Archive for March, 2008
Shawn Sage has been a foster child since the age of two, and the State of California’s foster care system has recently found a new way to try to keep Shawn down.
Last October, Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Marilyn Mackel denied Shawn request to join the United States Marine Corp.
As a 17yr old foster child, Shawn could not legally join the Marine Corps without the permission of this anti-American bureaucrat.
Shawn was trying to sign-up for the Marine Corps early enlistment program, which would have let him join the Marine Corps when he was 17 and report for duty when he turned 18. The early enlistment program would have meant a $10,000 signing bonus for Shawn.
Marine recruiter Sgt. Guillermo Medrano reported “The judge said she didn’t support the Iraq war for any reason we’re over there. She just said all recruiters were the same — that they ‘all tap dance and tell me what I want to hear.’ She said she didn’t want him to fight in it.”
Sage himself was quoted as saying “Foster children shouldn’t be denied [an] ability to enlist in the service just because they’re foster kids. Foster kids shouldn’t have to go to court to gain approval to serve one’s country.”
Shawn is working with California Assemblyman Cameron Smyth to get the law changed so that future generations of patriotic Californians cannot be harassed by leftist bureaucrats. State bill AB2238 will allow minors in California Foster Care to join the military with the permission of a foster parent or social worker.
Shawn plans to join the Marine Corps when he turns eighteen and frees himself from the California Foster Care system. Shawn says “I’m not going to benefit from this, because I will be 18 years old by then, but other foster children will benefit from it. I’m doing this so they won’t have to go through a lengthy court process like I did and just be denied their rights.”
Shawn Sage is a real American hero. He has struggled with adversity and not let it defeat him. He withstood the assault from Marilyn Mackel and took his struggle to the California legislature. His strength of character will benefit generations yet to come.
It’s not getting much press here in the U.S., but the backwards government of Belarus has imprisoned Aleksandr Sdvizhkov and set him to three years hard labor for the imagined crime of publishing cartoons containing drawings of Muhammad.
These cartoons originally appeared in the Jyllands-Posten in Denmark and sparked a global wave of riots, arson, and murder by militant Islamists.
After the cartoons were republished in Zgoda, Belarus’s totalitarian government shut down the newspaper and arrested Sdvizhkov. Sdvizhkov is now being held by the government and is allowed no communication with the outside world.
It is worrysome to see Islamist totalitarians and Communist totalitarians joining hands and closing ranks against freedom.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has published an interesting document titled Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2005.
This is a fascinating document, because it breaks down taxes by who pays them. It shows us, for example, that the lowest earning quintile (20%) of taxpayers pay only .8% of all Federal taxes. On the other side, the top earning quintile of all taxpayers pay 68.7% of all federal taxes. The top 1% pay 27.6% of federal taxes.
Send this document to your liberal “friends” next time they complain to you that hard working Americans are not paying enough taxes to support the poor and unfortunae.
Guns in the hands of civilians save many more innocent lives through deterrence and prevention than are caused by both accidents and crime put together.
Every time an innocent person is either accidentally or maliciously hurt with a firearm, it is covered widely by the mass media. And yet, when an innocent person uses a firearm to protect the lives and their families, the mass media seems to cover it up.
The Civilian Gun Self Defense Blog is a good centralized repository of stories about law-abiding civilians using guns in self-defense. Clayton Cramer and David Burnett do an excellent job of keeping up with the massive volume of positive uses of firearms in civilian hands.
Visit the site. Send the URL to your “liberal” friends. 
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 | Posted in Politics | No Comments »
The mad mullah’s in Tehran have forcibly shut down nine magazines for… publishing stories and pictures of Western film stars. Thirteen other publications were also warned that they could be next if they fail to obey the dictates of their totalitarian government.
The move was accomplished by the “Press Supervisory Board” of Iran’s “Culture Ministry.”
The publications censored in this round were Baznegari, Talash, Be Sooy-e-Eftekhar, Donya-e-Tasvir, Haft, Havar, Neday-e-Iran, Shooka, and Sobh-e-Zendegi.
The Iranian regime has shut down more than a hundred newspapers in the last few years, imprisoning many of the writers and editors.
It’s a strange world that we live in when the Hollywood elite — Iran’s greatest supporters in America — are singled out for persecution by their allies.
In 2007, Al Qaeda and the Taliban burned 150 schools to the ground, forced 305 more to close, and murdered 105 students and teachers across Afghanistan.
Despite Islamist efforts to keep the people of Afghanistan living in poverty and ignorance, almost six million Afghani children are now in school. Approximately one-fourth of these children are female.
The U.S.-allied Afghan government is working to raise the total number of children in school and the percentage of female students by defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban and making it safe for children to go to school without being murdered by a bunch of Islamist fanatics.
Education is a critical component in the success of any country. Al Qaeda and the Taliban know that they cannot conquer an educated and prosperous Afghanistan. We must not allow them to succeed in their efforts to keep the children of Afghanistan ignorant and poor. We must not allow another generation of Afghani children to fall victims to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
More than 130 tribal leaders from the predominantly Shiite provinces of southern Iraq signed a letter denouncing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to their country.
The letter states: “Since five years ago Iraq has turned into the scene of the Iranian regime’s meddling and aggression. Everyday hundreds of Iraqis are victims of the Iranian exported terrorism. In southern Iraq we are witnessing the murder of our children and ransack of our oil and other national wealth by the criminal elements of the Iranian regime.”
It is difficult to be much more clear than that concerning the current troubles faced by the Iraqi people.
The statement mirrors a petition signed last year by more than 300,000 Iraqi Shiities condemning the Iranian government’s interference in Iraq and supporting the asylum of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), in Iraq.
The Iraqi people deserve to be able to live in peace. The Iranian government is providing terrorists with money, weapons, and training — and then smuggling them across the open border into Iraq. For the security of Iraq, this traffic of death must be stopped.
On 22 February, the government censors in Pakistan ordered the popular video sharing site YouTube blocked because the web site was publishing a trailer for a forthcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders which they fear may portray Islam negatively.
Four days later, YouTube censored the video and Pakistan removed the block on YouTube.
If you attempt to view the original video, you are presented with the error message “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”
In the past, Google YouTube has also censored material at the request of the Turkish government.
What does this mean to you? It means that the governments of Pakistan and Turkey are now able to effectively censor what you are able to watch on the Internet.
This is shameful behavior on the part of an American corporation. The management of Google YouTube should be ashamed at their lack of moral courage and their willingness to cooperate with evil.
S.2433, the Global Poverty Act of 2007, is a bill introduced by Barack Obama, the Junior Senator from Illinois.
This bill would require the U.S. government to spend an additional $845 billion of your taxpayer dollars over the next 13 years to subsidize poverty in Africa.
This money won’t stop poverty, because it doesn’t get at the root cause of poverty. The root cause of poverty is poor economic decisions made by the governments of these nations. This aid money does nothing but support these governments.
As our own founding father Ben Franklin stated two centuries ago, “I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
This wisdom is echoed in the words of Kenyan economic expert James Shikwati, who stated the argument clearly in For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!
This bill has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives. It was done with a voice vote so that the Congress critters involved could deny responsibility for their actions.
I urge you to call your senators immediately and tell them where you stand on S.2433!
