Kudzu Molly Mormon

Rising Energy Costs…Obama Keeps His Promise

2012-01-23T14:06:00.000-05:00

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama flatly proclaimed that under his policies electricity rates would “necessarily skyrocket.” For once, Obama can’t be accused of breaking a campaign promise. Unfortunately it is not just electricity rates, but energy prices in general, that have skyrocketed. One look at your huge electric bill, or $3.50/gallon gasoline in winter, and you’ll realize Obama meant what he said. In fact, the Obama administration is quietly waging a full-scale assault on fossil-fuel based energy, which accounts for the vast majority of all energy produced in America, while at the same time throwing taxpayer money down a rat hole lined with Democrat-donors and special interest groups.

As our illustrious campaigner-in-chief would say, “Let me be clear!” This is not by accident. He has filled his Cabinet and administration with “greenies” like Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu (who has stated that he wants to force gas prices in the U.S. up to European levels of around $7-10/gallon).This is a conscious, concerted effort. Obama openly brags that he will bankrupt coal companies, which generate almost half of the electricity produced in the United States today. Using the simple Law of Supply and Demand, what do you think will happen to electricity prices if you cut the generating capacity in half? If you said prices will “necessarily skyrocket”, then come get your gold start and go to the head of the class.

Unable to get his desired “Cap-and-Trade” legislation through Congress (even when he had a huge majority in the House and a filibuster-proof Senate), Obama has resorted to becoming a de facto dictator, ruling by executive order and regulatory fiat (or, as Obama likes to say, “If Congress won’t act, I will”). Obama has used the EPA to impose costly, burdensome regulations on fossil-fuel generated power plants, which in turn artificially restricts power generation and artificially inflates energy prices. The American people are suffering from high unemployment and a sluggish economy, yet that does not stop Obama from imposing higher costs on the people that can least afford it. That’s one way you can tell that Obama likes poor people…he is working tirelessly to make as many people poor as possible.

This week, Obama rejected the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, an oil pipeline originating in Canada that would provide 700,000 barrels of oil per day to U.S. refineries, in the process creating thousands of jobs almost immediately to build the $13 billion, 2,450 mile, privately funded pipeline, plus tens of thousands more jobs in the oil and related industries over the coming years. It would connect to the already existing 200,000 miles of oil pipeline traversing the country, which has operated safely for decades.

The Obama administration uses the excuse that it needs to perform additional environmental impact studies before it can approve the project; this despite the fact that the State Department had already released a more than three year-long study showing that the project would have a minimal environmental impact. Think about that! The study lasted three times longer than it took to build the Empire State Building, and nearly as long as it took America to win World War II…that is insane! We used to be a nation of doers and builders, but we’ve turned into a nation of hyper-safety conscious ninnies afraid to take the slightest bit of risk, no matter how big the reward. Of course, I’m sure that the threats by the Sierra Club and other “environmental” groups to withdraw support for Obama if he approved the pipeline is completely unrelated, aren’t you?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Obama continues to put our national security interests at risk with his policies. Iran, the largest state-sponsor of global Islamic terrorism, and a country that has openly mocked Obama for his weak-kneed, prostrate capitulation in seeking to curry favor with the mad mullahs that run that country, is now saber-rattling and causing fear in an already weak world economy. Iran has begun naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which nearly one fifth of all global oil transits. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait and shut off the flow of oil if the world continues to object to its hostile actions. If we were producing our oil domestically we’d not have to worry so much about Iran, and could strip it of the petro-dollars it uses to function, having no other real source of income.

Also this month, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar declared a 20-year ban on uranium mining on a million acres in the western United States. Uranium is a vital to producing nuclear power, a process that produces 91% less greenhouse gas emissions than solar power, according to the IAEA. For that reason you’d think the greenies would enthusiastically support nuclear power generation, but instead they fight against it tooth and nail. Just a hair under 20% of America’s electricity is safely produced by nuclear power, and has been for decades. You wouldn’t know that to listen to the ranting of the “environmentalists” who would have you believe that using more nuclear power will lead to a generation of babies that glow green, have webbed-feet, three eyes and gills.

These actions by the Obama administration are just the latest in a long line of anti-business, anti-energy production policies and actions which drive up the price of fossil fuel energy and force us into using “green” energy. After the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama essentially shut down oil drilling in that area. He lied about the recommendations of a panel he commissioned to study the spill, saying that a moratorium was in order. Obama has kept the moratorium in order, defying the recommendation of his panel and the court rulings against him (for which he received a contempt of court order, not that it did any good), and driving the owners of those oil rigs to countries hostile to U.S. interests. This means the oil gets drilled anyway, but America receives no benefit. What’s worse, Obama gave the national oil company of Brazil billions of dollars to drill oil and then gave an address in their country in which he stated that he wanted America to be their best customer! I guess having Americans be dependent on their own government is not enough for Obama, now we have to be dependent on other countries as well.

Liberals, Democrats and “environmentalists” claim we can solve our energy problems by forcing a move to “green energy”, but like so many liberal policy positions, this just does not hold up to scrutiny. According to data provided by the IEA (International Energy Agency), in 2008 the United States generated 4,369 terawatt-hours of electricity (4,369 x one trillion watts), of which 2,133 TWh was produced by coal. By comparison, renewable or “green” energy sources (hydro, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind, tide and biomass/waste) accounted for 430 terawatt-hours…combined! In other words, all “renewable” energy sources combined produce less than 10% of the electricity produced by coal, and less than half of the electricity produced by oil/gas (969 TWh), or nuclear (838 TWh).

The bottom line is that, for America’s national security, we need to take advantage of the massive energy supplies we have available at home, which we recently discovered is far more vast than previously believed. We should use all sources, as long as they are economically viable and not subsidized. In doing so we can drastically reduce energy costs, improve the economy for the American people, and improve our national security.

We can start that in November, by tossing Obama out of the White House and into the compost bin.

Playing the Conservative Hate Card

2012-01-16T14:36:00.000-05:00

As we near the South Carolina primaries, the media is abuzz with the drama unfolding among the Republican candidates for president, and the harsh attacks being leveled by each faction. Some see this as detrimental to the eventual Republican nominee, but I tend to disagree. In 2008, when Mitt Romney graciously stepped down and conceded to John McCain, it allowed the Republican Party to coalesce around “their man”, who promptly went on to get an Electoral College tail-whipping, losing 365-173 to a smooth-talking political neophyte with no record to speak of, but a catchy, feel-good slogan and the media on his side.

This year, make no mistake, the gloves are coming off, and the Republicans had better have a battle-tested candidate that is ready to go up against Obama. The “Hope and Change” campaign is no more, and Obama knows it. He now has a record that can be used against him, so rest assured, the absolute last thing he will focus on is that record. He’s accumulated more debt than every other president combined, signed off on a nearly trillion dollar stimulus bill that actually increased unemployment by more than two percent, the size of the federal government has grown by a quarter, and we have the scandals surrounding voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party, the Solyndra scandal, Fast and Furious, his latest unconstitutional power grabs, and more.

Since he can’t run on his record, so what will he do? My guess is, first, he will claim that while things have been bad under his administration, he has the right policies, and therefore it would have been even worse under Republicans. The second angle I believe he will use, and indeed we saw it implemented in part during the 2012 mid-term elections, is to paint his opposition as being against him because he is black, and because they are just bad people. Why that route? Because if you can demonize the messenger you can avoid having to address the message.

In response to my last article criticizing Obama for being a Chicago thug who has repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, a liberal friend responded that the real story was that I, and conservatives in general, hate Obama and want to see him fail, and are willing to destroy the country in order to ensure his failure. As corroboration of these claims, he posted an article from a popular, left-wing website, which claims that conservatives hate Obama more than they love America. Said author claimed this is because conservatives/Republicans are filled with hatred for Obama, gays, blacks, immigrants, Muslims, socialism and social justice, regulations, taxes, spending and the Government. He also said we hate “poor people, all of us, women, atheists and agnostics, Latinos, Muslims, Liberals, all of us, I think you hate every one who isn't exactly like you, and I think you hate us more than you love your country.” I think the only think he didn’t accuse us of hating is the environment, but I am sure that was just an oversight.

There is no way to comprehensively address the pure idiocy of this mindless rage in this short space, but I’ll take a shot at it.

Conservatives and Republicans don’t hate Obama, we detest the things he stands for and has tried to impose on our country through corruption, bribery, class warfare incitement, lies, and executive fiat. We detest the disrespect he has shown for the greatness of America, for the sacrifices made by our military, and the dynamism of the free market economy. In short, his beliefs cause revulsion in us at a core level, so yes; we will absolutely fight him tooth and nail to retain our heritage.

We don’t hate blacks, just the opposite in fact. We are baffled that so many would remain slaves to the Democrat Party plantation. We are confused that they would monolithically support a party that tells them that they are not intelligent enough, strong enough, or hard-working enough to survive in this country without Democrats there to protect them as if they were little children. It is the Democrat Party that has betrayed the vision of Dr. King, and that demands we look at everyone through the prism of race, gender or sexual orientation. The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, the party that gave blacks the right to vote, that elected the first black man to Congress. Too many Republicans fail to bring that message to the black community, and shame on us for it.

We do not hate Muslims, but we do fear a religion that, at least as evidenced by the actions of its practitioners and the scarcity of criticism within its ranks, seeks to use force and bloodshed to make it superior to all other religions, and which seeks to replace our constitutional government with one governed by sharia law.

We do not hate gays, but we do to object to attempts to undermine the bedrock of virtually every society, culture and nation throughout history; namely, a family composed of a father, a mother and children. We object to attempts to redefine marriage, to act as if traditional marriage was simply an archaic societal construct with no validity, or at least no more importance, than any other amalgam of interpersonal relationships. We believe that God made man and woman with unique characteristics and physical traits, opposite yet complimentary, and that both sets are required to produce well-balanced children.

We don’t hate Latinos, and we don’t hate immigrants. Immigrants are people that have followed our legal process, abiding by the rule of law. We do, however, oppose a lax policy towards illegal aliens, which makes our borders meaningless and puts our security at risk. We do oppose those that want to allow those from foreign countries to enter, legally or illegally, and then encourage them to segregate themselves from society, reject the adoption of their new nation’s language and heritage, and to in all senses of the word show allegiance to America.

We don’t hate taxes, regulations or government, but do declare that, as necessary infringements on our freedoms, we must keep them to an absolute minimum, and allow them only to exist and operate within the tightly bound confines of the Constitution.

We absolutely do hate socialism, because we have studied history and have seen how, in the name of “equality of outcome” and “social justice” the rights of the individual are crushed in the name of obeisance to the will of the collective. We believe that we are individual human beings, each created and endowed with rights by our Creator, and we adamantly reject the philosophy that makes us nothing more than little cogs in a giant government wheel. We also realize that socialism and its variants are responsible for the violent deaths of more than 100 million people in just over the last half century, and as such, we covenant to fight against its spread at all costs.

In short, we love America and its people. We love our Constitution and the rich heritage our Founding Fathers and subsequent generations left to us. We mourn the destruction of our rights in the name of security and charity. We love our fellow man, and feel it is our Christian duty to serve them, not because our government forces us to, but because our Savior, Jesus Christ, told us we must if we are to follow Him.

So buckle up people. Put on your big girl panties and your He-Man Underoos, put on your football helmets and get ready for the hard-hitting, rough and tumble world that will be politics in America this year. It will at times be thrilling, infuriating, and divisive, but our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less than a full restoration of the greatness that America once enjoyed.

The U.S. Constitution, Obama’s Door Mat

2012-01-09T14:19:00.002-05:00

A few days after the 2008 elections, Valerie Jarrett, co-chair of President-Elect Obama’s transition team, was interviewed by Tom Brokaw on “Meet the Press”, where she stated: “ [Obama] is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.” At the time it was written off by most as simply a poor choice of words, but after the last three years in which Obama has compiled an inglorious record of contempt for the Constitution, Jarrett’s words now have proven prophetic. Obama has even surpassed FDR in the sheer brazenness of his contempt for our nation as a rule of law under the Constitution, and in attempts to make servants of the other co-equal branches of government.

Obama truly seems to see himself in the role of a king, with power to enforce his agenda by sheer will, ignoring law and precedent in crushing opposition to his executive branch tyranny. Two recent events have added to our despicable president’s legacy of corruption, disdain and contempt for the Constitution; his signing of the National Defense Appropriations Act, which funds military and defense operations, but that also contains a provision that should terrify every American that loves freedom; and Obama’s appointment of Richard Cordray as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new agency created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) is frightening because of Amendment 1031, a provision which, under the guise of combating terrorism, allows the military to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial, a blatant and grotesque violation of the due process rights of U.S. citizens. It was just a few short years ago that Democrats protested against the Bush-era policy of indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay of enemy combatants captured on the field of battle trying to kill Americans. Now we have a Democrat president (who, it should be noted, was one of the ones calling indefinite detention of terrorists un-American) who just signed a law granting him power to eviscerate the rights of American citizens.

The fact that the vote was a bipartisan measure, and that Obama proclaimed that he would not use the provision allowing him to detain American citizens, is small comfort. Obama has long ago shown that his word has the consistency of wet toilet paper (the generic single ply kind, not even the expensive stuff), and that he will do and say whatever he has to in order to advance his agenda and expand his power. His abuse of power has gone well beyond anything George W. Bush was accused of, yet the political left remains mum on these counts.

This law allows the government to indefinitely detain American citizens engaged in terrorism or “belligerent acts” against the U.S. government. Yet how are terrorism and belligerence defined and who gets to define it? What speeches or actions rise to the level of belligerence or terrorism? According to comments made by Vice President Joe Biden back in August, TEA Party-supported Republican members of the House of Representatives “acted like terrorists” for not conceding more to Democrats over the debt limit hike. Steve Rattner, Obama’s “car czar” (who paid a $10 million fine for influence peddling), said Republican steadfastness in the debt fight was a “form of economic terrorism”, and that “these TEA Party guys are, like, strapped with dynamite, standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour, and saying either you do it my way or we are going to blow you up…” At this point, does anyone seriously trust our government not to use whatever pretext is necessary to suppress dissent against its tyrannical actions? Are you ready to live in a world where speech that is critical of government is considered “terrorism”, and where your government can lock you up without any rights?

The other event was the recess appointment of Richard Cordray as the first Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. There is only one problem..the Senate was not in recess. Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution, the president has the power to appoint federal judges and high-level cabinet and policy-making positions, with the advice and consent of the Senate. In most cases this is a mere formality, as Congress has traditionally given the president wide discretion here. In addition, Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 grants the president the power to make “recess” appointments. In these cases the president is able to make the appointment when Congress is not in session, with the caveat that the appointment is valid only until the adjournment (sine die) of the next Senate session, at which time the position becomes vacant pending confirmation by the Senate.

Though unusual, on occasion the Senate, in order to block controversial nominees, goes into what is called a pro forma session. Under Article I, Section 5, Clause 4, the Constitution stipulates that neither house of Congress may adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other. Pro forma (Latin for “as a matter of form”) sessions are sessions in which no actual business is conducted, and the session is opened and closed with very few members in actual attendance. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), the acknowledged master of Senate rules and traditions, used the threat of pro forma sessions against President Ronald Reagan in 1985 to extract a promise from him that he would not make recess appointments after the Senate adjourned.

In addition, under the 110th and 111th Congresses (from November 2007 until the end of the Bush presidency), Democrats enacted pro forma sessions to keep President George W. Bush from being able to make recess appointments. They were successful in their efforts, for Bush made not a single recess appointment through the end of his presidency.

One may ask, since the Senate is controlled by Democrats, how it is that the Senate has been unable to adjourn for more than three days so that Obama can make recess appointments. That would be because the House is controlled by Republicans, and they have refused to pass a concurrent resolution of adjournment, forcing the Senate to come in every three days for a pro forma session.

However, this week Obama declared the recess appointment of Richard Cordray to the CFPB in spite of the fact that the Senate had never officially recessed. His argument is, to summarize, that because the Senate is not conducting business, the pro forma sessions are a sham, and he is simply declaring unilaterally that such pro forma sessions are illegitimate, and therefore the Senate is in recess, hence his ability to make the appointment.

In essence, our Community-Organizer-in-Chief, a product of the Chicago School of Political Thuggery, has declared an end to the separation of powers and the mandates of the Constitution on this matter. He is declaring a blatant usurpation of the legislative powers, claiming now that he, not the Senate, may determine what shall be the rules of the Senate. He and he alone may now declare which laws, rules and traditions this nation will be governed by.

Democrats are mocking and dismissing Republican concerns over such a blatant and illegal use of executive power, claiming that Republicans only care about obstructing Obama’s agenda (although, with the disastrous results of those policies, that is not a bad thing in and of itself). However, they should remember that what comes around goes around, and that they should not whine when the next Republican president uses this ploy to appoint Supreme Court Justice Ann Coulter, Secretary of Defense Rush Limbaugh, and Treasury Secretary Ron Paul. You can bet there will be some hell-raising then.

Warm Wishes and Hope for the New Year

2012-01-03T19:27:00.002-05:00

“New Year's Day - Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” ~ Mark Twain

Well, another year has passed and we now usher in a new one. Today we declare the resolutions upon which we’ll embark as we seek to become better people, and tomorrow we’ll get to work breaking them. New Year’s Day is a time of celebration and introspection, a time of renewal, and a time for hope. With that said, I offer up a bit of introspection, resolution and hope.

I’ll start off with an easy one. This year I resolve to exercise more and eat less. I make this resolution in the full knowledge that, like the decorative soaps in the guest bathroom, it is completely pointless. It won’t happen. Every day I tell myself I need to exercise more, and every day I come face to face with my infinite to-do list, put off the exercise until tomorrow. The resolution to eat less is also laughable. My oldest daughter Naomi has taken up cooking and is really, really talented at it. I’m not talking macaroni and cheese either. I mean potato soup, homemade beef stew, a variety of Mexican dishes, and more. I’m talking about down home comfort food like I had the other night, with home fries and slabs of meatloaf bathed in barbeque sauce. I always tell myself I will just eat a small portion, but it’s a lie. It tastes so good I just can’t help myself. Besides, when she worked so hard to take care of her daddy, it would be a form of child abuse to eat just a little bit, right? It would break her heart!

I resolve to be a better father this year. My oldest son Elijah just turned nineteen and will be leaving soon to serve a mission among the people of southern Mexico. The realization that he is leaving me has taxed my emotions more than I ever suspected possible. I look at the man he has become in spite of my shortcomings as a father and it humbles and amazes me. It makes me want to work harder to be an even better father for the rest of my children, to correct the mistakes I made over the years. So I shall work even harder to make each moment count not only with Elijah, but with Naomi (the “second mom” who helps manage the rest of the kids), Shai (my little black-belt ninja), Noah (chess player and amateur comedian), Malachi (helper and handyman), Ezekiel (my boy who loves to laugh and learn), Mahalie (my drama queen, where everything is either super great or the end of the world, but who makes me feel like Superman when she curls up in my arms), and my baby, Echo (that beautiful tiny tyrant who showers us all with love, yet demands strict obedience from us in responding to her demands for juice, food, blankets and whatever else her heart requires).

I resolve to be a better husband. My wife is a saint who puts up with me, home-schools eight children, is a Cub Scout leader and teaches Sunday-School for little kids, who does the accounting for my business, and in short who, when looking at all she does in a day, makes me feel lazy compared to her even if I just worked twelve hours. She is my rock, she is my confidante, and she is the yin to my yang. She deserves all that I can give and more.

I resolve to be more patient, humble and tolerant. Anyone who knows me knows there is very little gray with me, just black and white. I am a Christian man who believes in the divine founding of America, the Judeo-Christian philosophy of our Founding Fathers and the miraculous republic that they formed. I have little patience with people that belittle America, and who say we are, as President Obama did, no more or less great than any other country. I get easily agitated when I hear people claiming America is a bad or imperialistic nation, which degrades the sacrifice of the millions that sacrificed so much for our freedom and prosperity.

Ignorance bothers me at a core level. It is like nails on a chalkboard when I hear someone refer to America as a democracy, or when they talk about our unlimited “right” to vote, or to healthcare, or to high speed internet, or to never be offended. I have a visceral reaction when people insist that religious expression must never be conveyed in public due to some mythical “separation of church and state.” This year I will increase my efforts to be more patient as I discuss divergent opinions from my own, and take time to realize that people may disagree with me on certain topics (like income inequality, the “99% versus the 1%”, the need for the rich to pay their “fair share”, the need for more socialist income redistribution, the need to bankrupt our economy in order to combat the ridiculous secular religion of global warming, etc.), not because they are blooming idiots or socialist malcontents, but because they just have a different viewpoint. This is extremely difficult because I spend a lot of time studying these issues, and get impatient with people telling me I am wrong when they haven’t really studied it out (maybe this is where that humility thing comes in, huh?).

There are many other things I need to work on as a person to improve myself, and if I have missed any, I know that my wife, children and friends with gladly point them out. And if they miss any, well, that is what a mother-in-law is for, right? Because behind every good man is a better woman and a shocked mother-in-law.

In closing, I would like to bring up the topic of hope. This last year has been a tough one for my family, just as it has been for so many other Americans. This new year is likely to bring more challenges; sustained high unemployment and underemployment, a staggering and ever increasing national debt, increasing polarization on social issues like abortion and homosexual marriage, uncertainty in our future because of entitlement programs going bankrupt. It is enough to make one lose hope in the future.

Yet America is great because America is good. Even as politically divided as we are today, most Americans truly want what is best for this nation; we just have drastically different views on how to fix our problems. This morning, I joined a group of friends for breakfast and fellowship, brought together by a mutual desire to be better men through our Savior, Jesus Christ. I found that we all have weaknesses, we all suffer with different struggles; no one is immune. Yet if America can still produce such decent men as these, and the good wives that support them, then God will see America through its current struggles as He has all others.

So on this New Year’s Day, this day of renewal, may I wish my family, my friends, and each of you a most blessed and Happy New Year. May God be with you and hear your prayers, and give to you what you most need at this time, even if that is not what you most want. And may He grant you wisdom to discern between the two.

The Bill of Rights - Birthday or Funeral?

2011-12-20T08:47:00.002-05:00

This week marked the 220th anniversary of the ratification of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, collectively known as the Bill of Rights. Many Americans today would be surprised to learn that the Bill of Rights was adamantly opposed by some of the Founding Fathers, including Alexander Hamilton. Why? Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 84, declaring "I…affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous…For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?" This alluded to the rule of “inclusio unius est exclusion alterius” (the inclusion of one thing necessarily excludes all others), whereby the very enumeration of certain rights as being free from regulation implied that all others were subject to the general legislative powers of the Congress.

Hamilton understood that the Constitution strictly limited the powers of the federal government, and feared a bill of rights would open the door for expansion of congressional power. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”, agreed there was not necessarily a need for the Bill of Rights, but was also not opposed to one. As he explained in an October 1788 letter to Thomas Jefferson, “My own opinion has always been in favor of a bill of rights; provided that it be so framed as not to imply powers not meant to be included in the enumeration. At the same time I have never thought the omission a material defect, nor been anxious to supply it even by subsequent amendment, for any other reason than that it is anxiously desired by others. I have favored it because I suppose it might be of use, and if properly executed could not be of disservice.”

In the end, it was the courage of an oft-forgotten Founding Father, George Mason of Virginia, which led to the establishment of the Bill of Rights. Mason, called “the wisest man of his generation” by Jefferson, was a powerful figure in the debates on the Constitution, and in the end refused to sign it without the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. This was terribly unpopular, but Mason stood firm, along with fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, and as a result we have our Bill of Rights.

Unfortunately, the passage of 220 years has led to a dimming in the national understanding of our founding principles and the Bill of Rights. Most Americans can’t tell you what is in the Bill of Rights beyond freedoms of religion, speech, press and the right to bear arms. Even our understanding of those rights, particularly the freedom of religion and the erroneous understanding of the “separation of church and state,” is often tenuous at best, and puts those rights at risk. How can we preserve and defend that which we do not understand?

Today, the Bill of Rights is steadily eroding right before our eyes, and far too many Americans are either ignorant of or apathetic to this impending disaster. Far too many fall prey to the soothing assurances of a federal government which promises us complete security from physical harm, hunger, destitution, and any other unpleasantness that life may throw at us, if only we will give up our freedoms.

Some might consider this hyperbole, but is it?

The First Amendment declares “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” yet anti-religionists misinterpret the first phrase and omit the second altogether. Even former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court William Rehnquist with frustration admitted that the “Court bristles with hostility to all things religious in public life.” Today there are constant attempts to ban any public expression of religion. Each year around Christmas the ACLU bullies into submission those that would erect scenes of the Nativity in the public square. Attempts to limit religious expression under the rubric of constitutionality is difficult, as seen by the confusing rulings in two 2005 cases concerning public displays of the Ten Commandments. In a pair of 5-4 decisions, the Court ruled that the a six foot tall granite monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Texas state capitol could remain, but forbade a pair of framed copies of the Ten Commandments in two rural Kentucky courthouses. Regardless, such encroachments continue.

The First Amendment protects free speech, yet that is also under attack. It was specifically written to protect unpopular political speech, but today we are supposed to believe the Founders would have agreed with the Incumbent Protection and Free Speech Suppression Act (passed under the moniker of “campaign finance reform”, and shamefully co-authored by former Republican presidential candidate John McCain) which drastically limits the content and timing of political speech, At the same time we are supposed to believe the Founders would have defended child pornography as protected speech (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 2002, in which Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, unbelievably asserted that “virtual child pornography is not ‘intrinsically related’ to the sexual abuse of children,” as if some people view kiddie porn as harmless fun).

The Fourth Amendment (theoretically) protects us from unreasonable search and seizure, yet any airline passenger recently that has been groped, prodded, stripped and fondled can attest that the TSA has absolutely no respect for this amendment. In addition, buried in the recently submitted 2012 Defense Reauthorization Bill was a provision which allowed American citizens to be indefinitely detained without trial for simply being suspected of association with terrorism. Considering a 2009 internal report of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security associating those that reject broad federal powers over our lives with being potential terrorists, or the statement by Vice President Joe Biden earlier this year declaring the TEA Party as “a bunch of terrorists”, this is a frightening prospect for millions of Americans.

There are literally thousands of examples of government violations of the Bill of Rights each and every day, and all too often Americans meekly submit to this subjugation to federal power, the act of which reduces us to mere slaves to the federal leviathan. They do so out of ignorance, apathy, or the belief that it is better to submit to a little government abuse in exchange for protection from larger threats.

Yet ours is a nation that was founded on the primacy of individual liberty, with stringent protections put in place against government authority in order to protect us from the tyranny of government. To acquiesce to these subjugations is simply a matter of choosing which master we shall be slaves to.

Samuel Adams, speaking vigorously in favor of the decision to break with Great Britain, summed it up powerfully, when he proclaimed, “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

If we are to retain our freedoms, passed down from our forefathers through the shedding of much blood, we must learn of our heritage of freedom and then fight to protect it from the tiniest encroachment. May we celebrate the birthday of the Bill of Rights by studying it and defending it.

Conservatism versus the Charlatans of Sophistry

2011-12-12T13:14:00.001-05:00

Today, the level of political animus and vitriol seems to be on a nearly vertical trajectory, with both sides pulling out all rhetorical stops in an effort to win converts to their ideology. For a time this seemed to be just a partisan war, but I am beginning to believe that it is much, much deeper than that. I believe we are at one of those great crossroads in our nation’s history where we must assess who we are and what values we hold before we can come to agreement on policies that reflect those beliefs.

On the ideological left is a philosophy which elevates the state above the individual, which says we as individuals can’t be trusted to make correct decisions and must therefore be governed by a technocrat oligarchy of (theoretically) unbiased bureaucrats. These are the intellectuals and the scientific “experts” who are smarter than the rest of us and will therefore make wise decisions that we are forced to accept now, and at some distant point in the future we will pay homage as beneficiaries of that wisdom.

This philosophy can be seen in efforts to ban the incandescent light bulb, regulate salt and sugar intake in our diets along with the use of trans-fats; in the use of the tax and regulatory codes to force us into smaller, more fuel efficient cars. It can be seen in attempts to ban all public expressions of religious belief and in the rigging of the free market in favor of “renewable” energy sources by providing taxpayer subsidies that hide the true cost.

On the ideological right is a philosophy that holds the individual above the collective, that sees government as a necessary evil to be kept under tight constraints and against which we must jealously guard our liberties from the encroachment and expansion of government power.

The philosophy of the right is often denigrated as being hateful, greedy, selfish and inhumane. However, those that feel that way simply misunderstand the nature of this philosophy. One of the glaring philosophical differences between the left and right is that the right believes in limited government, with other needs being met through families, friends, churches, community and civic organizations, humanitarian organizations and the like. The left holds that we simply can’t trust the average person to do the right thing and therefore must use the power of government force to compel adherence to these goals.

All too often we get caught up in the minutiae of this or that policy debate (i.e., what percentage of GDP is an acceptable amount of debt to hold, should we cut spending on this program or just reduce the rate of increase, etc.) without addressing the underlying principles. So, in order to make the case for conservative policy positions, we must first make understood the principles upon which they are based.

Above all, we must understand the nature of an individual’s relationship with government. Our Constitution is the codification of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration declares the self-evident truths that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights... [and that] to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

What this means is that we are children of the great Creator, born into this world as sovereign beings answerable only to Him; that we are born with rights that cannot be taken from us (though they can be infringed upon if we are without power to defend them), and that government is a creation of men, wherein we delegate a limited portion of those rights to agents acting in our behalf. Further, this means that government has no powers which we do not ourselves possess (indeed, how can the creation have more power than the Creator granted?), and that we can take back those powers when our agents violate the terms of the grant of power.

So, what does this mean in a practical sense, and what does it have to do with the conservative philosophy? It means that the Founders well understood the nature of man and power; that men in power have a tendency to consolidate and expand that power. That is why they introduced mechanisms into the Constitution which pitted the branches and levels of government against each other. By doing so, any increase in power for one would come at the expense of another. The tension between the branches and levels of government, as the computer geeks would say, is a feature, not a bug.

Yet it goes even deeper than that. The Declaration establishes that we are sovereign beings. That means that we rule ourselves. Our Constitution limits government power to the minimum level necessary to carry out the functions delegated to it. Why? Because a single step beyond that is a usurpation of the sovereignty of the individual. In his Commentaries of the Constitution (1833), Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, called the “Father of American Jurisprudence”, explained "[The Constitution] Being an instrument of limited and enumerated powers, it follows irresistibly, that what is not conferred, is withheld, and belongs to the state authorities, if invested by their constitutions of government respectively in them; and if not so invested, it is retained BY THE PEOPLE, as a part of their residuary sovereignty."

So as we discuss the 99% versus the 1%, or the social “safety net”, or entitlements or redistribution of wealth, it is important that we place these things in their proper context and understand the implications. A conservative objects to expansive government not because (as liberal Democrats love to claim) we want to breathe dirty air and drink dirty water, or let children starve or go uneducated, or let the poor suffer or the sick die or any other such nonsense. We simply believe deeply in the Constitutional limitation of powers upon the federal government, and understand that the usurpation of power that leads to a loss of freedom is more often than not rooted in the rhetoric of compassion, charity or security. We believe not that these things are not important, but that the federal government is not the agent to accomplish them.

If man is sovereign and rules himself, then it follows that his labor is his own, and the product of that labor is his own. To force a man through taxation to fund a single item beyond those authorized by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution is to make him a slave to government in the name of compassion. Ergo, the compassion for one man is achieved by the oppression of another.

America became the global ensign for freedom because she was a land of liberty that secured for each citizen the right to act as they desired, provided those actions did not infringe upon the rights of another. America is the most charitable nation in the world, with literally thousands of humanitarian, religious and civic organizations established to help those in need. We do not allow starvation or suffering as seen in other parts of the world. We take care of our own; but that does not mean we need the heavy hand of government to accomplish these goals. Let us not allow ourselves to be deceived into giving up our sovereignty to the siren song of charlatans seeking to enslave us with the flaxen cords of sophistry.

Capitalism, Jobs and the Wizard of Menlo Park

2011-12-07T18:17:00.002-05:00

One of the most disturbing trends I’ve witnessed over these last few years is a coordinated attack from the left on the institutions and principles that make America great. Maybe nowhere has this been more evident than in the vitriol spewed by our eternal Campaigner-in-Chief and his dutiful Minions of Social Justice, all bemoaning the evils of capitalism, and the inequity of wealth distribution (although oddly, their desire for more equal distribution does not extend to income taxes, where the top one percent earn 19% of the income and pay 40% of all income taxes, while the bottom fifty percent that pay exactly zero).

Obama has set so many straw men on fire that he’s now the leading cause of global warming. He accused doctors of slicing out tonsils and amputating limbs just to bill a few more dollars to insurance companies. He’s accused business owners of not caring about their employees and only about their company’s bottom line. He accused the Chamber of Commerce, without proof, of using foreign money to buy elections. His NLRB threatened Boeing for opening a new, billion dollar plant in right-to-work South Carolina, and his wife urged young students not to go into the corporate world, but rather “work for the community” like her community organizer husband, as if bringing valued goods and services and the accompanying jobs and wealth into the community was not a worthwhile endeavor.

When did we reach the point where we extol the timid and the parasitic? Where wealth creation was bad, and the American Dream had been supplanted by a desire for European-style social welfare? We don’t even have to look back in history to see what a nightmare this is; we just have to turn on the news. The Greeks are rioting in the streets at the thought of giving up an ounce of their lavish social welfare benefits, and the European Union is at the brink of collapse as it struggles under the weight of its debt driven by these welfare state policies.

America is a nation that has historically rewarded the risk taker and the dreamer. We rose to greatness as a nation that valued freedom and reward over the timid security of the nanny state. We are the nation that rose from small colonies into the greatest economic and military engine the world has ever known.

And how was this accomplished? By establishing a nation founded on the rule of law as opposed to the arbitrary and capricious rule of man. By establishing laws making private property sacred, and acknowledging that the wealth creation derived from a man’s physical and intellectual labor was his own. So important was this concept that it was among the short list of enumerated powers granted to the federal government under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. The federal government was thereby empowered to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respecting Writings and Discoveries…”

It is no mystery that shortly after the ratification of the Constitution was passed followed a national patent law (1790) which granted exclusive rights to the inventor for a period of fourteen years an invention “not before known or used” “if they shall deem the invention or discovery sufficiently useful and important”. In the first four years following the passage of the patent law, only a few dozen patents were granted. Yet in the few decades following that, an astounding 10,000 patents had been granted, and America was officially on the rise, becoming a global intellectual juggernaut producing more life-changing inventions than any other nation; indeed, more than all other nations combined.

Surely America did not have a monopoly on intellectual capital. So why did America dominate the world in the creation of these revolutionary inventions, ideas and processes? Why was America the world’s petri dish of invention, where by comparison other nations were barren wastelands? It is because America saw their inventors getting rich from these ideas, which motivated other would-be inventors, and as a result the whole nation prospered. The inventor grew rich, but life was improved for the average citizen as well, as they became more productive through the use of these machines and ideas, with less physical exertion and ultimately more leisure time.

This risk and reward environment led to a technological explosion and paved the way for the likes of our most prolific inventor, Thomas Edison, known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park”. Edison invented the tin foil phonograph, which allowed the spoken work to be recorded. He invented the incandescent light bulb, the dictaphone, and the radio. By the time he died he would be granted a staggering 1093 patents for designs and inventions that would revolutionize the world.

Edison would be remembered as an intellectual titan if all he’d ever invented was the light bulb, an invention that would be the catalyst for creation of an entire industry, electrical power generation. This industry would start by replacing the soot-producing oil lamps with clean electrical power, and in turn an entirely new way to power the nation. In order to achieve a working light bulb, Edison spent years developing other necessary components, such as the parallel circuit, safety fuses and insulating materials, and of course, the critical piece, the carbon filament. A reporter once asked Edison how it felt to have failed two thousand times before he successfully discovered the carbon filament. Edison responded that he had not failed even once; he had successfully discovered two thousand materials that did not work.

Edison said that invention is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration, and that “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Yet would Edison have been just as motivated to labor so many years of his life if he did not think his sacrifice and effort would lead to great reward? Would you be willing to toil harder knowing you’d receive the same reward as your neighbor who put in forty hours a week at a menial job? Where would we be today without the Franklins, Edisons, and Fords of the world? Do we want to live in that world?

Too many Americans today look at Enron and WorldCom, at Solyndra and Goldman Sachs (which Obama gave billions in taxpayer bailout money before hiring a flock of its senior executives to work in his administration) and equate that corruption with free market capitalism, which it is not. That is crony capitalism, where Big Government and Big Businesses crawl in bed together at the expense of the consumer and taxpayer. True free market capitalism is a voluntary exchange of goods and services where both parties feel they have come out better.

Would you want to live under any other type of economy? Ask yourself this…when you are downloading one of half million available apps to your iPhone, which gives information on demand and provides entertainment, communication and productivity, do you shake your fist at the sky and scream in fury that the now-deceased Steve Jobs became a multi-billionaire off the backs of the working class…or do you marvel that you, a member of the working class, can afford a hand-held device that communicates with a satellite traveling 18,000 miles per hour above the earth in geosynchronous orbit, allowing you to talk to friends on the other side of the country for free, or just use birds as missiles to destroy villainous pigs?

Yeah…that’s what I thought.

The Proletariat Uprising Against Evil Corporations

2011-11-30T14:46:00.000-05:00

With the economy in a sustained recession, unemployment at or above nine percent for approaching three years, and tens of millions of Americans struggling just to put food on their table, perhaps few people or organizations have been showered with such hostility and ill-repute as have “corporations.” Yet, of all of the root causes of our current economic malaise, such contempt may nowhere be more misplaced.

Obama, after the shellacking his party took in the 2010 elections and with no end in sight to the economic downturn, has turned to finding a scapegoat or two to deflect blame for the anger and frustration America feels. His two favorite targets are Republican “obstructionism” and those evil, faceless corporations that steal from the poor to sate their insatiable greed.

Maybe he has a point though. After all, we all know that Steve Jobs became one of the richest men in the world as the head of Apple by hiring legions on thugs to go out across America to households and college campuses, brandishing guns and clubs and threatening violence if the poor masses did not give these brutes their money in exchange for little pieces of molded plastic and silicon and copper which Jobs called “Macs” and “iPods”, “iPhones” and “iPads”. His reign of terror was so complete that every time Jobs released a new version of these little pieces of plastic, hundreds and thousands of people would camp out overnight at one of his stores to give up their money in exchange for these gadgets, in the hope that by voluntarily doing so his thugs would not show up at their homes, schools and places of businesses and threaten them there.

Some have hailed this monster as a visionary, and entrepreneur and an innovator, but we all know that can’t possibly be so, for he was a CEO, the head of one of the nation’s largest and most (gasp!) profitable corporations, which we all know by now (thanks to President Obama, the Great Defender of the Common Man) are the universal epicenters of evil. Unless, of course, they produce “green” energy, which of course merits our unquestioned praise and adoration.

As bad as Apple is, it pales in comparison to the horrors unleashed by oil companies like Exxon and Chevron. These behemoths plunge their drill bits of death into the earth, extracting the black goo which is the lifeblood of commercialism in today’s world. This oil is refined and turned into things like plastics and gasoline. If we could stop these oil companies once and for all, we could return to the halcyon days before gasoline and cars, where we traveled by horse and carriage. Gone would be those noxious exhaust fumes, and we’d be able to enjoy the subtle fragrance of streets covered in horse manure and urine, with a gentle breeze created by the supple yet fervent beating of the wings of millions of flies preparing to feast. And if we rid ourselves of gasoline then we can sound the death knell for car companies like Ford and GM once and for all. What a glorious day that would be!

Of course, if we rid ourselves of the oil companies we’d have to go back to burning coal and wood to keep warm and generate light, which also creates more carbon emissions, but at least as we inhaled that smoke and soot we could take comfort in knowing that we will not be allowing the oil companies to make a single dime in profit.

Maybe our next target will be chemical companies. Why do we need purified water when our forefathers did just fine without it? So what if the water is filled with millions of tiny, flagellating microorganisms. Why should they die just so we can avoid the occasional bout of diarrhea? Aren’t they part of nature too? This would also end the practice of ripping scars into the earth to lay pipe to carry the water to us. Let us go back to the old ways, where we carried buckets from the rivers and streams when we needed water. To be sure, those pipes carry water both ways, so we’d have to go back to using chamber pots to get rid of our bodily eliminations. Be careful though, you do NOT want to have to clean up that spill!

And don’t even get me started on the pharmaceutical companies; they are among the worst offenders of all. It is their cornucopia of drugs which have drastically extended human life expectancy and led to worldwide overpopulation. If not for these meddling drug companies we’d still have widespread cases of smallpox, malaria and the plague, which is nature’s way of cleansing itself of the infestation of humanity. Without these drugs we’d revert back to the natural order, where disease killed off millions of humans and we died in our fifties (noting an additional salutary effect, we could finally deal with the rising cost of Social Security and Medicare if old people would go back to dying sooner). So we lose out on a little wisdom, and many grandkids never meet their grandparents. That is a worthwhile trade-off, right?

We also need to get rid of the mortgage and financial services companies, so we can go back to living with our parents until we can buy a house outright. No more borrowing from banks or credit unions, no more investments that eventually allow us to have a comfortable retirement; just keep working until you die.

We must join with Comrade President and his faithful legions of Democrat class warriors in banishing once and for all these evil corporations from the face of the earth. It will not be an easy job though. They have grown rich and powerful, and the only way to defeat them is to starve them to death, to drain them of the money obtained from the backs of the poor and downtrodden workers, the great proletariat of which Marx spoke.

So, join me this day in committing to never again aiding these corporations in their works of destruction and oppression. Never again give your money to bureaucrats at some faceless corporation. Never again spend money on their electricity, their gasoline, their canned and packaged foods, their clean water or life-saving drugs. Never again buy their clothing or shoes, and wear only that which you’ve made yourself (after growing and harvesting the cotton…buying fabric is cheating). Never again buy their iPods and iPads and iPhones, their Androids and tablet computers, their MP3 players or their flat-screen televisions. Never again use their Google search engines, their propane or natural gas to heat your home. Never again go to their vacation resorts or movie theaters or restaurants. Never again read their books, stream their internet, play their musical instruments, buy their pens and paper, or live in their homes.

Yet even that is not enough. If you are working for a corporation you are aiding in this work of oppression and evil. You must quit your job today and go back to farming the land for your sustenance. And don’t be fooled; just because the company you work for only employees a dozen or two dozen people, or even less, does not mean that it is not incorporated. So make sure your plumber, your electrician, your mechanic, your doctor, and all others you do business with are not incorporated.
Together, comrades, we can make this world a corporation-free utopia!

My Humble Apologies to Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-21T14:54:00.000-05:00

I need to offer an apology. For the last couple of months I’ve been highly critical of the Occupy Wall Street movement, accusing them of being violent, misbehaved, clueless social malcontents. However, in light of recent events, I’ve concluded I was wrong, and we should embrace the philosophy of government enforced equality for all. No more disparities in anything we do or have, just an equal distribution of everything to everyone.

I had this epiphany a few days ago while watching ESPN and coverage of the NBA lockout, now nearing its 150th day. What it boils down to is multi-millionaire owners and multi-millionaire players arguing over who gets the biggest piece of a multi-billion dollar league revenue pie. I realized that all of this bickering could be resolved by implementing the demands of equality espoused by the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

So here’s the deal…since President Obama wants to increase taxes on “the rich” who need to “pay their fair share” so that we can “spread the wealth”, we simply set the maximum NBA player salary at the level Obama defines as “rich”, which is $200,00 for an individual. That is $50,000 more per year that what it takes to be in the Top 5% of income earners in this country (a threshold which starts at just under $160,000). In fact, that will be the salary for EVERY NBA player, because it is immoral to discriminate simply on the basis of talent, productivity or some other performance-based metric. Just because one player was not born with the natural talent of another player, or refused to succumb to the oppressive dictates of some evil corporation (after all, the NBA is basically a big corporation) with its constant demands to maintain physical fitness and practice all the time, doesn’t mean they should be punished.

In addition, owners should only be able to charge an amount for tickets and merchandise which covers their costs, plus a $200,000 salary for themselves. After all, that is only fair, right? Just because they invest and risk their own money to build an industry that creates thousands of jobs directly, and even more jobs indirectly, doesn’t mean they should be able to get rich on the backs of the poor, downtrodden fans.

This new equality should not be limited to just to salaries though; it should extend to the basketball court. While winning is fun, losing just stinks. It makes the losers feel like, well, losers. Sometimes players even cry when they lose. It hurts their self esteem and makes them feel inferior to the winners. To solve this horrible injustice, I propose that at halftime of each game, the total points scored by that time be redistributed equally among the players of both teams. Then, with one second left on the clock, just before the game ends, the head referee will call time out and the official scorekeeper will once again redistribute the points evenly among the players of both teams.

Think how great this would be! Everyone that plays will be the high scorer. Never again will an NBA player experience the sadness of losing! Every team will be the L.A. Lakers or Boston Celtics, and no team will have to feel like the Washington Wizards or Toronto Raptors. Every team will go 82-0, and every player will be an MVP! It’s perfect! Just like PC-kiddie-soccer leagues, everyone is a winner and everyone gets a trophy. Isn’t this awesome?

This will set an example for the rest of society, and soon everyone will see the wisdom inherent in such equality of outcome. Never again will anyone feel depressed or unworthy simply because they were unable to achieve a goal, because results won’t matter, only the fact that you tried. And how hard you tried won’t matter either, because it is wrong to make someone work as hard as someone else. We would feel just awful if we were to cause stress by demanding someone work harder than they want to. Never again will childhood dreams be shattered simply because of a lack of ability, ambition or work ethic.

Granted, as a society we will have to accept that there will be a small price to pay for this newfound parity. We may lose a billion dollar spacecraft here or there when little Johnny, who always dreamed of being an astronaut when he grew up, dies a ghastly death when the ship burns up upon re-entry into the atmosphere because poor Johnny never mastered the finer points of astrophysics and geometry, so was unable to bring the spacecraft in at the correct angle to keep himself from turning into a human bacon bit.

There might be the occasional sacrifice that hits closer to home when little Sally, who always wanted to be a surgeon but could never quite remember the names and anatomical characteristics of the various human organs, accidentally mistakes the aorta for the appendix and snips that sucker right out of there. Oops! That’s gonna make a mess! Alas, poor mom, we loved you and will miss you, but the loss of your life was the acceptable price for keeping Sally’s self-esteem intact by letting her become the surgeon she always wanted to be, even if she never quite mastered the minutiae of performing surgery.

Of course, we’ll also have to accept a drastic slowdown, if not an outright cessation, in technological innovation. These last two decades have seen an explosion in the quantity and speed on new technology. Twenty years ago if you were on the go and needed to contact someone, you pulled into the parking lot of a gas station and used the pay phone. If it was urgent but the person you were trying to contact was not at the place you were calling, you may have to sit there and wait for a little while until they finally answered, or spend a few dollars worth of quarters calling around until you found them. Today we have smart phones, where you dial a number and it connects with a satellite in space and beams a stream of data back down to earth which connects with the other person’s phone, regardless of whether that person is sitting at home or traveling 85MPH down the interstate (in metro Atlanta, if you drive less than 70MPH you had better be in the turn lane or risk getting run over).

We’ll likely never again see innovations like MP3 players, lap tops thinner and lighter than a paperback novel, 3D television, streaming movies, MRI machines, robotic surgery, 3D ultrasound, Facebook and text messaging, commercial space flight, internet search engines, cars that get 50MPG, or who knows what else. Literally, who knows what else? We can’t predict these inventions because they are the product of the ingeniousness of the human mind.

On the other hand, it is well worth giving up these life-saving, productivity increasing technologies that make our lives easier and longer, more efficient and leisurely, as the price for government enforced universal equality. The people that created these inventions were willing to risk their time and capital for the chance of getting rich. Often they were funded by evil corporations seeking to make a profit! It’s doubtful they’ll take the risk with so little reward, but that’s okay, right?.

So here’s to a long (although not as long as it would have been with new technologies and skilled men and women bringing us life-saving inventions) life of stress free, universally enforced mediocrity, where no one is exceptional because we are all exceptional. Call 1-800-IMA-WINNER to order your first place trophy.

When Lambs Lay Down With (Nittany) Lions

2011-11-14T15:37:00.000-05:00

Over the past week, we’ve been inundated with lurid details of the deviant exploits of Jerry Sandusky, former long-time defensive coordinator for the Penn State University football team under legendary coach Joe Paterno. Sandusky has been indicted on numerous counts of molestation and rape of boys as young as ten years old. According to the charges, Sandusky molested nearly a dozen boys over a fifteen year span, many of which he encountered due to his work with The Second Mile, a charity for at-risk youth. One must now wonder whether he founded the organization specifically to give himself better access to troubled boys.

As the story has developed, we learn that a graduate assistant with the football team walked in on Sandusky and a young boy in the locker room showers, with Sandusky performing sexual acts on the boy. The assistant, Mike McQueary, reported the incident to Coach Paterno, who reported it to the university president. From there the story begins to diverge, but the reported facts tell a story of a shameful abdication of moral responsibility which left numerous young boys as victims of a sexual predator. As of this writing, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and former VP of Business and Finance Gary Schultz have been criminally charged for actions relating to covering up evidence of a crime and committing perjury. University President Graham Spanier and Coach Joe Paterno were then fired on Wednesday night after a meeting of the Board of Trustees, and both may end up facing criminal charges before all is said and done.

While Paterno may have met the absolute minimum legal requirement when he reported the incident to Spanier, morally, his actions were reprehensible. He knew that there were credible allegations of the most vile of crimes having been committed by Sandusky, yet after reporting the incident he seems to have forgotten about it. No follow up, no attempt to make sure Sandusky was never in a position to harm a child again; in fact, just the opposite. Even after resigning abruptly from his position after an investigation years after the initial allegations, the university gave Sandusky full access to the campus, including the athletic facilities and showers, up until last week.

As I sat watching the coverage on television following the announcement that Paterno had been fired, I was disgusted by the actions of thousands of Penn State students that had congregated in support of Paterno. The students, knowing of Paterno’s inaction (by his own admission he had not done enough to protect the victims), still carried signs and chanted in support of Paterno. When news came down of the firing, students rioted and destroyed property, including a television news van.

Is winning football games so important that we see as acceptable the sacrifice of small children to the deviant appetites of sexual predators? Joe Paterno may be the winningest coach in college football history, with a career spanning well over half a century, but his record will, in the minds of decent human beings, be but a footnote to the fact that he allowed this travesty under his watch; that for fifteen years he allowed children to be permanently scarred by this monster. His defiance in the face of these revelations, his pathetic, half-hearted mea culpa, cannot undo his sins. That his legacy is forever tarnished is only fitting.

At the same time, I must ask why this is so shocking. We live in a society that has become progressively more tolerant, and even embracing, of such deviancy. We live in a society that mocks the sanctity of sexual relations within the confines of marriage, which ridicules such notions as antiquated and prudish. We watch passively as our culture becomes hyper-sexualized, as children of younger and younger ages are not only exposed to such sexualization, but actively indoctrinated in it. There are tens of thousands of pornographic websites on the internet, and pornography is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Does anyone actually believe that this industry is not working to get their customers addicted to pornography as early as possible, like the tobacco industry did in getting people hooked on cigarettes?

Shortly after taking office, President Obama appointed Kevin Jennings to be his “Safe Schools Czar”, a position which turned out (like so many things this president says and does) to have the exact opposite agenda as the name would imply. Jennings was the founder of GLSEN (The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), an organization which promoted the homosexual agenda in our public schools, teaching young children about the virtues of homosexuality and indoctrinating them into the belief that to oppose homosexuality is to “hate” homosexuals. Jennings was eventually forced to resign as more information about his past came out, including the fact that when a 15-year old boy revealed he’d met a much older man and engaged in sex with the boy (a felony), he simply told the boy to be careful and wear a condom.

In another recent story, it appears that the Girl Scouts of the USA has decided to avoid the harassment, criticism and lawsuits from organizations representing sexual deviants. A troop in Colorado recently prevented a seven-year old boy from joining (it seems he did not meet the primary qualification of…being a GIRL) but, in the face of criticism, did an about-face and allowed the boy to join, stating that other boys could join as long as they were “living life as a girl”. What kind of insanity is this? Seven year old boys can’t figure out how to wear matching clothes on their own or remember to take a bath, yet we now believe they are capable of making decisions about human sexuality, a concept they are far too young to even grasp?

Regarding Sandusky (and other similar stories), one wonders how a man could reach a point of such depravity. The answer lies in the science of sexuality. In a recent study on pornography, Dutch scientist Gert Holstege observed that the rush of viewing extreme pornography is physiologically similar to the rush obtained by a heroine user. And like heroine users, prolonged use requires more and more of it to get that “high”. Other studies have shown that extended use of pornography actually “re-wires” the neuro-chemical pathways of the brain, to the point where the “moral/judgment center” of the brain is completely bypassed when exposed to the stimuli. In other words, over time porn addicts require more and more extreme and deviant pornography to achieve that rush, to the point that eventually it is simply not enough. Their new searches for that high lead them to these child victims, and by this point they have suppressed their moral compass too much to care about the damage they are doing.

Today, defenders of moral deviancy claim the mantel of freedom. They claim to be fighting for pornography as a matter of free speech. How ironic that we are watching restrictions on pornography and deviancy fall by the wayside, even as we place more and more restrictions on religious and political speech.

President John Adams once said that the Constitution is made for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other. We should keep that in mind. We can employ semantics and sophistry to our hearts’ content to justify our increasing acceptance, and even embrace, of deviancy, but that will not change the laws of human nature as outlined by our Creator. Violations of “the laws of…Nature’s God” come with a price. This week, we learned of the price paid by some young boys in Pennsylvania…a heavy price indeed.

Pontificating on a New Global Economic Authority

2011-11-08T12:38:00.001-05:00

Recently, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (a branch of the Roman Curia established to promote justice, peace and human rights in the world from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church) released a treatise on the global monetary system entitled “Note on Financial Reform”, which examines what it believes to be the root cause of global suffering and inequality, and proposed solutions to remedy that suffering. Normally a religious pronouncement of this nature would elicit little more than a few raised eyebrows, but coming from on official body of a church whose adherents account for nearly one quarter of the global population, one must give weight to the commentary regardless of concurrence in the conclusions.

Weighing in at just under 6500 words, a detailed analysis in this space is impossible, so some general summarizations are necessary. In short, the Pontifical Council seems to believe that the root of global suffering lies in an unequal distribution of resources, growth of credit markets that far outpaced real markets (agriculture, manufacturing, etc.), a world too enamored with capitalism, a lack of regulation and control on national and supranational financial transactions and markets, and the need for governing authorities to submit acquisition of material wealth and national sovereignty to the needs of the global “common good.”

With all due respect to the august body of the leadership of the Catholic Church, while they make a valid point regarding the physical suffering of many, the assessment of the root causes is, in my opinion, deeply in error, and as a result the Council’s conclusions and proposals are also in error.

In a preliminary section titled “Presupposition”, it states that “Every individual and every community shares in and is responsible for promoting the common good.” Yet what constitutes the “common good”? Who makes that determination, and how is that determination enforced? To what extent are you and I responsible for the material well-being of our neighbor? Does this extend beyond basic human needs? Is the requirement to facilitate equality of material wealth mitigated by the level of effort an individual (and by extension, a community, state or nation) to provide those needs for themselves, or a lack of effort to do so?

In a theoretical sense, the lofty goal of “equality” is laudable. After all, no person of good conscience would want to see another suffer if they can alleviate that suffering. Yet there are infinite variables that play into this equation, to the point where it is simply not possible to achieve equality without reducing freedom. Our Declaration of Independence names four rights with which all humans are born; life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the right of people to alter or abolish governments which become destructive of the ends of the first three rights. Since billions of humans will never come to a consensus on what constitutes the common good or how to achieve it, to enact that common good requires governing authorities with power to enforce their will. The more power granted to that governing authority, the less freedom left to the individual.

The Council goes on to state that “Global economic well-being, traditionally measured by national income and also by levels of capacities, grew during the second half of the twentieth century, to an extent and with a speed never experienced in the history of humankind…But the inequalities within and between various countries have also grown significantly. While some of the more industrialized and developed countries and economic zones…have seen their income grow considerably, other countries have in fact been excluded from the overall improvement of the economy and their situation has even worsened.”

So what led to such expansive economic growth over the course of the 20th century, and which nations benefited most? The United States, which began as a small, weak group of states overshadowed by the dominant world powers of England, France and Spain, established a form of government that maximized individual freedom while limiting the power of government to interfere with those human activities that did not infringe on the rights of others. As a result, the United States is today the world’s lone superpower, a nation which, while containing barely 4% of the world’s population and about 6% of the Earth’s total land mass, nevertheless manages to produce (according to the CIA Factbook) an incredible 24% of global economic output. Interestingly, according to a recent U.S. News article, the U.S. percentage of global economic output rose from an anemic 2% in the early 1800’s, to a staggering 36% just fifty years later. Yet today we see American economic superiority on the decline, and it is little wonder that during this decline we have seen an explosion in government control and regulation of the economy, as well as manipulation of paper currency in a way not possible when our currency was tied to the Gold Standard.

The Council says “the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and the hoarding of goods on a great scale.” Yet once again this is a matter of interpretation. For example, who is “greedy”? The man who works sixty hours per week to earn enough to provide material security and comfort for himself and his family and who wants to keep the fruits of that labor; or the man who works thirty hours a week, does not seek to improve his education or labor skills, and then demands a portion of the fruit of the other man’s labors simply because the other man has more material wealth (as a result of working harder and smarter)?

Discussing the types and causes of social injustice and poverty, the Pontifical Council then eases into a frightening solution; namely, the creation of a “world political Authority” (in the mold of the United Nations, an organization with a lofty mission statement yet one historically riddled with corruption and scandal), one “inspired by the values of charity and truth,” whose purpose would be to implement an equal distribution of wealth around the globe for the common good. And while it initially calls for this body to enact reforms through the acceptance of an obligation to help our fellow man, it later opens the door to the use of force when it discusses how to make these policies “binding”.

The Pontifical Council would be well served to recall that charity, by definition, is an individual pursuit, and a commandment of Jesus Christ to his followers. Charity must be voluntarily given and therefore, when the ends are achieved through political force, it ceases to be charity and instead becomes legally coerced extortion.

The Holy Bible, in Luke Chapter 18, tells of a rich man that comes unto Christ seeking the path to eternal life. The Lord tells him to keep the commandments. The man declares that “all these things have I done from my youth and up,” to which the Lord replies that he should sell all he has and give to the poor. The man leaves in sorrow because he can’t bear to part with his riches. Yet the decision to be charitable was the man’s to make, and Christ did not send the disciples to hold the man down, take his riches and give to the poor in the name of “social justice”.

I applaud the Catholic Church’s desire to save the human soul and alleviate physical suffering, but it should maintain that effort as it has done traditionally, through the voluntary efforts and contributions of its believers. Considering the levels of corruption, greed, immorality and incompetence of pretty much every single government in the world, it is a frightening thought to consider giving such unquestioned, widespread power to any government, much less a global government, no matter how inspirational its goals may sound.

More Random Musings and a Rebuttal

2011-11-01T13:38:00.001-04:00

I have a confession to make…I love hate mail. I actually get disappointed if I go too long without getting a really nasty e-mail from someone. Hate mail means that I have challenged someone’s assumptions at a core level. Hopefully this irritates them enough to do research to try and mount an effective rebuttal, and in the process hopefully learn new truth. I don’t even care if hate mail comes from the political left or right. We all need our assumptions challenged. I used to be a die-hard advocate of the War on Drugs, until I looked at the facts and saw how it had failed at its stated purpose of reducing drug use, while simultaneously being used to destroy constitutional rights with such things as asset forfeiture laws, which allows government to accuse you of drug related activity, seize your assets, and then make you spend enormous money fighting them to prove your innocence and regain your property. Most people just give in to this tyranny.

Last week I offered some random thoughts, and I figured I’d do more of the same this week. However, before I do, I’ll respond to a few comments from an angry reader of last week’s article. The reader took exception to my mockery of the Occupy Wall Street protestors, accusing me of misrepresenting them. She said I ignored “corporate greed” and oppression of the poor, and asked “about all the corporations that want more and more from the general public”. She was upset that I pointed out that the socioeconomic demographic with the highest obesity rates is those below the poverty line, and claimed that it’s cheaper to eat junk food than to eat healthy fruits and vegetables.

As for the OWS protestors, I actually sympathize with their position against corporate bailouts. In fact, another big protest group, the TEA Party, has been protesting that for about two years, with the only difference being that the media paints them as violent racists while ignoring the actual violence and anti-social behavior of the OWS protestors. The problem I have with the OWS movement is that it complains about corporate bailouts, then turns around and demands bailouts for themselves. They want their student loans forgiven, and free healthcare, and high paying jobs regardless of the value they bring to their employer. Government can’t give any good or service to someone without it having been taken from someone else. These OWS protestors aren’t against greed; they just demand that the recipients be themselves. They seem ignorant of the fact that a major reason unemployment is so high is because heavy taxes on small businesses (which create about three quarters of all new jobs) is used to bail out politically connected corporations, which takes capital out of the private market that otherwise would have been used to expand business and add jobs.

Concerning the claim that “corporations…want more and more from the general public”, of course they do! They want to grow! Growth brings in profits which can be used to grow more. Growth creates jobs! We all want more. That is human nature. It should be noted that that in a true free market, corporations can only get “more and more” from the general public by creating a product or service that drives demand, like the iPhone or iPad, the Ford F150, or the Chick-Fil-A sandwich. People willingly give up their money because they want that product more than they want their money, and the corporations want the consumers’ money more than they want their products. It is a voluntary transaction where both parties feel they came out ahead. The free market is not a zero sum game. The exception is when corporations get consumer money by force, and that can only occur when they lobby government to exert force in their behalf. So the problem is not corporations, it’s government which takes from taxpayers and gives to corporations in exchange for political donations and power brokering.

The claim that junk food is less expensive than healthy food is pure nonsense. My wife and I have eight children, and in the twenty years we’ve been married she’s cooked fried food exactly zero times. It is a point of pride that half my kids have never eaten at McDonald’s. We make meals at home that are filled with fresh fruits and vegetables and lots of grains, and my kids are very healthy because of it. After checking our budget, I found we feed a family of ten on about $1000/month, which comes to $11.11 per meal, or $1.11 per person per meal. So for less than the cost of two McDonald’s “value meals”, we feed a family of ten home-cooked, healthy food. So it is simply a myth that eating healthy is more expensive.

Now, for a few more random thoughts…

Joe Biden says Republican obstructionism will lead to more rapes and murders if the $447 billion Obama “jobs” bill is not passed. The problem is that only $5 billion, according to Democrat Harry Reid, will go to “retain” police and firefighters, not add more. Unless these cops are clairvoyant and can see into the future to when and where these murders and rapes will occur, they won’t be reducing them. It should also be noted that Biden made these comments in Flint, Michigan, which spent the $2.2 million it received from last stimulus on…electric buses. Unfortunately those buses were never delivered because the bus company went out of business, despite a $1.6 million taxpayer loan.

Obama has been lionized by liberal media pundits and intelligentsia as “the smartest guy ever to become president” whose “IQ is off the charts”, who is “sort of God” and a man for whom the presidency was “a step down”. Yet this was a man whose credentials included being a student at Harvard, being a “community organizer”, getting elected to the Illinois state senate (where his most notable accomplishment was speaking against a bill that would have required physicians to give life-saving care to babies that survived abortion attempts), and then being elected to the U.S. Senate. He never held an executive position, never ran a business. His presidency has yielded sustained high unemployment and more debt accumulation in three years than every president from George Washington to George H.W. Bush combined.

By contrast, liberals mock Herman Cain as the Republicans’ “token black man” who is used to deflect charges of racism. This TEA Party favorite is a man that grew up in Atlanta as the son of poor parents who worked service jobs to provide for basic needs. He graduated from Morehouse College with a mathematics degree, earned a Master’s degree in computer science from Purdue “while working full-time developing fire control systems for ships and fighter planes for the Department of the Navy.” He then went into business, turning around Burger King franchises in Philadelphia and later resurrecting Godfather’s Pizza. He also served as chairman of the board for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

So, while the presidency does not require a man who is an economist or a rocket scientist, if it did, Herman Cain would be your man. It makes one wonder why liberals attempt to tear down a black man of such great accomplishment.

Finally, why is it that on the television show “House”, no matter how bizarre the case or confusing the symptoms, Dr. House always has sarcoidosis or lupus as one of the initial diagnoses? One would think after 158 episodes without that being discovered as the actual cause, he’d throw them out of his Top Ten.

Random Musings

2011-10-24T13:58:00.000-04:00

As a voracious consumer of news regarding current events and politics, it occurred to me this week that to a person of sanity and sound reason, listening to and reading the coverage of what is going on in our nation and world today is so far removed from reality, historical experience and logic as to be the product of a journalist reporting live from the bottom of that rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. We regularly hear from people considered leaders by many, uttering the most incredibly nonsensical things with a straight face, fully expecting the rest of us to believe them. Indeed, often these things are uttered with such seemingly powerful sincerity that even the sane begin to question themselves.

So…a few random thoughts from the passing week…

Judging by recent stories from California, the nickname for that state should be changed from the “Golden State” to the “Granola State”, because it is positively the land of fruits and nuts. California, with a debt rating of A- (the lowest of any state), annual deficits of billions of dollars, and long-term debt obligations to public employee unions that amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, nevertheless recently decided to double down on lunacy by passing the “California Dream Act”, a state version of the federal law that would give in-state tuition and more lavish taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens and their children. This is a magnet for more illegal immigration, and in the end the state will continue its rapid descent into bankruptcy.

This is a perfect example of the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in establishing a federalist system which gives primacy to a narrowly-defined set of powers to the federal government, and leaves all else to the states or the people. Californians are welcome to engage in such collective fiscal suicide if they desire, but when the inevitable consequences hit, the federal government should by no means bail the state out. Unfortunately, being America’s most populous state, the cries that it is “too big to fail” will be great. If such ends up being the case, I propose that California lose all rights to send electors to the Electoral College until such time as the American taxpayers are paid back in full, with interest, by California.

Two other stories from California concern two laws recently passed by the state. The first law forbids anyone under age eighteen from using a tanning bed (which, after tossing aside the coddling nannyism behind it, sounds reasonable at first given the threat of skin cancer), but the second law would allow juveniles over age twelve to make their own decisions regarding medical care concerning sexually transmitted diseases and such, without the consent of a parent or guardian. To put this in perspective, it means that a seventeen-year old girl is committing a crime if she uses a tanning bed, but a thirteen-year old girl is perfectly within the law when she walks into Planned Parenthood and requests an abortion without her parents’ knowledge.

Continuing the lunacy of the Granola State is the story of Thomas, an eleven-year old son of lesbian parents who started him on a regimen of hormone blockers to delay the onset of puberty while he works through his decision to become a transgendered woman. Imagine that…a boy that grows up as the son of lesbian women deciding he does not want to grow up to be a man, and is therefore willing to put his health at significant risk to achieve an emulation of his parentage. Stories like this expose the absolute ludicrousness of the claim that children do not need to be reared by a mother and a father in a loving home. The fact that many heterosexual relationships are not healthy in no way changes the fact that children need both the male and female influence in their upbringing to have the optimal chance become a healthy adult, both physically and psychologically.

Showing a severe irony deficiency, many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters this week complained bitterly that they had been the victims of theft at the hands of some of their fellow OWS protestors. According to the NY Post, “Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment,” said Nan Terrie, 18, a kitchen and legal-team volunteer from Fort Lauderdale…I had my Mac stolen -- that was like $5,500. Every night, something else is gone. Last night, our entire [kitchen] budget for the day was stolen, so the first thing I had to do was…get the message out to our supporters that we needed food!” So let me get this straight…protestors that for weeks have condemned the evils of corporations and “the rich”, demanding the use of government force to take from them and give to the “less fortunate”, are now complaining that others have taken from them the expensive products made by evil corporations that they use to fulfill their basic needs and wants, and to get out the message of the evils of corporations? Personally, I find the irony delicious indeed.

While the media has lavished positive coverage on the Occupy Wall Street crowd, with a portrayal of nobility that they would never grant the TEA Party protesters (this despite the violence, vandalism, theft and general anti-social behavior of these petulant ingrates), it also echoes their mantra that the evil rich, “the 1%”, should be punished for their greed. President Obama has fueled this hate and envy with his constant demagoguery of “millionaires and billionaires” (millions of which are small business owners earning gross revenue of as little as $200,000 annually) and “corporate jet owners” which he uses as a symbol of greed.

Yet who is ringing the bell of warning as to what occurs if Obama gets his way and corporate jets become extinct as a luxury that none should have since all can’t have? What happens to the millions of people employed in the production of those corporate jets either directly or as suppliers of materials and finished components? What happens to the machinists, electronics manufacturers, producers of avionics, suppliers of aviation fuel, and the employees of the hundreds of small airports dotting the nation? What happens to the airline mechanics, the sheet metal workers, the carpenters and electricians, the suppliers of exotic woods and leather? They all become unemployed. Of course, to a Democrat that means that the economy would improve, as evidenced by former Speaker of the House and Democrat Nancy Pelosi, who explained to us that unemployment checks are the quickest way to stimulate the economy.

We are also getting a confused message from Democrat leadership elsewhere. Obama wants the Congress to pass his $447 billion “jobs” bill, which is nothing more than “Stimulus Jr.” If a trillion dollar stimulus resulted in a net loss of jobs, what does Obama think that half that amount will do? Result in only half as many more jobs lost? Maybe he should talk to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who this week declared that "It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers.” Maybe he should check with the millions and millions of Americans currently unemployed or underemployed who might disagree.

So then, we may ask, why is a raven like a writing desk? That is a discussion for next time, Alice.

Occupy Wall Street: The Young and the Clueless

2011-10-17T14:49:00.000-04:00

"Now since man is naturally inclined to avoid pain - and since labor is pain in itself - it follows that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work. History shows this quite clearly. And under these conditions, neither religion nor morality can stop it." ~French Economist Frederick Bastiat, 1845, Economic Sophisms”

"There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity." ~President Ronald Reagan

For the past few weeks, America has been treated to a steady news coverage diet of Occupy Wall Street, a motley amalgam of former hippies, idealistic but misinformed college students, Marxist advocates, seekers of mayhem for mayhem’s sake, and the just plain clueless. Welcome to the Flea Party, the far left’s answer to the organic uprising of the TEA Party. However, that is where the comparison stops. Whereas the TEA Party uprising has been peaceful, the Flea Party has been a study in anti-social behavior masquerading as noble civil disobedience.

While most of the mainstream news organizations have tried to put a positive spin on these gatherings, pictures of the gatherings on YouTube, Facebook and other media expose the disingenuousness of the claim. In New York, the NYPD has arrested nearly a thousand protestors, many of which were arrested after walking down the traffic lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge, which rendered the bridge impassable to vehicle traffic. One NYT article reported that “None of the protesters interviewed knew if the bridge march was planned or a spontaneous decision by the crowd. But all insisted that the police had made no mention that the roadway was off limits”, which just proves that these people are too stupid to walk to the corner store without an adult present, and surely should not be offering commentary on the complexities of the free market.

Some have been arrested for attacking police officers, another was arrested for defecating on a police car, and yet another for defecating on an American flag. Ironically, the byproduct of that action produced more intelligence than the combined ruminations of the entire protesting assembly. Some of the protestors were having sex in public. Crowds would chant repetitiously the words of the speaker, as if hypnotized cult members. These protests have left mountains of trash in their wake. Protestors carry signs with such captions as “Soon, the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich,” “Money hungry fascist bankers”, “One Nation Under Greed”, “Kill or be killed”, and of course a wide variety of signs for various socialist, communist, Marxist and World Workers Party organizations. I could not help but be amused at two pictures in particular, each of a person lamenting the unfairness of their lack of employment, yet seemingly oblivious to the impact that the numerous face and body tattoos, facial piercings and general appearance might have had on their employment status.

These protests were filled with ironies. While these imbeciles raged against “corporate greed”, they got the word out by using the products of corporations such as smartphones (Apple, HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc.), by tweeting (Twitter), Facebooking, digital cameras (Nikon, Sony, Kodak, Canon), video cameras (Panasonic), signs made from cardboard (Kimberly-Clark) with black markers (Sharpie), while wearing clothes made by large corporations (Levis-Strauss, Eddie Bauer, Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister).

A casual perusal of videos containing interviews with the protestors shows that the vast majority have little or no clue as to what they are protesting. Some openly admit they are there for a little fun by joining in the protest. Many lambast “corporate greed”, but then show that they have no clue as to how much profits corporations make versus gross revenues, or the amount of money they pay in taxes. Some express outrage that Wall Street corporations were bailed out, yet seem oblivious to the fact that one of the largest recipients of bailout money is Goldman-Sachs, of which Obama has placed literally dozens of upper-level former employees in important positions in his administration.

This group of unwashed rabble-rousers has a cheering section as well. None other than the Class-Warrior-in-Chief himself, President Barack Obama, said that "I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works." In the same interview he also defended the bailouts as necessary, but that seemed to escape the attention of the majority of the protestors. When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about the Occupy Wall Street protesters, she responded "God bless them … it's young, it's spontaneous, it's focused and it's going to be effective." At times the protestors were joined by liberal millionaires such as Kanye West, Tim Robbins and the bloated, bloviating behemoth Michael Moore (a man who has grown quite rich by making “documentaries” about corporate greed). Once again, the protestors seem oblivious to the irony of such solidarity.

The entire exercise would be comical if it were not such a devastating commentary of the travesty of ignorance that our education system has produced, with so many of the younger generation clueless as to the basic tenets of our free market economy and the prosperity it produces for all when unshackled from the chains of government. A recent government report on “poverty” in America found that the vast majority of America’s “poor” have air conditioning, at least one color TV, cell phones, microwave ovens, and a car or truck. These are items that would have been considered luxuries not too long ago. Another oddity regarding the poor is that they are statistically more likely to be overweight than those in upper income levels, exposing the tear-jerking yet fallacious narrative of Dickensian poverty in America.

The bottom line is that America is a land of opportunity still, and there is significant income mobility, meaning those that start off poor rise up through the wealth strata over time as they gain more experience and skills. Of course, that requires the whiny little ingrates (who are now demanding that corporations and the rich be taxed more in order to pay for their education, healthcare and whatever else they want) to learn a new four-letter word…W-O-R-K. It is amazing how there is a direct corollary between the amount of education and work one pursues and the amount of wealth one accumulates.

My advice to the protestors? Go home, take a shower, wear pants that don’t show your behind or your navel, stop turning yourself into a walking, talking wall of graffiti, get rid of the eyebrow rings, the nose rings, the lip rings, the angry glare, the bad attitude, the sense of entitlement, study hard, work hard, show respect and humility. You’ll be amazed at how many opportunities will open up as a result.

A Global Warming Challenge for Liberals

2011-10-10T16:28:00.001-04:00

For several years now there has been an ongoing debate regarding the impetus for President Obama’s economic policies. Were they the work of the smartest president in history, a man so intelligent that his wisdom could supplant the collective experience and choices of 300 million Americans, and in so doing restore our economy? Were they the well-intentioned but errant contemplations on an Ivy League egghead with lots of “book learnin’”, but without a shred of private sector experience that is the proving grounds for such ideas, being exposed to the unmerciful judgment of markets? Was he a Kenyan-born Manchurian candidate sent to infiltrate our ranks, rise to power and then destroy the country from within?

At this point I have come to the conclusion that it is an intentional effort to replace America’s free-enterprise system with a democratic-socialist style, centrally-planned, government run economy. Look at the evidence…the massive stimulus package which failed spectacularly, the auto union bailouts, government employee bailouts, Cash for Clunkers, Son of Stimulus, and myriad other economic “remedies”. Combine this with calls for increased taxes of “the rich”, more regulation and more government intervention in the market, and we end up with a long-term stagnant economy. One can no longer chalk it up to pure stupidity. If it were pure stupidity then the law of probabilities would dictate that Obama would have made the right decisions, even if only by accident, somewhat approaching fifty percent of the time.

Maybe the most costly and intrusive example of this government intervention that most Americans are unaware of (or at least unaware of the level of damage being done by it) is the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA was ostensibly founded to protect air and water quality, endangered species, etc. Yet today it has become a bludgeon used by government to circumvent the legislative process in pursuit of the elimination of private property rights. Bureaucrats at the EPA continually pass regulations and issue edicts that have the force of law without ever being exposed to the will of the people through the legislative process.

In order to justify their power grab, bureaucrats must have a pending catastrophe to use as an excuse to circumvent the will of the people, and always under the guise of being done for their own good. In the 1970’s it was the “coming Ice Age” which threatened the Earth, as well as population growth which was going to lead to a dearth of food and resources, which would cause a hundred million deaths.

Today the catastrophe comes in the form of “global warming”, the theory that man’s industrial activity is leading to elevated levels of carbon dioxide, which in turn warms the earth, which in turn melts the icebergs, which in turn causes sea levels to rise, which in turn is going to cause New York City skyscrapers to be underwater and Guam to tip over (…strike that last part…Guam capsizing would be the result of putting too many Marines on the island, making it too heavy on one side, according to Democrat Rep. Hank Johnson).

The problem now, at least for liberals, is that with each passing day more and more Americans stop believing in the dark fairy tale of global warming. And without that belief and the accompanying fear, liberals can’t get enough support to pass global warming bills into law, and therefore they miss out on the chance to expand government power. This falling support for the global warming nonsense is justified. NASA had to revise its predictions when it was discovered they were using faulty temperature data. The revised data showed that we are actually in a decade long cooling trend. Then you have the hacked e-mails from the East Anglia University CRU (Climate Research Unit), which showed that the lead scientists were frantically falsifying climate data when they discovered that the actual data did not support their political agenda (and put future billion dollar government grants at risk). In short, the entire foundation for global warming theory is being exposed as a huge lie perpetrated not only on the America people, but the entire world, all to justify the confiscation of private wealth to combat this phantom menace.

Of course, there are millions of liberals today that are still crying like weak-kneed Cassandras, warning us that the problem is all too real and the Earth is plummeting towards destruction unless we enact a full scale assault on industry to reverse the damage. We are told that the contradicting evidence is the work of conspiring capitalists and evil coal, oil and gas company executives. Yes, Chicken Little, the sky is falling.

This week a report was released that revealed that the EPA is preparing to hire 230,000 new bureaucrats to process the paperwork associated with the agency’s decision to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under cover of the Clean Air Act. The newer, incredibly stringent standards will mean that the number of businesses which are currently regulated by the EPA for CO2 emissions will jump from 14,000 to an estimated 6.1 million. The cost to taxpayers for the new staff is expected to be at least $21 billion.

This is hugely controversial considering the diametrically opposed positions of each side, and the cost incurred to business and taxpayers if continued. Yet I believe I’ve come up with a solution. The crux of the problem is proving whether global warming is the cause of man’s activity or natural cycles. I propose a scientific experiment to end the debate once and for all, and the test is really quite easy. The natural byproduct of human respiration is carbon dioxide. According to calculations by the chemistry department at UC-Berkeley (a liberal bastion that other liberals cannot therefore refute), the average adult human produces 360 liters of carbon dioxide per day. If we extrapolate that out, then we find that 360 liters/day x 365 days per year = 131,400 liters per year per adult human. So, if we assume everyone that voted for Obama supports his policies and would sacrifice to see him succeed, we now have a control group.

Now, if we take the 69.5 million people that voted for Obama, who each produce 131,100 liters of carbon dioxide per year through respiration, we conclude that Obama supporters produce 9,104,500,000,000 liters of carbon dioxide annually (yes, that is 9.1 trillion liters). If they are right, that has to be doing a lot of damage to the environment. My proposal is this; in order to prove their claims, all Obama supporters should voluntarily refrain from exhaling for a period of one year. If the corresponding elimination of 9.1 trillion liters of carbon dioxide produces a measurable decrease in the Earth's temperature, the rest of us will jump on board and enact whatever laws are necessary to combat this meteorological menace. If there is no corresponding temperature drop despite such a drastic reduction in CO2, then we get to drop this nonsense once and for all, and allow people to enjoy the standard of living we’ve attained, and allow businesses to be unshackled from nanny government.

Everybody on board?

Barack Obama is no George Washington

2011-09-26T13:30:00.001-04:00

Earlier this week, our illustrious president performed his latest material from the “BHO World Comedy Tour”. Following up on some of his earlier knee-slapping, rib-busting Greatest Hits material such as “Mine Will Be the Most Transparent Administration in History”, “If You Like Your Insurance Plan, You Can Keep It”, “I Will Not Sign Any Bills That Contain Earmarks”, “There Will Be No Lobbyists in My Administration”, and of course, the very popular and hilarious “If You Pass This Stimulus Bill, Unemployment Will Stay Below Eight Percent”, Obama now releases his latest bit, “George Washington Agrees With Me on Taxes”. For a collector of comedy gems, this is an absolute must have.

This latest routine was performed from the White House’s Rose Garden. Showing a mastery of subtle comic genius, Obama performed this bit as if it were a serious policy speech. As it turns out, Obama was not attempting to land a sit-com on NBC after he leaves office. Depressingly, he actually believes this.

The purpose of his address was to garner support for his agenda of ever-increasing spending by government, and ever more private wealth confiscated by government bureaucrats and politicians to pay for it. Despite having these attempts repeatedly rejected by both houses of Congress and even by his own party (remember the 97-0 vote to reject his budget earlier this year?), Obama is still seeking to stoke populist rage against “the rich” in order to get his latest job-killing bill passed.

No matter how charismatic and soothing the voice delivering the rhetoric, it is simply impossible to hide the putridity of the manure being shoveled under the guise of job creation and debt reduction. According to the eternal Campaigner-in-Chief, “It’s always more popular to promise the moon and leave the bill for after the next election or the election after that. That’s been true since our founding. George Washington grappled with this problem. He said, ‘Towards the payment of debts, there must be revenue, that to have revenue there must be taxes, [and] no taxes can be devised which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant.’ He understood that dealing with the debt is—these are his words—‘always a choice of difficulties.’ ”

Obama has taken a select few words out of context and twisted them to imply that George Washington, arguably our greatest president, would approve of the monstrously bloated leviathan that we call the federal government. Yet is that true? Would Washington have approved of a federal government that is now at $16 trillion in debt and climbing in perpetuity, a government that devours enormous quantities of taxpayer dollars? Obama has admonished us against saddling future generations will huge debts, yet even his own rosiest budgets project nearly $1 trillion deficits for years to come (projections, by the way, which depend on levels of GDP growth triple and quadruple what we have seen for the last few years).

Obama, who in trying to turn the citizenry against Republicans has built so many straw men that it now qualifies as the world’s third largest army, repeatedly characterizes the Republican position as being against all government and all taxes. That is simply a blatant, politically expedient lie. No Republican has ever said that or alluded to any support for that position. On the contrary, conservative Republicans support a strict interpretation of the Constitution as written, not the “living” Constitution which liberals adore, which is nothing more than house built on a foundation of Jello, giving no firm base of understanding of the law, but one which morphs and sways with the whims of the majority.

This Constitution, as written, adopted and ratified by the members of the Constitutional Convention and the states, was one that explicitly granted the power of Congress to levy taxes under Article I, Section 7. No Republican disputes or objects to the grant of power. What is in dispute lies within the confines of Article I, Section 8, known as the Enumerated Powers. Article I, Section 8 lists the powers granted to the federal government, which only the federal government may perform. However, under the Tenth Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”), the federal government is limited to ONLY those powers specifically enumerated.

And that is what makes Obama’s claim so laughable. For nearly a century now, both parties have incrementally expanded the size and scope (and therefore the cost) of government. This is always done under the rubric of protecting the people, or helping them. New programs and agencies are created (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, ObamaCare, the EPA, the Department of Education, Department of Commerce, and an endless litany of alphabet soup agencies) which then grow larger every year, no matter how ineffectively the carry out their mission. On the contrary, the worse they perform, the more money and power (we are told) must be given them.

The justification for this encroachment on the liberties of the people and the sovereignty of the states has been given by invoking the General Welfare, Commerce, and Necessary and Proper clauses of the Constitution. That has been aided and abetted by a judiciary which seemingly believes that government should be allowed to usurp any power so long as it can theoretically justify it under these terms.

The quote referred to by Obama comes from Washington’s Farewell Address, one of the most inspiring and eloquent documents ever written. Yes, Washington does confirm the need for the government to collect taxes, but let us go back a few sentences in his address, to look at the context in which he made that statement. Said Washington, “As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.” Does anyone today believe our government uses our credit sparingly? Is Obama imploring us to authorize more spending in his “jobs” bill to “prepare for danger” or “unavoidable wars”?

Washington goes on to say that “Towards the preservation of your government, and the permanency of your present happy state, it is requisite, not only that you steadily discountenance irregular oppositions to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts. One method of assault may be to effect, in the forms of the Constitution, alterations which will impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.”

Today, there is seemingly now power which the government does not feel justified in usurping. That which can’t be accomplished through the legislative process is often done through Executive Order, judicial fiat, and the imposition of burdensome regulations by unelected government bureaucrats.

Our nation desperately needs another Washington, a leader who sacrifices much for the good of the nation while resisting the lure of attaining greater power unto himself. Following the Revolutionary War, many pleaded with Washington to be America’s king, yet he rejected them, and then served only two terms as president. This led King George III to say “If that is true, he must be the greatest man in the world”.

Barack Obama, America knows George Washington, and you, sir, are no George Washington.

Does the Constitution Really Say That?

2011-09-20T13:11:00.000-04:00

Nearly five years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a Congress of the unified American states assembled for the first time on March 2, 1781, under the Articles of Confederation. The newly independent states of America were states in the true historical sense; autonomous geopolitical bodies with their own borders, laws and even currencies. These states had united to throw off the oppression of Britain under King George, but for all intents and purposes, the Articles of Confederation made them a loose alliance, not a single nation.

The Articles of Confederation created a weak government, due to the recent memories the Founders retained of a powerful central government under King George. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government had no power to levy taxes or regulate commerce, no enforcement powers for the laws passed by it, and there was not even a provision for an executive officer, the closest thing being the President of the Congress, which was simply a presiding officer.

On May 25, 1787, delegates from the states convened in Philadelphia for the purpose of discussing amendments to the Articles. George Washington was unanimously elected president of the convention and the work commenced. Over the next four months, these men discarded the Articles of Confederation and began work on a new Constitution. This assembly was arguably the greatest collection of political and philosophical minds ever assembled under a single roof.

After enduring the oppressive heat and humidity of the Washington summer, and debating the various proposals for the new Constitution, a final document was finally agreed upon and on the 17th of September, 1787, all members of the Constitutional Convention, except Gray (Massachusetts), and Randolph and Mason (Virginia), signed the final draft of the Constitution, forming a new government for the United States of America.

The Constitution was and is a political masterpiece, striking a delicate balance between the will of the majority and the rights of the minority (and individual). The brilliance of the Constitution lies in the Founders’ understanding of factions and the nature of man, as well as in the doctrine of federalism. The Founders established vertical and horizontal separation of powers, such that encroachment on power from one branch or level of government would of necessity come at the expense of another. By creating this natural tension, the Founders established a government under which power would be widely distributed and therefore less susceptible to abuse.

This week, we celebrate the 224th anniversary of the Constitution, a document that has show amazing durability considering the assault that has been waged against it. The checks and balances built into the Constitution have largely been erased, which has led to a weakening of the rule of law in our country. If this erosion remains unchecked, it will lead to the fall of our republic.

In order for us to retain our liberties, we must first understand why the Constitution was constructed as it was, and why those principles and mechanisms are critical for the establishment and maintenance of liberty. For how can we defend what we do not understand? And when the people are ignorant of the power granted by the Constitution, wicked and conspiring men will step into the breach and usurp that power for themselves.

To assess your own knowledge of the Constitution, consider whether you have succumbed to some of the myths regarding it.

For example, we are forever being told about the “separation of church and state”, and warned that religious influence should be kept completely separate from civil government. Yet is that true? Not according to the Founding Fathers. The phrase “separation of church and state” comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, shortly after he assumed the presidency, to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, in which he assured them that their fears that the establishment of a national religion was eminent were unfounded. The wall of separation referred to the government restriction on an establishment of a single national religion at the expense of other denominations, but by no means demanded the complete exclusion of religious influence in government. Indeed, President John Adams said that the Constitution is made for a moral and religious people, and is “wholly inadequate for the governance of any other”. Thomas Jefferson, widely held up as a non-Christian by secularists, allocated federal funds to send Christian missionaries out to proselyte the Indians. These are hardly the words and actions of those that support complete separation of religion and government.

Another area of confusion lies in the right to vote. There is no constitutional right to vote, period. The Constitution never states that all people have a right to vote, only that citizens can’t be denied the right to vote based on certain criteria. Over the last two centuries the Constitution has been amended to grant the right to vote to negroes (forbidding the denial of suffrage based on race, color or condition of servitude, under the 15th Amendment), women (under the 19th Amendment), the poor (forbidding denial of suffrage based on failure to pay a poll or other tax, under the 24th Amendment) and legal adults (setting the minimum voting age at eighteen years, under the 26th Amendment). If there was a universal right to vote, then there would be no need to establish characteristics by which a person can NOT be denied the right to vote, correct?

Maybe one of the most insidious and damaging of all myths surrounding the Constitution is that the Supreme Court has the final say in all matters pertaining to the law. Article III of the Constitution establishes the Supreme Court as the vested judicial power in the United States, granting it primary jurisdiction to resolve cases involving ambassadors, consuls and other public ministers. However, the Constitution grants only “appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as Congress shall make”. In other words, the Supreme Court and all lower courts are limited by the Congress in their jurisdiction, and Congress may forbid the courts from reviewing specific laws or types of cases. Unfortunately, this aspect of the separation of powers has been largely forgotten, and the judiciary has become a black-robed oligarchy, not only interpreting the law but rewriting the law through their rulings. This is diametrically in opposition to the system created by the Founders.

Other common fallacies include the belief that the United States is a democracy, which is patently false. America is a constitutional republic, one that guarantees the protection of the unalienable rights of the individual, regardless of the will of the majority. In fact, many of the Founders believed democracy to be the worst form of government, second only to anarchy.

It might also come as a shock to many to discover that there is no “right” to education, health care, high speed internet, or to never be offended. In fact, many of the “human” rights, “civil” rights and “environmental” rights some advocate have no foundation in our Constitution.

The great patriot Patrick Henry once exhorted, “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” Our government today has grown larger and more intrusive than ever before. Only when “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union” begin to truly study the Constitution’s principles and precepts, and elevate men and women to positions of public trust that revere the Constitution and honor their oath to defend it, will we again become a nation of truly free men. May we all rejoin the fight for liberty, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Happy Anniversary, Constitution, and many more!

Ten Years Later, The Hidden Enemy Remains

2011-09-12T15:23:00.002-04:00

Ten years ago, nineteen Muslim men hijacked four American airliners and used them as guided missiles, plunging them into the economic, military and symbolic hearts of America. Two flew into the World Trade Center towers, instantly killing all on board, killing hundreds more in the direct impact with the towers, and even more when the searing heat from the burning jet fuel weakened the structure of the buildings, bringing them crashing down on top of those trapped within. Additional American lives were lost when one of the airliners crashed into the Pentagon, and more when United Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, denying the terrorists a final victory.

In the days following the horrific attack by Muslim terrorists on 9/11, America was shaken to its knees. Thousands were dead, billions of dollars of damage done to property and, more importantly, the psyche of the American public had been bruised badly. We wondered how this could happen on American soil; how less than two dozen men using fake identification could’ve so badly hurt the world’s mightiest power. We lived in fear of when the next attack would occur.

As days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, the resilience and determination of the American people shone through the cloud of fear and sadness. Fear turned to anger and moral outrage at the atrocities waged against the American people. We went into Afghanistan and crippled the Taliban, which had aided and harbored the terrorists that had attacked us. Later we would turn our sites on Saddam Hussein, a brutal dictator who slaughtered tens of thousands of his own people, developed programs for weapons of mass destruction, and repeatedly defied U.N. Security Council resolutions and the terms of his surrender agreement that allowed him to retain power.

Ten years later, we must ask ourselves…are we safer? Despite harsh criticism from his political enemies (along with a heavy dose of selective memory and Monday morning quarterbacking), George W. Bush prevented another attack on the American homeland for the next eight years. His methods, especially the provisions of the PATRIOT Act, were constantly questioned and vilified as the resurrection of Nazi Sturmabteilung (‘stormtroopers”), the paramilitary “brown shirts” of Hitler’s Germany that instilled fear and terror in the citizenry. To be sure, many provisions were rightly questioned and, if implemented, demanded constant scrutiny to prevent abuse. Yet any attempts to protect us were the cause of wailing from an army of leftist Cassandras warning of impending doom.

The results of these actions were not so much the creation of an American Third Reich, but of a self-imposed, politically correct mass insanity of the American people, or at least their leadership. Despite the fact that, on 9/11 and in subsequent attempts, the perpetrators of terrorist attacks were young Muslim men, many named Muhammad, who came here from terrorist-supporting countries, it is considered uncouth to acknowledge those facts. It is considered racism or religious bigotry to vocalize the universally understood fact that it was not Jewish grandmothers, Swiss bankers, California surfers, middle class American businessmen, or moms with kids in tow that slaughtered our fellow Americans.

Instead, we engage in a ridiculous form of kabuki theater, mandating shoe removal to go through airport security, carrying no more than three ounces of liquid, and that nail clippers be confiscated from passengers (including an air marshal who was also carrying a loaded pistol, which he got to keep…apparently there was no fear of the air marshal shooting anyone, just that he might get bored and perform manicures without a license). We have the TSA perform physical searches so invasive that you can cancel your colonoscopy and mammogram and just take a flight to Des Moines instead. The TSA has also begun doing random searches on subways and bus terminals. In other words, we’ve given up tremendous freedom in exchange for the empty promise of safety.

As devastating as the attacks of 9/11 were, I never once feared America would fall to a bunch of Muslim extremists who. These are the enemies we could see, that we knew were trying to destroy us and that we could then prepare for and defend against. Yet, as Cicero warned, "An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself... A murderer is less to fear."

Today, the possibility of the collapse of the great American experiment lies not with Muslim terrorists, or even a resurgent Russia or the growing specter of a Communist Chinese superpower. No, if America falls it will not be by foreign hand, but by suicide. It will be because, through ignorance, jealousy, avarice or a lust for power, we let slip through our fingers the delicate threads of liberty. It will be because we wanted security more than freedom, and in the end were left with neither.

There is no hyperbole intended when I say that the greatest menace to the individual sovereignty enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution comes not from foreign invaders, but from those subverting our political system for their own gain.

We have a president and a major political party that have made it their mission to destroy the Constitution when it interferes with their agenda. President Obama refuses to enforce our immigration laws, and recently announced that only illegal aliens that engage in felonies will be prosecuted. He has signed a health care reform bill that removes the last vestiges of federalism and eliminates any remaining constraint on the federal government in its effort to control the lives of its citizens. President Obama and his party, after lambasting President George W. Bush for accumulating $4 trillion in debt in eight years, have accumulated nearly $5 trillion in less than three years. The burden of this crushing debt will fall largely on future generations, making them economic slaves before they even leave the womb.

When an organic uprising of millions of ordinary American citizens occurred, citizens previously uninvolved in political activism but now frightened at the rapidity with which we were propelling ourselves to become a socialist welfare state, Obama called them the “enemy”. His speeches are replete with calls for his supporters to battle those who demand lower spending, lower taxes and limited, constitutional government. He’s told his supporters to “get in [our] faces”, and to engage in “hand to hand combat”. Last weekend, AFL-CIO labor union president James Hoffa told a huge crowd of union workers to fight the TEA Party, telling them to “take the son of a b**ches out”. Obama spoke shortly after that to the same assembled crowd, and not only did not rebuke such inflammatory language, he actually said how proud he was to be associated with the union leaders and members. His Vice President, Joe Biden, at a separate event, referred to Republicans and TEA Partiers as “barbarians” that must be “kept from the gate”. This is nothing less than an incitement to violence, a proclivity which we’ve already seen in union thugs.

Ten years after the 9/11 attack, there is still a danger of America collapsing. However, it will not come from Muslim terrorists (though they will surely attempt to hurt us), but from a government kleptocracy intent on permanently subjecting its citizens to economic slavery, and making enemies of those that fight to restore individual freedom and constitutional government. May we all fight valiantly protect the rights of our neighbors as much as for ourselves. In doing so, we will purge the enemy from within and restore America’s vision of liberty.

Salem Redux: NYT Christian Witch Hunt

2011-09-06T13:49:00.003-04:00

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” ~ The Constitution of the United States of America, Article VI, Clause 3

It is unequivocal fact that the Founding Fathers of our nation were deeply religious men. So important was religion in their view that the protection thereof was codified in the first line of the first amendment of the Bill of Rights, even before freedom of speech and of the press. From Washington to Adams to Madison and on, Christianity and the Judeo-Christian belief system was at the heart of the government which they formed. Even Jefferson, known as a Deist who shunned the organized religions of his day, wrote in an April 1803 letter to Benjamin Rush, “I am a Christian in the only sense in which He wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others.”

Strange indeed then that modern liberals live in abject terror of the possibility that any religious influence might accidentally (or more likely, through the nefarious workings of those dreaded, meddling Christians) seep into the philosophy or policies of our secular government.

Recently, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller attempted to whip Americans into a fearful frenzy regarding the religiosity of Republican presidential candidates. Said he, “But I do want to know if a candidate places fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon (the text, not the Broadway musical) or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country. It matters to me whether a president respects serious science and verifiable history — in short, belongs to what an official in a previous administration once scornfully described as “the reality-based community”. I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.”

What exactly is he afraid is going to happen? Mitt Romney gets elected and issues an executive order mandating all Americans have at least four children, wear modest clothing and eat green Jello at least three times a week (Utah Mormons love green Jello…don’t ask me why)? Michelle Bachmann gets elected and encourages fidelity in marriage and that husband and wife be “equally yoked” while observing the traditional role of the husband as head of the home? There is also fear of Rick Santorum’s Catholicism (a fear not extended to Democrats Joe Biden, John Kerry, Chris Dodd or Dick Durbin; presumably because they do not allow their Catholic faith to interfere with their political support for killing unborn children). We’re also supposed to be afraid of Rick Perry, not for any specific beliefs apparently, but because many Christian evangelicals support him.

Oddly, in 2008, when the issue of Obama’s religion came up, the NYT and liberals in general were outraged that conservative Republicans would dare make mention of the fact that Obama attended Trinity United Church for twenty years (baptizing his two daughters there), led by hate-spewing pastor Jeremiah Wright, a man with a racial vendetta who referred to our nation as the “U.S. of K.K.K. A.” and said “…not God Bless America, God d**n America”. No, Obama’s religion was never a concern to liberals. Apparently Christianity is only a concern when practiced out of personal conviction and not political pragmatism (for example, the separation of church and state never seems to be an issue when Democrats swarm black churches shortly before elections).

Keller goes on to give specific concerns. For example, he is gravely concerned that Bachmann expressed her opinion that social welfare should come from private charity, not government taxation. If I were Bachmann, I’d ask Keller to show me article, section and clause in the Constitution that authorizes government extorted “charity”. Even James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”, could find no warrant for government charity, as noted when he stated "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." This sentiment was later echoed by Presidents Cleveland and Pierce when they vetoed appropriations bills containing provisions for taxation for charitable purposes.

Keller also posed more questions he would ask candidates to respond to, including:

Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or a “Judeo-Christian nation?” and what does that mean in practice? The answer is an emphatic “YES”. Just over a decade after the ratification of the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in Runkel v. Winemiller that "By our form of government, the Christian religion is the established religion; and all sects and denominations of Christians are placed on the same footing." This view was reiterated throughout our history, not only by the Founding Fathers as their personal views, but also by the legislature (in the January 19, 1853 Senate Judiciary Report, and the March 27, 1854 House Judiciary Committee Report) and again by the Supreme Court in Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S. (1892), which ruled again that "There is no dissonance in these [legal] declarations…These are not individual sayings, declarations of private persons: they are organic [legal, governmental] utterances; they speak the voice of the entire people…These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation."

Keller also insists Republican candidates declare fealty to tenants of liberal secular religionism, such as a belief in evolution and global warming, both of which are far from being “settled science” and which even hard-core evangelical Christians would be shocked at the leap of faith required to believe in. Theory of anthropogenic (‘man-made”) global warming has taken repeated hits over the last few years, from NASA being forced to correct erroneous/fraudulent data, to the leaked e-mails from UNIPCC leadership showing they doctored temperature data to achieve the desired political outcomes, to the fact that the earth has been in a decade-long cooling trend despite increased carbon emissions.

Likewise, Darwinian macroevolution (belief that man is the product of random mutations over billions of years, creating entirely new species which has taken us from primordial slime to Homo Sapiens) takes a huge leap of faith, and is easily undermined by something as “simple” as the human eye, a complex organ with intricate interrelated parts that could not possibly have come into existence by random mutation, since every single part has to work simultaneously in order for the organ itself to function. On the other hand, you’d be hard pressed to find a conservative that does not believe in microevolution (intraspecies mutations which allow creatures to better adapt to their environment).

In summary, Keller wants us to believe that electing any of these frightful Christians will usher in a Christian theocracy, because he “care[s] if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.” Yet, the Founding Fathers were deeply religious men, and more than three quarters of all U.S. presidents can be identified with a specific Christian denomination, and most of the others were considered religious but not affiliated with a particular sect.

So while Keller may be concerned about overtly-Christian presidents, I join the millions of other Americans that are far more concerned by a president that would bow the head and bend the knee not to Jesus Christ, but to brutal dictators; and who would worship at the altar of abortion, global warming and big-government control of our lives.

Crossing the Moral Rubicon

2011-08-31T19:11:00.002-04:00

In 1993, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) wrote “Defining Deviancy Down”, which warned of the decline of morality in society by way of redefining morality itself. The standards of morality in society have over time been eroded. Behavior which was once shunned by society, over time became tolerated, then accepted and then celebrated. Understanding that society would naturally rebel from attempts to move accepted morality from A to Z, those seeking this end over time persuaded us to move from A to B, from B to C, from C to D and so on; until one day we awoke and found ourselves at Z. What’s worse, few even care at that point.

At one time in America, the moral standard was monogamy between a married man and woman. Sex before marriage and infidelity were shunned as immoral behavior. Modesty in dress and action were not only encouraged but expected. Of course, that is not to say that such behavior did not exist; certainly it did. However, there is an enormous chasm between working to eliminate such immoral behavior while accepting that it exists, and embracing and even encouraging such behavior. Beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, we’ve engaged in a slow but steady redefinition of what is considered immoral behavior.

In America today, a culture war is being waged. This war is fought on many fronts, but the primary battleground today surrounds the normalization of homosexuality, the acceptance of which would culminate in the legalization of homosexual marriage. Proponents of homosexual marriage argue that the government has no right to interfere in the sexual relationships of consenting adults. They argue that if two people love each other then society should not discourage that relationship, and the law should not forbid the “right” to marry simply because both members of the couple are of the same sex.

Critics of this attempt to rewrite the moral code argue that homosexuality defies not only Biblical law but natural law. They argue that marriage between a man and a woman is not about the romantic relationship between the two, but about creating the best environment to raise children, without which society would simply die off. Since same sex relationships cannot naturally produce offspring, that relationship should not be protected by government.

Proponents of homosexual marriage mock the “slippery slope” argument, dismissing warnings that the acceptance of their behavior will eventually lead to the normalization of other deviant behavior. Yet on what rationale is this based? If the argument is that the government should not interfere with the sexual relationships of consenting adults, then pray tell how (if we accept that argument) we can ever object to bigamy, polygamy, incest and other behaviors currently considered deviant and criminal? Are not those engaged in these behaviors consenting? Then if we accept the initial premise, how can we possibly argue against all that flows from it?

As society accepts the propriety of normalizing those relationships (in large measure assisted by the media, which pushes the idea that objection to homosexual behavior is rooted in “hatred” and “homophobia”), other, more damaging deviant relationships will not be far behind. At the top of that list is the normalization of pedophilia. While homosexual advocates become enraged at any connection between acceptance of homosexual behavior and pedophilia, the writing is already on the wall.

On the website for the Department of Health and Human Services, under the heading “Questions and Answers About Sex” in its “Quick Guide to Healthy Living”, our government oracles inform us that children and infants are “sexual beings.” The web site states that “Children are human beings and therefore sexual beings,” continuing on, “It's hard for parents to acknowledge this, just as it's hard for kids to think of their parents as sexually active. But even infants have curiosity about their own bodies, which is healthy and normal.”

It is hard to imagine the twisted mind that equates the natural anatomical curiosity of an infant or young child, with the physical and sexual desires of a post-pubescent teen or young adult. Yet by establishing the false premise that children are sexual creatures, it begins to lay the groundwork for societal acceptance of sexual relationships with children.

To the average person, it is unfathomable to think that such a thing could occur in our society, regardless of what other behavior is normalized. Surely that is a sacrosanct boundary, a Rubicon never to be crossed. But is it? Recently, thirty eight individuals attended a symposium in Baltimore hosted by B4U-Act, an organization that is lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to remove pedophilia from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), arguing that "Stigmatizing and stereotyping minor-attracted people inflames the fears of minor-attracted people, mental health professionals and the public, without contributing to an understanding of minor-attracted people or the issue of child sexual abuse." Their stated mission, according to a recent article, is to “help pedophiles before they create a crisis, and do so by offering a less critical view of the disorder.” So it seems that this group wants to end fears of child rape not by ending child rape, but by calling it by another name and assuring us it is all biologically normal. By that logic I guess we can assure women that they no longer need fear rape, just the occasional “unauthorized entry of a foreign body”.

To those inclined to dismiss this as a gathering of kooks and perverts, it should be noted that the symposium was attended by researchers from Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, and the universities of Illinois and Louisville. Their very presence bestows a patina of respectability on the indefensible. It couches the twisted underbelly of sexual deviancy in the Delphic oratory of scientific legitimacy.

In the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional protection of sexual privacy regarding homosexual sodomy. Less than 20 years later, the Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence v. Texas that consensual sexual intimacy is part of the liberties protected by due process under the 14th Amendment. The ruling would overturn all state anti-sodomy laws in the nation.

Today, Kody Brown and his wives, the polygamist clan made famous on cable television’s show “Sister Wives”, are suing to have their relationship arrangement decriminalized. The basis of their argument relies in part on the Lawrence ruling; namely, that the state has no compelling interest in interfering in the private, intimate relationships of consenting individuals.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court ruled that minors may bypass parental notification requirements regarding abortion when it is determined that they are sufficiently mature to make that decision on their own. If that is the case, then how can the court argue that a minor may be mature enough to make the decision to abort a pregnancy, but not be mature enough to make the decision to engage in the act which led to the pregnancy? And, following that logic, if a minor is mature enough to make the decision to engage in sexual activity, on what basis will the court then deny the “right” to engage in sexual activity with a mature minor?

These are the very premises on which the polygamists, B4U-Act, and NAMBLA (The North American Man-Boy Love Association) have argued for the normalization and decriminalization of their deviant sexual behaviors. We have watched the continuous erosion of morality in our society on these semantic and emotional arguments. What once was shunned becomes tolerated, then accepted, and then celebrated. Where do we draw the line?

America’s Greatness Lies in Knowledge Diffused

2011-08-23T17:28:00.000-04:00

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." ~Thomas Jefferson, 1816, Letter to Thomas Yancey

Our nation, for several years now, has been in extended crisis mode. By the end of the Bush administration, we’d reached a point of complacency. We had wars raging on two fronts, but rather than being something the entire nation was focused on and engaged in, it was little more than partisan fodder to be used against Bush and the Republicans in the newspapers and on the nightly news (as evidenced by the fact that the constant front-page stories of soldier death counts miraculously disappeared once Obama took office).

Then came the financial collapse, which effectively ended John McCain’s chances at the presidency and ushered in Barack Obama, a political neophyte who campaigned not on specific policy positions and political philosophies, but on his claim to being “not Bush”, ushering in an era of “hope and change”. Unfortunately, while Obama has certainly achieved “change”, in doing so he has all but destroyed hope in America, at least until he leaves office.

These past two weeks we’ve seen the stock market rising and falling more often than a Kennedy after a night of partying. The dollar continues to be weakened, America’s credit rating is downgraded for the first time in history, unemployment remains high, and the prospects for improvement seem bleak in the short term. We are largely dependent on our enemies for our energy consumption, mainly because we refuse to access the vast reserves of energy we have on our own soil and in the oceans surrounding us. The waves of bad news crashing over us seem endless right now.

At the root of these problems, I believe, is ignorance; ignorance of the greatness of the traditions on which our nation was founded; ignorance of the superiority of a free market economy over all other economies, and an understanding that what we operate under today is not a free market, but a bastardized, incestuous form of socialized crony capitalism, in which big business colludes with big government to gain advantage over its competitors in exchange for favorable tax and regulatory benefits. Ignorance of how government’s interference in the health care market has both lowered quality and access, and increased expense. Ignorance as to how oppressive, progressive tax policy that punishes the most productive actually lowers gross revenues to the government. Maybe most dangerously of all, ignorance of basic economic principles in general, which has led to an apparent belief that someone will always extend credit to America, regardless of our diminishing ability to repay the debt.

Our educational system has done an abysmal job of preparing students, and this is an existential crisis. No matter how glorious the edifice or pristine the halls, if the foundation is weak the structure will eventually fall. So how is it that we can expect to produce ignorant children and still maintain a strong foundation for our nation? We are not producing free thinkers, we are producing Myrmidons which blindly follow the Pied Piper of federal government in exchange for phantom promises of largesse provided by the stolen labor of our fellow citizens. In many ways we’ve become infantile, a solipsistic nation preoccupied with wants and desires and feelings, rather than a nation which sacrifices to accomplish hard things and overcome obstacles.

If our nation is to survive, we must return to the fundamental principles and teachings that long defined us as Americans. If we allow our children to be taught that America is no better or more unique than any other nation, how can we instill a desire to perpetuate what is American? If America is so awful, then what possible motivation would there be to save it?

In his 1790 treatise on government, “Of the Study of Law in the United States”, James Wilson, signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as well as an original Supreme Court justice, noted that "Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge." Yet today so much of what the public “knows” is simply incorrect, and is rarely acknowledged as such.

For example, how many times have you heard politicians of both parties speak lovingly of our great “American democracy”? Yet the Founders did not set up a democracy, they established a constitutional republic; a form of government where the unalienable rights of the individual take primacy over the tempestuous desires of the many. The Founders abhorred democracy, describing the difference between a republic and a democracy as the difference between order and chaos. Or, as civil libertarian James Bovard so aptly put it, democracy is nothing more than two wolves and a lamb voting on what is for dinner.

Another fallacy is the claim that we have a “right” to vote. Nowhere in the Constitution are we granted a “right” to vote. The Constitution only establishes characteristics (age, sex, race) by which we can’t be denied the right to vote, all other requirements having been met.

Earlier this year, Newsweek magazine surveyed a thousand Americans, asking them questions that, arguably, any ninth grader should know. The results were concerning in their implications. Of those surveyed, 29% couldn’t name the vice president, 73% could not say why we fought the Cold War, 44% couldn’t define the Bill of Rights, and 6% could not correctly say what date Independence Day falls on. Such ignorance is absolutely tragic.

How well informed are you as a citizen? Can you name the three branches of government (legislative, executive and judicial) and define their roles? Can you explain to someone the vertical and horizontal separation of powers that is the basis of our federalist system of government? Can you name the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, your federal representative and senators, your governor and lieutenant governor, your state representative and senator? Can you name even three members of the Supreme Court, which now holds tremendous power over national policy (though it should not)? Can you name three members of your local school board? Can you identify the 17th Amendment and explain how it weakened the power of the states, subordinating them in large measure to the federal government?

If not, why not? The gravity of the problems we face cannot be understated. How can we, as citizens of a constitutional republic, do our duty to protect our Constitution and the freedom it codifies if we don’t understand it or the government it formed? Reasonable people can have reasonable disagreements on the best policies to guide our nation, but let us educate ourselves so that the decisions are based on knowledge, fact and reason, and not on ethereal or populist rhetoric and emotion. Hope and change is a catchy slogan, but a poor substitute for knowledge and leadership.

Jimmy Carter once told us, in essence, that America should accept its decline and embrace mediocrity. Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections because he reminded Americans of the greatness of this nation and that our best days did not have to be behind us. He reminded us that America’s greatness does not lies in a huge and ever expanding government, but in the drive, inventiveness and entrepreneurialism of everyday citizens seeking to improve their lives, and in the process, improve the lives of their fellow citizens.

It is my absolute belief that America’s best days lie before us, if we will only seek knowledge and independence, and not the soul-crushing embrace of dependency on government.

Sincerity, Burning Through the Fog of Obfuscation

2011-08-16T14:38:00.001-04:00

It is human nature to seek those things which are most rare and beautiful, and therefore the most prized. In the physical world, few things elicit visions of such stark elegance and grandeur than Carrara marble. Marble is highly sought after and desired in our most beautiful edifices. Expensive and often difficult to work with, its very temperamental nature makes it all the more desirable, the elemental equivalent of a beautiful, tempestuous woman that will not be tamed.

Marble comes in a myriad of types and colors, but Carrara marble, known for its pure, milky white character, is prized above all other marble by the world’s greatest sculptors. Centuries ago, in the “Golden Age” of Tuscan sculpture, it was considered the highest honor for a sculptor to be commissioned by a wealthy benefactor to create a statue from a block of Carrara marble.

It was also an endeavor that came with great pressure for the sculptor. Before the chisel was ever applied to the marble, the sculptor must first study the block in exquisite detail, memorizing its characteristics, noting the direction of the grain and any tiny flaws in the stone. He had to map out every strike with precision, completing the sculpture in his head before ever touching the stone. It was critical that he understand the flow of the marble’s grain. If not, a single strike with hammer and chisel against the grain could crack it. To strike with excessive force could cause the crystalline structure of the stone to be crushed, which in turn led to sub-surface holes that could ruin the entire piece.

Such mistakes rarely happened with master sculptors, who spent years perfecting their craft, learning the intricacies of the medium in which they labored, attending to every nuance, understanding every element of the process required to achieve perfection in their work. For less skilled, more impatient sculptors, however, disaster was just a hammer strike away. To those more unscrupulous artists, there was an opportunity to hide their “sin”, to cover up their mistake. Instead of admitting their error and losing both their reputation and commission, some artists would use a soft, white wax to cover up any flaws. When delicately and fastidiously applied, the wax would hide any imperfections. Generally, the artist had been paid long before the cover-up was noticed.

Eventually, the wealthy benefactors who funded these projects began to catch on to the subterfuge. As this method of using wax became more common, the patrons became more discerning; no commission would be paid to the artist until such time as the statue had been scrutinized in near microscopic detail for the presence of wax. Once the examiner determined that the statue had been created without wax, the payment would be released to the sculptor. For Carrara statuary, the highest level of artistic integrity came with the distinction of being “sin cere”, or “without wax”. It signified that the statue was of the highest quality, without hidden flaw, uninjured and unadulterated. It meant that the statue was fundamentally pure, not just superficially flawless.

Over time that designation began to be used to apply to people. A person who is “sincere” is pure of heart, honest and has integrity. They are the same whether in public or private. They seek not deception or fraud, evasion or sophistry. In short, they can be trusted as men or women of impeccable character and unimpeachable virtue.

Today, our nation faces existential problems that must be confronted honestly if we are to solve them. The magnitude of these problems is simply staggering, and our propensity to address these topics honestly seems to be inversely proportionate with the level of hyper-partisanship. We have a national debt that now exceeds 100% of GDP. We have unemployment rates that have stayed above 9%, and often near or above 10% in 25 of the last 27 months. The dollar has been weakened on the world market, which in turn had driven up the price of commodities such as food and oil. Entitlements are threatening to consume nearly every dollar earned in America, at least those dollars not consumed by payments for interest on the debt, which is projected to reach $900 billion annually within a decade. We have a federal government that is using redistributionist taxation policies and burdensome regulations to manipulate markets and reward favored donors and constituencies, and as a result stifling economic growth and entrepreneurialism.

Those that have sought to return government to its constitutional constraints, reduce or maintain current tax levels, drastically reduce regulatory burdens, and cut the runaway spending levels which have brought our economy to the brink of collapse have been referred to as terrorists and hostage-takers. They have had their character and motives maligned. Our own president has engaged in thuggish tactics, when multiple times he addressed the nation and called on those that bought into his class warfare rhetoric to bombard the phone lines and e-mail servers of those who opposed his policies. His party has aired commercials rhetorically accusing Paul Ryan and Republicans of murdering the elderly because they submitted a budget that did not cut Medicare spending as claimed, but simply reduced the rate of increase.

For their part, Republicans must also admit their complicity in the bind we find ourselves in. It was Republicans under Bush that increased federal spending massively, and not just on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was Republicans that passed the first bailout and TARP, Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind. All of these things have added to the overall cost of the federal government, usurped powers granted to the states or reserved to the people, and turned us into mere slaves and adjuncts to our government masters.

I am not in the least bothered by the passion and emotion of both sides in these arguments. That is to be expected when we have diametrically opposed beliefs on issues of national importance, and we are fighting for the supremacy of our ideas in the public square. However, if we continue to attack the supporters of these policies individually and collectively, as opposed to the policies themselves and their merits and detractions, we’ll look up one day to discover that the walls have fallen around us and the roof is crashing upon our heads. This is easier said than done, and of that I can personally attest.

What we need now is principled leadership. We need men and women of integrity, who will make an honest case for their positions, free of deception, manipulation and outright lies. We can’t have thuggery and leaders who “lead from behind”.

Joseph Story, former Supreme Court Justice and called “The Father of American Jurisprudence”, wrote in his Commentaries on the Constitution (1833) that "Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them."

Those who have been most honest about the problems facing our nation and the solutions required to repair them have been viciously attacked by those that want to retain power. Every American must begin to study these issues carefully, let the light of knowledge burn away the fog of obfuscation, and rise up and demand accountability from our elected officials. Of that belief I am both firm and sincere.

Of Hobbits and Acid-Tongued Democrats

2011-08-10T09:18:00.001-04:00

On January 8th of this year, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was one of nineteen people shot, six fatally, by crazed gunman Jared Loughner. For nearly a week the national press and Democrats excoriated the TEA Party in general, and Sarah Palin in particular, for creating the environment that nurtured this horrifying act of political terrorism. President Obama, apparently in another example of leading from behind, eventually called for “more civility in our public discourse”, and admonished us to refrain from “lay[ing] the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happened to think differently than we do”.

Democrats finally heeded their leader’s advice, although it is uncertain whether that resulted from an epiphany that such inflammatory rhetoric was producing more of the division they claimed to deplore, or because they’d lost the moral high ground when it was discovered that the shooter, supposedly driven to his murderous rampage by seeing target symbols on a map of political districts, was actually a liberal, anti-Christian pot-smoker who hated George Bush.

The civility truce was short-lived however, and soon liberal Democrats went right back to ascribing the worst possible motives to their political enemies, simply for holding opposing policy positions. This last week or so, though, has seen liberal vitriol march back into full attack mode. The TEA Party and conservative Republicans have been repeatedly called “terrorists” by the mainstream press and prominent Democrats.

Yet what did they do to deserve such a misanthropic moniker? Did they strap bombs to themselves and their children and detonate themselves in the middle of civilian populations, or take an SUV and run innocents down for holding a different religious viewpoint? Did they behead someone simply to show their unrighteous power? Nope, none of the above. So what did they do to cause this liberal Democrat backlash? They refused to back down in their insistence that any passage of a bill to increase the debt ceiling contain a few morsels tossed to those that think that our government is too large and that we should no longer ignore the fact that we are barreling down the highway to bankruptcy.

The TEA Party and conservative Republicans are not terrorists, and I can prove it. If they truly were terrorists, Obama would not have waited five days to call for civility, he would have been exhorting the American people immediately not to rush to judgment and not to retaliate (as he did with Muslim and Fort Hood killer Nidal Hassan). He would have called on the Justice Department to make sure that their every constitutional right was strictly adhered to. But no, it was just TEA Partiers, so he opens up with both barrels blazing.

It is now open season on conservatives. In a closed-door meeting of the Democratic Caucus, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), complained that conservatives are a “group of terrorists [who] have made it impossible to spend any money”, apparently unaware total federal spending has risen more than 25% under Obama. Vice President Joe Biden was in attendance and reportedly expressed agreement with Doyle, although he later denied ever saying so.

They weren’t the only ones to the attack conservatives though. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that Democrats were ‘trying to save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save the planet as we know it today”. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said Republicans were playing “Russian Roulette” and “want to shoot every bullet they have at the president”. Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, head of the Congressional Black Caucus called the final deal a “sugar-coated Satan sandwich”. Former Obama “car czar” and counselor to Treasury Secretary Geithner said that “These TEA Party guys are, like, strapped with dynamite, standing in the middle of Times Square at rush hour and saying, ‘Either you do it my way, or we’re going to blow you up, ourselves up, and the whole country up with us.” Former leftist radical and Obama “green jobs czar” Van Jones said the TEA Party was putting “a gun to the head of 310 million people and say[ing] ‘if you don’t do it our way we will blow your dreams away, we will blow a hole in the American economy’, that is un-American…”.

Even some of the establishment Republicans joined in, most notably Senator John McCain, who called them TEA Party “Hobbits”. Of course, if he knew his literature, he’d recall that the Hobbits were the heroes, fighting against the massive forces of evil arrayed against them in an effort to save their land and all that was virtuous. I guess that makes Obama and the Democrats collectively the dark lord Sauron, and McCain the traitor Saruman, who joined forces with Sauron so he could rule over a portion of the rubble that remained after the destruction of his world.

The supposedly unbiased press was quick to pick up the narrative as well. NYT columnist Thomas Friedman cautioned that “if sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the TEA Party will take the GOP on a suicide mission”. NBC’s Ann Curry questioned whether the TEA Party “understand[s] that standing up for a cause in not the same thing as governing?”

Of course, we should note the Democrats are simply following the example of their Dear Leader. This is, after all, the same man who has a long history of hate-filled, deceptive partisan rhetoric. This is the man who told Latinos that they “should punish our enemies” and “get in their face”, telling them that Republicans wanted to build a moat at the border and fill it with alligators, and that Republican immigration legislation would have police arresting them every time they took their kids out for ice cream simply because of the color of their skin. He claimed that the Republicans’ budget bill would require America to leave children with Down Syndrome and autism to suffer so that the rich could get an extra tax break. Regarding the tax and debt debate, he called Republicans “hostage takers” who had decided to engage in “hand to hand combat”.

Of course, hand to hand combat is better than Obama’s preferred alternative as noted in his campaign when he said that “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun” (he must have just watched Connery in the classic mob movie “The Untouchables”).
This hateful language has been spewed by Democrats, all because freshmen Republicans decided to honor their campaign pledge and push for lower taxes, spending cuts and fiscal responsibility. No bombings, no beheadings…just fiscal sanity. Spending under Obama has risen exponentially; unemployment has been at or above 9% since he took office. Average annual deficits under Obama are triple what they were under the worst Bush years. We now borrow $4 BILLION per DAY to fund government spending. The madness must stop and begin to be reversed.

We should also remember that TEA Party Republicans are not the only terrorists, if we define votes against raising the debt ceiling as terrorism. If so, those ranks would include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (who voted against every single increase under Bush), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, former Democrat presidential candidate and Sen. John Kerry, and current president Barack Obama, who called it a “failure of leadership” to raise the debt limit. It would also include actual shooting victim Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who voted twice against an increase in 2010, saying, ““What is the purpose of having a debt limit if we vote to increase it every time we hit the limit?” Preach on, sister, preach on.

As for the rest of the foul-mouthed Democrats I’d say, get off your high horse before you get hurt.

Confessions of an Opium Addict

2011-08-01T13:48:00.002-04:00

I am an addict. A junkie. For years I’ve maintained an air of respectability in public, while behind closed doors I’m always looking for my next fix. With every year that passes it takes more and more for me to satiate my need. I will tell any lie, distort any claim, and do whatever I need to do to maintain my habit. I used to be embarrassed about it, covered it up, but no longer. I am who I am and everybody can just deal with it. I used to be able to shuffle the finances around to fund my habit, hide it so that no one would notice. Now, my habit is so bad that I can’t cover the cost with what I earn. I had to find a way to pay for it.

I took out a second mortgage on my house, telling myself that my habit was not so bad, that I could quit whenever I wanted; that this was only a short term solution and I’d pay it back quickly. That is what I told myself anyway. But days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months and months turned to years, and I’m more addicted than ever, with no way to pay for my fix. I’ve maxed out my credit cards, emptied my savings account, borrowed from family and friends. I’ve emptied the trust funds that were supposed to be for my kids. I’ve stolen anything I could get my hands on that I could sell. I’ve gone to loan sharks.

But now I’ve nothing left and nowhere to go. My friends don’t trust me and loan sharks want assurances that I will pay them back, assurances I can no longer give. So now I am coming to you. You have to lend me some money. I know, I know…I blew through what you gave me before. I bought a huge house and an expensive car, I went on exotic vacations. You can’t throw that in my face now though. I am in desperate need, and unless you pony up and give me the money I need, I’m going to tell the whole world just how cruel and heartless you are! I mean, come on! I have kids to feed, bills to pay, health needs and more. If you don’t give me money these needs go unmet, and it will all be your fault.

I am an addict. I am a junkie. My name is Federal Government and I am addicted to OPM (Other People’s Money).

This is the bizarre situation we find ourselves in as a nation. We have spent ever increasing sums of borrowed money for decades now. We’ve run up our debt to staggering levels, amounts so great that most people would have no clue as to how many zeros go on the end of that number. We have accumulated $14.3 trillion in debt, and we are now arguing over whether to $7 trillion or $15 trillion or more.

This is not money that we are borrowing from our children and grandchildren. To borrow implies intent to repay. We have no intention of repaying these debts; we are brazenly stealing from them and telling them to deal with it. We are robbing them of money they have not earned yet. We are making them slaves before they are even born. It is a moral travesty. It is despicable. It is heartless.

The sad thing is that this is intentional. Our leaders know what they are doing, and they understand the consequences. This is a manufactured crisis. For over two years now Obama and the Democrats have been on a spending binge. A near trillion-dollar “stimulus” that was nothing more than a huge goodie bag of funding for liberal pet projects and favored constituencies. Then we had Cash for Clunkers, bailouts of teachers unions and government employees. We ran up federal government spending by 25% to respond to this “financial crisis” that Obama “inherited”, but then we used that as the new baseline for spending.

Now, we have the Republicans that have started to get the message that the American people are sick of runaway spending. So they passed Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity”, a budget plan so radical, so harsh, and a plan that slashes spending so steeply that the budget will be balanced in…27 years. In essence, this is the legislative equivalent of paying the minimum payment on the credit card each month on a $150,000 balance. The problem is that we never stop charging more on the card.

Republicans then passed “Cut, Cap and Balance”, a bill that would begin to finally put real constraints on government spending, but would still take years to pay down the national debt. No matter, Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared the bill Dead On Arrival even before it was passed by the House Republicans. Even if he hadn’t, Obama already promised he would veto the bill.

As of this writing, the Democrat Senate and President Obama have yet to put a plan on paper. The Senate has abdicated its constitutional duty and refused to pass a budget for nearly two and a half years. Republicans have passed two worthwhile bills already, but Democrats refuse to consider them. As I said, this is a manufactured crisis. Republicans have jumped through hoops to present a compromise, with bills that extend the debt limit in exchange for putting in place serious constraints on future spending. Democrats refuse to negotiate, instead running down the clock and warning Republicans that they will get the blame when all hell breaks loose.

If history is any guide, the establishment Republican leadership will fold like a cheap lawn chair in a hurricane. The only reason they haven’t so far is because of the freshmen Republicans who have provided some much needed spine in Washington and refuse to be bullied into abandoning principle. Even after being threatened and cursed at by House Speaker Boehner, they refused to back down, and Boehner had to pull his bill Thursday night because he couldn’t round up enough votes.

Obama and the media are a united chorus in excoriating the House Republicans (and a handful in the Senate) who have stood firm on principle, who have said it is time to cut up the credit cards and start paying down the debt so that we no more saddle future generations with the heavy burden of our folly.

We are told now that Republicans must show “bipartisanship” and “compromise” (something Democrats were not concerned about as they gleefully rammed the stimulus bill and ObamaCare down the Republicans’ throats). But compromise is not a good thing in and of itself. I doubt that the victim would feel content that a bystander who had the ability to stop her rape had instead negotiated with the rapist, getting him to compromise and agree to proceed with her violation as long as a prophylactic was used and he agreed not to beat her in the process. Republicans now must decide if they will be the “reasonable” bystander, or if they will stop the crime.

I know that this is a harsh analogy, but it is an accurate one. We are pillaging and destroying the future of generations to come because we refuse to be responsible and stop pretending that we can have whatever we want, no matter the cost, and someone else will pay the bill down the road.

The party is over. It is time to clean up this mess and start fixing the damage that has been done. It is time to start acting like responsible adults and not petulant, spoiled children. It’s time to restore hope for our children’s future.

Holding the Line for Fiscal Sanity

2011-07-25T12:51:00.000-04:00

Perhaps nothing more acutely demonstrates the divide between the political class and the rest of America that the ongoing debate over raising the debt ceiling. With less than two weeks to go before the August 2nd deadline designated by Treasury Secretary and tax cheat Tim “Turbo Tax” Geithner as the date when America runs out of money, there is still no deal for raising the debt limit. House Republicans, swept into power in November 2010 on the TEA Party/anti-spending tidal wave, have held the line admirably. Even Speaker of the House John Boehner has been more resolute than I would have expected in insisting that there be no new taxes as part of the deal (although this could be less from principle than the realization that to cave in on the tax issue would guarantee a challenge to his Speakership).

At the center of the controversy are the terms of raising the debt ceiling, which currently stands at $14.3 trillion, with President Obama asking for trillions more. Republicans demand a deal which allows the debt limit to be increased in exchange for cuts in spending. Democrats just want the debt ceiling to be raised period, and loathe spending cuts because it would reduce the size and scope of the imperial federal government, and in doing so take away from their ability to dole out taxpayer dollars to favored constituencies in exchange for votes.

It has been an established understanding for decades now that the Democrats can’t be trusted with national defense. It should be clear now to every sane American that Democrats can no longer be trusted with economic matters either.

America is at a crossroads. Neither party has held the moral high ground on fiscal responsibility. Republicans in the last decade gave us the first stimulus bill (a $170 billion payout to taxpayers that seems like a petty cash withdrawal by today’s standards), TARP bailouts of the financial sector, an expansion of the federal welfare state with the Medicare Part D prescription benefit, and increasing the total federal spending significantly over what occurred under Clinton (even factoring out the wars).

Democrats, after their endless weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over Republican deficits under Bush, decided to double down on bad policy and then some. The largest deficit during Bush’s eight years in office was about $400 billion and change, which Democrats rightfully derided as fiscal irresponsibility. So after taking control of government what did they do? Immediately quadruple the largest Bush deficit and give us projected deficits of a trillion dollars annually for the next decade or more. They gave us the nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill which failed to stimulate job growth, but did add to the debt and raise unemployment rates significantly. They gave us the ObamaCare boondoggle, highly unpopular and already having a negative effect on health care quality and costs. The ten year cost of that program is expected to be $2.5 trillion or more.

Even though it is largely ridiculed, dismissed or blamed by the media and Democrats, the effect of the TEA Party movement and its demand for lower taxes, less spending and a return to constitutional government has been unmistakable. Two years ago Democrat strategist James Carville announced the death of conservatism and the beginning of a decades-long ruling dominance by the Democrat Party. Today the discussion is not on whether government spending will be cut, but by how much.

Obama and the Democrats are doing their usual best to demagogue, vilify, obfuscate and divide the American citizenry with racially tinged comments and wealth-loathing, class warfare rhetoric. Yet it seems that on this issue the American people are seeing through the smokescreen, as evidenced by the fact that polling results show nearly two in three object to a debt ceiling increase. Many realize that to continue such reckless spending undermines the strength of our economy.

There is only one party that has shown it is ready to act responsibly about our economic and debt crisis and that is the Republican Party. The GOP has passed multiple budgets this year, including Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” and most recently the House Republicans’ “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan. The only budgets submitted by Democrats have been Obama’s. The first Obama budget was rescinded, quickly reformulated and rereleased after Ryan’s budget revealed just how juvenile it was in dealing with the debt issue. The second was so preposterous that it was unanimously rejected by the Senate, including every single Democrat. The Senate, controlled by the Democrats, has failed to produce a budget for well over two years as is their constitutional obligation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said to do so would be politically “foolish” when they can just attack and distort Republican budget proposals.

According to the conservative House Republican Study Committee, “H.R. 2560, The Cut, Cap, and Balance Act, is based on the framework first proposed by the Republican Study Committee in June 2011. The bill makes cuts $111 billion in FY 2012, places firm caps on future spending, and – contingent upon House and Senate passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment – grants President Obama’s request for a debt limit increase.”

In response, Democrats claimed this was a foolhardy and dangerous bill that would lead to fiscal “Armageddon”, as our illustrious Agitator-in-Chief put it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid led a vote by the Senate to “table” the bill, or refuse to allow it to be voted on. He went on to say "I think this piece of legislation is about as weak and senseless as anything that has ever come on the Senate floor, and I'm not going to waste the Senate's time day after day on this piece of legislation which I think is an anathema to what our country is all about,".

Think about that for a minute. The second highest ranking Democrat in the country feels like a bill which forces the government to cut spending, reduce deficits and pay down the debt, is “some of the worst legislation in the history of this country”. This is a bill that forces government to live within its means, and Democrats react to it as if they were vampires plunging into a dunk tank full of holy water and garlic cloves. They simply can’t fathom being restrained from unlimited spending of taxpayer dollars. And the bottom line is that a debt ceiling that is raised every time it is reached is no debt ceiling at all. Eventually creditors cut off the spigot and demand the bills be paid. If we can’t pay up then interest rates increase, lending stops and the economy comes to a crashing halt.

Both parties have agreed that the debt ceiling needs to be raised. One party insists that before we do so we address the underlying spending crisis and begin to reverse it and get our fiscal house in order. To fail to do so only prolongs the inevitable collapse and makes it far worse when it happens.

Kudos to House Republicans for standing their ground and showing they understand and will deal with the problems. Senate Republicans, take note and follow their lead. And to Senator Saxby Chambliss, a member of the “Gang of Six” which is pushing a proposal to raise taxes and gives us non-existent spending “cuts” which are nothing more than smoke and mirrors and accounting gimmicks, I will only say this…in 2008 you failed to win the general election because you couldn’t muster 50.1% of the votes in a solidly “red” state. You won the runoff because we refused to give Obama one more senator to work with. We are watching, and we are taking note.

Rejecting False Choices and Exposing Lies

2011-07-18T13:59:00.001-04:00

As August 2nd approaches, stipulated by Treasury Secretary and tax cheat Timothy Geithner as the date when the U.S. will reach its statutory debt limit, our illustrious president, Barack Obama, becomes more and more unhinged. From highly partisan, contemptuous and fact-challenged press conferences, to his angry and petulant exit from a meeting with Republicans on the issue, it is clear that Obama is feeling the pressure. This is compounded by the fact that the historically weak-willed Republicans seem shockingly willing to be proven vertebrates, and actually refuse to back down on principle (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s recent suggestion to completely abdicate constitutional duty and give all power to the president notwithstanding).

From class warfare rhetoric about tax breaks for corporate jet owners (signed into law by Obama in the 2009 stimulus bill, and less than a rounding error on the federal budget) to fear mongering the elderly to think Social Security checks will not go out, nothing is beneath this integrity-challenged president in his quest for power. He tirelessly repeats his Marxist mantra of needing to get “millionaires and billionaires” to “pay their fair share” and be a part of the “shared sacrifice”, despite the fact that the top 1% of all income earners (a group starting at $380,354/year and including millions of small businesses that file taxes under personal returns…hardly millionaires and billionaires) paid 38% of total tax revenue, while the bottom 50% paid only 2.7%. The top 5% starts at $159,619 and accounts for 58.7% of taxes paid.

Yet, just as many conservatives easily predicted when the stimulus bill was passed, Obama and the Democrats have run up trillions of dollars in new spending and debt, and after their profligate orgy of irresponsible spending, they now demand taxpayers pony up (predominantly high producers since we can’t ask the bottom 50% to help pay for government benefits they enjoy, now can we?) and pay the bill for them. They are furious at the Republicans who stand in their way, like a selfish teenager that has maxed out the credit card and throws a fit because mommy and daddy won’t increase their allowance.

Though he couches his rhetoric in a professorial, mellifluous voice, his speeches are an odious amalgam of half-truths, omissions, distortions and outright lies. Yet with the fourth estate and its tingly-legged benefactors all too willing to obfuscate on his behalf, the American people rarely get the unvarnished truth. For example, Obama has used scare tactics to stir up anger and fear towards Republican intransigence on raising taxes in a weak economy (something which not even John Maynard Keynes would countenance), yet the press refuses to point out that the national debt is now as large as the total U.S. GDP. In other words, you could have the federal government confiscate 100% of all wealth produced in America this year and it would barely pay off the national debt. Of course, that would leave nothing to fund next year’s budget, not to mention the personal needs of 310 million Americans, or the operations of state and local governments; but why quibble over such inconsequential details, right?

Obama, he who lectures us so often on “rejecting false choices”, is engaged in that very method of intellectual deceit. Recently, he painted the issue as one in which Republicans force us to choose between giving tax breaks to corporate jet owners, big oil companies and “millionaires and billionaires” on the one hand, and compromising the safety and future of our children on the other. Or, as he recently opined, he doesn’t want, and won’t accept “…a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans.”

Curiously, Obama, the man most responsible for the rhetorical excoriation of the Bush tax cuts, took full advantage of every one on his own 2010 income tax return, leaving him with an effective tax rate of 26.2%, far below the 39.6% tax rate that he is advocating. It is also noteworthy that Obama did not take advantage of the government’s program to voluntarily contribute additional money specifically for the purpose of reducing the national debt, which he could have done by visiting the website www.pay.gov. Also, for the man who touts shared sacrifice, the man living in the taxpayer funded White House and riding in the world’s most luxurious corporate jet as he travels back and forth to his myriad campaign fundraisers, he seems a little selfish. In 2010 he reported adjusted gross income of $5.5 million, yet his charitable contributions were a downright miserly $329,100, a mere 5.98% of his income. Surely someone as wealthy as he, living in taxpayer-funded luxury, could afford to pony up more than that, couldn’t he? But as is typical of liberal “charity”, is begins and ends with government confiscation of OPM (other people’s money).

Before we continue the rape and pillaging of the most productive people in our economy, maybe we could free up some money by eliminating some of that waste, fraud and abuse we are always hearing about. Personally, I’d like to see the elimination of the federal Department of Education, a black hole swallowing $77 billion in taxpayer money last year, and that on top of the $100 billion received through the stimulus law. In the four decades since its creation and despite receiving hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in funding, the DoE has shown no statistical improvement in student achievement over that time.

That is probably still politically untouchable for now though. So how about a few most can agree on; like the $71,000 spent at Wake Forest University to study the effects of cocaine on monkeys, or the $181,000 spent to see how cocaine enhances the sex drive of the Japanese quail. Or the $500,000 spent by the U.S. Forest Service to replace windows at the Mount St. Helen’s Visitors Center…which has been closed for years. Or the $3.4 million Florida received to build tunnels for turtles to cross underneath busy highways. Or the $1.9 million for the California Academy of Sciences to photograph ants in Madagascar. Or the $762,362 to develop interactive dance software in North Carolina. Or the $89,298 spent in Boynton, OK to replace new sidewalks with newer sidewalks…which leads to a ditch. Or the $357,710 to give a facelift to the Fitchburg Furnace in Kentucky, which was abandoned five years after it was built and then sat unused for 140 years (this money was granted on top of the $661,000 given by the federal government in 2004, money which was largely wasted due to “bad stewardship” according to the treasurer of Friends of Fitchburg). Or the $39.7 million in stimulus dollars spent to upgrade the offices and parking spaces of politicians in Kansas?

The list of such gross abuse of taxpayer funds is virtually endless. Yet like spoiled children, Obama and the Democrats refuse to let the spending party end, demanding more money from taxpayers and vilifying the very people that work hard, take risks and invest their money to improve the lives of themselves and their families, and in doing so improve the lives of their fellow citizens.

Obama and the Democrats know they can only achieve their goals by deception, by dividing the American people and pitting them against each other. Here’s hoping that Americans won’t be suckered into the “false choice” again, and that we’ll give Obama and the Democrats what they truly deserve…forced retirement in November 2012.

Obama’s New Economic Advisor: Magic 8 Ball

2011-07-11T12:36:00.000-04:00

On Friday, President Barack Obama gave a speech to address the latest monthly jobs report. If the consequences of his policies were not so disastrous, the speech would have been comedy gold. The history of Obama’s promises on the economy is a case study in cognitive dissonance, with promise after promise, then failure, then excuses and accusations. The only thing consistent when it comes to Obama and the economy is that when his predictions prove elusive, it comes as an “unexpected” shock to him and his diehard supporters in the media.

At issue is the jobs report issued by the Department of Labor for June, which reveals that a cadaverous 18,000 jobs were created for the month, 83 percent less than the 105,000 jobs predicted. The “unexpectedly” low jobs growth contributed to the rise in the unemployment rate, which rose to 9.2%. To put this in perspective, economists say that we need to create 125,000-150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth, and we need to be creating roughly 300,000 jobs per month to begin seeing strong economic growth. The news was made even worse by the revelation that far fewer jobs had been created in May than originally reported, which was also “unexpected”.

Shortly after taking office Obama used the fiscal crisis to ram through the “stimulus” package, which we were told would keep unemployment below 8% if passed, and warned that unemployment would go as high as 9% if it did not pass. We passed it, and in the nearly two and a half years since, unemployment rose from 7.8% in January 2009 when Obama took office, to 10.1% in October 2009 (a full eight months after the bill was signed into law), hovered just below 10% for a while before dipping to 8.8% in April 2011. Unemployment has ticked up every month since, and Obama’s own Treasury Secretary warns that it could be more than five years before we see a drop to Bush-era unemployment levels.

The Obama model has been a grab bag of cheap fiscal novelties, shiny and amusing at first glance but ultimately worthless. Stimulus, Son of Stimulus, auto union bailouts, teachers union and government employee bailouts, Summer of Recovery, Summer of Recovery II, Cash for Clunkers, ObamaCare (which Nancy Pelosi claimed would create four million jobs, and 400,000 almost immediately), Quantitative Easing, QE2, one-year payroll tax reduction, “shovel-ready” jobs…the list is seemingly endless.

Yet what do we have to show for it? Sustained high (and rising) unemployment, highest debt-to-GDP ratios since World War II, record debt and deficits, a weak dollar, high inflation in commodities like oil and food, and fear by small business owners to turn their dollars loose to invent, invest and create jobs.

But don’t tell our illustrious, Harvard-educated, most-brilliant-man-ever-to-become-president, Community Organizer in Chief that. No, he knows who the real culprits are, the ones making our economy suffer. Of course, he’s already revealed in past speeches some of the facilitators of fiduciary failure. Those include such arch enemies as ATMs, airport kiosks, tax cuts for the rich, the earthquake in Japan and unease about the European fiscal situation, high gas prices, and other “bumps” in the road.

Regardless, none of the current climate of economic stagnation can be laid at the feet of Obama. Just ask him and he’ll tell you. These are problems that he “inherited”, problems which “weren’t created overnight, and they’re not going to be solved overnight.” It is a national secret as to when “overnight” will finally give way to the era when Obama takes responsibility for the financial situation.

Friday’s speech was more of the same, with a few new twists. We got a dose of the tried-and-true, from reiterations that its “not going to be fixed overnight”, that “we’ve always known that we’d have ups and downs”, to the well-worn need to “invest” in roads, bridges and infrastructure (because the $180 billion allocated for roads and bridges in the stimulus bill was apparently not enough), and acknowledgements of other “tough headwinds” that are impeding his brilliant plan from working as it should.

Of course, there are some new villainous miscreants that have raised their vile heads and must be dealt with in order to revive the economy; for example, the need to streamline the patent process. So true…the cacophony of complaints about the un-streamlined patent process that has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs is a drumbeat we’ve all heard relentlessly (writer’s note…the preceding sentence was an example of gratuitous sarcasm meant to convey said writer’s exasperation at the litany of ridiculous excuses by Democrats and the president as to why their economic policies have been a miserable failure, and should not be taken literally).

Obama also mentioned the need to have Congress immediately pass already negotiated trade agreements which have bipartisan support as one way to spur the economy and produce more jobs. This is more than a little disingenuous since the trade agreements he is referring to (agreements negotiated under the Bush presidency with South Korea, Panama and Colombia) were held up by Obama until Republicans agreed to swallow a poison pill in the form of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, a sop to Democrats’ union cronies that, as the Heritage Foundation notes, “provides overly generous benefits for just a small fraction of laid-off workers. TAA gives those workers two years of job training, a year of Trade Adjustment Allowances, money for job searching and relocation, a refundable health care tax credit and a two-year wage insurance program to supplement lower earnings.” A sweet deal if you are one of the few.

Obama’s tone would have you believe that he is impatiently waiting for Congress to get the trade agreements approved so he can sign them, but such is not the case. Last month in a call with reporters, senior White House economist Gene Sperling unapologetically admitted that Obama would not allow submission of “implementing legislation on the three pending [free trade agreements] until we have a deal with Congress on the renewal of a robust TAA program consistent with the objectives” of the stimulus bill passed in 2009. In other words, pony up cash for more lavish benefits for displaced union workers, or the trade agreement gets a bullet in the back of the head, Chicago-style.

In closing he tossed out a few paeans to the need to rein in the deficits and spending and to get government living within its means, provided, of course, that we don’t cut funding for more government “investments”.

In the end, we should not expect to see much improvement in the economy until Obama is voted out of office. Obama is not a stupid man, which means that he is willing to sacrifice the economy and the welfare of millions of Americans in order to pursue a far-left ideological agenda. If he wasn’t so ideologically driven, he’d be able to look at historical indicators of what brings an economy back to prosperity. He could, like Kennedy and Reagan, do the only thing government can do to create long-term jobs…cut tax rates, drastically reduce regulations, stabilize the currency by ending the flood of loose dollars which devalue assets and savings, and most importantly, drastically reduce spending by government to free up capital in the private sector for job creation. As a bonus, he could stop using language that paints businesses as the enemy of the poor, helpless workers and consumers. Any and all of these things would be better than the Magic 8 Ball approach he is using now.

On the bright side, for once he didn’t blame Bush…

Coming to Expect the Unexpected

2011-07-08T13:20:00.001-04:00

Shortly after the 2008 presidential election, historian Michael Bechloss gushed with praise for President-Elect Barack Obama, declaring him to be “probably the smartest guy ever to become President”, and raving that his IQ is “off the charts”. When interviewer Don Imus inquired as to what Obama’s IQ is, Bechloss admitted that he did not know, but that did not keep him from gushing effusive praise. We are left to take a historian’s word for it, because Obama has steadfastly refused to release his college transcripts, and his policies while in office certainly do not lend credence to the claims of his brilliance. In fact, if we had to judge the president by the effectiveness of his policies, Obama would be the functional equivalent not of the class valedictorian, but of that weird kid that sat in the corner and ate paste while talking to himself.

On matters of the economy, the president and his advisors seem to be particularly clueless. Consider some statements from the administration of late:

In a recent video clip making the rounds, Obama responds to a question about the near $1 trillion “stimulus” package and its effect on the economy by laughing and then declaring “ ‘Shovel-ready’ was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” This is, you will recall, the same stimulus package that Obama demanded must be passed immediately if we were to stem the possibility of another Great Depression. We were promised (by Christina Romer, the first chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors) that if we passed it, unemployment would stay below 8%. Well, we DID pass it, and we have been rewarded with unemployment levels between 9-10+% for well over two years. Now, we have high unemployment AND staggering quantities of additional debt crippling the economy.

About a year ago, Vice President and gaffe-machine Joe Biden went on a national tour touting a “Summer of Recovery”, when we would finally see Obama’s policies create massive numbers of new jobs and kick-start the national economic engine. Except it didn’t. Unemployment remained high and private business capital remained on the sidelines. So far, there has been no announcement by Obama of “Summer of Recovery II”, the sequel.

Watching Obama and Biden and their cadre of economic cheerleaders glibly assure us that the economy is improving under their stewardship, despite more than sufficient evidence to the contrary, is like watching a real life economic sequel to that mind-numbingly stupid 1989 movie Weekend at Bernie’s, in which two friends go to their boss’s beach house and find him dead. Mistakenly believing that they are at fault, and with a hit man is after them (who they believe won’t kill them as long as their boss, Bernie, is believed to be alive), they dress him up and parade him around town, propping him up and trying to convince everyone that he is not dead, just partied out. Obama and Biden see the voters as the hit man, so they have to convince us that Bernie (the economy) is not dead at all; in fact, it’s been so much fun that it just needs a little time to recover, to be nursed back to health, and they have just the magic elixir that will cure our hangover. The problem is that their “cure” has taken us from hangover to coma, and for all their comic protestations, the truth is that they have no clue what they are doing.

A few weeks ago Austan Goolsbee, one of Obama’s closest economic advisors, bailed on the administration, tendering his resignation for the highly suspect excuse that he needed to go back to teaching at the University of Chicago in order to retain his tenure. His departure came in the midst of a rash of “unexpected” bad economic news, including the fact that the economy created an anemic 54,000 new jobs in May, and unemployment rose to 9.1% despite Obama’s constant refrain that his policies are working. Goolsbee was said to have pushed a more free-market approach after the departure of Romer, who had led the charge for the bacchanalian rampage of Keynesian government spending that proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Goolsbee’s departure leaves on Timothy “Turbo Tax” Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, remaining from his original economic team that was supposed to use their government-centric economic brilliance to pull us out of the Bush doldrums.

Like a punch drunk boxer, the Obama administration seems unprepared for the negative economic news that has bombarded us of late, and they seem to have no clue as to how to reverse the trend. Even Fed chairman Ben Bernanke recently admitted that he is at a loss to understand the weakness of the economy. This confusion is understandable from their perspective, because they have had free reign to implement their policies and still failed. From the expansion of TARP, to the stimulus package, to Son of Stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, Quantitative Easing, QE2, ObamaCare, Frank-Dodd financial reform, and an endless train of other anti-free market policies, they’ve had their way and we are worse off, and now they have run out of tricks.

What seems to most confusing to them is that they truly believed that they had assembled an august body of brilliant economic experts in whose capable hands the management of a multi-trillion dollar economy would flourish. They believed that their wisdom far exceeded that of a dynamic, organic economic ecosystem in which billions of economic decisions are made by hundreds of millions of citizens each and every day. They truly believed that a handful of brilliant people would know better the needs of the hundreds of millions than those hundreds of millions would themselves. It is an incredibly arrogant philosophy.

Of course, the mainstream media has been all to happy to continue the narrative that this is all “unexpected” and that we just need to give Obama more time for his policies to work. Popular blogger Instapundit adeptly addressed this by noting some of the national headlines and asking at what point the “unexpected” should become expected. Those headlines included “New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed,” (CNBC.com, May 25), “Personal consumption fell…when it was expected to rise” (Business Insider), “Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month…worse than economists’ expectations” (Reuters, May 25), “Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall,” (Bloomberg News, May 19), and “U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April,” (Wall Street Journal). Those headlines and more all came from a two week period from the middle to the end of May and, as Dick Clark used to say, the hits just keep on coming. Of course, these hits hurt and no one wants to listen to them.

The problem with our liberal friends, as Reagan once noted, is not that they are ignorant; it’s that so much of what they know just isn’t so. Or, as Harvard/University of Chicago economist Thomas Sowell regularly points out, while the intelligentsia may have extensive knowledge (often theoretical, which never seems to translate into the practical) within a narrowly defined field, they will never have even a tiny fraction of the aggregate knowledge acquired daily by the hundreds of millions of participants in the economy.

Of course, they never stops the intelligentsia from coming up with, and insisting we implement, ever more “cutting edge” policies, no matter how miserable the track record of past ideas, and they condescend to the unwashed proletariat that dare object. Yet as we watch our phrenic superiors’ prognostications continuously fail, we are reminded of George Orwell’s maxim that "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals can believe them."

A Long Train of Abuses and Usurpations

2011-07-05T09:31:00.001-04:00

This week we celebrate the 235th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the act of which broke ties with King George’s England and gave birth to a new nation. The decision to break with England was not one made lightly, but one that came after “a long train of abuses and usurpations” which finally made the oppression unbearable. And what comprised this long train of abuses? In part, it was the denial of self-governance and obstruction of the administration of justice. It was the erecting of “a multitude of New Offices, and [sending] hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance”, the subjection of citizens “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution”, and cutting off our trade. It was imposing taxes on us without our consent, and exciting domestic insurrections.

It was this and more that led us to dissolve our political bands with England, declare our independence, and shed our collective blood in defense thereof. Yet, if we truly believed that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, what else could we have done? When we truly comprehend that we are all children of God, sovereign by virtue of our very creation, how can we be content to be slaves? How can we be content to suffer the indignities of oppression?

It was this new philosophy that emboldened the hearts and minds of Americans. It was this belief that led Patrick Henry to declare “give me liberty or give me death!”, and that led Nathan Hale to proclaim moments before his execution by the British that “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country”.

So perfectly did Samuel Adams embody the new spirit of the American people when he proclaimed on August 1, 1776, from the Philadelphia state house "Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

Today we still feel that pull of freedom within our hearts as we consider the worthy origins of this nation and the freedoms protected by our Constitution. On Independence Day we gather in thousands of communities across the nation to celebrate this sacred gift bestowed on us through the blood of our forefathers. We march in parades, listen to rousing speeches, and issue shouts of acclamation as we see the explosive display of light and the percussive thunder of the fireworks, reminding us of the “rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air”, which are symbols of that fight we won more than two centuries ago.

Yet, as inspiring as these traditions are, I fear that we have deluded ourselves into believing we are any more truly free. I fear instead that we are a nation of Gullivers, allowing ourselves to be bound by an army of government Lilliputians, strand by silken strand of oppressive law binding us as surely as if with chain. The process is all the more nefarious because we fail to realize we are being bound. Indeed, too often we facilitate our own bondage when we willingly trade our liberties for the promise of government security.

One has only to consider the burdens that we daily endure, often without even thinking about it.

American colonists were impelled to the separation in part based on what they considered onerous taxation without representation. The king had levied taxes on them including the Sugar Act (1.5 pence on sugar, wine, molasses, textiles, coffee and indigo), Stamp Act (taxing all printed materials), and the Townshend Revenue Acts (taxing paper, tea, glass, lead and paints). Possibly the most famous was the Tea Act, which imposed a three penny per pound tax on tea. Yet such taxes seem inconsequential compared to our current tax burden.

Today we are burdened by an income tax, a form of taxation forbidden under the original Constitution, with the lowest rate at 10% and the highest rate at 35%, and a president and Democrat Party demanding those rates be raised further. We also have Social Security and Medicare taxes, property taxes, vehicle taxes, capital gains, corporate income and federal excise taxes. We have state income taxes, state and local sales taxes, SPLOSTs, and luxury taxes. We have fuel and unemployment taxes, inheritance/death taxes and inventory taxes. We have taxes in the form of fees or permits or licensing (fishing, hunting, driving, car tag, marriage, business license, CDL, etc.) and fines. Can you imagine how the colonists would have reacted to such a tax burden? Yet we labor strenuously while doing little about it, except plead and grovel to our government masters that they might ease the burden on us a little and place it on the back of our fellow man that is less politically favored.

We also have the hidden tax of inflation, a result of abandoning the constitutional requirement that debts be paid in gold and silver coin, which have intrinsic value, rather than our paper currency, the value of which can be manipulated at will, and in the process destroying the underlying value and rendering the fruits of our labor worthless. Even the real assets that we “own” are nothing more than rented, for if we fail to pay our property taxes will government not come and seize our land by force?

Government now not only taxes our purchases, but demands we purchase a product (health insurance) whether we want to or not! Government dictates how much salt and sugar we can ingest. It dictates what type of light bulbs can illuminate our houses, how many gallons our toilets can flush, and how many gallons/minute our showers can spray. Government bans us from drinking raw milk and requires children in day care to brush their teeth after lunch (Massachusetts). It requires extensive training and licensing for African hair-braiding. The list is almost limitless!

We allow the TSA to grope us in ways that would get them on a sex offender registry in any other situation. Drug laws allow government to seize our assets and place the burden of proof on us to show that we are not guilty.

The freedom we have as Americans today is but a hollow shell of the freedoms secured by the blood of the Founders of this nation and those that fought to obtain them. Today, the doctrine of federalism, the vertical (federal, state, local) and horizontal (legislative, executive, judicial) separation of powers, and the sovereignty of the individual is on life support.

Yet how can we protect and defend that which we don’t understand. As Declaration signer and original Supreme Court justice James Wilson once said, "Law and liberty cannot rationally become the objects of our love, unless they first become the objects of our knowledge." On this Independence Day let us do more than eat hamburgers and go to parades. Let us once again rekindle the love affair with freedom. Let us learn of our rich heritage and honor it by reasserting our sovereignty, reigning in our government, and once again derailing this “long train of abuses”.

The Refining Fire of Fatherhood

2011-06-20T13:16:00.001-04:00

Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero once noted that the first principle of society is rooted in the family, and in turn grow communities, cities and nations. The family is the building block of society, and if families are weakened the society will crumble. Throughout the millennia, family has consisted of a father and mother united in marriage, and from that bond comes the well-spring of children.

In many ways, the structure of the traditional family is being undermined today. As society becomes increasingly morally relativistic, the respect for that structure wanes, and indeed, some are openly hostile to it. From feminists who insist that children do just as well, and maybe even better, without a father, to a Hollywood culture where celebrities see marriage more as a series of short-term leases than as lifelong commitments, it becomes difficult to instill in children just how critical a strong marriage is not only to their long-term happiness, but to the strength of society.

Maybe one of the most insidious methods of weakening the family is through popular media. One has to work hard to come up with a father character on television that is not a vacuous imbecile being scolded by his wife, who does much more than come home from work, grab a beer, stick his hands in his pants and watch sports. Those that aren’t insipid are depicted as serial philanderers. There was a time when Hollywood gave us depictions of wonderful fathers like Ward Cleaver, Heathcliff Huxtable, and Charles Ingalls. These were men of quiet strength, loving but firm, who taught their children strong values of honesty, integrity and virtue. Today we are fed a shovelful of Al Bundy and Homer Simpson. How can we expect our children to grow up to be strong adults if we bombard them with a constant narrative of mediocrity?

My wife and I married young; many said too young, at the tender age of nineteen. Most were kind enough to refrain from telling us directly that our marriage had little chance of enduring success, but statistically, the odds were stacked heavily against us. The first year of marriage may have been the most difficult year of my life. Jennifer became pregnant three weeks after we were married. I was working three jobs, none making much more than minimum wage. We used to joke (to keep from crying) that we couldn’t possibly have money problems because we had no money. It was a trial by fire, and with each obstacle it seemed the chances of us staying together diminished a little more. Maybe all of the doubters were right. Maybe it was just too hard. I loved her with all my heart, but the stress was overwhelming. Being an adult was a lot harder than I had expected. Maybe divorce would be easier and better for us both.

That all changed on the night of December 23, 1992. We had taken three trips to the hospital in two days, only to be sent home. After the last rejection, we left with her in tears, wondering if the baby would ever come. The contractions had gotten stronger overnight but she refused to go back until the next afternoon for a pre-scheduled appointment. When we arrived and the doctor began to check her progress, he immediately sent us to the hospital, saying the baby could come any minute.

Whether it was a skeleton crew around the holidays, a scheduling screw-up or what, I would never know, but when we arrived at the hospital there were three other women in labor, a couple of nurses in Labor and Delivery, and the on-call OB/GYN was not at the hospital but more than half an hour away. Of the four women in labor, my wife was in the best physical health. One woman was having a Caesarian section, another had a baby that was born breach, and the other also had a child in distress. When the doctor finally arrived he did an initial check on each woman and began to work in the order of greatest need. Jennifer, being young and healthy, was last. The doctor asked her not to push, and she responded with a look that could have melted tempered steel.

That baby had other thoughts and would wait no longer. When Jen cried out that she had to push I turned to the nurse and declared that she needed some help. To my utter shock, the nurse snapped back, saying “Well, go help her!” I looked stunned, but the nurse explained that the doctor wasn’t going to get to her in time, that she (the nurse) had to work the monitors and such, and that left me. She said she would walk me through it, and she did. At nineteen years old, terrified and panicked, I nevertheless helped that little baby work its way into the world and take his first breath.

As I stood there holding this red-faced, crying little person, the magnitude of what had just happened came crashing down upon me. I was now a father. I was responsible for feeding, clothing, educating, instilling values in, and in all other ways bringing him into adulthood to the best of my ability. The sheer terror was overwhelming. I was barely more than a kid myself and now I was in charge of raising one? What kind of insanity was this? Don’t people have to get training first for this kind of thing, a permit, something? Apparently not!

Yet within moments that precious little child burrowed into my chest. I could feel his little lungs rising and falling, his tiny little hands gripping mine, his warm breath against my skin. In that moment I knew my world had changed. I knew that I would do whatever I had to do, sacrifice all I had, in order to give him a good life in a loving home. I would be the father he needed, no matter what that took.

Over the next seventeen years I’d become the father to seven more children. I learned that each one of them, despite being raised in the same house by the same parents, had very distinct personalities, strengths and weaknesses. What worked with one may not work with another. There was going to be a lot of trial and error on my path as a parent.

One thing I have learned though is that children are resilient and forgiving. I’ve made many mistakes over the years. Despite the mistakes though, my four sons and four daughters know without shadow of doubt that I love them and would die for them if need be. They know I have tried my best to be a good father, even if sometimes I come up short. Nothing gives me greater joy than coming home and have them rush to me in a flurry of hugs and kisses, and the cacophony of them all telling me about their day simultaneously.

Next to my marriage, I most cherish the eight wonderful children with which God has blessed me. They are beautiful children of great intelligence, but more importantly, of outstanding character. If I live to be a hundred years old, I will take no greater satisfaction in any wealth, fame or achievement that I could conceivably attain, than I do in the amazing children that I have had a role in producing. Truly, my quiver is full. Fatherhood has been a refiner’s fire, the necessity of putting my children first teaching me lessons of sacrifice, of unconditional love, and that you never leave anything that will cost more than $5 to replace within reach of a two-year old. It has been the greatest joy of my life.

Beltway Lotharios and the Cycle of Scandal

2011-06-13T12:28:00.001-04:00

For the last two weeks the media has gorged on a non-stop litany of stories concerning the single most important issue facing our nation. Would that be the “unexpected” reports of almost non-existent private sector job growth and an economy that, despite Obama’s reassurances, may be on the brink of a double-dip recession? No. Is it Obama’s violation of the War Powers Act with our continued “kinetic military action” in Libya? Nuh-uh. Maybe it’s Sixth Circuit’s review of the ObamaCare case (nope) or the Federal Reserve’s warning that the political body must act responsibly in order to stave off an economic collapse? Wrong again.

Based on the 24-hour saturation in the news cycle and the sheer number of stories written and aired, clearly the most important issue facing our nation is that a skinny New Yorker with an incredibly overinflated sense of his own worth had to finally admit, after days of vehement protests to the contrary, that it was indeed he who sent the lewd photographs of his genitalia, as well as sexually charged and explicit texts, to college-aged women. These women, who include a porn star, are young enough to be his daughters.

And so unravels the scandal of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), possibly the most obnoxious and arrogant member of Congress now that former Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) was defeated in the last election. Weiner, considered a rising star in the Democrat Party and a likely candidate to be the next mayor of New York, instead is tearfully admitting to the nation his indiscretions which have been going on for several years, and with at least a half dozen women. Watching his fall from glory, a Brooklyn-born Icarus plummeting towards earth, the proverbial wax of his wings melted by his own flaming ego, it is hard not to feel just a little sorry for him…at least until you remember that these indiscretions occurred both before and after his marriage to his wife Huma, who is now pregnant.

Weiner’s is just the latest in a sad saga of scandals involving the Beltway Lotharios, and neither party is free of the embarrassment. Weiner’s scandal comes on the heels of Rep. Chris Lee (R-NY), who sent a shirtless picture of himself to a woman on Craigslist, former Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) who resigned after being arrested for soliciting gay sex in a public restroom (or he was practicing tapping out Morse code with his penny loafers, we still aren’t sure), former Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC), who disappeared for a week or so before he admitted he was having an affair with an Argentine woman. We also have former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently revealed that he fathered a child years ago with a servant woman in his home. Let’s also not forget former governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) who turned out to have an expensive proclivity for high-end prostitutes, and former House Speaker and current presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, whose adulterous affairs would certainly be used against him during the campaign (although with this week’s implosion there may not be a campaign much longer).

As embarrassing as those incidents were, others have landed the offenders in even more hot water. Former president Bill Clinton (D-Hooters), who gave us the term “Oral Office” and had us debating the true meaning of the word “is”, was accused (but not convicted of) sexual harassment and rape, was “serviced” by a young female intern and perjured himself when caught lying about it, which led to his impeachment. Last week former senator and vice presidential nominee for the Democrat Party, John Edwards, was indicted for using campaign funds to pay off his mistress and cover up an affair he had while his wife was undergoing treatment for cancer. He now faces the possibility of jail time.

Clearly, neither party has clean hands when it comes to scandalous behavior. It seems that the main difference between the two parties is that Republicans tend to run their offenders out of office, and the Democrats tend to circle the wagons, protect and even promote their offenders. Even though Sanford, Ensign and Vitter remained in office through the end of their terms, and Vitter was actually re-elected, there was and is considerable pressure from the party for these people to resign and fade away. On the other hand you have serial offenders Bill Clinton, Barney Frank (ran a gay prostitution ring from his home), former Rep. Gerry Studds (D-MA, censured for having sex with an underage male intern before Massachusetts voters re-elected him for six more terms), former Rep. Mel Reynolds (D-IL, convicted of a dozen counts of sexual assault on a 16-year old before being pardoned by President Bill Clinton), and of course Ted Kennedy (D-MA), whose sexual dalliances were legend and who helped his nephew escape a rape charge.

In short, neither Republicans nor Democrats have escaped the taint of scandal. Likely, the heady rush of power, the ego-inflating habit of being surrounded by yes-men, people indulging your pride in order to gain favor, and women seeking to be close to power, is just too much for many men to resist. Like an elixir of arrogance, they become intoxicated by the power, the money, the deference, and all that goes with it. They begin to think that they are above the law, and that the rules do not apply to them. In essence, they begin to believe all the self-promoting hype they stuff into their campaign commercials.

While such scandals are discouraging, I am glad to see that there are many Americans that are appalled by such behavior, unlike France, whose citizens are lambasting the victim of an attempted rape by the powerful international banker Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who also has a long history or sexual abuse. Europe calls us prudes, but considering the continent-wide welfare state Europe has become, I’m not too worried about criticism from them.

Here at home though, that is another matter entirely. It is to be expected that men in positions of great power will occasionally succumb to temptations and become wrapped in scandal. However, there is an element of the national populace that would have us believe that these scandals and indiscretions should be irrelevant as long as the man (or woman) is competent at executing the responsibilities of their office. I would counter, in response, with a question; namely, if we can’t depend on a man to have the strength of character to maintain fidelity in the most intimate relation he has (with his wife), then how can we expect him to maintain fidelity, in fiduciary or other terms, with hundreds of thousands or hundreds of millions of constituents, only a tiny fraction of whom he will ever meet or converse with?

In 1756, John Adams wrote in his treatise “Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law”, that "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."

Let us not equate an acknowledgment of man’s weakness with a normalization and acceptance of those weaknesses in those that would govern us. If we are to remain free, let us require the highest level of character from those in positions of power, so that we can hold them justifiably in high esteem, and not have our deliberative bodies turn into a casting call for the Jerry Springer show.

Civility in Politics: The End of Detente

2011-06-06T18:33:00.001-04:00

In the aftermath of the tragic shooting of Rep. Danielle Giffords by leftist lunatic Jared Loughner, President Obama was praised for his speech in Tuscon calling for civility in our national political discourse. Said Obama, “[A]t a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized - at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” Just so, Mr. President, just so.

Mr. Obama continued, “But what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another. As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let us use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Bravo, Mr. President, bravo!

Alas, that détente disappeared faster than Kool-Aid at an Obama rally, faster than a bottle of Jack Daniels at the Kennedy compound, and even faster than the results of a paternity test at the California governor’s mansion. No sooner had the dead been laid to rest in Arizona than Democrats were back on the hyperbolic, rhetorical offensive, ascribing the worst motives possible to their political opponents. Charges of racism, hatred, apathy towards suffering, and many more abounded.

Consider:
After Senate Democrats failed to pass or even vote on a single budget for more than two years, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that it would be “foolish” for Democrats to pass a budget, after letting the country’s fiscal crisis get ever more perilous so they can take cheap shots at Republicans while making sure they have no budget votes to haunt them, Democrats now accuse Paul Ryan and the Republicans of murdering the elderly. In an ad released during the recent NY-26 special election, Democrats depict a Ryan look-alike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair through the woods and out of a clearing to the edge of the cliff. As the elderly woman begins to panic, realizing her fate, the Ryan-clone shoves her over the cliff and to her death.

This is civility? Accusing your political opponents of pre-meditated murder so that the rich can keep their tax cuts? The left went into a frothing at the mouth, rabid hysteria over Sarah Palin’s “death panels” comment, yet the ObamaCare law grants a board of unelected bureaucrats power to decided whether or not government will pay for (and therefore, if a patient will receive) treatments based on a government-formulated assessment of the value of that person’s life to society.

On the other hand, the Ryan budget actually provides for near-double digit increases in Medicare funding, while introducing block grants to states and other free market mechanisms which would reduce costs and increase accountability through competition (something the left despises since it clearly identifies winners and losers), and for this they are accused of killing old people? Until Democrats back off of their unwavering support for taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood abortion mills, which are responsible for the deaths of far more innocents in fact than Ryan’s Medicare reforms would be in theory, I really have a low threshold of tolerance for their hypocritical, moralizing lectures.

The accusations against Republicans did not end there though. In Obama’s budget speech, he accused Republicans of heartlessness, saying that the Ryan budget would “give” (as if they had been given the money instead of earning it) “millionaires and billionaires” more money while leaving "poor children," "children with autism" and "kids with disabilities" to "fend for themselves." Absolutely nothing in the Ryan budget justifies such slanderous lies; but then, the truth has never gotten in the way of Obama spinning a yarn of lies, misrepresentation and deceit when it suits his purposes. After all, this is the same man that told a group of Hispanics that they needed to support him and the Democrats last November because “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends”. Heck, we could have a victorious end to the war in Afghanistan by the middle of next week if we could convince Obama that the Taliban is trying to cut taxes for the wealthy and reform entitlement spending. He’d send in SEAL Team Six and take every last one of them out.

Last month, making a speech near the Mexican border, Obama accused Republicans of racism for wanting a secure border. It couldn’t possibly be drug, gun and sex trafficking that results from this unabated influx of illegals, or the Americans and law enforcement agents that have died as a result. No, it must be racism. Obama joked that Republicans wouldn’t be happy unless we built a moat on the border and filled it with alligators to devour all of those pesky Mexicans. Way to set high that bar of civility, Mr. President.

When gas prices hit $3 per gallon under Bush, Democrats blamed it that president, accusing him of using his power to enrich his buddies in the oil and gas industry. When gas hit $4 per gallon under Obama, somehow it is still Republicans’ fault. On the other side of the coin, a recent admission by Barney Frank that he used his influence to land a high-ranking job at Fannie Mae for his gay lover, Herb Moses, drew no more than a yawn from the media. At the time, Frank was chairman of the House oversight committee responsible for monitoring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…the same Fannie and Freddie that he proclaimed were the picture of fiscal health and regulatory responsibility…just before they collapsed, costing the taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money.

Also receiving scant attention was the recent re-signing of the PATRIOT Act by Barack Obama, the counterterrorism law that he adamantly opposed under Bush. Under Bush, liberals and Democrats screamed bloody murder, proclaiming it to be the end of our civil rights, regaling us with visions of jackbooted storm troopers breaking into innocent citizens’ homes, spying on them, torturing them and turning America into a fascist hell. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall many Democrat politicians taking to the airwaves when Obama reauthorized the law, lamenting it was the end of liberty. I don’t recall leftist organizations warning us of the nightmarish repercussions.

Personally, I don’t get all that worked up over hyperbolic political speech. No one of any intelligence will believe that Republican efforts to reform Medicare result from a desire to kill old people, or that our desire to secure the border and combat drug and gang crime is because we loathe our melanin-enhanced brethren. No one of intelligence believes that conservatives want poor children to starve or go without medical care, or that we’d happily destroy the environment we have to live in to make a few extra bucks. And those not intelligent enough to discern hyperbole from reality are going to vote Democrat anyway, so there is no point in wasting our breath convincing them otherwise.

No, it’s not the slanderous hyperbole directed at conservatives and Republicans that grates on me, it is the fact that I have to be lectured to on the need for civility by people accusing their political opponents of the most hateful, racist, homophobic, sexist, uncharitable behavior. That just gets annoying.

That Posterity May Never Forget

2011-05-31T12:49:00.001-04:00

"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!" ~Samuel Adams, August 1, 1776, Philadelphia State House

When the ink dried on that hallowed document we know as the Declaration of Independence, two things occurred. First, the world was blessed with a blueprint for freedom, in the form of a charter of liberty that forever broke with the philosophy of the divine right of kings, instead acknowledging for the first time that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. It proclaimed that in this nation men are sovereign, and their government serves them, deriving its just powers from their consent.

The second thing that occurred was that, having penned their names to that document, the Founding Fathers had pledged their lives to the cause of freedom; for had that war for independence failed, the Declaration of Independence would have become their death warrant. If the forces of King George had prevailed, then these men would not have been patriots founding a new nation, but traitors to their king.

The first American army could barely justify that designation. They were nothing more than a ragtag band of farmers and merchants hastily organized in an effort to maintain their newfound freedom. They were undisciplined, untrained, outnumbered and overmatched by a superior fighting force. Yet they fought for freedom for themselves and their posterity, and many paid the price of that freedom with their own blood. Washington’s armies often were without the funds needed for supplies, and when shoes wore out the soldiers wrapped their feet in rags, which were quickly torn to shreds by the ice and rocks, leaving their feet to be torn and bruised as they marched on; more died of dysentery and other disease than fell by the sword.

More than two centuries have passed, and our military has evolved from that ragtag band of farmers and merchants into the finest fighting force the world has ever known. Their weapons are far more advanced, their training and discipline unparalleled, but these valiant men and women are still driven by the same thing as their forefathers; a love of their God and their country, and a desire to uphold the great legacy of liberty bequeathed to them by generations past.

More than one million men and women have given their lives in the service of their country, and an infinitesimal few will ever have their names and stories lauded in the history books. Their fallen bodies have littered the fields of battle at home and around the world. From Antietam to Fallujah, from Bull Run to the Bulge, from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the desert sands of Afghanistan, they work tirelessly, laying their lives on the line each and every day, with little praise or even thanks, all that we here at home can enjoy the benefits of a nation built upon their backs and nourished with their blood.

As the dawn rises on this Memorial Day, where will our thoughts lie? As we fire up the barbeque grills and break out the baseballs and gloves, as we go to the beaches and enjoy time with our families, will we remember in whose honor we celebrate this holy day? Will we take a moment to kneel in prayer and thank our Creator for blessing this nation with brave souls willing to lose their lives for their fellow man? Or will we go to mattress sales and sports events, never stopping to honor the memories of their sacrifices?

General Douglas McArthur, addressing the new cadets at the U.S. Military Academy, captures the essence of the American soldier. Said he, “Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures -- not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless. His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast…From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs in memory's eye, I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God. I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them: duty, honor, country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they saw the way and the light."

The American Revolution, the War of 1812, The Mexican-American War, the War Between the States, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq. These and many more wars and military engagements have called upon our soldiers to once again rise up and take up arms in defense of their nation. After each one we have lain our men and women to rest; some were brought home and given their justified honors, buried in our cemeteries reserved for those that sacrificed all, white tombstones adorned with their names, with crosses, or stars of David, even in death giving honor to that God who gave them life.

In the Holy Bible, Book of John, Chapter 15, verse 13, Jesus Christ, upon whose teachings the laws of this nation and its government are based, said to his disciples, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”.

On the solemn day reserved in their honor, before we enjoy a carefree day away from work, spending time with our families, I pray that we each take a few moments to honor our dead, those that have fallen on the fields of battle securing the liberties which we too often take for granted. May we take the time to teach our children the meaning of this holy day. May we take time to instill deep within their hearts a solemn reverence for the blood spilt by generations past for our sake. And may we, with utmost sincerity, with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and humility, offer up words of praise to our God for blessing us with so many, who sacrificed so much, who demanded so little in return.

The Modern Battle Between Christianity and Secularism

2011-05-24T12:43:00.000-04:00

In a nation founded in large measure on freedom of religion, we seem to have reached a critical point in our society where the religious majority is suffering from the tyranny of the non-religious minority. Actually, let me be more specific. In a nation in which 85% of the citizens are self-described Christians, the terms of our worship are being imposed on us by a virulently anti-religious minority. While evidence of this has been building for years, several incidents of late which have garnered little media attention show that (to steal a line from Hillary Clinton), we are witnessing the results of a vast, anti-Christian conspiracy. Well, maybe not vast, but certainly intense, with Christians abetting the perpetrators by their silence.

Every year around Christmas we see political correctness rear its ugly head. In an effort to make sure that no one is ever offended in any place, at any time, for any reason, we see schools replace Christmas holidays with “winter break”, or retail stores that take the “safe” road by telling their employees to refrain from uttering “Merry Christmas”, opting instead for the more mundane “Happy Holidays”. Ironically, in doing so they are still acknowledge the religious significance of the day, since the world “holiday” derives from the Old English “hāligdæg”, meaning “Holy day”.

This year, the self-imposed blockade on expression of Christian sentiment extended to the most holy of days in Christianity, Easter, the day celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In California, the Compass Bible Church spent thousands of dollars to create an Easter ad and then signed a contract with NCM Media Networks to have it aired in theaters leading up to the holiday. The ad was about as non-controversial as it can get. With a powerful instrumental track, the screen shows a grassy field with the sun rising in the background. Across the screen, unspoken, flows a series of arguments made against the resurrection (the disciples stole Christ’s body and claimed he had been resurrected, or they had hallucinated seeing the risen Savior after his death). Meanwhile, the phrase “Did It Happen” flashes across the screen. The ad closes with the caption “We Actually Believe in the Resurrection”, followed by the name of the church and the Sunday worship times; hardly the stuff of controversy.

Yet apparently that was too controversial for NCM Media, which banned the ads as being controversial and potentially offensive. Why? Because it mentions the name of Jesus. Yet one wonders why the name of Jesus would be offensive in this context. NCM’s response was that they do not allow ads with historical religious figures to be aired. However, no depiction of Christ was presented, only His name. So is it His name they object to? Hardly. NCM ads air in 49 of the top 50 media markets nationwide, and regularly advertise movies which use the name of Christ as an expression of disgust, incredulity or profanity. So apparently the name of Christ is only offensive when used in a religious context.

In another example, in 2009 a number of prominent Christian leaders assembled and developed a document that would come to be known as the Manhattan Declaration. The declaration was a response to efforts by groups to silence the voice of Christianity in the public arena, and to publicly support the biblical Christian worldview regarding the importance of traditional marriage, the sanctity of human life, and the foundational pillar of religious liberty. This document was offered as an app for the Apple iPhone and was approved with a “4+” rating, meaning that there was no objectionable content. Unfortunately, in November 2010, Apple pulled the app after a small but vocal group of pro-gay marriage protestors accused Apple of promoting “hatred” and “homophobia” and of being anti-gay.

Similarly, Exodus international, a Christian ministry working with homosexuals seeking to rid themselves of those tendencies, produced an app (also approved with a 4+ rating) intended to reach out to and support the efforts of those trying to overcome those desires. The app did not condemn homosexuals, but offered them hope in the prospect of changing their lives through Christ. That app was also pulled by Apple after protest. The protestors claimed that Exodus had engaged in “scare tactics, misinformation, stereotypes, and distortions of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) life to recruit clients”.

I’m not arguing that Apple didn’t have the right to pull those apps, because they are a private company and aren’t obligated to disseminate all views. However, I do question the wisdom. In a center-right country of which 85% are self-proclaimed Christians, how is it that a vocal but tiny minority has been able to achieve de facto censorship of the Christian worldview under the guise of deeming such a worldview “offensive”? One can easily, literally with a few taps on the iPhone, download apps that would be and are offensive to Christians. Yet the inverse is not true. Apple still allows a number of gay/bisexual friendly apps for download, apparently unconcerned that it may be offensive to Christians.

Major corporations, in an effort to show their acceptance of “diversity” and “inclusiveness”, have begun to openly support these lifestyles which are considered offensive to long accepted Christian doctrine. For example, The Home Depot has repeatedly sponsored gay pride parades across the countries, including donating a large number of the famous orange aprons (some used by vendors passing out condoms). Parade marchers also handed out plastic cups to kids, in which small flags advertising a gay men’s dating website were placed. In Chicago, Home Depot sent its corporate mascot to march in the parade, and in Pennsylvania the company set up a Kids’ Workshop at the Gay Pride parade. Many of these parades feature fetish costumed parade walkers, and regardless of where you land on the issue of gay “rights”, such a venue is inappropriate for children.

It is bad enough when private companies allow themselves to be threatened, intimidated and extorted by these militant minorities, but the dangerous implications are much more far-reaching as matters of government and public policy. Due to government decisions embracing homosexual relationships, the Catholic Adoption Services agencies in Boston and Washington D.C. were forced to close because they refused to place children in homes with homosexual partners. In both of these cities there were other agencies that did allow child placement in homes of homosexuals, but that was not enough for the gay rights crowd. As a result, CAS, the largest placement agency for special needs children, can no longer serve those children.

The bottom line is that we are rapidly reaching an apex in the religious/culture war. One side must, of necessity, win, and the other side must lose. If government grants protected status to homosexuals, then it comes in direct conflict with religious rights. If the secular contingent wins, the religious loses. We’ve already seen the affects as noted above, or in the confusing Supreme Court rulings regarding display of the Ten Commandments, or policies regarding public displays of Nativity scenes. The examples are numerous and varied, but the conclusion is clear. If Christians want to keep the right to worship freely, they will have to fight vigorously for it because their opponents seek nothing less than to completely ban public expression of Christianity.

While those seeking to quell religion in our country often use the “separation of church and state” argument to justify their attacks, it is unassailable fact that we were founded as a Christian nation. Decades after Jefferson penned that phrase in a letter to the Danbury Baptists, the House Judiciary Committee in 1854 reaffirmed in official report our status as a Christian nation when it wrote "At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged…In this age there can be no substitute for Christianity…That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendents."

To reach a point where religion is discouraged or forbidden would not only be a travesty, it would destroy the “indispensable supports” of religion and morality, and in so doing, would usher in the end of our republic.

Charity Begins at Home (and Church)

2011-05-16T13:26:00.000-04:00

In our society it is almost axiomatic that liberals are charitable and conservatives are greedy and heartless. After all, conservatives are the ones calling for spending cuts to social programs, and tax cuts to stimulate job growth. Liberals are the ones that vociferously object to even the most minute of spending cuts to any type of social program, lest the poor, downtrodden and innocent suffer. Yet, as with so many things, such a conclusion may be accepted with little argument, but has very little basis in fact.

Most of us have seen coverage of the personal tragedies in the aftermath of the historic outbreak of tornadoes across the southeastern United States a few weeks ago, which left more than 300 dead. Footage of the massive tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa and other parts of Alabama are heart wrenching. In my little section of northwest Georgia we received significant damage as well. For the second time in three years my home narrowly escaped the brunt of a tornado’s destructive path, but many of our friends and neighbors were not so lucky.

Two days after the tornados hit I drove through Adairsville and Ringgold and witnessed the awesome force of nature’s fury; billboard frames bent at 90-degree angles, warehouses demolished as if they were made of tin foil and swaths flattened trees that looked like matchsticks. There were huge sections of towns that had essentially vanished. If ever there was a need for government this was it, right?

Yet at 7AM the morning after the tornados struck, it was not FEMA that was taking the lead to help the newly homeless. It was friends and neighbors out with chainsaws, already cutting up trees and removing debris. It was churches that were already providing hot meals for hundreds, and taking up collections of clothing and other needed supplies. In my home county of Bartow, more than three hundred families were cared for in the immediate aftermath. Teams from these churches went about clearing debris and salvaging as much of the victims’ personal belongings as possible.

Donations of bottled water, food, clothing, toiletries, blankets and even toys for children came flooding in, in some cases redirected because a facility had no more room to store the items. Churches were aided in the effort by local humanitarian and civic organizations. Disaster relief headquarters were set up to coordinate the logistics and attend to the needs of the victims. So great was the outpouring of help that FEMA actually sent some volunteers back home in certain areas because they had more volunteers than they could coordinate.

Last year I wrote that it is not government’s role to dispense charity, and when government does get into the charity business, the distribution of that charity becomes a political decision based on favored status, and not on need. It becomes plagued with bureaucratic red tape, and much of the resources are eaten up by “overhead” costs. The response from the more liberal readers was as you would expect; claims that government MUST be the one to address humanitarian needs because the average person can’t be trusted to do the right thing voluntarily, and therefore government must make us do the right thing by force.

Here is where reality departs from the accepted narrative. I advocate for limited government that performs only those functions enumerated in the Constitution. I argue this because I believe that just because a thing needs to be done does not mean it needs to be done by government. Ironically, I can argue for limited government because I deeply believe in the innate goodness of the average American. The left argues in favor of government-enforced charity because they believe that, at our core, Americans are greedy and heartless. I believe they do so because they are projecting their personal character flaws on those around them.

Don’t take my word for it though. Take the word of Syracuse professor and self-described liberal, Arthur Brooks, who published a book entitled “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism." Professor Brooks sought to do an in-depth analysis of charitable giving, but his conclusions so surprised him that he rechecked his data because he was certain there was an error after his finding showed that conservatives are far more charitable than liberals, which is just counterintuitive.

Among the findings were the following:

People that oppose the notion that “government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality” give four times more in charitable contributions than those that embrace the idea.

Despite the fact that liberal families' incomes average 6% higher than the incomes of conservative families, conservative families give just over 30% more in charitable donations than their liberal counterparts ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227). It’s not just money either. Professor Brooks asserts that “If liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply of the United States would jump about 45 percent.” Democrat presidential candidates John Kerry, Al Gore and Barack Obama all gave miniscule amounts of their income to charity, far less than George W. Bush.

The single biggest corollary to charitable giving is whether a person is religious. Religious people give in far greater proportion than do the non-religious. Of course, this should come as no surprise. As Christians, we believe that every man, woman and child is a brother or sister in God’s great earthly family, and we have been commanded by our God to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, lift up the downtrodden, and in short, to do our best to fill any need and alleviate any suffering we may see. We engage in charitable acts not because we have a government job paying us to do it, but because we seek to obey God’s commandments.

Ah, you forget (argue my liberal friends), that the rich man came to Christ and asked what he had to do to gain the kingdom of Heaven, and Christ told him to sell all he has and give it to the poor. True; but the difference is that when the rich man walked away saddened, too in love with his riches to part with them, Christ did not send His apostles to hold the rich man down and take what he had and give it to the poor. Charity, in order to be charity, must be voluntary. Forced charity is simply theft and extortion.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Red Cross was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of donations of money and blood for the victims. They were logistically unable to handle it all, and in fact so much blood was collected that much of it had to be destroyed because it expired before it could be used. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami, the Japanese tsunami, the recent tornado outbreaks and many other natural disasters the world has endured of late, the American people have risen to help those in need, without being directed by government.

Contrary to the opinion of the liberal elite, it is the religious/conservatives that are the most compassionate, that donate the most in time, money and other resources. Just remember this the next time you hear the common refrain about conservatives not being compassionate, not caring about their fellow man, and being driven by greed. The difference is that while liberals like to “give at the office” (with other people’s money), conservatives feel it our responsibility to show charity beginning at home. It was truly inspiring to see the massive outpouring of love and assistance after the tornadoes recently. If you didn’t see it, maybe you are hanging around with the wrong people.

Reminiscence of a Mother's Influence

2011-05-11T09:47:00.001-04:00

The noblest calling in the world is that of mother. True motherhood is the most beautiful of all arts, the greatest of all professions. She who can paint a masterpiece or who can write a book that will influence millions deserves the plaudits and admiration of mankind; but she who rears successfully a family of healthy, beautiful sons and daughters whose immortal souls will be exerting an influence throughout the ages long after paintings shall have faded, and books and statues shall have been destroyed, deserves the highest honor that man can give. David O. McKay

My mother was a saint. I lost her to cancer when I was thirteen years old, her body having struggled for four long years against this demon that ravaged her body. She was only thirty-six when God called her home, and the world became a poorer place that day. During the holidays I often feel a moment of sadness, wishing she could be here to see the man her boy became, and the grandchildren that are hers. She’d tell my children about their father as a boy, and what made him into what he is today.

Though it may sound cliché, ours was a home poor in material wealth, but rich in a mother’s love. My mother was the youngest child in her family, an unexpected one at that, with her next oldest sister in high school when she was born. Hers was also a hard life in many ways, but instead of making her calloused, it made her more compassionate. I never knew my mother to see another’s need and not try to fill it. A month before she died, too weak from chemotherapy to get out of bed, she had me prop her up with pillows so she could knit blankets for babies whose parents couldn’t afford them. I once told her to stop because she needed to save her strength, and she shot me a look of pure indignation and declared that just because she could not get up did NOT mean that she could not find a way to serve. To this day, nearly a quarter century after her death, I run into people that knew me as a child, and they often shed tears as they tell me stories about my mother, about her gentle nature and unfailing kindness.

The years have faded the details of those pictures in my mind of my life growing up, but certain memories stand out as clear as day. As I said, we were very poor, with my mom, my four sisters and I living in a small, three bedroom house on the south side of Atlanta. Yet, to my mother, that had no bearing on who we were as human beings. She insisted we carry ourselves with dignity, and never let us feel sorry for ourselves just because we didn’t have as much as others. It mattered not that most of our clothes were either hand-me-downs or purchased from the clearance section of the Penney’s Outlet Store, we were to look our best no matter how pathetic that might be. This was because, as she once scolded me, “We may be poor but that don’t mean we’re gonna be white trash”. It was a matter of self-respect to her.

My mother, who did not finish high school, nevertheless had a great love of learning. She drank in books in great draughts, each word a life-giving drop of intellectual nectar to be savored. My earliest memories are of sitting in her lap, her reading to me and making those stories come to life. Then she began to teach me how to read seemingly just days after I could walk, pronouncing each word and having me say it back, teaching me the sounds each letter combination formed, taking joy in my excitement as I learned to read for myself. It is because of her that I gained a lifelong love of reading, which my wife and I passed down to our children.

As sweet as she was, my mama was the strongest woman I’d ever met until I met my wife, and she had high expectations for me. Heaven help me if an uncouth word, profane or not, ever escaped my lips. I knew if it did my mama would break a wooden spoon across my hind end before I could bat an eye, and she knew I knew. I remember coming home from the first day of school in second grade with a form that the parents had to sign to state whether the principal had permission to paddle us if we got in trouble. I made the mistake of allowing a satisfied smile to cross my lips when I saw that she had checked “no”, and she put an end to that real quick. She told me that if I ever got in trouble at school and she found out, I’d wish I’d gotten whipped by the principal instead of what she would do to me.

In truth, when I did get in trouble at home I often pleaded with her, literally pleaded with her, to spank me. That’s because the pain of my butt getting whipped paled in comparison to the anguish I felt when I looked up at her and she’d say simply and quietly, “Louis, I am disappointed in you right now. I thought I had raised you better than that.” I’d rather have been eaten alive by fire ants, cut up and thrown to the sharks or died any of a thousand painful deaths rather than see that look of hurt and disappointment in her eyes.

The Lord took my mother from me long before I would have liked, and why, I don’t know. His ways are not my ways and some things we just accept on faith. It seems though that he tried to soften the blow, because I met the girl who would become my wife just a few months after my mother died. I knew just a few months after we met that she would be the girl I would marry, mainly because she told me flatly not to bother looking at another girl again because she was going to marry me one day. It turns out she was right, because we got married on her nineteenth birthday.

It’s often said that men marry their mothers, and in a lot of ways that’s true. My wife bears those same angelic qualities that my mother did…tenderness, kindness, compassion, a quiet sense of inner strength and an unlimited capacity to sacrifice her own needs and wants in order to take care of the needs and wants of those around her. She is usually the last one in bed at night because there is always one more thing that she needs to do for one of us, and yet she never asks for much of anything in return.

In the nineteen years we have been married, I have watched this amazing woman give birth to eight children, raise them with tenderness, teach them, mold them, love them. I have watched her shaking with laughter at something they’ve done, or shed quiet tears as she felt their sadness or heartbreak.

A fool is the man that looks at a woman and sees her as “only a mother”. A man may gain riches and prestige, he may gain fame and influence, he may do many things to be remembered by history. Yet the fate of nations rest in the hands of mothers, who form those men in the womb and then sculpt them into leaders and citizens. On this day let us all take a moment to praise our Father above for his most sublime of all creations…mothers.

Green Energy: Barack's Magic Beans

2011-05-02T14:13:00.001-04:00

According to the Lundberg Survey last week, while the national average for gasoline is approaching $4/gallon (prices having increased for 35 straight days), the highest gas prices in the nation are to be found in Chicago, which is reporting an average price of $4.27/gallon, with some stations charging as much as $4.60-$4.70 per gallon. I am tempted to feel sympathy for them, at least until I remember that they are the ones responsible for politically nurturing and elevating the current occupant of the White House to that esteemed position, a man that adores a statist, command-and-control economy where government dictates the terms under which goods and services are exchanged. When I think about that, I lose my religion and think they have not suffered enough.

Barack Obama, channeling his inner Bill Clinton (you remember him, the first black president), now tells us that he feels our pain but that, unfortunately, there is no “silver bullet” that will make gas prices come down in the short term. That may be the closest he has come to making a true statement on the subject since he told us as Candidate Obama that his policies would “necessarily cause energy prices to skyrocket”. Now faced with declining poll numbers and rising anger at the cost of gas, Obama does what every political charlatan does best…find a scapegoat.

Comrade President recently announced that he had directed Attorney General Eric Holder to form a task force to “root out” any instances of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets (presumably because the Holder DOJ has plenty of time on their hands since they won’t be investigating the Black Panther voter intimidation case), including going after those evil oil speculators. Every time oil prices spike politicians raise the populist banner and come riding in on their white horses, promising to go after “price gougers” who are taking advantage of people. This is done with much table pounding and angry declarations, which make us feel good that our vaunted public servants are coming to our rescue and will find and prosecute these detestable rapscallions.

Here’s the problem though. Other than a few gas stations owners here and there, they never find those “gougers”. You can go back twenty years or more and find that every time gas prices spike too high, politicians launch investigations with much fanfare. You’ll also find that pretty much every single investigation finds, months later, that the “gouging” was simply the market responding to market forces. That old supply and demand, it will get you every time.

If the president really wants to get to the bottom of high gas prices, I suggest he start by checking the man sitting in the Oval Office. Obama told us several years ago exactly what he was going to do. He told us that his policies, as mentioned earlier, would “necessarily” make energy prices skyrocket. He said he would bankrupt coal companies, which produce a large portion of the electricity that our nation requires (the same electricity, by the way, that charges up those cute little electric cars that the greenies so much want to force everyone to buy). He appointed as his Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, a man who complained that we needed to figure out a way to get American gas prices up to the level of Europe’s, which is typically double or triple what we pay. It looks like Obama and Chu are well on their way to meeting that goal.

Obama goes on to say that this is further proof that we need to invest in “green” energy in order to wean our dependence on foreign oil (even as he gives Brazil billions of American taxpayer dollars to drill for oil, telling them that when they find that oil he wants America to be their best customer). Of course, another way to get America weaned from foreign oil is to allow us to drill for oil HERE! We have plenty of it, from ANWR to the western oil shale to the Bakken Formation, not to mention the massive quantities on the Outer Continental Shelf. Unfortunately, Democrats have managed to block virtually all efforts to recover domestic oil supplies. The other nations of the world must be shaking their heads and laughing at us as we self-restrict our oil supplies, which force us to be dependent for our energy needs on countries that as often as not actively seek our destruction.

Furthermore, regarding “green energy”, the problem is that it is simply not a viable alternative at this point. He tells us endlessly that he wants us to “invest” in renewable energy sources, which is a feel-good way of saying that he wants us to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars propping up industries, companies and fuel sources that can’t make it on their own in the free market. In addition, it helps mask the true cost because you’ll never see the taxes you paid to subsidize these boondoggles at the bottom of a receipt.

We are told that our “investment” in “green” technology will bring exponential returns for our taxpayer subsidies, but can you name right now, off the top of your head, a single government subsidy that has been ended? Al Gore admitted that ethanol did not make sense as a fuel and that he only pushed it to court the votes of the Midwestern farm community, yet billions in ethanol subsidies still made it into the last appropriations bill. Okay, I can think of one…the 3% excise tax placed on long-distance telephone calls. Of course, that particular tax was instituted in 1898 to help fund the Spanish-American War, and was only ended 108 years later (in 2006), and even then after a good fight.

Do we really expect taxpayer subsidies to lead to giant leaps in wind and solar technology? The windmill has been around and since the first century A.D., and we have the same problem today with the windmill’s successor, the wind turbine, that they had more than two millennia ago…the windmill don’t turn when the wind ain’t blowing. So unless we plan building a wind farm in front of Joe Biden’s microphone, I don’t see how we turn this into an efficient technology.

Likewise, solar cells have been around since 1941, and its efficiency has not taken great strides forward, at least not to the point of making it economically viable. It currently takes about 30 years for electricity savings to pay off the cost of installing solar as the source of energy for your home.

To paraphrase our Beloved Leader, “let me be clear”. Intelligent people “reject the false argument” between being good stewards of the environment and having inexpensive energy. We CAN have both. We SHOULD have both. We WOULD have both if we had politicians in Washington that put the needs of the people ahead of their own agendas. We would have both if Obama would stop his de facto moratorium on drilling, the same moratorium for which he was cited with a contempt of court charge. Obama and the Democrats for years have artificially kept energy prices high by manipulating the laws of supply and demand. They restrict domestic fuel production and leave us at the mercy of third world tyrants and radical Islamic regimes.

America is a land of plenty, a nation of abundance blessed by God. However, God will not save us in ignorance. Wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and other “renewable” energy sources all should be a part of the mix. But it is economic suicide to continue to purposely deprive ourselves of the efficient, abundant and inexpensive energy sources in oil, gas, and nuclear. Unfortunately, to accomplish that, we have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid that President Obama and his army of myrmidon greenies is passing out.

The Political Sandbox: PROOF: the Birth Certificate is a FORGERY

2011-04-29T13:11:00.008-04:00

I haven't been a birther, but this article and other links provide some compelling and interesting insight. Heck, it was just too much fun to pass up...jumping on the band wagon in my small way, that is.

The Political Sandbox: PROOF: the Birth Certificate is a FORGERY: "PROOF OF FORGERY! No race-bait here, just pure unadulterated facts, that if President Obama's Birth Certificate is real, why was or were..."

ATLAS SHRUGS

Gateway Pundit

JOIN IN THE FUN: If you have Adobe Illustrator, you might want to check and see if it layers when it's opened. Here is the link for the posted certificate on whitehouse.gov.

We Have Hope, For He is Risen!

2011-04-25T10:13:00.002-04:00

Today marks the end of the holiest week in all of Christendom; a week beginning with Palm Sunday and culminating in Easter Sunday. For more than 250 million Americans who identify themselves as Christians, this is a day of hope, a day which marks for us as sinners the release from spiritual bondage and the chains of Hell which would be our fate if not for the Atonement of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Some believe Christ to be a great moral teacher, but not the Son of God as He claimed to be. To those I echo the sentiments of C.S. Lewis, who said, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Easter week began quietly, a special dinner prepared by Martha, at which the feet of the Lord were anointed with precious oil. The next day Jesus entered Jerusalem to much fanfare, borne upon a donkey, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah. Palm fronds waved in joy and triumph, a tradition associated with the coronation of Israelite kings, evidence that Christ was seen as the promised Messiah. They understood not that He had come at this time to deliver them from spiritual, rather than physical, bondage. Jesus was showered with praise and adoration, which would days later become demands for His death.

As the week progressed Christ cleansed the temple, throwing out the moneychangers and sellers whom He said had made His Father’s house a “den of thieves”. Christ taught in the temple and was questioned by the Jewish elders, who were furious at His claims of divinity and concerned with His influence over the people which had diminished their own power and influence.

The night before his crucifixion Christ would partake of The Last Supper with his apostles. A Passover supper, this meal was in part symbolic of the ancient Israelites having been spared from the Angel of Death by smearing the blood of an unblemished lamb across the door. Likewise Christ, the Lamb of God, would have His blood spilled to save us all.

Following His offering of the sublime Intercessory Prayer, Christ would proceed to the Garden of Gethsemane to endure His greatest suffering. Leaving Peter and the two sons of Zebedee at the watch, he proceeded alone. Possibly for the first time fully understanding the suffering which He was about to endure, He pleaded with the Father that “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me”. Realizing that His suffering was necessary to fulfill the Atonement, he relented, saying “nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt”.

Alone in the garden, in a way incomprehensible to mortal minds, the Savior took upon himself the sins of the world to satisfy the demands of justice. So great was the suffering that it caused Him to bleed from every pore. No mortal man could have endured such suffering, yet Christ, He who was without sin and therefore having no cause to be made to suffer, chose to suffer this agony that we might have salvation.

Still weak from the suffering in Gethsemane, there would be no reprieve for the Son of God. Judas Iscariot, one of His apostles, had betrayed Him. He was taken roughly by “a great multitude with swords and staves” to be tried before the chief priests and elders. The approbation He received as He rode into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week had now devolved into the hateful treatment of an angry mob. Jesus was then questioned at the hands of Caiaphas before the scribes and the elders as they attempted to trap Him in His words, giving reason to punish Him by death. Having accused Him of blasphemy for attesting that He was the Christ, they spat upon and mocked Him. Yet the Son of Man held His peace.

The next morning Christ was accused and condemned before Pilate by the Jewish elders, yet Pilate found no fault with Him. Tradition dictated that at the feast Pilate release a prisoner, and Pilate thus saw his way out, offering up a choice between Christ and the criminal Barabbas. The crowd shouted that they wanted Barabbas. Asking what should be done with Jesus the cry from the bloodthirsty crowd rang out, “Crucify Him!” And thus was the sentence of death pronounced.

The rest of the tale is well known. Jesus was scourged, stripped and had a scarlet robe placed upon Him. He was given a reed as a scepter and a crown of thorns, which caused more blood to pour from His tender head. He was spat upon and mockingly hailed as King of the Jews. Stripped again, He was forced, until His strength gave out, to carry the heavy wooden cross upon which He would be crucified; the cross’s journey was completed by Simon of Cyrene.

On the hill of Golgotha our Lord was secured to the cross, heavy spikes driven through His hands and feet. A sign was placed above His head which read “THIS IS JESUS, THE KING OF THE JEWS”. As He hung from the cross His tormentors continued to mock, saying if He was truly the Messiah then let Him remove himself from the cross. Instead, He chose to complete His work, and remained there upon the cross as He looked into the weeping eyes of His beloved mother. Finally, His Father having removed His spirit for a brief time, Jesus cried out in despair, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” which is to say, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” After a final cry of anguish and suffering, He gave up the ghost and died.

Had the story ended here, history would have forgotten Jesus as the charitable but lunatic son of a humble carpenter. Yet the story does not end here…

On the third day following the crucifixion, after the Sabbath had passed, Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James and Salome came to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body. As they approached they saw the great stone had been rolled away from the entrance, and entering the sepulcher they saw the body was gone. Confusion and anxiety fell upon them as they wondered what had happened to the body.

Then came the words which bring the greatest hope to all mankind. Appearing before the mourners, two angels asked of them, “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.” And thus was the mission of Christ completed, and the gathered were told to go and spread the “good word”, the gospel, that our Lord and Savior had suffered all things, had descended below all things, had been broken and crucified, and as He had promised had arisen the third day, the mortal tabernacle rebuilt and immortal. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior and Redeemer, had broken the bonds of death that we might have eternal life.

And so it is that on this Easter morn, Christians throughout the world celebrate the most significant of all events in the history of man, the resurrection of our Lord. It is He that gives us hope in all things. It is He that brings us salvation. It is He that is our advocate with the Father, who pleads for mercy for us as sinners, which is granted because He, the greatest of all, suffered that the demands of justice might be met. In a world wracked with despair and suffering, may we all find hope in our Savior, Jesus Christ. And may we all understand that this is, truly, a Happy Easter.

President Pyro and the Field of Straw Men

2011-04-18T13:39:00.001-04:00

Eight hundred and fourteen days. That is how long it has taken me to lose my last shred of respect for the current President of the United States. Erupting onto the national political stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama was immediately praised as a rising star. A charismatic, well-spoken young politician, he clearly had a future in politics. A tall, lanky senator from Illinois, he drew comparisons to Abraham Lincoln. A black man that avoided being characterized as a black politician (as opposed to a politician who happens to be black), he avoided bombastic speeches about racism and reparations. He gave white Americans still harboring guilt over our ancestors’ participation in the evil of the human slave trade the chance to prove they were no longer racist by voting for him. His entire campaign was a nebulous celebration of “Hope and Change”. He was the post-racial, post-partisan candidate that as president would heal the divide between black and white, Republican and Democrat.

That was then, this is now.

Last month, having given speech after speech decrying the need for fiscal responsibility and the need to rein in the deficits and get the debt under control, President Obama unveiled a $3.7 trillion dollar federal budget that increased federal spending and projected (based on unrealistically optimistic growth rates for the next few years) $1.6 trillion in deficits for the year, with annual deficits averaging around $1 trillion over the next decade. It increased spending. It did nothing to control the largest contributors to the deficit and long term debt (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the $14.2 trillion national debt). In short, the serious discussion he claimed to want regarding fiscal responsibility was nowhere to be found in his budget.

In response, earlier this month Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) unveiled a proposed budget that is the most comprehensive, serious and balanced effort to deal with America’s budget failures in a generation. It called for targeted cuts to duplicative, unnecessary federal programs and agencies. It gave specific steps to reform Medicare, using free market principles to increase competition and accountability. It guaranteed benefits as currently promised to all 55 years old and up, with phased in changes for those younger. It actually increased the level of spending on Medicare to make sure these promises were kept. Indicative of just how bad the fiscal situation is, it cuts over $6 trillion from the Obama 10-year budget proposal and STILL leaves us with several trillion in additional debt over that time, and this plan would take more than a quarter century to balance the budget.

President Obama, having done what he does best in giving great speeches while offering no leadership, suddenly found himself looking up at Paul Ryan as the leader on national fiscal matters. Mr. Ryan, a credible figure with a no-nonsense, non-inflammatory, “Just the facts ma’am” approach, had carefully laid out the severity of the crisis we find ourselves in, the danger of failing to address it immediately under terms of our choosing, and viable options for dealing with the problem.

In response, on April 13th, Mr. Obama gave a speech that revealed him not as the president of “hope and change”, not as the president of post-partisanship, not as the president willing to tackle the tough problems and be honest with the American people…but as what he truly is…a peacock-proud, chest-puffing, smooth talking, flame-throwing, dishonest, hyper-partisan, bombastic, egotistical two-bit Chicago thug willing to see the country teeter on the precipice of insolvency for his own personal political gain. His speech was so dishonest, so filled with class warfare and cheap emotional appeals with no basis in reality, and so overtly mean-spirited that it may have set a new low in presidential discourse.

In retrospect we should have expected it. This is, after all, the man who told Republicans that they had to sit at the “back of the bus”, who called them “the enemy”, who called them hostage takers, who consistently paints those that have achieved wealth not as what they are…extremely hard-working businessmen and women who sacrifice their time and energy, risked their money to implement an idea that led to the creation of not only wealth for themselves, but jobs for tens of millions of Americans…but instead he depicts them as being evil, greedy fat cats bilking the poor and working class out of their hard earned money. This is a man that despises our free market system.

His speech offered no real solutions, opting instead to criticize Mr. Ryan’s budget in the harshest language and declaring that we need to uphold America’s values, which apparently include denial of reality and fiscal irresponsibility. This after Democrats failed to pass, or even vote on, a budget for FY2011; after convening a deficit reduction commission (Simpson-Bowles) and completely ignoring their findings, and after adding as much to the national debt in two years as George Bush did in eight years. More than two years into his presidency, he is still finding a way to blame his problems on George W. Bush, saying that we made the problems worse with “trillions in unpaid for tax cuts”. Of course, in order for that statement to be correct, we have to start with the premise that those tax dollars did not originally belong to those that earned the money, but to government, which then “paid out” those dollars to the taxpayers. That is why your tax refund checks show up as“tax expenditure” in the federal budget.

After showing himself to be a feckless leader and incompetent chief executive, he then basically called Paul Ryan the devil incarnate and Republicans the army of demonic minions doing his bidding. He claimed the Ryan budget reflects “a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them”, a bald-faced lie. He claimed that Medicare and Medicaid would leave seniors “on [their] own” if they could not afford insurance; another lie. He said that Ryan’s plan would leave “bright, young Americans” with no money for college, and lamented that our kids are being outpaced by South Korean children in academics (as if lack of money had anything to do with the miserable failure of our public education system).

The lies continued, claiming 50 million Americans will lose their health insurance under the Ryan plan. He claimed that “millionaires and billionaires” (his favorite whipping boys…never mind the fact that “millionaires” now include small business owners earning as little as $200,000) would get to line their pockets while “children with autism and Down’s Syndrome” would go without care, and grandparents unable to afford a nursing home would be thrown into the streets.

In short, with his approval ratings near 40%, his signature achievement (ObamaCare) more unpopular now than when he signed it, with criticism from the right and the left for his entrance in and incompetent handling of the conflict in Libya, with gas prices soaring because of a disastrous energy policy, with his very first act as president being embarrassingly reversed (the call to close Guantanamo and try terrorists in civilian courts), with himself being a laughingstock by world leaders (French president Nicholas Sarkozy has had particularly unflattering things to say), with high unemployment and a sluggish economy, and in summary with the realization that the campaigner in chief has massively failed to make the transition to Commander in Chief, Barack Obama has decided to (as Paul Ryan so deliciously put it) be a “pyromaniac in a field of straw men”.

Much to our dismay, instead of a reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln, who he loves to compare himself to, our current president has revealed himself to be nothing more than a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, cobbled together from the fiscal brain of Jimmy Carter, the heart of Richard Nixon, and with enough courage and integrity to put into a 5-pound bag and still have room for, well, five pounds of whatever you wanted to put into the bag.

This president has shown no desire to serve every American, but only those that worship in his cult of personality. I was once told that everyone brings joy; some by coming and some by going. Barring a sudden reversal of the disastrous policies that President Teleprompter has ushered in, I have a feeling he’ll be bringing me a lot of joy come November 2012.

Obama Offers No Hope for Minority Children

2011-04-11T13:58:00.002-04:00

In 2009, Democrats quietly issued the death certificate for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program by slashing its budget on the way to phasing it out altogether. It is unheard of for Democrats to be so enthusiastic about cutting funding for anything other than the military, so this must have been a drastic case indeed to convince them that the program needed to go. So what was it that led to the decision to end the program? Was it because it was too expensive? Not by a long shot, and besides, when was the last time you’ve heard a Democrat argue for ending a program just because it costs too much? Was it because of underperformance? No, it actually performed quite well. If you guessed it was because Obama and the Democrats fell prostrate to their masters in the teachers unions, now you are making some progress.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program was founded in 2004 and became wildly successful. The program provided $7500 scholarships to students so that they could attend private schools. For students of the D.C. Public School system, which is at the very top of the national list of worst-performing public schools, and in one of the most violent districts in the nation, this was a lifeline out of poverty, and a path to a brighter future. The scholarships allowed students, nearly all from low-income families, and the vast majority of them being minority children, to escape the prison system for children known as the D.C. Public Schools. The fact that minority children could take these scholarships and go to private schools was quite a bargain, considering that the public school system in D.C. was spending $18,000 per child per year, and still managing to turn out some the worst academically achieving children in the country. To give you an idea of how bad it was in the DCPSS, only 14% of 8th-graders attain proficiency at reading on their grade level.

The program itself was extremely popular. D.C. residents approved of the program by 70%, and the children testified that they felt safer in those schools and more capable of learning in that environment. When the program was being considered for elimination under the appropriations bill in 2009, Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Joe Lieberman issued a joint statement calling for the program to be continued. The statement read, in part, “This program has the overwhelming support of D.C. residents, parents, Mayor Adrian Fenty, Chancellor Michelle Rhee, former Mayor Anthony Williams, and the D.C. City Council….Five years after the first scholarship students walked into their new schools, we know that the program is helping them both academically and socially…Local D.C. officials and residents have been very clear – they want this program to continue…In fact, during his sworn testimony before the House Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia, Mayor Fenty stated that he supports adding new students to maintain the current cap.”

The results speak for themselves. Before the program was cancelled, children receiving OSP vouchers to attend private schools graduated at a 91% rate, compared to the D.C. public school system, which graduated just over half the children who entered that prison…sorry, “school” system. And this was not a case of token advancement either. The OSP graduates attained significantly higher levels of academic proficiency that their public school counterparts.

Attempting to restore some of that lost hope to the children of Washington, D.C., House Speaker John Boehner this session introduced the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results (SOAR) Act, a bill that would restore the DC scholarship program to those poor minority children in desperate need of a way to break that cycle of crime and poverty that they have suffered under for so long. It passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives by a vote of 225-195.

Unfortunately, President Barack Obama, a very wealthy and powerful man who used that wealth and power to enroll his two daughters into a very expensive ($29,000 per year per child in tuition fees), very exclusive private school, does not feel it necessary to extend that same opportunity to the children of low-income, inner-city parents. In a press release issued by the White House in conjunction with the FY2012 budget proposal, Obama declared “the Administration opposes targeting resources to help a small number of individuals attend private schools rather than creating access to great public schools for every child.”

There is only one problem with that. Literally billions of dollars have been funneled into the D.C. public school system over the last several decades, and for decades the results have been abysmal. Students continue to leave that school system barely able to read, and in no way prepared to succeed in the real world. As noted earlier, another flaw in that logic is exposed when you realize that the OSP produces superior students at less than half the cost. Clearly this is not a case of Democrats finally finding one single, solitary area of the budget where they are willing to show fiscal restraint.

The hypocrisy here is stunning. In addition to the Hypocrite-in-Chief, former Senator and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent her daughter Chelsea to an exclusive private school. This is the same Hillary Clinton that once called public education the "cornerstone of our democracy" (apparently she never learned that we are a republic, not a democracy…but I digress). This sentiment was echoed by her husband and former President Bill Clinton, who, as president, proclaimed he was "unalterably opposed to a voucher system to give people public money to take to private schools."

Other politicians vociferously opposed to any type of voucher system for the children of the unwashed proletariat, yet who see no problem making sure that their precious children never have to mingle with the children of the vagabond lower classes, include former Vice President Joe Biden (whose three granddaughters attend Sidwell with Obama’s daughters), former White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, former senator and now Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee, and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., just to name a few. In fact, just under 40% of the members of Congress have sent their children to private schools, including Democrat Senator Dick Durbin, who authored the language in that 2009 appropriations bill that ended the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Those members of Congress that don’t send their kids to private schools have the luxury of moving to high-income neighborhoods with excellent public schools, unlike the poor parents of D.C. children who are trapped in poverty.

The bottom line is this. Our public school systems, despite getting hundreds of billions of dollars a year in funding between federal, state and local allocations, are producing students incapable of being successful in a constantly evolving global economy. What we are doing now is certainly not working, despite continual increases in annual funding.

My challenge to Obama and the Democrats who are intent on doing the bidding of their union masters, even if that means crippling the future of America’s children and by extension America herself, is this: You proclaim to be pro-choice, right? So if you are indeed pro-choice, then can’t you at least give parents the tools and options they need to help their children, the ones you’ve allowed to escape the womb intact, be successful when they are all grown up? It’s the least we can do.

Manifesto of a Right-Wing Extremist

2011-04-04T12:18:00.002-04:00

Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the second most powerful Democrat in the Senate, was exposed this week for engaging in a coordinated effort to paint Republicans, and especially those with ties to the TEA Party movement, as “extremists”. Speaking to fellow Senate Democrats (and not realizing that the media had already been connected in on the conference call), Schumer explained that he “always use[s] the word extreme”, because “that is what the caucus instructed me to use this week”. This intentional attempt at character assassination comes because House Speaker Boehner is getting pressure from freshmen Republicans and the conservative base to do something more than offer lip service to fiscal responsibility.

Indeed, the problem is not that Republicans are too extreme. The problem is that they are not extreme enough; the $61 billion in budget cuts, from a $3.78 trillion dollar budget which increases the deficit by about a trillion and a half dollars, is little more than a rounding error. Much deeper cuts to spending are necessary if we are to get our fiscal house in order, and Republicans had better show some spine and get serious if they expect to keep the support of conservatives and the majority of independents come November 2012.

To be sure though, any Republican with an ounce of intelligence and awareness knew these attacks would come. After all, this is an administration who refuses to acknowledge the radical Islamic roots of the terrorist attacks on American soil over the last few years, yet whose Department of Homeland Security two years ago published a report entitled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”. Obama himself has repeatedly refers to his political opposition as being extreme and dangerous.

A liberal friend recently told me that I am a right-wing extremist, so I asked him to define the views that I held that he considered “extreme”. Rather than giving me specific examples, he told me that all of my views were out of the mainstream and that most people don’t agree with me (an assertion I dispute since polling over the last two years shows those calling themselves conservative are about 45% of the population, with only about 20% calling themselves liberal, and the remaining moderates having turned out in droves to elect Republicans last November).

He then made a statement which is so quintessentially liberal in its nature, which so perfectly captures the liberal mindset of groupthink, that it made me chuckle. He told me that it did not matter whether my beliefs are right or wrong, it matters only that most people disagree with me (again, am assertion which I do not concede). I’m guessing that there are millions of blacks throughout America today that are glad that a bunch of hardheaded white men and women were undaunted in their efforts to end slavery despite it being a definite minority of public opinion 160 years ago.

At this point, I am ready to embrace the label of “extremist”, so long as we can define the term. No more of these ad hominem attacks where accusations are made without offering proof or definition.

Am I an extremist? It depends on how you define extreme.

If you define extremism as being a strict constitutional constructionist, showing allegiance to that document above all other laws and policies, then yes, I am an extremist, and proudly so. I believe that the Founding Fathers intended the Constitution to be the bedrock of the American republic, the foundation upon which all government in this nation is built. It was meant to be as granite, and not the shifting sands of a “living” Constitution, where the law means only what a particular judge wants it to be, or what honey-tongued politicians promising free lunches on the backs of others can convince 50% plus one of the voters to vote for.

If you define extremism as believing deeply that this is a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and that those principles lay the foundation for the greatest nation in history, a nation which has done more to protect the weak, to create an environment where people can succeed regardless of race, religion or station at birth, then yes, I am an extremist. I reject the multiculturalists’ moral relativist drivel that states that our culture is no better than any other. Our culture is superior to all others, and we should be unapologetic about it. We have dozens of religions that peacefully coexist. We protect the rights of the minority from the oppression of the minority. Every man and woman in this country has the opportunity to succeed if they are driven to educate themselves and work hard. So if that belief makes me extreme, then paint me extremist.

If you define extremism as believing that the federal government should be restricted to only those functions outlined by the Constitution, with all other powers and functions being reserved to the states or the people, then I am an extremist. The Founders would be appalled at the gaping maw of the federal leviathan that we have allowed to become an untamable beast, which sees itself as the master of the people instead of the servant, demanding we bow prostrate before it and meekly submitting to every tax, regulation and usurpation of rights granted by God. If it is extreme to believe that I am a sovereign citizen who answers only to God, and that my government answers to me, then absolutely, I am an extremist.

If you think it is extremist to demand that government be required to live within its means like its citizens do, and not load up future generations with perpetual debt, bankrupting their futures; then most definitely, I am an extremist. It is a moral evil to turn future generations into slaves so that we can indulge ourselves today.

If you define extremism as someone that believes that life begins at conception, that all life is sacred and should be defended, that killing unborn children because they are inconvenient is the holocaust of our day and is a great moral sin, then without a doubt, unequivocally, I am en extremist of the first order. Our liberal friends rightly decry the evil that Hitler perpetuated upon six million Jews, gunning them down or walking them through gas chambers before bulldozing their bodies into massive pits which became their graves. Yet, they defend the slaughter of more than 50 million of the most precious, innocent and defenseless lives…the unborn human child…and not only defend it but demand taxpayers fund this genocide. Why? Because apparently genocide is acceptable as long as it is done in America and not Germany, and as long as sign on the front door of these death chambers reads “Planned Parenthood” instead of “Auschwitz” or “Buchenwald”.

So, am I am extremist? It depends on how you define the term. If believing in the sanctity of life, in the rule of law above the rule of men, in rejecting legalized theft even if done under the patina of legitimacy granted by government, in living within our means, in knowing that ours is the greatest country and culture on the face of the earth…if these things are extreme, then most assuredly I am an extremist, and will embrace it without shame and with a smile on my face when I meet my Creator. However, if these beliefs ARE extreme in our society today, then it says more about how far society has degenerated than it does about me.

Being an eternal optimist (and a full-time cynic…how do you reconcile the two?), I believe that these views are neither extreme, nor that the majority of Americans view them as extreme. I believe that the majority of Americans understand intuitively that these things are what make us great, and that they embrace them as well. And that, my friends, gives me hope for America despite our current plight. All that it takes to again make America that shining city on a hill is for us to stand up for what we know is right. Is that so hard?

The Animating Contest of Freedom

2011-03-28T09:01:00.002-04:00

I know better than to write when I am angry, but I really just can't help myself. This afternoon I had a conversation that was an epiphany of how absurd we have become as a nation. I guess it was not so much an epiphany as it was the impact of saying them all together in one long thought process. The conversation began on the topic of the economy and the financial struggles facing American families and businesses. That led to comments about how these problems could be fixed, and why they haven't been. That is when my initial frustration began simmering, evolving into a full-fledged anger. When I look at all of the suffering we are enduring which is self-imposed, the lunacy of the situation is simply too hard to ignore. I'll explain what I mean ...

We've been told recently by this administration and their economic experts that inflation is actually quite low. By their standards I suppose that is true, but then again that inflation calculation does not factor in gasoline and food prices. Since the price of gas has doubled since Obama took office, which is worth making note of.

Why has the price of gas doubled? A number of reasons, and right near the top is an administration that desires high gas prices. Candidate Obama said his policies would make energy prices "necessarily skyrocket." He wants our gas prices to align with Europe, which is often triple ours. To achieve that, his administration has done everything in their power to block domestic energy production. They've revoked oil and gas leases, delayed research on locating new energy sources, and used the Gulf oil spill as a pretext to ban offshore drilling, despite the exact opposite recommendation of the commission he appointed to study the issue.

Despite the tragedy in Japan, nuclear energy is one of the safest, cleanest energy resources available. Yet miles of bureaucratic red tape and endless regulation make it nearly impossible to build a new reactor, despite the fact that about 20 percent of our currently electricity production comes from nuclear power plants built decades ago. Wouldn't it make sense to build newer facilities which employ the latest technology?

Gas prices are also high because so much of the world's oil is produced in the Middle East, a hotbed of political instability. Every time violence and unrest flares up the price of oil goes up. We send hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to buy oil from countries that then use those petro-dollars to fund radicals that want to see our nation destroyed. The same day that the tsunami hit Japan, a group of Palestinian terrorists broke into the Jerusalem home of a young Jewish family. These animals stabbed the father to death, and then stabbed the mother as she came out of the bathroom, and stabbed and slit the throats of a 4-year-old son, an 11-year-old son and finally, stabbed and slit the throat of the 3-month- old daughter. The same animals have for years lobbed rockets and mortars into civilian populations while the world looked idly on and only showed outrage for Israel's "disproportionate response."

Other than Israel, virtually every Middle Eastern country has an economy based on oil production and exportation. Why are we not embarking on a Manhattan Project-type effort to develop and exploit every energy resource available domestically? We have massive quantities of coal and oil, which can be supplemented by nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass and other fuels where they are cost effective. Doing so would end our dependence on foreign oil and starve these nations of our petro-dollars. Then these savages who so revere a culture of death can either come into the 21st-century and learn to get along peaceably, or they can starve to death while they throw rocks at each other. I really don't care which. How long must we excuse such savage, violent behavior? Would we tolerate it on our own soil?

Back at home we are going bankrupt and have two political parties that are so intent on keeping their jobs and the power and perks that go with them that they refuse to realistically address the financial crisis we are facing. A just released report shows that the 10-year economic estimate has been revised to reflect more than $2 trillion in additional deficits above what was predicted just a few months ago. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars in just the interest payments on the debt, never touching the principal itself.

The Obama administration is projecting average annual deficits of $1 trillion, and even that is based on rosy economic growth scenarios that are not coming to pass. This is fiscal insanity! Yet we have one party that acts as if we can keep escalating spending and the payments will never come due (and that people will always lend to us), and another party that KNOWS what must be done but is afraid that to do so would be to lose elections, so they are trying to swallow a 20-pound loaf of bread by scraping off a few crumbs at each meal. The proposed $100 billion in budget cuts is less than 3 percent of the annual deficit, and a rounding error on the national debt. We must have a massive reduction of government spending, returning it to the taxpayers so they can provide for themselves and create new jobs. Centrally-planned government economies have a 100 percent track record of failure.

Yet all of these things and so many more are symptomatic of a larger set of problems. They are the natural result of a nation that no longer teaches its children what makes their country great, of its rich and noble heritage, or of the principles and values upon which this country were founded that led it to become the freest, most prosperous nation on the face of the earth. It is a result of a nation that has come to expect the cradle-to-grave protection of government, while avoiding risks as all cost. We built this nation into a mighty power because people took risks, they built things, they invented things, and they worked hard to succeed. They didn't expect the government to protect them from every possible unpleasantness.

Where is that spirit today, the spirit of men and women who loaded wagons and traveled thousands of miles to find California gold? That put a man on the moon in less than a decade? That invented mass production and created the internet? That built the Empire State building in 18 months (even as we await the rebuilding of the Twin Towers a decade after they fell)? That went from the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor to rebuilding the Navy and winning the Battle of Midway to gain control of the seas in only six months? Where is that spirit? It is crushed by government.

Am I mad? I'm furious! We've allowed the roaring fire of the American spirit to turn to cooling embers, lulled into complacency by the siren song of a government that promises to take care of all our needs in exchange for servile obedience. We are a nation of Gullivers who have voluntarily lain down and allowed ourselves to be bound by thousands of government Lilliputians, binding us into immobility using the threads of high taxes, burdensome regulation and promises of protection.

On Aug. 1, 1776, speaking at the Philadelphia State House, Samuel Adams threw down the gauntlet to his brethren and issued a challenge. Said he, "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

If we are to be free men and women, we must throw off the chains of a patronizing, oppressive government and once again take control of our destiny. Clearly, the politicians in neither party are willing to do what needs to be done. Are you? America is great because she is filled with great people that do great things. We must remember and embrace that if we are to become great again.

The Federal Dept. of Education: Time to Pull the Plug

2011-03-22T09:00:00.002-04:00

The current, ongoing showdown between Democrats and Republicans over the federal budget is giving Americans a front row seat for the fight over national spending priorities and, for the conservative wing of the Republican Party, over the proper role of government itself. There are huge quantities of heated rhetoric being thrown around about greedy corporations, the need to help the poor and dire warnings against “Draconian” cuts to the budget. Yet, make no mistake about it; the problem is solely one of spending. Even if we taxed 100% of earnings for those hated millionaires and billionaires that Obama and the Democrats so love to publicly flog (even as the privately court them for their campaign donations), we wouldn’t even fund the annual budget, much less make a dent in the national debt.

While we will be forced in the very near future to finally have a serious discussion about the Big Three entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid…with ObamaCare pending resolution in the courts), there is some low-hanging fruit that we can cut in the budget if we look at a cost-benefit analysis of programs and agencies that are duplicative, outdated or simply unnecessary. Right near the top of that list should be the federal Department of Education.

The federal Department of Education was created in 1976, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. The legislation narrowly passed Congress, but succeeded in large part because of a heavy lobbying effort by the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Many politicians, eager to secure the donations, manpower and influence of a large and powerful constituency, jumped at the opportunity to cement this politically incestuous relationship.

The case for or against continuing the federal DOE should come down to two questions. Is it constitutionally proper? Has it effectively achieved the purpose of its charter? For those of us still old-fashioned enough to believe that the Constitution is the supreme law of the law, and should be interpreted by use of the original intent of those that wrote and ratified it (until amended under proper procedure), the answer to the constitutionality question is an emphatic “NO!”. Nowhere in the Constitution does authorization for the federal DOE exist. Not being specifically enumerated, that power lies completely with the states.

For those tempted to use the General Wefare clause as justification, I would direct you to the words of James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution”, during debate on the 1792 Cod Fishery bill. He said, "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare…they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union…in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

Clearly, the General Welfare clause was not intended to support such a federal endeavor.

But what of the second question, that of necessity? By any objective measure the federal DOE has been a miserable failure; the only possible exception being as a jobs program and source of funding for Democrat politicians. According to the White House website, “The mission of the Department of Education is to promote student achievement and preparation for competition in a global economy by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access to educational opportunity. The Department administers federal financial aid for education, collects data on America's schools to guide improvements in education quality, and works to complement the efforts of state and local governments, parents, and students.” To execute this “mission”, the taxpayers pony up nearly $70 billion dollars to fund 4200 employees, administering more than 2000 pages of federal regulations pertaining to education.

Obama’s proposed budget calls for an 11% increase in education spending, a glaring exception to his “spending freeze” promise. It’s not as if education has been underfunded either. Education spending has risen dramatically faster than public school enrollment. The United States spends on total education outlays nearly four times as much as the next nearest country, Japan, according to the statistics of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and is second only to Switzerland in per-student spending.

For this lavish expenditure we have a public education system that produces little that could plausibly justify the expense. From a global standpoint, America has nothing to brag about. According to the 2009 report of the Program from International Student Assessment (PISA), the U.S. ranked 24th out of 34 countries in math achievement and fared about the same in reading. We’ve had our collective and figurative tails handed to us by countries that spend far less on education, including Finland, South Korea and Singapore. America, the nation that once put a man on the moon and was the world leader in academic achievement and innovation, no longer gets the blue ribbon on the international education stage, nor even an “Honorable Mention”. We’ve fallen so far that we get the equivalent of the “Participant” ribbon.

Domestically this stagnancy is also evident. According to the DOE’s own National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, we’ve made no progress. In 1980, 17-year-old students in public schools scored 284 out of 500 on the NAEP math test; in 2008, they also scored 284 out of 500, and in 1990, they scored 289 out of 500, which was the highest scored in 30 years, despite an exorbitant and ever-rising education budget. Similarly, reading scores show that 17-year-olds in public school scored 300 out of 500 in 1978, 304 of 500 in 1990, and in 2008, they showed positive results by scoring an astounding...305.

The bottom line is this: for the tens of billions of dollars we spend every year on education at the federal level, there has been no noticeable improvement in education levels over the nearly 40 years since the Department of Education was established. Obama, after releasing his budget proposal calling for double-digit increases in federal education spending, declared that he sees “nothing responsible” in cutting education spending. Frankly, with average annual projected deficits of more than a trillion dollars over the next decade, I can think of few things more irresponsible than continuing to fund a department that has so utterly and completely failed to live up to its own goals despite increases in power and budgets for four decades.

It is time, long past time, to abolish the federal Department of Education. It has drained the taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been better spent improving their own lives as they saw fit. Eliminating it would improve the quality of education in our country by letting states regain control of their education systems, allowing them to experiment with those policies and innovations that best work for their children. It would eliminate the No Child Left Behind requirements, the bane of every public school teacher and administrator I’ve talked to on the subject. It is time to end it because we can do so much better, and because it is hard to imagine that we could do much worse.

Just Checking In To Say Congratulations...

2011-03-21T02:08:00.002-04:00

DeBroux has just been voted Chairman of the Bartow County Republican Party!

Good job!

~Yvonne

Government’s Revolting Attempt at the Free Market

2011-03-16T12:22:00.001-04:00

Few things in life confound me more than the propensity of the political left to put unbridled faith in the government’s ability to make wise decisions for us all, while simultaneously treating purveyors of goods and services on the free market as if they were shady characters lurking in some beer bottle strewn, garbage littered back alley, just waiting to take advantage of the unsuspecting traveler lost and wandering into the wrong side of town.

In the free market, those who provide goods and services must do so (theoretically, at least…pretending big business and big government don’t collude to rig the market to the advantage of those willing to pay) by providing those goods or services with a level of quality superior to those of their competitors at a given price point. And because businesses are subject to the profit motive, they must constantly work to become more efficient and innovative than their competitors. If they fail to do so, they lose market share, which means they lose money, which means they go out of business. Many companies that were once king of the hill have fallen by the wayside, victims to more innovative upstarts. Remember Eastern Airlines, Atari video games, American Motor Company, Rich’s, Datsun, Woolworth’s, KB Toys and Enron? All were once major players in their markets, and all are now nowhere to be found.

The process of “creative destruction”, by which the existing economic order is constantly churned by the very nature of free market dynamics, is what drives the rapid advances in technology and efficiency. Oddly enough, the concept of creative destruction finds its roots in Marxist economic theory, tracing back to Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and later Das Kapital. Of course, Marx saw the concept as negative, preferring the economy to be managed by a powerful central government directing the lives of its citizens by force.

Despite the fact that it is the very innovation of a free enterprise economic system that elevated America to become the greatest economic engine in history, there is a segment of our population that embraces the idea of an all-wise, all –powerful central government which heavily taxes our earnings, and in exchange provides us with what we need to subsist. These are the same people that approve of forced implementation of ObamaCare, or a heavy regulatory structure that dictates every facet of our interaction with the world.

Yet, if we look at the track record of government’s effort to perform functions better left to the free market, it is a dismal one. With every decision being a political one, and subject to heavy regulation which makes it near impossible to react quickly to the changing needs of its “customers”, government programs are ineffective and inefficient, slowly dying from their own bureaucratic lethargy, like so many whale carcasses washed up on the beach. These once powerful leviathans, unable to adapt to their changed circumstances, take slow labored breaths before finally succumbing to inevitable death. Once majestic creatures, brought down by the very size and immobility that once made them powerful.

A perfect example of government’s inability to effectively function in a free market environment is right before our eyes today. After receiving tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, General Motors shed much of its liabilities and formed the “New GM”, which was supposed to be a significant market force, leaner and meaner and ready to regain its place at the top of the auto manufacturing hierarchy. The only problem…government owned a controlling share of the company, and therefore it got to dictate what GM would produce. And what market miracle did GM produce? An homage to President Obama’s obsessive infatuation with “green energy”…the Chevy Volt.

The Chevy Volt is like the nerdy kid whose rich daddy got him a spot on the varsity football team after donating a big, fat chunk of money to the school. He’s on the team, but he’ll never step on the field. The Volt is nobody’s top pick, almost literally! Since the model rolled out for sale, Chevy has sold a whopping nationwide total of…928! Maybe you could put a positive spin on it if the sales numbers started sluggish but were trending upwards, but not even that can be said. After selling 321 units in January, only 281 units were sold in February. Even with an initial production run of only 55,000 units planned (and only about 10,000 actually manufactured to date), it would take years (about 15) to sell every unit of even that modest initial batch. As a percentage of market share, the Chevy Volt doesn’t even qualify as a rounding error.

Chevy, a division of the New GM (Government Motors), can’t even pay people to drive the Volt off the lot. The federal government is offering a nearly 20% subsidy for the purchase ($7500 off the $41,000 sticker price, which is itself only about half the actual production cost) and still can’t move these glorified Matchbox cars. If the government offered a 20% subsidy for the Honda Accord or the Toyota Camry or the Ford F150, you can be sure there would be lines around the block to buy one. But not the Volt. Not even a little bit. But really, what else could you expect from a car with such a tiny niche market…wealthy liberals with more money than sense, eager to prove their environmental bona fides to the world no matter how worthless the car actually is?

Consumer Reports recently offered a not-so-flattering review of Chevy’s new baby. Said David Champion of CR’s auto testing center, “When you are looking at purely dollars and cents, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The Volt isn’t particularly efficient as an electric vehicle, and it’s not particularly good as a gas vehicle either in terms of fuel economy”. Oops. I guess he didn’t get the White House talking points.

Despite marketing efforts to diffuse criticism, the Volt is being almost universally panned by consumers. The complaints are numerous and varied. The cost is far too high. The range is limited. It is annoying to wait five hours to charge the batteries. The batteries take up a substantial amount of room (and are charged by plugging the car into an electrical outlet, which receives power from where? The electrical grid, which gets its power from fossil fuel generated power plants…a fact conveniently ignored by environmentalists so in love with electric cars). The seats are heated but your hands and feet get cold. The list goes on.

Maybe it was best summarized by a review in Car and Driver Magazine, which reported “"The smooth-riding Volt can’t shred tarmac like a VW GTI or infuse fun into the family-sedan segment like a Honda Accord or a Hyundai Sonata. Think of the Volt as smile-inducing Xanax for range anxiety—something all other EVs evoke... A tight back seat, limited cargo capacity, and a general lack of horsepower—though plenty of low-end grunt to merge onto the highway like you have somewhere to be…” Wow! With such a riveting endorsement, where do I get one (not in the South, at least until next year)?

The bottom line is this…the Chevy Volt is a masterpiece of government engineering, being overpriced and unappealing, a car that could never, ever have come from the minds of free market entrepreneurs seeking to entice millions of buyers to purchase their product. The reason is obvious. Government is used to producing based on political considerations, with the luxury of requiring taxpayers to fund its product by force. When the free market works its magic, it is a thing of beauty. When the government attempts its poor imitation, the end result is, not to be too punny, revolting.

Obama: Stupendous Man! and Lawgiver

2011-03-07T13:50:00.002-05:00

My all time favorite comic strip is Calvin and Hobbes. It is about a young boy and his pet stuffed tiger, and the adventures they have jumping between real life and a world ruled by his imagination. He escapes the mundane tasks of life by escaping into his alternate reality, where he can be anything he wants to be, from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, to the Intrepid Spaceman Spiff, from Stupendous Man!, to the Supreme Ruler and Dictator for Life. Calvin always wins in the end because, it being his imagination, he controls the outcome. In a comic strip, this is great fun. In real life…not so much.

President Obama seems to have determined that he is the new Supreme Ruler and Dictator for Life. At least, this is a plausible conclusion based on his actions since taking office. Our first real glimpse at his unbridled narcissism came at a rally in June 2008. Having won the Democrat Party nomination for president, Obama proclaimed to the adoring throngs that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.” Goodness, now all he has to do is cure cancer and raise the dead and he can call it a day!

The problem with Obama’s view of himself as a messianic leader is that he seems to feel not only that he is above the law, but that he is the Supreme Lawgiver. He sees himself as the voice in the burning bush, giving utterance to his subjects which has force of law by virtue of his having spoken it, and we are all commanded to obey.

Some may think this hyperbole, but if so, it is by only the thinnest of margins. Consider his actions since taking office. One of his very first acts as president was to help push through the GM/Chrysler bailout. Using the weight of the presidency and Chicago-style intimidation tactics, Obama blatantly defied decades of establish bankruptcy law by forcing the secured creditors to accept a tiny fraction of what they were owed, and then giving the unsecured creditors, the United Auto Workers union, a sweetheart deal in the form of 12.5% ownership of the “New GM”. This type of extra-legal behavior causes uncertainty in the markets. Why invest when the president can ignore the law and dispense favors as he pleases.

Keeping in line with his messianic self-view, Obama has created more czars than the entire lineage of the Romanov Dynasty. He has a “Pay Czar” which gets to determine the executive level pay at private corporations. He’s got the Green Jobs Czar and the Auto Recovery Czar, the California Water Czar and the Great Lakes Czar, the Oil Spill Escrow Fund Czar and the Safe Schools Czar. It gets to the point of Seussical silliness. “I would not could not in a car, for so says Obama’s auto czar. I would not could not in a tree, oh environmental czar just let me be! Not in a car, not with a czar, not in a tree, just let you be? Would you could you with a mouse? Not as long as the EPA has anything to say about it!”

Okay, the last part didn’t rhyme, but then this is not really funny either. What is even more galling is that these “czars” have tremendous administrative and regulatory power, yet Obama has created them through appointment, escaping the Senate confirmation process which would expose many of these people as radical leftists.

Obama, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, gave tacit approval for his Justice Department’s dropping of the Black Panther voter intimidation case in Philadelphia, a case which had already received summary judgment and required only enforcement of the sentence. He’s also has decided he will not enforce our immigration laws, telling now House Speaker John Boehner that he will only enforce the immigration laws if Republicans agree to a comprehensive immigration reform law (i.e., amnesty), because if he enforces the law now he will have no leverage in the negotiations.

Early in his administration he declared that America will not dictate the type of government another country will have, or interfere in their internal affairs. I suppose that is the reason he has been virtually silent or offering only weak condemnations of the atrocities in countries ruled by anti-American dictators, like Iran, Libya, China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, where peaceful protestors and political dissidents are shot in the streets or tortured in prisons. On the other hand, Israel and Honduras, both pro-American and giving great freedom to their people, are probably wondering why this “hands-off” approach has not been applied to them, and why the Obama administration has been meddling in their affairs.

Right here at home Obama’s defiance of the law continues. Obama recently declared that the Justice Department will no longer defend DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act, a law passed by large majorities of both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Clinton, and subsequently upheld repeatedly by the courts). He said he’ll no longer defend it because HE feels it is unconstitutional. If he is the final arbiter of what is constitutional;, then why have a legislature or judiciary at all?

Obama has also twice defied a court order to end the moratorium, both official and de facto, against domestic oil drilling. Even a contempt of court citation against Obama has not deterred him. As if this moratorium were not enough, he also declared the he will not allow drilling for the next seven years in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Energy prices are skyrocketing (just as he said that they “necessarily” would), people are suffering, the economy is struggling, but none of it matters. The Supreme Ruler has issued a decree.

The federal courts have twice now declared parts or all of ObamaCare to be unconstitutional, yet Obama continues to force the implementation of the law in defiance of those rulings. He does not like the ruling so he will simply ignore it. States, already staggering from record budget deficits, are burdened even more by the requirements of this law. Yet Obama demands that his will be obeyed or those found disobedient will suffer the consequences.

America is not a monarchy, it is not a dictatorship, and it is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. We are a nation of laws, laws which are supposed to transcend any man, laws which put us all on equal footing before the eyes of Lady Justice. If we lose, as a nation, respect for those laws, we will either descend into anarchy, or we will become subject to the rule of a tyrant that will brutally enforce order. We’ve already seen the beginnings of the effects of disrespect for the law with the events in Wisconsin, or the reaction to SB1070 in Arizona, which led to violent protests.

In his famous pamphlet “Common Sense”, Thomas Paine wrote "But where says some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain...let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING."

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (called “The Father of American Jurisprudence”) warned of the results of a president who feels himself above the law. He said, "The duty imposed upon him to take care, that the laws be faithfully executed, follows out the strong injunctions of his oath of office, that he will 'preserve, protect, and defend the constitution.' The great object of the executive department is to accomplish this purpose; and without it…it will be utterly worthless for offence, or defence; for the redress of grievances, or the protection of rights; for the happiness, or good order, or safety of the people."

Democracy: The Destroyer of Free Governments

2011-02-28T12:14:00.003-05:00

In Georgia, a hot-button issue that has suddenly surfaced is one concerning whether local governments should be able to determine whether or not alcohol can be sold on Sunday. The media is framing this as you’d expect. On one side you have a bunch of right-wing, Bible-thumping, super-religious zealots intent on imposing their morality of everyone else. On the other hand you have hard-working local restaurant and package store owners looking to earn additional revenue in a tough economy, and at the same time increasing the tax base which would help fund government services.

Now, before I get inundated with nasty e-mails from either side, I should point out that I have absolutely no dog in this fight. Personally, I’ve never consumed a single drop of alcohol in my life, nor do I plan to; and, being a conservative with libertarian leanings, I tend to not care what other people do so long as it does not infringe on the unalienable rights afforded to all people, and as long as I do not have to pay for the consequences of their decisions.

Yet, while there have been many perspectives offered (conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat, religious/secular-business), the one perspective that seems to have been overlooked is the constitutional perspective.

Article III, Section VI, Paragraph VII of the Constitution of the State of Georgia reads “The State of Georgia shall have full and complete authority to regulate alcoholic beverages and to regulate, restrict, or prohibit activities involving alcoholic beverages...This regulatory authority of the state is specifically delegated to the counties and municipalities of the state for the purpose of regulating, restricting , or prohibiting the exhibition of nudity, partial nudity, or depictions of nudity in connection with the sale or consumption of alcoholic beverages; and such delegated regulatory authority may be exercised by the adoption and enforcement of regulatory ordinances by the counties and municipalities of this state.”

The Constitution as written, therefore, would seem to indicate the state has sole power to regulate alcohol, with the explicit exception allowing it to delegate to counties and municipalities authority to determine regulations regarding alcohol sales at strip clubs. That appears to be the only authority to delegate such power; otherwise, if all power could be delegated then why bother specifying one circumstance?

I find it amusing that certain proponents of passage of Sunday sales are lamenting the failure of the Senate (to date at least, since it has been returned to the Rules Committee) to allow the people to decide the issue by public referendum, thus denying them the “right” to vote on it. Many of those demanding the right to vote on the matter would be adamantly opposed to a public referendum on other issues…say, school vouchers, for example.

All of this misses a more fundamental point. All too often we determine our desired outcome on a partisan or ideological basis, and then, if our position is not clearly supported by the Constitution, we look for ways to manipulate it through interpretation, even when such interpretation defies original intent. In doing so, we fail to see the danger that lurks when applied to other circumstances.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington admonished "If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates, but let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed." In other words, changing or circumventing the process of government may help you in this instance, but it may bite you in the backside later (remember a few years ago when Republicans were arguing against the filibuster of judicial appointments and threatened to end the practice? Suddenly that changes when you’ve got an opposition president in office making the appointments).

So, how to address this from a constitutional standpoint? First, we must understand that America is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic. The Founding Fathers abhorred democracy, and constructed the constitution so as to temper the corrosive effects of democracy. Secondly, we must understand that the Constitution grants no one a “right” to vote. It simply lists criteria (race, gender, age, etc.) by which a person otherwise qualified may not be denied the voting privilege. So let us end the nonsensical complaints about democracy denied.

In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned against the dangers of democracy and extolled the virtues of a republic, in which the people would seek out from among themselves men and women of sound wisdom, virtue and integrity to represent them and their values within the legislative body. This is far superior to democracy. As Madison warned, “a pure democracy… can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction…there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Public referendums are in essence pure democracy. Many want to see the Sunday alcohol sales issue put to a referendum, but is this truly the way we’d want to run our government? In practical terms, would we make the same demand in other, arguably more important areas? For example, would we want to put the state budget, which is hundreds of pages long and filled with endless amounts of technical language and accounting minutiae, to a public referendum? This surely has far more impact on us than the Sunday sales issue, doesn’t it? Yet to do so would be an absolute nightmare, and I think it is safe to say only a small percentage of the population would easily grasp the details of the budget, much less be inclined to study it paragraph by paragraph and then vote on it.

The other problem I have with the public referendum is this: in a constitutional republic we are supposed to elect men and women of wisdom and integrity to do the hard work of studying the details of these issues and then voting in such a way that best comports with the Constitution and the values of their constituents. Too often, politicians use the public referendum so that they don’t have to take a stand on a divisive issue that may get them voted out in the next election. But populist passions are not conducive with sound judgment, and making decisions in the heat of the moment often leads to regret and ill-considered consequences.

This is a hard thing for many to understand. It’s easy to believe our wisdom justifies ignoring or twisting the Constitution to suit our current needs and desires. Democrats were completely content to undermine clear constitutional doctrine to pass ObamaCare, which they saw as a moral issue. Republicans and conservatives rightly were outraged. Many Democrats have also called for an end to the Electoral College. On the other hand, many Republicans/conservatives/TEA Party members would be tempted to do the same thing to achieve term limits or get the line-item veto.

The bottom line is this: our Constitution has governed this nation for more than two centuries, having been amended just 27 times. It provides for incredible security, stability and the peaceful transfer of power. Around the world these last few months, and even here at home, we’ve seen the destabilizing effects of populist uprisings, and more often than not they are not pretty. Let us therefore not be quick to advocate democracy at home, because if we are not careful, we may just get it and all that comes with it.

Entitlements Will Be the Death of Our Economy

2011-02-21T12:14:00.002-05:00

President Obama recently released his proposed budget, a $3.73 trillion monstrosity that is a monument to his own arrogance and complete inability or refusal to understand the concerns of the American people. After a historic tail-whipping of his party in November, Obama decided to engage in a little rhetorical compromise, and then turned around and doubled down on the disastrous policies that have kept this country in a long recession followed by a jobless recovery.

Simply put, even if we tax the “millionaires and billionaires” at 100% of earnings, it still won’t put much more than a dent in our $14+ trillion national debt. Within a decade we’ll be spending more than $800 billion (conservatively) for interest payments on the debt, and even more if interest rates rise, which they surely will. The fact is that our road to economic recovery lies down the path to drastically reduced spending.

The problem we have as a nation is that Democrats embrace fiscal irresponsibility; a policy of tax, borrow and spend (as if we can keep borrowing to pay for lavish welfare and entitlement programs and the bill will never come due) and Republicans claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, but engage in a policy of borrow and spend. Yes, cutting tax rates stimulates the economy, but even with increased gross revenues, spending more than you raise still leads to deficits. Republicans are half right, refusing to raise taxes, but drop the ball by not making the case for spending cuts. Republicans, fearing Democrats will demagogue them as heartless to the plight of the poor, back off of spending cuts at the first sign of trouble.

No serious person can discuss the economic crisis we face without addressing the Big Three…Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (and toss in ObamaCare if the Supreme Court upholds it). These programs take up such a huge portion of the budget that unless they are addressed, nothing else we do is anything more than trimming around the edges.

Take Social Security: implemented in 1935, it taxed all income at 1% for the first $3000, increasing to 3% over the next 12 years. Today, the rate is 13.2% of the first $106,800 in income (Employees are taxed at 6.2%, with a 2% rate reduction for 2011 only. Employers don’t truly pay their portion of the tax, they simply reduce employees’ salaries by an equivalent amount as the tax they collect; either way, the employee’s income is reduced by 13.2% from this tax).

That’s alright though, because all those taxes went into the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for future benefit obligations, right? Not so fast. For decades politicians have raided the SSTF surplus and used those funds on various vote-buying schemes and political largesse. In exchange, they issued IOU’s to the trust fund. So who pays off those IOU‘s? The taxpayers, of course. This is the equivalent of taking a yearlong vacation and funding it by borrowing against your home equity line, and saying that it is “paid for”. Nonsense! It is just being paid out of a separate account, but you (we) are still on the hook for it.

So where are we now? A few months ago the Social Security Administration projected that the program would face permanent deficits in 2016; now, just a few months later, the SSA is reporting trust fund deficits this year and continuing through at least 2021, a shortfall of $600 billion. This estimate is likely to increase as millions more baby boomers retire and the economy remains stagnant (Treasury Secretary Geithner recently noted that we should not expect unemployment levels to return to normal for another 5-6 years).

Many assume that we’ll figure out a way to fix the problem by tweaking the retirement age, removing the cap on taxable income, etc. The numbers just are not favorable for that as a plausible solution. The ratio of workers to retirees is a small fraction of what it was when the program was implemented, and that ratio is continuing to fall. Workers would have to face a massive tax increase to fund current benefit levels.

Though no one dares say it, we’d be better off phasing the program out altogether. Guarantee payments for those 55 and older based on promises already made, because it would be horribly unfair to yank that security net from them at this late stage of life. For those under 55, allow them to take their current contributions and invest them privately as they see fit. For those afraid of managing their own retirement funds, devise a program that guarantees a lower rate of return, but guaranteed benefit levels. Of those 45 and under, I know very few that actually believe that Social Security will be paying out benefits by the time they retire.

What may shock many is to learn that there is no guarantee of benefits. The Supreme Court ruled in 1960 (Flemming v. Nestor) that regardless of whether someone has paid into the Social Security system, even for decades, there is no “right” to those benefits, and Congress can alter, amend or repeal benefits at will. You can find the following passage today on the SSA website:

“There has been a temptation throughout the program's history for some people to suppose that their FICA payroll taxes entitle them to a benefit in a legal, contractual sense. That is to say, if a person makes FICA contributions over a number of years, Congress cannot, according to this reasoning, change the rules in such a way that deprives a contributor of a promised future benefit. Under this reasoning, benefits under Social Security could probably only be increased, never decreased, if the Act could be amended at all. Congress clearly had no such limitation in mind when crafting the law. Section 1104 of the 1935 Act, entitled "RESERVATION OF POWER," specifically said: "The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress." Even so, some have thought that this reservation was in some way unconstitutional. This is the issue finally settled by Flemming v. Nestor.”

What’s difficult to fathom is the continued faith that so many put into government. It is nearly impossible to think of government programs or agencies that are not riddled with inefficiency, waste and corruption. The entitlement programs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are taking up most of the federal budget, yet are all near bankruptcy. The almost trillion dollar stimulus plan failed to stimulate the economy but straddled us with massive new debt. The Postal Service, the closest thing that government has to a private business, is billions in debt and only still operational because Congress has banned private companies from competing.

The Founding Fathers constructed the Constitution in such a way so that the federal government had supreme power within a narrowly defined set of functions, with all other functions and powers left to the states or to the people. They understood, as Henry David Thoreau once said, “That government is best which governs least.”

While the free market is certainly not perfect, it has a far better track record than government. The reason is because it is made up of hundreds of millions of free people making decisions as to what is best for them, where no one is forced into a transaction that does not benefit them (of course, this is not the case when the government interferes in the market and chooses the winners and losers).

In each of these cases, the issue comes down to this: Are we sovereign individuals who control our lives, empowered to make decisions for ourselves? Or are we servants of an all-powerful government, our lives simply pawns to be moved around the great national chess board fulfilling the wishes of our masters? If the latter, then we’ll ride this train until it derails. If the former, it is time to do away with drive-by, sound-bite politics and deal with this crisis like adults.

Poor Eyesight and Bad Taste in Men

2011-02-14T09:42:00.001-05:00

I saw her for the first time nearly 25 years ago. She was so beautiful that I thought my heart would stop just looking at her. At only five feet tall, she packed a whole lot of gorgeous in that little frame; long, curly brown hair and brown eyes so big and warm that it felt like I was swimming in a pool of Godiva chocolate. To put it succinctly, she was stunningly beautiful. Literally stunning, as in, I stood there and couldn’t remember how to speak. Of course, that should have been expected. I grew up in a poor home and found my refuge in books. I was a huge nerd with absolutely no chance at popularity, and girls as radiant as this one just did not talk to me.

Except this one did. Not only did she talk to me, she actually seemed to enjoy it. I soon came to realize that she actually cared for me as much as I cared for her, and it was the greatest feeling in the world. Every moment with her was heaven, every moment apart the most excruciating form of hell. I went to sleep thinking about her and woke up doing the same. I lived in a world that alternated between euphoria at having her and fear of losing her.

We met less than a year after I lost my mother to cancer at the age of fourteen, which makes the fact that she loved me all the more astounding. I was an emotional wreck and trying to figure out my place in the world. I ended up in a children’s home an hour and a half away from her. One of my sister’s boyfriends changed musical tastes and gave me several cases of heavy metal cassette tapes. I happened to have a friend with a car (more like a battleship with wheels) who loved heavy metal music, and I paid him with cassette tapes to take me to see her on the weekends as often as possible.

We were quite a volatile couple; madly in love but both hotheaded. We broke up often, but always ended up back together. In high school she moved out west to live with her dad and we lost contact. A couple of years later I ended up moving in with her uncle and cousin, building houses on the south side of Atlanta. We started talking again, and after a couple of months she moved back home to be with me. Less than a year later, at the ripe old age of nineteen, we were married.

I would not recommend getting married at nineteen. It is hard for a marriage to be successful without love, but having love is just one component of what makes a marriage work. At nineteen I was selfish and immature, unprepared for the hard work that goes into a successful marriage. This was compounded by the fact that she became pregnant with our oldest a few weeks after we married. I was working three jobs and came home wanting nothing but a shower, food and sleep, and often times I’d skip the food just to get to the sleep. This was frustrating for her, a nineteen year old girl experiencing her first pregnancy, at home alone during the day with no one to talk to, and a husband so tired he could barely stay awake for an hour after work. It was a recipe for disaster.

Some of the best advice I ever got, I got from my best friend, and from my unofficially adopted dad. My friend came for a visit about seven months after we were married, with our first baby coming soon. I told him how much I loved her but that I was not sure our marriage could survive because we were always fighting. He told me that I had a choice to make; I could either be right, or I could be happy, but I could not be both. Showing her that her feelings and concerns were important to me than winning an argument greatly reduced the number of arguments we had.

The other advice came from my unofficially adopted dad, a man who, with his wife and children, took my wife and me under their wings and helped us make that transition from childhood to adulthood. He was a fountain of wisdom for me as a young father and husband with no clue how to do either one well. He helped me write my first resume (a masterpiece of creativity since to that point I’d been a customer service rep at Blockbuster Video during high school, followed by stints as a warehouse employee, a third shift stocker at a grocery store, and a construction laborer). After sending numerous copies out and not getting any bites, I called him in a panic and demanded he tell me what to do next. He gave me a verbal smack-down and told me I’d better open my eyes quickly to reality; I was the head of the house, I was a husband and would soon be a father, and it was up to me to make those decisions for my family. It was my job to come up with a game plan, and he would help me implement it.

Well, I eventually figured it out, as well as anyone can figure these things out I guess. I got a good job that could take care of my family and pay the bills, and I worked my tail of and was quickly and repeatedly promoted. It’s amazing how much good luck coincides with hard work.

Over the last eighteen years I’ve made a good life for myself. My wife and I went on to create a wonderful family, with four sons and four daughters. Each of them has such a distinct and wonderful personality, and I’m so excited to see where their lives take them. The same goes for me. I am excited to know what life holds in store for my wife and me.

Whatever that is, I know that I will face it with my wife, a woman of untold patience and kindness, a woman who is always the last one in bed at night because there is always one more thing to do for her family that can not be postponed, a woman who sacrifices so much for those she loves and who inspires me to be a better man than I am, if for no other reason than to be almost worthy to be in her presence.

The institution of marriage has gotten a lot of bad press over recent years. With Hollywood marriages that last less time than a cell phone contract, and the rate of divorce high enough that many ask “Why bother”, we’ve lost sight of a simple fact…that marriage was instituted by God between a man and a woman because it is the best way for us to achieve happiness, and the best environment in which to raise our children. Men and women have opposite but complimentary traits which, when fused together in marital unity, become greater than the sum of their parts. What we need is not to abandon marriage, but to work harder to make it succeed.

My life has been infinitely blessed by having an extraordinary woman by my side. I know without a doubt that I would today be a miserable, angry man without the tempering influence of this good woman. So as we prepare to celebrate another Valentine’s Day, I pray you all receive the blessings of a strong marriage. And to my exquisitely beautiful and eternally sublime wife Jennifer I say…I’m so grateful for your poor eyesight and bad taste in men.

The Dangerous Philosophy of a Living Constitution

2011-02-08T12:35:00.002-05:00

My more liberal friends often talk to me about the “living Constitution”, one that changes with the shifting moods of the electorate. They do so as if this was a good thing, something that should be lauded and encouraged. They also agree with the leftist elements of the judiciary who think we should show more deference to foreign law, and incorporate that into our own deliberations and rulings, in the process making us a more inclusive part of the global community. On the contrary, the strength of our nation lies in the fact that we are a nation of the rule of law, not the rule of man. It is the very foundation of our national structure. The concept of the highest law in our land being fluid depending on the temporary mood of the people is the equivalent of building a house on a shifting foundation. Inevitably that house will come crashing down.

Last year, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said in a speech that “Judges in the United States, after all, are free to consult all manner of commentary — Restatements, Treatises, what law professors or even law students write copiously in law reviews, and, in the internet age, any number of legal blogs. If we can consult those sources, why not the analysis of a question similar to the one we confront contained, for example, in an opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the German Constitutional Court, or the European Court of Human Rights?”

Indeed, the court has referenced external law in numerous cases over the last few years, including Lawrence v. Texas (ruling all anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional), Roper v. Simmons (ruling unconstitutional capital punishment for minors under age 18), Boumediene v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (both dealing with the question of granting terrorist detainees the constitutional rights traditionally afforded to only U.S. citizens).

In Roper v. Simmons, the high court ruled 5-4 that Christopher Simmons was not eligible for the death penalty for a murder committed at the age of seventeen. The majority ruled that the death penalty for a minor constituted a violation of 8th Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. This was a reversal of prior court rulings (presumably the argument was so persuasive that the liberal wing’s usual preference for stare decisis over the original text of the Constitution was set aside for the moment, and in the process invalidated the laws of 19 states).

The Simmons case was particularly gruesome and heartbreaking. Christopher Simmons, less than eight months prior to his 18th birthday, convinced two friends to conspire to commit murder. He openly bragged that they would get away with it because they were legally still juveniles. In September 1993, Simmons and his friend Charlie Benjamin (the other friend backed out at the last minute) broke into the home of Shirley Crook, forced her to the floor and bound her hands behind her back with duct tape, put duct tape over her eyes and mouth, and drove to a nearby river. She was then thrown from the bridge into the river below. She was not immediately killed, but was paralyzed, drowned several hours later as the water level in the river rose.

Despite Simmons confessing to premeditated murder planned months earlier, bragging about it to friends afterwards, and despite the testimony of his accomplice, the court ruled that a “national consensus” regarding “evolving standards of decency” compelled them to rule that no minor will ever face the death penalty, regardless of the barbarity of the crime or the level of premeditation. As support for this position, Justice Kennedy cited a body of sociological and scientific evidence which purported to show that juveniles at that age are unable to appreciate the consequences of their actions, and that they are highly susceptible to peer pressure; therefore; they are not responsible for the full repercussions of the decisions they make. Oddly, this would seem to be the opposite argument made as to whether minor girls are mature enough to get contraception or have abortions without parental consent.

The living constitution philosophy has also completely broken all ties to the original meaning of the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which allows the government to take private property for “public use” (previously understood to mean for projects that benefited the general public as a whole, such as roads, bridges, schools, etc.). In Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court redefined eminent domain to mean “public purpose”, a broad interpretation that allows government to take private property as long as there is a “conceivable” benefit to the public, including taking property from one private entity and giving it to another private entity so long as it increases the tax revenues to a government body. Since the rich are not at risk of having their land taken, the painful consequences of this ruling fall exclusively on those least able to defend themselves from the capriciousness of power.

So how far do we take this concept of a living constitution, this inclusion of foreign law into domestic legal doctrine? Are we to show respect for Islamic religious law (sharia) by allowing married men to rape and beat their wives, who are considered the husband’s property? This was an actual ruling in a recent case in New Jersey, which was thankfully overturned by an appellate court. Are we to show respect for Islamic law and allow repeat offenders of theft laws to have their hands cut off as is done in some Muslim countries? What about adopting some of Mexico’s immigration laws, like imprisonment of up to two years for illegal aliens? Why do we not show respect for Singapore’s laws by emulating their harsh anti-drug stance, with a mandatory execution by hanging for anyone caught possessing more than 15 grams of heroin? Or maybe we should adopt Malawi’s laws, where last year a couple was sentenced to 14 years hard labor for the crime of being homosexual.

The “living constitution” supporters really aren’t all that concerned with integrating all foreign legal doctrine into American jurisprudence. Rather, they have personal beliefs that they seek to codify into law by judicial fiat, and pick and choose those foreign rulings which support their personal beliefs and agendas.

The Founding Fathers were wise enough to know that the needs of our national populace would change over time, and that they would not be able to foresee those needs well into the future. To deal with those needs they included an amendment process by which the Constitution could be altered. Yet they were also wise enough to understand that there is no stability in a body of law that is constantly changing depending on the whim of the moment. The first ten amendments to the Constitution were passed shortly after the Constitution itself was passed. In more than two centuries since, the Constitution has been amended only seventeen times. The threshold for passage of an amendment is high, insuring that those amendments that do pass are truly needed and broadly supported.

So let us end this foolish notion of a living Constitution once and for all. Let our legislatures pass laws in agreement with the Constitution, and if the law as written is no longer meeting the needs of the people let us use the mechanisms already in place to change those laws. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, echoed this sentiment, stating "If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates, but let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."

The Conservatives' Love Affair with The Constitution

2011-01-31T12:27:00.001-05:00

The political left cries “foul!” when the right accuses them of attempting to undermine the Constitution, alleging that such accusations are slanderous, unfair and untrue. They say they love the Constitution as much, if not more, than the right, and that they are simply trying to protect the great liberal philosophies embodied in the Constitution.

Well, if there was any doubt that the right was absolutely correct in its portrayal of leftist contempt for the Constitution, it has been surely been erased in the aftermath of the first reading of the Constitution from the floor of the House of Representatives since that sacred document was passed. The sarcasm, contempt and loathing of the left has been so strong as to be almost palpable, and certainly strong enough for Americans to know once and for all that the left may pay lip service to the Constitution, but it has nothing but disdain for the text, and the underlying values and beliefs, of that beloved parchment.

The outrage from the left at the reading of the Constitution comes from all corners of leftist politics, media and academia. It includes such revealing statements as:

Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein mocked the recitation as “a gimmick”, and continued, “I mean, you can say two things about it. One is that is has no binding power on anything. And two, the issue of the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think their following. The issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done.” (Actually, the Constitution is almost 225 years old, which shows that Klein’s math skills are as suspect as his reading comprehension skills. As for confusing, consider that the U.S. Constitution has governed an entire nation for more than two centuries and clocks in at a miserly 4400 WORDS, and ObamaCare governs a single industry and contains a mind-boggling 2500+ PAGES!).

U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) whined that the reading of the Constitution on the House floor would be “ritualistic” and for “propaganda purposes”, and expressed his disgust that the Constitution was being treated like it was a “sacred text”. He lamented “You are not supposed to worship your Constitution…You are supposed to govern your government by it.”

Daytime talk show hostess and avowed liberal Joy Behar asked her panel and guests, “Do you think this Constitution-loving is getting out of hand?”

U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) expressed his objection to the format in which the Constitution was to be read, referring to the fact that the text to be read would be abridged to exclude sections of the Constitution later superseded by one of the 27 amendments. Inslee called these “deletions”, an incorrect term as pointed out by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX). Inslee protested that “…since we have not been able to review the exact language we will be reading today…this is not intended to create any statement of Congressional intent about the language, but rather to do our best to have a moment of comity to read the language as best as we can ascertain it.” This evoked laughter from a number of Republicans because, really, isn’t this of the crux of the problem; namely, that the very men and women who took an oath to support and defend the Constitution not only have not read it, but the very thought of doing so elicits howls of outrage?

From the January 5, 2011 editorial page of the New York Times comes this complaint: “It is a presumptuous and self-righteous act, suggesting that they alone understand the true meaning of a text that the founders wisely left open to generations…” (How, exactly, is a straight reading, without commentary, of the Constitution a presumptuous, self-righteous act? Does that mean they think Christian pastors are presumptuous and self-righteous when they read the Bible aloud?”).

Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL) complained about the reading of the abridged version because it would leave out text related to the “long struggle” over slavery, which would be offensive to African-Americans. He continued, “Many of us don’t want that to be lost upon the reading of our sacred document…The three-fifths clause would not be mentioned.” This just shows the deficit of understanding liberal Democrats are afflicted with. If Rep. Jackson had any remote clue of the true nature of the “Three-Fifths Compromise” he would be praising it. That compromise was reached as a way to get the full Constitution passed with the approval of the southern states, and at the same time weakening the political power of the southern states by not allowing them to count slaves for the purpose of representation in the Congress. This compromise was actually intended to accelerate the end of slavery.

The list of Democrats railing against the reading seemed endless, but it was also understandable. A strict adherence to the clear language of the Constitution would be the death knell for the vast majority of Democrat policies and programs. This is why Democrats defeated a bill that would require every bill introduced to include a statement identifying the section of the Constitution authorizing it. When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked last year where in the Constitution she found the authority for passage of the individual mandate in ObamaCare, her reply was to sputter “Are you serious? Are you serious?!!”. She never provided that basis.

Similarly, in a committee meeting on health care reform, Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) boastfully admitted “When the deal goes down, all this talk about rules, we make ‘em up as we go along.” This was echoed by former Rep. Phil Hare who, responding to a town hall questioner about the constitutionality of the proposed health care reform, replied “I don’t worry about the Constitution on this, to be honest with you”. That much is clear. At another town hall meeting Rep. Pete Stark, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, mocked a constituent who’d asked similar questions and said that “the federal government can do most anything in this country.”

The bottom line is that we as a nation have strayed far from the original intent of the Founders regarding the Constitution. We hear constant talk about a “living Constitution” from the political left, one that changes with the shifting moods of the citizenry. Yet how many of us would want to live in a house with a constantly shifting foundation? Only a fool would do so, and the wise would understand that a shifting foundation leads to a collapse of the entire structure.

Each and every member of the House of Representatives and the Senate are required to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, which says “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

In reply to a woman who asked what type of government was now to be had after the convening of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin replied “A republic, Madame, if you can keep it.” If we are to continue this great experiment in human freedom, each of us as private citizens must read, study and voraciously absorb the language of the Constitution. Then we must elect men and women of integrity to administer it. As declares the warning by Thomas Jefferson, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

An Evening with Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich

2011-01-25T09:00:00.001-05:00

As we near the end of January 2011, speculation is rampant concerning the 2012 elections. Will Republicans retain and expand control of the House of Representatives? Can they take advantage of the fact that the Democrats will be defending a significantly higher number of Senate seats than they will be, and regain control of the Senate? Will Republican control of the House force Obama to concede spending cuts and deficit reduction while maintaining or lowering current tax rates? If so, will the predictable result, an upswing in the economy and lowering of unemployment, give Barack Obama an opportunity to claim credit for the economic improvement? And most importantly, will Obama reveal Houdini-like powers and win re-election a la Bill Clinton, or will he suffer a resounding defeat along the lines of Jimmy Carter?

If you ask ten different pundits and prognosticators you’ll get fifteen different answers. In politics, a week is an eternity and 21 months might as well be the Paleozoic Era. Only a fool would place bets at this stage of the game. I for one will certainly not attempt it. Rumors are rampant as to who will be the Republican challenger to Barack Obama in 2012. Speculation includes former and current governors, current governors, a Congressman, and even former U.N. ambassador. Of course, no list would be complete without former Speaker of the House of Representatives (and Georgia native) Newt Gingrich.

This past Thursday evening I took advantage of a generous invitation to join a small group of Bartow County’s business leaders in attending the Paulding County Chamber of Commerce’s 50th Anniversary celebration, at which Speaker Gingrich was the keynote speaker. The evening, complete with a delicious dinner with old friends and more recent acquaintances, would have been enjoyable in and of itself. However, it also had the benefit of being both entertaining and enlightening. Mr. Gingrich, well known for his mastery of history and his astute analysis of current events and political trends, gave a speech that was both frustrating and encouraging at the same time.

It was frustrating because he spent quite a while detailing some of the immense problems our nation faces. At the forefront of the nation’s collective mind is, of course, the high unemployment rate and the sluggish economy. Following closely behind is justifiable fear over the massive and growing debt load, and what that portends concerning inflation and the value of the dollar. Add to the mix a regressive, archaic tax code that punishes achievement and entrepreneurialism, a leviathan of confusing, burdensome regulations which suppress job growth, the impact of the quality and availability of services due to the ObamaCare de facto takeover of the health care industry, and you have a witch’s brew of downright depressing dilemmas.

Luckily, the speech did not end there. Otherwise, despondency might have been our bitter dessert. Mr. Gingrich then went on to discuss what we can do to restore American exceptionalism (which, despite the prevaricating platitudes of our current Commander-in-Chief, is several cuts about the exceptionalism of China or Germany or Britain). He spoke of the great entrepreneurial American spirit, a spirit that refuses to accept the concept of “impossible”. It is the spirit that invents and creates and improves and grows. It is the spirit and ingenuity that gave us the light bulb and e-mail, the assembly line and mass production, the transistor and the Frisbee. It is the spirit which limits human achievement only as far as the limits of imagination.

As our Founding Fathers clearly understood, in order to create such a dynamic, successful society, the key is not for government to direct, but to protect. Government’s role is to adjudicate disputes under the blind eye of justice, to protect intellectual and real property, which is the natural outgrowth of the mental and physical labor of the owner. Government’s role is to regulate the currency, not the economy. On the other hand, when government sees itself as omniscient and omnipotent arbiter of human exchange, usurping the power of hundreds of millions of individual citizens making billions of individual financial decisions daily as to what is best for them and their families, the free market devolves into a bureaucratic morass. For no matter how intelligent one person or group of people may be within a narrow sliver of human knowledge, they will never be as efficient as the collective knowledge of the whole of our nation. Or put simply, "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." So opined Thomas Jefferson.

The dynamic of a constitutional republic based on the doctrine of federalism, which limits government and protects the property of individual citizens, combined with the effects of a true free market economy, has made America the envy of the world. America has about 5% of the world’s land mass, about 5% of the world’s population, and yet accounts for more than 25% of the world’s total economic output. That does not happen by accident.

As Mr. Gingrich so adroitly explained, America’s best days are not behind us unless we allow them to be. Our problems are largely self inflicted, and are therefore within our power to resolve, provided we understand the principles which lead to success, and provided we have the willingness to do what is required to achieve those goals. The difficulty lies not in understanding what to do, but in being willing to admit reality. That means not pretending that we can have a productive, vibrant nation while subsidizing sloth and bailing out irresponsibility. That means not pretending that freedoms come without responsibilities or that we can indulge the basest elements of human nature and still has a moral society, without which a constitutional republic cannot survive. That means realizing that the more we are dependent on government for every aspect of our subsistence, the less we are able to control our own destinies.

These are lessons that both political parties and each American citizen must learn. Both parties have shielded the irresponsible from the consequences of poor decisions. This is a disservice, for it is through dealing with the consequences of poor decisions that we gain wisdom.

At my table, I sat with a man who has made it a personal mission to foster networking opportunities in our community, so that the successes of individual businesses increase the overall prosperity of the community as a whole. I sat next to another man who has worked tirelessly for years in the Chamber of Commerce, helping businesses increase their presence in the community. A few seats down sat a woman who has spent her career helping businesses and individuals succeed through marketing their products and services. Across from me sat another who helps people take the fruits of their labors and organize, grow and protect those assets. Down from him was another that helps protect those assets by insuring them against life’s unpleasant surprises. In some way, each person at that table had contributed to the betterment of society by working hard to be productive citizens, and in doing so helping those around them. This small group has done more to develop true free market growth (and not just using taxpayer money to protect or create jobs in one place by crippling them in another) than the entire brain trust of the current administration.

If America is to regain the unrivaled dominance it once enjoyed as we embark on this new century, if it is to compete with China, India, Germany and others, we must remember that America’s greatness lies not within a government that does everything for us, but within the millions of individuals that go out each and every day and make life a little better for themselves and their families, and in doing so, improves our communities, our states, and our nation.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for a prescient reminder of just what makes America great.