting the capital gains tax.

Obama is a liberal ideologue. To change would require him to become a different man. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.

Democrats, under this president’s leadership, will continue to push a left wing, liberal program. This means that the door will be open for Republicans to make hay, as independent voters nationwide wake up and recall why the “liberal” label became so deadly.

Over the last ten days, the probability of Democrats retaining control of the House in 2010 dropped from 85 percent to 59 percent, as reflected in contracts traded on Intrade.com.

Economic recovery will continue at tortoise-like speed as result of the prevailing culture of high taxes, expanding government spending and deficits, and welfare state bailouts that encourage non-productive behavior.

It will be tempting for many Republicans to take the easy way and campaign to exploit prevailing unhappiness. This would be irresponsible. The problems facing the nation are too great.

Republicans must offer now a concrete alternative vision, Contract with America-style.

Return to a low tax, limited government environment. Address escalating health care costs with market, enterprise-driven reforms. We are drowning in the red ink of entitlements. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid must be transformed into models of ownership and choice. Parents must be given freedom to choose where to send their children to school.

A bold Republican agenda would aim to unite our deeply divided nation by reaching into black and Latino communities to show that ownership and personal responsibility — not the welfare state — is the key to the American dream.

And let’s not shy away from the truth that this is a nation under God.

Some say that a free society has no religious absolutes. Stephen Douglas argued this when, in his debates with Lincoln, he claimed it was the American way for each state to be free to decide if it would permit slavery.

Current polling shows that less than one in three Americans feel the country is on the right track. It’s time to get back on the path of freedom.

Time to Replace Napolitano
by Star Parker

Last March, our newly installed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano explained, in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, her vision for fighting what was formerly known as terrorism.

By calling these now “man caused disasters,” she explained, we would “move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.”

“Our policies will be guided by authoritative information. We also have assets at our disposal now that we did not have prior to 9/11. For example, we are much better able to keep track of travelers coming into the U.S. than we were before. The third thing is to work with our international partners and allies to make sure that we are getting information and sharing information in an appropriate and real-time fashion.”

Yikes.

Putting Napolitano in charge of a department of 200,000 people and a $50 billion budget with a stated mission to “lead the unified national effort to secure the country and preserve our freedoms” was a “man caused disaster.” And it is one that President Barack Obama should fix — pronto.

His No. 1 priority to restore credibility in his administration’s ability to protect Americans from terrorism should be replacement of Napolitano.

Her blundering performance on Sunday talk shows following the failed Christmas day terrorist attempt to blow up an American plane showed clearly that this isn’t the person we want responsible for the security of our homeland.

It’s much more than her incredible observation that “the system worked.”

Napolitano told CNN’s Candy Crowley, “The traveling public is very, very safe in this air environment.”

This despite answering every one of Crowley’s probing questions with “I don’t know.”

Are there Al-Qaeda ties? How could he have gotten past security and on the plane carrying an explosive? How could he fly to the U.S. when his own father — a wealthy banker — briefed our embassy officials about what he saw his son up to?

Crowley, astonished, asked the Secretary how she could possibly be reassuring Americans that they are safe when she seemed to know nothing about what happened.

“….if it was properly screened and he got on anyway with that, it doesn’t feel that safe.”

Napolitano: “Well, you know it should.”

The same morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked Napolitano if the amount of explosives the young man had was enough “to bring down the plane.”

Her reply: “I think we’re far from knowing that.” This two days after the incident.

Her own agenda and bias emerged in the interview with Gregory. He asked if there were Al Qaeda ties and she responded, “Again, we don’t know.”

But in concluding, Gregory asked her if we should continue to view Al Qaeda as a threat.

Referring, in her rambling response, to this latest incident, Napolitano noted “And while this case does not appear specifically connected there…”

The Obama team knows how to fire CEOs.

Since General Motors became a subsidiary of the U.S. government after getting bailed out with taxpayer funds, two CEOs have been forced out. Their failure was not coming up with plans for selling Chevrolets, Buicks, and Cadillacs that pleased their government overseers.

Surely at least the same standard for performance should be demanded of someone responsible for America’s security and American lives.

Barack Obama has led a charmed life.

The botched terrorist effort on Christmas was a gift to the 300 innocent passengers on that plane and a gift to America.

But it was also a potential political gift to Obama. Americans rally around their president when we are threatened. Making the right moves now could prove a political boon to him.

And the right move now is finding and installing a qualified Homeland Security secretary.

Health Care Struggle is About Freedom
by Star Parker

President Obama took his case for what he now calls “health insurance reform” to the faith community. He made his pitch in a phone call, also broadcast over the Internet, to clergy who called in and logged on from around the nation.

In his remarks, the President ticked off points of contention that dissenters have with his proposals — “government takeover of healthcare…government funding of abortion…death panels” — and dismissed these concerns as “fabrications.” In one swipe, Mr. Obama reduced his opposition to liars.

And why, according to the President, are dissenters supposedly making all this stuff up? Because, he told his audience, they want to “discourage people from meeting…a core ethical and moral obligation…that we look out for one another…that I am my brother’s keeper…”

So those whose fight for individual freedom are immoral and our moral champions are those who want to extend the heavy hand of government.

Forgive me if sermons about morality are a little hard to swallow from a man who supports partial birth abortion, who just announced his intent to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.

And who really wants to obstruct moral behavior?

About 100,000 Americans participate in private, voluntary Christian communities that take care of their own healthcare independently of government and insurance companies. They are called health-care sharing ministries.

These communities assess members “shares”, based on family size, which are paid monthly, in addition to annual dues.

Those in the community who need care submit their claims to a central office, which sends members monthly bulletins informing them whose care their monthly payment will be covering.

No government. No insurance companies. It’s health care with a true human face, operating in freedom, where those paying know who they are paying for and for what.

In addition to sending funds to cover costs, they send notes and pray for the sick person whose costs they are covering.

You wouldn’t think that communities that embody the very essence of personal responsibility and Christian love would need lobbyists for their protection. But they do.

If Barack Obama has his way, they’ll be out of business.

Part of the thousand page health care bill mandates that individuals buy insurance and that companies provide it, or pay a fine. These government mandates to buy and provide insurance would make health-care sharing ministries, where communities of individuals contribute their personal funds to take care of each other, unviable.

These ministries share contributed funds of around $80 million dollars annually to take care of each other, driven only by guidelines of biblical principles to “Bear one another’s burden, and thus fulfill the law of Christ.”

It’s crazy that Christian Americans have to lobby to be free in their own country.

Health-care sharing ministries is one particularly beautiful example of how faithful Americans take care of themselves when allowed to be free. But there are many others.

In thousands of homeless shelters around the country, charitable Americans provide complete health care for the homeless. There are 5000 crisis pregnancy centers, financed privately by charitable Americans that provide free care for pregnant women.

Many creative ideas have been put forth on how American health care delivery can be dramatically improved if markets are allowed to work. John Mackey, chairman of Whole Foods, listed eight in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

In another Wall Street Journal column, a University of Chicago Business School professor explained how forward purchases of insurance could deal with the problem of pre-existing conditions.

But, Barack Obama and congressional Democrats have slammed the door on all this. They only want to hear about more government. Not less.

The problem isn’t that dissenting Americans are immoral. It’s that Democrat leadership has a problem with individual freedom.

Obamacare meets Twitter
by Star Parker

President Obama is a clever and ambitious man. And he has surrounded himself with a clever and ambitious staff.

This bright crew understood from the outset that time would determine if they would succeed with their health care plan.

They understood that their plan, which would require massive new expenditures, new taxes, and major new government interventions, had to be done quickly if it would get done at all.

They understood that it had to be done while the president’s approval ratings were still high so that Congress would bend to his will. And that it had to breeze through and land on the president’s desk before the general public could scrutinize it and understand the major way it would impact their lives.

As result, we’ve been hearing for months about the President’s deadlines, tied to a list of explanations (economic recovery, if we don’t do it now we’ll never do it, growing hordes of uninsured, etc.) why the world will collapse if these sweeping reforms were not passed by August.

Now Washington’s hot and humid August is here, Congress is adjourned, health care reform did not reach the House or Senate floor, and the White House is in panic. What they knew and feared they now confront. Dropping approval ratings and rising public awareness.

When the administration kicked this off with its White House Health Care Summit early last March, the president’s 62-percent approval, per Gallup, was 36 points higher than his 26-percent disapproval. Now, at 56-percent approval and 37-percent disapproval, the gap has shrunk to 19 points.

A new poll from Quinnipiac University has him at 50-percent approval and 42-percent disapproval.

And, the details of the 1,000-page monstrosity, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, are being delivered to desktops, laptops, and blackberrys. Group emails, websites, twitter and facebook accounts are churning.

Old discredited socialist ideas meet the new economy and free people are reacting and revolting — as the White House knew they would if they got a chance to know what was going down.

Ironically, this technologically savvy administration is being hung by its own petard.

Rather than concluding that the public understands what they are being served up and doesn’t want it, the White House damage control machine is breaking out the smoke and mirrors, determined to spin government health care past the American people if they won’t buy it outright.

Instead of talking about “health care reform”, the White House website now uses the focus group tested “health insurance reform.” Make the insurance companies the bad guys.

And they, along with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, claim that grassroots protests at town hall meetings are manufactured.

Perhaps they also think that Quinnipiac University pollsters, who now report that 39 percent of Americans “approve of the way Barack Obama is handling health care” and 52 percent disapprove, are being paid off by insurance companies.

Suggestions that grass roots protests prevent the White House from getting its message to the public are hilarious. This president has been on a honeymoon with the press for the last six months. You can’t turn the TV on without seeing him.

He has had an unprecedented four prime time press conferences in six months. No. Their problem is not that President Obama has not communicated. Their problem is that he has. We’ve got the message and we don’t want it. We don’t want bureaucrats determining what health care is and how we get it. We don’t want abortion, much less federally funded. Or government meddling with how our elderly live out their lives. And we don’t want trillion dollar deficits. Perhaps Mr. Obama, who once suggested he admires Lincoln, will grasp Lincoln’s understanding that ours is a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Republicans need Washingtons, not Specters
by Star Parker

The columns are all over the place, and all the analyses seem to be the same.

The Republican Party is supposedly deader than a doornail. Except in a handful of states in mid-America and in the South, Americans, according to these columnists, see Republicans as irrelevant, out-of-touch, mean-spirited dinosaurs.

And, they continue, among those groups that will demographically define the America of tomorrow — the under-30 crowd and non-white America — Republicans are toast.

These many columns inevitably lead to the conclusion that Republicans have no choice but to lighten up on the conservative agenda and buy into a new America of big government and gay marriage.

But, may I remind folks, that we just had a presidential election in which 130 million voters cast ballots and the difference between the winner and the loser was 9 million votes. Not exactly what I would call an insurmountable divide.

Nor should we forget that there was that window following the Republican convention when the McCain-Palin ticket was leading.

A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows 42 percent self-identifying as Democrats compared to 31 percent as Republicans. But the same poll shows 35 percent identifying as conservatives compared to 24 percent as liberals.

According to Dick Polman of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party shows what’s wrong with Republicans — they can’t tolerate moderates — and not what is wrong with Specter.

But there is little doubt that Specter changed parties because polls were showing him getting his clock cleaned in the Republican primary by conservative Pat Toomey.

More revealing about Specter is that, in light of this, he didn’t simply choose to retire.

Here is a 79 year old man, elected five times to the US Senate as a Republican, who concluded that it is so important that he continue — that he have a sixth term, serving well into his eighties — that he totally shafts the party that supported his national candidacy for almost 30 years.

We’re talking about years of getting party funds and Republican leaders coming in to Pennsylvania to campaign on his behalf.

Not only does he shaft the party that supported him, but he does it when the power balance in the Senate hangs on a thread, and a shift of one — Specter — makes the Democratic majority filibuster proof. And, he does this at a time when the most left wing administration in our history is pushing through a mega-ambitious agenda to nationalize everything in sight and undermine every traditional value we hold dear.

Truth is that Specter is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. He is a self serving egotist that stands for nothing other than the pursuit of personal political power and having the federal government as his sandbox to play in.

Consider that the first American politician to term limit himself was George Washington. As Washington’s second term came to a conclusion, many around him felt his leadership was indispensable to the fledgling nation.

Yet Washington, who led the nation in war, and then as its first president, took himself out of the running. He knew that America fought to throw off the yoke of kings and the capricious use of power.

Considering that the greatest of Americans limited his political career out of principle casts further irony that the most unprincipled of Americans, Arlen Specter, feels he’s so indispensable that he’ll betray anyone or anything to hold on to power.

We should also recall Washington’s guidance in his farewell address that “Of all the dispensations and habits which led to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.”

It’s a message as relevant to today as when Washington wrote it in 1796, and relevant to every American of every background.

Republican Party problems started from straying from principles, not from sticking to them.

The party’s future lies in principles, not in pandering. We need George Washingtons. Not Arlen Specters.

Republicans need to get back to business
by Star Parker

There are now nine capable candidates vying for the chairman’s job at the Republican National Committee. The day of reckoning will be Jan. 29, when 168 committee members from around the country will vote their preference.

The stakes are high this time around. It’s different when you are looking for a caretaker – someone to keep a good thing going – as opposed to a turnaround specialist – someone to transform a loser into a winner.

Clearly after consecutive electoral shellackings led to Democratic takeovers in both houses of Congress and the White House, and significant drop-off in the number of self-identified Republican voters nationwide, it is the latter type of executive that the RNC needs. What kind of leadership talent should the RNC seek?

Republicans think of themselves as the party sympathetic to free enterprise. But the party has gotten off track applying sound business principles to its own operation.

The three most important management questions, according to famed management guru Peter Drucker, are: What is our business? Who is the customer? What does the customer consider value?

What is the business of the RNC? Some might say it is to get Republicans elected. I’d say that’s inadequate. Clever marketing techniques can move product in the short run. But if customers are not happy, they don’t come back.

If the party does not have a clear agenda, and is not making a positive sale based on that agenda, it’s a sign of weakness. Republican national campaigns of recent years that have been defined by Willie Horton and Swift Boats may have defeated the other side. But they brought candidates into office with no clear mandate and eroded party definition and discipline.

The RNC business model must be based on positive marketing of its platform of traditional values, limited government, free enterprise and strong national defense. Candidates must be groomed who genuinely believe that it’s this agenda – all of it – that keeps out country great and candidates who don’t shouldn’t be nominated.

Who is the customer? The RNC must genuinely view the full spectrum of the American electorate as its target market. What business can possibly grow by only focusing on customers who have already bought its product? Only going after low-hanging fruit is not a business plan that any venture capitalist would finance.

Republicans must get their message to the many diverse communities that make up our great country that they have ignored. Yes, I am certainly talking about black and Latino communities.

Formula for GOP recovery: traditional values PLUS limited government
by Star Parker

Now that Democrats have won the White House and have widened their margin of control in Congress, does this signify that American voters have moved to the left?

Many Republicans question this claim. And a new report from the Pew Research Center seems to verify that America is still a right of center as a country. But the picture gets murky when you look at the details. And this murkiness presents a considerable challenge for Republicans who are trying to figure out where to steer their party.

According to the just published report, more Americans today call themselves conservative than liberal, and the relative percentages in each category has hardly changed since George W. Bush was elected to his first term in 2000.

Thirty eight percent of Americans self-identify as conservative, 21 percent as liberal, and 36 percent as moderate. This compares to 36 percent, 18 percent and 38 percent, respectively, in 2000.

But taking a closer look at what this means leaves you scratching your head. You have to wonder what it means today to think of yourself as conservative.

When asked if the Bush tax cuts should be made permanent, only 38 percent of those who said they are “conservative” said yes. And 50 percent of “conservatives” said they favor government guaranteeing health care “even if it means raising taxes.”

Although 71 percent of “conservatives” said they oppose gay marriage, only slightly more than half, 52 percent, said that abortion should be illegal.

Many Republicans point to the fact that traditional marriage initiatives won in all three states where they were on the ballot — California, Florida, and Arizona — as evidence for the conservatism of the country. But pro-life initiatives lost in all three states where they were on ballots — California, South Dakota, and Colorado.

What can be the message here for those vying for leadership of the Republican Party?

Some argue that the party should lighten up on the social agenda. The party is all white, they say, and there is no future without Latinos and blacks.

But consider the obvious. First, conservatives define the Republican Party. According to this study, 68 percent of Republicans call themselves conservative.

Second, it should be obvious from the above, that if conservatives are rooted anywhere, it’s more in the social agenda than in the fiscal and limited government agenda. Where in the world would the party be if the leadership tried to uproot from social conservatism?

Third, consider what is going on with blacks and Latinos.

In this same Pew survey, 25 percent of all Democrats called themselves conservatives. But among these same Democrats, 35 percent of blacks call themselves conservative compared to 21 percent of whites.

Why? Blacks are social conservatives. Blacks understand the havoc that moral relativism has caused in their communities. And, this is also the case with Latinos.

As was widely reported, blacks and Latinos voted for Proposition 8 in California, supporting traditional marriage, despite the majority of them also voting for President-elect Barack Obama.

So where is the logic in Republicans abandoning social conservatism in order to reach blacks and Latinos?

It appears that the message getting lost is the importance of limited government and fiscal conservatism.

Health care is almost 20 percent of our national economy. Too many are not getting what it will mean when bureaucrats will define what health care is and when the IRS comes knocking to check on the policy you bought. Too many seem to have forgotten that prosperity is created by individual freedom and creativity and not government programs.

These are tough times and families are under duress. Perhaps it’s tempting to think that opening the door to more government is a good idea. Particularly in an environment where every day another half trillion-dollar check is being cut in Washington for bailout programs.

When most Americans say they are conservative, they mean it. Too many, however, are forgetting that this means limited government as well as traditional values. We need new, energetic Republican leaders to get this message across.