9 in 10 Favor Protections for Secret Ballots
February 23, 2009 by FCD Administrator
Filed under Current, Guest Articles
Guest Editorial | Poll Shows Voters Demand State Constitutional Protection of Secret Ballot Elections; Highest Support Among Union Households
Salt Lake City, UT – 9 out of 10 Utah voters want the state constitution to be amended to protect secret ballots, concluded a poll conducted by Wilson Research Strategies. This poll surveyed likely voters to assess attitudes toward the issue of voting by secret ballot and found that overwhelming support for secret ballots was strongest (up to 89%) among Union households.
Chris Wilson of Wilson Research Strategies noted that, “Voters in Utah strongly support any action confirming the right of secret ballot, indicating a firmly held belief by Utahans that democracy through secret ballot should extend from elections for public office to the workplace elections for employee representation. Union members offer even stronger support for the amendment than non-union members. This support demonstrates a deep-rooted favorability for the democratic process among Utahans of all backgrounds.”
“With support above 80%, Utahans take a unified and non-partisan approach as a strong majority of both Republicans and Democrats endorse the amendment. The amendment to guarantee secret ballot rights earns majority support from voters of both genders, all ages, Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Support this universal is rare and demands the attention of elected officials,” Wilson concluded.
“We knew that support for the secret ballot was high and that securing the right to a secret ballot in the UT state constitution had widespread support. 89% confirms what we’ve been telling legislators: attempting to take this right away from voters is political suicide. The unions have very clearly misread their membership and their continued for support for eliminating the secret ballot is seen as a crude, transparent power grab. Utah voters, especially union members, see right through it,” said Troy Walker, SOS Ballot’s UT coordinator.
SOS Ballot is a 501c4 organization dedicated to educating the American public on the continued need for a secret ballot wherever state or federal law requires elections. seeks to protect voters from intimidation and harassment by empowering them to vote whether they wish to have the right to a secret ballot guaranteed in their state constitution. SOS Ballot is currently conducting initiative or legislative campaigns in Arizona, Arkansas Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah.
The secret ballot was used locally as an act of post-Civil war southern reconstruction, first as a way to impose a literacy requirement on newly freed slaves. The secret ballot also protected mostly black voters who faced physical intimidation, even lynching depending on how their vote was cast. Secret ballots were first used statewide in the Massachusetts governor’s race 1888 and nationally in 1892 to elect President Grover Cleveland.
Contact: Audrey Mullen or Dave Mohel at 703-548-1160
Clinton: Communist China & USA will “Rise or Fall Together”
February 23, 2009 by FCD Administrator
Filed under Featured, Guest Articles, Principle 04
Breitbart.com | US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Sunday urged China to keep buying US debt as she wrapped up her first overseas trip, during which she agreed to work closely with Beijing on the financial crisis. Clinton made the plea shortly before leaving China, the final stop on a four-nation Asian tour that also took her to Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, where she worked the crowds to try to restore America’s standing abroad. In Beijing, she called on authorities in Beijing to continue buying US Treasuries, saying it would help jumpstart the flagging US economy and stimulate imports of Chinese goods.
“By continuing to support American Treasury instruments the Chinese are recognising our interconnection. We are truly going to rise or fall together,” Clinton said at the US embassy here.
Clinton had sought to focus on economic and environmental issues in Beijing, saying Washington’s concerns about the human rights situation in China should not be a distraction from those vital matters. Beijing’s human rights record emerged nonetheless as an issue, as Chinese activists on Saturday reported being harassed or intimidated by Chinese authorities in a bid to stop them speaking out or meeting Clinton while she was here.
“Plainclothes police blocked me from leaving my home. They were afraid I would try to meet with Hillary Clinton or others in her delegation,” democracy campaigner Jiang Qisheng told AFP by phone on Sunday.
Clinton and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi largely agreed to disagree on human rights as they pledged future joint action on the economy and climate change.The goodwill, also on display in her talks with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, could raise hope for a new era of cooperation between the two largest greenhouse gas emitters and two of the world’s top three economies.
“Now it is more important than any time in the past to deepen and develop China-US relations amid the spreading financial crisis and increasing global challenges,” Hu told Clinton, according to state media.
Clinton began her day Sunday by attending a Protestant church service in western Beijing at which an AFP journalist saw plainclothes police taking away some visitors who attempted to enter the church.Their identities could not be confirmed. Later, Clinton met Chinese women’s rights advocates at the US embassy but continued to steer clear of speaking on contentious human rights issues.Instead, while taping an interview on a Chinese talk show, she focused on the need for China to help finance the massive 787-billion-dollar US economic stimulus plan by continuing to buy US Treasuries.
“Because our economies are so intertwined the Chinese know that in order to…” <<<Read Full Story>>>
RNC Speaking Out Against Socialism? Wow.
December 30, 2008 by FCD Administrator
Filed under Current, Guest Articles, Principle 04
By Ralph Z. Hallow (Washington Times) |In what would amount to a slap in the face to a sitting Republican president and the party’s Senate and House leaders, national GOP officials, including the vice chairman of the Republican National Committee, are sponsoring a resolution opposing the resort to “socialist” means to save capitalism.
“We can’t be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms,” said Solomon Yue, a cosponsor of a resolution that would put the RNC — the party’s national governing body <<<Read the Full Story>>>
Bush Stops Gravity: Abandons Free Market to Save it?
December 18, 2008 by FCD Administrator
Filed under Brain-Off Awards, Guest Articles, Principle 04
Can principles be suspended or sacrificed?
AFP (Breitbard.com) | US President George W. Bush said in an interview Tuesday he was forced to sacrifice free market principles to save the economy from “collapse.”
“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”
Bush’s comments reflect an extraordinary departure from his longtime advocacy for an unfettered free market, as his administration has orchestrated unprecedented government intervention in the face of a dire financial crisis.
“I am sorry we’re having to do it,” Bush said. Bush said….<<<Read the Full Story>>>
Britain: joining Euro?
December 16, 2008 by Stephen Anderson
Filed under Current, Guest Articles, Money & Economics
AFP (BREITBART.COM) | Britain is considering joining the eurozone as a direct consequence of global financial turmoil, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Sunday.
“We are now closer than ever before. I’m not going to break the confidentiality of certain conversations, but some British politicians have already told me: ‘If we had the euro, we would have been better off’,” Barroso told a weekly French news programme, referring to the fall in the pound’s value since markets and liquidity meltdown earlier this year.
“The British have an enormous quality, one of many, that is they are pragmatic,” he said on the panel of a joint RTL-LCI radio and television broadcast. “This crisis has emphasised the importance of the euro, and also of Britain,” he added.
“I don’t mean this will happen tomorrow, I know that the majority (of British people) are still opposed, but there is a period of consideration underway and the people which matter in Britain are currently thinking about it,” the former Portuguese prime minister said.
Barroso pointed to the case of Denmark, another EU state which has so far refused to accept the euro but is now planning another referendum on the single currency. The Danish voted against joining in 2000.>>>>Read the Full Article
President Obama! Now What?
November 5, 2008 by FCD Administrator
Filed under Featured, Guest Articles, Principle 13
By Fouad Ajami (Wall Street Journal-Opinion Page)
The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat — by now unthinkable to the devotees — will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won’t be solved by a leader’s magic.
There is something odd — and dare I say novel — in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.
As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, “Crowds and Power” (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when “distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.
On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest — African-Americans and affluent white liberals — has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking — Canetti’s feeling of equality within the crowd. The day after, the crowd will of course discover its own fissures. The affluent will have to pay for the programs promised the poor. The redistribution agenda that runs through Mr. Obama’s vision is anathema to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the hedge-fund managers now smitten with him. Their ethos is one of competition and the justice of the rewards that come with risk and effort. All this is shelved, as the devotees sustain the candidacy of a man whose public career has been a steady advocacy of reining in the market and organizing those who believe in entitlement and redistribution.
A creature of universities and churches and nonprofit institutions, the Illinois senator, with the blessing and acquiescence of his upscale supporters, has glided past these hard distinctions. On the face of it, it must be surmised that his affluent devotees are ready to foot the bill for the new order, or are convinced that after victory the old ways will endure, and that Mr. Obama will govern from the center. Ambiguity has been a powerful weapon of this gifted candidate: He has been different things to different people, and he was under no obligation to tell this coalition of a thousand discontents, and a thousand visions, the details of his political programs: redistribution for the poor, post racial absolution and “modernity” for the upper end of the scale.
It was no accident that the white working class was >>>> Read the Full Article
McCain: Obama tax policies are socialist
October 31, 2008 by Stephen Anderson
Filed under Featured, Guest Articles, Money & Economics, Principle 11
By Glen Johnson (Associated Press) | CONCORD, N.C. – Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Saturday accused Democratic rival Barack Obama of favoring a socialistic economic approach by supporting tax cuts and tax credits McCain says would merely shuffle wealth rather than creating it.
“At least in Europe, the Socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said in a radio address. “They use real numbers and honest language. And we should demand equal candor from Sen. Obama. Raising taxes on some in order to give checks to others is not a tax cut; it’s just another government giveaway.”
McCain, though, has a health care plan girded with a similar philosophy. He proposes providing individuals with a $5,000 tax credit to buy health insurance. He would pay for his plan, in part, by considering as taxable income the money their employer spends on their health coverage.
McCain leveled his charge before a pair of appearances aimed at restoring his lead in critical battleground states. In both North Carolina and Virginia, where McCain was to speak later in the day, his campaign has surrendered its lead to Obama in various polls. President Bush, a Republican, won both states in 2004.
During a rally outside Charlotte, N.C., McCain returned to the socialism theme, although he did not use the more tart language of his radio address.
He also was sharply critical of the Bush administration, saying it should be more aggressive in buying>>>>Read the Full Story


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