Star Parker

Spokespeople and pundits stick their foot in it all the time. But rarely do we see public relations heavy artillery brought out to do damage control to the extent provoked by Hilary Rosen’s recent remark that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.” The issue was not so much what Hilary Rosen said, but who said it. More than Rosen’s words, her persona itself is an assault on working-class, traditional-thinking Americans of both sexes.

President Obama seems to think America is a fundamentally unfair place because some people have more than others. Ironically, I would say that if America is unfair today, it is because politicians and government have the power to do exactly what it is that Obama wants to do: Seize control of the wealth of some and redistribute it to whomever they choose. The Bible that I read every day calls this theft.

Liberal and open-ended interpretation of the Constitution has rendered it practically meaningless, opening the door to steady growth of the federal government and its inexorable encroachment in our lives over the last half century. The problems we are having today all originate here.

As the Supreme Court starts its three-day marathon Monday to hear arguments on the constitutionality of the health care law known as “Obamacare,” let’s be clear about the justices’ challenge, and ours. It’s about applying, in good faith, the principles that define this country and assuring that our government operates in a fashion consistent with those principles. This country is about freedom. When we lose it, we lose our country. This is what the Supreme Court should be thinking about when it hears the arguments on Obamacare.

After Rick Santorum’s victories in Tuesday’s Alabama and Mississippi primaries, Mitt Romney told Fox News, “We’re not going to go to a brokered convention.” But those who put their money where their mouths are, buying contracts on the Intrade.com online prediction market, assess the picture much differently. The latest Intrade.com probability that the Republican nominee will be selected in a brokered convention is 21.5 percent. This same probability stood at 5 percent in early February.

In 1993, then Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a paper in which he coined the phrase “defining deviancy down.” He was ringing an alarm about what he saw as a dangerous social unraveling as a result of our redefining deviant behavior as normal, rather than doubling down on traditional standards of behavior. It’s through this lens that we should view the Obama administration mandate that employers provide free contraception and sterilization and its refusal to grant an exemption to morally opposed religious institutions.

March 3, 2012   ·   By Star Parker (by Star Parker) – What could strike more effectively at the heart of the left’s premises than the inscrutable death of a young and prodigiously talented, successful man — a husband and father to four young children — who still was scaling the heights of achievement? The left, [...]

In the 20-plus years that I have worked as a conservative activist, I’ve spoken on almost 200 university campuses — usually to Republican and conservative groups. Over time, I have observed changes in attitude among many young Republicans — and I believe these shifts help explain the rise of Ron Paul. Where young Republicans once had a sense of purpose and traditional values, now many don’t want to hear about “values” such as marriage, life, or family–just talk about the economy.

Some conclude that Republicans must water down the conservative message and nominate a moderate. But Americans crave answers, clarity and leadership. This call will not be answered by ambiguity. We need a conservative leader who unwaveringly believes that a return to freedom and moral clarity is what this nation needs.

We stand at a critical crossroads today in clarifying the role of government in our free country. President Obama was correct to say in Osawatomie, Kansas recently that “this is the defining issue of our time.” Ours is no longer, in our president’s take on things, the land of the free and the home of the brave. America now is the land of the envious and the home of the victim.

Last year, a one-year cut in the payroll taxes that working Americans pay to finance Social Security was enacted in the name of so-called economic “stimulus.” But, like the rest of the economic stimuli that have come from Washington over the last three years, the only thing that has been stimulated is the growing hole of national debt into which we sink deeper and deeper. Now, unsurprisingly, our president and his Democratic colleagues want to continue, and possibly expand, this payroll tax holiday despite its obvious failure.

According to a recent report comparing attitudes in Europe and America, only 49 percent of Americans now feel that American culture is superior to others. This is down from 60 percent in 2002. What the study does not examine is what we mean by culture. Culture is about the prevailing core attitudes of a society. And, when we look further into this same study, we find that American attitudes are distinctly different from their European counterparts and that these attitudes very much reflect what is uniquely American.

If you’ve never heard Medved’s Thanksgiving story, then you are about to have all your assumptions about our Thanksgiving holiday challenged. Particularly, Medved talks about the economic model the pilgrims tried when they first came to New England. Medved tells when the pilgrims arrived, they instituted a socialist collective where everyone would work together and everyone would get a share of the crops. It turned out to be the same kind of debacle socialism always turns out to be.

As ObamaCare heads toward the Supreme Court, is it not sad that most basic violations of individual liberty are not intuitively obvious to so many citizens and members of Congress? It’s obvious what’s wrong today. We’ve either forgotten what being American means, or we no longer care.

The Wall Street Journal calls the economic implosion now taking place in Europe “a crisis of the welfare state.” For America, this is a time for decision and definition. Not a time for splitting the baby. Are we going to continue in the direction of materialism and bureaucracy and share the fate of Europe? Or will we make the tough decisions to get back on the path of prosperity, the path of faith and individual freedom?

Santorum may be dragging the rear in the line-up of Republican presidential candidates, but I am grateful to him for being the only candidate who insists that the so-called “social issues” remain an integral, explicit part of his agenda. I think it is a sign of our deeply troubled and lost society that so many don’t grasp the validity of Santorum’s claim that morality and economy cannot be separated.

Last week, one of the Republican Party’s young stars, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., spoke at the Heritage Foundation about the values that made America great. Our economic machine is sputtering today as a result of departure from these values. Today’s task is to restore them and get America growing again, which will benefit everyone. Americans must recapture what made this the world’s greatest, most prosperous nation.

Disrespect for life and disrespect for property go hand in hand. We can’t divorce our sexual promiscuity from our fiscal promiscuity. Restoring personal responsibility in both areas is what we need today to get our nation back on track. The “right to abortion” culture is simply a subset of the entitlement culture, the culture that says your life is about making claims on others rather than personal responsibility.

America needs a new president who loves freedom and has the guts to pursue it without compromise. Freedom is not about warmed-over conventional wisdom. It’s about ideals, humility, originality — and embracing the unexpected and unanticipated. The Republican Party establishment needs to start listening to grassroots Americans and asking why no one is exciting them like Herman Cain.

The Tea Party movement is protest against abuse of political power and the increasing marginalization and disrespect for truths, such as protection of life, liberty and property that define American freedom. Occupy Wall Street is about lust for political power, about defining what others should have, and redistributing and spending what belongs to some else.

President Obama recently chided the Congressional Black Caucus for “complaining, grumbling and crying.” The black Caucus is not criticizing Barack Obama because his big government answers don’t work. They are criticizing him for not doing enough of it. When people refuse to learn, when they refuse to look at the truth, they shouldn’t be surprised at the results.

The Republican presidential debates are looking more and more like symptoms of the problems we’ve got than part of the process of solving them. Maximum style, minimum substance. Focus on sizzle, forget about the steak. It is a symptom of the big problems of our country that we appear incapable of having presidential debates with serious questions.

When it comes to government borrowing and spending as a way to “create” jobs, the Black Caucus is possibly the last vestige of the triumph of hope over experience. Or in Einstein’s famous definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” What they should do is get behind “enterprise zones,” geographic areas of high unemployment that would qualify for special tax and regulatory relief to encourage investment and establishment of businesses.

If your bank made you wait longer to withdraw your savings, or cut your interest rate, would you put up with that? If not, why would you tolerate it from your government? If Americans prefer getting negative returns on what they pay in order to save an unworkable government system, we deserve the mediocre, second rate nation we are becoming. But I don’t think most want this. It’s why we need politicians with the courage to tell the truth and citizens with the courage to be free.

Florida’s young Republican Sen. Marco Rubio recently gave an important speech at the Reagan Presidential Library in California that has set off the liberal talking-head universe. He had the temerity to suggest that the huge growth in government’s role in American life over the last century “actually weakened us as a people.” The resulting onslaught from liberal blogs and cable hosts comes as no surprise because Rubio directly took on the idol at which liberals worship — Big Government.