Thank you Representatives Chambers and Alons and Senator Johnson for being at the Forum this morning in Sheldon. Although Senator Feenstra had family commitment keeping him from participating, he supplied written answers to some preliminary questions posed from Sheldon Tea Party Patriots. Additional copies are available. Email: Sheldonteapartypatriots@gmail.com
American Minute with Bill Federer
November 20
On June 25, 1962, the Supreme Court stopped school prayer.
Ronald Reagan said, March 6, 1984: “From the early days of the American colonies, prayer in schools was practiced and revered as an important tradition.
Indeed, for nearly 2 centuries of our history it was considered a natural expression of our religious freedom.
Then in 1962, the Supreme Court declared school prayer illegal.”
Reagan continued: “Well, I firmly believe the loving God who has blessed our land and made us a good caring people should never have been expelled from America’s classrooms.”
Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd, who was born NOVEMBER 20, 1917, agreed, stating: ”In no other place in the United States are there so many…official evidences of…faith in God on the part of Government as there are in Washington…
On the south banks of Washington’s Tidal Basin, Jefferson still speaks: ’Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.’”
Senator Robert Byrd concluded: “Jefferson’s words are a forceful and explicit warning that to remove God from this country will destroy it.”
from 1948
Do you know how the Supreme Court positions are filled?
“In 1962, Iowa voters approved a constitutional reform that replaced the process of selecting judges by popular vote with a merit selection and retention election process. This reform, referred to as the “Missouri Plan,” promotes selection of the best qualified applicants and ensures that Iowa has fair and impartial judges who are accountable to the public. ” (all quotes in this post are from http://www.iowacourtsonline.org/Public_Information/About_Judges/Selection/ )
“The State Judicial Nominating Commission interviews applicants and selects nominees for appointment to the Iowa Supreme Court as well as the Iowa Court of Appeals. This commission is composed of a chair, seven commissioners elected by lawyers, and seven commissioners appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Iowa Senate. The chair is the senior justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, other than the chief justice. All commissioners, but the chair, serve for a term of six years.”
Who is on the State Judicial Nominating Commission? The Chair is already a Supreme Court Judge. Seven are elected by lawyers. If you tried to find information about the judges on the past ballot you probably found out that lawyers give each other high scores with not a low score in the bunch. Yet we see a different story when it comes to hearings on a conservative judge for the federal courts where they are scrutinized on their views and leanings instead of receiving the blanket statement that they, of course, always vote according to the constitution. The other seven on the State Judicial Nominating Commission are appointed by the governor. Maybe that explains why it’s rumored that 12 on the Commission are Democrats.
“How Citizens Play a Key Role
While Iowans no longer select judges by popular election, they continue to play a fundamental role in deciding who serves on the judiciary. Iowans:
- May serve on judicial nominating commissions.
- Suggest the name of an applicant to be considered for a judgeship.
- Provide a nominating commission with comments about individual applicants for the bench.
- Vote whether or not to keep a judge in office for another term.
If you would like to serve on a judicial nominating commission, contact the governor’s office. If you would like to serve on a magistrate nominating commission, contact the county board of supervisors.
When a vacancy in a judicial office occurs, the appropriate commission will announce the start of a nominating process, including an address for sending information, nominations, and applications. This information can be found on this site and it is also published by most newspapers in the state.”
Many within the Ruling Class tried to tell us we had no right voting no on the retention of the judges yet right here on the Iowa Judicial Branch website it is clearly explained that this is the plan that “promotes selection of the best qualified applicants and ensures that Iowa has fair and impartial judges who are accountable to the public. ” We did our part in voting, now let’s do our part in nominating and not leave it up to the Ruling Class. Do you know anyone who would be willing and able to serve on the Judicial Nomination Commission? If you do, encourage them to do so. If you would like to serve on the nominating commission, please contact Governor Branstad or your elected representative.
“The rules shall encourage the provision of child foster care in a single-family, home environment, exempting the single-family, home facility from inappropriate rules.”
Iowa Code section 237.3 (1)
The message is pretty clear. Iowa’s law on child foster care facilities wants to protect the children being cared for in family homes, but the state also doesn’t want to go overboard in its regulation. Apparently, this has been lost on some within the Department of Human Services as a growing number of foster parents are being faced with having to put bigger windows in their houses in order to continue helping the state with this important task.
State law gives the Department of Public Safety the authority to establish fire safety rules for agency-run facilities that provide foster care. And DPS has established requirements that a foster home including:
- Having battery-operated smoke detectors;
- Requiring exits to be clear and unobstructed;
- Prohibiting placement of combustible items within 3 feet of the furnace;
- Having a carbon monoxide detector; and
- Requiring an egress window in a basement room where a child sleeps. The egress window must have a minimum opening height of 24 inches and width of 20 inches.
For some reason, these requirements weren’t enough for DHS. The Department established its own standards for foster care homes, on top of the DPS rules. Rule 441-113.7(b) (2) requires that all windows on the floor of a house where a foster child sleeps to meet the height and width requirements that DPS set for egress windows in a basement bedroom.
By broadening where the size requirement applies, many windows in a home could fall under the DHS rule. After DHS changed the foster care licensing procedures last October, many foster families are facing an expensive choice. They can either put new windows into their homes or stop being a foster parent. A number of families have chosen to quit, leaving the state’s foster care system in an even more precarious position.
The situation highlights a troubling trend with the Department of Human Services. Staff within the Department have gone beyond the statutory authority granted them by the Legislature. In this case fire safety rules are the specific duty of DPS, which happens to be the state agency charged with protecting Iowans from fires. The fire marshal’s expertise and authority has been trumped by a department that apparently thinks it knows better. It’s just another example of bureaucrats gone wild within state government.
As the school year has started and schools are now implementing the nutritional mandates spelled out in the 2008 Healthy Kids Act, news stories are beginning to pop up across the state. While there are positives from upgrading food choices, some parents are complaining about the strict guidelines now in place and some districts are facing financial difficulties getting the program up and running. Mandatory exercise requirements are also hurting academic time for teachers.
Originally a stand alone bill, the Healthy Kids Act passed as part of the HHS budget bill in 2008. House Republicans voted against the idea, not because we do not support healthy kids but due to the government bureaucracy it created. Not to mention that the Democrat controlled legislature set tougher lunch standards than it did for reading and math.
The Ankeny school district drew national media attention when it implementation of the new nutritional standards involved the school children memorizing and using a 4-digit PIN number when purchasing their lunch. The PIN identifies what food items the child chose and whether those items meet the guidelines stated in the law. The program smacks of “Big Brother” tactics, but the school district officials maintain that they are not keeping track of what kids choose.
The school district also cut 75 items from its ala carte menu and switched milk from 2% to 1% to meet the guidelines, which drew some calls from parents.
In Ames, switching out ala carte menu items has actually proved to be a budget burden. Ala carte menus are meant to provide a range of choices for older kids and last year brought in between $1800 and $2300 per day. That amount is down $1000 per day this year. If the students don’t get on board with the new options, it’s possible that revenues could be down as much as $200,000 for the fiscal year. And while student nutrition shouldn’t be about profits, the bottom line is that money lost will need to be recouped somewhere and property tax payers could foot the bill for it.
Part one of the Healthy Kids Act, requiring how much cardiovascular exercise students get per day is also seeing some potential problems. While kids do need more exercise to combat the rising level of obesity, that 30 minutes per day required in K-12 can come at the expense of academics. School districts forced to cut their budgets by two governor-ordered across the board cuts have led to layoffs not only of teachers, but of professional associates, including recess associates. Now, in districts that were forced to layoff those associates, teachers are filling in, pulling them out of the classroom for an additional 30 minutes or more per day. In an already stressed system, this is a burden that teachers can’t afford.
Physical activity is important, but should it come at the expense of classroom time? Several Republican ideas passed around at the time of adoption of the Health Kids Act gave parents and children the opportunity to meet these physical requirements outside of school time and prevented these new requirements from cutting into academic course time. This is important at a time when Iowa’s leaders are searching for ways to restore Iowa to its first in the nation status when it comes to education. However, these ideas were not adopted.
Again, this points out that many times government does not get it right – local control following some general guidelines would make more sense.
(Capitol Comments – Rep. Dwayne Alons)
The first of these looks as intricate as an integrated circuit. Titled “Your New Health Care System,” this schematicshows how Obamacare’s hundreds of moving parts will fit together and
whirl — or not, as rising health costs at Boeing, McDonald’s, and the
United Federation of Teachers (to name a few affected organizations)
already reveal.
Staff members at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee “spent four months, night and day, and weekends” assembling this amazing graphic, Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas) tells me by phone.
“They vetted it based on all 2,801 pages of the Obamacare legislation. They captured this new law’s stunningly complexity.”
Well, almost.
Literally scores of icons and symbols show how the president, the secretary of health and human services, the IRS, and other existing
federal actors and agencies interact with Obamacare’s new entities including, among many others, the Elder Justice Coordinating Council,
the Medicare Prescription Drug and MA-PD Complaint System, and the National Oral Health Public Education Campaign.
Even worse, the JEC’s diligent personnel could not fit all of this new law’s boards, commissions, mandates, and other elements onto this chart.
So, by way of shorthand, they created “bundles of bureaucracy.” Beyond those functions delineated in the chart, these seven collective symbols
respectively represent clusters of four loan repayment and forgiveness programs, four other new regulatory programs, 17 insurance mandates, 19 special-interest provisions, 22 other new bureaucracies, 26 other new demonstration and pilot programs, and 59 other new grant programs. These 151 additional items within Obamacare do not appear individually on this diagram. As Representative Brady explains, “If we included all of these units, this chart would be three times larger.”
Anyone who believes the JEC concocted this out of thin air should think again. Beneath each new program or agency, policy analysts cited the
section in the Obamacare law that empowers that particular intervention in the American people’s medical decisions. The lines that connect
programs to mandates indicate the pertinent passages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that bind them together.
The JEC’s 25-megabyte creation is difficult to transmit via e-mail. However, a convenient link opens a PDF that allows readers to zoom in and explore this chart in amazing and shocking detail.
Even those who believe that government actively should heal the American people must wonder if that goal really required something this
staggeringly convoluted.
As it is, the JEC’s chart is both an incredibly impressive piece of graphic design and a jaw-dropping glimpse of the health-care Hell that
awaits the American people, unless they elect a new Congress to shutter this entire fiasco before it renders this republic irretrievably ill.
http://www.resistnet.com/forum/topics/three-charts-that-will?RID=26108594
The second chart appeared in the New York Post on September 6 and is based on a Heritage Foundation analysis
of figures from the U.S. Labor Department, the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, and Haver Analytics. Between December 2007, when the Great
Recession began, and last July, the private sector lost 7,837,000 jobs
(down 6.8 percent). Local-government employment
dropped 128,000 positions (minus 0.9 percent), while state governments
shed 6,000 positions (less 0.1 percent). Meanwhile, Washington, D.C.,
boomed. Federal employment zoomed by 198,100 slots as Uncle Sam’s workforce expanded by 10 percent.
This graph’s whiff of Marie Antoinette should boil every patriot’s blood. While the American people live increasingly ascetic lives, and even city halls and statehouses have displayed some restraint, Washington, D.C., increasingly resembles Versailles — an out-of-touch, extravagant, and callous place that fuels little beyond the nation’s disgust, fury, and organized rebellion. As the party rages within the Beltway, federal revelers scream, “Let them pay taxes!”
http://www.resistnet.com/forum/topics/three-charts-that-will?RID=26108594