OREGON JUSTICE WATCH September 2006
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AFFORDABLE HOUSING
In the May Newsletter we mistakenly called the Affordable Housing group Aftercare which is a part of Prison Fellowship. As reported, Affordable Housing has 20 houses around the state and provides rooms, an address, and phone for Job Search for those released from prison. Rent is $400. a month. The first month rent can be postponed until a job is found. Their address is: 505 SE Washington
Hillsboro OR 97123
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State revenue is unexpectedly up by $1.1 billion. We should get our kicker this fall.
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The Ballot Measure to cap state spending will be on the Nov. Ballot. The Measure wants to keep spending no greater than the increase in population and inflation. Very good idea. Let’s vote for it.
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We deplore child abuse and spend almost a half a billion $ biannually to prevent it. But do we get our money’s worth? To get the details for these expenditures is near impossible. This should not be. State employees must learn to report to the taxpayers. Susan Detlefsen has learned, however, $100 million goes for salaries. 3 times that amount goes for “services” which are for Foster Care, $ 30 mil.; psych consultants ?; and ? all the rest.goes where ??? No details are forthcoming. Hopefully DHS knows. In 2005 there were 6,178 children in State care. The number is increasing. The Dept. head, admits child abuse in Oregon is down. So why are we taking more children? Could it have anything to do with more fed $ per child taken? We should also consider the trauma children suffer taken away from their parents and homes and left with strangers. We need also to remember that children do love their parents and are often able to forgive them anything. When our mother died, my twin sisters and I were sent to live with an Aunt and Uncle we barely knew. Though kindly and good to us, we still cried ourselves to sleep every night for weeks. We were too young to realize our Dad was doing his best.
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DID YOU KNOW?
That the Supreme Court’s decisions are often
disregarded by the lower courts? Especially here in the 9th Circuit. And here I thought the U.S. Supreme Court
had the last word. One such case in Oregon is back again before the Supreme Court – Phillip Morris vs Williams. Mayola Williams was awarded Punitive damages for her husband’s death 97% more than Compensatory damages. The cigarette maker thinks that’s a bit much. Even though we might think Phillip Morris should be put out of business, as a general principal one tends to agree not to send a precedent to bankrupt a company.
Another goofey case from the lower courts which Pacific Legal Foundation had to take to the Supremes to set the decision right is that of a Michigan
land owner who filled in a low area on his property which had standing water now and then. Rapanos vs
the Corps of Engineers and their interpretation of the
Clean Water Act. Their rules say you must have one of their permits to fill in a pond, a ditch or a low area on
your property so as not to pollute navigable waterways.
No matter, the offending low area was small, no matter
it was 20 miles! from any navigable stream, common sense was absent. Mr Rapanos was fined $185,000. and
faced 5 years in prison for not getting one of their very
expensive permits which often run into 5 and even 6 figures because they require you to get engineering and
environmental studies. The Supremes over turned the
lower courts reprehensible, stupid, pathetic decision.
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George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist, sometimes called the "Liberals’ guru, came out with a
practical solution for peace on earth recently, one we can all buy into. He says what we must is a strong inter- national body of law and international courts to enforce it. Even though what we need, that’s down the road awhile as Americans won’t go for it now. We remember all to well U.N. corruption; a bloated., arrogant, abusive bureaucracy and hate filled votes against us at the present world debating society. But it is time to start the bully pulpit now .
OREGON JUSTICE WATCH September 2006
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A BOOK REVIEW
Ann Coulter’s new book, GODLESS should have had, to my mind, The Emperor’s Clothes as a sub-title for that’s exactly how so many of us blindly accept whatever the loudest voices say. Not Ann. She presents
in no nonsense fashion facts most of us have never heard about: Chapter 1
“On the 7th day God rested, and the Liberals schemed.”
Under the guise of not favoring religion, Liberals insist we give obeisance to their cosmology: tithing to
Teachers Unions; reverence for abortion; gay marriage; pornography; banning any mention of God in our public schools. Their religion replaces, by law, Christian-Judaism teachings. Why do we let this happen?.
Chapter 5
“Sobbing, hysterical women, the Jersey Girls,” Ann calls them, ran the 9/11 Commission amuck. She adds, “she has never seen widows so enjoy the deaths of their husbands.” About the CIA Leak case, Ann tells us
Valerie Plame was no covert agent to be outed. She was a chair warmer at the CIA; one who managed to get her mostly unemployed husband his entire life, Joe Wilson, someone who palms himself off as a Diplomat when he once was an Embassy employee, one who ran errands in Gabon, a job going to Niger to investigate whether or not Saddam tried to buy yellow-cake (an ingredient in making nukes) None of this stopped Liberals from getting a Special Investigator to investigate “the illegal leaking” by the White House.
Even the Special Investigator, after spending $300 mil
of our money chasing rumors, sending a reporter to prison, dropped all other charges yet kept his job, spending more money on the V.P.s assistant, Scooter Libby when all he was trying to do when he unfort-unately mentioned Plame was to give the reporter a heads up about her nutcase husband.
Chapter 6
Public School teachers are the foot soldiers for the Liberals.to prevent any knowledge of God in our children’s lives.
Chapter 8
On Evolution vs Intelligent Design, the Godless claim
Evolution is “scientific” whereas I.D. is not, so it must not be taught in our public schools. Another tempest in
a tea pot as even if man evolved by random selection from a one celled creature, who created that one cell? As St Thomas Aquinas said, “There must be a First Mover.”
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