The Friends of ATR Blog has Moved!

ATR recently relaunched its website. This newly designed site includes a blog on the front page.

Be sure to check it out at www.atr.org. Hope you'll continue to read and leave your comments on our blog.

Hilarious AFSCME ad **Warning: explicit language!**

This is VERY FUNNY, but VERY DIRTY. You have been warned.

Senator Harkin joins Bill Press and Senator Stabenow in calling for regulating free speech.

As if Senator Debbie Stabenow's calling for ignoring the First Amendment wasn't bad enough considering her standing to personally benefit from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, now we have Senator Tom Harkin joining the call for making the unelected 5-person FCC the de facto program director of every talk radio station in the country.

While talking with the struggling, once famous Bill Press on his radio show, Senator Harkin said this:



"By the way, I read your Op-Ed in the Washington Post the other day. I ripped it out, I took it into my office and said 'there you go, we gotta get the Fairness Doctrine back in law again.'"

As if it isn't bad enough that a bunch of old men with no real-world experience and no background in economics are attempting to micromanage the economy with a power-grab and spend bill that would even make Stalin blush, these central planners are seeking to silence dissent in the name of diversity.

Press has reason to be upset, his show was taken off the air in Washington, DC, though not for the black helicopter type reasons he would like you to believe. Press, and the rest of the "progressive" talk is going the way of the dodo because more people listen to him sing in the shower in the morning than listen to their radio shows. So it's in their financial interest to have the government mandate stations carry the type of show they just so happen to be producing. The legislators on board with this power grab have more nefarious motivations.

The "spendulus" bill currently worming its way through a House-Senate conference is facing its toughest obstacle not from squishy lawmakers, but from a public being informed about the pork-laden bill through the only media outlet where conservatives and libertarians have a clear voice - talk radio. Those phone lines on the Hill aren't melting down because of outrageous aspects of that bill discovered by MSNBC or The New York Times, it's coming from talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

If Liberals are able to silence them, or at a minimum, "balance" them by forcing station to carry what amounts to direct propaganda for the so-called "progressive" agenda, the public will be less informed by omission. Rather than a choir of liberty loving hosts singing from the Constitutional hymnal, stations will be forced to morph into a battle of bands format and lose their self-chosen identity.

Add to that the fact that liberal talk radio fails, doesn’t sell and doesn’t attract an audience or advertisers, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster for the talk radio business as a whole. That, come to think of it, may well be what they’re hoping for.

In typical left-wing fashion, the phrase "celebrate diversity," while accepting of nearly anything you can think of that liberals embrace, stops just short of differing opinions. The modern liberal movement has turned into Trotsky with better suits and friend provided drivers.

Lone Star State Lawmakers Work to Avoid Fate of D.C. and Sacramento

What better day than Reagan's birthday for a conservative group of legislators to release their priorities for 2009.

Michael Quinn Sullivan, president of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, reports out of Austin that the Texas Conservative Coalition today "announced their fiscal priorities for the current session ‘to help keep our economy strong and growing’ by noting that the economic climate has been caused by ‘poor decision-making in Washington D.C. and lack of responsibility on Wall Street.’ High on their list: real reductions in property taxes.”

Another top goal this year for the Texas Conservative Coalition, led by Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Nacogdoches), will be the implementation of a tax and expenditure limit to ensure that the state lives within its means and avoids the ill fate of their profligate counterparts in other states like California and New York.

ATR supports legislation by coalition member Rep. Ken Paxton (R-McKinney), House Bill 994, that would tie increases in state spending to population growth and inflation. The text of that legislation can be found by clicking here.

The TX Conservative Coalition sent a letter to key state officials today outlining their priorities. Click here to read the letter and here for Sullivan’s full commentary on the matter. To learn more about the TX Conservative Coalition click here.

Debbie Stabenow's conflict of interest on the so-called Fairness Doctrine.

So Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, well known for...um, something, not really sure what, is now going to make a push to censor conservative talk radio. While on the Bill Press Show, Bill touted Senator Stabenow as the leader in the Senate advocating for "progressive" talk radio, even though it doesn't sell and the audiences don't listen.

Well, there's a reason Stabenow is champion for the type of talk radio, she's got "skin in the game," to steal a phrase from the President. Her husband, when not sleeping with 20 year old prostitutes, dabbles in the liberal talk radio business. So it's only natural that she would seek to impose regulations to "balance" what people do want to listen to with what people don't want to listen to, namely her husband's products.

Not Any of Our Taxes Mr. President? President Obama Breaks Campaign Promise 16 Days into Office

Dear President Obama,

Do you remember the campaign promise that you made in Dover, NH on September 12th, 2008 where you promised never to raise taxes on any family making less than $250,000 a year? You specifically said, "“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." If you want visual proof, click the video below.



Did you watch the video? It appears from this video that your word doesn't mean much all. On the sixteenth day of your presidency, you broke one of the central promises of your candidacy: No American earning under $250,000 per year would face any form of tax increase under your administration. By signing the S-CHIP legislation today, Mr. President, you have now broken your oft-repeated promise. Did you know that on average, smokers, whose median income is a little more than $36,000, make about 30 percent less than non-smokers.

I think Grover Norquist's quote says it best, “Tom Daschle and Leona Helmsley believe that only the little people should pay taxes. Obama agrees; he just raised taxes on millions of lower-income Americans. His central campaign promise was a lie.”

Yours truly,
Disgruntled taxpayer

You think this is bad?

If you think what’s going on here is bad, spare a thought for conservatives in Australia.

Having won election as an "economic conservative", Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd earlier this week called for a new world order that goes even further than "the 70-year-old interventionist principles of John Maynard Keynes".

Today, he proved his call for socialism, and introduced into Parliament the largest spending increase in Australia's history - equivalent to 4% of total national output. He plans to ram this through in - wait for it - one day. Opposition legislators got to see their first copies of the bill the morning that they are expected to vote on it.

Full details here.