Congressional Reform Act of 2011

Term Limits

• 12 years max, some possible options are below.
  A.    Two Six-year Senate terms
  B.    Six Two-year House terms
  C.    One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

• No Tenure / No Pension

• Members of Congress receive a salary while in office, that salary ends when they leave office.

• Congress members (past, present & future) are to participate in Social Security.
  A. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately.
  B. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with all Americans.
  C. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

• Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

• Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

• Members of Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

• All contracts with past and present members of Congress are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make the contract members of Congress enjoy, Congress made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person who reads this contacts a minimum of twenty people, and passes this on, it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Maybe it is time. THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!

If you agree with the above, pass it on.  If not, just  run for office.

Veterans Affairs Bans Mention of God at Funerals for Vets

The VFW District 4, American Legion Post 586, National Memorial Ladies Join Lawsuit Against VA and Director of Houston National Cemetery for Religious Hostility

HOUSTON, Texas, June 28, 2011 — Today, Liberty Institute, on behalf of the Veterans of Foreign Wars District 4, The American Legion Post 586, and the National Memorial Ladies, returned to federal court with new allegations of religious hostility and unlawful censorship by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and its director of the Houston National Cemetery. Last month, Liberty Institute successfully represented Houston pastor Scott Rainey in the same federal court after Houston VA officials tried to prevent him from praying in Jesus’ name at a Memorial Day ceremony.

“The hostile and discriminatory actions by the Veterans Affairs officials in Houston are outrageous, unconstitutional and must stop,” said Jeff Mateer, Esq., general counsel of Liberty Institute. “Government officials who engage in religious discrimination against citizens are breaking the law. Sadly, this seems to be a pattern of behavior at the Houston VA National Cemetery.”

Today, Liberty Institute amended its original lawsuit that states the Department of Veterans Affairs and its Director of the Houston National Cemetery, Arleen Ocasio, are engaging in religious viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, by adding new incidents of religious hostility including:

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VA Forbids Mention of God at Funerals for Veterans and Requires Families to Submit Prayer for Approval to the Government:

For 30 years, the VFW District 4 burial team, at the request of the family of the deceased, has honored veterans by performing the VFW burial ritual during private burial services at the Houston National Cemetery. For 20 years, The American Legion Post 586 has honored our veterans by performing its burial ritual for fallen veterans. On at least four separate occasions, government officials told the burial teams that prayer and religious speech could no longer be included in the burial ritual unless the family submits a specific prayer or message in writing to Director Ocasio for her approval. Government official Jose Henriquez also told the VFW Honor Guard Commander, Junior Vice Commander and Chaplain that the word “God” is forbidden.

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VA instructs the VFW and a Private Funeral Home that they may not present the option of prayer to families:

American Heritage Funeral Home, which sits next to the Houston National Cemetery and specializes in veterans’ funerals, was instructed by government officials that the funeral home may not inform the families that they have the option of requesting prayer in the VFW burial ritual.

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VA Tells Volunteers to Remove “God Bless” from Condolence Cards to Grieving Families:

About a year ago, Director Ocasio instructed the president of the National Memorial Ladies that the words “God” and “Jesus” are forbidden and that “God Bless” could no longer be written in condolence cards to families. Volunteers also were banned from speaking a religious message when talking directly to veterans’ families on cemetery grounds.

VA Closes Cemetery Chapel; Uses it for Storage:

The chapel where families used to gather, pray and reflect has been closed and is now called a “meeting facility” and used for storage. The chapel cross and Bible have been removed and the bells that once used to chime are no longer used.

“On March 15, Director Ocasio told me that I couldn’t say ‘May God grant you grace, mercy and peace’ to grieving families, said Nobleton Jones, Honor Guard Junior Vice Commander. “Today we ask the government to make it right.”

“All we wanted was to give honor to fallen soldiers,” said Inge Conley, incoming VFW District 4 Commander.

Today’s hearing took place before Federal District Judge Lynn N. Hughes who had granted the original temporary restraining order preventing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs from censoring Pastor Rainey’s prayer in May. Judge Hughes gave the government until July 15 to respond to the new allegations and set a status hearing for July 21.

Help support this case and stop government censorship!

Last week, it was reported that a NATO air strike in Tripoli had killed a son and three grandchildren of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. That report, however, is now in question as the only confirmation is from the Gadhafi government itself. The family rarely stays in the same place for long, particularly given current circumstances. Also, Saif-al-Arab, one of Gadhafi’s sons, is 29, unmarried and childless and is not a senior military commander or other notable target.

As Hot Air’s Allahpundit writes, “That means it’s unlikely that the coalition was targeting him; why hand [Gadhafi] free propaganda by killing a son who’s not causing the west much trouble? The airstrike must have been aimed at [Gadhafi] himself — except that … the [Gadhafis] are probably keeping their distance from each other knowing that there are eyes in the sky. And even if he did decide to meet with Saif, NATO would have to have spies very, very close to him to be able to pinpoint his location and launch a quick attack. Is that likely? The rebel’s spokesman in Benghazi told the media that the whole thing smells fishy.”

In related news, Gadhafi is losing even his friends’ support. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for Gadhafi to step down “for the sake of the country’s future.” Given that and the termination of Osama bin Laden, Gadhafi may be wondering just how many days he has left.

Immigration Front: Border Agent Faces Time for Doing Job

Another Border Patrol agent, Jesus Diaz, has been prosecuted by Johnny Sutton, federal attorney for the Western District of Texas. In 2006, Sutton put two other agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean away for “violating the rights” of a fleeing Mexican drug smuggler. Sutton’s tactics raised great protests, even from such senators as Dianne Feinstein and Arlen Specter.

A Border Patrol veteran, Diaz is married to another agent, Diana Diaz, and has four children, including a six-month-old he has never met. He is being held in solitary confinement for his own protection from the illegals who fill the prison he’s in. He is allowed only two 20-minute visits per week.

Diaz was prosecuted for excessive force under color of authority against an illegal alien, a charge more serious than murder for an average citizen. His crime consisted of forcing an uncooperative suspect to the ground by raising the offender’s handcuffs. Even though pictures taken of the man soon after the arrest showed no signs of abuse, Mexico complained, and Sutton filed charges.

As in the 2006 trials, the “victim” received full immunity plus a visa to come and go in the U.S. (which he promptly used to smuggle drugs again). Sutton carefully controlled everything the jury heard and suppressed exculpatory evidence. When the first trial ended in a mistrial, he re-filed. This time he got his conviction, despite prosecution witnesses having changed their stories and some indicating that they had lied to the grand jury. Diaz could get 10-35 years simply for doing his job when he’s sentenced in September. Diana Diaz perhaps states the obvious when she says that these prosecutions are causing other agents “to think twice” when bracing the Mexican invaders.

Postscript: A recent Government Accountability Office report indicates that only 129 miles of the 1,954 mile U.S.-Mexico border is “controlled” by the federal government. The Mexican cartels control the rest.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” ~Rahm Emmanuel

“Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand and obtain total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens” ~Joseph Stalin

The Bolshevik revolution took place in 1917. The Socialists took over and killed Czar Nicholas and his family; killed all the leaders and took over all the farms and businesses. But afterward, after they had killed off all the business owners and confiscated all the farms, it so disrupted the county that the rest of the people were starving. So Lenin came up with a plan on how to get agriculture rolling again, trying to get the economy working again.

But Joseph Stalin came in and scrapped the whole plan saying, “No, we want there to be crisis because crisis allows me (the government) to demand and obtain the submission of the people.” Stalin was so cruel that he brought trucks into the Ukraine all took the food off of the grocery shelves and moved them out of the area. Millions of people starved to death.

I said in 2008 that, like the fictional Nicolae Carpathia, Obama would not leave office voluntarily. There might be some national emergency or something catastrophic would happen, but the elections would be suspended and everyone would agree it was the correct thing to do at the time.

On July 29, 2008, Jesse Petersen wrote:

“I’ve been holding my tongue for months, but the media just keeps drawing too much attention to intangibles that he has yet to deserve as a junior member of the Senate with a piss-poor hardline liberal/socialist voting record, unethical real-estate deals, and a 20-year relationship with his Farrakhan-worshipping pastor. He has outlined how many taxes he wants to raise, programs that need to be funded with taxpayer money, and said that he both wants to socialize healthcare and will dismantle the entire nuclear program.

Check out how closely this egotism and propaganda mirrors that of Nicolae Carpathia from the Left Behind series: Nicolae Carpathia.

As for the media support, I can’t do much better than let you see all of the depictions of Obama with a halo-like appearance: The Halos of Barack Obama.

Oh, and you do realize that he doesn’t write those speeches that everyone (read stupid people, celebrities, and straight-line liberal/marxist/socialist whackjobs, and naive/historically uneducated young people) is so moved by? Those are created by people called “speechwriters,” who are professionally trained and tested political writers of moving prose. Barack does not have the command of history of global politics to attempt to pull off his speeches’ content himself, that much you can be guaranteed.

Jon Voight wrote one of the best historical/social pieces I’ve seen: Washington Post.

The Democratic Party, in its quest for power, has managed a propaganda campaign with subliminal messages, creating a God-like figure in a man who falls short in every way. It seems to me that if Mr. Obama wins the presidential election, then Messrs. Farrakhan, Wright, Ayers and Pfleger will gain power for their need to demoralize this country and help create a socialist America.

Francis Frangipane reported that this was sent to his ministry recently from their friends at Generals.org. He felt that this report has more truth in it than anything he has heard on the news to date. This account is one of several they have received, yet the report cannot be independently verified. Please pray daily or more for the crisis in Egypt and also write your local newspapers, and share with them this eye-witness account (below). It can go in the “letters to the editor” page. Let’s get this word out to bring balance into this event, and especially let’s stand in faith for Egypt and its future.

Eye-Witness Account from Egypt

Dear Friends,

Egypt is finding its way towards more freedom, but please don’t believe what the international media is saying!

There is a plot to topple the president, and Egyptians do not want that. I have been on the streets with many hundreds of thousands, probably even millions, who want stability, dialogue, and change with Mubarak until the elections in September. There are forces taking advantage of the situation and twisting facts and figures to portray to the international community a distorted image to topple the government.

The vast majority of people in the streets in peaceful demonstrations (I speak as an eyewitness because I took to the streets myself) are carrying banners saying things like:

• yes to stability, yes to Mubarak

• give change a chance

• we are sorry Mr. president

• we accept dialogue, we trust you

• no to El-Baradei, no to the muslim brotherhood (many like this one)

• we are the Egyptians, where is Al-Jazeera, let them come and see

• no to corruption, no to vandalism

• we got what we asked the president for, so why are people still in Tahrir? Who are they? What do they want? etc., etc., etc.

We met with people who were in the original protest in Tahrir square who decided to join us saying: we got what we asked for, and now we accept Mubarak’s changes and proposals.

I left the street with my wife around 4:15 pm, and the numbers in the neighbourhood of Mohandessin where the crowds were gathered had swelled to easily over a million. As we drove home we saw the same slogans on banners all over the city, on cars, on walls, on shop windows. We learned that similar demonstrations are taking place all over the country, in many different cities. This is the cry of the people of egypt that isbeing totally ignored by the international news media. Is this on purpose??!!! I am perplexed!!!

I am wondering: How come CNN, the BBC, and others are reporting only the anti-government protests as the voice of the people? This is not justice, this is not the truth. There have been reports that these people are being paid by the government. Not true! I was there with many, many others. I saw the streets.

Now to the situation in Tahrir square. Only a few people (hundreds?) are still there from the original protesters. They have been slowly replaced by other highly organized groups. They all have the same model of cell phones. They all have the same blankets (eye witnesses). THESE ARE NOT THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT.

Some witnesses claim that they don’t look Egyptians, and don’t sound Egyptians (different accent, different dialect). This is a big organized coup to try to convince the world through the media that egypt wants mubarak to go, and the media is part of the deception.

People in Tahrir square are escalating the situation on purpose to topple President Mubarak for their own hidden agendas. This is typical of the muslim brothers, and everybody in the streets of cairo knows this. We heard people on the streets saying that the plot to take over the country is now clear. The international media doesn’t want you to know this.

The escalation of violence in Tahrir square is because of this. Egyptians who love Egypt, the millions that took to the streets yesterday, want this to end. They fully understand that president Mubarak is between a rock and a hard place, that he cannot quench the unrest in Tahrir through the army, so the people want to go to Tahrir to disperse the crowds there by themselves. People in Tahrir are vastly outnumbered. If Egyptians go the Tahrir square to take control of the situation, more chaos will erupt, giving a chance to the international media to blame the President even more.

Don’t believe an opportunist like Mohammed El-Baradei who is deceiving the international community into putting pressure on president Mubarak to leave immediately so they can fulfill their own agendas. Franklin Roosevelt said, “Nothing happens by accident in politics. If it happened, somebody made it happen.” And this is NOT what Egyptians want! I am an Egyptian. My wife and I were on the streets on Tuesday and Wednesday in support of the current regime, and we saw millions on the streets. If Egypt falls, then neighboring countries are going to fall one after the other. Someone is behind this!

Website: www.generals.org | E-mail: generals@generals.org

Phone: (972) 576 8887 | Fax: (972) 576 8899

Rightly or wrongly, people lump us together with others of the same family, gender, age, nationality and religion. While businesses routinely discharge employees who hurt the company’s reputation and the individual above withdrew from his birth family, separating from a group is rarely easy.

Thus I sadly criticize about 250 rabbis who recently appended their names to a shameful newspaper advertisement. In it they defamed Glenn Beck, calling for sanctions against him.

Full disclosure: I like Glenn Beck and consider him a friend. I have frequently appeared on his radio and television shows and I find most of his views to be fully supportive of Israel, good for the United States, and largely in accord with the values of the Torah. The enormous number of fans Glenn has in Israel and among America’s Orthodox Jewish community suggests that other Jews share my enthusiasm.

This leaves the question of why these rabbis called Glenn an anti-Semite. Answering that requires a certain understanding of what makes a rabbi.

Unlike many other professions, there is no universally accepted qualification for rabbis. In fact, anyone can declare him or herself one, and even accreditation by a seminary proves no adherence to a common standard. Thus we have rabbis who do not believe that the Torah is God’s message to mankind and we have rabbis who do not believe that the Exodus ever occurred. We even have atheistic and humanistic rabbis who do not believe in God at all. In itself, the title means nothing.

This helps explain how rabbis are easily found who are willing to state almost anything, regardless of how bizarrely distant it may be from Torah values. It doesn’t explain why they would choose to slander Glenn Beck.

These rabbis attacked Glenn Beck not because he is an anti-Semite, but because he is a conservative. The attack was political; liberals tarnishing someone whose influence they hope to diminish. I am practically certain that there was not a single Orthodox rabbi on the list. It’s a fair guess that none of those named rabbis opposed Obama-care or considers homosexuality a sin.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is neither a Republican nor a Democrat but that doesn’t mean He has no views on how society ought to function. He prefers private charity to government. He prefers private ownership of property to communal ownership and He has a lot to say about how we live our personal lives. He says all these things in His Book. Those Jews who reject the message their ancestors heard at Sinai frequently replace it with the message of secular fundamentalism whose doctrines are usually quite the opposite of those found in the Torah.

When such people damage the reputation of a good man, it is appropriate to publicly protest.

Defending one’s own reputation as well as that of one’s family or group is an important moral obligation. Upon being assigned his mission, Moses slandered the Israelites by saying, “But they will not believe me…” (Exodus 4:1)

Ancient Jewish wisdom explains that God’s reaction was not random. He transformed Moses’ rod into a snake (Exodus 4:3), ancient Jewish wisdom’s symbol of scandalmongering, to convey the message that Moses was being snake-like by defaming the people. He then made Moses’ hand white and leprous, (Exodus 4:6) the traditional Torah response to Lashon Hara—negative gossip.

Having told you that the title rabbi is undefined, let me define who I am. To the best of my ability I teach that which I was taught, as part of a chain reaching back to Sinai. I constantly strive to stay faithful, but am aware of how easy it is to deviate from the correct path. The decline from Adam to the generation of the Flood, which I delve into in my audio CD set, The Gathering Storm, on sale this week, sounds eerily current. I encourage you to listen to it and make sure you learn how to distinguish between those with whom you wish to stand and those whose entreaties you should ignore.

Here comes a reckoning we won’t soon forget

If you’re one of the lucky ones in these economically depressed times, you have a job that comes with a steady paycheck. (Nine percent of Americans or more have not been so lucky for twenty straight months.)

But even for the fortunate gainfully employed among us, the economic situation is more dire than many are remotely aware.

Take your yearly pay. Subtract your local, state, and federal tax burdens. Then deduct the amount you are paying to service your personal debt, including mortgages, credit cards, business or student loans, etc.

For a lot of Americans, after such a cruel calculus, their yearly income looks a lot smaller — perhaps barely adequate — even if one is pulling down a nominally “good” salary.

But the situation is even more alarming still: for the first time, our national debt has surpassed $14 trillion — a dubious and shameful record.

Even more astonishing, the past two presidents, one from each major political party, are responsible for half of that monstrous sum. As an Associated Press story noted,

about half of today’s national debt was run up in the past six years. It soared from $7.6 trillion in January 2005 as President George W. Bush began his second term to $10.6 trillion the day President Obama was inaugurated and to $14.02 trillion now.

In this era of hyper-partisanship, it is comforting to know that there is one thing both parties have agreed upon — spending the nation into insolvency.

It is clear that $14 trillion is an amount so astronomical as to be literally incomprehensible — beyond the ken of our formidable, if recently evolved, homo sapiens mind.

Unfortunately, that does not stop us from racking up such sums. Doubtless, the two phenomena are somehow related.

So deduct another $45,300 from your salary. That is what the national debt amounts to for every man, woman, and child in America. For a family of four with two small children and both parents working, that’s an additional $181,200 in family debt.

Few such families reckon this additional burden when they allocate their already-stretched resources. Yet reckon it they should, for national governments — despite our legal fictions to the contrary — are not autonomous entities. The money they spend and promise has in the end but one fount — the wallets and purses of individuals and families.

The government’s debt is our debt, and when our creditors at last demand their due, that heretofore unseen $45,300 per person in debt will suddenly surge to the surface and sweep all before it in a terrible deluge. Not one person in America will be unaffected. The rich will become less rich; the middle class will become, for all intents and purposes, poor; and the poor will see any hope they may have had of economic advancement disappear.

The deluge will come as a surprise to many. After all, cheap money and unlimited credit has given us the illusion of prosperity for all too long.

But ours is an inexcusable ignorance. For decades, the government has been spending our wealth — first everything we made, then everything we are ever going to make, and now everything our children and their children will ever make. How future generations will judge us for the theft of their prosperity is not hard to guess.

America is not alone in this fiscally debased condition, of course. The rot is deep and widespread; it is civilizational. The entitlement promises made by national and local governments of the West are so vast that they can never be kept. When people finally and fully realize this, the capitals of the world will shake with the rage of masses which have come to expect everything, and will accept nothing less.

Indeed, it is already happening. The recent unrest in Greece, France, Britain, and elsewhere adumbrate our future rather nicely.

The reckoning is coming.  It will be swift, and it will be terrible, and we will have only ourselves to blame.

Matt Patterson is senior editor at the Capital Research Center and contributor to Proud to be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation. His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.