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From the Desk of: Steve Elliott, Grassfire Nation 4/22/2010
On Monday, Sens. Kerry (D-MA) and Graham (R-SC) will unveil their broad climate and energy tax to the American people.
I say tax, because that is precisely what it is - a huge regressive tax that will impact every American and simply stated, devastate the poor and those on fixed incomes...
Allow me to explain.
President Obama's plan is to force power companies, refineries and factories and manufacturing plants to reduce their carbon emissions. He plans to accomplish hat feat through heavy taxation - meaning you and I will pay the tax at the pump, on our heating/cooling and electricity bills.
Those in the lowest and fixed income brackets spend a greater percentage of their income on gas for cars and utilities and stand to be hit the hardest by this latest tax scheme.
But there is good news...
The Hill reports, "it remains unclear whether they can gain traction for [Cap and Trade] legislation that includes controversial limits on greenhouse gases."
That's our window of opportunity, and one that we cannot miss in the coming week...
+ + More than 300,000 Petitions Opposing Climate Tax Scheme
Only days ago, I wrote you saying we were 15,000 petitions shy of our goal of 300,000 petitions - petitions that we will hand-deliver to every Senate office, beginning next Monday when the bill is announced.
Since that message, we've added more than 21,000 petitions, with thousands more signing every hour!
This is precisely the kind of blistering grassroots feedback that needs to sweep into Washington, D.C. next week opposing this latest tax plot. And given the fact that support for the plan is on shaky footing already, your petitions could make the difference between Cap and Trade moving forward or dying.
Give my team the opportunity to hand-deliver your petition to your two Senators by clicking here right now:
http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=27282&RID=21136934
Over the next 36 hours I'm calling on EVERY member of our incredible team to take action - to sign our petition and alert their friends so that we can effectively short-circuit this latest Obama effort to take your hard-earned money by clicking below:
http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=27282&RID=21136934
Our deadline for this critical delivery is Monday morning at 9 a.m. ET. So after adding your name, forward this message to your friends and encourage them to oppose this massive regressive tax by clicking here:
http://www.grassfire.net/r.asp?u=27282&RID=21136934
With your support, I believe we could mobilize an additional 75,000 citizen signers before our deadline!
But I'm counting on you.
Thank you for taking action.







Long after Wall Street's crisis, Congress still arguing over fix
By KEVIN G. HALL AND DAVID LIGHTMAN
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- Eighteen months after the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system, lawmakers in the nation's capital still can't agree on how to fix what went wrong, despite the abundant evidence of the economic devastation the crisis has caused.
The House of Representatives passed a sweeping overhaul of financial regulation in December, but the legislation is now tied in knots in the Senate. There, Democrats and Republicans have argued fruitlessly for months while Americans feel the aftershocks of the meltdown in the form of high unemployment, record lengths of joblessness and a historic plunge in lending.
The House legislation, patterned largely on the Obama administration's blueprint, tackles everything from first-ever regulation of complex financial instruments to new bankruptcy-like powers to liquidate giant financial institutions if their problems threaten the broader financial system.
The biggest obstacle to agreement remains the administration's proposal for a stand-alone Consumer Finance Protection Agency to police credit products such as mortgages, credit cards, student loans and even payday loans.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., has floated a compromise with Republicans to scrap the stand-alone requirement for the consumer protection agency in favor of one that would be independent but housed in an existing bureaucracy, such as the Treasury Department or perhaps the Federal Reserve.
"Things continue to move very well," Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., one of two GOP senators negotiating with Dodd on compromise language, said Wednesday. "We're closer on a couple issues, but I'm not going to say any more."
Another influential Republican was more direct.
"There will be a bill, but it will be very much cut back from what the House passed," said Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. "There will be consumer protection, but probably not under a separate agency. I don't know where it could be housed."
Those comments, however, reflect a fight over an address and not the more substantive question of what the agency's consumer-protection powers would be. That's the issue on which lines are being drawn in the sand. Neither Democrats nor Republicans appear ready to blink, and the impasse could doom the legislation.
"The debate about where it is, is not insignificant, but most significant is: What powers will it have? Will we be able to do something about what happened to consumers over the last few years?" Dodd asked on MSNBC Wednesday.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, lobbying hard against the new agency, was unmoved.
"For us it's less about the address of the agency and more about what it would be able to do. Our concern here has been that this new agency or independent division would have these very broad regulatory authorities that would, at the end of the day, choke off the availability of credit for small business and consumers," said Ryan McKee, senior director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center for Capital Markets.
Business groups and banks fear that the consumer-protection agency could impose costly regulations, raising borrowing costs for consumers and companies.
Consumer groups argue that federal bank regulators failed miserably to protect consumers because they consider banks, not consumers, their constituents. Leaving consumer protection up to the regulators who failed consumers preserves the status quo, they argue.
"We do not believe banking regulators, or any committee or group of those regulators, should be given any authority to veto or delay important consumer protections," Pamela Banks, senior counsel for the Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, wrote to Dodd on Wednesday.
"Moreover, as we have seen, inaction and delay by banking regulators is what allowed the subprime (mortgage) crisis to fester in the first place, threatening the near collapse of our economy."
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner met Wednesday with representatives of 30 advocacy groups and assured them that he won't back off a core goal of strong consumer protection.
"To us, he said, that means a dedicated authority with the independence and capacity it needs to be accountable and effective. He said that real accountability requires real independence to make and carry out decisions; independent leadership appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate; independent budget and administration; independent ability to set clear rules for the consumer financial services marketplace and enforce them," said a Geithner aide, on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely.
He was preaching to the choir.
"We urged them to continue to stress the need for an independent consumer regulator that has the power to oversee all players in the financial market place, whether they are banks or not, and it has strong enforcement authority," Travis Plunkett, the legislative director for the Consumer Federation of America, told McClatchy Newspapers.
So with businesses, banks and consumer advocates all digging in their heels, is it a stalemate? "I definitely wouldn't call it a stalemate.
But I would sound delusional if I said something definitely was going to happen," said Plunkett, noting that substantive talks are taking place in the Senate. "It's pretty clear right now that the banks hold the upper hand. All the movement on policy is on what the banks have wanted. I think a lot of people would find it surprising that large banks still have that much power."
Eighteen months after September 2008, when investment banks collapsed and threatened to topple others, prompting government intervention, the urgency for change is waning
. "From an economic point of view, we have time to do this right, and there is a lot of disagreement over what we do. Politically, it is important to get it done this year . ... There is a danger that the longer it goes, the less reform we get," said Douglas Elliott, a former investment banker turned researcher at The Brookings Institution, a center-left policy group in Washington.



Mathew Staver on The Huckabee Show this Weekend to Discuss Changes to Textbooks

www.LC.org

New York City, NY – This weekend Mathew D. Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, will appear on Mike Huckabee’s show to discuss potentially dramatic changes to the framework of textbooks that are being discussed by the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE). Huckabee and Staver will be revealing suggested changes, some of which are still under discussion. TSBOE will soon finalize the language that textbook publishers use to align their textbooks to current standards. As Texas is a leader in textbooks, most other states purchase the same educational materials. The show will begin at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday and 2:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, Eastern Time. Some of the suggestions that have come forward at various times include:

* Removing references to Daniel Boone, General George Patton, Nathan Hale, Columbus Day, and Christmas.
* Including the cultural impact of hip hop music, ACLU lawyer Clarence Darrow, and the Hindu holiday of Diwali
* Replacing the term "American" with "Global Citizen"– stating that students need to be shaped
    "for responsible citizenship in a global society" without any mention of citizenship in American society.
* Replacing expansionism and free enterprise with imperialism and capitalism.




Supreme Court hears arguments on Chicago handgun law
By MICHAEL DOYLE
McClatchy Newspapers

The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared poised to strike down strict state and local gun bans, though in the most judicially conservative way possible.
During a highly anticipated oral argument, the same justices who eliminated the District of Columbia's near-total handgun prohibition in 2008 suggested strongly that they thought that Chicago's handgun ban was equally incompatible with the Second Amendment.
"The right to keep and bear arms is right there. It's right there in the Bill of Rights," Justice Antonin Scalia said.
In this case, the court's eventual reasoning could matter as much as the final result.
The justices indicated Tuesday that they were likely to apply the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to extend gun ownership rights. A more aggressive alternative would be to overturn an 1873 precedent that had gutted part of the 14th Amendment. Doing that, though, would have far-reaching consequences for rights and laws that have nothing to do with gun ownership.
"It's a heavy burden for you to suggest that we ought to overrule that (1873) decision," Chief Justice John G. Roberts told one of two attorneys who were arguing on behalf of gun owners.
Scalia and Roberts were part of the court's 5-4 majority that struck down Washington's gun ban in 2008. The landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision was the first time the court ruled that the Second Amendment's right to bear arms extends to individuals and not just formal militias.
The Second Amendment says that "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The 2008 decision was limited to federal jurisdictions, because the first 10 amendments that make up the Bill of Rights cover only the federal government.
Finding that gun ownership is an individual right makes it harder, but not impossible, for the federal government to impose gun restrictions. Certain laws, such as those that ban gun ownership by former felons, might still survive.
"It's still going to be subject to the political process," Roberts stressed.
Underscoring the issue's political visibility, lawmakers including Sens. George LeMieux, R-Fla., and Max Baucus, D-Mont., observed the proceedings.
In the case heard Tuesday, called McDonald v. City of Chicago, the court must decide whether the Second Amendment extends to state and local governments. Chicago's ban is essentially as strict as Washington's, permitting handgun ownership only by licensed private detectives and the holders of old handgun licenses.
"Firearms, unlike anything else protected in the Bill of Rights, are designed to injure and kill," James Feldman, Chicago's special assistant corporation counsel, told the court, adding that "this is not fundamental, unlike freedom of speech or freedom of religion."
Feldman appeared to have some allies on the court, including Justice Stephen Breyer. Mostly, though, he faced skeptical questions from justices whose primary focus seemed to be what route they would take to expanding the Second Amendment.
This is called "incorporating" the Second Amendment against the states. It has already happened for most of the rest of the Bill of Rights, through the 14th Amendment's due process clause.
The 14th Amendment declares that states can't "deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law."
"The case for incorporating the Second Amendment through the due process clause is remarkably straightforward," former Bush administration Solicitor General Paul Clement argued on behalf of the National Rifle Association.
The 14th Amendment also declares that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." An 1873 decision called the Slaughterhouse Cases rendered this "privileges or immunities" clause toothless.
Attorney Alan Gura, who won the 2008 D.C. v. Heller case, urged the court to expand the Second Amendment by overturning the 1873 decision. This would restore power to the privileges or immunities clause, a prospect that clearly worried justices from both sides of the ideological fence.
"What unenumerated rights would we be declaring?"
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked. After Gura responded that "it's impossible to give a full list of all the unenumerated rights that might be protected by the privileges and immunities clause," Justice Samuel Alito questioned whether these might extend as far as a "right to contract," which in Supreme Court history is an excruciatingly controversial idea. Such a right would make it easier for businesses to, say, challenge minimum-wage laws.



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