Spirit of America to Cover Iraq Election (from PowerLineBlog.com)

Jim Hake writes:

Great news! We've just received confirmation that C-SPAN is planning to cover Spirit of America's Iraq election event this Sunday from 2pm to 4pm Eastern (11am to 1pm Pacific). Please watch. Your support has made this possible. Please forward this message far and wide and encourage people to tune in.
Iraq's elections are an historic event. This broadcast will provide a unique, more complete picture of the elections with ground-level news and views from the Iraqi people. You will get much more than the typical focus on violence and terrorism. We'll have reports, photos and video from all corners of Iraq. The broadcast event is described more here: http://www.spiritofamerica.net/site/blog/459

You can see reports and photos now at: http://www.friendsofdemocracy.info. And, during the show on Sunday, we will be publishing the discussion at http://www.friendsofdemocracy.info and asking for your comments. Please visit the site and tell us what you think.


This really is great news. We'll be watching the C-Span coverage.

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U.S. Central Command, for instance, announced yesterday:
"Soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd 'Commando' Brigade Combat Team prevented an apparent kidnapping of eight Iraqis Jan. 26 in western Baghdad.

"During a patrol in Baghdad’s Khadamiyah district, the Soldiers noticed a suspicious vehicle about 8:30 p.m. They stopped the vehicle and found three Iraqis bound and gagged.

"They detained five suspects in possession of four pistols, an AK-47 assault rifle and a sub-machine gun outfitted with a silencer. The kidnap victims included a sheik and an administrator from the Iraqi Ministry of Oil."

Nod to Newsmax.com for pointing this story out!

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The crux of the argument posed by the opposition is that US Military involvement in Iraq is the sole sustaining reason for the insurgency in there.

Beyond being irrelevant, our being there plays only a supporting role in the violence in Iraq. The terrorists in Iraq are attacking in order to prevent Democracy from taking hold in that land.

Unfortunately, the polls tell us that nearly 46% of Americans think we should leave Iraq as soon as elections are over, nothing else said. That is called cutting and running. According to the Democrats, the painful struggle that leads to Democracy is too much to withstand. Democrats (or according to a recent FoxNews Opinion Dynamics Poll, 46% percent of America) seem to be saying that regardless of the fact that it is the Iraq-based leader of the organization that attacked on 911 that we fight and that leaving early will guarantee the fall of Iraq to the Islamofascists that knocked down those towers, we should leave NOW!

Everyone needs to settle down and hang in there! Elections begin in Iraq this Sunday.

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First we need to understand the issue.

In California, a person under the age of 18 cannot get a body piercing, tattoo or get married without parental consent. Yet according to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, public schools are not required to inform parents if their child leaves campus to receive certain confidential medical services that include an abortion, AIDS treatment and psychological analysis. Although he has previously claimed the law is ambiguous, he recently indicated that in his opinion; parents do not have the right to be notified if their children receive these services.

As a parent of 3 children and myself a product of the public school system, I have an acute sense about how important it is for parents to be aware of most, if not everything their children are up to. This becomes even more important when considering the issues of abortion and mental counseling. The after-effects of these processes require that parents understand what their children have been going through in order to head off any complications. Drug counseling, for instance, has the possible effect of creating depression and a deficiency of self-worth in the teen as they battle to stay off drugs. Abortion can result in Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome (PASS), a form of post traumatic stress which can result in substance abuse and potentially suicide.

Abortion could be fatal to a teen when those in charge of the teen are not aware that the abortion occurred. Furthermore there are many alternatives to abortion that must be discussed with the teen before the procedure is performed. Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers rarely educate girls about abortion alternatives or its potential complications. If Bill Lockyer and those of his opinion have their way, you, the parent will not be allowed to administrator parenting to your child in these events.

But the really disturbing part about all of this is the double standard that Attorney General Lockyer’s opinion presents. The San Jose Unified School District, the largest in the state, recently sent letters to 3,715 parents who excused their children from school for various reasons including orthodontist appointments. The letters warn parents that they must cease excusing their children from school or face visits from Child Protective Services or even lawsuits from the district attorneys office. But apparently, a child excusing herself for a surgical procedure without her parents’ knowledge is a-okay.

This whole mess is sending conflicting signals to California students and their parents. Any reasonable person can see that knowledge of a child’s activities is directly related to a parent’s ability to insure their child is getting every possible benefit from the public school system. For years, the educrats up in Sacramento have assailed any attempts to wrestle control of the public school bureaucracy away from them. One process they have used to hold that power is to limit how much parents know about their student’s school life.

The Schwarzenegger administration has indicated a desire to hold a special election in 2005. California needs to choose a successor to popular Democrat Senator Robert Matsui, and a plethora of pending initiatives are far too numerous to relegate them all to the 2006 regular elections. Enter Parental Notification and the opportunity to have the voters in the state weigh in on the issue.

This special election, should this issue be represented on the ballot, presents a great opportunity for both the supporters and proponents of mandatory parental notification to be heard. Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers stand against Parental Notification because it weakens the ability for a teen to get an abortion by allowing a concerned parent to weigh in on the matter. And the educational establishment is against parents having consent or notification beyond what is already given them. As parents, it is imperative that we stand up for our rights to be notified of what our children are up to, regardless of the powerful forces that work against this endeavor.

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