Your vitriol, speaks for itself.

How embarassing.

G.Anderson

As I said, “Document this from a source other than Mr. Baskervilles’s rhetoric and skewed “facts”.”

I’m perfectly open to engaging debate from RELIABLE sources.  On the other hand, debating ficticious rhetoric from whining, inadequate bigots is a waste of time.

You’ve provided no links to credible sources to back up anything that you’ve asserted.  I’m left wondering if any actually exist other than erroneous Mr. Baskerville, the bigoted Prager or the off the wall Phyllis Schafley.

Also it isn’t an “attack” to tell the truth.  All of the aforementioned have been exposed for their hypocrisy, delusional thinking and bias.

It’s not a surprise that you attack Dennis Prager, and that you spend so much time in personal attacks, simply because you are so mis informed when it comes to the facts.

“When, EVER have welfare recipients NOT been allowed to have a father in the home?  This has NEVER occured to my knowledge. Document this from a source other than Mr. Baskervilles’s rhetoric and skewed “facts”.”

This statement says it all. There is a world of experience, and social research that exists out side of your knowledge.

G.Anderson

On Dennis Prager:

Wikipedia: “Prager is a proponent of his version of “American exceptionalism”, the view that the moral superiority of American values sometimes justifies unilateral action on the world stage, and that the U.S. should not always be constrained by international law or the United Nations in pursuit of its goals. Prager has been an enthusiastic supporter of the United States’ initiative in the War in Iraq.”

Prager quote: “To the extent that I understand how most Republicans think, it would seem that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani comes closer to the Republican ideal than any of the other viable Republican candidates. They are all good and decent men who would be better for America than either of the Democratic front-runners.”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/t he_case_for_rudy_giuliani.html

“Prager did go on to say that he thought the interment was “probably” wrong. Bully for you, Denny. But his overarching point was that the internment of thousands of American citizens based on their ethnic identity was an example of how non-xenophobic America actually is. Racism, for Prager, you see, is an artificial construct foisted on the American public by the victim-mentality liberal Democrats and not, even peripherally or incidentally, an actual part of the American experience.”

http://politicallunacy.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/den nis-prager-is-an-ass/

“Dennis Prager is a conservative commentator… no, not that guy… the other one… no, not him either… no… take my word for it, you know him. He’s the one who’s sick of the way gay Mexican Muslims run everything, and doesn’t like America’s moral decline and he ducked Vietnam and he’s been divorced three times.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/dennis-pr ager-is-a-dope_b_51065.html

Prager quote: “So, forgive me, but I for one am not encouraged by the ecstatic reaction of young people to Barack Obama. The track record of politically excited youth movements in modern Western history is not a good one. And I see no reason why this will prove to be the first major exception.”

http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view& pageId=67296

Hopefully this speaks for itself, other than that, NO…. I am not a fan of Dennis Prager either.  Do you only listen to those who embellish, skew and otherwise subvert facts?

G.Anderson

It is obvious that apparently only Mr. Baskervilles perspective counts as legitimate to you.  Aside from that qualify this statement:

“Historically this has gone on even in the days when welfare recipients were not allowed to have a father in the home, and it is well documented by study after study.”

When, EVER have welfare recipients NOT been allowed to have a father in the home?  This has NEVER occured to my knowledge. Document this from a source other than Mr. Baskervilles’s rhetoric and skewed “facts”.

Please,

ad hominum attacks do not give your arguments any credibility. This is not a referrendum on Phyllis Schafely.

Mr. Baskerville, has also appeared on the Dennis Prager show, why don’t you attack him as well?

Please refrain from making personal attacks against those that disagree with you.

The fact remains that every study cited by Mr. Baskerville in his work indicates that child support enforcement polices are dependent on broken homes:

“how these same officials set the child-support levels..they collect and tend to ratchet them ever higher, and how “high child support orders, in combination with other child support enforcement policies, have a negative effect on contact between non-custodial parents and their children” (2003, 715).”

The important thing is what happens to children who now live in poverty, and how we encourge the development of family systems that support them.

The current system incentivizes the destruction of the family by creating montetary gains for the state,and non custodial parent for each single family it creates.

Historically this has gone on even in the days when welfare recipients were not allowed to have a father in the home, and it is well documented by study after study.

The current system is really little more than a continuation of the same system, with financial rewards to both the non custodial parent and the state, while creating poverty for everyone else. 

Currently it’s running a debt of several billion dollars annually for debt that can never be collected simply because those that owe the money, could never pay it. Either because they can’t find a job, or they make too little money.

Re: G.Anderson

In the article you cite Mr. Baskerville quotes Hayek and endorses that idiocy.  Mr. Baskerville also has a piece entitled “Will Your Kids Be Adopted by Homosexuals” in it he “warns” of the “dangers” of this segment of society apparently out to grab up your children.  Mr. Baskerville has also written an article endorsing PHYLLIS SCHAFLEY!  Do some research of your own.

Some of Phyllis Schafley’s quotes:

“How can we protect homeland security unless the government stops the invasion of illegal aliens?”

“It is long overdue for parents to realize they have the right and duty to protect our children against the intolerant evolutionists.”

“Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions.”

I could go on….What a nut-job. 

In one article Mr Baskerville asserts that MN non-custodial parents are asked to pay 25% of net income for one child.  However, he erroneously claims that if this parent EARNED $4400 a month that they would have to pay $1100.00 dollars.  EARNINGS and NET PAY are two entirely different amounts. In addition most states also factor in all types of expenses.

During the period when our country and its citizens enjoyed the greatest economic security we also had the BEST SOCIAL SUPPORT SYSTEMS.

In Morris Berman’’s book, Dark Ages America he makes this observation:

“Proponents of financial liberalization argue that the post Bretton Woods period, when capital controls were lifted, was the period of greater prosperity, and that this action led to an improvement in the global economy. Close comparison of the two eras, however, shows pretty clearly that the quarter century between the signing of the agreement was the ““golden age””. The volume of trade between America and the rest of the world, for example, rose nearly sevenfold from 1944-1974, while investment increased fivefold, and the median American wage rose 80 percent between 1947-1974. Significantly wages did not rise at all between 1974-2001, and it was only after Bretton Woods was abandoned that a slowdown of per capita GDP growth began to affect both the developing world and the industrial nations. Thus David Felix writes, ““No period of comparable length, past or present, comes close to the high output and productivity growth rates, low sustained unemployment, and distributional equity of the Bretton Woods era.”

*Note: “financial liberalization” as Mr. Berman acknowledges is laisse-faire capitalism or what many like to call the Hayek or Austrian school of economic thought. Or more familiarly, Reaganomics. An idiotic “school of thought” which Mr. Baskerville appears to endorse.

*Note: Bretton Wood Agreement: The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value——plus or minus one percent——in terms of gold and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary imbalances of payments.

> Of course there are other factors which should be included. War and greed are but two. However, your assertions are totally off the mark and incorporate a “blame the victim mentality”. Quit whining and pay your child support your CHILD deserves it.

Child support and welfare are TWO different things.  And while many of our social safety nets have been undermined by block grants, child support is NOT one of them in my state and I seriously doubt it in MN.

Does it ever happen that non-custodial parents get caught in the system unjustly..?  Sure…but that is the EXCEPTION and NOT the rule.  Many, many more custodial parents and the children in their care live in poverty than non-custodial parents.

“Those custodial parents receiving full child support were less likely to be living in poverty.”

http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/05/fathers_ fight/buttenwieser_0605_4.htm

In point of fact you are mis informed. I would encourage you to do some research before you just react emotionally.

I would suggest your read Stepen Baskervilles article in the Independent Review Winter 2008 From Welfare State to Police State, here is a quote:

“The federal funding created or exacerbated a number of perverse incentives and perhaps unintended consequences: to turn as many parents as possible into payers; to separate as many children as possible from their parents and otherwise encourage the creation of single-parent homes; to make payment levels as onerous as possible; to extract every dollar from every payer available; and even to impose payment obligations on citizens who are not parents. Jo Michelle Beld, a consultant to the Minnesota child-support enforcement agency, has described how the livelihoods of enforcement
officials depend on broken homes, how these same officials set the child-support levels
they collect and tend to ratchet them ever higher, and how “high child support orders, in combination with other child support enforcement policies, have a negative effect on contact between non-custodial parents and their children” (2003, 715). “

In point of fact custody orders are directly reflected in support orders. But just because their are orders, that doesn’t mean that the non custodial parent has the financial means to pay them, especially once they have been reduced to abject poverty.

Re: G.Anderson

“Child support orders are based on custody.”

>Not in my state. I don’t know where you live but I’ve not heard, seen or experienced this assertion.

“Being a single parent, or a divorced single parent, is a situation which rewards the custodial parent the most economically”

> Again, Not in my state. I don’t know where you live but I’ve not heard, seen or experienced this assertion.  But that must be why so many women and children live in poverty… cause life’s just TOO DAMN EASY, for them.  After all, according to you “the custodial parent” is “rewarded” the most economically.  You might what to check that crystal ball my friend, I think yours has a crack, right down the reality line.

Oh..and your quote ” the state rewards women who have children out of wedloc economically they also create an incentive for women to do just that.”

>I challenge you G.Anderson…. where’s the data for your assertion? According to your position women should have twenty kids “out of wedlock” because obviously then.. they’d be set for life.
As an aside, I find it “out of sorts” so to speak to ACCUSE parents of having children. It seems a degenerate ideology. Many of the posters here seem to be making that assertion. So my question is: Are only children born to those who can “afford them” of value? OR.. Is it that only those “of means” should have children?

People do put a lot of thought into having children.

Many religous groups encourage people to have large families, and to have a child each year they are married. They also believe that sex is only for procreation.

Since these groups are the only ones having families, now that marriage has become a liability for non fundamentalist types, they will be the ones who determine, the temper of our society, it’s values and it’s laws in the not too distant future.

Those that don’t reproduce won’t have much stake in the future, their beliefs, values hopes and dreams will not be passed on to future generations.

Amy Nova:

I totally agree with you that:

“Perhaps if people put more thought into deciding to have children and how it would change their life poverty would not be such an issue, nor absent fathers.”

I don’t have any children; and often people have asked me why don’t you have children. My response has been, as I see it, it’s cheaper to save up for a canary yellow lamborgini (In these times, if you wanted to provide a decent education for your child, and do home schooling, etc - you could probably make that a few lamborgini’s, unless you had a paid for piece of land, where you were virtually fully self-sufficient, which I don’t.)

When people tell me they are having kids in these peak oil, water, etc. times, my response—if I am of the opinion they are willing to hear my honest response without taking offence—is usually, you are either exceptionally brave or exceptionally stupid. That is of course assuming that they are seriously committed to being there for their children, in a significant manner, emotionally, psychologically, financially etc.

Personally, for me, if I was to bring a child into this world, that to me is a huge responsibility: I would be bringing a living, breathing being into the world, an act of ‘Creation’ if there ever was one.

Furthermore, if the child was to have my genes, which of course it would, and knowing what I know about myself, and should any of that knowledge be genetically transferred to my child, I would definately want to be there to support my child, to deal with a world of people who haven’t got the faintest clue, about living with such, shall I call it genetic sensitivity, for want of a better description.

But that’s my opinion, undoubtedly others disagree.

The problem with all of this, is that the government creates incentives to push fathers out of the home.

Child support orders are based on custody. They are also based on how much time fathers spend with their children. Consequently when fathers are absent child support orders are the highest.

Being a single parent, or a divorced single parent, is a situation which rewards the custodial parent the most economically, because the courts set child support orders the highest under those curcumstances.

And because The money that the state collects in federal matching grants from the federal government is based solely on the total amount of child support collected there is an incentive for the state to support custody orders that yield the highest amount of Child support payments.

It is impossible to be a father when you only have 4 days a month and two week nights with your children. But that is all the amount of time you have, when courts issue standard custody orders. These orders are the norm.

And because the state rewards women who have children out of wedloc economically they also create an incentive for women to do just that. Once again the state benefits from Federal matching grants for each dollar they collect from missing sperm donors. This money can be used for anything the state wants, from roads to new office buildings.

The real answer to the problem is to make shared parenting, shared custody, shared financial responsibility the law. With no cash incentives to divorce or have children out of wedlock.

But since the state makes so many billions on single parenthood, the state will fight it tooth and nail.

excellent post, aegrus, well said. ~laura

It is the most unfortunate thing how value voters who want to strengthen family and marriage in America so often vote Republican. In the real world, Democratic center-left reform in minimum wage, taxation, pragmatic foreign policy, education and the arts improve opportunities for families to survive adequately. What do you really get when you vote for these new Republicans? The illusion of saving marriage from homosexuals? The false promise of protecting your children when they are brought forth to the killing fields in the middle east? The facade of choice and economic freedom by subsidizing, providing tax relief and giving immunity to the law the largest corporations and most wealthy who ship your jobs overseas, allow China to build cheap and dangerous products for your consumption and poison your family with petro-chemicals in practically everything in your home.

Think about family when you vote this election, and really give thought to who actually works for families. John McCain or Barack Obama?

for anyone who reads french, here is a facinating analysis in LE MONDE today regarding obama’s spirituality.

La Fête des pères : quelle meilleure occasion pour traiter d’un problème qui touche beaucoup d’Africains-Américains, celui des foyers monoparentaux ? Barack Obama, qui en a souffert lui-même - son père a quitté sa mère quand il avait 2 ans -, a “parlé durement”, dimanche, de ces “trop nombreux pères qui manquent à l’appel, qui désertent”, rapporte Politico.

Touchant à un sujet très sensible dans les milieux politiques noirs, le candidat démocrate a souligné que les quartiers difficiles “ont besoin de moins d’armes dans les mains de gens qui ne devraient pas en avoir, de plus d’argent pour les écoles, de meilleurs enseignants, de davantage de soutien scolaire, d’emplois et de formation professionnelle”. “Mais nous avons aussi besoin de familles pour élever nos enfants”, a-t-il dit, ajoutant : “Nous avons besoin que les pères réalisent que leur responsabilité ne s’arrête pas à la conception.”

Génération Josué
Prononcé, à Chicago, devant les fidèles de l’Eglise apostolique de Dieu - un temple protestant différent de celui qu’il a fréquenté pendant vingt ans et quitté à la suite des propos racistes qui y ont été tenus -, le discours d’Obama témoignait à la fois de sa piété et de sa volonté d’affronter les problèmes de la société américaine. Fox News, qui avait mené campagne sur les sermons incendiaires de Jeremiah Wright, l’ancien pasteur d’Obama, rend compte de son discours de dimanche et de la prière prononcée pour lui après son départ.
“Malgré Jeremiah Wright, malgré les rumeurs sur son appartenance à l’islam, Obama a une bien meilleure relation avec la droite religieuse que vous ne pourriez le penser”, indique le New York Post. Selon ce quotidien, la campagne du sénateur de l’Illinois se prépare à “lancer, la semaine prochaine, le Joshua Generation Project (voilà qui sonne à la fois biblique et science-fiction, non ?)”, destiné à attirer les jeunes protestants évangéliques, les jeunes catholiques et, plus généralement, les “gens de foi”. Moïse a amené les Hébreux au seuil de la terre promise, mais c’est Josué (Joshua) qui l’a conquise, explique le journal, observant qu’Obama est “très à l’aise avec le langage codé des évangéliques”.

Vieille Amérique, nouvelle Amérique
Selon Stephen Mansfield, auteur d’un livre à succès sur la foi de George Bush, en 2004, et qui va en publier un du même genre sur Obama, les jeunes évangéliques “sont en désaccord avec lui au sujet de l’avortement, mais l’approuvent sur la pauvreté et sur la guerre”. “La campagne de McCain est assez maladroite quand il s’agit de religion”, estime cet auteur. Dans USA Today, Dan Gilgoff, qui a enquêté sur l’action des lobbies religieux dans les campagnes électorales, estime que John McCain “en a mécontenté beaucoup, dans la droite religieuse, quand il a rejeté publiquement l’appui de John Hagee, évangélique du Texas, et de Rod Parsley, un pasteur de l’Ohio”, dont les propos avaient provoqué le scandale. Selon l’institut de sondage Gallup, le candidat républicain bat son concurrent démocrate chez les électeurs qui se déclarent religieux, mais l’écart - 47 % contre 42% - n’est pas si grand que cela.
Le mot important n’est peut-être pas “religieux”, mais “jeune”. Ancienne “speechwriter” de Ronald Reagan, Peggy Noonan pense que la compétition politique de 2008 est entre “la vieille Amérique et la nouvelle, ce que nous étions et ce que nous avons commencé à devenir il y a environ quarante ans”. “M. McCain est la vieille Amérique, bien sûr ; M. Obama, la nouvelle”, conclut-elle. Dans le New York Times, Adam Nagourney explique qu’après la “race” et le “genre”, l’âge devient un élément-clé du débat électoral, avec deux candidats représentant “deux générations très différentes”, encadrant celle du baby-boom.