The Republican Club of Sun City NEWSLETTER

February 2013 Everett Schmidt, Editor Sun City Texas SENATOR SCHWERTNER TO ADDRESS CLUB

State Senator Charles Schwertner, MD, will address the club during its dinner meeting scheduled for Thursday, February 21 in the ballroom of the Social Center in Sun City.

His address is expected to touch on a variety of state issues, including such controversial matters as Medicaid, school vouchers and funding, water resources and other matters which have been – or will be – in the news.

Sen. Schwertner is a member of the following committees: Government Organization; Agricultural, Rural Affairs & Homeland Security; Criminal Justice; Health and Human Services.

The Social Period, Dinner and Program. A social period will begin at 6:00 PM. The dinner will begin at 6:30 PM, and will be followed by the program. The dinner will consist of beef tips and rice, green beans, green salad, bread and tea.

Cost. Cost is $16 per person. Checks made out to The Republican Club of Sun City should be mailed to: The Republican Club of Sun City, 1530 Sun City Blvd., Suite 120, Box 227, Georgetown, TX 78633. The deadline for payment or reservations is Friday, February 15.

Club treasurer John Congdon has set up a special collection box on his front porch at 610 Farm Hill Drive for individuals wishing to hand-deliver payments, provided delivery is made by the Friday deadline. For information about reservations, contact John at 686-1676 or johnsctx@gmail.com

VISITORS ARE WELCOME!
“CANDIDATES’ FORUM” SCHEDULED FOR MARCH MEETING

Candidates for positions on the Georgetown City Council and the Georgetown ISD will participate in a “Candidates’ Forum” scheduled for the club’s dinner meeting of Thursday, March 14.

Details of that meeting will be provided in the March newsletter.

OTHER CLUB NEWS

Club membership dues, $15 per person, are now payable. Attached to this newsletter is a membership renewal form which should accompany checks mailed to the address shown on that form. Payment is also accepted at club meetings. Both residents and non-residents of Sun City who “believe in the philosophy of the Republican Party” are eligible for membership.

Vice President (for membership) Bill Chiles reports that the number of members as of the end of 2012 was 249, and that, currently, 2013 membership stands at 149.

Club treasurer John Congdon reports that the number of attendees at the January club meeting was 90.

News of the County Party
SENATOR CORNYN TO KEYNOTE 2013 REAGAN DINNER

On Monday, February 18, the Williamson County Republican Party will be holding its annual Reagan Dinner in the ballroom of the Marriott Austin North in Round Rock’s La Frontera development. Sen. John Cornyn is the keynote speaker. The Reagan Dinner is the county party’s major annual fundraiser, and includes both a live and silent auction.

A limited number of individual tickers are available for $75 per person. Contact Dinner Chairman Nita

Davidson at davidsondr@ecpi.com or 512-635-6482 for information.
While Congress Debates Laws Abridging Rights of Law Abiding Citizens

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN SCHOOL VIOLENCE AND PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS APPEARS IGNORED

Julian Whitaker, MD, author of the Health and Healing newsletter, being concerned that the dangers of psychiatric drugs in regard to school violence have not been adequately discussed or even acknowledged, asks his readers to share the content of his February newsletter with others. This article is in response to his request.

In that newsletter, he says that, “I can say with near certainty” that Adman Lanza, the killer of 20 children and 6 adults at Newtown, “was taking psychiatric medication.”

While details of that incident are yet to be confirmed, Whitaker did reveal relevant data from official government reports:

Between 2004 and 2011, the FDA’s Adverse Events Reporting System for drug side effects logged 12,755 reports of psychiatric medications relating to violence. Among them were 359 homicides, 7,250 incidences of aggression, and 2,795 episodes of mania. There were 9,310 suicides.

Actually, the damage is far greater. According to the FDA, fewer than 10 percent of adverse reactions are reported. To get a truer picture of the horrors of these medications, multiply these numbers by 10!

Whitaker contends that instead of focusing on these disturbing statistics, “The major news outlets lament the disintegration of our society and discuss possible solutions gun control, heightened security at schools, and curbing violence in video games, TV shows and movies.” But, concludes Whitaker, “they rarely bring up the real cause: psychiatric drugs. That topic is taboo.”

And why is that topic taboo? Whitaker explains:

Big Pharma pays the FDA millions in fees to approve and license their products, and the ties between these two entities are so tight that it’s been described as the “fox guarding the henhouse.” Pharmaceuti- cal companies have more paid lobbyists and donate more to political campaigns than almost every other industry. And virtually all news outlets, particularly the large ones, are heavily supported by Big Pharma’s dollars.

To illustrate his points in a more personal way, Whitaker lists in his newsletter 24 incidents involving school violence and psychiatric drugs. Following is a sampling of 9 incidents from the reported 24 incidents:

Pittsburgh, PA, March 8, 2012: John Shick, age 30, shot and killed one employee at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Western Psychiatric Institute and injured six other people before he has killed by the police. Forty-three prescriptions, including 9 Antidepressants, were found in his apartment

Huntsville, AL, Feb. 5, 2010: Hammad Memon, 14, shot and killed a fellow student
at their middle school. He had been treated for Depression and ADHD and was taking the antidepressant Zoloft and other drugs.

Columbine, CO, April 20, 1999: Eric Harris,
18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, shot and killed
12 students and a teacher and wounded 26 others at their high school before killing themselves. Harris was taking an antidepressant; Klebold’s medical records are sealed.

Red Lake, MN, March 21, 2005: Jeff Weise, 16, killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend, and drove to the high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation where he opened fire, killing seven and wounding five. He

then shot himself to death. He was on Prozac. El Cajon, CA, March 22, 2001: Jason Hoffman,

18, opened fire at his high school, injuring 3 students and 2 teachers. He committed suicide while in jail later that year. He was on 2 anti- Depressants, Celexa, and Effexor.

Conyers, GA, May 20, 1999: TJ Solomon, 15, wounded 6 of his high school classmates with a gun he had taken to school. He was taking Ritalin, a stimulant often prescribed for ADHD.

Dekalb, IL, Feb. 14, 2008: Steven Kazmierczak, 27, shot and killed five, wounded 21, then killed himself at Northern Illinois University, where he had been a student. He had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax, & Ambien.

Cleveland, OH, Oct. 10, 2007: Asa Co, 14, shot 2 students and 2 teachers at high school and then committed suicide. He had been prescribed trazodone.

Springfield, OR, May 21, 1998: Kip Kinkel, 15, shot his parents to death with a rifle. The next day, armed with five weapons and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition, he went to school and opened fire in the cafeteria, killing 2 wounding 25. He was taking Prozac.

Despite Obvious Connection Between School Violence and Video Games SUPREME COURT INVALIDATES STATE LAW PROHIBITING SALE OF VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES TO MINORS

In the 2011 case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn., the U. S. Supreme Court invalidated a California law which said that merchants could not bypass parents and sell directly to children without parental approval.

The majority opinion was that of the following odd assortment of Justices: Scalia (who wrote the majority opinion), Kennedy, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Kagen. With that ruling, author Michael McConnell notes the resulting convoluted but current jurisprudence:

With this reasoning the court now interprets our constitutional principles in such a way that it can be illegal to sell a Playboy magazine to a seventeen-year old boy or a beer to a twenty-year-old veteran, but a state cannot make it illegal to sell to children of any age videos in which the gamer repeatedly
commits incredible acts of sadistic violence.

Eagle Forum provides the following evaluation of that Supreme Court ruling:

The U. S. Supreme Court got it wrong in 2011 in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. This wasn’t a First Amendment case; it was a parent’s rights case and only Justice Clarence Thomas understood that. The issue was a California law that would prohibit the $60 billion-a-year video game industry from selling hideously violent games to children without parental consent. Numerous other states and cities had unsuccessfully passed similar laws against selling violent video games to children and now these games are

wrapped nationwide by this recent Supreme Court ruling in the embrace of the Constitution.
The California law did not prohibit the video game industry from producing and selling these realistically violent games, and didn’t stop parents from buying or allowing their kids to buy them. The law said that

merchants could not bypass and sell directly to children without parental approval.
As Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his eloquent dissent, it is “absurd” to suggest that the First

Amendment’s “freedom of speech” includes a right to speak to minors without going through the minors’ parents. His dissent gives us a history showing that the First Amendment was written in a society that assumed parents had absolute authority over the upbringing of their children “including control over the books that children read.”

The Court’s majority couldn’t see any difference between The Divine Comedy, or Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and teaching kids to role-play criminal acts such as torture and murder acted out on the screen in vivid color.

Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts pointed out that the Court’s decision now allows the industry to sell minor “games” that show victims “dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces . . . Blood gushes, spatters, and pools.”

There is a big difference between reading the printed page and role-playing criminal acts. Reading a book takes the words only as far as the reader’s own imagination. But video games blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, and train kids to be highly proficient murderers when they do go off the deep end.

COURT KNOCKS DOWN OBAMA’S N.L.R.B. APPOINTMENTS; BUT N.L.R.B DEFIES COURT RULING

In a case that stems from Mr. Obama’s decision to make what he considered “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit indicated that it did not agree with the president’s interpretation. The appointments were not constitutional.

Nevertheless, the NLRB has indicated that it plans to ignore the court, stating, “The parties who come to us seek and expect careful consideration and resolution of their cases, and for the that reason, we will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decision.”

The Wall Street Journal has the following assessment of the situation as it currently stands:

Without Mr. Obama’s illegal appointments, the board would have been without a quorum and unable to decide a single case. That lawless behavior means more than 200 of the NLRB’s rulings in the past year are in limbo. It’s bad enough to force those 200 litigants to appeal rulings that are sure to be overturned. But the board wants to keep issuing new rulings though it now knows that a unanimous appeals court has declared them illegal, pending a Supreme Court review that may never happen.

SOME DECEITFUL REPORTING PRACTICES OF THE GOVERNMENT

Following are but three illustrations from a pool of possibly an unknowable number of deceitful if not fraudulent reporting practices of the U. S. government. Because the nation is now moving inexorably toward ever bigger and bigger government, people – and especially the “low-information” voter – should begin to understand some of the unfortunate consequences of that movement.

•   Baseline Budgeting. Weeks before leaving office, President Nixon signed a bill that would be far more devastating to the country than the Watergate scandal. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 created the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and codified a practice known as “baseline budgeting,” a key contributor to the river of red ink flowing out of Washington, D. C. Baseline budgeting allows automatic spending increase every year (now 6%) based on inflation, projected policy decisions and other factors. If Congress spent the same amount this year as it did last year, the CBO would actually report a draconian cut of around $10 trillion. Thus, whatever “cuts” Obama and Speaker Boehner agree to in a budget deal will almost certainly include no cuts at all. (Source: World)
•   The Official Inflation Rate. Social Security recipients, upon noting the recent modest cost of living adjustment, may conclude that the adjustment does not seem compatible with the rising cost of food, fuel and other items they now purchase. Columnist Kirby Anderson explains that the consumer price index is calculated different today than in the past. First, the government’s figures understate the inflation rate because they exclude food and fuel cost from its rate of “core inflation.” The argument is that food and fuel are too unstable to be included in the inflation rate. Second, the government also substitutes less expensive products when prices rise. In the past, economists used a “fixed basket of goods” to calculate the consumer price index. In other words, if I buy the very same goods every year, how much does the price rise? Now the government assumes that people will switch brands or foods if the price goes up. For example, if the cost of steak goes up, the consumer price index replaces the cost of steak with hamburger. (Source: Point of View)
•   The Official Unemployment Rate. For the last few years, the official unemployment rate hovered at the 8-9 percent level. But just before the election, the official jobless rate suddenly dropped below 8 percent to 7.8 percent. It was hailed by Obama supporters as evidence that his economic policies were succeeding. Others believed there was “cooking of the books.” The official unemployment rate only considers those who are unemployed and have looked for work during the past month. It excludes the person who has not looked for work, deeming that person to not be in the labor force. The effect is to lower the unemployment rate. Another measure, known as U-6, is believed to be more accurate because it does include both the unemployed person and the person who is available for work but who has not given up looking for a job. That measure can produce a different outcome. For example, an “official” unemployment rate of 8.3 percent translates to 15.0 percent under the U-6 measurement.DECEPTION AS A FACTOR IN THE GROWTH OF ENTITLEMENTS

  How the now virtually bankrupt entitlement programs came into existence can be better understood by examining the beginnings of the Social Security system. In addition to social security being based upon a Ponzi- like scheme of one group of citizens having their wealth confiscated for the benefit of another group of citizens, and of reporting there is a “trust fund” when there is no such fund, comes the following report from The New American revealing possible sinister motives for establishing that system:

Not known at the time [when President Roosevelt sent a proposal for a Social Security program to Congress] was that FDR sought to emulate Germany’s Otto von Bismark, who had candidly admitted employing a welfare scheme to force the people into dependency on government. The Iron Chancellor actually boasted , “Whoever has a pension for his old age is . . .far easier to handle [and will become] a servant in the chancellery or at court. (emphasis added)

The American Enterprise reports that the earliest attempts in this country to establish a tax-funded pension system were rejected as being “un-American and socialistic.” President Roosevelt, however, prevailed. His idea was to force the entire nation – poor, middle class, and wealthy – into a comprehensive national pension system. His cynical reasoning was that once everybody depended on these government transfers, there would be no going back. This tactic, as he famously said, guaranteed that “no damn politicians can ever scrap my Social Security system.”

How did President Roosevelt turn around the initial rejection of the country to his Social Security plan? The answer is through a tactic similar to that used by the Obama administration in regard to the health care bill: obfuscation. With respect to Roosevelt’s success, it was largely through word obfuscation: (1) The new wage tax, said to be specifically marked to pensions, wasn’t called a “tax,” but a “contribution;” (2) the funds that came in from the wage tax were said to be “trust funds,” a deceitful claim; and (3) to further the illusion that workers have a contractual right to benefits, the SS Administration keeps records of each worker’s “contribution,” as if these payments establish a legal right to specific benefits, while, in practice, Congress can lower or raise benefits at will.

Gaining control of the people under the guise of health case is actually nothing new. In fact, author Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation notes that, in this country, health care was first proposed in 1904 modeled on German social insurance. It was in the Progressive Party’s platform in 1912, and then came back under FDR and Truman, then Johnson, then Clinton, and now Obama. Then Spalding makes this stark assertion: “And the goal all along has had little to do with the quality of health care. The objective is rather to remove about a sixth of the economy from private control and bring in under the thumb of the state . . . “

And once a people-controlling program is in place, all competition with the program must be eliminated – as may be the case with ObamaCare. The “Galveston Plan” is instructive with regard to elimination of competing programs. The reader may recall that in 1980, local governments could opt out of the Social Security system if they provided another retirement plan. The “Galveston Plan,” based on an alternate retirement plan, was successful and was so touted by then-president Bush. But in 1983, that option was suddenly closed to “save” the Social Security system.

WHY HAS ISLAM REMAINED MIRED IN ANTIQUITY?

Author Robert Spencer attempts to answer the question as to why Islam remains mired in antiquity, particularly in regard to science. He contends that the Koran portrays Allah as absolutely sovereign and bound by nothing. In contrast, Jews and Christians believe that God created a universe according to rational laws that can be discovered, making scientific investigation worthwhile. Saint Thomas Acquinas explains:

Since the principles of certain sciences – of logic, geometry, arithmetic, for instance – are derived exclusively from the formal principles of things, upon which their essence depends, it follows that God cannot make the contraries of the principles; He cannot make the genus not to be predictable of
the species, nor lines drawn from a circle’s center to its circumference not to be equal, nor the

three angles of a rectilinear triangle not to be equal to two right angles.

But Allah has no such limitations. Al-Ghazali, an Islamic scholar, and others took issue with the very idea that there were laws of nature. That would be blasphemy, a denial of Allah’s freedom. Thus modern science developed in Christian Europe rather than in the House of Islam. In the Islamic world, Allah killed science. Islam remains mired in antiquity.

Author Herbert Meyer, who, as a member of the CIA during the cold war era, was the first to forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union, contrasts Islam with another operating system, Western Civilization:

•   Islam is a different system from that of Western Civilization. Church and state are combined. It’s a political structure as well as faith, and the individual is subservient to the church-state combination. You do not have the option to opt out. Islam does not unleash the entrepreneurial talents of its people. It discourages intellectual curiosity. That’s why there hasn’t been a scientific breakthrough for the Islamic world in a thousand years. And it treats women as though they were property. Very simply put, it’s incompatible with the modern world.
•   Our operating system is Western Civilization. It’s who we are. It started in the ancient world and took off in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when Judaism and Christianity reconciled with the modern world. That ignited the greatest scientific revolution of all time. Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo, the greatest explosion of art and literature in world history. Western Civilization means the individual is at the center. Church and state are separate. The rule of law, the idea of property rights, economic liberty, individual rights, human rights, women’s rights. We encourage intellectual curiosity, unleash the entrepreneurial talents of our people, endless struggle for equality among the races and the sexes. That’s Western Civilization.SOME ALTERNATIVES TO TV NEWS AND RADIO TALK SHOWS

  The reader who would like news covered in more depth (without people talking over each other) and on topics more closely related to Judeo-Christian and family values is urged to consider the following programs:

  •   Point of View. This is a two-hour long program available via podcast on the internet. Topics include both secular and religious topics. The fact that the programs are available via podcast means they can be accessed 24 hours a day, M – F. To access the program: (1) key in www.PointofView.net, (2) click PODCASTS at right side of screen, (3) click “To view a list of Point of View programs,” and (4) click “play in new window.”
  •   American Family Association Broadcasts. This association broadcasts a series of radio programs both secular and religious at 89.9 on the FM dial. A schedule of programs can be obtained from is web site, www.afa.net.The Republican Club of Sun City MEMBERSHIP FORM FOR 2013

    Enclosed is my (our) check in the amount of____________for membership dues for _________person(s) to The Republican Club of Sun City for the year 2013 at $15 per person.

    The membership classification is as cheked below:
    ___Active (resident of Sun City); ___Associate. (non-resident of Sun City); ____Renewal

Name(s): Address:

Phone No.

E-Mail:

____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
____________________________________________________
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Send completed form and check ($15 per person) made out to “The Republican Club of City” to 1530 Sun City Blvd., Suite 120, Box 227, Georgetown, TX 78633.

For Office Use
Payment in the amount of__________________was made by check #__________or cash____________. Date:__________________