BackboneAmerica

By Jeremy Schupbach jshoebox@mac.com

Spanish courts this week convicted an Al-Qaida leader, Imad Yarkas, of conspiracy to commit murder in connection to the September 11 attacks. Twenty-one other alleged terrorists were tried along side Yarkas. 16 were convicted.

Among those convicted in the conspiracy was a reporter for Al-Jazeera, Tayssir Alouny. Alouny was given seven years for his role in the conspiracy. He was accused of arranging the meeting in which last-minute details of the attacks were finalized. (more…)

By Ben DeGrow (http://bendegrow.com/index.php?p=792)

DENVER – Amid a heated election contest to suspend taxpayer refunds, a leading Colorado Senate Democrat has moved forward in her plan to urge voters to adopt another tax increase to fund K-12 education.

At a Tuesday meeting, an Interim School Finance Committee composed of 10 state lawmakers agreed to proceed with crafting legislation recommending Colorado voters approve a new funding source to finance the state’s schools. Committee chair Senator Sue Windels (D – Arvada) proposed the idea, which she styled as “Referendum E.”
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Ray Revenue and Debbie Debt, proud Democrats for Referendum C & D, are starring in their second radio ad of this year’s campaign. It will air statewide over the next couple of weeks, sponsored by Backbone Issue Committee.

The new spot, entitled “Panic Button for Higher Taxes,” imagines Ray and Debbie planning an early Halloween surprise for Coloradans. Their fright night of false fears is aimed at scaring people into voting for higher taxes and deeper debt.

Listen online to the ad:
Broadband connection
Dial-up connection.

By Krista Kafer

Monday’s Rocky Mountain News featured two Associated Press stories that were at first glance miles apart and at second eerily close. The first was about a federal court case in Pennsylvania. A small Pennsylvania school district is defending its policy to give 9th grade students a short statement on Intelligent Design before presenting information about evolution. (more…)

BULLETIN FROM JOHN ANDREWS
Chairman, Backbone America
Colorado Fellow, Claremont Institute
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Join us on radio every Sunday, 5-8pm on 710 KNUS, Denver
To listen online from anywhere, click http://www.710knus.com/
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Most American kids, at age 12, have been helped to understand that they live in a pretty darn good country, governed by an admirable if imperfect constitution, led by decent if fallible grownups. Not so with a young boy and girl who stormed me at a suburban junior high the other day.

Michael Moore Jr. and Cindy Sheehan Jr., as I have dubbed these two 7th-graders, tag-teamed ol’ John after my Constitution Day speech on Sept. 16. They had all the marks of little leftist clones — the sneering slogans, the arrogant demeanor, even the anger-flushed faces and the voices trembling with emotion. (more…)

By Jessica Peck Corry (Jessica@JessicaCorry.com)

Milton Friedman, winner of the Nobel Price in economics, has denounced Refs C & D for what they are–a massive tax increase that won’t help bring accountability to our ever-growing government.

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By Jessica Peck Corry (Jessica@JessicaCorry.com)

In America, you can criticize your doctor. You can make all the lawyer jokes you want. You can even interrogate your preacher. Call into question the abilities of your kid’s teacher, however, and you’re likely to have an entire teacher’s union screaming outside your window. It’s a lesson Arnold Schwarzenegger learned the hard way yesterday. (more…)

By Brian Ochsner baochsner@aol.com

Lt. General Russel Honore, Bush’s military commander in New Orleans, has my vote for Best Phrase of 2005. It’s the perfect thing to say to anyone who’s saying, doing, or advocating something dumb.

“Don’t get stuck on stupid,” the blunt-spoken general told a reporter at a Katrina news conference on Tuesday. We thank radioblogger (Duane, Hugh Hewitt’s sidekick) for this gem. See his 9/20 post for the full transcript.

By Jeremy Schupbach

Senator Harry Reid announced yesterday that he would vote against the confirmation of Judge John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The Senator from Nevada has made it clear that he is now a wholly owned subsidy of the left. After a week of testimony, thousands of pages of documents, and the opportunity to question Judge Roberts ad nauseum (and some of the questions were noxious) Senator Reid had not made up his mind about how he would vote. (more…)

By Dave Crater

“For me, Mr. President, this is a very close question. But I must resolve my doubts in favor of the American people, whose rights would be in jeopardy if John Roberts turns out to be the wrong person for this job,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said today in announcing his opposition to the President’s nominee for Chief Justice.

Translation: Despite a clear affirmation by Roberts that a “right to privacy” is created by the liberty clause of the 14th Amendment – an affirmation troubling to many conservatives and one that certainly would have been troubling to the authors of the 14th Amendment – Judge Roberts has not sufficiently endorsed the orthodox liberal activism Sen. Reid has grown to expect of American judges. The people, apparently, are demanding such activism and senators who heroically defend it. (more…)

Colorado schools are serving more than 250 displaced Gulf Coast students in grades pre-k through high school. Schools around the country have taken in some 372,000 displaced students. Hats off to the teachers, principals, and fellow students for their commitment to educating and caring for the young victims of Hurricane Katrina. (more…)

(John Andrews in the Denver Post, Sept. 18) Why not victory? The question haunted me all day on Sept. 11, the fourth anniversary of Islamofascist military attacks against America’s seat of self-government, Washington, and our crown jewel of liberty, New York. We are a nation supposedly at war, yet the enemy is not identified, the definition of winning is vague, the national will is weak. The war itself is misnamed and undeclared. (more…)

By John Andrews, Host of Backbone Radio
backboneradio@aol.com
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Join us every Sunday, 5-8pm
on 710 KNUS, Denver
or at www.710knus.com
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Okay, that’s more like it. Storm hysteria finally began to abate this week, and some perspective was regained. It takes more than just a hurricane, even a monster storm like Katrina, to knock the United States of America off its pins.

Even when the political and media elites lose their heads in a manner that would disgust our stern forefathers, the good sense of the American people and the resiliency of American institutions have a way of coming through. What a relief. (more…)

By Dave Crater crater@wilberforcecenter.org

The first in a three-volume edition of the collected letters of Oxford don C.S. Lewis is now out from HarperSanFrancisco. “The funny thing,” Lewis wrote of Sir Walter Raleigh to his father in June 1926, “is that Raleigh’s views on the things of the spirit…are not really in opposition to the atmosphere of Christianity. Whatever he thought about the historical side of it, he must have known…that the religious view, whether literally true or not, was at any rate much more like the reality than the views of the scientists and rationalists.”

Or, alternately, the world is so obviously a spiritual place that any spiritual account of it is closer to the truth than that of the scientists and rationalists — and a view with a Christian flavor to it, Lewis was then discovering, is downright enchanting. There is a reason the story of a dying and rising god pervades world myth.

Lewis did not live to see Hurricane Katrina pull back the “thin veneer of civilization” from the urban results of a half-century of scientific, rationalistic American liberalism. If he had, he might well have commented upon it from the perspective just quoted — that even a vaguely spiritual view of the world has more explanatory and political power than all the research and reason of secularists. (more…)

By Krista Kafer krista555@msn.com

It’s time to celebrate! This Friday, September 16, is Constitution Day — commemorating the signing of the Constitution of the United States 218 years ago. Last year, Congress designated September 17 as Constitution Day, but since that’s a Saturday this year, it will be celebrated a day early so schools can make the most of it.

And so they should. Ignorance of the nation’s foundational law has given politicians and judges a free pass to do what they shouldn’t while failing to do what they should. This ignorance exists at the highest levels of government — as the rhetoric over Hurricane Katrina and Supreme Court nominations attests. Or is it ignorance? (more…)