The PA Supreme Court voted 4-3 to send the proposed redistricting plan for seats in the House and the Senate and is sending it back to the Legislative Reapportionment Commission.

Stay tuned…

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As a result of the most recent census, reapportionment has been underway in PA.  The PA Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument for all petitions that challenge the Final Reapportionment Plan on January 23, 2012.  Click here to see the Press Release concerning the hearing.

Click here to link to the Pennsylvania Redistricting Website and to check out the proposed maps for your districts.

The writer accuses the Republicans of nearly killing a tax cut bill that would extend tax cuts for working Americans for two more months. What the writer neglects to mention is that the Republicans wanted to hammer out a plan to extend them for at least a YEAR.  But here is the rub; they wanted to pay for the tax cuts with spending cuts in other areas of government. Call me crazy but I thought living within your means was a good idea. I guess not after reading the editorial, must be that Government bureaucrats are more efficient than I thought – no waste to cut there!

The author goes on to blast Tea Party Republicans, calling them far-right radicals, loud and stubborn, they are the tail wagging the dog and this is one sick puppy according to the writer.

Well on that we can agree – our government is one sick puppy, on both sides of the aisle.  But in this case the tail has it right, the tail of this sick puppy (the tea party freshmen) are the only adults in room.  They are being blasted by the writer because they want fiscal discipline? They want to pay for extended spending in some areas by cutting expenses in other areas? They want a government that lives within its means? They want the people to keep more of their money and the Government to get less? They want to uphold their promise to the voters who put them there to change the status quo in DC?

Am I the only one who thinks the writer’s vitriol is somewhat misplaced, or to be a little more accurate, bizarre?

The editorial seems to claim that the status quo folks – business as usual, out of control spending and borrowing and printing of money folks – are the smart ones. It’s like the author hasn’t heard about the little problem Europe is having with their economy: IT’S ABOUT TO IMPLODE. Europe is the canary in the mine and that’s one sick canary.  We are right behind them, ready to jump off the cliff if we follow the tax-and-spend business-as-usual crowd.

It is not the new Tea Party Republicans who have it wrong, it’s the folks who have gotten us to this point: $15,182,756,264,288 in debt and rising, stolen money from our Social Security Trust Fund to feed the spending beast, trillions spent on 50 years of Great Society Entitlement programs to end poverty and poverty is worse than ever. Nothing to show for trillions spent.  Every dollar we send to Washington is one less dollar in the private market. Who do you think has a better chance of creating good sustainable jobs: Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank or a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs? If you answer Jobs and Gates than we need to cut the size of government and grow the private sector. Our federal government has grown farther and wider and has more of our money than our Founders could ever have imagined. This was not their plan for America and if we don’t make some radical changes in Washington we may never get the old America back again.

The Tea Party Freshmen have it right, that sick-headed puppy in Washington has gotten us into this mess and it’s going to have to be pulled out by its tail.

“Endorsements in a primary election distort the electoral process by allowing party bosses within the Bucks County GOP to promote one Republican over another by having sample ballots printed at every polling station for the Republican that the party wishes to promote to the Republican voters. The only endorsement that matters in a primary should be the voter’s endorsement. It is time to end the County GOP’s closed-door back room favoritism, by allowing for an open primary without any party endorsement” said Carlineo.

Gloria went on to add “it is clear that with his history of campaign contributions from Union and party bosses that my opponent will outspend my campaign by a large margin. Along with the advantage of incumbency there should be no need for a party endorsement that shuts voters out of the process.”

See http://www.carlineo2012.com/issues.html for Carlineo’s stance on the issues.

You can donate to Carlineo’s race for the 178th district at http://www.carlineo2012.com/contribution.html.

Today we commemorate the 10^th anniversary of inarguably the most horrific attack on US soil. Ten years ago on September 11^th, Americans witnessed a terrifying, heart-wrenching, heinous attack on our nation. Although every memory of that day still weighs heavy on the hearts of many, our tradition is to recognize significant events on each decennium. So in honor of those who have lost their lives, over the past weeks we have observed tributes in our towns, an overwhelming show of American flags. There are magazine articles and covers in tribute to the lost and their loved ones. Celebrities are giving accounts of how they felt on that infamous day in television and radio interviews.

On September 11, 2001 many heroes were born. Many of them we lost that day and some are still among us. We had front row seats to the events; people literally rising from the ashes; the symbol of our nation’s productive wealth burning to the ground; the destruction of the greatest city in America; and a devastating shot to the home of our nation’s defense. We grieved on that day and for what seemed like an eternity after. We couldn’t escape the visions of our brethren jumping hopelessly to their deaths to escape the torture that was sure to come.

On 9/11/2001 and for a period of time afterward, we came together in anguish and anger. We wanted to know why, how and who. Every detail mattered to us. These people had attacked our way of life and our freedom. Ten years later as we commemorate the tragedy, I am amazed at how many have forgotten the magnitude of that catastrophe. Many have only reawakened because of the attention of the trumpet call reminding us to pay our respectful homage. The enemies who assaulted our way of life and wanted us to live in fear have, in some ways, succeeded. Over this past decade we have watched our freedoms erode. Everyday Americans humiliated at airports, while those who share the nationality of the assailants walk through freely, smugly daring us to consider them a threat. For fear for being labeled intolerant or racist, we have been told to dedicate more time to worshiping at the altar of political correctness. The crushing events of 9/11 were supposed to make us come together for longer than just a year or two. We were supposed to become more vigilant, but instead we have given way to intimidation by the very people who want to alter our way of life. Like many others, I do not need a 10^th anniversary to remember 9/11. I have never forgotten. It does not take the 10^th year commemoration to remember who and what was truly lost on that day.

Golden sunlight on azure skies

A gentle breeze passing by

It could have been spring or fall

In awe of the glory of God

That precious morning when all seemed right

We lost our innocence with those fated flights

We will always remember that sorrowed day

When lives with meaning were stolen away

We will always remember 9/11

The muffled screams from down the hall

When someone turned the TV on

We watched our Brothers and Sisters fall

Eighty stories to escape the fireball

Wondering what they must have felt

On their way to our Maker’s home

Martyrs to the demonic scheme

To crush liberty and the American Dream

Not wanting to watch or turn away

We struggled to survive that terrorized day

We will always remember 9/11

The gallantry of those who tried

To rescue souls who painfully died

Who put their lives at risk for all

And put their faith in our loving Lord

We cannot praise them near enough

Their acts of bravery, borne in love

How can we not stand straight and tall

When we understand that they

Represent us all

There was but one American Way

On that ill-fated summer day

When our innocence was taken away

We will always remember until this day

We will always remember 9/11.

-Greta Scriboni

Today, we are lucky if our young people see the merit in graduating from high school. Asia and Europe lead the world in manufacturing and technical skills. Now we lead the world with the highest business taxes and regulations out our kazoo. The acceptable norm is to run our country on the Wimpy school of economics, “I’ll gladly pay you on Thursday for a hamburger today.”

Our revenues can hardly pay the interest rate on our debt, let alone pay down on the principal. Today’s debt is the product of years of denial and it has to stop.

Today, many families are up to their eyeballs in debt. They live from paycheck to paycheck praying nothing happens before the next payday. Saving money for retirement or a college education is a dream long gone. Yet many in Congress want to raise taxes, claiming that taxing the rich will get us out of debt. What they don’t seem to grasp is that those taxes will just be passed down to us. We will pay more for fuel, food and commodities. Who can afford more? I can’t!

Last November we thought we sent a loud and clear message to Washington. We demanded an end to the madness and put 87 new people into office. Many of these were held by spendthrift incumbents. We expected them to follow through with their campaign promises. They promised to cut the budget and get the debt under control. Returning that $105 billion secreted in the health care bill would be a good start.

Many of them voted for another stopgap bandage that would temporarily keep the government open. Radical surgery is needed. Jim Gerlach and Pat Meehan reneged on their word. I urge you to pay them a visit and demand them to keep their campaign pledges.

Take your kids along for a good civics lesson. Express your disappointment in their behavior and in our waning support. They are hoping we have forgotten and have grown apathetic but we have not. No more Band-aids or bubblegum.

Patricia Sellers

West Chester

Also printed in The Daily Local News – Sunday, April 24, 2011

Our obligation is to our kids, not to the system. Kids should not be harmed because adults cannot fix their schools. And those who are able to ensure a quality education for their own children do not have the right to deprive less fortunate families the opportunity to do the same.

Click here to read this op ed printed in The Daily Local on March 22, 2011.

Some have claimed Gerlach voted to “gut” the EPA and prevent it from enforcing the Clean Air Act. Others have claimed that he has “abandoned our core environmental and public heath programs.” These charges are baseless and demonstrate the lengths to which environmental activists will distort the truth to advance their goals.

Click here to read this op ed printed in The Daily Local March 22, 2011.

Gov. Corbett was elected because he said he would balance the state’s budget and anyone with any common sense knew then that some folks in the Commonwealth were going to receive less state money if he was to accomplish that objective.

The cry from the state’s universities is deafening, presenting all kinds of hollow reasons why the students will become victims for lack of state money.

Click here to read this op ed printed in The Daily Local on March 22, 2011.

In 1956, an extraordinary three-year agreement on cooperation was signed by the Department of Economics at the Chicago University and the Faculty of Economics at the Catholic University of Chile. It was renewed twice, for a total of nine years. As a result, by the mid-1960s, there existed in Chile a substantial number of free-market economists, known as the Chicago Boys, even though many went on to graduate studies at other American universities. (Personally, after receiving my undergraduate degree there in 1970 and being a “Chicago Boy”, I went to Harvard University for my M.A. and Ph.D., to be forever the subject of jokes by my libertarian friends as a “Harvard Man”.) By the end of the 1960s, this team had begun to exert influence from middle-level positions on the Christian Democratic government of Eduardo Frei Montalva.

Then came the breakdown of democracy under Salvador Allende and his ouster by the armed forces. Being in graduate school in the United States, I did not witness those dramatic days in my country, but for the same reason I faced a very difficult choice at the end of 1974: to remain in Boston enjoying the academic life I loved so much, or to go back to help the Chicago Boys (my former dean was already the economics minister) fight for a new country. I chose the latter. This team of economists who had learned so much from the American experiment did a “friendly takeover” of the Pinochet government in order to engineer a free-market revolution and to restore democratic rule. Our goal was nothing less than to transform a socialist country into a free one. And, we believe, we succeeded.

From 1973 to 1989, a true revolution took place in Chile, involving a radical, comprehensive, and sustained move toward free markets. This Chilean revolution doubled Chile’s historic rate of economic growth (to an average of 7 percent a year from 1984 to 1998), drastically reduced the proportion of people living in poverty, enormously advanced human liberty, and unleashed the forces that brought liberal democracy and the rule of law. The demonstration effect of the revolution has been described in this way:

“In a sense, it all began in Chile. In the early 1970s, Chile was one of the first economies in the developing world to test such concepts as deregulation of industries, privatization of state companies, freeing of prices from government control, and opening of the home market to imports. . . . In 1981, Chile privatized its social-security system. . . . Many of those ideas . . . ultimately spread throughout Latin America and to the rest of the world. . . . They are behind the reformation of Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union today. . . . In some measure, Chilean economics are the prescription for bringing ailing Asian economies back to health . . . which demonstrates, once again, the awesome power of ideas” (James Flanigan, Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1998).

The Economist has stated that “Chile has become the most studied country in Latin America. Visitors arrive from all over the world to see how they can emulate the Chilean transformation, and what they should be doing next” (November 13, 1993).

Nevertheless, those of us who decided to enter the arena to bring about positive change working inside the revolutionary Pinochet government knew that the project would be controversial, even if we succeeded. Or, I should say, especially if we succeeded. We knew that socialists would never forgive a successful liberal revolution like the one we were engineering and would use all their influence in the media to create a black legend. To an amazing extent, they have succeeded…up to now. And that is why I have accepted Navigator’s invitation to speak out on the Chilean revolution, on the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, even though my cause in America is a completely different one (introducing social-security choice).

Check Your Premises

The Pinochet government originated in a civilian rebellion against an unconstitutional government. Of course Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970 by means of a democratic election (though with only 36.6 percent of the vote, and only after a congressional choice between the top two vote-getters), but his government lost its democratic character by repeatedly violating the Constitution. There are numerous evidences to that effect (including a letter of the Supreme Court to Allende), but the most important one is the momentous agreement of August 22, 1973, of the Chamber of Deputies (the Lower House of the Chilean Congress that had elected Allende).

This agreement was approved by 81 to 47 votes, with all the deputies of the Christian Democratic Party (the party of former president Eduardo Frei Montalva) voting in favor. In this agreement, the chamber presented a list of twenty legal and constitutional violations of President Allende’s government (including illegal detentions and torture), and it agreed to give information of this “grave breakdown of the legal and constitutional order of the Republic” to the Armed Forces, among other authorities, and to tell them that “by virtue of their function, of their oath to remain faithful to the Constitution and the law, . . . it is up to them to put immediate end to all the situations referred to above, which infringe the Constitution and the law.” This demand of the elected legislature to the armed forces was, in fact, a call to forcibly remove the president, who had initiated the use of violence with the purpose of imposing a communist dictatorship. The Armed Forces, led by the person who was then the commander-in-chief of the army and acting pursuant to the agreement of the House of Deputies, removed Allende and took power eighteen days later, on September 11, 1973, vowing to restore democratic rule once circumstances permitted. It was as though Hitler, another democratically elected leader, had been removed by the Reichstag before becoming a dictator. As The Economist said in an editorial only two days later: “The temporary death of democracy in Chile will be regrettable, but the blame lies clearly with Dr. Allende and those of his followers who persistently overrode the Constitution” (September 15, 1973).

Another key document in this regard is the letter that former president Eduardo Frei Montalva sent in November 1974 to Mariano Rumor, then president of the International Christian Democrat Union, explaining and justifying the military intervention to remove Allende. He wrote: “The fall of Allende has meant a setback to world communism. The combination of Cuba with Chile, with its 4.500 kms. of Pacific Ocean coast and its intellectual and political influence in Latin America, was a decisive step in the control of this hemisphere. That explains such a violent and exaggerated reaction [against the ouster]. This country was going to be an operations base for the whole continent.”

According to Brian Crozier, founder of London’s Institute for the Study of Conflict: “During his three year period, Allende transformed the country, in effect, into a satellite of Cuba, and hence an incipient addition to the Soviet Empire. . . . By then Chile could be truthfully described as a Marxist state in ideological and economic terms. . . . From a strategic viewpoint, it had been turned into a major base for Soviet and Cuban subversive operations, including terrorism, throughout Latin America. . . . The Soviet KGB was recruiting members for training courses in terrorism. . . . North Korean specialists were training young members of Allende’s Socialist Party” (The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1999, pp. 346-48).

Given how far communist forces had proceeded in Chile, and given Allende’s unconditional support of Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union (he even called this country the “big brother” of Chile in a meeting in Moscow with Brezhnev), it is not surprising that a state of civil war followed the military intervention of September 1973. Despite that, and perhaps because of a long Chilean tradition of respect for the law, this civil war produced a minimal number of deaths – every one of them regrettable, of course, to those who value the human life as supreme – when measured by any historic standard. According to the report of the commission set up by President Aylwin (an antagonistic successor to President Pinochet): In a seventeen-year period, 2,279 people died, including members of the armed forces, terrorists, and possibly innocent civilians. “Most of them,” Crozier states, “died during the first months of military rule, when Chile was in effect a combat zone.” By way of comparison, 600,000 people died in the Spanish civil war (2 percent of the population), 375,000 in the American civil war (1.1 percent of the population), and 250,000 in the Guatemalan civil war (2.5 percent of the population) – not to mention the 100 million deaths attributed to socialism by The Black Book of Communism. In a country of 12 million, where a third of the voters had initially supported Allende, the toll was so low that clearly there was no systematic policy of human-rights violations such as would have involved hundreds of thousands of deaths.

But I also believe, and let me state it unequivocally, that members of the armed forces, in their fight against leftist terrorism, went beyond the law and committed human-rights violations. (See the compilation of my press articles, “Standing up for human rights and promoting democracy during the Pinochet government,” in www.josepinera.com.) Those were not mistakes, as some people call them, but crimes. They should be condemned, and the guilty individuals should suffer the penalties imposed by the courts. And indeed some are, the most notorious example being the former head of the intelligence office, an army general, who is in a Chilean jail.

Once we had created the institutions for democracy and limited government – a free-market economy, an independent central bank, a constitutional court, private television, and so on – the transitory government of President Pinochet, according to the constitution proposed by him and approved by referendum in 1980, voluntarily surrendered its power to a democratically elected government on March 11, 1990.

Since then, Chile has had three democratic governments and all the free-market reforms have survived successfully the political transition. Moreover, Chile has been the top-ranking Latin American country in several indexes of economic and political freedom. One of the younger members of the Chicago Boys, the current mayor of Santiago, received 49 percent of the vote in the 1999 presidential election, and current polls indicate he may be the next president.

Those of us who stayed in Chile or returned to Chile to bring about the success of this revolution were willing to risk our honor and our lives on its behalf. One of my best friends, Senator Jaime Guzman, was gunned down by leftist terrorists. We were willing to run such risks because we loved liberty above all, and because we thought it obscene to stand by and watch from an American campus or from Wall Street while our country was turned into a second Cuba. Today, we celebrate the Chilean revolution because, like the American Revolution, it has given birth – not without pain – to a new country and a free society.

José Piñera is founder and president of the International Center for Pension Reform, a worldwide initiative to promote the privatization of state-run social security systems. He is also a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Cato Institute, co-chairs its Project on Social Security Choice, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the institute’s Trade Policy Center.

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