Boise’s Channel 7 ran a story on Planned Parenthood’s outrage over being dropped by the Komen Foundation. The impression they convey is that all of the Treasure Valley is up in arms because the local abortion clinic will no longer receive money raised under the auspices of “fighting breast cancer”.

Perhaps local donors will no longer be interested in finding a cure.

It has long been a curiosity that Komen got involved with the Abortion Industry in the first place. Setting aside the growing body of research which shows a linkage between abortion and increased risk of breast cancer – the simple truth is that Planned Parenthood does not do mammograms. The money they’ve been getting from Komen is in the form of “pass-through grants”, whatever that is. (There is an informative article on this point now up on LifeNews.Com). The local news “reporter” failed to ask anything about Planned Parenthood’s ability to actually screen for breast cancer. They simply gave Planned Parenthood staff the chance to publicly chastise and threaten Komen.

Channel 7 also failed to contact this organization for a fuller explanation of the upside for Komen. While there may be abortion zealots who are offended about not simultaneously helping kill babies while supporting cancer research – many in the pro-Life movement are energized. In fact, Komen is reporting that its donations have doubled since the announcement. That was, apparently, too much information to share with viewers in Idaho.

In truth, Channel 7 – the “Idaho News Leader” – rarely covers the pro-Life movement, despite the views and values of an overwhelming majority of its audience. How sad.

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Folks, we are asking people to send this to their representatives so that Idaho can be certain that candidates that appear on Idaho ballots are actually eligible to be there. It is up to the Chairmen of the political parties to “vet” the candidates. This is not always done. Georgia and Texas and a handful of other states have begun this process and this legislation is modeled after their legislation.

This is a draft of the proposed legislation that folks all over the state are asking their representatives to sponsor/cosponsor.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks, Andi Elliott
208-662-5808
straighttalkidaho@yahoo.com

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED
AN ACT relating to certification for placement on the ballot of candidates for president or vice-president of the United States.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF IDAHO:

SECTION 1. Section_________, Election Code, is amended by amending Subsection (__) and adding Subsection (___) to read as follows:

(a) Except as provided by Subsection (__) or (___), the secretary of state shall certify in writing for placement on the general election ballot the names of the candidates for president and vice-president who are entitled to have their names placed on the ballot.

(d) The secretary of state may not certify the name of a candidate for president or vice-president unless the candidate has presented the candidate’s certified and/or notarized copy of his or her original birth certificate indicating that the person is a natural-born United States citizen.

SECTION 2. The secretary of state shall perform a background check on presidential candidates to ensure they meet the Constitutional qualifications, including whether not they are a NATURAL Born Citizen of the United States – born of 2 U.S. citizen parents within the United States according to the U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett, 1875. Candidates for president and vice-president who are entitled to have their names placed on the ballot shall complete the same Federal I-9 form that every other employee in the country is required to complete to prove that they are legally able to work in the United States. The secretary of state shall certify that said Federal I-9 form has been completed.

SECTION 3. An emergency existing therefore, which emergency is hereby declared to exist, this act shall be in full force and effect on and after its passage and approval.

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The pro-Life community is buzzing with the tremendous news that Planned Parenthood has lost the legitimizing cover of the breast cancer lobby. The Komen Foundation’s decision to end its partnership with the Abortion Industry is a huge blessing – on many levels.

There is the money which Komen has transferred from life-loving citizens to those promoting the death of women and babies. Seeing Planned Parenthood lose several millions in charitable support is certainly encouraging.

And we are all excited by the fact that pro-Lifers will no longer have to argue or wince or boycott fundraising efforts designed to end the scourge of breast cancer. In fact, we encourage our readers to at least send the Komen Foundation an email to express our gratitude; a donation in the name of innocent children would be better. Komen deserves sincere praise for protecting the integrity of the effort to treat and cure breast cancer.

But in the long term, the best aspect of this development is that Planned Parenthood can no longer hide its evil behind the skirt of “fighting breast cancer” – as if it were principally concerned about the health or lives of women. Whenever their killing operations have been exposed, they seek to change the subject by pointing to their work with Komen.

That ruse just got a lot harder.

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The president, in his State of the Union address declared, “The problems we’re overcoming are not the heritage of one person, party, or even one generation. It’s just the tendency of government to grow. And there’s always that well-intentioned chorus of voices saying, ‘With a little more power and a little more money, we could do so much for the people.’ For a time we forgot the American dream isn’t one of making government bigger; it’s keeping faith with the mighty spirit of free people under God.”

If you don’t recall that opening line, it’s understandable, for it wasn’t in the latest State of the Union, and it wasn’t this president. The president was Ronald Reagan, and the year was 1984. Whether one agreed with him or not, there was remarkable consistency in what he said, and his message didn’t vary based on the venue, his audience, or the grandness of the stage. Even more remarkable was his policies and recommendations to congress and the American people were consistent, at least incrementally, with what he said. This is an increasingly rare commodity, especially in politics, as we observed firsthand this week.

In this week’s State of the Union we heard, “What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.” I couldn’t agree more! But what does he think those values are? The historical version of those “American values” and Obama’s are not synonymous. For the rest of the speech the only words uttered with greater frequency than “fair” and “fairness” were “I,” “me,” and “my.”

From what Obama said Tuesday night, his notion of our “American values” is not based on freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness, or any of the ancillary principles or traits that have made America great. His overarching theme was “fairness,” which is simply a euphemism for class envy, based on increased taxation of the most financially successful Americans, to pay for more regulation, agencies, and programs. This concept of “values” is very un-American. They are distinctly antithetical to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that encompassed the nation’s political value system for two centuries.

This contrast is observed even more starkly with the 1986 State of the Union address when President Reagan put the role of fairness in proper perspective. “Private values must be at the heart of public policies.” He elaborated, “Americans have always valued faith, character, hard work, personal responsibility, self-reliance, discipline, competition, charity, fairness, and achievement. Values originate from what people believe, especially what they believe about God.” Clearly, from Obama’s speech, those are not his idea of “American values.”

Editors at The Washington Post observed this as well, when they said of Obama’s speech, “None of the proposals constitutes a single bold stroke to revive the economy, but the heart of Obama’s message was that America’s wealthiest citizens must do more to cement the economic recovery and pull the country from its dire fiscal condition.”

We should, with every major speech like the State of the Union, assess the consistency in speech and actions. If one tells us one thing but does another, that’s not just duplicity, it’s hypocrisy and prevarication. Here’s a perfect example from Obama’s speech the other night, “But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” He obviously doesn’t really believe that, since government now is expanding and encroaching into our lives more than ever before and he proposed even more government “solutions” in his speech.

In describing the period leading up to Reagan’s 1984 address, Reagan said, “There was a feeling government had grown beyond the consent of the governed. Families felt helpless in the face of mounting inflation and the indignity of taxes that reduced reward for hard work, thrift, and risk-taking. All this was overlaid by an ever-growing web of rules and regulations.” Sound familiar?

Every solution for Obama is another government program or more spending. This is clearly not an American value. But this one is, “I think the best possible social program is a job.” That, too, was Ronald Reagan. He also correctly assessed the relationship between expansion of government and individual liberty, when he declared factually, “As government expands, liberty contracts.”

For those of us who lived through the Reagan years, the contrast between our president from thirty years ago and our current incarnation could not be more stark. They are diametrically opposed in the role of government in our lives, the American values that define us culturally and economically, and in the inherent trust of people, versus a trust of the government.

History and our founding documents provide a documented transcript of what our “American values” are, and that transcript provides a narrative much different from what our current president portrays.

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The Board of Idaho Chooses Life has voted to oppose the creation of a state insurance exchange because of the myriad dangers it poses to Idahoans. Implementing ObamaCare, even as we challenge it before the U.S. Supreme Court, just doesn’t make sense. The pending lawsuit provides with a great exit ramp.

But the nation’s best hope is a rejection of Barack Obama at the polls this fall.

We have distributed a “Policy Statement” on the idea of a state exchange to key members of the Legislature and are now meeting to reinforce our message. Rather than voluntarily submit to the edicts of Obama and Secretary Sebelius, Idaho must offer national leadership by choosing a private-sector path to better, cheaper health care.

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President Obama issued a public statement this past Sunday honoring the Supreme Court for its heinous act 39 years ago this week:

“We must remember that [Roe v. Wade] not only protects a woman’s health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.”

That is special. As the present leader of a movement to strip Americans of privacy and their right to pursue happiness and retain the fruits of their labor – the one area Obama would acknowledge “privacy” is in the matter of destroying an innocent life. In his view, the destruction of a defenseless human being should remain a “personal” matter between a mother and her abortionist.

How truly sad it is that the “leader” of the free world has nothing more to offer than legitimizing moral chaos in the name of “freedom”.

We ask that you join us in praying to the Lord Almighty that He would raise up a righteous man to help restore America’s moral grounding by tearing down the high altars of libertinism.

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It’s too bad that we can’t rely on the headline numbers that our own government gives us. The headline numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases each month obfuscate the real unemployment malaise across the country. Yet ironically, it’s in the BLS releases that we find a more complete unemployment picture, we just have to dig deeper for it.

When the BLS reported that the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5% with December’s year-end data, media pounced on the headline figure but almost none delved deeper into the official report. What they report is the demographic composition of the workforce as calculated in Table A-1 of their monthly report. Since 1994, these are the primary data for headline purposes. They also “tweak” the figures for “seasonal adjustment.”

For a more complete picture, however, look at the BLS monthly employment report, table A-15. U-6 on that table indicates as a percentage of the total civilian workforce, the number of unemployed (those included in Table A-1), those who have given up looking for jobs, plus those who are working marginal part-time jobs who need fulltime positions. In the latest report, that percentage is 15.2%. This is a much more accurate indication of the state of the economy relative to unemployment and job creation.

It’s easy to understand why those figures wouldn’t be reported in the headlines. They don’t look good. But to understand how current economic policies have failed so dramatically in job creation, it’s imperative that we look at the full picture.

Based solely on BLS data, for example, we learn the following. Over the past year alone, the civilian workforce population rose by 1,726,000. That means we need to add an average 166,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the demand of those who are entering the job market. Yet over the past year the number of people actually working fell by 67,000.

In November alone, when the headlines across the nation reported that unemployment dropped from 9.1% to 8.6%, job creation was not what caused the decline. The cause of the drop, which should’ve been the real headline, was that 487,000 fellow Americans stopped looking for work.

In the 30 months since the recession ended officially, according to BLS data, nearly one million previously employed workers have dropped out of the labor force. That means that not only are they not working, but they’ve become discouraged and given up finding a job, and aren’t even looking for a job anymore.

Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) reports that this anemic job growth is atypical in post-recession recoveries. Their research indicates that in the past nine recession recoveries the labor force “had climbed an average 3.5 million by this point.” After the recession in 2002-2003, job growth exploded with over 4 million jobs created, culminating in an official unemployment rate of 4.4% by this point in the recovery.

Instead, we have a net job loss over the past few years. The participation rate, which is the percentage of the number of people either working or looking for work compared to the civilian working-age population, is now 64%, which is down nearly two points from when the recession officially ended in June 2009. The only time that figure was lower, according to BLS, was several decades ago when women began entering the workforce en mass. And total payrolls are still a whopping 6.1 million lower than when they peaked in 2008.

The nonprofit Employment Policy Institute tracks this data closely. They take the number of jobs lost since the recession began and add in the growth of the working age population. The resulting figure they report as a “jobs deficit,” and they calculate we have a current deficit of 10.8 million jobs, even factoring in the 1.4 million jobs added since the recession ended,

The anemic job situation has a pejorative impact even on those who are fortunate enough to still have one. According to Sentier Research, real median annual household income has declined 5.1% since the recession ended 30 months ago. That represents even more of a drop than what happened during the recession itself, which declined 3.2%.

Corporate profits have continued to improve over the past two years, but companies are still reluctant to start hiring again. Most small business owners and corporate officers cite the uncertain regulatory environment, high corporate tax rates, and new regulation implementation costs as obstacles.

If anything, it’s a testament to the resiliency of our private sector that we’ve had any jobs created in this hostile environment that Washington has created. What jobs have been added is in spite of, not because of what the administration has been doing to the private sector.

The only real hope for revitalizing America’s job market lies in policies emanating from Washington that are conducive to job creation, rather than punitive. Let’s hope November elections facilitate that most critical change.

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Americans United for Life has released its pro-Life rankings of the states for 2012. They rank Idaho as the 19th “safest” place for preborn children in the country – at least in terms of the legal protections afforded our preborn brothers and sisters. That is an improvement of four spots from the year before, reflecting our strong 2011 legislative session. In 2009, AUL ranked us at 26 among the states.
Leading the list for the past several years has been Louisiana, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

A deeper look at the rankings shows that, generally speaking, the states governed by the ultra-liberal 9th
Circuit are the deadliest. California and Washington have been fighting over dead-last for several years. The average ranking for states in the 9th Circuit – without Idaho and Arizona – is an appalling 45th. Part of that phenomenon reflects the Abortion Lobby’s death grip on the political culture in states like Montana, Washington, Oregon and California. But one cannot discount the deleterious impact of 9th Circuit judges on the pro-Life movements operating within their political orbit.

The rankings from AUL are by no means the last word on the subject, as the organization does come at the question with certain biases. However, it does give us a feel for state of the nation and the great disparity between the states.

It also reminds us of the work we have left to do.

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Sometimes in life timing is everything and it seems like the stars line up. Other times not so much. I have been working for quite some time on a piece of legislation to change the date of the primary election from May to August. The Primary election was held in August before Idaho decided to join in a presidential primary. And now that the political parties will be caucusing to choose their nominees, there is no longer a need for the presidential candidates to appear on the primary ballot, it seemed like a good idea to move the election back to August.

Little did I know that the Supreme Court was about to dispense with the redistricting plan that was adopted by the Redistricting Commission. You can call it foresight, or just plain luck or even coincidence but the agenda for introducing the legislation was in place before I had any idea the court was about to rule. With the commission having to come up with a plan that will pass constitutional muster, the counties will have a tough time complying with the May primary date and to get everything in place for the election. At this moment, legislative candidates don’t know what district they might be in and the filing date is about a month away. Needless to say the bill, House Bill 392 has already stirred things up and everyone has an opinion.

We don’t seem to lack for controversy, even this early in the session. A bill introduced in State affairs twice this week, is scheduled for a hearing to make it unlawful to camp on the Capital Mall or around any other state owned building. There is a group that has tents around the old Ada County Courthouse that is across the street from the capital. We took some testimony from some “occupiers or 99 per centers” as they call themselves. One of the committee members asked a BSU student who spoke before the committee, what event would cause them to be satisfied so they would disband on their own. The fellow stammered a bunch but was unable to come up with an answer. Is it good idea to pass a bill that in effect would evict them from the property? From a PR perspective, probably not. One thing for sure is that there will be no shortage of press coverage on this one and some of us are feeling like this is not a winner no matter how we vote.

Joint Finance is still hearing from agencies and their wish lists, that are in competition for the state’s resources. Committees are dealing with the rules that have come forward since last session. Two years ago we put a resolution in place in an attempt to better define what would constitute a reason for new rules and to try to curb the explosive growth in rules from the agencies. For the last two years we have seen fewer rules instead of more. That’s a good thing and we continue to be optimistic that we will see the cost of this process reduced. I think we can count that as a success. Again, maybe that is due to the stars lining up, or good luck or even coincidence. I’d rather call it success because of the efforts of a citizen of this state, who brought the idea to us.

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Pro-Lifers will gather once again on Saturday, January 21st to mark the 39th year of our national suffering under the Supreme Court edict legalizing abortion.

In Boise, folks will meet at the Julia Davis band shell at 1 pm. A rally on the steps of the Idaho Statehouse to defend preborn children will follow the march down Capitol Blvd.

Our best estimate is that over 54 million children have lost their lives under the Roe regime. May the Maker of Heaven and Earth reach down and save us from our great national sin.

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